Signal to Noise #59 - fall 2010

✹ THE QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF IMPROVISED, EXPERIMENTAL & UNUSUAL MUSIC ✹

joe morris the ex “the sound of singapore” 50 miles of elbow room eve egoyan jd emmanuel minotaurs

issue #59 fall 2010 $4.95 us / $5.95 can

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SIGNAL TO NOISE THE JOURNAL OF IMPROVISED, EXPERIMENTAL & UNUSUAL MUSIC

#59 : FALL 2010 eve egoyan 6 minotaurs 8 jd emmanuel 10 joe morris 12 “the sound of singapore” 20 the ex 30 50 miles of elbow room 36 live reviews 42 cd / dvd / lp / dl reviews 52 graphic novella 90 PUBLISHER pete gershon COPY EDITOR nate dorward BLOG MASTER christian carey CONTRIBUTORS clifford allen ✹ bill barton ✹ caroline bell ✹ darren bergstein ✹ jason bivins ✹ marcus boon ✹ shawn brackbill ✹ stuart broomer ✹ pat buzby ✹ joel calahan ✹ christian carey ✹ john chacona ✹ mike chamberlain ✹ andrew choate ✹ fred cisterna ✹ jay collins ✹ larry cosentino ✹ david cotner ✹ ethan covey ✹ julian cowley ✹ raymond cummings ✹ jonathan dale ✹ christopher delaurenti ✹ tom djll ✹ nate dorward ✹ lawrence english ✹ phil freeman ✹ andrew gaerig ✹ michael galinsky ✹ david greenberger ✹ kurt gottschalk ✹ spencer grady ✹ jason gross ✹ kory grow ✹ james hale ✹ jennifer hale ✹ carl hanni ✹ ed hazell ✹ mike heffley ✹ andrey henkin ✹ jesse jarnow ✹ mark keresman ✹ robert loerzel ✹ howard mandel ✹ peter margasak ✹ brian marley ✹ marc masters ✹ libby mclinn ✹ marc medwin ✹ bill meyer ✹ richard moule ✹ larry nai ✹ kyle oddson ✹ natasha li pickowicz ✹ grant purdum ✹ chad radford ✹ casey rae-hunter ✹ gino robair ✹ michael rosenstein ✹ elise ryerson ✹ ron schepper ✹ steve smith ✹ thomas stanley ✹ adam strohm ✹ john szwed ✹ nathan turk ✹ dan warburton ✹ alan waters ✹ ben watson ✹ seth watter ✹ charlie wilmoth ADVERTISING e-mail for rates & info: operations@signaltonoisemagazine.org DISTRIBUTION

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Wayne Rogers at Twisted Village, Cambridge MA, July 2010 by Tim Bugbee.

This issue dedicated to the memory of Bill Dixon, Fred Anderson, Harvey Pekar and Tuli Kupferberg.

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EVE EGOYAN

David Rokeby

The Canadian composer and pianist’s “quiet” music bears the stamp of Satie.

By Ted Harms It’s opening night at the 2009 Open Ears Festival in Kitchener/Waterloo, Ontario, and composer and pianist Eve Egoyan is performing multiple sets in the company of the K/W Symphony and the Tactus Vocal Ensemble. The evening begins with a few solo piano pieces by Erik Satie, but the highlight is “Sky Music 2,” an epic orchestral piece by Maria de Alvear. With other instruments and voices swirling around her, Egoyan was the reserved and poised focus of the evening.

Two days later, she’s performing “Surface Tension” at the Registry Theatre. A computer program devised by her husband, the artist David Rokeby, manipulates a digital image in response to her improvisations on a Yamaha Disklavier. A picture of a piano soundboard is covered with raindrops (going from sprinkle to downpour ), then it turns into a city scene during a snowstorm; later, the image shifts to the construction of an angular Russian Futurist tower. As demonstrated by a ten-minute excerpt posted on Vimeo, the music is clear and pointed, concise and provocative, and an equal partner to the visuals.

Despite the disparate settings of these shows, Egoyan’s calm is apparent. The music she plays is delicate and everything rests on the three T’s—taste, tone, and touch. Playing with such measured effort is not easy—one rushed passage, an unbalanced chord, and the entire piece would be ruined.

Growing up in Vancouver, BC, with her artistic parents and her brother—film direc-

tor Atom Egoyan—Egoyan was a self-described piano nerd. She immersed herself in performance, crossed the globe in her studies, and eventually decided to focus on modern and living composers. Erik Satie is one of the stars by which she sails, and it’s easy to hear his simple deliberateness in her playing. She paid homage to the Velvet Gentleman in 2002 by releasing a collection of his piano works, Hidden Corners (Recoins). Rather than perform his more common works (such as the Gymnopedies and Gnossiennes), she instead chose to record less familiar repertoire, including a world premiere of a recently unearthed manuscript and all 21 pieces of the Sports et divertissements series.

Her most recent CD is a recording of Ann Southam’s Simple Lines of Enquiry. Its 12 sections are variations on a 12-tone row, and while the music is restrained, it never sinks into background listening. As a whole, it’s small and perfect, a fixed point of meditation. As it says in the disc booklet: “This music is intended to be quiet. Please adjust your playback level accordingly.” The disc received a much-deserved boost when critic Alex Ross put it on his year-end top ten list for 2009 and called it “immense, mysterious.”

Egoyan has also begun to further explore free improvisation, as a natural outgrowth of her work as an interpreter of indeterminate scores. She recently took part in a two-month residency, performing weekly at Toronto’s Somewhere There venue as part of a sextet. She sums up

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the appeal of free improvisation: “You’re working in the moment with whatever you have.” Her improv partner, the cellist Anne Bourne, elaborates: “Eve has the sound of living composers’ inquiry in her ears, and the tenacity of a cliff climber in her hands, and she holds both and the other player, deeply in her impassioned heart, while cocomposing each moment.”

And then there’s her film work. Much of it can be heard in her brother’s films, but her best known work in this vein is perhaps her contribution to Mary Harron’s American Psycho (2000)—the haunting piano that you hear when Christian Bale’s character is in his apartment at the start of the day makes for an evocative counterpoint to the movie’s satire of mid-80s excess.

Add all this to concerts, teaching, overseeing all aspects of five CDs, self-managing her career, and having a daughter, and it’s been a very busy five years. What’s coming next is unknown, even to her; the future falls upon her, she says. This summer she’ll release a CD with Linda Catlin Smith, Ballad for Cello and Piano; next, perhaps she’ll record Satie’s entire piano oeuvre, perhaps another Southam recital, or maybe commission other new work. When you have a multi-pronged career that crosses genre lines, it’s not uncommon to find yourself at a crossroads.

And yet despite this whirlwind, she’s still calm and poised. “It’s a quiet thing I do,” Egoyan says, shrugging her shoulders a little, as if bemused by the enthusiastic reaction her music brings out in her listeners.✹ WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #59 | 7

MINOTAURS Freelance indie drummer uses his own group to meld folk and pop with a twist. By Vish Khanna

Nathan Lawr is known for many things in Canada, but he’s seldom counted on to produce the kind of warm, summery grooves that inhabit his new Minotaurs record, The Thing. An in-demand drummer who, in the last decade, has held the fort for indie-rock-flavored artists like Feist, Royal City, King Cobb Steelie, Jim Guthrie, Sea Snakes and the FemBots among many others, Lawr eventually stepped out to lead his own group. A charming singer and songwriter, Lawr has explored interpersonal dynamics in his lyrics as well as any contemporary artist. And his musical aesthetic too has been clever yet comfortable, melding folk and pop accessibility with sly twists.

Something changed tangibly on 2007’s A Sea of Tiny Lights, where Lawr’s political outspokenness and earnest incisiveness infiltrated a gorgeous collection of angular pop songs. There was something insistent and worldly about this material, with less boy-girl romance and guitar strumming. Instead, there were weightier songs about escaped prisoners of war and social collapse, bolstered by hypnotic drums, keyboards, and horns.

All of this has led Lawr to re-imagine his Minotaurs and create The Thing, a distinctive amalgam of cheery Fela Kuti Afrobeat funk and pop song structure, propelled by lyrics dripping with death, paranoia, and social critique. “This is me, running in the opposite direction of what I was doing before,” Lawr explains. “I was drawn to Afrobeat from the moment I heard it and that’s all I was listening to for

a couple years. I felt like I was stuck in this ‘singer-songwriter’ thing and I don’t even know how I got there. All of the songs I was writing, the chords and words weren’t quite enough to hold my interest and I felt like I needed something else.”

As Lawr tells it, the new sound came about organically when he and producer/ percussionist Don Kerr experimented with bridging the gap between Lawr’s knack for pop hooks and his passion for Afroinfluenced jazz and rhythms. “We took a guitar-led folk song and put a funky Afrobeat under it and, lo and behold, it slotted together, which opened our mind to the possibilities. One thing that some people don’t get is that, if the general vibe is good enough, you don’t have to change chords or keys. Like Miles Davis on Bitches Brew or Kind of Blue, to some extent; it’s just one scale, or chord, or key, and they hang on them forever. If the musicians and ideas are good enough, you don’t really need to move to anything else.”

Despite the success of the Minotaurs’ earlier work, Lawr’s change of direction compelled him to rebuild the ensemble for The Thing. “I was living in Sudbury and I wanted to try something completely different,” he recalls. “It wasn’t premeditated or anything. My old band was all spread out around different cities so I figured I’d just try a whole new thing.”

Drawing from star musicians in Toronto jazz and electronic outfits like Holy Fuck, Feuermusik, Canaille, and the Hylozoists, Lawr has assembled a mighty octet. And

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even as touring with large, multi-headed groups becomes more expensive, Lawr doesn’t see any expendable instruments in his line-up; his Minotaurs can’t be anything but big. “It has to be,” he says.

“You can’t really do The Thing without one of the horns or guitars. There are no glockenspiels or mandolins in this band, being used superfluously.”

Lawr hasn’t lost his emotional edge. If anything, much like the militancy that pervades Fela Kuti’s music, Lawr’s new songs balance hip-shaking with his own call to arms. “I call it a protest record mostly because I’m sick of love songs but also because I don’t think there is any protest music now,” he says. “I’d be hard-pressed to name one song that is in any way popular that actually addresses the very crushing and cataclysmic things that are going on in the world that honestly keep me up at night. It’s a fine line to try and address those things without being preachy and pretentious, but I try to tackle them just to put my own mind at ease.”

An indie-rock veteran in his mid-30s, Lawr has transcended artistic frustration to reach peace of mind with The Thing. After countless tours around the world and album releases that receive critical acclaim but sell modestly, he is doing his best to play it cool while sitting on his finest work.

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Sandy Ewen

While critics have expanded the already outsize narratives of Texas outsiders like Daniel Johnston, Jandek, and Roky Erikson, and waxed theoretical about the slurred, streetlevel sound of Houston’s chopped ’n’ screwed rap, sound artist JD Emmanuel has quietly proved to be something of a touchstone for an entire movement of neo-Kosmiche keyboardists with his sanity and sociability intact. Like his fellow Lone Star innovators, he has done it without extensive touring, ample press or even prolific recording, but rather by an ornery persistence in his musical vision.

A native of La Porte, Texas, located south of Houston on the Gulf Coast, Emmanuel pursued formal music studies at the University of Houston with the intention of becoming an orchestral bass trombonist. His adolescent interest in rock music and the West Coast jazz of Dave Brubeck kept pace as well, but in 1970, his brother loaned him a copy of Walter Carlos’s opus Switched-On Bach. Included was an LP sampler with tracks by Terry Riley and Steve Reich. The transporting and trance-inducing effects of these minimalist pieces provided the blueprint for Emmanuel’s musical future. With financing from a friend’s parents, Emmanuel recorded and released his first cassette, Sound Paintings, in 1979. It was his 1982 release Wizards, however, that would eventually make his reputation amongst aficionados of experimental music. As with many such recordings, the initial release of Wizards was a vanity pressing of 300 that met with little fanfare.

“The LPs just didn’t sell,” Emmanuel remarks. “I couldn’t give them away. They were sitting in the attic of a house we had in Dallas.

We hated living in Dallas. When we moved back to Houston, I left all my albums in Dallas, in the attic. I truly didn’t have a place to put them.” Though he continued to sell cassette copies at a respectable rate, the vinyl edition of Wizards was lost to history. Or so it

seemed. “In 2004 or 2005, I’m contacted by this guy out in California, Douglas McGowan.

He was in Dallas at the time and went to Half Price Books and found Wizards. I didn’t know it, but Wizards had created kind of a cult following. I had no idea.”

Much of that interest was elicited on the other side of the Atlantic among a cadre of musicians expanding the reach of tranceinducing synth-based music into the 21st century. One of them, Lieven Martens, credits the “incredibly simple, lonely and magic sound of Wizards” for Emmanuel’s popularity in Europe. “It’s something beyond words really. To me it seems like some enchanted minimalism.

JD’s stuff is a creative and heavy personal take on the whole new age/soothing electronics scene.” Martens convinced Emmanuel to mail the original analog masters to Belgium for repressing. This time the edition of 300 (from Martens’ own Bread & Animals label) sold out in ten days.

The repress caught the attention of Martens’ friend Christelle Gualdi, who performs visionary synth-based music under the alias Stellar Om Source. She felt an immediate kinship with JD and his music, likening it to finding a musical parent. “I realized that JD’s music had many things in common [with ours]: releasing music on a private press, using analog synthesizers, music as a medium to attain higher states, etc.,” she says in an email from the Netherlands. “The only difference is that we’re all today interconnected and aware of each other’s creations in an instant form.”

While planning her U.S. tour with Daniel Higgs in 2009, she was ecstatic about the opportunity to perform with Emmanuel in Texas.

Amazed that he had not performed live since 1982, she convinced him to perform concerts in Houston and Austin (in an abandoned boba tea shop and Episcopalian church, respectively), both of which she regards as high points of her tour. “He performed ‘Focusing

Within’ live in a church! All I want is to hear him perform it in a 360° room, with 64 speakers and 5,000 people!”

With the Bread & Animals CD sold out, the U.S. avant-garde stalwart Important Records elected to reissue the title in an edition of 500. Label owner John Brien was aware of the 2007 release and felt the record deserved another version with higher fidelity to the original masters. “I don’t like much of the new Kosmiche/New Age stock,” he admits, “but I do think that the best of it owes a good deal to JD’s tasteful aesthetic.” The release is to be paired with an album by Cooper Crane’s project Cave. “Cooper wasn’t actually influenced by JD’s record, but when I told Cooper about it he was excited about the similarities between how and why both records were recorded. They are separated by 30 years, but rooted in similar experiences.”

How does Emmanuel feel about so much attention on a record nearly thirty years old?

“I’m just kinda honored that that even happened,” he says. “We just enjoy audiences.

But ultimately you write the music for yourself.

You produce something in your heart and then if someone else’s heart responds to it, that’s cool.”

He continues to make music in his home studio (released on cassette and CD-R) and is enjoying his return to live performance. As for the unique inspiration his music has had on a genre which is now enjoying popularity across the globe, he gives a characteristically straight-shooting Texan response.

“A lot of these New Age, spiritual growth people I used to try to mess with would get into this stuff on purity. They’d make themselves crazy on the ‘purity’ of food, or how a synthesizer does this to your brain and body, how guitar is so pure, harp is so pure, the human voice is so pure...sound is sound. If you make it do the right things, give in to it, you know, it’s ok.”✹

JD EMMANUEL The Houston-based keyboardist and sound artist who paved the way for New Age Kosmiche re-emerges for phase two of his career.

By Lance Higdon

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FREE AGENT Veteran guitarist and bassist Joe Morris makes up his own rules as he walks the treadmill of a lifetime in free music.

Story by Phil Freeman.

Photos by Libby McLinn.

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Joe Morris at home in Guilford, CT, July 2010

It’s an overcast Saturday afternoon in July; all of New York and New Jersey are braced for rainstorms. And yet, umbrella by my side, I’ve taken the train to Roosevelt Island to meet up with guitarist and bassist Joe Morris.

One of the preeminent figures in avantgarde jazz since the ’80s, he’s come into town from his home in Connecticut to play at the first Albert Ayler Festival, a day-long event put together by the legendary and recently rejuvenated label ESP-Disk. “I like that about you,” Morris calls out as he approaches the park bench where I’m sitting, in advance of our appointment. “You’re always early, just like me.”

As a guitarist, Morris is every bit as comfortable working in non-jazzy improv settings as he is in those that swing wildly. For example, his new duo release with trumpeter Nate Wooley, Tooth and Nail, is a spiky, almost amelodic set of miniatures—eight pieces, from four to eight minutes in length—with Morris on acoustic guitar without pedals or reverb effects of any kind. It’s an extremely dry session, and very quiet, with the trumpeter mustering various “extended” techniques (lots of sputtering, hissing, and tapping of the valves) while avoiding conventional melody like it was a virus. Morris latches onto what toeholds he can find in Wooley’s opaque, introspective murmuring and surrounds him with pinging bursts of notes, but the session is ultimately about juxtaposition rather than unison or even deliberately complementary playing. It’s music of a much more selective appeal than much of what he’s recorded to date, but that’s not necessarily the point, for Morris. As a working musician, he is constantly seeking to strike a balance between making a living and doing what’s interesting for him.

“I think of it differently than a listener would,” he says of hardcore, capital-I Improv.

“Cause I’m trying to figure out what people are doing. And sometimes I think what people are doing commands a lot of respect, even if I don’t wanna do it all the time, or it’s not that gratifying, and then sometimes I think there’s a level of pretentious nonsense there like it’s superior to everybody else.

From a listener’s point of view, you gotta like what you like. You can’t just like things because you’re supposed to. And why are you supposed to like music that you don’t like?

But I think from the point of view of being a musician, that’s the expansion of the art, and for me it’s no different than understanding why people paint in an abstract style rather than in a figurative one. It’s the methodology that I’m always trying to understand. And sometimes within that, I see great challenges to speak in that kind of idiom, and I don’t wanna tell myself I can’t because I’m committed to one of these other things. I have done that, but it was a long time ago. And as soon as I decided I was really gonna break from that [kind of thinking], things got a lot more vague in the direction of my career, and in 14 | SIGNAL to NOISE #59 WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM

some ways they’ve gotten a lot better.”

As the Festival kicks off on a small patch of grass, with the performers safe under a small tent, a heterogeneous mix of out-music diehards has gathered, with their ill-advised hats, glasses and facial hair, T-shirts advertising long-defunct European art-prog bands, and physiques sculpted through years of hunching over dusty record bins. Three days prior to what would have been Albert Ayler’s 74th birthday, a parade of players—some soloists, and others assembling in groups of various sizes, from duos to a sextet—play free jazz in the post-1960s tradition, sometimes fierce, sometimes introspective, frequently honking and dissonant, and almost always possessed of the spirit of the festival’s namesake: questing, joyous, expansive, filled with and consumed by love and the belief that music can both heal the human spirit and bring transcendence. The cultists who’ve seen all these performers—Daniel Carter, Sabir Mateen, Gunter Hampel, William Hooker, Marshall Allen—a dozen or more times aren’t the only people present, though.

The combination of “outdoors” and “free” has led a surprising number of local folks, including parents and small children, to stop by and even stay a while. Kids run back and forth on the grass, playing in muddy puddles as the saxophones blare and the drums rattle and crash. And despite ominous gray skies, the promised rain never comes.

One of the groups performing today is the Flow Trio, with Morris on bass, Louie Belogenis on tenor and curved soprano saxophones and Charles Downs (formerly Rashid Bakr, ex-Other Dimensions in Music) on drums. The group’s music has deep connections to free jazz history. Downs can be heard backing pianist Cecil Taylor alongside alto saxophonist Jimmy Lyons and bassist William Parker on The Eighth, while Belogenis had long and fruitful relationships with drummer Rashied Ali and bassist Wilber Morris. The Flow Trio’s second CD, Rejuvenation, came out on ESP-Disk in 2009. Live and on disc, the group lives up to its name, with pieces moving organically along, not based on repetitive melody and then solos, but on the impulses of the instrumentalists. The music gives every impression of being fully improvised, but within a set of parameters laid down by players like Ayler, John Coltrane, Pharoah Sanders and Archie Shepp. Belogenis’s saxophone playing is suffused with the blues, and Morris’s bass is a thick throb; Downs’ deft touch on the drums adds weightlessness to music that could easily become ponderous. His sense of time is derived from Rashied Ali’s and Milford Graves’s relentless subdivision of rhythm not into rigorous counting, but into moments that captivate and vanish. It’s a collective sound that doesn’t demand close attention, but rewards it, the way the patterns in a tree’s bark are present and beautiful, whether you’re mindful of them or not. You can sink

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deep into the Flow Trio’s music or you can let it course around you like a river.

It’s really hard to pin Morris down. That can be frustrating… until you stop trying.

For years, particularly throughout the 1990s, he was known as a highly individualistic jazz guitarist. He eschewed distortion (other than on a couple of early records, Racket Club and Sweatshop) and preferred rapid bursts of notes to chording. Perhaps weirdest of all for the time and place (the Boston-New York free jazz axis), his music swung. Hard. This was particularly true when he was working with his own rhythm section(s), but even when he brought in ringers from the New York free scene, as on 1996’s Elsewhere, which featured Matthew Shipp on piano, William Parker on bass and Whit Dickey on drums, or joined semi-all-star bands like a Dickey-led ensemble that made four albums in the early to mid-2000s, he managed to coax swing from free players, and retain song form to a remarkable degree, without ever being boring or traditional in his melodic approach.

In the last ten years, though, he’s taken up the upright acoustic bass, splitting his time between it and guitar. He’s done this as a sideman, backing Shipp on several superb trio and quartet discs—Piano Vortex, Harmonic Disorder, Right Hemisphere, and Cosmic Suite—as well as this year’s Night Logic, which teams Morris and the pianist with saxophonist Marshall Allen. But he’s also played bass on numerous records under his own name, including recent releases on AUM Fidelity (Wildlife, with saxophonist Petr Cancura and drummer Luther Gray) and ESPDisk (the aforementioned Rejuvenation).

That’s the other thing about Joe Morris— he’s relentlessly prolific. He’s put out a double fistful of discs in 2009 and 2010, with more on the way. By the time this article sees print, the following releases will be available somewhere or other: Tooth and Nail (the acoustic guitar-trumpet duo with Wooley on Clean Feed), Creatures (a guitar-drums duo with Luther Gray on Not Two), Camera (a quartet date on ESP-Disk featuring cellist Junko Fujiwara Simons, violinist Katt Hernandez, Morris on guitar and Gray on drums) and an as-yet untitled duo disc with Shipp on Not Two. His discography goes back to 1983, and is spread among nearly thirty labels, several of which no longer exist. At 55, he’s released or played on over 75 albums—nowhere near the productivity of his friend Anthony Braxton (with whom he recorded Four Improvisations (Duo) 2007, a four-disc box for Clean Feed), but I think it’s safe to say he puts out music faster than your average listener, who might want to occasionally check out a record or two by someone other than Joe Morris, can process it. And even more remarkably, he seems to reveal a different side of himself on almost every record. Okay, there are some times when he’s gotten into something of a

rut (to me, his contributions to the Whit Dickey albums Big Top, Coalescence and Sacred Ground sound kinda samey) but generally speaking, he’s staggered his releases in such a way as to demonstrate the multiple sides of his musical personality.

Morris’s not-from-New-Yorkness is as crucial to his artistic identity as is his choice of instruments. Raised in New Haven, Connecticut, he spent his early professional years, and made his reputation, in Boston. He may have started out wanting to break through in New York, but circumstances (like marriage) kept it from happening, and eventually he began to think about it differently.

“When I lived in New Haven, Leo Smith used to live down the street from me,” he recalls. “It was a really good music scene, with George Lewis and Anthony Davis and Gerry Hemingway… Loren Mazzacane Connors had a space for a while, Julius Hemphill played there. I left New Haven in ’75 with the idea that I was gonna be involved with a scene like that, probably in New York. But then I met this girl and we moved to Boston and I started doing things there… and when I did I thought it was better to have a scene there, just like at the time they had a scene in St. Louis, in Chicago, in Amsterdam, and everywhere else. I went to Europe in 1981 and really got that idea, that it was better to have a satellite scene.”

So he began doing more than just playing—Morris started organizing things and attempting to build the scene he wanted to be part of. “I was the first person that got William Parker a gig in Boston,” he says. “I booked a place called Charley’s Tap, and we had David Murray and Ed Blackwell and Billy Bang. I organized a concert with Billy Bang and Andrew Cyrille up there in the early ’80s.

So I always thought I would be connected not just to everybody in New York, but everybody in England and everybody in Germany—I wanted to be connected to every version of what this was, as a musician. I tried to do that really early. I had gigs organized to play with Steve McCall, which fell through, and Peter Kowald in one week in 1982.”

The work might have been artistically rewarding, but it had its downside, too. This mostly took the form of frustration at an uncaring local media environment. “The people in Boston who wrote about music never helped us. They never did anything. They never took us seriously. They only took people from New York seriously, or people from out of town. So it was really hard to get it recognized as an active scene, even though it really was.”

One event in particular offered artistic satisfaction while also helping Morris make crucial connections. “I went up to Cecil [Taylor] one time,” the guitarist recalls, “and asked him, could I play with you in New York?, and we talked about it a couple times. And one time he was up in Boston playing, and he looked at me and said, ‘Come by tomorrow and we’ll play.’ So I did. It was me and William Parker

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and Masashi Harada, and it was great. And he said, ‘Come to New York, we’ll play.’ And for years and years, that’s what I’d wanted to do. I’d wanted to be the guitarist who played with Cecil Taylor. And I’m proud to say the day I did that, I did it exactly as well as I thought it should be done. But it was the same time I was about to get married, my wife had a job in Boston and I was already 35 years old.

Cecil was like, here’s a mountain to climb that hasn’t been climbed before, but once I did it, [I thought] yeah, I’ll just keep working on my own thing.”

What came out of that rehearsal was a strengthened connection to the broader New York free jazz scene, specifically through its present-day locus, William Parker. Morris had proved himself to be an adept player who could operate at the highest levels, a man with a real and undeniable feeling for AfricanAmerican art music. “I understand Cecil’s music and Jimmy Lyons’, and I could play to the specifications that, say, Jimmy would,” Morris explains. “Now, I don’t think that matters to Cecil. Who knows what Cecil likes. But being involved with that, impressed by Jimmy like that, is how I get involved with William and [trumpeter] Roy Campbell. Because they’re sort of like Jimmy’s kids.”

Morris is willing to play with almost anyone, because he’s fascinated by systems and constantly seeking to observe how other people approach music-making. “By being a kind of free range character, I’m of no tribe,” he says. “It took a lot of work to be like that.

I’ve played with Derek Bailey, at his house, and that doesn’t mean I want to play like Derek Bailey, I just wanna know where he’s coming from so I’m reacting to it. To me, that’s vocabulary. That’s like knowing every tune in every key if you’re an old jazz musician. It’s the meta-methodology; you have the overview of how everybody constructs their own methodology so that you can be on a higher level of methodology and those things can be part of the whole ontology of it. To me that’s what has to happen.”

This openness allows him to perform all varieties of jazz, thorny UK-style improv and even work within the John Zorn style of juxtaposition of seemingly incompatible elements—though he’s not 100 percent convinced of its awesomeness. “I can appreciate juxtaposition as a musical structure.

It requires a different skill set. But that doesn’t mean that everybody who partakes in that is any good at it. And it also sort of negates the idea that there would be a universal language of agreement where people understand what percentage of connectivity they have in their playing. Because this is a very formal thing.

People come out of schools of thought, and if they operate like they’re not connected at all it doesn’t sound any good.”

Left to his own devices, Joe Morris will opt to swing. It’s that simple. He sees that as a crucial development in music and refuses to abandon it in the name of so-called progress.

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“It’s always a big part of what I do. Pulse is huge in the way I play,” he says. “Stating pulse, playing rubato to the pulse, not playing with any pulse at all—all those things are like formal parts of the vocabulary of being an improviser. And this idea that you’re not gonna do one of those things on some rigid principle to me is just silly.”

Morris makes swing a crucial component of his teaching at the New England Conservatory. He’s constantly trying to get students to understand the subtleties and varieties of swing—in his words, “the way Ed Blackwell swings versus the way Steve McCall swings.

The way Fred Hopkins plays time versus the way Henry Grimes plays time.” That’s the heart of the music, according to Morris; indeed, he compares it to kissing the person that you love for the first time. “There’s no way in the world you’re not gonna wanna do it again.” And yet, he sees players who are blinded by the critical and message-board rhetoric of constant forward motion, of jazz being creatively moribund, to their detriment and the music’s. “Some people don’t bother learning because they think it’s old fashioned.

Is kissing the one you love old-fashioned?

Now, in music, for the rest of time we’re not gonna bother to swing? We finally got to the point in time where people invented that and we’re never gonna do it again?”

“I do swing,” he continues. “But I put it all in terms of how you relate to pulse.

There are all kinds of ways of understanding it that are very formal. You’re either playing with the pulse in a bunch of different ways, you’re playing rubato to the pulse, basically melodically to the pulse—a lot of that comes out of Cecil, the sort of collective rubato. A lot of stuff at the Vision Festival is collective rubato to the pulse. There’s a strong energy there, and there’s a pulse, but people don’t state it. And then there’s things inspired by Webern, and through the AACM and Leo Smith, who has a thing called rhythm units, and a lot of the English improvisers, the UK improvisers from the ’60s and ’70s, Derek and those guys, they don’t play the pulse, they play a pitch, a sound, a timbre and then another one. But all those things need an understanding of where the pulse is and how the pulse is being stated, and you’re either stating it or not stating it. So to me, again, it’s not like an ethic. It’s a musical device that expresses certain things. And also, I think the hardest thing in music is to figure out another way to swing. I can’t get off of that idea. So one, it’s a ball to do it. Two, it’s really difficult to expand on it. So if you don’t try, it’ll never happen.”

Note, though, that he points to players identified with free jazz or the avant-garde.

He doesn’t want to just follow a line laid out by Charlie Christian or Grant Green; he wants to carve out a space for himself where the rhythmic and melodic innovations of decades past are not ignored in a headlong charge toward some ill-defined “freedom.”

When he does head explicitly backward, it’s in an almost joking (but not parodic) manner—and it’s in the company of friends.

“Sometimes I do what I call my ‘fake jazz’ thing,” he says with a laugh. “It’s almost like if Jim Hall was me and thinks the way I play.

Braxton and I, we play together like that. I’m me/Jim Hall, he’s him/Paul Desmond. It’s sick. We go crazy when we play together like that.”

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Morris’s relentless productivity can make his catalog intimidating—it’s hard to know where to come in. But four records he released in 2009 make good starting points.

Each shows a different facet of his music, but collectively they paint a picture of him as a complete artist.

The first one released was the Flow Trio’s Rejuvenation. Like their performances, it’s fully improvised, moving from three-way conversation to extended solos and back, and it reaches some of the same ecstatic peaks as the live set. However, the stiffness that always overtakes jazz players, of any subgenre or style, in the studio combines with Belogenis’s innate reticence—he’s not Charles Gayle, and he doesn’t try to be—to make the album a more meditative experience. At many moments, it feels like the bandmembers are walking around each other in slow, cautious circles rather than wrestling in the middle of the floor. For the most part, the tracks are relatively short, coming in at five or six minutes rather than the ten-plus of many other Morris albums. He’s a disciplined player who focuses on groove and melody, but he’s not always concise. On Rejuvenation, though, he’s following Belogenis and locking in with Downs, and the saxophonist and drummer both seem to be committed to a kind of slow-dancing exploration of the space between them. This leaves Morris playing more notes than Belogenis, without ever attempting to drive the band faster than the other two want to go. The ultimate effect is strangely calming.

Today on Earth, released on AUM Fidelity, features Morris on guitar, in a group with three Boston-area improvisers he’s worked with many times before—saxophonist Jim Hobbs, bassist Timo Shanko and drummer Luther Gray. He wrote all seven of the album’s tracks, but they’re frameworks, not through-composed pieces; he says his writing is always “meant to inform the improvisation, 100 percent. It’s really just the key that unlocks the door. Once the door’s open, just use the fact that you’re in the room and play the room.” His clean tone rises out of the melodic, boppish heads on pieces like “Backbone” and the title track, pairing off with Hobbs’s alto sax for a sound that’s as informed by Jackie McLean as by Ornette Coleman. Shanko and Gray are a looseygoosey rhythm section, the bassist frequently opting to provide a countermelody while the drummer switches between ultra-light tapping on the cymbals and hi-hat, and a staccato, rattling funk groove. The back-andforth between guitar and saxophone, and the overall friendliness of the music, makes Today on Earth the closest thing Morris has recorded to a mainstream jazz album in some time, the kind of disc that could easily appeal to fans of guitarist Kurt Rosenwinkel.

Morris’s other AUM Fidelity release of 2009, Wildlife, is a very different animal (pun intended). It’s another trio date with him back on bass, surrounded by Luther Gray, again, and saxophonist Petr Cancuri. The disc features only four tracks, all of them over the ten-minute mark and one just shy of twenty, but it’s never mere blare for its own sake, the sound of musicians playing to hear themselves play. The drum solo that opens “Geomantic” has all the time-shredding intricacy of Rashied Ali, coupled with the melodic songcraft of Max Roach. When Can-

curi comes in, offering high-speed flurries of notes, it’s up to Morris to build momentum and be the engine—and he does so, almost race-walking the instrument so you think he’s gonna wind up heading right out of the recording room and down the street, still slapping the strings. On the second and longest track, “Thicket,” he yanks at the instrument in a way that’s reminiscent of the gigantic North African guitar/lute known as the guimbri. It’s a forceful and propulsive album by a band that sounds like they’d be astonishing live.

Colorfield, another ESP-Disk release, is the most abstract of these four records. There’s no bass player at all; the disc features Morris on guitar, Steve Lantner on piano and, for the third time, Luther Gray on drums. The lack of a bass player makes the ensemble entirely melody-focused, and frees Morris in particular to fire streams of notes in every direction like a machine gun, as Lantner comps in a heavy-handed manner that’s not far from Matthew Shipp’s rumbling, churchy solos. The individual tracks (three of which are between 13 and 15 minutes long; the fourth comes in just under seven) blur into one another, creating an impression not unlike a gig. It’s beautiful, but it’s also the least immediately inviting of all four of these albums—though even that’s relative, as the piano/drums passage midway through “Purple Distant” could win over even the most skittish, free-jazz-fearing listener.

But again, the fact that Joe Morris put out four terrific records on two labels within a single calendar year (he actually appeared on ten CDs in 2009, including Matthew Shipp’s Harmonic Disorder and David S. Ware’s Shakti) raises questions about how, exactly, the market for avant-garde jazz and improv works. Everybody knows jazz albums, even by “name” artists, don’t sell more than a few hundred copies most of the time. So the question is, does releasing multiple albums in a year drive sales up, or down? Sure, there are fervent collectors who will pick up every Anthony Braxton album, and Morris’s output is barely a fraction of Braxton’s. But it’s still hard to imagine anybody genuinely keeping up with all this music, no matter how good it all is. And in a way, that’s a bummer. It seems like he’s doing a disservice to his own work by producing it at a rate faster than even his most ardent fans, let alone new listeners (there’s always the potential to attract new listeners), can absorb it.

Morris’s approach makes a lot more sense once you let go of the idea that he might be trying to make any serious money from record sales. Because the reality is, jazz hasn’t sold in significant quantities since the 1950s. The best thing that can possibly happen is for people to stop thinking about the recorded artifact as the beginning and end of music, particularly music as dependent on in-the-moment experience as jazz.

Morris believes that by hustling—taking gigs with anyone he thinks it will be aesthetically productive for him to play with—teaching, and recording more as documentation of the work (new compositions, new collaborators, new instrumental techniques) than as an attempt to have a “hit,” he can be a working musician. And that’s all he really wants to be.

“We’re playing to an audience that’s supposed to show up with the expectation of being challenged,” he says of the experi-

ence of connecting with listeners. “And sometimes I think the challenge is actually weaker than it could be... I also agree that there’s other ways to reach people. Like showing up, playing really avant-garde music and saying, ‘Hi. Thanks a lot for coming. It’s good to see you, hope you enjoy the music.’

That’s an incredible way to get people to break that fourth wall... To demystify it in terms of presentation is an invitation for everybody to come to it. And to expect that they might not have the same reward that you want them to have, so you’re leaving it open to their interpretation. So if they come up to you and go, ‘this sounded like Monk’s music,’ or ‘it sounded like Martians coming down and fighting with birds,’ you say ‘Great, man.’ I didn’t tell you what it was, so if that’s what it is to you, come again, buy a CD. I think there’s ways to demystify or to de-sanctify the presentation.”

In his role as a teacher, Morris attempts to pass along what he’s learned about surviving as a working musician alongside issues of technique and improvisational approaches.

“Take this as far as you can and never, ever, for one minute let it wreck your life,” is what he tells his students. “Have a family, travel, have a home. You could say Charlie Parker died to teach us all the lesson to never go the route he went. There isn’t any part of this worth dying for or being miserable for.”

Morris’s uncle, Johnny Morris, was a drummer who moved to New York in the early 1920s and made a steady, middle-class living gigging, touring and occasionally working for the movies, even recording soundtracks to cartoons. “Those guys didn’t have the tyranny of 85 years of this failed jazz structure to deal with,” he says admiringly. “They just started playing. And when they saw people wanted to dance, they played the Charleston. They made music in a new century.

That’s my operating methodology right now.

I’m gonna try to stay as busy as I can and not do anything that anyone says I’m supposed to do… just let it grow on its own. This idea that you’re this kind of avant-garde artist who improvises is a fairly recent thing. And it hasn’t really worked out for a whole lot of people.”

Three decades of playing free jazz and improvised music have allowed Morris to build up a strong network of connections and be as prolific as he wants to. But he concedes that when you zoom out, you can see that like every other avant-garde musician, he’s running on a treadmill. When asked how things have changed between 1975 and 2010, he says, “I think it’s almost exactly the same. For younger people. For me, it’s easier than it was—I have a lot of contacts, I can play different places. But a lot of this is like the movie Groundhog Day. You wake up and it’s the same thing, and you try to incrementally move it forward so it’s different the next day. Since 1975 it’s been like that, one way or another. I can make a living as a musician and do a lot of things I wasn’t able to do in the ’80s, but I don’t get a sense that things are expanding. I think it’s exactly the same.”✹ Phil Freeman lives in New Jersey. He wrote about Borbetomagus in STN#57.

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THE SOUND OF SINGAPORE

CD racks in Singapore's Little India, July 2010

Natasha Li Pickowicz went to Singapore to meet those who are preserving the republic’s disappearing musical past as well as those who are pushing its music forward, and brought back this story and photos.

In a melatonin-induced haze, I descend into the Republic of Singapore—the glittering city-state and financial jewel of Southeast Asia—after 22 cramped hours in the air. As I skim through the tattered in-flight literature, the latest issue of Sky Delta Magazine assures me that the island country “offers something for everyone.”

The magazine makes a few good points— with its extensive middle class, outrageous mall culture, thriving downtown and heady tropical climes, Singapore is, by most standards, the most utopian city in Asia. But while Singapore is renowned as a gastronomic and shopping paradise, its cultural identity has remained far more elusive.

Settled into a taxi barreling towards my apartment on Pasir Panjang Road, I overhear a disc jockey announce that the ‘Global Livable Cities Index,’ a newly developed list suspiciously developed in Singapore, has ranked Singapore the third most livable city in the world, behind only Swiss cities Geneva and Zurich. Yet the more established Mercer Quality of Living Index put Singapore at number 28 in 2010. As the world’s fourth leading financial center, Singapore prides itself on its ease of living and controlled, consumable pleasures. One local describes Singapore as a ‘lollipop city.’ Bright, fast and easy, it’s a sparkling city that dissolves on the tongue.

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traveler at every corner: as I make my way through the various Singapore tourist attractions, the perfumed Singapore Botanic Gardens, the latticed wet market Lau Pa Sat, the historic Raffles Hotel, the ostentatious new casino Marina Bay Sands, and the sleek mall ION Orchard all utterly blow my mind with their wealth and sumptuous aesthetic grandeur.

In the three weeks that I spend on the tiny island, I discover that behind the technologically-enhanced image that Singapore projects is a delicate multicultural tapestry.

Singapore’s interiracial makeup—which includes groups of Caucasians, Chinese, Malays and Indians, each maintaining their own cultural traditions—is a product of its globalizing port ecosystem. In this uniquely engineered heterogeneous society, contemporary art has always been a way for those traditions to be contested. Yet its ‘lollipop’ reputation and cosmopolitan savvy might be at odds with Singapore’s struggle for a cohesive cultural identity.

Singapore gained independence from Great Britain in 1965, and the following ten years were marked by a momentous amount of political, cultural, and social change. Many locals I encounter tend to agree that the subsequent decade was Singapore’s most charged musical period—and also attest that it since has been unsurpassed in innovation, vibrancy, and autonomy. Like other Southeastern Asian musicians, Singaporean bands were a hybrid of Western influences (like The Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, or The Beatles), kinked with traditional ethnic flourishes like Malay vocals, Indian percussion, or Mandarin stringed instruments.

The remarkable creativity of the period—combined with an adopted Western-influenced drug culture and sexual revolution—inevitably led to a harsh government clampdown on music in the 1970s.

One infamous policy extended to shaggy Western rock musicians, who would be apprehended for an impromptu haircut at the Singapore Changi Airport if they wanted to enter the country.

With Singapore’s government deeply concerned with maintaining traditional aspects of Asian culture—instead of the perceived hedonism and decadence of the Western rock ’n’ roll zeitgeist—traits like hard work, social stability, responsibility, and community were encouraged. On the fringes, strains of Indonesian dangdut, Malay a-go-go and Hindustan irama flourished, although they were diametrically opposed to a pop music mainstream that favored Western-style ballads, toned-down rock, and light pop. Many musicians had to evolve or perish—either adapt to the pop and disco climate of the club scene, or wait it out for increasingly infrequent gigs.

In some cases, government censorship led to artistic self-censorship, a problem that appears to be endemic even to this day.

“We’re not a city that’s repressed, but what we don’t have is a collective memory, in a sense,” Png says. “If you create a history, you could create a new scene that has its roots somewhere that you could build on.

Instead, we get stretched every time.”

Benefits that emerged from being an economic powerhouse—social stability, su-

perior education, and modern efficiency— were the very things that quelled any visible counterculture.

One of the most fanatical archivists of the post-1965 period is editor and writer William Gibson—not to be confused with the American-Canadian cyberpunk writer of the same name, who once wrote that Singapore was “relentless G-rated experience, micromanaged by a state that has the look and feel of a very large corporation… conformity here is the prime directive, and the fuzzier brands of creativity are in extremely short supply.” This Gibson is a bespectacled, lanky Los Angeles native who moved to Singapore in 2005. On a blazing, mid-June afternoon, I meet him at a dingy café located deep in an anonymous Chinatown outdoor market.

For many, the Technicolor byways of Chinatown serve as a powerful antidote to Singapore’s benign beige exteriors, and Gibson revels in its lively, sweltering grittiness. The Outram neighborhood is dotted with cheap open-air noodle shophouses, pungent apothecary pharmacies, and grimy Thai discos—flashy dance clubs with female Philippine and Thai bands performing covers of Top 40 hits by Lady Gaga and Britney Spears, while their all-male patronage flash dollars and dance until dawn.

“There are intentionally touristy places like the Clarke Quay and the marina district, where it is sanitized, and kept that way. But come down here at night. It’s filthy,” Gibson laughs, and we suck down plastic beakers of radioactive-colored lime juice in the hazy afternoon heat.

Upon his move to Chinatown in 2007, Gibson noticed the wizened old men selling trinkets that littered the sidewalks. “I saw them selling 45s, and I was intrigued,” he recalls. “I bought these 1960s Chinese pop records and started making copies for my friends. Most of my Singaporean friends didn’t know them at all, and people were reluctant to talk about it. I quickly found out that it was because of a racial and class divide, and that a lot of my friends who were English speakers only listened to local English language pop.”

Before long, Gibson became obsessed with the effervescent, bubblegum dance music popularized by The Stylers, The Silvertones, The Travelers, The Melodians, Chinese-language bands that dominated the shelves at his neighborhood junk shops and flea markets. Gibson began hunting down the mysterious 45s released by longdeceased labels like Sakura, Polar Bear, Antelope, and Panda, and had his wife translate the liner notes on the worn, faded record sleeves.

After a series of email communications between Gibson and musician and seasoned world traveler Alan Bishop, in 2009 Sublime Frequencies released the Gibsoncurated compilation Singapore A-Go-Go, the first Singapore-centric record the label had ever released. Digitized from his private collection of rare vinyl 45s, the CD is a bubbly take on the pulpy Singaporean ’60s pop styles—particularly the ‘off-beat cha-cha’ that characterizes the beat-a-gogo genre—sung entirely in Mandarin and Hokkien dialects. “They are artifacts of a particular time and place,” Gibson writes

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in the liner notes, “a swinging Singapore recently made independent, a groovy place at a post-colonial crossroad.”

In his quest to trace the roots of his dusty records, a prevalent hush-hush attitude regarding that decadent decade became an obstacle. “At first, I didn’t even know what those artifacts were. It took a long time just to figure it out. That’s why I was intrigued and wanted to pursue it,” Gibson says. “Some of the singers and performers that I tracked down refused to speak with me. Like, ‘This is in the past, and we refuse to speak about it.’ If I was lucky, they would be ‘amused’ about my project, and would talk to me. But quite a few people refused to talk about it all, avoiding the persistent rumors that the musicians had crossover with organized crime and prostitution. But mostly, the records I was buying were considered old-fashioned junk.”

Gibson leads me to a record store, a newer spot on Sago Lane in the Chinatown neighborhood named Still Can Use, run by an enthusiastic record collector named Roger Mak. As we sift through records printed with beaming Chinese starlets in candy-colored outfits, Gibson explains how many artists suffer from the ephemeral, flash-in-the-pan nature of the Asian pop industry. “A lot of Asian pop is supermanufactured and popular for a very short time, and then disappears,” Gibson says.

“I think in Singapore there is a tendency to divorce yourself from the past. You can see that in the way they treat their architecture and city planning. They wouldn’t think twice about taking a beautiful 19th-century row of houses and bulldozing them and putting up condos or a shopping mall. Eventually they stopped because educated and affluent Singaporeans said, ‘This is ridiculous and you are destroying our heritage.’ And I think we realized that we don’t have to do that anymore, we don’t have to exclusively look into the future.”

And just as crumbling edifices have been swapped out for commerce-heavy, utilitarian shopping malls and hotels, the sanitizing of the city appeared to be happening on every aesthetic level. Occasionally the cognitive dissonance is magnificent: the second record store Gibson takes me to, View Point Trading & Collectibles, is a cluttered Singaporean antique shop housed in an otherwise soulless shopping mall on China Square Central. We sift through vintage photographs, magazines, posters of pin-up girls and faded maps, and finally depart for a late lunch at the Maxwell Food Centre, one of most infamous outposts for cheap, sinful hawker food.

At a glamorous meal a few nights before at the Royal China, the elegant, periwinklehued dining room located in the heart of the Raffles Hotel, I casually mention my excitement at ordering the Chinatown favorite char kway teow, or fried cockles and rice noodles, which one food writer described to me as “the most disgusting dish on the planet.” One dinner guest, Khim Loh, a co-founder of Moving Visuals Co, an independent TV production company based in Singapore, crinkles her nose in disgust.

“Hepatitis,” she says, taking a delicate bite of gingered shredded duck and braised short ribs. “Those things are served raw.”

Back at the Maxwell Centre, her words

William Gibson record shopping in Chinatown, and a portion of his collection of Singaporean pop, below.

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echo disturbingly in my head, and I settle on a fairly innocuous-looking, restorative bowl of fish ball noodle soup. Gibson eyes the steaming dish warily as he wipes away the beading sweat on his forehead. “I only eat in the mornings and at night,” gesturing towards the beating sun overhead. “It’s just not happening in Singapore anymore,” he sighs. “So many bands stopped performing, from this entire cottage music industry.

It came and went in 20 years, and there’s not a lot of traces of it—only the records.”

As I slurp down my bowl of chili-saucespiked noodles, Gibson explains how modern Singaporean youths don’t listen to Singaporean pop bands the way American teenagers worship at the altar of the Velvet Underground, The Kinks or Blondie.

“There’s no irony in Asian youth culture,” Gibson explains. “It was fun to play and got people laid. But there’s no artistic merit in it, there’s no reason to be interested in it, it’s not culturally valid, it’s garbage, it’s just junk.

I would buy these 45s for $2 at shops and they look at you like you’re crazy.”

So what happened to Singapore-a-gogo? Censorship and bootlegging played equal roles in the scene’s demise. “The records that I was buying seemed to die out completely at the same time cassette tapes became popular in the 1980s. That was a real turning point,” he says. And though one can apply for a national heritage grant from the Singaporean government, people here still seem reluctant to celebrate the period. “Because this music was considered bubblegum pop, it doesn’t merit the attention I’m giving it,” Gibson says. “That’s

what confuses locals. Like, ‘Why are you interested in that?’”

The government doesn’t acknowledge the artists as part of the country’s historical narrative, and they simply disappear.

“Maybe they’ll play at a Chinese festival, like the Hungry Ghost Festival. But as far as them showing up at any kind of Singaporean pride festival—no way,” he says. At the moment, here in Singapore, Gibson’s curatorial efforts are considered mostly superficial. “There are so many ethnicities here and so many folk traditions, and they never fully melded,” Gibson says. “There is some crossover in sound and technique and style, but the local sound is more or less gone.”

Halfway through my trip, I schedule an appointment to meet with a trio of librarians at the new location of the National Library of Singapore, a mirrored, towering repository located around the corner from Raffles Hotel. Two young women, Gladys Ng and Chiew Boon, rush to meet me and give me a tour of the 11th floor, which houses the library’s impressive Southeast Asia Collection. “We are so proud of our collection,” says Boon, a librarian, sweeping her arm across the room.

Flipping through stacks of books, magazines and old film reels, there seems to be a greater effort to catalog the efforts of its artistic denizens, but its contents focus almost entirely on the more popular English-speaking bands of the period—The Checkmates, The Quests, The Cyclones, The Stray Dogs, or Pests Infected—not the Chinese-singing bands Gibson features on the Singapore AGo-Go compilation. “I played the Sublime

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Frequencies record for my father-in-law and he said that none of those tunes were even hits at the time,” Gibson recalls. “He was like, ‘Why would you even put those out?”

Later in the week, I meet up with Kenny Png, one of the cofounders of local arts collective The Enigmatic Army. A wiry, fast-talking 30-something, Png suggests we meet at Baden, a German bar pub tucked away in the boozy, ex-pat-friendly neighborhood Holland Village. He promptly orders us $15 German lagers and begins enthusing about a Chinese punk show happening later that night, featuring Enigmatic Army favorites LGF (short for ‘Little Green Frog’).

With five bands slated to perform, the bill that night is diverse. Png and his Enigmatic Army cohorts encourage stylistic cross-pollination, but the results are mixed.

Despite local pockets of metal bands, pop singers and indie rock ensembles, the niche communities rarely interact. There are a few success stories, most notably the atmospheric space rock band The Observatory, which has straddled mainstream and experimental sensibilities for nearly a decade. Many of its members are active in other projects, including Dharma, who plays in Throbed and Meddle; Evan Tan, who was the original bassist for cult Singapore punk band The Opposition Party, and currently plays in drone and noise outfit Minister; and vocalist Leslie Low, who played in cult local band Humpback Oak and started the black metal duo Magus.

But The Observatory seems to be a unique example—everyone wants a unified

Singapore, but the music scene’s fragmentation is undeniable. “We’re a very small city, and we’re so fragmented in the sense that, if you listen to Chinese pop, you probably just listen to Chinese pop. You don’t bother with anything else,” Png bemoans.

Gibson, whose wife is a Singaporean native, agrees. “My wife just listens to Cantonese pop music, contemporary stuff made in the last 10 years,” he says. “It comes out of Taiwan or Hong Kong, and it’s overwhelmingly ballads. It’s all in a 4/4 beat with Western instrumentation on a Western scale, except the singer is singing in Cantonese. It’s usually pained love ballads delivered in a very poorly crafted operatic style—big vocals to show big emotions, like heartbreak.”

Png, who supports himself as a successful documentary film director, has been a part of the music community for 17 years, working as a musician, event organizer, and producer at the Enigmatic Army. “It’s a shame,” Png sighs, and shrugs his shoulders. “It’s a transient space—we always look outwards.

A lot of bands here want to play in Thailand, Malaysia, Taiwan. It doesn’t make sense to only want to play Singapore four times a year… My bands would tour to Hong Kong, Taiwan, New Delhi to play shows, and everyone faced the same problems in those places, too. The music wasn’t hip enough for the indie scenes, you couldn’t get money to record, you couldn’t get gigs. So we decided to pool our resources together.”

Finally, in 2007, the Enigmatic Army— an outspoken multi-disciplinary collective with its roots in Singapore but spread over Asia—was born. Their manifesto reads, in part, “The aim of the army is to create a platform for Asian voices who may otherwise be left unheard. You do not have to be pretty, be in tune with what sells or even bend over backwards just to be heard or seen.” By providing the resources and funds to complete projects like CDs, concerts, art shows, or books, the collective encourages growth among regional or unknown artists, who play in genres as disparate as folk, punk, funk, metal and goth rock. The collective also supports underground bands from as far away as New Delhi and Hong Kong, including Victor, Sajid & The Lost Boys, Ugly In The Morning, and Crazimalz. “We’re trying to provide a more underground gig circuit,” Png explains. “For example, we’ve been having an ‘exchange programme’ with a collective known as DongTaidu in Kuala Lumpur and Malaysia.”

Fortunately, Png is not alone. There are many other groups in Singapore that take a similar approach, including Willy Tan, who heads up Aging Youth, which promotes funk, pop, rock and indie bands. Mourning Sound Records focuses on metal, and Big Ear Music supports emo, metalcore and folk.

Png hands me a copy of On Happiness, an experimental book he recently wrote with Jeremy Fernando. The slim volume is published by Math Paper Press, an imprint run by local independent bookshop Books Actually. Rebecca Koh, a marketing and public relations executive at The Substation, also insists that I visit the hipster hangout. I end up back in Chinatown: located on the

snaking indie shopping road Club Street, the three-story space is a treasure trove, and a key distributor for local authors and publications, including the literary journal Singa and the zine The Lichen Press.

KittyWu Records, a growing DIY label formed in 2007 by partners Lesley Chew and Errol Tan, works hard to celebrate obscure local music, particularly instrumental, shoegaze, and post-rock bands like I Am David Sparkle, Amateur Takes Control, Amberhaze, and Lunar Node. They also book touring Western acts to play in Singapore, like summer shows with Lymbyc Systym and Delphic. “We wanted to do something more for the local music scene,” Lesley says. “We’ve always been supportive by attending gigs and buying CDs but we felt it wasn’t enough… Now we’re geared towards penetrating the overseas market and finding a viable and stable business model for our bands to do what they love full-time.”

Darren Moore, an Australian based in Singapore, organizes Choppa, a monthly experimental music series that showcases both local and international experimental noise and improv. In January, Moore celebrated the series’ third anniversary with the Choppa Festival 2010, which featured appearances from Ruins, Cho Sokkyo, Uchiharshi Kazuhisa, Zbigniew Karkowski, Pimmon, and Goh Lee Kwang.

Moore, who also leads the jazz band the Darren Moore Quintet, is taking a break from Choppa for the summer season. The challenges to maintaining underground collectives like Enigmatic Army, Aging Youth, or Choppa are sizeable: Between the costs of regional plane-jumping tours and producing CDs in a country where music sales are pitifully low, many of these groups remain firmly under the radar. “Promotion and distribution of [KittyWu] music is definitely a challenge, due to the geography and varied languages [like] Malay, Bahasa, Japanese in the region,” says Tan. “To make it really big outside, bands have to tour incessantly.”

Png often funds Enigmatic Army projects out of his own pocket. “It can get harder and harder to squeeze it out. We don’t do it for profit; all of the money we put in. We don’t ask for it back,” Png says. “I’ll be honest with you, with almost any project, 60% of the money comes from me. And that’s a lot of money. But I do it for the love of it.

Sometimes you have to put the money out, and that’s that.”

Many mainstream Singaporean artists rely heavily on government funding, while more marginalized groups like the Enigmatic Army refuse it entirely—and often suffer the consequences. Png rattles off a long list of noise and industrial musicians who have recently left Singapore for Australia, England, America, and France. “There is a very narrow definition of art here. You can’t fit in, and it’s very hard to get funding,” Png explains. “And even if you get funding, there are just so many strings attached. That’s not the way it’s supposed to be. Our guys are so hot on doing music, and the last thing they need is some organizer being like, ‘Oh, it’s supposed to be like this.’”

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Opposite, top: LGF, and below, Kenny Png and Rui at Singapore's Home Club

like to say, ‘Look, we came from a line of this,’” Png says. “Because of whatever stupid rules and laws regarding drugs and hair length — it nips history in the bud. I think if the current generation of players knew about our heritage, they would enjoy it. But the problem is, you can’t even talk about it.

When what defined you in the 1960s was drugs, it’s like, does the city want to talk about that? It’s whispered.”

I explore a variety of music venues, including Timber, the restaurant adjacent to The Substation, the Home Club, the Post Museum, the Singapore Arts Museum, and the Esplanade, but many of these are beyond the Enigmatic Army’s modest budget.

Local noise fanatic Victor Leong tips me off about the Blackhole, a non-profit, all-ages community space on Syed Alwi Road that doubles up as a gig space for alternative bands at night. “Most of the noise and punk bands play there these days,” Leong tells me.

And for the mainstream electronic music crew, there’s Zouk and the Velvet Underground, a pricey, Euro-style dance club that has booked top-shelf artists like Ewan Pearson, Digitalism, and Ellen Allien since 1991. Despite these options, often it can be difficult to find just the right spot for an upcoming gig. “We have a lack of live venues to host shows—which is a real shame,” says Chew. “We have two sides of the spectrum with spaces for 200 and the alternative, 2,000. We lack spaces to hold mid-sized shows and most of the available venues are clubs whose sound systems are EQed to dance music.”

Ultimately, Png just wants to party—and the Enigmatic Army definitely knows how to have fun. “People tell us that we are very disorganized, but that’s also one of the fun things about it,” Png says. “We’re not trying to do this for a living, and our guys aren’t trying to be rock stars. For us, the rock star era is over. There’s no such thing as ‘15 minutes of fame.’ It’s just about expression if you want it. The idea is not about selling records and being rock stars, but to empower.”

Several hours later and four beers deeper, I temporarily say goodbye to Png and fortify my stomach for the long night ahead with plastic plates piled high with crispy suckling pig, steamed rice, and the umami-heavy carrot cake, bought for a pittance from the tiny stalls that line the famed Tiong Bahru Market. When I make my 9pm arrival for the Chinese punk concert at the Home Club—a small club tucked away on The Riverwalk, between the Clarke Quay and Boat Quay— Png and his Enigmatic Army cohorts are already wasted, careening into walls and downing tumblers of whiskey. “You gotta meet everyone!” Png shouts into my ear, as I pay the $15 cover and receive my drink tickets.

In the dim, cool cave of the club, I am in-

troduced to at least 20 enthusiastic concertgoers, all of whom seem equally inebriated and are apparently having the best time of their entire lives. “We’re not Metallica, we’re nothing,” Png laughs. “It’s not like, in four or five years we’ll make tons of money, buy a sports car, be rich. In four or five years we just want there to be a support system to help the folks that we like. We’re just so happy that things have been happening.”

Redpoll, Ah5ive, Elyzia, LGF, and Tian Di Hui are all scheduled to play. The bands are highly oriented to Western music traditions, playing hardcore, rock and punk with varying degrees of intensity. Bands share musicians, equipment, and booze. Throughout the night, Png and his friends race around the club, slinging arms around each other, moshing into cement pillars, and shouting lyrics that blur into obscenities. The sense of camaraderie is palpable and messy. Png leaps onstage to force-feed pints of beer to a gangly bassist, while his friend Rui ties a sky-blue scarf around the neck of a guitarist like a noose.

Pop-punk quartet LGF play an uncharacteristically toned-down ‘unplugged’ set instead of their typical Rasputina- and Velvet Revolver-inflected glam rock. LGF’s petite, beaming frontwoman, Regine Han, perches on the edge of the stage, legs dangling, belting out songs that are only a few precarious steps removed from Evanescence or Papa Roach. Despite the misgivings I have about this particular brand of Chinese punk, it is hard to deny the infectious spirit of the club and the welcoming attitude of its patrons. Exhausted, I duck out of the club early and head home amidst the neon-lit stripe of the Singapore River.

Located on Armenian Street in the downtown civic district, The Substation has become a cultural institution in Singapore since its inception as an independent arts center in 1990. With its black box theatre, gallery, dance studio, and multipurpose classrooms, The Substation hosts sound artists, conceptual art installations, experimental theater, poetry readings, stand-up comedy, and workshop series. It is unquestionably the most visible spot for experimental artists both emerging and established, and The Substation’s monthly programming schedules reveal a wide array of options, from an annual short film festival to the widely touted Night Festival 2010.

“We have always been about interdisciplinary practice,” says Noor Effendy Ibrahim, who has served as the Artistic Director at The Substation since the beginning of 2010.

Ibrahim, a seasoned and celebrated performance artist, has explored both traditional Malay theater as well as more peripheral and controversial performance art. “[Growing up,] I rejected English theater, or what I saw as a fixation with Western-centric theater,” Ibrahim says. “I found theater

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to be too rigid and structured so I went into more body-based works and physical theater—but there was a ban in 1994, a clampdown on performance art.”

As a registered non-profit, The Substation fights different battles from off-theradar collectives like Aging Youth or the Enigmatic Army. “Of course, the lucky artists are able to create a practice which is self-sustainable. But the majority of us rely on the National Arts Council, and it gets very competitive,” Ibrahim explains. “The government funds 50% of your proposed budget, and the rest you have to raise elsewhere, through sales, other donations, and sponsors.”

With the government dangling meaty financial carrots in front of eager artists, promoting pure creative expression hasn’t always been easy. “The idea is always to work independently so you’re not subjected to criteria and red tape and their agenda, but the reality is that every artist is subject to censorship—and that does somehow tie into criteria and causes,” Ibrahim says.

Many cash-strapped artists adopt survival strategies in order to be a more appealing candidate for government funding.

“The clampdown [on performance art] has been lifted, but censorship still occurs, sometimes as self-censorship, because you know you’ve been given certain signals, or because you’ve worked so long you understand how things work and you try to preempt. And that compromises the integrity of a lot of work here. It’s either comply and get support, or do it on your own, or don’t do it at all,” Ibrahim fiddles with the keypad of his cell phone.

While Ibrahim concedes that government intervention is a dark reality, more anarchically-minded souls like Png express cynicism. “You almost can’t find evidence of it, because it’s almost like self-censorship.

It’s all very subtle,” Png says. “That’s why we refuse to take money from the government, because we don’t want to put ourselves in a situation where we feel compromised. We always want to do our best; we don’t want to feel like, ‘Well, we shouldn’t say this.’”

In the 20 years of its existence, The Substation has managed to circumvent most of these challenges, creating a vibrant, multi-disciplinary space that promotes innovation and conceptual creativity—all while fighting the ongoing gentrification of the neighborhood. “You can’t just hang out here anymore,” Ibrahim admits. “For me, the challenge is not only to convince but to ensure that the artists who work with us understand the landscape, and to be sensitive to that landscape and its changing elements. To be able to survive it.”

Not every event is successful, and Ibrahim has learned to adapt with the changing political and social climate. “With The Substation, we have to be very clear that we are more interested in process, and failure is an WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #59 | 27

acceptable result. More importantly, it’s not about learning, it’s about unlearning. The Substation has been around for 20 years, and we have learned so much. So the challenge is to apply what we have learned, and most of the time, whatever we have learned is definitely outdated by the time we apply it, so we have to unlearn it. For me, the challenges in Singapore are who can do the most with the least amount of resources— not just materials, but the administrative, logistical, financial, spatial resources. Even spirit,” Ibrahim laughs.

More than any other arts space in Singapore, The Substation is attempting to bridge the ambiguous space between struggling artists and the myopic public, to discover the next elusive ‘crossover artist.’

“The problem now is that cultural events become niche, and only the enlightened or the converted will come,” Ibrahim says.

“There is no real community in that sense.

My definition of community is having the real desire not just to engage, but a real desire to learn… We are looking for works that are relevant not just to the arts community, but also to the larger community. That’s a real challenge, how to open a space for civil society… For me, it’s all about how do I make the work legit so that it transcends its issues, and is relevant to the larger community?”

Not everyone appreciates The Substation’s efforts to reach out to the greater public. “I would go see the punk band The Opposition Party play in 1986, when they were 16 years old,” Png recalls. “They had huge Mohawks and leather jackets and got into fights at The Substation, back when The Substation was actually a venue and not the freaking commercial bar that it is now… I mean, talk about Timber—what a bunch of fucking yuppies. They claim to play original music, but it’s covers and a bunch of yuppies hanging out thinking they’re really cool. The place was a mecca.

Substation is where it all started, and we still have a soft spot for it. We used to climb the walls to watch shows there because of course we didn’t have $5 when we were 14 years old. And no one would bother us.

That place has so many memories for us.”

Ibrahim acknowledges that the role of The Substation has mutated in the last 20 years. “The Substation has always been seen as the space where more avant-garde works happen, where more envelopes can be pushed. It’s a safe space for freedom of expression. But in the last few years the government has kind of imposed several restrictions and it did affect our programming. It’s an occupational hazard here,” Ibrahim shrugs. “Just the very name of The Substation is associated with activism, be it political or social.”

Between the DIY noise collectives, arts non-profits and commercial venues, the strata of tension build up. With its metallic porcupine quill exterior and uniform rows of shops inside, the sprawling waterfront arts center Esplanade is home to the Singapore Symphony Orchestra and also caters to big-name international acts like Broken Social Scene, Belle & Sebastian, Fujiya and Miyagi, and Kode 9. “It’s bigger, well facilitated,” Ibrahim admits. “Of course, it’s not a competition, but my sense is that [the Esplanade] spoils and pampers the artist…

Because it’s such an iconic and complete space, there’s a lot of red tape issues such as security and maintenance. It’s very rigid, you can’t do certain things. At The Substation, it’s always been a very flexible, fluid and organic space where we are definitely open to discussion.”

At the Esplanade, there’s far less local music representation except for acceptable indie pop or soft folk acts like The Great Spy Experiment. “When it comes to local boys, they discriminate a bit,” says Png, who prefers the relaxed, anything-goes attitude of hipster hangout Home Club. “With most places, it can cost a couple grand to rent per night. And that’s not including finding your own equipment, finding sponsors.”

Since its opening in 2007, the Post Museum is often heralded as a modest alternative to The Substation, and on Ibrahim’s good word, I visit the multi-disciplinary art space, buried deep on Rowell Road in Little India, one of the most thrilling neighborhoods in Singapore. Located in adjacent 1920s-era shophouses, the Post Museum houses a contemporary vegetarian café, an exhibition space and show room, a multipurpose backroom, and a number of working spaces that serve as studios and offices.

On the afternoon I visited, the exhibition space was empty, although the peeling flyers on the wall outside advertised a number of promising group shows.

With the venue quiet and closed, I spend an hour sifting through wares at the iconic Thieves’ Market, an open-air flea market that sells old cassettes, used clothes, broken appliances, and the occasional LP. In Little India, Tamil and Bollywood-centric music shops of all shapes and sizes are happily plentiful, and my favorite is Tirupathi Music & Hairdressing on Kebrau Road, which is about the size of a large walk-in closet and blasts music that can be heard two blocks away. The owner, Thacna Murthx, ushers me into his shop and handpicks a fistful of Tamil CDs, most of which are crudely burned as MP3s—often 100-150 tracks per disc—and sold for around $2-4 USD. Unlike Chinatown, there are no cassettes or vinyl records available. “Why would you want those things?” Murthx shakes his head vigorously and pushes five discs into my hand.

Hands heavy with fresh purchases— which include plastic bags stuffed with dried anise and cardamom pods from Mustafa Centre, vials of turmeric powder, holographic neon religious art, a handful of classical Chinese LPs from the Thieves’ Market, and glass pots of Tiger Balm—I finish the day with a deep bowl of fragrant fish head curry at the Banana Leaf Apolo, a popular upscale mini-chain that specializes in the fiery, saffron-hued red snapper dish.

Though the Post Museum seems well integrated with its vibrant Little India surroundings, there seem to be few efforts to incorporate contemporary art culture within civil society. Galen Yeo, the other creative half of Moving Visuals, suggests that I visit PULSE, a multi-disciplinary installation erected as part of the 2010 Singapore River Festival, built by the Singapore River on the North Boat Quay, near the Parliament House and Ministry of Information. With an instrumental folk soundtrack by Kelvin Tang, a local experimental musician, the

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piece is touted as a “multi-sensory interactive art installation… like a pulsating heart fueled by the veins of the river.” Sadly, the multi-roomed piece is mostly inoperative, with several of the motion-triggered rooms as still as a tomb.

One quality that’s made it harder for Singapore to develop a cohesive cultural identity—its location as a port city—is also part of its attraction: it’s uniquely well-positioned relative to every other destination in Southeast Asia. From Singapore, Bali is a speedy, affordable two-hour flight, with airlines that cater exclusively to the droves of tourists that visit the sun-soaked island during the summer season.

Bali is a fitting conclusion to a trip that felt defined by my struggle to find an exciting musical narrative, because in Bali I am overcome with its easy-to-find cultural riches. I spend six luminous, spectacular days in Ubud, a small touristy town perched near the southern edge of the Indonesian island famous for its labyrinthine openair markets, sacred Hindu temples and monkey-speckled rainforests.

Perfumed by Hindu temple offerings of crushed flowers and leaves, Ubud’s dusty, narrow roads are often packed with Balinese locals watching festival marching bands and parades of dancers and percussionists. Thanks to a growing Western fixation on gamelan ensemble music—the highly ritualistic, vaguely discordant music played on a pentatonic scale—there are quite a few shops that peddle Indonesian music, and Balinese CDs are prized by tourists as much as a jar of amber rainforest honey or an intricate ikat tapestry. At places like the Ubud Music and Foto Center, traditional Indonesian styles like gamelan, kecak, and fire dance are sold alongside mainstream Asian pop, Western imports, and lounge music marketed to European and Australian tourists looking for a downtempo Buddha Bar ‘chill’ aesthetic.

While I am in Ubud, I attend two lavish, spellbinding gamelan concerts, both with accompanying troupes of legong performers, a popular type of dance characterized by its intricate and highly stylized finger movements. As leather-winged bats circle overhead and brassy, rust-colored beetles stage a trance-like performance of their own, I listen, captivated, as the gamelan ensemble inches ever closer towards impossible spiritual truths. It is a breathless narrative display of music’s eternal potential to bridge the ambiguous space between body and mind, and a transformative moment in my search for foreign catharsis.

Bali’s dreamy otherworldliness helps me reflect upon the tough realities of Singapore’s worldliness—its endless contradictions, uniquenesses, and limitations. It is when I leave for a nearby, but utterly different, place that Singapore finally becomes apparent to me as the profoundly complex, beguiling place that it is. Compared to the crumbling, ancient vistas of Indonesia or Malaysia, Singapore may not have much of a past, but its futuristic mindset makes it an undeniably exciting place to watch in the years to come. ✹ Natasha Li Picowicz wrote about touring Europe with Benoit Pioulard in STN#57.

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SOUND UNBOUND

Guided for over 30 years by a taste for adventure and a spirit of self-reliance, The Ex reinvent themselves yet again on an unlikely career path that's taken them from the squats of Amsterdam to the concert halls of Addis Ababa.

Story by Bill Meyer.

Photos by Angeline Evans.

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The Ex in Chicago, IL, March 2010.

From left: Andy Moor, Katherina Bornefeld, Arnold de Boer and Terrie Hessels

Arnold de Boer was not there when The Ex played their first concert in the summer of 1979. Don’t blame him; he was just four and a half years old. It took him another dozen years to know they existed, and he wasn’t drawn into their orbit until they and his own band Zea played the same festival in 1998. It wasn’t just their music that grabbed him. “I really liked the fact that they just parked the van near the stage and there were lots of people there, and also with their kids. It was really great to see this group of people who completely had their own way of doing things. Even though the whole organization, structure and system of this festival was, everyone had to get wrist bands, they showed that it’s still possible if you want for a group of people to stay in your own tribe, create your own little universe for maybe 45 minutes, and then leave.” In 2009 he joined the band.

It’s tempting to call any combo that’s been around for over thirty years, let alone one that’s been feted by Sonic Youth, the Mekons, and Steve Albini, an institution, but The Ex are fundamentally anti-institutional. They aren’t a part of any existing musical hierarchy. They’ve never signed to a major label. The Ex are a self-renewing democratic collective whose commitment to certain principles—honesty, sustainability, freedom—has kept them on course while so many of their contemporaries and the social and business milieus around them have expired or faded to irrelevance.

Such commitment has enabled them to grow from a rudimentary punk ensemble who picked their name because it could be spray-painted in two seconds to a flexible ensemble that persuasively shares stages with top-flight free improvisers and musicians from other cultures whilst playing a myriad of musical forms, including pareddown rock, free improvisation, Africanrooted dance music, and Eastern European folk, with unassailable authenticity.

Despite being based in Amsterdam, The Ex is an international affair. The band currently comprises Dutchmen Arnold de Boer (vocals, guitar, keyboard) and Terrie Hessels (guitar), German Katherina Bornefeld (drums, vocals), and Englishman Andy Moor (guitar). Since 2006 there’s been no bassist, and Moor and Hessels have filled out the low end with baritone guitars. Bornefeld joined in 1984. Moor first played with the band in 1990, whilst on hiatus from the Dog Faced Hermans, and joined permanently after they broke up in 1994. Hessels is the sole founding member left since GW Sok (a.k.a. Jos Kley—until the 2000s band members either used punk rock pseudonyms or took

the band’s name for their surname), whose instantly recognizable bark has been part of The Ex’s signature sound since their first gig, left last year.

Such a loss would sink some groups, but The Ex used it as an opportunity to re-energize. Since de Boer joined they’ve written and road-tested a new set of songs; toured Europe under the banner Brass Unbound with high-powered saxophonists Mats Gustafsson and Ken Vandermark, trombonist Wolter Wierbos, and trumpeter Roy Paci; played in Europe and North America with the 75-year-old Ethiopian saxophonist Getatchew Mekurya; curated one evening of the Irtijal Festival of improvised music in Beirut, Lebanon; and organized the latest in a series of expeditions to Ethiopia. This time Moor, Hessels, and de Boer played some gigs in Addis Ababa with Vandermark, multi-reedist Ab Baars, and drummer Paal Nilssen-Love, and also set up saxophone clinics in order to restore the instruments that have fallen into disrepair since the ’70s, when they were a key voice in that nation’s golden age of groove music.

In March 2010 The Ex came to the USA to play a couple of gigs that confirmed their ongoing excellence as a live unit.

They played almost nothing but new songs, and their ferociously paced onslaught of jagged guitar riffs and interlocking rhythms worked a Chicago audience to a frenzy. I meet with them on the day between that show and a session at Albini’s Electrical Audio studio where they would record Catch My Shoe, their first album of original songs in over six years, now available as CD, LP and download from Ex Records.

In a statement as bald and blunt as one of their lyrics, The Ex’s website indicates that GW Sok left because he no longer had the “enthusiasm, inspiration, and commitment” to continue. Explains Moor, “It was always a struggle for him to find text.

At a certain point it seemed to be more of a struggle than it was satisfying. We were feeding him a lot of ideas because he didn’t seem to be inspired.” But rather than leave with rancor, Sok simply moved behind the scenes. He still runs Ex Records and has taken over their online store, while the band has carried on with de Boer.

Players have come and gone throughout The Ex’s history, changing the sound as they passed through. When Luc Ex, their electric bassist for 19 years, departed in 2002 they replaced him with New Music acoustic bassist Rozemarie Heggen and wrote an entirely new set of songs (collected on the Turn double album) that

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were as skeletal as the music they had played with Luc was dense. They’ve done something similar with de Boer. The Ex’s new songs are remorselessly driving, with each instrument holding down a beat like one drum in a circle. But de Boer’s vocal delivery is more melodic than Sok’s, turning up the tunefulness quotient. The single “Maybe I Was the Pilot,” his debut Ex recording, is as lilting as birdsong blowing through a barbed wire fence; the song’s acerbic observations about the uneven distribution of economic risks sustain The Ex’s practice of delivering biting social and political commentary that holds to no party line. But instead of setting words over the music, as the band often did with Sok, the new songs have evolved more simultaneously, out of rehearsal-room riffs and conversations. Says Moor of de Boer’s part in the writing process, “He hears one of us say something and he grabs that and then he makes stories from it.”

Adds Hessels, “It is good to work with someone who has lyrics right away. It’s really part of the music process now. In a way the biggest change is now we feel more on an equal level.” It bears remembering that The Ex once released an album of improvisations with ICP Orchestra vets like Han Bennink and Tristan Honsinger named Instant. Doing things in an egalitarian way, spontaneously and together, has always been part of the plan.

“Improvisation for us starts in the rehearsal room,” says Moor. “When we make our songs we’ve always started from improvising. It’s never one person saying, ‘Oh, I’ve got a song and you play this part and you play this part,’ which some bands do. Someone has an idea and we all react to it. The improvising starts really early.

And then we realized that you can also do that on stage, and that was another huge step.”

Although The Ex came up playing punk rock venues, they’ve shared stages and studios with improvisers since the late ’80s, when such cross-genre collaboration was quite rare. Both Hessels and Moor have side labels to document their improvisational ventures. Hessels’ Terp just released Lets Go, a vinyl-only set of pungent dustups with drummer Bennink and Canadian saxophonist Brodie West, while Moor’s Unsounds imprint has issued a stream of encounters with electronic musicians Kaffe Matthews, Thomas Lehn, Colin McLean, and label co-owner Yannis Kyriakides, as well as French orator Anne-James Chaton and English saxophonist John Butcher. In the group Lean Left, Moor and Hessels pit their raw, rock-derived lingo against the highly nuanced free jazz vernacular of the WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #59 | 33

With Getatchew Mekurya in Austria, November 2008. out of the debris. In the quartet we’ve got with Paal, the music will go from this kind of chaos of things in opposition and then it will flip, and then all of sudden we’re into this really hard-grooving stuff that came from four different directions. A lot of the time I don’t even know how we get there, we’re all kind of surprised. Playing with them is like playing with a different world.”

quite soon when you are in a band. But while other people maybe got mad all the time, we don’t.”

“Maybe once in a while,” counters Hessels.

“If you find yourself getting frustrated when things go wrong, you could be frustrated the whole time,” adds Moor. “So we had to learn to deal with that. In improvisation, we deal with stuff going wrong and not being angry, but instead saying OK, that’s different than we expected. How do we deal with that and how can we make a good thing out of it?”

www.theex.nl

Ken Vandermark / Paal Nilssen-Love Duo. Vandermark says of the guitarists, “They’re really familiar with certain kinds of jazz and have worked with people out of the jazz canon, the ICP guys and whatnot. But the way they’re coming towards improvisation uses their background. They’re really interested in building things up and knocking things around to see what comes

Nilssen-Love also plays with Hessels and Italian electric bassist Massimo Pupillo in the brutally loud trio Offonoff, and he reckons that their work together has really opened up his playing. “It is nice and sloppy, it’s not so detailed and exact as, say, playing with Thomas Lehn. Terrie just drives in, it’s a really raw energy. He pushes me, I push him, and we fight together,” he says with a satisfied smile. Lean Left and Offonoff both have records out on Smalltown Superjazzz, and plans are afoot for Lean Left to come to the USA in 2011.

But improvising isn’t just something The Ex do when they get together with improvisers. As Vandermark got to learn firsthand during the Brass Unbound tour, it is in the guts of their music. “One of the things that I liked about them from the beginning was that they are one of the few rock bands where the structure is elastic. Sections can open up and extend if they are really working, like that Konono No. 1 riff that they do. Sometimes they’ll just stay on that groove without the vocals coming in for a long time and it just builds up so much energy. And they’re really great about knowing when to move on to different parts. They are unusual in that they have very specific songs, specific melodies, specific lyrics, but within those songs there is space for things to expand.”

Improvisation goes beyond music making for The Ex; it’s a way of living. “From the beginning, if you are in a band and you are touring, you are improvising, because things go wrong,” says Bornefeld, eliciting laughter from everyone in the room. “That is something that you have to deal with

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This flexibility serves them well in Ethiopia, which the band has toured several times despite the absence of conventional rock venues. Observes Nilssen-Love, “They know a lot about the local infrastructure, they know how to deal with the people, and the people will improvise just as much as Terrie and Andy do. If there is a problem or an obstacle they will find some way around it; [in Amharic, Ethiopia’s tongue] the word ‘no’ doesn’t exist, which says quite a lot about the people.”

Ethiopia provides The Ex with a fundamental source of aesthetic and personal inspiration, and they’ve returned the favor by bringing in music that the country has never heard before. They’ve also facilitated the release of several Ethiopian records on Terp and forged an ongoing relationship with Getatchew Mekurya. The national orchestras in which Mekurya cut his teeth were extinguished by Ethiopia’s diminished economy and volatile politics decades ago, but in The Ex he once again has a foil for his gargantuan sound that is just as powerful as his old big bands. When they play together, The Ex add a horn section that includes West, French clarinetist Xavier Charles, and Dutch trombonist Joost Buis, as well as Moor’s old Dog Faced Hermans mate Colin McLean on bass guitar.

Mekurya calls the tunes when they play together, drawing on a repertoire that includes melodies adapted from Ethiopian folk tradition and classic ’70s Ethio-pop melodies. Says Moor, “Getatchew has been playing the same songs for forty years, but every time he plays the song it’s like the first time for him.”

“Sometimes you see him and he seems old,” says Hessels, “and then the next time you see him and he is fitter than ever.

He’s like a punk rocker, he’s not afraid of anything, and he takes the piss out of anything. He had an interview with the biggest Dutch newspaper, a really important interview, and he made them believe that raw meat is good for your sound. He had such a great time that he took the piss out of an important journalist.”

“Especially,” adds Moor, “since the Ex are supposed to be vegetarian squatters.”

Amsterdam’s anarchist squatting movement has been ground down by gentrification, but its ethics of self-reliance, separateness from the mainstream, and purposefulness are still at the root of The Ex’s practices. In the ’80s they raised money and consciousness for resistance movements around the world; nowadays they bring saxophone parts and repair know-how to Ethiopia, a country that’s lost them. Says Moor, “The great thing about it

is it really doesn’t feel like charity work.”

“That’s a really important point here,” Hessels adds. “We don’t feel like we have to help them at all, not at all, they give so much back.”

In their exchanges with Ethiopian musicians, The Ex have found a society that operates more closely to their own principles than the Western musical mainstream. Explains De Boer: “You play there and you see musicians there and they never have any boundaries like it should be rock or it should be jazz, it’s just people who play. You get individuals, and that’s how we make music also.” He continues, “Something that you find in Ethiopia a lot in communication with people, there is a lot of joking, but also like a challenge in communication. They will try to put you on your wrong leg to see how you will react.

But also I think that’s a great thing in a way; we also try to do that in music. We try to challenge the songs, to twist things, turn things about and create an open space for new melodies, new rhythms, and new ways of moving for the people in the audience.”

At this point African music has become as much a part of The Ex’s musical DNA as rock. “We’ve been listening to African music for twenty years,” says Moor. “It has nothing to do with style, we’ve been listening to this music so long that it kind of creeps in more and more and more, and when we go to Africa that adds another layer. When I joined The Ex, the first time I heard Kat drumming I thought that she really drums African style, she doesn’t drum like a rock drummer. And when you play with a drummer who plays like that, it changes the way you play yourself. So I found that I played much more simple and repeating lines like they do in African music.”

“And the funny thing for me,” adds Bornefeld, “was actually I didn’t listen to African music before I first played drums.

For me it was a discovery to hear African music, this is music that I loved and I am already playing like the repetitive stuff, the trancey thing, to play a lot on the toms, that is already what I was doing naturally.”

This summer The Ex played a series of festival gigs with Brass Unbound and Getatchew Mekurya, and Hessels initiated a partnership with Nilssen-Love and Gustafsson’s trio The Thing. Moor played with Lebanese alto saxophonist Christine Sehnaoui Abdelnour, whose extendedtechnique-heavy playing is well matched to his physical guitar style. And this fall The Ex will tour Europe in support of Catch My Shoe, whose title comes from the incident near the end of George Bush’s presidency in which he narrowly averted being clocked by some airborne Iraqi footwear. In 2011 there will be more Brass Unbound gigs, and they hope to re-release on CD a series of collaborative singles they first issued in the early ’90s. But with a band as open to whatever the moment offers as The Ex, anything as possible. As Bornefeld quips, “You never know what we’ll do.” ✹ Bill Meyer lives in Chicago. He wrote about John Butcher in STN#35.

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CULTURAL WORKER Through his magazine, label and distributorship 50 Miles of Elbow Room, Adam Lore has helped to preserve and disseminate some of the most carefully “hand picked” music on the planet.

Story by Alan Waters.

Photo by Michael Galinsky .

It’s funny how something like a magazine can just burst into your life, and that’s exactly what happened on a gray wintery day back in 2000 when I was thumbing through bins of Jamaican 45s in the old Jammyland reggae shop on New York’s East 3rd Street.

It caught my eye right away, on a shelf high up against the wall, with its unusual title—50 Miles of Elbow Room—and its unconventional 8” x 8” shape and black and white graphics. Then there was the curious, old-fashioned photo on the cover, showing rows of men posing for the camera in business suits and hats all wearing fake mustaches, except one who seemed to be wearing some type of goofy bonnet.

But the real kicker came with a glance at the contents. It made sense that this magazine would be in Jammyland, since there was a lengthy annotated discography of Prince Far I. But also included were pieces

by Daniel Carter, a poem by Matthew Shipp, an article by No Neck Blues Band percussionist Dave Nuss, and a review essay about a gospel release on Arhoolie by the Reverend Louis Overstreet. This, the least classifiable music publication I’d ever laid eyes on, was the brainchild of Adam Lore, who also authored the issue’s lead article, an in-depth profile of the multi-instrumentalist, composer and instrument-maker Cooper-Moore.

Issue #2 of the magazine, released in 2002, carried on in the same direction. Lore himself contributed four substantial articles: LTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM 36 | SIGNAL to NOISE #59 WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM

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Opposite, top: Cooper-Moore, Cleve Pozar and Adam Lore in Brooklyn, July 2010.

Bottom: Otha Turner, foreground, with granddaughter Shardre on fife and RL Boyce on drum at their 2002 Labor Day picnic.

one on Reverend Charlie Jackson, the guitar evangelist from Baker, Louisiana, one on Sun Ra Arkestra vocalist June Tyson, another on storied bluesman Robert Pete Williams, and the centerpiece—a sort of group biography encompassing Otha Turner and his fife and drum community, including R.L. Boyce, Jessie ‘Chip’ Daniels, Andre Evans and Bernice Pratcher. Sitting right alongside this Mississippi blues feast were Steven Joerg’s interview with Hamid Drake, which is the most detailed look at Drake’s life and drumming yet to appear in print, and bassist William Parker’s interview with the great South African drummer Louis Moholo. It became obvious that 50 Miles of Elbow Room was more than just eclectic, that there was clearly a highly original aesthetic vision at work here.

Following the second magazine, Lore expanded the 50 Miles brand to a record label, occasional concert promotions, and an online music distribution service. As a record label, 50 Miles has been dedicated to releasing the work of Cooper-Moore, most notably a beautiful cedar box set of five 7” 33rpm records. In May of 2003, Lore collaborated with Dan Rose to put on a spectacular night of music at Sin-é on the Lower East Side in commemoration of Otha Turner and his daughter and bandmate Bernice Turner Pratcher, both of whom had died on the same day just a few months earlier. This was a joyous event, headlined by the Rising Star Fife and Drum Band, which carries on the Turner legacy, but also featuring the Silos, Haitian roots group Rasin Okan, and Eddie Kirkland, as well as video footage from Mississippi by Alan Lomax. The place was absolutely packed, and when the fife and drum band took the stage with 13-yearold Shardre Thomas, Otha’s granddaughter, on fife, the vibe was intense to say the least.

The following year Lore worked with 50 Miles web designer Sylvia Parker and the Aum Fidelity and CaseQuarter labels to bring gospel singer-guitarist Isaiah Owens up from Montgomery, Alabama for his first ever New York performances at the WFMU record fair and at Barbès in Park Slope, Brooklyn.

The 50 Miles website has been Lore’s ongoing and most time-consuming project since that time. This is where he makes available a handpicked selection of music, publications and information related to his areas of interest—gospel, blues, free jazz, fife and drum, and southern culture.

50 Miles is probably the only music outlet that puts CDs by David S. Ware and Rob Brown next to 10” vinyl recordings by Elmo Williams and Hezekiah Early, or that puts music by Derek Bailey next to the Stanley 38 | SIGNAL to NOISE #59 WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM

Brothers, or that carries publications by the Alabama Folklife Association and the Blue Ridge Institute while also making available recordings by Arthur Doyle.

When I approached Lore about an interview, he was at first hesitant to be put in the limelight, only agreeing once we’d made plans to invite Cleve Pozar and CooperMoore, two of the musicians who’ve most inspired and helped shape the 50 Miles project. Pozar is one of the great underrecognized percussionist-composers in America today. He collaborated in the ’60s with trumpeter Bill Dixon at the infamous October Revolution in Jazz and appeared on what’s certainly the farthest-out recording in Bob James’s discography, the 1965 ESP release Explosions. Pozar’s own recordings Good Golly Miss Nancy (produced by Dixon for Savoy, 1967) and Solo Percussion (combining loops and electronics with exotic percussion) have become underground rarities, with Pozar’s own personal supply of the latter now available through 50 Miles’ distribution arm.

For his part, Cooper-Moore has become a singular figure in the downtown creative music scene since coming to New York from Virginia in the late ’70s. After work with associates as diverse as saxophonist David S. Ware, ecologist Sam Love, and paper artist Susan Share, he eventually met Lore in the mid-’90s while playing piano in William Parker’s group In Order to Survive.

So it was on a soggy, hot day in July that I made my way out to the Carroll Gardens section of Brooklyn to Lore’s apartment, which also serves as headquarters for his 50 Miles operation. Pozar and Cooper-Moore soon showed up, and the conversation was off and running. Pozar gets right to the point in commenting on the importance of Lore’s work in recording, preserving, and disseminating southern music. “He’s doing some work in the south that, without him doing that, it’s gone, that stuff will be gone.” As if to explain why someone who grew up in Green Brook, NJ might have a role to play in preserving southern musical culture, Lore added: “there’s a tendency of people not to prize that which is local to them, that which they know.”

Pointing to boxes of video and audio tapes stacked around his cramped workspace, he explained: “For the last few years I’ve been working on an archive of Reverend Charlie Jackson’s music. He and his wife at the time used to travel around to churches. They would record their services on, probably something like that [indicating my hopelessly out-of-date Radioshack cassette recorder] or a boombox. For the

last few years I’ve been going through all this material, trying to find a way to present it. These are all very informal recordings, as you can imagine quite raw, but I love it. Reverend Jackson is one of my all-time favorites, his music means a lot to me.”

And so, with Cooper-Moore lending a hand to repair and digitize the tapes, Lore is working at putting these recordings into releasable form for a wider audience. He describes the recordings as “really bringing out the richness of the culture of that region from the span of years between the 1970s and the 1990s.” For those unfamiliar with the electric guitar preaching of Reverend Jackson, there’s an excellent collection called God’s Got It (CaseQuarter) which contains many of the Reverend’s 45rpm singles from the early ’70s.

Cooper-Moore speaks of Lore’s work with typical care and deliberateness. “He’s a soulful, spiritual person who is in tune with spirituality. He’s in tune to it, he hears it, he knows it. And in people he hears it and knows it.” Lore jumps in, clearly uncomfortable. “The notion of me being spiritual…

I don’t feel spiritual. So much of the music that I like and so many of the people whose music I like talk about it as a spiritual thing, and people who I oftentimes connect with personally talk about it that way. I don’t receive it that way necessarily. I feel very much—for better or worse—very earthbound, like, this is all we’ve got.” This provoked gales of good-natured protests from Lore’s associates, with Pozar finally shouting over the top of it all: “What the hell do you think being spiritual is all about!” After further discussions and digressions, Pozar turned to Lore with palpable admiration and said, as if to finalize the issue: “You are a spiritual person, so shut up!”

Growing up near Brunswick, New Jersey in the 1980s, Lore wasn’t exposed to very much music outside the mainstream. But that all changed when he got involved with the campus radio station as a student at Connecticut College in New London, CT. “When I got to college I remember the first thing I wanted to do was find out when the meetings were happening… I spent a couple of years as music director the, and that was very big in terms of opening me up to different music. I was being sent everything to listen to and to me that was just the greatest thing.”

In 1995 Lore moved to New York City where he worked at Homestead Records, did some writing for Badaboom Gramophone and began to volunteer annually at the Vision Festival, providing an important opportunity to meet many cutting edge

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musicians, including William Parker, who entrusted Lore with an extensive set of interviews he'd conducted with contemporary musicians, which are still in the process of being transcribed and assembled into a book.

Lore names Peter Guralnick, Robert Palmer and Elijah Wald as music writers whose evocative and non-technical style he has come to admire. But he singles out the folklorist and field-recordist George Mitchell as a special inspiration. “I feel like he was very good at establishing a mood and a setting with a brief introduction, and then letting the person’s words shape the story.

Someone like that has been very influential in my current way of thinking about how to present people.”

At the heart of Lore’s undertaking is the assertion of a connection between the deep southern roots traditions and the avant garde in jazz. In many people’s minds these two strands of music are very distant from each other. One is southern, rural, local, supposedly unsophisticated, earthy; while the other is northern, urban and urbane, and by many people’s estimation very intellectual, very cerebral. Lore is obviously defying this opposition, challenging people to hear each of these traditions in terms of the other. When I asked him how he came to this awareness, he told me he’d heard free jazz in person before he’d heard it on record and its raw, visceral energy resonated with him very similarly to blues and gospel.

“It all… gives the same feeling to me.

I think perhaps to some degree with the avant garde and the jazz I tend to gravitate to, it also comes out of something of a folk tradition. As William Parker might say, there are folks [musicians] who have a street approach.” Lore gestured toward CooperMoore, noting that from his background in rural Virginia, he “came out of the church too, he was a community musician.”

Cooper-Moore reinforced the closeness of these two musical strands by telling how he first learned about fife and drum from Marion Brown. “He [Brown] was from Georgia, and he talked about fife and drum, and how fife and drum came to black folks from the military music, and then they turned it into something else. And this is from a man who played with people called the avant garde! So it wasn’t distant for him at all. It was just what he heard growing up. And he was playing it in his music.”

An important part of Lore’s 50 Miles project is his annual trips to the south. He typically sets off in the blue 1991 Oldsmobile he inherited from his grandmother for several weeks of visiting and research during late spring or early summer. He recalled the first of these trips back around 1998 or ’99: “I guess the first real time was going to one of the Turners’ picnics. When I heard the fife and drum music, that really got me excited. I mean I just loved the music, and I guess the fact that Otha was at an older stage of life and people were saying he was one of the last of this, so it added a sense of urgency to go. And I remember at the time there were several friends of mine who said that they all wanted to come along with me and slowly but surely they all dropped out, and I just said ‘oh well, I’m going.’ And I remember it was difficult to find out when things were happening, where they were happening,

and that added another element of, ‘well, I’ll find it, I’ll find it and get there.’ And it was great fun.”

With each subsequent trip he’s met more people and discovered more places, deepening his appreciation for southern music and culture. “I have a pretty set route now because it’s gotten to the point where I’m visiting people, and that really defines it… I try to go to New Orleans every time.

I have good friends who live there. I go to outside of Baton Rouge, where Reverend Charlie Jackson lived, where his widow still lives. I always go visit her pretty much every summer. I’ll try and go visit R.L. Boyce who lives in Como, Mississippi. I know people in Georgia, I know people in Memphis…

There’s a great little old record store outside Bowling Green that’s run by a guy who used to be head of the Carter Family fan club and he’s this very sweet old fellow who runs the post office in that town which is also a record store. And he’s got all sorts of country memorabilia and things like that. I always try to go visit him if I can. It’s really nice to sit there and talk about old-time music with somebody who really loves it, and it was fairly contemporary for him.” Lore says that “going down there is what has made the difference for me in terms of a lot of things…

People are very welcoming. They’re glad to see people who are interested in the music.

And certainly someone like R.L. Boyce has been very hospitable to me from the moment I wanted to start to come down.”

So, what’s with the name 50 Miles of Elbow Room? “When I was going to be doing a magazine and I was coming up with a title, I just happened to be looking at the Anthology of American Folk Music [by Harry Smith] and there’s a track by the Reverend F.W. McGee, ‘50 Miles of Elbow Room,’ and at the time I was living in this overstuffed room and trying to make it work, trying to live in such a small environment. It just made me laugh, that maybe eventually when I get to heaven I’ll have some space. That’s what the song is all about. When you get to the afterlife then we’ll all have our fifty miles of elbow room.

It was a nice song… very welcoming. It just gave me a chuckle.”

The 1930 version of the song by McGee is a scratchy, stomping affair, but the words can be made out with careful listening: “When the gates swing wide on the other side / Just beyond the sunset sea / There’ll be room to spare as we enter there / Room for you and room for me / For the gates are wide on the other side / Where the flowers ever bloom / On the right hand, on the left hand / Fifty miles of elbow room.” The song has been recorded numerous times since then, including by the Carter Family in 1941 and more recently by Iris DeMent on her debut album Infamous Angel.

I asked Lore about how he actually selects and compiles the music that’s available on his website, and he said with a mischievous laugh: “I mean, you look around.” He specializes in vinyl, of all sizes, but carries lots of CDs as well. “I try to go direct with the labels as much as I can… because I like to get as much money to the labels as possible… It’s also interesting to get to have some kind of relationship with these folks and have me know them and them know me.” Some of the numerous labels Lore has cultivated relationships with include Fat Possum, Eremite,

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Norton Records, Revenant and Tompkins Square.

As our meeting wound down, Pozar, Lore and Cooper-Moore reminisced, joked, laughed, made small talk, discussed future plans, and teased Lore about the problem he was having with his car’s radiator cap. We made our way down to the street. CooperMoore popped the hood and quickly ascertained that the current cap, which Lore had bought earlier in the summer down south, was not the right fit for this car. How he’d driven all the way north without the engine overheating was a mystery.

At one point, before making this discovery, Cooper-Moore had turned to Lore and said: “Why is it when you do something for me, you say ‘thank you’ to me?” In this comment he seemed to touch the real spirit of generosity that drives Lore as a cultural worker. He openly admits that nothing other than love for the music and respect for those who make it is behind the multi-faceted work he does. With his work, he renders laughable the slogans you see in Starbucks next to the little CD displays they have there: ‘Make your day bright with handpicked music’ and ‘Great music we’ve found for you.’ Forget that! Who would you trust to hand-pick great music for you? Corporate marketing experts, or a self-described earthbound secular listener based in a cramped apartment in Brooklyn who does fieldwork at backyard fife and drum picnics in Mississippi?

There’s a kernel of a real utopian proposal at the core of Lore’s work as a publisher, writer, researcher, promoter and distributor, namely: What would it be like if people’s musical lives were entirely personalized? What if all music was based on friendship? What would it be like if we made music only with friends? Bought and sold music only among friends? Listened to recordings and attended performances of music only by friends and with friends? What would it be like if we actually tried to follow a rule that says, no music outside of friendship and community?

Listen to the way Lore summarizes in issue #2 of 50 Miles the experiences and processes he went through in creating that particular publication: “Being schooled on courtship

by Otha Turner. Cooper-Moore singing. A day that consisted of a burial and, a few hours later, music and barndancing. Driving across Tennessee, listening to the radio.

Conversations with Daniel Carter that last for many hours, encompass more topics, and often come around to him asking, ‘So when are we gonna play together?’ (I’ve long since given up my protests of not being a musician.) Being the shabbiest parishioner on at least three occasions, but always welcomed.

Bernice Pratcher lovingly kidding around with her children. The completely engrossing storytelling of Art Jenkins. Always encountering Matthew Shipp in the record stores. Rev. Charlie Jackson at home + in church: smiles.

Jessie ‘Chip’ Daniels singing about the visiting white boy from New York. Starting 2002 in the home of RL Boyce, Sheila, Shanquisha, and Aunt Grace. Louis Moholo’s reply when asked if he’d like to review the transcript of his interview prior to publication: ‘My soul is in your hands.’” ✹ Alan Waters lives in Scituate, MA. This is his first feature for Signal to Noise.

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LIVE REVIEWS

Top: Fixed Fragmented Fluid with Evan Parker, foreground Bottom: Paul Limley, Frank Gratkowski and Han Bennink's free-associative brew

Vancouver International Jazz Festival Vancouver, British Columbia 6.24–7.3.2010

It’s been a rough summer for the Canadian jazz festival: Toronto’s event had to contend with the unanticipated logistical nightmare of the G20 summit, and Calgary’s collapsed the day before it was to start. So it was a pleasure to instead head westwards to Vancouver, whose festival—now in its 25th year—remains one of the most ambitious and diverse in North America. Things felt less hectic here than on my visit two years ago—maybe it was the unusually cool, gray weather, or the general sense of a city digesting the impact of the Winter Olympics. But the program’s still bogglingly large: even just concentrating on the avant-garde offerings rather than the full range of jazz (and nonjazz) on offer, from George Benson to the Anti-Pop Consortium, there’s far too much to choose from.

Han Bennink is a frequent visitor to Vancouver—his calligraphy adorned this year’s program, fittingly—and all the facets of his persona were on display this year.

Sometimes he’s the bandanna’d soul of jazz, as when, equipped with just a snare drum, he performed acts of swinging telekinesis in Eric Boeren’s Ornette Coleman covers project. And sometimes he’s the imp of the perverse. A sellout meant that I caught only a snatch of a latenight improv at Ironworks by Bennink, Wilbert de Joode and pianist Paul Plimley, but the on-stage friction became the talk of the rest of the festival—Plimley at one point actually requesting an overpowering Bennink to play brushes (who complied for only a few seconds). Tension was still in the air at next afternoon’s gig by Plimley, Bennink and Frank Gratkowski—the drummer brought one improvisation to a halt after barely a minute, right in the middle of Gratkowski’s bass-clarinet solo—but mostly in a good/ productive way, and the concert turned into a storming free-associative brew of warped Ellingtonia and Monk.

Indeed, it was a pleasure to hear so much of the underrated Plimley throughout the festival: a totally wired but communicative improviser, stylistically somewhere between stride piano and action painting.

His duet with percussionist Lucas Niggli

during Barry Guy’s Roundhouse concert was a highlight. Unfortunately, “Fixed Fragmented Fluid,” a multimedia collaboration between Guy and animator Michel Gagné (creator of the tastebud fantasias in Ratatouille) was bedeviled by technical glitches, and I found myself wondering what these colorful, cycling patterns of trumpets, polygons and comets had to do with the improvisers’ nonlinear energies. Baroque violinist Maya Homburger, though, was a welcome presence, her searchlight intensity prising open Guy and Peggy Lee’s scrabbling improv. Guy’s bass playing was best showcased next afternoon, in complementary duets with Homburger and Alex von Schlippenbach (in more balladic form than usual, including a 12-tone unpacking of “All the Things You Are”).

Schlippenbach’s Globe Unity Orchestra was a festival highpoint: raucous but impressively varied, its spontaneous sectionwork and riffing unexpectedly evocative of the classic big band idiom. Looselimbed newcomer Henrik Walsdorff was a striking presence on alto, while Evan Parker and Gerd Dudek’s sense of kinship was palpable, Dudek’s crisp post-Coltrane sax contrasting sharply with Parker’s molten whirls.

The Schlippenbach Trio (still the gold standard for classic European free-improv after four decades) was paired with blitzkrieg boppers Mostly Other People Do the Killing for a louder-faster-busier double-bill: almost too much of a good thing, really, though MOPDTK’s deadpan presentation (1950s suit-and-tie cool) was a nice touch.

Parker and Paul Lovens sounded even better in a trio gig with bassist Torsten Müller that took several surprising turns, from fulminating tenor/drums duels to a passage of retro “two to the bar” walking bass.

Big festivals like this throw up intriguing juxtapositions. The big-venue jazz-rock soundscaping of trumpeter Nils Petter Molvaer was a stylish white elephant next to a small afternoon gig by fellow Norwegians Huntsville, whose slowly morphing Fahey-meets-electronica aesthetic suggested a twangy cousin to The Necks.

Tomasz Stanko’s quintet was dire—flat dynamics, so-so tunes, a one-note electric bassist making a hash of some lite-bossa numbers—but Tord Gustavsen’s velvety gospel tunes conveyed the virtues of the ECM aesthetic: so much seemed to hang on the pianist’s gradations from pppp to p to ecstatic crescendo that one became newly aware of the sheer strangeness of a person’s trying to coax such expressive shadings out of wood, metal and strings.

A host of excellent gigs by hometown

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alt.jazz mainstays was a reminder of the Vancouver scene’s strength and variety.

Concerts by the Tony Wilson Quintet, Peggy Lee’s “Film in Music” project, and Tommy Babin’s ominously named Sendero Luminoso (“Shining Path”) left me thinking that there’s something of a local style: interlocking, slow-burn grooves and great hooks, drawing on everything from math-rock to Afrobeat to (in Babin’s case) bossa nova. Best of all were Inhabitants: fractal rock anthems lifted by the bluesy/ ethereal combo of guitarist Dave Sikula and JP Carter’s FX’d trumpet. Coat Cooke’s trio meshed beautifully with fiery guitar/oud player Gordon Grdina; though the music was totally free, the leader’s hefty postRollins oratory was unapologetically (and refreshingly) In The Tradition. Singer Kate Hammett-Vaughan, often an outcat, played an Ella/Joe Pass-style gig with guitarist Bill Coon, marking Frank Loesser’s centenary with a swinging clutch of his tunes. The only letdown was a muzzy gig by Vancouver’s prog-rock monster Fond of Tigers, opening for Deerhoof in the Commodore Ballroom (a refurbished Art Deco building with a “sprung” dance floor: during intermission I spotted a dance troupe on their night out making delighted jetés). Other parts of Canada got their licks in too, from Montreal clarinetist Lori Freedman (duetting with violinist/laptopper Stefan Smulovitz) to Toronto expat Harris Eisenstadt, whose Canada Day group ended the festival with a gig that showed the drummer’s African leanings heating up the Blue Note avantcool of their Clean Feed disc.

Miscellaneous quick hits: I can take or leave Bill Frisell’s gritless refurbishings of traditional American music, but when his trio latched onto “Subconscious-Lee” their corkscrew-shaped lines were a delight. A tough, spirited set by Mario Pavone’s trio belied the bassist’s age (78); Tony Malaby even managed to pull off a JATP-style honk/squeal setpiece without losing interest. And Mikko Innanen’s Innkvisitio was yet another discovery: with no bass player and a nutty/greasy synth player it suggested a wild, Ornettified take on organ/ sax soul-jazz. But it was saxophonist/clarinetist Michael Moore who delivered two of the subtlest, most satisfying concerts at a festival often dominated by high-intensity improvising. A quintet with trumpeter Brad Turner and pianist Chris Gestrin’s trio dug feelingly into the friendly-but-slightlystrange contours of Moore’s compositions, while the first set of his trio with Peggy Lee and Dylan van der Schyff was as spontaneously perfect as any free improvisation I’ve heard. Nate Dorward

Chris Cameron

Caught in the act, significant concerts from around the globe.

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festival itself the concert offered information overload, and both will take some more time to process. Lawrence Joseph

Hamid Drake, William Parker and Kidd Jordan at Suoni Right: Elfin Saddle

Suoni Per Il Popolo

Montréal, Quebec 06.06-26.2010

Festival International de Jazz de Montréal

Herb Greenslade

Montréal, Quebec 06.25-07.06.2010

The Suoni per il Popolo’s 10th anniversary edition featured 110 acts over 21 days, offering an intensive experience of cutting-edge rock, jazz, and electronic music. The Casa del Popolo’s new live music room was quieter than the adjoining resto-bar previously used, providing a worthy partner to the main Sala Rossa hall. Simultaneous live performances every evening meant that one could catch at most half of the action, and folks could be seen scurrying from one venue to the other between sets. Freeing up the old Casa space opened up a third option, nightly DJ spinnings.

Festivals as eclectic and contemporary as the Suoni provide an opportunity to survey emerging musical trends and technologies.

For example, there were 20 solo sets, with approaches ranging from a cappella voice to layered loops blanketed by reverb. The latter was especially prevalent, perhaps a sign of how hard economic times have forced musicians to find ways to create a full sound with minimal personnel, or maybe it’s simply that cheap digital memory chips have expanded the possibilities of this approach.

Noveller, aka Brooklyn guitarist Sarah Lipstate, sculpted thoughtful loop-based work benefitting from a variety of strategies.

She invoked prerecorded backing tracks and melodies, creating songs with widely varying arrangements that avoided the predictability often found in music based on additive loops.

One frantic piece layered guitar feedback with rapidly strummed notes above the fingerboard, conjuring up a thrashing wall of

sound, while the next brought the volume down to quiet swells with overlaid bell harmonics. Two other one-woman bands used similar set-ups, feeding live cello playing into delay devices. While Montrealer Rebecca Foon stuck to low-register lines and elegant tonal patterns, New Yorker Julia Kent’s relaxing atmospherics resulted from thick layers of extended techniques. Other solo highlights included C. Spencer Yeh (as Burning Star Core) and Didi Bruckmayr. Yeh started with long distorted tones sprinkled with fast violin runs. Over time, a prerecorded heavy metal drum solo crashed in and water sounds meshed with cut-up vocal lines. Visually, Bruckmayr projected an angst-filled persona set against a backdrop of computer generated monsters and 3-D eels that moved about like demented screen savers. Musically, he displayed masterful command of a wide array of vocal techniques. The overall effect was akin to watching an ultra-tense video game.

The Bruckmayr show was part of two evenings billed as “What’s Up Vienna,” featuring collaborations between musicians from that city and Montrealers of a similar bent. NTSC is a duo of Billy Roisz and Dieb 13 whose interactive setup intimately mixed video and audio, the images bouncing to the music in Norman McLarenesque fashion. While the technology was impressive, the images never varied from strobing test patterns with frequent loss of vertical hold, while the music’s electronic bleeps, doodles and LP surface noise was overly familiar. I look forward to this system being used with deeper material. The Viennese sub-festival also included a wonderful set from Christof Kurzmann on vocals, sax, and laptop and Martin Brandlmeyr on percussion. This was electropop in the widest sense, quiet electro-acoustic improvisation through which occasional songs broke through. Finally, Radian set up like a rock band with guitar, bass, keyboards and drums, but allowed only fragments of pop hooks, deemphasizing rhythm and melody.

The avant-rock Constellation label, best known for recordings by Godspeed You! Black Emperor, celebrated their 13th anniversary by spotlighting their current roster. Most memorable was Elfin Saddle, a folksy Rock in Opposition trio with charming vocal harmonies. Each member often played two or more

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instruments at once: one player, for instance, would kick a snare drum while one-armed accordion playing left the other arm free to play a tune on toy xylophone.

Weird rock ensembles included Gavin John Sheehan’s 15-piece orchestra of Montreal post-rock luminaries. Their set began with a thundering crescendo of droning feedback, overblown horns and small wind instruments, progressed into early Pink Floydian pop (with floating vocals over strummed acoustic guitar) and finally settled into dense instrumental rock. The No Neck Blues Band’s set started at the stroke of midnight, bringing their brand of eerily menacing free improvisation to the stage. Hypnotic tribal beats mixed with shrieks of slide guitar, pounding one-fingered piano and synth chords, repetitive yet organic. Hair Police’s non-stop set of thrashing white noise rock featured unintelligible vocals and screeching feedback guitar, making early no-wave bands seem like muzak by comparison.

A wide variety of strategies were also employed by jazz artists. The Kidd Jordan/ William Parker/Hamid Drake trio showered the capacity crowd with two hours of highenergy psychedelic free jazz. The Matthew Shipp Trio’s approach was more measured, the set-length improvisations interspersing Shipp’s own compositions with standards, including a rousing “Take the A Train.”

Between these two models were the comprovisations of Ken Vandermark’s two outfits, the Frame Quartet and Vandermark 5. Their material remained highly structured but not as tightly wound as Shipp’s. Both Vandermark units were held together by funky drummer Tim Daisy, giving the music a rockier feel compared to the others’ lighter, more fluid touch.

European free improvisation was amply represented by the Canadian premiere of Alexander von Schlippenbach’s 11-piece Globe Unity Orchestra, as well as several shows by subgroups of the larger ensemble.

Although few original members remain from the group’s original 1966 line-up they still pack a wallop, and even with no instruments miked the Sala overflowed with powerful waves of sound. Each player took a solo turn, and Rudi Mahall’s lines raised the roof in what was already a barnburner of a set. Like the

After 31 years, the Montréal Jazz Festival is still one of the niftiest annual music events in North America. Sure, purists will groan about the inclusion of such unambiguously non-jazz performers as Smokey Robinson, Wanda Jackson, and Brian Setzer. But the MJF also presented Vijay Iyer, Nils Petter Molvaer, and Lukas Ligeti’s Burkina Electric among other cutting-edge acts. Concerts in indoor and outdoor venues ranged from free to dear, nearly all within a 20-minute walk.

(And for those on tight budgets, cheap slices of pizza were plentiful.) Just a few highlights hint at the breadth of the music on hand.

At the Salle de Gesú, trumpeter Dave Douglas and his group Keystone presented the soundtrack to the forthcoming film Spark of Being—it was bright and restless, full of yearning and fire. Douglas’s horn carried echoes of Woody Shaw and Miles Davis, his band sounding like a 21st century version (i.e., with judicious use of sampling) of the classic Art Blakey Jazz Messengers circa 1964.

The Théâtre Maisonneuve de la Place des Arts hosted a five-hour “marathon” of works by John Zorn—to be more specific, the music Zorn composed for his Masada ensembles. There was “chamber” Masada, consisting of ace string players Mark Feldman and Erik Friedlander, guitarist Marc Ribot, and clarinetist Ben Goldberg, among others; jazz-with-horns Masada, usually the quartet of Zorn, trumpeter Dave Douglas, bassist Greg Cohen, and drummer Joey Baron, here expanded to include Goldberg and pianist Uri Caine; and piano trio Masada, featuring pianist Jamie Saft. Zorn seamlessly integrated motifs from his Jewish heritage into all these contexts (and more!), covering a huge stylistic range: Bill Evans-ish piano trio elegance; exhilarating, hard-swinging post bop with cheerfully free soloing; three solo cello pieces (Friedlander was astonishing, bowing, plucking, strumming, and tapping); and a lilting, sanctified set of songs sung a cappella in Hebrew by a quartet of female singers (including Basya Schechter from Pharaoh’s Daughter).

Back at Gesú, trumpeter Tomasz Stanko, dressed in a suit and hat that, if adorned by question marks, would have made him a ringer for The Riddler, led four young Northern Europeans down hallways of spare, mysterious, sweetly melancholy, and cinematic jazz… imagine Chopin interpreting Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew.

Thwarted in my attempts to briefly break free of the festival and visit the art museum (closed), I heard some captivatingly vigorous big band jazz wafting my way. Despite the intense heat, I followed the sound to one of the large outdoor stages to find an orchestra full of 18- to 20-year-olds roaring through a set of compositions by Charles Mingus (“Fables of Faubus”), George Russell (“Stratusphunk”), Robert Graettinger (“Thermopylae”) [!], Satoko Fujii [!!!], and Carla Bley with the right combination of precision and boisterousness. No warmed-over Maynard Ferguson or Rob McConnell for these young people (students at Quebec’s Cégep de Saint-Laurent school)—the future (or a portion thereof) is in good hands.

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Top: Les Filles Electriques at Victo Below: Bill Dixon's Tapestries for Small Orchestra Bottom: Tatsuya Nakatani and yogis in Houston

Festival International de Musique Actuelle de Vicoriaville Victoriaville, Quebec 05.20-23.2010

Nakatani: Stephen Laird | FIMAV: Martin Morissette

After a year’s hiatus, the Victoriaville Festival returned for its 26th edition. Though it was a day shorter than before, only three fewer concerts were presented, even if a scaled-back budget forced artistic director Michel Levasseur to play things a bit safer: fully half of the festival’s 20 concerts featured Quebec artists. Presumably this kept away much of the Québécois audience, who’d rather catch local musicians in Montreal than make the two-hour trek to Victoriaville. Add in the current economic crisis and the fact that the late Bill Dixon (in what would be his final major performance) was the only marquee name on offer, and you’ve got plenty of reasons why the halls were emptier than in years past, with the lowest paid attendance since 1984. Sadly, those who stayed home missed a festival that was artistically quite successful.

While Victoriaville is known for its dedication to the cutting edge, many concerts this year featured the oldest of musical instruments, the human voice. Sam Shalabi’s Land of Kush is a project inspired by Egyptian orchestras of the 1940s and ’50s, employing five vocalists, strings, reeds, and percussion. An earlier version presented in Montreal in 2008 was a groove machine, but the guitarist unveiled completely new material at Victo, which was more complex and layered even if not yet fully formed.

That said, this performance represented an intriguing evolution of Shalabi’s most accessible yet most ambitious project to date.

Les Filles Electriques is a group of Montrealers led by three mainstays of the city’s spoken word scene, Alexis O’Hara, D. Kimm, and Fortner Anderson. Combining improvised music (by guitarist Bernard Falaise, clarinetist Khyro, and percussionist Michel F. Côté), dance, video, and poetry, the performance addressed multiple aspects of the human condition with equal parts humor and existential angst; the results were completely captivating.

Violinist/vocalist Carla Kihlstedt, percussionist Matthias Bossi, and guitarist Shahzad Ismaily are Causing a Tiger, a project inspired by dreams, travel, and (on this occasion) the words of the Japanese poet Ikkyu. Their performance was entirely improvised but sounded as though it had all been worked out in advance. Kihlstedt intoned phrases from Ikkyu as the trio slowly built up the tension; about half an hour in, she had her Jimi Hendrix moment as the music exploded in a hail of frenzied dissonance and electronics. This may be a collaborative enterprise, but Kihlstedt— one of those rare musicians with a totally original conception—is undoubtedly the focal point.

The duo of vocalist Anne-James Chaton and guitarist Andy Moor was direct and 46 | SIGNAL to NOISE #59 WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM

oddly affecting. Chaton read texts— random newspaper headlines, an airplane flight log—in a deadpan voice that pulled against Moor’s thrashing guitar, the contrast heightening the sense of dread and urgency.

Tanya Tagaq’s take on Inuit throat singing combines improvisation and overt sexuality in a blast of energy that left both male and female members of the audience breathless. Growling, screaming, cooing, bringing sounds from her very depths, she owned the room from beginning to end of the 50-minute performance (accompanied by drummer Jean Martin and violinist Jesse Zubot). Though her voice is a gift from the gods, she may be relying too much on pure talent, and one can only imagine what she might become if she added more artistry to the mix. As things stand, she is still as powerful a performer as one is likely to see.

Another festival highlight was the North American premiere of Kim Myhr and the Trondheim Jazz Orchestra, who followed Urs Leimgruber and Jacques Demierre’s Six on a Sunday that was the most exciting single day of performances that I have seen at Victo (they in turn were followed by Chaton/Moor, Tagaq, and René Lussier’s 7 Têtes). The writing of the Oslo-based guitarist Myhr accentuates delicate shifts in dynamics and tone, balancing strings, reeds, and (once again) voice in a manner that left one straining at the edge of the chair in anticipation of where the music would go next.

The performance of Bill Dixon’s “Tapestries for Small Orchestra” turned out to be the legendary trumpeter and composer’s last concert before his passing on June 16th. Obviously ailing, Dixon was unable to play (his one solo was pre-recorded), and instead conducted and coaxed a beautifully textured fold of overlapping and interweaving lines from a stellar front line of trumpet players—Taylor Ho Bynum, Rob Mazurek, Graham Haynes, Stephen Haynes—just a few among the many who certainly will bring Dixon’s influence to bear on their own music in the future.

A year’s sabbatical was, on the evidence, worth it in terms of the revitalization of the festival. And if the lineup did not look as interesting on paper as some might have wished, that speaks more to audience expectations than to the festival’s vision and execution. Mike Chamberlain

Tatsuya Nakatani Houston, TX 06.16.2010

Over the course of his or her concert-going career, the fan of creative music will frequent the basements of Unitarian Churches and small university recital halls, countless coffee shops and galleries and theaters and even the occasional tourist-trap jazz club.

However, the evening of my 37th birthday was the first time my ambitions as a budding yogi had intersected directly with my life as follower of virtuoso improvisation. To wit, here’s the well-traveled but nominally Pennsylvania-based percussionist Tatsuya Nakatani, in the southeast corner of yoga studio B at the posh Houstonian club and

spa, setting up a small drum kit beside racks holding several large gongs. Club members had begun lining up for the class almost an hour in advance, all enthusiasm despite the fact that most of those unrolling their mats in the room have no previous experience with the concepts of deep listening or extended technique.

The occasion was the brainchild of Achim Fassbender, a devotee of jazz and improvised music who hosts a segment of the Sunday afternoon jazz program on Rice University’s KTRU as well as teaching yoga here and at his own studio. “This won’t be your usual yoga tonight,” cautioned Fassbender at the outset of the session.

“Ideally, you are in your body, and you let these sounds surround you. There will be sounds you aren’t accustomed to, I’ll give you as a friendly warning… I invite you to really stay with it, that’s the practice. We have to re-educate our ears.”

From a cross-legged meditational position, the participant could begin to flex his powers of deep listening before the percussionist had even made a sound, with the start of focused pranayama breathing and the chirps and groans of squeaking door hinges and creaking floorboards as curious onlookers removed themselves from the room. As the session began, Nakatani slowly bowed the edges of three giant gongs, producing low, vibrating drones that traveled through the wooden floor and glinting knife-edge scrapes that made the hair on the back of one’s neck stand on end. What could in one context have made for an excellent horror movie soundtrack in fact also perfectly supported and complemented the relaxation and clarity of focus needed for effective yoga practice.

Smaller hand instruments produced sounds that were less intense and more breathy, and while the rubby friction of drum-head manipulation lent variety and had a welcome, organic feel, the metallic gong-scrapes and alien cymbal-bowing seemed to resonate most directly with a sequence of easy twists and bends plotted to accommodate a group with varied experience and capabilities. Physical movement has always been part of the concert-going experience, from Sufi whirling to big band ballroom dancing to hippie and rave culture, and the tracking of bodily motion to sound seemed to have a synergistic effect on both the appreciation of the performance and the intensity of the poses. Fassbender’s directions informed the percussive responses but also worked just as well as abstract poetry (“Flat on your back… toes touch… flat hands… broad shoulders”).

Towards the hour’s end, the percussive sounds faded out and silence took hold as yogis laid in savasana, the “corpse pose” in which the body quietly absorbs the day’s practice. Fassbender closed the session with a quote from German novelist Berthold Auerbach: “Music washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.”

It’s hard to say what kind of lasting impact the class may have made on these virgin ears, but the circle of curious wellwishers surrounding Nakatani afterwards and perusing his CDs (and the reports of an even more well-attended outdoor class the following day) was an encouraging sign.

Pete Gershon

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Chicago, IL 07.16-18.2010

Pausing for a minute in the midst of a musical rampage, Titus Andronicus singer Patrick Stickles gazed out on the crowd of young folks who’d been shouting along to his band’s songs, pumping their arms under the hard glare of the afternoon sun. “We’ve got a little utopian society here, it seems,” Stickles said. “Don’t forget that beyond those walls, there’s a big, scary world we can only begin to understand.”

Stickles, whose pitch-black beard gives him the look of a punk John Brown, was indeed addressing a society of sorts: the 2010 Pitchfork Music Festival at Chicago’s Union Park, a hipster microcosm of all things considered hot within the realms of indie rock.

Carrying on an annual tradition, the Pitchfork website assembled a mid-July festival with big-name headliners (Modest Mouse, LCD Soundsystem and a reunited Pavement) and a slew of artists who are still trying to make it big. It wasn’t quite the utopia that Stickles suggested, but it was still a pretty good place to spend three days.

That was due to spirited performances like the set by Titus Andronicus, a New Jersey band that recently released its second album, The Monitor, which quotes Abraham Lincoln speeches and Walt Whitman poems in between punk-folk anthems. In concert, the band dispensed with the spoken-word stuff, diving headfirst into its dramatic songs. The Bruce Springsteen influence was obvious from the opening seconds of the first song, “A More Perfect Union,” when Stickles yelled out the lyrics: “I never wanted to change the world, but I’m looking for a new New Jersey, because tramps like us, baby, we were born to die!” Guest players on horns and strings gave the songs a sense of grandeur resembling Neutral Milk Hotel, as Stickles and his band mates flailed around with their guitars every chance they got. An American flag was draped over the front of the keyboard, and the Stars and Stripes dangled from Stickles’ guitar, too. Titus Andronicus is hardly your typical bunch of patriotic flag-wavers, but the band’s lyrics show a deep appreciation of American history and the long struggle to secure our freedoms. Amid the loud, rollicking chords and Stickles’ keening, emotiondrenched vocals, the crowd chanted, “U.S.A.!

U.S.A! U.S.A.!”

Around 24 hours later, on Sunday afternoon, a more peculiar musical spectacle prompted another outpouring of enthusiasm, when the Rhode Island duo Lightning Bolt took the stage. While Brian Gibson nonchalantly buzzed and thumped with his bass, the masked Brian Chippendale went crazy on the drums, playing what seemed like a 40-minute solo as he growled into a microphone with all the coherence and unbridled energy of a rabid wolverine. This was about as avant-garde as the music got at Pitchfork, and some people must have wondered what the racket was all about. But most responded to Lightning Bolt’s weird wall of noise by dancing or muttering exclamations like, “This is fucking unbelievable!” The throng in front of the

stage moshed like mad, spattering it with spray from their water bottles.

Another one of Pitchfork’s more daring lineup choices flopped, however. Panda Bear, the Animal Collective member otherwise known as Noah Lennox, played in a prominent time slot, just before Saturday’s headlining show by LCD Soundsystem.

With his 2007 album Person Pitch, Panda Bear won comparisons with Brian Wilson— and a coveted 9.7 rating from Pitchfork’s critics. But the boredom in the festival crowd was palpable as Panda Bear played meandering music with all the energy of a Gregorian chant. Lennox barely moved as he stood behind his keyboards with a guitar strapped over his neck, and the acid-trip geometric patterns spiraling on the video screens added little excitement. At first, the fans near the stage tentatively nodded their heads, as if they were trying to find a beat.

Perhaps Panda Bear’s music would have been a little more involving in a different setting—say, an art gallery—but it lacked the presence necessary for a big festival.

Another disappointment was openingnight headliner Modest Mouse, who stayed stuck in the same mid-tempo rut. But the following evening, LCD Soundsystem ended the night in proper style, as James Murphy and his talented crew of musicians made great dance music in an increasingly unusual way—by actually playing their instruments.

The crowd loved it. At one point, dancers formed a huge conga line on a baseball diamond near the stage, raising clouds of dust into night sky.

Sweden’s Robyn also got the audience moving with her bright pop melodies and sprightly dancing. Meanwhile, Major Lazer (DJs Diplo and Skerrit Bwoy) whipped up a party atmosphere with pulsing beats and raunchy antics, including some dry-humping onstage with female dancers.

St. Vincent, a.k.a. singer-songwriter Annie Clark, played majestic versions of her colorful, multilayered songs, aided by a group that included clarinet, violin and flute. She occasionally interrupted the delicate passages of chamber music by pounding her fist into her electric guitar during a frenetic solo.

Other festival highlights included lively sets by Broken Social Scene, Wolf Parade, Liars, the Smith Westerns and Cave, a Chicago band that knows how to get a good Krautrock groove going. Sharon Van Etten and the Tallest Man on Earth were just as impressive in more solo performances.

Beach House made some pretty sounds, but its set was just too sleepy. And it’s still not clear whether Sleigh Bells has the goods to deserve all the hype it’s getting, but the duo stormed the Pitchfork stage with rambunctious force.

Pavement closed out the festival by giving its longtime fans just what they wanted—a live greatest-hits collection, opening with “Cut Your Hair” and proceeding through other favorites like “Shady Lane,” “Range Life,” “Stereo” and “Stop Breathin’.” Rather than occupying the standard frontman spot, singer and guitarist Stephen Malkmus stood off on one side of the stage, looking toward the rest of the band instead of the audience.

Pavement played like a band in its prime rather than a halfhearted reunion act. The musicians appeared to be having fun as they

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hit that strange balance that always defined their best moments—somehow managing to sound shambling and tight at the same time.

It was no utopia, but the Pitchfork Music Festival kept up its reputation for bringing together a decent cross-section of current indie rock. As the festival closed one night, riders on an Ashland Avenue bus looked out at the thousands of people streaming out of the park. One man on the bus asked: “Did anyone famous play?” Robert Loerzel

International Contemporary Ensemble / Jack String Quartet New York City 06.29.2010

In preparation for their high profile appearances at the Darmstadt Festival this summer, the International Contemporary Ensemble and the Jack String Quartet presented four works as a dress rehearsal of sorts before an audience at New York’s Le Poisson Rouge.

ICE opened the event with a captivating performance of Earle Brown’s quasi-improvisatory Tracking Pierrot (1992). In it, the musicians each in turn take the role of conductor, eliciting different manners of playing from the ensemble. Thus, the piece becomes less about the individual soloists and more about collaborative interplay: an ethos epitomized

by ICE. Composed for the Jack Quartet, Caleb Burhans’ Contritus (2010) is an unabashed display of slowly moving diatonic verticals.

Although its uniformity of rhythmic profile might have been cloying in lesser hands, and sections occasionally overstayed their welcome, Burhans seasoned the pot with unexpected harmonic twists and turns. Thus, while the surface resembled something you might hear in the lush environs of a cinematic soundtrack, the music still managed to render surprises aplenty.

ICE returned with Jason Eckhardt’s 16 (2003), which was as different from the Burhans piece as one could imagine. Jauntily aggressive, and led by Claire Chase’s mouth noise laden flutings, 16 set up a handsome groove despite being rife with dissonance. Here again one was taken with ICE’s commitment to ensemble interaction.

Their rapt attention to one another translated to corresponding attention to their exertions from the audience, full bar and clinking beer bottles notwithstanding.

The Jack Quartet closed the concert with Yoshiaki Onishi’s Cul-de-sac (en passacaille) (2009). Once again, the stylistic demeanor shifted radically, this time to the world of sound effects. Onishi presented a catalog of extended playing techniques— scratchings, scordatura, glissandi, and stacks of harmonics. The latter technique won the day in the piece’s flautando coda, executing a gradual rear guard action in a diminuendo al niente. With the last note, someone at the bar dropped their beer glass, punctuating an evening of the avant-garde with the sound of glass shattering. Christian Carey

Robert Loerzel

Pitchfork Music Festival

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Christian Marclay: Festival

Two of Christian Marclay’s graphic scores: Top: Screen Play, 2005 Bottom: Zoom Zoom, 2008

courtesy Christian Marclay and Paula Cooper Gallery

New York City 07.01-09.26.2010

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If the “Christian Marclay: Festival” exhibit at New York’s Whitney Museum had a centerpiece, if there was a hole in the middle with a spindle through it like an old LP, that locus would have been Marclay’s video score The Bell and the Glass. Physically, the two screens on which it’s projected, one just above the other, are off to one side of the large room that housed most of the exhibition, which itself occupied the full fourth floor of the venerable Upper East Side institution. But philosophically the piece—interspersing video of Marcel Duchamp, the Liberty Bell, old film clips and footage shot by Marclay all in one way or another referencing the city of Philadelphia—summed up not just what the artist is about but how someone who started making new sounds by gluing together old records in New York’s then nascent Downtown scene, and whose obsessiveness led to gallery shows where he displayed vivisected record covers, can earn a chair for himself in art history.

The Duchamp gallery at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, on the other hand, does have a centerpiece. Standing at the center of the relatively small room is the sculpture The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass), an assemblage between two panes of glass that were cracked during shipment in 1926, an accident which Duchamp came to see as finishing the piece. (It’s still exhibited with the spiderweb of cracks running through it, and in Marclay’s video piece it is juxtaposed with the Liberty Bell, Philadelphia’s other cracked artifact.) Duchamp was, of course, most famous for his “readymades” and for embracing mass production as a modern process which resulted in objects that could still be seen as possessing aesthetic qualities. The fact that 20 snow shovels could look exactly the same was, to Duchamp’s eye, just as remarkable as the distinctions a modern archaeologist might see looking at 20 different prehistoric arrowheads. Putting a bicycle wheel on a gallery wall could just as easily be seen as the end of individuality or the beginning of a new kind of beauty.

Duchamp’s speaking voice even echoed through the show at the Whitney. Amid the clips of chocolate Liberty Bells being molded and a Duchamp jigsaw puzzle being pieced together (both, it should be noted, mass produced items) is an excerpt of an interview with Duchamp speaking about The Large Glass: “The more I look at it, the more I like it,” he says a few times an hour. “The breaks, the way they seem, the cracks… They have a shape. There’s a symmetry in the cracking. There’s almost a curious intention that I’m not responsible for, a readymade, that I respect and love.”

When Duchamp died in 1968, Marclay was 13 years old and the LP was just taking over from the single as the means of delivery for popular music. That year, Robert Rauschenberg transferred a photo of Janis Joplin with Big Brother and the Holding

Company onto his painting Yellow Body.

Pop music separated from Pop Art when the Velvet Underground parted ways with Andy Warhol, and merged with the Fluxus movement in the dual identity of John and Yoko. Warhol’s silk-screened soup cans (almost mass-produced themselves) and the performative questioning of music among the Fluxus artists can be seen as precursors to Marclay’s repurposed detritus.

Music and mass production were woven together throughout the exhibit. The piece 64 Bells and a Bow extended the Liberty Bell fixation to a performance with no further instructions than to use the collection of objects the title describes, the approach left up to the performer. Nicolas Collins focused on the overtones and decay of the bells, using condenser mikes to reveal the complexity of the sounds they produced and to create feedback, whereas Ikue Mori chose to have a museum employee ring the bells as she processed their sounds.

Elsewhere, a long exhibition case was filled with carefully placed newspaper ads, shopping bags, memo pads and other found objects, all of which included decorative bits of musical scores in their design.

That collection also provided the components for the collages which comprise Marclay’s variable score Ephemera. The same room also featured Mixed Reviews: a single line of text inscribed across the four walls, constructed out of excerpts from reviews of his work. In another room, a video of an American Sign Language interpreter signing the Mixed Reviews text was screened, while an adjoining room displayed a video of Mats Gustafsson interpreting the same text on baritone saxophone.

Mixed Reviews raises a question not easily answered—a bit po-mo, perhaps, but a perplexing one nevertheless: at what point does the concept become the work?

Is Mixed Reviews the collection of words, a sort of found poem collated by Marclay?

Is it the interpretation of the words, or the video of the interpretation? Likewise, is Ephemera the collection of stave-emblazoned scraps, or the collages Marclay made from them, or is it the interpretations of the score, as realized by such musicians as John Butcher, Anthony Coleman, Sylvie Courvoisier, Marilyn Crispell, Peter Evans, Mark Feldman, Mary Halvorson, Kato Hideki, Robin Holcomb, Wayne Horvitz, Guy Klucevsek, Okkyung Lee, Butch Morris and Ned Rothenberg over the three months of the show? Are the scores functioning as social critique? As an observation on mass production perhaps, or on the disposability of art? Is there something devaluing about the fact (which would probably go largely unnoticed were it not for Marclay arranging for performances of the music printed on cocktail napkins) that Beethoven’s work is so often used as visual ornament?

The whole notion of scoring, in fact, is called into question in Marclay’s work, a question also highlighted by the iconic cast of improvisers called upon to perform in the exhibit. They were, after all, musicians hired because of their individual approaches, their unique voices; and their presence challenged the hazy borders of interpretation, improvisation and composition. So

is playing the same score the same way in different performances lazy or de rigueur?

When—in two separate performances accompanying Marclay’s 20-minute silent film Screen Play—Alan Licht responded to a scene of a train moving through a tunnel with a blues song, was it a simplification?

Or was he just reading the score?

The amount of potentially “literal” material in Screen Play makes it a challenge for the audience as well. The piece is filled with clips from old movies for which we know the appropriate soundtrack. A nightclub; the pounding surf; a woman walking cautiously down the stairs, singled out by a beam of light in an otherwise dark room— we know how these scenes “sound.” The performers are forced to decide if they’re going to give in to the urge to accompany someone bouncing on a trampoline, or to read Marclay’s superimposed dots as notes without a staff, or the person doing back flips behind superimposed staff as the notation filling it. Does a film of a car’s flat tire represent a flatted whole note? And does the wide-open field of variables in reading a Marclay score make it any less of a “score”?

And what, for that matter, is to be made of his use of actual scores, even if they were scores not really meant to be played?

The piece Prêt-à-porter (which translates as a Duchampian “ready to wear”) calls upon musicians to play the notation printed on clothing worn by models moving around the stage area. Central to the piece, and to Marclay’s aesthetic in fact, is that the garments—the shirt with Snoopy dancing in front of a score, the piano-geek socks, a rather inexplicable gown patterned with staves twisted like unfurling croissants—are appropriated.

They’re not manufactured by Marclay but found by him, off-the-rack, ready to wear, readymade. A big part of Marclay’s job is accumulation.

Marclay himself only performed once during the run, and then surprisingly not with a turntable but with a slide projector, selecting images of onomatopoetic signs and packaging for Shelley Hirsch to riff on in the piece Zoom Zoom, a fairly perfect setting for the vocalist which allowed Marclay to try to construct sound-phrases using her as the voice box. He has long straddled the worlds of visual and audio art in unusual ways, and at the Whitney he was a sort of filmmaker and producer (or distributor) of goods. The Marclay who was at the Whitney didn’t make things that made sounds, at least not on their own. He wasn’t a manufacturer of wind chimes or aeolian harps, but he did install an array of music box mechanisms within an acoustic guitar. Marclay makes and amasses things that can be made to make noise, or which represent the making of sounds.

What was new at the Whitney is that it’s now all old. The only CDs to be found were in a side room where the artist’s own recordings were being played. But in the creation of his work, Marclay doesn’t deal with digital audio—or jewel cases, for that matter. As the world has grown up around him, a kind of nostalgia has infused his collections of musical byproducts. What once was salvage has come to seem sentimental. Kurt Gottschalk

WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #59 | 51

CD / DVD / LP / DL The season’s key releases and reissues from the world of creative music ...

OPN's Daniel Lapotin

Oneohtrix Point Never Returnal

Nate Dorr

Editions Mego CD

Every couple of months or so, a new genre surfaces, along with a few artists singled out as its ambassadors. The buzz surrounding Hypnagogic Pop, for one, has grown considerably with the ascendant profile of the genre’s current poster child, Oneohtrix Point Never (real name Daniel Lapotin). No Fun Productions helped rouse interest when it collected three limitededition releases (2007’s Betrayed in the Octagon, 2009’s Zones Without People, 2009’s Russian Mind) into the double-CD Rifts.

And now we have Returnal, the debut CD proper, which was produced using an Akai AX-60, Roland MSQ-700, Korg Electribe ES-1, and Lapotin’s precious Roland Juno60, a device with a personal history so deep he inherited it from his father. The sonic

universe in question is a resolutely synthetic one bereft of traditional instrumentation, with vocals the sole ‘natural’ element conspicuous in the mix.

Returnal’s opening three-track suite economically shows Lapotin’s range. In keeping with Edition Mego’s penchant for bruising electronic productions, the album begins with a hellacious cranium-crushing fireball called “Nil Admirari”—thankfully the album’s singular Noise exercise. Its bombardment of squeals, blasts, and vocal wails gradually eases off, paving the way for the soothing ambient-drone aftermath of “Describing Bodies” and “Stress Waves” (whose sunshowers of synth-generated psychedelia are more representative of the OPN style). Lopatin’s voice is prominently featured in the title track but, true to form, the singing is so heavily treated it functions as an unintelligible smudge across the chugging synthesizer patterns. Perhaps “Where Does Time Go” references the Sandy Denny classic, but little trace of the

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song is detectable within Lopatin’s incandescent swirl. In addition, there’s “Pelham Island Road,” a deep ambient setting of slow-motion washes and tones, the beautiful if brief serenade “Ouroboros,” and the tribal-inflected “Preyouandi,” which brings the album to a sputtering close.

Anyone curious about Hypnagogic Pop could do worse than start with Returnal, even if its lush synthesizer settings lack the narcoleptic haziness associated with the genre—for that one might turn to “Nobody Here” (Lopatin’s trippy rendering of Chris de Burgh’s “Lady in Red”) or the multiple blissed-out OPN videos on YouTube. But perhaps one should simply ignore the hype and take the recording on its own terms.

Returnal offers a commendable set of beatless, impressionistic electronica birthed from the legacy of Klaus Schulze, Vangelis, and Tangerine Dream. You could hardly describe it as revolutionary or even radically original—but it’s not as if Lopatin himself is making such any claims. Ron Schepper

Joshua Abrams

Natural Information Eremite LP

There’s the indie rock electric bassist, the underground beat scientist, the stalwart sideman in acoustic jazz ensembles, the free improviser, the frontporch minimalist, and the electronic composer who cooks up sounds in a Lucky Kitchen. If you asked the real Josh Abrams to stand up, they’d all leave their seats; he inhabits each role with sincerity and a deep respect for the requirements of his chosen style.

Natural Information presents yet another Josh Abrams, the transcendental trance-inducer. Chicagoans have seen this one around town, playing instrumental jams on his guimbri (a Moroccan camel-skin bass lute) with percussive accompaniment by the likes of Avreeayl Ra, Chad Taylor, or a drum machine; outside of town, the only way to get a taste of Abrams in this guise has been his work on Fred Anderson and Hamid Drake’s From the River to the Ocean. But neither encounter fully prepares you for the extraordinary Natural Information, which is a departure for both musician and label. Most of Eremite’s releases are no-sugar-added free jazz efforts by men who’d qualify for an AARP membership; this one is pan-generic and studio-enhanced, and made by a man too young to need bifocals. And while it draws on Abrams’ experiments with Saharan grooves and his affiliations with both rock and jazz musicians, it doesn’t sound like any record he’s ever made before.

The LP divides tidily into three parts. There are two tracks each by two different bands, and two more featuring Abrams alone. Opener “Mysterious Delirious Fluke of the Beyond” sets a mood of rarefied otherness with a surge of electronically processed hammered dulcimer.

The rest of side one is a kaleidoscopic whirl of constantly changing but always in-synch rhythm patterns articulated by Abrams’ guimbri and metal castanets, Frank Rosaly’s tomheavy drumming, and the buzzing electric guitar of Emmett Kelly (aka Cairo Gang); imagine Sterling Morrison sitting in for a spell with Bachir Attar. Side two features two pieces by the now-defunct AAT, which included vibraphonist Jason Adasiewicz and drummer Nori Tanaka. The trio usually worked in a jazz vein, but these tunes meld gut pulses and metallic chimes to hypnotic ends. Between their bright lights is a shadowy, solitary exploration of layered electronic and acoustic drone tones. The RosalyKelly trio takes the record home with another lengthy slow burn, only this one is backlit with blues and gospel hues. Its name is “A Lucky Stone,” and you’ll want to carry its spirit with you wherever you go. Bill Meyer

The Acid Mothers Temple & The Melting Paraiso U.F.O. In O to

∞

Important Records CD

This Japanese collective has rarely, if ever, sounded this chilled-out and meditative. Even when the drums start pounding harder and the noise level ratchets up, a sensation of

tranquility and concentration still permeates the music. It’s like an “Om” mantra that focuses your mind and clears away earthly distractions. This record finds Acid Mothers Temple returning to one of its earlier variations, the band called the Melting Paraiso U.F.O., with an appearance by the group’s former vocalist, Cotton Casino. Each of the four 18-minute tracks has a title that appears to indicate a musical key, although only one of them is a key that you’ll find on any actual sheet music, “In A.” The others are “In O,” “In Z,” and “In ∞”.

The wordless vocalizations on “In A” sound like animal wails echoing in a cave, while humming and buzzing builds in the background, like an advancing army of machines. “In Z” has an even more mechanical quality, its bubbling and whirring noises resembling a mad scientist’s laboratory in an old sci-fi film. Meanwhile, a brokenrecord guitar melody repeats and repeats and repeats, sounding slightly off-kilter each time, and a few chiming percussion notes ring out. Like all of this record, it’s simultaneously simple and complex. Acid Mothers Temple makes dissonance with such steadfast purpose that it starts to sound like beautiful harmony. Robert Loerzel

Ap’strophe Corgroc

Another Timbre CD

Håvard Volden and Toshimaru Nakamura Crepusular Rays Another Timbre CD

Martine Altenberger and John Russell Duet

Another Timbre CD

Martin Küchen Keith Rowe Seymour Wright Martin Küchen Keith Rowe Seymour Wright Another Timbre CD

Having just released a four-CD assessment of the piano in contemporary improvisation, Another Timbre turns now to the guitar. If the piano once musically epitomized Western cultural hegemony, the guitar is its successor, at once more adaptable to other cultures and even more a signifier of Western culture. It’s kind of like the transition from the British Empire’s brand of global dominance to the USA’s version. Since improvisers are generally empire-deniers if not Susan Alcorn defy-ers, they can’t be counted upon Touch This Moment Uma Sounds CD to play the damned thing right, and not many of these guitarists do. In fact Texan pedal steel guitarist Susan there’s a lot of guitar denying going Alcorn’s legend is built on her singular on here, to an extent that raised the approach to her instrument. The ire of Wire scribe David Keenan, who usual critical line on Alcorn’s playing is lamented the distance these players that she’s unchaining the pedal steel have wandered from the instrument’s from its enslavement at the hands essentially phallic quality. While I differ of country music. But that always from his conclusion that the music is seemed both a cheap shot at the lame—all of it is absorbing, although genre, and at Alcorn, who has spent I must warn you that some of it is plenty of time in traditional country ill-served by little bitty computer and R&B outfits, anyway. Her voice speakers—he’s got a point. None of on pedal steel is clearly indebted the guitarists, ex-guitarists, and duet to its history—there’s no ‘extended partners on these CDs seems at all technique’ attempt to get away from interested in Godlike domination. the instrument’s core sound—and has The Barcelona-based duo all the more emotional resonance as Ap’strophe declare themselves with a result. Touch This Moment, Alcorn’s their name; something is going to latest album, distills what she’s trying be left out. Acoustic guitarist Ferran to communicate via the pedal steel.

Fages seems quite capable of makThe opening “Little Bird, You Can ing his instrument sound the way it Fly” runs through a good portion of conventionally should, but more often her lexicon, from dark-as-night drones he and zither player Dimitra Lazaridou and weeping, sliding tones through Chatzigoga start with the notion that to almost aleatory streams of notes, their instruments are sound generarich strings of melody, and scrabtors, not historically determined inbling clusters of string-noise. As far struments. On Corgroc they start with as broad-sweep passes at the instrupoints of difference, amplify them, ment goes, its only immediate equal then find ways for the disharmony to is “And I Await the Resurrection of the resolve into a renegotiated one.

Pedal Steel Guitar,” Alcorn’s Messiaen Crepuscular Rays dismisses the tribute from her earlier album of the romantic implications of its name as same name. But I’m more drawn to quickly as it discards the notion that the small studies that fill the CD’s you need to touch a guitar’s strings second half: the gorgeous melody to play it. Volden rarely plays a note, lines woven through “Gilmore Blue,” preferring to rap and scrape the box, the mysterious spaces that Alcorn but when he does he lets it hang, as tears in the fabric of “Agnes Martin/ lovely as a cumulus cloud illuminated Specchio Nero,” the drifting clutches by the setting sun. Nakamura, of of chords she plucks from the sky for course, is a notorious guitar-denier the closing “Postlude.” In an odd who arrived at his current instruway, her absolute focus, and unstintment, the no-input mixing board, ing dedication to the sonority of the by unplugging his guitar. But he still pedal steel (both its strings and its loves the thing, even if he rarely plays body), remind me of Japanese guitarit. Perhaps mixed feelings are behind ist Taku Sugimoto, circa his pellucid, the puffs of acrid static he pokes at reflective Opposite and Italia albums.

Volden’s 12-string ruminations.

Like Sugimoto, Alcorn plays with The guitarists on the other two absolute, stilled concentration. Here records are UK improv vets, albeit she liberates the pedal steel: not from ones with very different relationships its history, but from neglect. Jon Dale to the guitar. John Russell likes to WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM

play the thing in a way that might seem old-fashioned next to Volden or Nakamura. He plucks notes, strums chords, and employs proper tunings, although he hardly limits himself to such elements. His music clearly comes out of a tradition that values and relies upon technical skill, and in cellist Altenberger he’s found a partner who is even more comfortably enfolded within those parameters. She’s an established classical cellist, albeit one who plays Scelsi and Cage, who happens to improvise.

Duet fits into a decades-long lineage of London-based improvisation, and furthers its values without trying to transform them. This is music that knows what it stands for and stands by it with stout heart, nimble fingers, and attentive ears.

Keith Rowe, on the other hand, has taken to literally cutting his guitars apart in recent years, and on this set he cuts it out of the action altogether by working with the tableful of gadgets he usually applies to the instrument but not the instrument itself. Saxophonists Küchen and Wright seem to be assessing the implications of Rowe’s approach. They play radios from their horns’ bells like he has through his pick-ups, apply electric fans to metal like he has to wood and wire. They play not many more notes than Rowe generally does, and are even pretty stingy with the squelches and barks of breath-born extended technique. More importantly, they and he together develop a sound world that is amorphous, inclusive, and exquisitely detailed. It may sound like a workshop, but perhaps that’s a loaded statement these days. How many people are sidelined in a backroom workshop, doing some hobby because they can’t find a job? How many are surrounded by the sounds of manufacture and industry, whether they like those sounds or not? This trio admits both the sounds and the circumstances of the world into their music. Bill Meyer

Robert Ashley

Atalanta (Acts of God) Vol. II Lovely Music CD x 2

Alvin Lucier

Sferics / Music for Solo Performer Lovely Music CD

New York-based Lovely Music offers two new releases by its cornerstone composers. They are presented in typically excellent sound and with fascinating and informative liner notes.

Robert Ashley’s operas may be the most revolutionary penned by an American composer. Atalanta’s second volume is a case in point.

The piece is itself made up of three operas, Max, Willard and Bud, whose scenes are interchangeable from performance to performance; a scene from each is recorded here.

My favorite is the riotously funny “Au Pair,” which occupies all of disc 2 and consists of stories of au pairs’ foibles and misdeeds, by long-time Ashley collaborator and vocalist Jacqueline Humbert. Ashley and Humbert’s humor can be brutally dark and sophisticated by turn as they lampoon modern parenting and explore psychosexuality. As always, SIGNAL to NOISE #59 | 53

John Butcher and Eddie Prévost

John Butcher Claudia Ulla Binder Under the Roof Nuscope CD

John Butcher Rhodri Davies Carliol Ftarri CD

AMM

Sounding Music Matchless CD

John Butcher Trace

Theo Eshetu

Tapework cassette

English saxophonist John Butcher once described his artistic motivation in nearapologetic terms as a modernistic determination to progress. A chronological listen to his work shows how much his playing has evolved over time, but also how important sustained relationships are to that evolution. On three new CDs he and his fellow musicians find support in shared values and experiences to further their strivings.

Under the Roof is the first time that Butcher and Claudia Ulla Binder, a German-born pianist based in Switzerland, have recorded, but they’ve played together occasionally for a quarter century. Both use extended techniques and electronic assistance (amplification and feedback on his end, e-bows on hers) to take their instruments outside their respective boxes. They’re comfortable with each other and the vocabularies they’ve evolved, and the music here is remarkable for the concentration of its ideas and the

clarity of its execution across a wide range of sounds. They sound uncommonly jazz-like charting conventionally voiced contrapuntal figures on “Raincoat,” like they’re bowing glass as they sculpt high tones in “Leak,” and like they’re both deferential partners to a third, dominant presence—silence—on “Cantilever.” But they’re always to the point, distilled even when they’re quite active.

Carliol is another long-term duo, one that has recorded before and gigged extensively over the years. But the Davies and Butcher heard here are not the same players who recorded Angels and Vortices (Emanem) a decade ago. Already restrained then, now they’re willing to drastically restrict their unimpeachable technical skills in order to serve pure sound. Both men use amplification to harden, brighten, and clarify their tones— and tones, not notes, are their base materials here. This is music that eradicates the composition/improvisation boundary; while it might be spontaneously generated, each sound is placed with such care in relation to its companion sounds that the music feels satisfyingly complete. It’s also drop-dead gorgeous; this is one to get lost in time and again.

Sounding Music is not Butcher’s first recording with AMM, but it’s the first on which he is represented as an unqualified member alongside stalwarts John Tilbury, whose piano playing seems not at all blighted by the stroke he had suffered three months before this set was recorded at the Freedom of the City Festival in May 2009, and percussionist Eddie Prévost. Also on board are American composer and multi-instrumentalist Christian Wolff, who has worked with AMM sporadically for decades, and cellist Ute Kanngiesser, a much younger player who has participated in Prévost’s improv workshops and whose inclusion in this concert was reportedly a spontaneous last-minute decision. Regardless of individual length of affiliation, each

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musician demonstrates a complete grasp of the AMM aesthetic, which allows players to be themselves but also requires them not to bully the music. Sounds guide them, but each player is responsible for engaging as deeply as possible with the implications of the sounds and how they relate to the whole. Not only does this configuration live up to prior line-ups’ realizations of that aesthetic, their music broadly sounds like AMM; it has the group’s usual feel of organic expansion and contraction, of sounds that seem to grow out of each other and recombine. Kanngiesser in particular makes sure that the record doesn’t sound like a rehash, though; the specifics of the activity are totally rooted in the now, it’s just the atmosphere of absolute concentration and the acuity of shared purpose that feel familiar. Bill Meyer The cassette-only Trace showcases two sides of Butcher’s distinctive approach to solo playing. Side A captures a live set recorded in Paris in October, 2009. Starting out on tenor, Butcher builds waves of sound, laying out long tones which he modulates and burnishes with quavering microtones, overblown harmonics, and fluttering oscillations of breath. When he switches to soprano, his clipped chirps and chopped phrases are readily identifiable. As with his tenor playing, Butcher is intimately in tune with the instrument’s nuances: the sputtering sprays of notes are constantly shaded by overtones which jump into skirling whistles or drop down to dark blasts.

On a second tenor solo, he combines shredded loops and foghorn tones in waves of gathering intensity. Side B is an extended piece for saxophone-controlled feedback and piano; it’s an entrancing study of shimmering electronic sounds, reed harmonics, the percussive clatter of sax keys, and the pure resonance of single hammered piano notes. Michael Rosenstein

Ashley’s electronic music is realized with stunning clarity by Tom Hamilton, a contradictory but effective blend of old-world tonality and lean but varied timbres that elegantly bolsters the rapid-fire speech-song vocals.

The two Lucier pieces hail from early in his career; like “I Am Sitting in a Room,” they are concerned with the sound complexes resulting from scientific principles. The title piece is constructed from sounds emitted by the electromagnetic energy given off by lightning. As in Ligeti’s symphonic poem for a hundred metronomes, rhythmic complexities converge and diverge, but much less predictably, and this 1980 realization has the high-frequency hallmarks of recent EAI. “Solo,” music for percussion instruments stimulated by loudspeakers controlled by the alpha waves of the human brain, was first realized in 1965 with the help of John Cage.

There are several realizations from the early 1980s, also on Lovely, in which Ashley and Pauline Oliveros employ less conventional percussion, such as cardboard boxes and trashcan. This new rendition is an extremely vivid document, with a rhythmic unpredictability of the kind I associate with European improvised music. The spatial distribution of the instruments is audible and becomes a key part of the musical experience, and the music is rhythmic while defying any preconceived notion of meter. It’s startling to realize that the human brain is capable of producing such complex and beautiful music in real time.

Marc Medwin

Jan Bang

...And Poppies from Kandahar Samadhisound CD

Denver-born but now Norway-based, Jan Bang is a sampler player and mixologist, although his M.O. differs a bit from that of David Shea and assorted DJs. Bang does his thang by sampling musicians in real time and then he do the hoodoo with their sounds (also with field recordings), remixing them in a live context. I don’t know if the entirety of …And Poppies from Kandahar was fashioned in that manner, but whatever the case, Poppies is an absorbing journey through a fairly unique sound-world. Some of the scenery may bring to mind the Fourth World excursions of Jon Hassell (one of the contributors here), but the cartography is all Bang’s. This is a terrain of lush, sultry, verdant fields, slowly moving waters, still air, the sighs and cries of small creatures, and distant (and occasionally nearby) mechanical sounds. There is rhythm and repetition, but both are expressed in a most understated manner. At times, this set feels as if Bang was trying to “interpret” Brian Eno’s Another Green World—not to “cover” or replicate it but to truly interpret it in a very personal, decades-on manner, the way a jazz musician might. One might (and no doubt many will) label this an “ambient” release, and who is to say they’re wrong. But there is much warmth, momentum, and resolution here, all sounding like they come from, dare I say, an organic source, not (any sort of) programming.

Mark Keresman

Barn Owl

The Conjurer Root Strata CD

Evan Caminiti West Winds

3 Lobed LP + download

It doesn’t take much wizardry to discern what Barn Owl are whipping up on The Conjurer. The San Francisco-based duo of Evan Caminiti and John Porras like their guitars as big and twangy as a Morricone soundtrack, their bass deep as a trip into the sepulchre, and their atmosphere so thick you could use it for a blanket. It’s effective stuff, just the thing for that late-night full-moon drive across Monument Valley. The duo never really transcend their influences, but when they pursue the inspired notion of pairing the eerie guitars with spooky vocalizing and a plush harmonium drone on the closing “Ancient of Days,” you have to respect them for combining some unlikely ones so well.

West Winds, the latest solo effort by the duo’s guitar-playing half covers similar ground but hits harder and bites deeper. Caminiti’s textures are harsher, his atmospheres bleaker, and the twang has flown the coop in advance of the pitiless wails of a circling, scavenging raptor. Again, there are influences; “Path to the Sea” trudges through a veil of time as well as distortion in a manner reminiscent of Steven R. Smith, while the tunes that bracket it feel like Roy Montgomery at his epic, naturalistic best. I wouldn’t recommend this record for driving; a late-night flight across the astral plane is more like it. Bill Meyer

Judith Berkson Oylam ECM CD

It’s not hard to see why ECM recruited relatively unheralded soprano and keyboardist Berkson for this label debut. Berkson’s only other recording was the 2008 Lu Lu on the small Peacock Recordings label, but she has been an active member of the New Music community on both sides of the Atlantic. And while other artists with influences as diverse as Berkson’s often try to combine them into some sort of eclectic, cross-cultural stew, Berkson adopts the less typical strategy of presenting the discrete parts of her musical persona with no bleeding of one form into another.

Nine of the fourteen tracks are Berkson’s own compositions. The opening and closing solo piano pieces, “Goodbye Friend” (Nos. 1 and 2), owe as much to Eric Satie as to the jazz canon. Berkson’s vocal compositions are quirky art songs which feature sudden leaps and tempo changes. Vocals often mimic the keyboard line (or vice versa) and sound is as important as literal sense. Lyrics are surreal and associational, with heavy use of repetition and wordplay. On two jazz standards, “All of You” and “They Can’t Take That Away from Me,” Berkson asserts her individuality: her playing is definitely within the jazz tradition, i.e., she swings, but her vocals playfully improvise around the original melodies. And just when you think you’ve got the full picture of

Berkson’s musical persona, she throws you a curve with a full-throated interpretation of a Hebrew liturgical text, “Ahavas Olam” (“Everlasting Love”), accompanying herself on Hammond organ. Later, she has more surprises, first with “Der Leiermann,” a brooding Schubert lied from Winterreise (this time with electric piano) and then with the Yiddish folk song, “Hulyet, Hulyet,” her vocals multi-tracked to create a three-part harmony. It’s hard to describe what all this adds up to, but Berkson’s artistic sensibility shines through everything she does.

Far from a musical grab-bag, Oylam is a satisfying and coherent musical experience. Bill Tilland

James Blackshaw All Is Falling Young God CD

Godflesh, Jesu), who has recruited an impressive supporting cast. The four principals (Broadrick, DJ Submerged, Enduser, and Bill Laswell) have all been around the block: even though the music offers a consistent vision (in part because of its use of the film as a touchstone), they’re careful to make sure that the electronic treatments never become predictable. Dr. Israel’s declamatory, heavily processed vocals provide just the right amount of amorphous malevolence, while the use of live drummers to supplement the electronic percussion keeps the beatz fresh. As for Laswell, his rubbery bass has never sounded better. He seems well suited to hardcore, which is really just a step away from his more customary ambient funk and dub.

Recommended for anyone who likes dark, muscular techno with virtuosity and flair. Bill Tilland

All Is Falling is James Blackshaw’s second full-length outing on Michael Gira’s Young God imprint, following last year’s triumphant The Glass Bead Game. This new release—an eightpart suite—documents the latest step in his ongoing metamorphosis from 12-string virtuoso to serious composer. Blackshaw distances himself here from past work by eschewing acoustic guitar altogether, opting instead for a 12-string electric that he supplements with his own glockenspiel and piano, as well as strings and woodwinds (courtesy Charlotte Glasson, Fran Bury, and Daniel Madav).

The influence of classical minimalism on All Is Falling’s melancholy romanticism is evident in several passages, such as the Glass-like rising melodic line in part two or the echoes of Reich in parts three and four. The disc’s opener focuses on piano, the first sign that the album isn’t going to be a set of guitar solos. Part two weaves strings and Blackshaw’s delicate guitar lines into courtly waltz balladry, a blend that eventually culminates in part seven’s intricate, sensual melodic patterns (climactically punctuated by plummeting wails). In part four, glockenspiel tinkles contrast with rough-hewn electric guitar, and in six Blackshaw and violinist Bury lock into a fixed meter amidst percussion flourishes. The sparkling guitar playing during the third part comes closest to spotlighting Blackshaw’s picking, while the coda pursues an entirely different approach: a lunar dronescape of shuddering feedback.

Though well-crafted (and admirably concise at 45 minutes), All Is Falling is less impassioned and thus ultimately less compelling than The Glass Bead Game. Blackshaw sounds constrained by the meticulously composed settings, and one longs to hear him break free and indulge his improvisatory side, even if for just a minute or two. Ron Schepper

Ross Bolleter

Blood of Heroes Blood of Heroes

19 Standards (Quartet) 2003

Ohm Resistance CD

Leo Records CD x 4

Named after a dark, post-apocalyptic 1989 film about a ragtag team that travels from town to town taking on all comers in a brutal competitive sport called “juggling,” this bracing dose of breakcore, raga, industrial, dubstep and what-you-will is the brainchild of Justin Broadrick (Napalm Death,

Over the decades, I’ve been too lazy to carve a few hours out of every afternoon to adequately follow the exploits of Anthony Braxton, but apparently it’s never too late to walk in on the party.

Braxton has pulled many musicians into his orbit over the years, but in

Night Kitchen: An Hour of Ruined Piano Emanem CD

Australian pianist Ross Bolleter has carved out a niche for himself as an advocate of the “ruined piano”: an instrument “abandoned to all weathers [that] has become a decaying box of unpredictable dongs, clicks, and dedoomps.” Sure, itinerant pianists have often had to contend with all sorts of battered and neglected instruments.

But Bolleter and the other members of WARPS (World Association for Ruined Piano Studies) have taken the idea to extremes, rescuing orphaned pianos from flooded basements, fields, garages, and trash heaps. Bolleter has been collecting these castoffs for years, housing four of them in his kitchen and a slew more at a farm in the countryside. This recording contains 14 improvisations recorded in his kitchen over the last decade, the pianist often playing several instruments simultaneously. An accomplished musician, he’s mastered the instruments’ dead keys, cracked soundboards, jangling resonance, fractured action, and bent tunings, prying out a remarkable range of sounds and shaping them with a clear sense of space and timing. The results sound like a junkyard gamelan; it’s an utterly unique take on solo keyboard music. Michael Rosenstein

Anthony Braxton Anne Rhodes GTM (Syntax) 2003 Leo Records CD x 2

Anthony Braxton Chris Jonas Molly Sturges GTM (Outpost) 2003 Leo Records CD x 2

Anthony Braxton

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Savage Energy: Jeffrey Hayden Shurdut with Michael Ray and Marshall Allen

Excavated Shellac's Jonathan Ward

Various

Secret Museum of Mankind, Vol. 2 Outernational LP

Excavated Shellac: Strings Parlortone LP

Rev. Johnny L. “Hurricane” Jones Jesus Christ from A to Z

courtesy Excavated Shellac

Parlortone LP

Between 1995 and 1998, the mighty Yazoo imprint (best known for reissues of vintage pre-World War 2 blues by the likes of Charlie Patton, Blind Willie McTell and Kokomo Arnold, as well the occasional foray into 78-era jazz, gospel, Hawaiian and hokum) tossed out eight CDs titled The Secret Museum of Mankind: Ethnic Music Classics 1925-48. Curated by Pat Conte, who, in the days when the internet was in its infancy, was already a wealth of knowledge about vintage music from regions as far-ranging as Corsica or Java, the project expanded what we knew about music in a way that has, quite frankly, never been equaled. The series, which included five geographically assorted volumes plus one each from North Africa, West Africa and Central Asia, was an expansion of the Morning Star vinyl release You Can Tell the Whole World About This, a 14-track collection of vintage ethnic goodies. In any case, the SMM series set the standard for ethnic reissues. No doubt because of its significant influence on 78 scavengers such as Ian Nagoski and Robert Millis, and on labels such as Dust to Digital that reissue the

sounds these collectors have found, it is finally finding its way onto vinyl. Produced

by Sublime Frequencies’ Hisham Mayet, the vinyl editions of the first two volumes don’t differ from the CD versions. Even the photos, as well as Conte’s original liner notes, have been left intact. But amidst the flurry of vinyl-only releases of such music on Mississippi, Sublime Frequencies, and Parlortone, these collections will perhaps now find a new audience.

The music is nearly beyond description. Volume 2 houses tracks that truly do seem to represent the absolute height of recorded music. Indian vocalist Professor Narayanrao Vyas reaches the summit of ecstasy in three minutes’ time, while elsewhere a zither-led tune from Western Java crawls along in a way that’s both highly sensual and disturbing. Tracks from Kazakhstan, Tibet, Crete and Algeria nudge alongside one another naturally, while brilliant South African acoustic guitarist John Bhengu, whose work Conte often featured on his WFMU radio show, “The Secret Museum of the Air,” takes the six-string to places westerners would have never conceived.

Despite the brilliance of Dust to Digital’s guest-edited ethnic 78 collections Black Mirror and Victrola Favorites, nobody seemed to match Conte for knowledge or sheer amount of recordings until Jonathan Ward started his blog, Excavated Shellac.

Since 2007, Ward has been uploading what now amounts to about six full-length CDs’ worth of downloadable 78-era Congolese mbira songs, Algerian guespa, Turkmen Iraqi qoyrat, Swedish polka, and Polynesian vocal music from Tonga, one track a time, week after week, while also supplying scholarly information that’s every bit as impressive as the music itself. Naturally Parlortone, Dust to Digital’s vinyl-only arm,

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would step up to properly release some of this music. Strings, which consists of material not available on the blog, features Armenian tar players, Ugandan onestringed fiddlers, Turkish and Iranian violin soloists and Bolivian charango players. The performances are fantastic and the sound, like all D to D releases, has been cleaned up just enough not to deaden the music.

The second Parlortone release (the first being a 7-inch of the first recorded human voice singing “Au Clair de la Lune” in 1860) features Atlanta, Ga. pastor of the Second Mount Olive Baptist Church, Rev. Johnny L. “Hurricane” Jones. Jones, who is still at it at age 73, recorded his own services over the years, and since D to D’s headquarters is in the same city, it was natural for the label to give selections from his tapes a home. Though Jones has made many records over the years, it’s likely that none of them match the power of his services. Here we have him delivering prayers in long, drawn-out near-song, as women in the congregation scream like young girls seeing the Beatles in 1964. An organ sometimes drones behind him, and electric guitars and drums are also to be heard.

His services also featured congregational singing, some of which is captured here.

Yet, as intense as all of this is, the album’s centerpiece is the 13-minute track that gives the LP its title. Here Jones growls, stomps, screams and stretches every word, as he works his congregation into a frenzy before showing how every letter of the alphabet symbolizes the work of Jesus. It’s ultimately the long-playing, modern-day extension of disc six of the initial D to D release, Goodbye Babylon, which featured “preacher records” from the 1920s and early ’30s, and it’s every bit as intense.

Bruce Miller

Compositions 339 and 340, collected on the two-disc GTM (Syntax) 2003, he has found his avant-Ginger Rogers, the remarkable East Coast vocalist Anne Rhodes. To hear the interplay between Braxton and Rhodes is to discover one of art’s great male-female pairings—two primal forces abstracting their bipolarity into smart, surprising, elegant moves.

Rhodes’ bright coloratura is the perfect contrast to Braxton’s gruff reeds.

They set a pattern right away: a few long notes followed by several shorter ones. They play together, but not in unison, synchronizing their stride but leaving different prints. Sometimes Rhodes decouples, following the long-notes-short-notes pattern while Braxton quietly drifts his own way on baritone or alto.

Trains give you a long-short-long pattern when they’re about to cross.

What is intersecting here? Question and answer? Statement and footnote? Numerator and denominator? I pick the last. Rhodes throws a lot of numbers, including decimals and algebraic symbols, among the wordless syllables, consonants and trills. The duo is hitching a ride on the equations, variables and constants that really run the universe—and that are frequently attached to those dotted lines on Braxton’s drawings.

They daub this precise calligraphy on a backdrop of legato SuperCollider electronic signals—fuzzed high and low tones that streak by like satellites.

“Composition 340” floats in the same sound world, but it feels less like a seminar and more like play. The electronics are more varied and integrated, the structure is less rigid, and Braxton more or less supports the inexhaustible fascinations of his vocalist, who trembles, sputters, dilates, soars and deflates in too many ways to count. Rhodes’ operatic training comes in handy when she sings a recitative with a text that seems to come from a corporate pep talk. (It’s from Braxton’s opera Shala Fears for the Poor.) “Let them desire our products or they will seek our competitors’. OK. OK. OK.” It’s those flat “OKs” that get you.

The first disc of GTM (Outpost) 2003 finds Braxton in a duo tussle with reedman Chris Jonas. It starts with an insinuating tone row on the same long-short-long pattern as the Rhodes stuff. Then the fragmentation and burrowing begins. While Braxton goes back to the tone row, Jonas might wrestle a scale or click the keys.

When conventional notes fail, or the bare mouthpiece loses interest, they whisper, hiss and make wet noises that sound like they’re vomiting clam chowder through their horns—the thick kind, not the bisque. It always goes back to the “head,” that clarion tone row, which they attack, take apart and reassemble in myriad exhilarating ways.

For “Composition 265,” vocalist Molly Sturges joins the BraxtonJonas duo for a stunning cycle of explorations, even for Braxton. With a squad of three on hand, the parsed, forced-march feel of Braxton’s music comes to the fore. The first track is a militaristic march with exaggerated right-left-right-left blasts from the horns and vigorous hup-hups from Sturges. Where are we marching?

Into a vertiginous spiral of slurred scales that funnels into an itchy pit of key clicks and lip smacks. It would be pointless and exhausting to detail the variety of forms and patterns that follows. Much of the fascination comes from waiting to find out if, when and how Braxton and crew will strip, fragment, decompose, digress or flee from those patterns. On the rare occasions when Braxton pushes a paisley spume of Charlie Parker through the grid he’s laid out, the effect is supremely strange and funny.

Take that tiny cheek sample of Bird, clone four more discs from it, and you’ll have something close to 19 Standards (Quartet) 2003, a four-disc set of relaxed quintet work from the same group featured in the earlier 23 and 20 Standards sets. Here, Braxton is as sunny, genial and legato as he is spiky, tough and exacting on his own numbered compositions. Most of the out-of-tempo digressions come from guitarist Kevin O’Neil (Grant Green plus he can play) or from fleeting bits like the larval squirming that opens “Inchworm.” Braxton’s generous net gathers creaky standards like “Nancy with the Laughing Face” in the same haul as “Afro-Blue,” but the egalitarianism isn’t insulting. He opens a beach where all the jazz standards come to stretch and bask, regardless of physique, no questions asked. After the rigor of the numbered compositions, 19 Standards is like a postlude to a visit with Niels Bohr—the part where he takes you into his garden to tell you about his hostas. “I have 19 varieties.” It’s not why you came, but you gratefully sip his tea and smell his flowers anyway. Lawrence Cosentino

Hélène Breschand & Sylvain Kassap Double-Peine D'Autres Cordes CD

These 25 short improvisations run the gamut from eerie soundtrack tension to playful moments of captured serendipity. Hélène Breschand plays “harp machines” while Sylvain Kassap plays clarinets, machines, and toys; both also contribute vocals. Despite the mysterious nature of the music (full of whispering and unidentifiable semi-electronic wind wisps) it’s actually a very coherent listening experience, like exploring every room—no matter how large or small—in an abandoned château. The two improvisers aren’t afraid to use loops, but they’re used sparingly and with great purpose.

The small-object electronics at the forefront of these tracks remind me of a less-muffled but equally playful Anla Courtis. Kassap has played with a bunch of heavy-hitting improvisers— Bennink, Parker, Sommer, etc.—and is equally at home in ensembles dedicated to modern composition— Kagel, Berio, Globokar, etc. That ability to move between freedom and more focused playing is evident even in his smallest gestures, but is most noticeable when he picks up the clarinet, adapting his attack to whatever direction the music seems to be taking. He’s a wonderfully subtle yet recognizable stylist. Breschand takes a lot of chances with her multitude of instruments, and most pay off. The two together have a real knack for finding intriguing little areas of sonic

space, and then fleshing them out.

Andrew Choate

A Broken Consort Crow Autumn

Tompkins Square CD / LP

Richard Skelton Landings Type CD / LP

Richard Skelton’s first batch of CD-R releases, on his own Sustain-Release label, took the private press to new extremes: each disc was an edition of one, inscribed to the purchaser, their name preserved on a strip of thick paper that bound an artwork to the disc’s packaging. Those early recordings are memorials formed out of dronology, chamber ambient and an audio equivalent of the landscape tradition—discovering that they were dedicated to his late partner, Louise Skelton, made these releases feel all the more private, as though you were listening in on one man’s quiet, humble articulation of grief.

Crow Autumn reissues one of those early discs under the pseudonym A Broken Consort—Skelton has also recorded under Riftmusic, Clouwbeck, Carousell, and other names. Crow Autumn’s seven pieces are all built from the same language, with raspy violin drones sounding out melancholy harmonies, while a piano drops chords, clusters of notes, across a sheet of hoarfrost cast by jangling, rustling cymbals. It’s fairly simple, which makes the album’s intense emotional impact the more surprising. Sure, Skelton knows how to put three notes together such that their minor-key mournfulness registers, but some of the most startling moments here occur when he peels almost everything away and allows two simple elements to rotate—the watery splash of a cymbal, slowly cocooning the feather-light burr of hair-against-string.

Landings is Skelton’s most recent album, and like Crow Autumn, it makes a virtue of relative minimalism, though here Skelton takes in a few extra instruments—a few tracks feature plangent figures for guitar, and mixed low in these pieces you can hear birdsong and other field recordings. But essentially, Skelton deals in a similar mood, a similar construction, with levitating strings bobbing and weaving across an echo horizon.

The differences are infinitesimal, which means they take on great import—the shock of hearing the guitar in Landings was seismic—and throughout, Skelton’s memorializing drone-works are lovingly produced.

He shares with others in this field—I am reminded of Andrew Chalk, Martyn Bates & Mick Harris, or Paul Bradley—a fecundity which means you do need to hear most everything he does to fully grasp the complexity of this reserved, quintessentially British, music-as-memory. Jon Dale

Peter Brötzmann & Hamid Drake Brötzmann / Drake Brö Records CD

Iron-lunged German saxophonist Peter Brötzmann’s Brö Records has a special history, beginning with his first LPs, For Adolphe Sax and Machine

Gun. In 2002 he revived the label with Michael Ehlers of Eremite, reserving it for limited-run special projects.

Most of the recordings have been CDs made to sell on specific tours, and they’ve all presented Brötzmann in duet with drummers, one in 2005 with Nasheet Waits and two for a tour with Han Bennink in 2006. Recorded in 2004 at Cleveland’s Beachland Ballroom Tavern, this one features Hamid Drake, a regular Brötzmann partner both in small groups and the Chicago Tentet. Like the previous CDs it’s packaged in a hand-printed piece of folded cardboard with a rubber nipple to hold the disc in place. It’s as simple and functional as packaging can be and this limited-edition is available only from the musicians on their 2010 tour or from Eremite.

The music, too, is as intense, direct and personal as one expects from Brötzmann: four pieces in which he moves from alto to tarogato to tenor, in constant dialogue with Drake, who is a master at creating the kind of polyrhythmic parade rhythms that Ed Blackwell did so well. Each piece is an exercise in the visceral free improvisation that has always defined Brötzmann’s music: initial melodic impulses are reduced to a trill, a wail, a bugle call, a portion of a scale, or a travesty of a traditional ballad.

The longest track at 18 minutes, “Nr. 02” is a dialogue for tarogato and frame drum, Drake establishing different pitch patterns and rhythmic figures as Brötzmann creates swirling modal patterns in which the rapid, repeated lines begin to double up into multiphonics before the piece moves to a keening dirge evocative of the Middle East. “Nr. 03” may be Brötzmann’s most powerful statement here, a classic tenor oration that magnifies emotion to an epic scale before Drake enters to supply both sonic backdrop and rhythmic fuel.

This is genuinely elemental music, an authentic encounter between two musicians deeply attuned to one another’s methods and impulses.

Stuart Broomer

Bryan and the Haggards

Pretend It’s the End of the World Hot Cup CD

Bryan is tenor saxophonist Bryan Murray, and his Haggards are alto saxophonist Jon Irabagon, guitarist Jon Lundbloom, bassist Moppa Elliott, and drummer Danny Fischer; their debut is a brief album of seven tunes penned by or associated with Merle Haggard. Yup, it’s got the same gonzo engagement with musical traditions so beloved by fans of Elliott and Irabagon’s other unit, Mostly Other People Do The Killing. But the sound is gonna get you. From the anthemic opener “Silver Wings”— with great chiming waves of feedback from Lundbloom—these fellows love to dig into the bent notes and heartsick melody of Merle’s world. It’s a continual riot of ideas and enjoyment from there until the last note. After the carousing opener, “Swinging Doors” sounds superficially more canonical, with its gentle shuffle and twanging guitar. But, in what’s basically the key to the group’s methodology as a

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whole, the sax players pepper their phrases with a muffle, a sigh, a little out detail. “Working Man Blues” is off to the races, chugging and swaggering like greasy roadhouse music. That is, until the monkey wrench hits the works and a racing swing section erupts like they’re just tired of playing it too straight (right up until another wrench flies: a ragged no wave guitar solo). Wafting, bleary tenor notes set the tone of “Miss the Mississippi and You”—beautiful, sentimental, committed—but it’s a relatively brief pause. The tempo stutters and glitches on “Lonesome Fugitive,” the sound of a continual breakdown, like a tour that can’t find its groove. The “oh yeahs” on “All of Me Belongs to You” sounds like the band are taking the piss a bit; ditto for Elliott’s vocalese along with his hysterically lengthy bass solo (doo-badoo-ba-doo, ad infinitum). But while the humor is thick, you get a clear sense of musical conviction: they love this stuff; they’re just tweaking it as well. And after the big free noise and lyrical shout on the closing “Trouble in Mind,” that impression is confirmed.

It’s kind of like a touring avant-garde band when their van has broken down and they have to do a pickup gig for repair money. But there’s nothing ersatz about this, even if there’s plenty of (non-snarky) humor. Genres collide, but more importantly, genres blend. Jason Bivins

Joost Buis & Astronotes

John Marshall, Karl Jenkins, Mike Ratledge and Roy Babbington in 1973.

Soft Machine

NDR Jazz Workshop Hamburg, Germany May 17, 1973 Cuneiform CD + DVD

Live at the Henie Onstad Art Centre 1971

courtesy Cuneiform Records

Reel Recordings CD x 2 + DVD

England’s Soft Machine went through one of the most interesting evolutions of any group in rock music, one that couldn’t even be conceived of from their first volleys as a trio and outgrowth from Daevid Allen’s band. Sure, the Kevin Ayers/Robert Wyatt/ Mike Ratledge threesome that recorded their eponymous debut for ABC Probe in 1968 and toured with Jimi Hendrix was prone to improvisation, suites and minimalism. But within two years they’d become one of the leading lights of European electric jazz and one would have been hard pressed to even call them “progressive rock” or jazz-rock. Once the 1970 album Third (CBS) came around, they were a four-piece with bassist-composer Hugh Hopper and saxophonist Elton Dean (ex-Keith Tippett Group) on board. By 1973, the only remaining original member was keyboardist Mike Ratledge, as Tippett alums John Marshall (drums) and Roy Babbington (bass) stepped in, and reedman/pianist Karl Jenkins (Graham Collier Music, Ian Carr’s Nucleus) replaced Dean. From Third onward, their music had become purely instrumental, electronic fantasias for quartet, often expanded with guests from across the UK jazz spectrum.

The concert presented at the NDR Jazz Workshop in Hamburg, Germany on May 17,

1973 is a case in point. Captured at the height of the Jenkins-Ratledge-Babbington-Marshall group and between the CBS albums Six and Seven, this release contains both quartet and sextet versions of the band, as well as a fragment of a performance adding Hugh Hopper to the mix. The audio and video fidelity are beautiful—not always the case, ironically, for a band that so rigorous and detailed in approach. There is only slight difference between what’s on the CD and DVD—the former includes Jenkins’ funky (post-Blue Note) “Down the Road,” while the latter has the gorgeous, minimal “Soft Weed Factor” as well as a lengthy section of Hopper’s “1983.”

If anyone were to criticize this edition of the Softs as “too cerebral” (and they did), one look at the rocking, bouncing Ratledge and Marshall grooving mightily throughout will end such notions. While not the fuzz-monster and compositional genius that Hopper was, Babbington’s syrupy six-string electric bass finds a comfortable niche in the music, lending it an enormous bottom and impeccable time. It’s interesting to see Jenkins here as a cool textural scientist as well as a heavyblowing horn man, running tape loops off of the rafters and playing piano, keyboards, soprano and baritone saxophones, oboe and recorder. Marshall had become an incredibly nuanced drummer by this point, as his solo “One Across” exemplifies, and the addition of guitarist Gary Boyle and the fierce tenor and soprano of Art Themen to the concert’s second half is a real coup. Ratledge’s “Stanley Stamp’s Gibbon Album” is one of the most swinging, bat-out-of-hell tunes in the Softs’ book and it’s given incredible punch here, while “Gesolerut” is the group’s recasting of Ornette’s “Ramblin’.” Let it never be said that

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Zoomin

mid-1970s British fusion didn’t have a healthy dose of soul.

February 1971 was late in the career of the “classic quartet” of Dean, Hopper, Ratledge and Wyatt, but despite a splintering group their concert at the Henie Onstad Art Centre in Norway is quite strong and well-recorded.

The two days of performance coincided with an exhibition by Scottish environmental artist Mark Boyle (1934-2005), who created many of the visual projections that the Softs used in addition to being a pioneer in British land art. As one would expect, the two sets included here are continuous performances. Rhythmically there’s a clear sheen: Hopper and Ratledge create a bedrock of architectural fuzz to keep things spry amid Dean’s quizzical, keening buzzsaws, and Wyatt’s in excellent form even though at the outset he’s perhaps phoning it in a bit. The foursome capitalize on tensions aesthetically, creating spare linkages between burbling grooves and glitchy relentlessness. “Slightly All the Time” is a clambering exposition of meter-shifts, providing a strong showcase for Dean’s twittering saxello and Ratledge’s skittering electric piano before the reverberated din of “Fletcher’s Blemish.” The second set tacks on another fifteen minutes, in which Wyatt’s FX’d vocals are unusually strongly featured. The rhythm section keeps a taut pace behind Dean’s acrid declamations on “All White,” Ratledge’s electric piano wandering and jabbing in ways that recall the Annette Peacock-Paul Bley Synthesizer Show.

At times, the quartet sounds like two duets— saxophones and keys in lilting and aggressive interplay as bass and percussion swell and recede—but as tense as things were in 1971, the Soft Machine were clearly a formidable organism. Clifford Allen

Data CD

ICP Orchestra ICP 049 ICP CD

Eric Boeren 4tet

Song for Tracy the Turtle: Live at Jazz Brugge 2004 Clean Feed CD

Tobias Delius 4tet Luftlucht ICP CD

New releases by the ICP Orchestra and Joost Buis & Astronotes demonstrate the ways in which these ten-piece Dutch groups embrace and revitalize big band jazz by keeping the swing and augmenting it with modern freedoms that the big bands of the ’20s, ’30s and ’40s never dreamed of. While passages of extended technique, dissonance and wild-eyed improv are in evidence on these discs, I am positive that the original practitioners of this style of music would be joyously overwhelmed if they could hear how the Dutch have continued the tradition, and advanced it.

The title track on Zoomin features thick electric guitar from Paul Pallesen that delves into crisp rhythmic interplay between percussionists Alan Purves and Michael Vatcher while the wind section layers long notes on top.

It’s impeccably arranged and wellexecuted. The song builds like a great movie score and ends on a slamming combo of tightly orchestrated brass and grooves. Among the other compositions, “Do Zijn” deserves special mention: its staccato bursts are distributed throughout the band, until you can feel the exact location

of each musician in the studio. While Buis, Wilbert de Joode and Tobias Delius will be familiar names to those who pay attention to the Dutch jazz scene, several others here are new to me, like Jan Willem van der Ham on alto sax and bassoon and Frans Vermeerssen on baritone sax. Buis has given himself over fully to this music, and has a very clear vision of how present possibilities interface with this great tradition. A toast to that; you’ll surely be raising your glass many times when listening to this record.

The ICP needs no introduction to followers of jazz and improv at this point. Their latest CD finds the ensemble in polished form, performing mostly new compositions as well as reworkings of tunes by ICP faves Nichols and Ellington. Right when the sultry, late-night waltz of the opening track, “Niet Zus, Maar Zo,” begins, you know you’re in for an hour of great music. And Mengelberg is singing! Michael Moore’s “Sumptious” (sic) is as lovely as the title suggests: a delicious snack of head-shaking big band jazz. Moore’s arrangement of Mengelberg’s “The Lepaerd” is another standout: the percussion fits right into the wind section, the strings and piano color it all in, and Baars takes a blistering tenor sax solo. If you want to find out what a genuinely contemporary big band sound is, start here; there is nowhere else in the world that is keeping this music so much alive, least of all the US, hellbent as it is on “preserving” the music, which is the surest way to kill it.

Two quartet discs offer another perspective on contemporary Dutch jazz. Eric Boeren’s disc is drawn from a single concert, in which his own compositions seamlessly blend with three Ornette Coleman tunes.

Boeren’s insightful liner notes give a little background into how the band organizes a concert: choosing tunes that may go well together, but which can be played in any order, filled in with improvisations as need be.

In addition to the leader on cornet and Michael Moore on alto sax and clarinet, the rhythm section of de Joode and Paul Lovens absolutely shred Boeren’s “A Fuzzphony.” They swing like overcaffeinated kids on a playground, and when Boeren comes in to play the head, the band rumbles to attention. As Boeren’s solo gets more and more animated, so do Lovens and de Joode, and the tune reaches a genuine climax. Moore’s clarinet work on “Free,” meanwhile, is devastatingly gorgeous.

The Tobias Delius 4tet’s latest CD (recorded at the Bimhuis in April 2009) lovingly charts the same brilliant territory as their previous releases.

Compositions by cellist Tristan Honsinger and tenor saxophonist Delius comfortably flit between heavy improv and tightly arranged jazz.

Whereas Lovens like to imply downbeats without actually hitting them, Han Bennink, the drummer here, establishes a myriad of microdownbeats, creating and filling them in at the very moment of their emergence.

As a result, bassist Joe Williamson is kept on his toes at all moments.

There are also much quicker changes, almost prog-rocky, in numbers like “Poeing” and “Befana.” The ability of the Dutch to wield such command

of the foundations of jazz—and take them so far—should be inspiring and shaming to some American jazz musicians. Andrew Choate

Linda Aubry Bullock Ray of Dark Sedimental CD

It’s not the subtlest of titles, but Ray of Dark nicely sums up the shadowy mood of Linda Aubry Bullock’s debut CD. Bullock has spent much of her career as a visual artist, but she’s trained as a musician, and as an electronic musician she has frequently worked with her partner, bassist Michael T. Bullock. On Ray of Dark Linda’s hand is at the tiller, but Michael and several other crew members are onboard.

Gloomy and plodding, the album’s title track layers an echoed beat with field recordings, sizzling electronics, and a backdrop of squeals and drones. The resultant atmosphere is more enthralling than the sounds that it’s made of, and until field recordings and distorted vocals push their way unexpectedly into the foreground, the track is ominously dreamy. The same tone is sustained over much of the album, especially on the first four tracks, which share a cloudy indistinctness teeming with murky activity. “A Specific Gravity” is rather less gloomy, though hardly less swampy. Like a chorus of alarm clocks, jackhammers, and robotic gnats, the music vibrates and rattles before eventually giving way to peals of feedback. Ray of Dark is a confident first effort, and Linda Aubry Bullock’s skill in the dark arts will bear watching. Adam Strohm

John Carter & Bobby Bradford

The Complete Revelation Sessions Mosaic CD x 3

While clarinetist and alto saxophonist John Carter was one of the most creative voices in improvised music during his lifetime, he recorded infrequently, and much of his work is currently out of print. So this three-disc set by Mosaic is particularly welcome.

Focusing on Carter’s recordings with frequent collaborator Bobby Bradford on the Revelation label, it returns their albums Seeking and Secrets to print, adding in two hours of previously unreleased material. Carter and Bradford formed their New Art Jazz Ensemble in Los Angeles in 1967 along with bassist Tom Williamson and drummer Bruz Freeman, picking up on the seeds of freedom sowed

by Ornette Coleman. But Carter and Bradford weren’t mere followers; Carter grew up in Fort Worth, Texas with Coleman and Charles Moffett; and Bradford met Coleman when the saxophonist moved to LA in the late ’50s, and played in early incarnations of his quartet.

Disc One features the ensemble’s first album, Seeking (1969), previously reissued on the HatArt label. Surprisingly, Carter plays alto, tenor, and flute here, featuring his clarinet on only one tune. The quartet kicks into high gear immediately, as the horns charge along in breakneck unison across Williamson and Freeman’s simmering pulse. Carter and Bradford have internalized a probing sense of free-bop

phrasing and their playing has a fiery intensity throughout. Carter’s edgy alto perfectly complements Bradford’s warmth, and it is intriguing to hear how bluesy he is on tenor. He also shows that he’s a skilled flute player on the title tune; but when his clarinet rings out on “Sticks and Stones” it is simply electrifying. Bradford’s full-bodied projection and lightning articulation is no less important in defining the music. Williamson’s not a flashy bassist, but his dark resonance provides an effective anchor for Freeman’s open swing. Four previously unissued pieces recorded around the same time are also included; the brazen extended performance of “Sticks and Stones” and the muscular swagger of the tenor-stoked “Domino” are particular finds.

Disc Two picks up with Secrets, drawn from two quintet sessions in 1971-1972, with Bill Henderson (p), Henry Franklin (b), and Freeman (d) on the earlier session and Nate Morgan (p), Louis Spears (b), and Leon Ndugu Chanceler (d) on the later session. Despite the addition of a harmony instrument, the music pushes even further toward freedom. Even on a slower piece like “Ballad” the group brings a restive energy to their playing, while the opening of “Circle” features a mercurial extended duo between Bradford and Carter on clarinet. (The two would continue to use the piece as a foundation for duo improvisations, as on the 1982 recordings issued by Emanem as Tandem.)

Even when the ensemble comes in, it is not until the end of the piece that they circle in on the theme. Though Carter is still switching between alto and clarinet, the latter is featured more prominently, showing just how distinctive his voice on the instrument had become. Bradford’s approach has changed as well, as he opens up his post-bop phrasing with a freer sense of time and form. The disc is rounded out by three unissued pieces from the 1971 session that balance propulsive groove and supple free energy: the lilting “The Little Waltz,” with its passages of collective improvisation, is a particular standout.

The real find of the set, though, is Disc Three’s previously unheard duo session from 1979. It opens with Carter’s “And She Speaks,” a piece recorded in a quintet setting on the long out-of print Variations on Moers.

Carter had by this point turned entirely to clarinet, and his mature voice is on full display as he jumps from the woody lower registers to its strident upper range. Carter and Bradford improvise with intense focus over the course of the 17-minute performance, structuring their interactions around the contrasts and intersections of the tones and timbres of their instruments. Carter’s sense of large-scale musical form is strongly in evidence, a harbinger of his later Roots and Folklore series for his octet. Bradford’s “Pinch” follows, utilizing a much more active sense of line and gesture as the two toss ideas back and forth.

Bradford’s solo piece “Redwood” is a study in musing lyricism and bluesy tonalities, while Carter’s solo, “This Earth Feeling,” is an exhilarating exploration of instrumental technique and melodic abstraction.

Kudos to Mosaic for this important

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set. Now let’s hope that Carter’s Roots and Folklore series and recordings for Flying Dutchman and Moers somehow find their way back in to print.

Michael Rosenstein

Little Horn, Big Sound: Ivo Perelman

Phyllis Chen

UnCaged Toy Piano CAG Records CD

Ivo Perelman Brian Willson Stream of Life Leo Records CD

Ivo Perelman Gerry Hemingway Apple in the Dark Leo Records CD

Ivo Perelman Soulstorm

courtesy DL Media

Clean Feed CD x 2

One of the great things about Ivo Perelman’s recent increase in activity is hearing him with all these hot drummers! Like many tenorists—hell, like many duo partners— he’s always been particularly energized by rhythmic urgency, whether it’s the sounds of his native Brazil or the drumming of Rashied Ali. On his recent trio release Mind Games, his communication with percussionist Brian Willson was almost telepathic. So it’s a real treat to hear just the two of them on Stream of Life. The skittering, playful title track opens things up, and it gives you a sense of how emotionally wide-ranging this duo is—not just the heavy intensity you often get in free improv (though there’s plenty of that) but also a masterful swing (“Clarice,” where Ivo’s tone is just so luxurious—listen to him hold that note at the end!). They sound patient and scalar on “Agua Viva” and “Murmirios,” and at times it’s like listening to an Ayler march played by Ben Webster. Willson is fond of brushes and subtly shifting patterns, almost Blackwell-like at times, but then he’ll

let loose a sudden swell or cymbal aside or breakdown. He reveals himself cautiously, a spare player who speaks volumes, as on the patient click and clang of tuned percussion at the end of “Juntos Para Sempre,” which flirts mischievously with samba. There’s a beauty of a Perelman solo on “A Bola e o Menino,” where he explores long passages of circular breathing, slowly modulating his phrases from the inside out, before retreating into hushed, almost cooing lyric lines. But it’s the sense of fun and discovery these two share that lingers longest in the memory, nowhere more so than on the playful folk dance “After the Third Wall.”

The duo with Hemingway is altogether different, not just because of the drummer’s more emphatic rhythmic language but because several tracks feature Perelman on piano. It’s overall still quite a restrained recording, at least by the standard of those who expect Perelman to breathe fire all the time. But even so, the emotional urgency of his saxophone lines on the opener (set against the brisk patter of Hemingway’s brushes) is unmistakable. There’s great chemistry between the two on the conversational “Indulgences,” the upwards-rising patterns of “Sinful,” and the semi-funked-up closer “Lisboa.” But the treat is to hear Perelman’s reflective, at times spidery piano playing on several cuts, notably “A Maca No Escuro”— it sounds almost like an abstract Herbie Nichols tune. On “Vicious Circle,” they flirt with rhythmic shapes that—deep in the grain of Perelman’s piano phrasing—could almost be lifted from some traditional materials. And after the gorgeous, spacious Hemingway solo on “The Path,” Perelman follows with pianism that buzzes with Borah Bergman-like intensity. These terrific performances hint at familiar sources, but they leave your imagina-

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tion to do its thing.

Finally, Soulstorm is a marvelous two-disc document of an encounter between Perelman, cellist Daniel Levin, and bassist Torbjörn Zetterberg. Pedro Costa’s notes reveal that, on their first meeting just before the recordings, there was a slightly tentative air to the music. Well, that’s absolutely nowhere to be heard on these extremely empathetic, emotionally rich improvisations. Perelman sounds very searching on “Plaza Maua,” which is a dilly of a start to this two-hour ride. I certainly enjoy hearing his creativity without a percussionist here, and there are enough ideas—especially from the fabulous Levin, with whom he is currently doing some followup recordings—that the music moves forward with plenty of urgency. The players merge beautifully, not just in terms of line or even tone but also phrasing and articulation of notes. The chemistry is superlative.

Zetterberg is in some ways the ace in the hole here. He’s got this growl in the lower register, and his playing positively throbs in several wild duo features with Levin as well as in the counterpoint that surges everywhere.

They can sing and swing heavily, though, as on “Dry Point of Horses,” where Perelman’s intervallic, lyrical playing is fantastic. And there are several points throughout these sets where, in the midst of boiling heat, he responds to a fragment or idea by taking an abrupt (but fitting) left turn, either cooing like a soft bird or getting all Johnny Hodges.

Freaks for arco and melismatic playing will drool at “A Manifesto of the City,” and those who dig it languorous and reflective will love “Day by Day” and “In Search of Dignity.”

But regardless of where the music is headed, even in moments of peak intensity (especially “The Body”), there is space; even at its outest, the music is lyrical. Jason Bivins

More can be done with toy pianos than childhood improv pounding.

The title of Phyllis Chen’s debut is a sly reference to John Cage, whose “Suite for Toy Piano,” composed in 1948, is the centerpiece of this set. It was almost fifty years later that Margaret Leng Tan’s toy piano works appeared, bringing the suitcase-sized instrument back to the concert stage. (During the intervening decades, various rock musicians used the instrument, including the B-52s, Warren Zevon, and the band NRBQ for a delightful solo on their 1972 Scraps album.) Chen’s CD is remarkably varied, both in terms of the compositions and the manner in which they were recorded. The instrument’s microtonal quivers shimmer, but there’s also a surprising resonance in the lower register. Cage’s five-part suite embraces the childlike character of the instrument, starting off with repetitive scale-like phrases. From there it becomes more purposely angular, evoking a sort of passage from the simple world of a child into the daunting complexities of adulthood.

Several pieces judiciously employ an additional sound source or two.

Julia Wolfe’s “East Broadway” has a rhythm bed created on a toy boombox, while Chen’s own “Memoirist” finds her playing a music box, bowls, and a frying pan. On UnCaged Toy Piano, Phyllis Chen’s modernist inclinations come across as reassuringly traditional. She’s managed the rare feat of being both daring and friendly.

David Greenberger

Steve Coleman and Five Elements Harvesting Semblances and Affinities Pi CD

Altoist/composer Steve Coleman has always been a fascinating musician, and not just for his synthesis of rhythmic information and his ability to articulate harmonically and timbrally complex ideas within the propulsions of hip-hop, M-BASE funk, or Cuban music. Even more important is his role as a conceptualist, a canny metaphysician eager to render fuzzy any musical or philosophical boundary he encounters. After a fairly lengthy recording hiatus, Coleman’s positively on fire with this lineup (several of whom have been on board since Coleman’s last two Label Bleu discs): trumpeter Jonathan Finlayson, trombonist Tim Albright, vocalist Jen Shyu, bassist Thomas Morgan, and the mighty Tyshawn Sorey on drums (drummer Marcus Gilmore and percussionist Ramon Garcia Perez join the crew for “Flos Ut Rosa Floruit,” medieval Latin text and all).

Shyu’s vocals are glorious, with a warm and seductive tone and incredible flexibility. She’s simply another horn, another color for Coleman to evoke in the articulation of bouncy, craggy post-bop lines like “Beba.” As

dense and intoxicating as the rhythms often are, Coleman is getting better at keeping them loose and flowing (there’s an occasionally mechanical feel to some of his earliest works), and at structuring the density in such a way that it favors the soloists.

Just listen to Albright respond to “Clouds” or to Morgan and Sorey’s tasty momentum on “060706-2319 (Middle of the Water).” With all of these instrumentalists at his disposal, Coleman also takes care to think in terms of voicings, with all the moving shapes coalescing in newer and newer formations that drift across the pulse. In sweet melancholy or burning intensity, the different lines snake out and return intertwined. Interestingly, Coleman frequently returns to medieval-sounding antiphonal lines for the brass on several tunes: the effect is especially memorable on “Flos Ut,” where Shyu sounds just marvelous. But it’s ultimately tracks like the busy, stuttering “Attila 04 (Closing Ritual)” that make your head swim delightfully, the soloists floating at length and also digging into the grain of the pulse, linking up regularly in exciting fashion. Jason Bivins

Conference Call What About...?

Not Two CD

Complete, two-set concerts aren’t the most common releases from creative jazz labels, though as those who swap live shows know, the format is rewarding in ways evidenced by Conference Call’s live What About…? The continuous changes of mood and texture, from rhapsodic to Dadaist to wistful, are stunning, and only broken when the listener has to change CDs. The concert took place in Krakow, Poland on November 19, 2008 at the club Alchemia, a favorite venue of the band (“[It’s] like coming home all the time,” reeds player Gebhard Ullmann noted to this reviewer). Though precious little dialogue onstage or with the audience made it onto the discs, the musical dialogue is crystal-clear thanks to both great fidelity and natural chemistry. Pianist Michael Jefry Stevens and bassist Joe Fonda have a particular rapport, as when on “Circle” they align splashes of counterpoint in rapid succession, like Tetris blocks over George Schuller’s backbeat. All four musicians contribute compositions, and while the long sections of free improvisation are often superb (dig the frenzied searching 13 minutes into the title track—wow!), it’s really the close-built passages that are the group’s strength. The transition in “Circle” is particularly stunning, and rightfully draws some audience applause: Stevens lays out a passel of stormy, tense chords that diminuendo into a few solitary high notes, which Schuller extinguishes in a quick kickto-snare shuffle that picks up Fonda’s bass and Ullmann’s soprano on its second run through the refrain. It’s over quickly, but little moments like this are like magic. Nathan Turk

Lol Coxhill Enzo Rocco Fine Tuning Amirani CD

Lol Coxhill is a legend in the UK

free jazz, fusion, and prog rock spheres; Enzo Rocco is an Italian guitarist active in Italy and France’s creative jazz scenes. Fine Tuning is an improvised encounter recorded live at the 2008 All Frontiers Festival in Gradisca d’Isonzo, Italy. Coxhill has a bittersweet, lithe, and slightly astringent tone (with a plaintive “cry” within) that dances around Rocco’s clean lines and plucked riffs. Rocco in fact is the (comparatively) “straighter” arrow here, his cool, almost Lee Konitz-like approach informed by the burred, blues-tinged riffage of Jim Hall and Grant Green (and even Bern Nix at the 17-minute mark).

Neither uses much distortion, and their improvs flirt with actual swing from time to time. The overall mood of “Fine Tuning”—one sustained 33minute performance—is pensive and chilled-out (while certainly not mellow) with a touch of wry. There are a few brief passages that meander but Fine Tuning is mostly an absorbing slice of mod improv. Mark Keresman

Cranc

Copper Fields

Organized Music from Thessaloniki / Absurd CD

Copper Fields is the second disc by Cranc, a group consisting of Rhodri Davies on electric harp, Angharad Davies on violin, and Nikos Veliotis on cello. It’s an altogether different affair from the hyper-detailed improvisations on their debut: the new disc consists of a single drone piece constructed from recordings made during a week-long residency at Q02 in Brussels in May, 2008.

Veliotis has edited the material into an enveloping 55-minute soundscape of pulses and thrumming whirrs.

This is music that doesn’t build or develop, but rather progresses in rumbling, coursing waves, sounding more like an electronic piece than something sourced in string instruments. Resonant harmonics and the tectonic abrasions of a bow loosely dragged across strings have replaced the thorny angularities of their earlier work, but a concentrated attention to detail is still in evidence. Thirty minutes in, Veliotis lets the music fade to inky silence, then after a minute slowly builds things back up again out of hisses and groans. Though this recording lacks the physicality of a live performance, it’s still easy to get immersed in the evolving soundscape if you just turn this one up, sit back and listen. Michael Rosenstein

Marilyn Crispell David Rothenberg One Night I Left My Silent House ECM CD

Of all the recordings pianist Marilyn Crispell has done for ECM since 1997’s Nothing Ever Was, Anyways, this extraordinary series of duets with clarinetist David Rothenberg is perhaps the most deceptively spare and beautiful. After the initial gasp when her fans discovered her lyrical, even sentimental tendencies, she’s gone on to deliver several superb trio recordings where she plays with Bley-ish abstraction. Here, however, she brings to this general sensibility

a newfound interest in modest piano preparations and percussion, and an affinity for spare, Giuffre-like themes that the resourceful and passionate Rothenberg savors mightily. It’s patient music, as is evident from the opening minutes of “Invocation,” with its long held tones and simple moving cells. Small details are at heart of this music, rather than racing expressivism. Hear this on “Tsering,” where Crispell worries a high note at length with the gentlest of preparations, shadowed by Rothenberg’s wintry clarinet. Yet the mood is far from lonesome or stark. In fact, I found the muffled lyrical patterns of “The Hawk and the Mouse” and “Companion: Silence” quite inviting, even warming in their graceful fusion of joyful and melancholic folkish themes. There are admittedly times when Crispell’s percussive forays—a bit of thwacking on the piano’s side, some click-clack under the lid—sound arbitrary, but they’re never distracting, and Rothenberg’s accompaniment is always striking— his control in the upper register of the bass clarinet is especially fine, almost bassoon-like in places. Not everything is quite so limpid. But the general tone of the record makes the occasional flareup of busy runs or buzzing activity all the more powerful. The sounds spread out vividly, and resonate comfortably. And they challenge, too, with their elegiac focus not merely tranquil or moody but invested in the spaces where sounds blend, decay, and are transformed.

Jason Bivins

Cristal

Swedish Child / Trial / Homegoing FLingco 7" EP + download

Lawrence English

Ingongruous Harmonies Touch 7" EP

Philip Jeck & Marcus Davidson Spliced Touch 7" EP

Sound-oriented music and the seven-inch single seem like uneasy bedfellows. The format’s temporal constraints can deny the listener the opportunity to drift away, and nothing negates bliss like a shitty pressing. But done right, an EP can impart a concentrated, quasi-worshipful listening experience; you kneel at the turntable/altar, genuflect/place the needle, and receive the word/ narrow your focus to a diamond point for five minutes max. The folks at Flingco and Touch have built their reps on music that sprawls most satisfyingly, but also on releasing records that make swell fetish objects.

Now they’re turning their attention to the single.

The Virginia-based electronic trio Cristal’s latest release tests a new entry in the format wars—the 45 rpm single with a downloadable bonus album. The album is called Homegoing, and if you’re into ephemera you can get it without the single for a bargain price, but then you’d miss out on regarding the deep red mystery of the cover and sinking into the lush calm of the seven-inch’s two

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non-downloadable tracks. The album deserves a physical release of its own someday, because it is very much of a piece with the single and together they constitute some of Cristal’s most vivid music. They’ve throttled back on the digital crunch and blitz of earlier recordings, added some deep bass and soulful cello, and come up with a dandy set of solemn atmospheres.

Two 7” records out now on Touch are more conventional singles. Each comes packaged in a sturdy cardstock sleeve that sports typically gorgeous Jon Wozencroft photography. Australian polymath Lawrence English’s Incongruous Harmonies blurs the boundaries between found/generated and natural/industrial sounds most masterfully. Its music is simultaneously shimmering and tactile, ready to hold your eyes and ears to the horizon for all time, and pitiless in its too-hasty departure. Great stuff.

Spliced, on the other hand, offers a glimpse of what is hopefully a brief transitional moment for turntablist Philip Jeck. One wonders if the resurgence of vinyl, which he’s spent his whole career loving, has put a spoke in his spinning wheels; this record lacks the emotional range and deep atmosphere of his best work. Marcus Davidson’s electronic keyboards feel a bit too conventional, Jeck’s records too peripheral and his overdubbed bass not quite big enough. It’s a pleasant listen from an artist who usually produces greatness. Bill Meyer

Curlew and Amy Denio

A Beautiful Western Saddle / The Hardwood Cuneiform CD + DVD

Some releases serve as a snapshot of a particular point of time, capturing the ethos of a set of musicians, a regional scene, or a specific location and memorializing people who have passed and venues that have closed. This reissue does all of those, combining Curlew’s A Beautiful Western Saddle (settings of Paul Haines’ poems, sung by guest vocalist Amy Denio) with a DVD of two performances from the same period. So, set the way-back machine to 1991. The Knitting Factory was in full flight on Houston Street in Manhattan, providing a locus for jazz, free improv, rock, and all their various overlaps. Curlew had transitioned from scrappy punk jazz band to a tight unit under founder George Cartwright, with a line-up featuring Davey Williams, Tom Cora, Ann Rupel, and Pippin Barnett. Cartwright had wrangled a concert a few years earlier at New Music America performing the Haines settings, and the CD captures this perfect synthesis of Cartwright’s loose stomps, Cora’s sinuous free flights, Williams’ hardscrabble skronk, Rupel’s elastic, funky pulse, Barnett’s lithe open groove, Denio’s dramatic vocal leaps, and Haines’ Dada-esque poetry. Each member weighs in with arrangements, and the group dives in with spunky energy, nailing the themes, hitting wild vocal

harmonies, and zooming around the edges with spirited improvisations.

On the DVD, an 80-minute video of a 1991 Knitting Factory gig captures the band (without Denio) performing music from their release Bee. The video quality of a Washington, DC performance of the Haines project from the same year is rougher, but shows how they stretched the music in a live setting while staying true to the forms. Nice to have this all together in a single package: it’s a fitting memorial to the sorely-missed Cora (who died far too young in 1998) and Haines, and serves as a reminder of a time when Soho and the Lower East Side were still a hotbed of music venues and galleries.

Michael Rosenstein

Tim Daisy Ken Vandermark Light on the Wall Laurence Family LP x 2

Ken Vandermark Paal Nilssen-Love Milwaukee Volume Smalltown Superjazz CD

Chicago Volume Smalltown Superjazz CD

If you follow Chicago poly-reedist Ken Vandermark on his website or Facebook, you know that he maintains a level of critical self-scrutiny to match an analysand. His music offers more action than your typical psychoanalytic hour, but his albums nonetheless resembles the “talking cure” in the way they represent nodal points in an ongoing process.

Vandermark’s been working with both Paal Nilssen-Love and Tim Daisy for a decade, and his partnership with each is driven by the same remorseless drive to keep moving that characterizes every part of his career. If there’s one thing these albums share, aside from the fact that each was made by Vandermark and a guy behind a drum kit, it’s the absolute confidence on display here; the man with the horn seems absolutely sure that each drummer has his back, and each drummer proves him right. This is music that goes way out on some limbs but never falls off.

There’s a much looser dynamic at work on Daisy and Vandermark’s double LP than in their work with the Vandermark 5 or the Frame Quartet.

Instead of compositions so carefully plotted and conceptualized that they come with their own meta-statements (in the form of Vandermark’s dedications), the duo just blows.

Daisy has a delightful knack for swinging and decorating at the same time, so that no matter how dense and aggressive his playing becomes, there’s a resting spot somewhere in the groove. Vandermark’s contributions likewise feel especially rooted in the jazz canon, hinting at the exotic otherworldliness of Sun Ra on “Turnabout” and bar-walking extroversion on “The Empty Chair.”

Only on the stark “Decollage” do they leave stated time behind.

“Decollage’s” rich metal timbres and broadly leaping clarinet also point the way to the solo turn each player takes on the second LP, which is split into Daisy and Vandermark solo sides. Daisy’s seven tracks are full

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of space, contrast, and bustle that is very clearly stated; Vandermark confines himself to clarinet and tests the limits of technique and listenability by using Jimmy Giuffre’s most bristling work as a starting point.

Lavishly packaged in a gorgeous gatefold sleeve and pressed on vinyl that seems to savor each sound for a millisecond before giving it up, it’s almost churlish to point out that the pressings are also audibly warped.

The Vandermark/Nilssen-Love albums are drawn from gigs played on successive nights in Milwaukee and Chicago. A source close to the project has indicated that despite titles and credits attributing each record to a single night, each CD includes material from both shows; to further muss your hair, the printed track times for the Chicago Volume correspond to the Milwaukee CD and vice versa. While one might fairly ask why not put both CDs together as one album, the sequencing yields two discs that contrast fairly strongly.

Song titles like “Clean Sweep” and “Cut and Thrust” betray Milwaukee Volume’s grappling tone, which feels like round after round of hand-tohand combat. Each man gives as good as he gets, swapping big blasts and rapid pecking squeals for single body-blows or flurries of masterfully controlled beats. Where Daisy seems to bend time, NilssenLove continually revises subdivisions of it from moment to moment. Chicago Volume uses a bit more empty space; when Nilssen-Love gets fast, he also gets quiet, and Vandermark spends the bulk of the set playing clarinets, which further reduces the sound-to-no-sound ratio. Together, these discs attest to the process orientation of Vandermark’s music. He’s always changing things up, trying to figure out how to break down his own habits and develop new ones.

Bill Meyer

Dither

Diatribes & Barry Guy

A Retrospective: 1977-2009

Multitude

Dither

Henceforth CD

Of the many “Dithers” you may find on amazon.com, this Dither, a NYCbased electric guitar quartet, is one of the more extreme and satisfying.

If you’ve mind’s-ear notions that this platter will likely evoke masters of Guitar Clang such as Glenn Branca, Rhys Chatham, Sonic Youth, and Elliott Sharp (who contributed liner notes herein), you’d be partly correct.

This debut release isn’t an all-out assault (though there are moments of that, to be sure)—it’s a collection of compositions from them that’ve grown-up with the six-string electric laced into their DNA. Lainie Fefferman’s “Tongue of Thorns” lets an A-chord be its co-pilot, its guitar-ring going from a whisper to a steel mill bashing away to save its soul, or to summon the spirit of Joe Strummer From Beyond. Depending on your mood and proclivity toward repetition, you may find this annoying or cathartic (perhaps both, even). “Pantagruel,” by Dither’s own Joshua Lopes, assimilates the shades of Steve Howe’s picking for Yes in the early 1970s, pensive jazz phrasing, Albert Ayler skronk, and the ominous, hammer-of-justice-about-to-fall twang of Spaghetti Western soundtracks. Miss the confrontational ’tude of No Wave? Put on your best basic black (and appear aloof or surly), and crank up Eric K.M. Clark’s “exPAT.” It’s an exhilarating and occasionally confounding exercise in divergence, confluence, and middle-finger merriment. Compared to this, Branca sounds like Larry Carlton. Dither is uneasy listening to be sure, but there’s also a bracing sense of joie de vivre amid the clangor, along with a lack of academic solemnity.

Mark Keresman

Charles Dodge New World CD

Cave12 CD

On Multitude, the contributions of Swiss laptop and percussion duo Diatribes are opaque and kept in the background for the most part, with bowed cymbals and clattery percussion meeting Barry Guy’s double-bass work up front. Three shorter tracks of around three minutes apiece are the most successful, as the band briefly hits on something and puts it away when done. The longer cuts meander, and Guy himself doesn’t seem particularly inspired, preferring to add arco layers rather than excitably joust with his collaborators. The most successful piece, “Le poids des humeurs,” finds each instrumentalist digging into his own microcosmic soundworld but somehow creating a perfect blend together. “Corrosion du possible” features Benoît Moreau as guest clarinetist, and he adds a welcome wild-card element. The last track, “Exil,” ends on a long, pleasant, solemn note of quiet coalescence after starting with hectic rubbing and snipping. Neither bad nor particularly compelling, this CD could benefit from a firecracker shock.

Andrew Choate

“It is the month of May… for me,” intones Opener at the outset of Cascando, a 1961 radio play by Samuel Beckett. May is the month of creation, or reawakening, but for Beckett and his three characters, such visions lead nowhere, to the ultimately fruitless retelling of stories that all end up being “not the right one.” For American composer Charles Dodge, Cascando proved the source for one of his finest creations. Sixteen years after the play was written, Dodge realized it using some of the voice synthesis techniques that informed his astonishing Speech Songs (1972). This version is now reissued in excellent sound, in tandem with two more recent works, and the triumvirate demonstrate the consistency and uniqueness of Dodge’s musical language.

The radio play has three characters: Opener, Voice and Music. The relationships between the characters are complex and beyond the scope of a review. Suffice it to say that unlike any other realization of Cascando that I’ve heard, Dodge unifies Voice and Music. His take on Voice, here a synthesized human voice given

repeated melodic material, is gruff, with vast spaces between phrases.

Francis White’s informative notes relate that Music’s portions are much more abstract renderings of the same sound sources. In this way, Voice’s struggle to complete the unseen Woburn’s story is given a slightly alien bent in direct contrast to Opener’s humanity (his voice is unmanipulated). Music’s language shares Voice’s start-stop aesthetic and hectic rhythms, reinforcing the sense of the equal futility of their efforts as Opener attempts the act of creation, once again.

Having been used to hearing this piece on LP, I noticed immediately how wonderfully pervasive the silences have become on this reissue.

Tape hiss has been all but eliminated, giving each pause new drama and weight. Each phrase is now cast into nothingness, the only respite for these searchers. Voices and music stand stark against nothing, even the comforting swish and rumble of vinyl having disappeared.

Dodge’s musical language is remarkably direct, a perfect complement to Beckett’s sparse text. That directness has remained integral to his later works. The title “Fades, Dissolves and Fizzles” (1995) might be a descriptor for Beckett’s texts, and its soundworld, like that of “Cascando,” emphasizes transparency, repetition and silence. The sounds themselves demonstrate the refinement of advanced technology, the textures more crystalline and softer around the edges as the piece wends its way, alternating pulse with meterlessness. With “Violin Variations” (2007) the worlds of electronic and acoustic sound are again unified as Baird Dodge’s violin throbs in symbiosis with its computer echoes and resonances.

All three works thrive on variation, and they work well together in a single program despite chronological disparity. There is so much informing each gesture of Dodge’s music, and each moment leads to the next with logic and intensity. Marc Medwin

Dosh

Tommy Anticon CD

You’d expect idiosyncrasy from a longtime Andrew Bird collaborator, and this new CD by Dosh does not disappoint in that regard. Bird even contributes vocals on two tracks, confirming the connection. Dosh (full name—Martin Dosh) and Bird are both from the Midwest (Dosh in Minneapolis, Bird in Chicago) and the isolation from dominant “scenes” perhaps gives them license to explore musical strategies and genres without regard for commercial appeal.

Dosh is a percussionist first and foremost (with a side order of keyboards, marimba, and kalimba), so it’s not surprising that many pieces on the CD, his fifth, have a strong rhythmic thrust. The opening “Subtractions,” is a whirlwind of interlocking riffs where the marimba, saxophone, wordless vocals and skewed time signature produce a decided world music flavor. Beyond that, though, the music is an almost

ungraspably diverse assemblage of keyboards, guitars and horns, not to mention a wide variety of tempos and textures. The final track, “Gare de Lyon,” is Tortoise-like in the way its languid guitar lines and rhythmic groove evolve into buzzing riffage.

Tommy (nothing to do with The Who’s rock opera, by the way) has a homey, ramshackle feel which works quite nicely if the listener likes musical surprises and is willing to follow Dosh’s lead. However, those who like to know where things are headed (or who require “real songs”) may feel off-balance and uncomfortable as they search for a focus or unifying theme. Bill Tilland

Bob Downes’ Open Music Open Music

Esoteric/Cherry Red CD

Flashback Openian CD

Electric City

Esoteric/Cherry Red CD

The music of flutist and saxophonist Bob Downes has escaped notice on these shores, as tends to be the case with artists from the halcyon days of British jazz. Now living in Germany, he has spent the last two decades involved with non-western musics, including lush wind works for meditation and healing practices. But between 1969 and 1975, Downes cut seven albums as a leader, including three on his Openian imprint (one of the earliest musician-run labels in the UK), and two on Vertigo/Philips. The music is not “free jazz,” but straddles the line between open form and rigorous structure—jazz, avant-garde composition and progressive rock all come into play. As an improviser, Downes had an R&B honk down pat, his flute and saxophone playing punctuated by vocal shouts, scatting, multiphonics and gutbucket intensity, as well as birdsong liquidity (Roland Kirk and Eric Dolphy were influences).

Visual art and dance have also been important to Downes’ work.

Open Music (originally titled Dream Journey) was recorded for Philips in 1969, and grew out of a commission by percussionist Derek Hogg and the Ballet Rambert. The disc is made up of seven compositions, ranging from the 22-minute title track to short oneand two-minute interludes. Originally a short flute piece, the extended “Dream Journey” is scored for flutes, brass and woodwinds, plus drums, vibes, tympani and assorted percussion. The piece goes through several contrasting movements, from bombastic percussion and breath volleys to a weighty ostinato waltz. The first section is for three drummers and two flutists (Downes and Jim Gregory), with Denis Smith and John Stevens playing auxiliary percussion in support of Hogg. At the outset, the flutes are lilting and conversational, accented by vibraphone, cymbals and tam-tam.

Burbling tension is released in a massive martial section, timpani and two drum kits pierced by trilling winds.

A slinky tenor line appears halfway through, Stevens and Smith loosely riding Harry Miller’s bass. Reeds and brass gradually intrude; Downes’ flute solo is backed by finger

cymbals, gongs, and tuned drums in Indo-jazz fashion, albeit peppered with vocal yelps. The record’s second half features a smaller, spiky chamber ensemble with Downes’ flutes supported by bass and the contrasting textures of Stevens and Smith’s kits.

“Electric City” plugs in, with the shrapnel slivers of Chris Spedding’s guitar countering Downes’ flinty tenor, which merges with sputtering scat and hoarse, shouted lyrics in an overdubbed avant-prog fantasia.

The Bob Downes Open Music Trio was formed in 1968, though its first appearance on record was 1972’s Diversions (Openian).

Flashback collects live and studio performances from 1971 and 1973.

It’s highly rhythmic, uplifting music, boasting rock-solid rhythm section work by Denis Smith and bassist Barry Guy. Even something as straightforward as “Funky Groove” is altered

by Guy’s extraordinary pizzicato, as Smith pushes the tempo, rattling and rocking as Downes’ flute moves between Herbie Mann and Severino Gazzelloni before eliding into a stark reading of Mingus’s “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat.” There’s tension between the rhythm section’s hunger for flatout tempo (Guy searching for every possible rhythm-cluster under the sun) and Downes’ pensive, bluesy phrases. One gets the feeling that, not unlike altoist Mike Osborne’s great 1970s trio with Harry Miller and Louis Moholo, BDOM was a charged rundown of the possibilities of the horn/bass/drums trio. Downes’ chops and bright disposition give the material a sunny lilt, and despite the powerful interplay the music is also immediately accessible (check the tongue-in-cheek “Whorefying Experience”).

The jazz-rock summit Electric City (originally issued on Vertigo in 1970) is an oddity in Downes’ discography.

Across 11 tunes, Downes sings lyrics penned by UK folkie Bob Cockburn, and he’s joined by top-tier players like Spedding, Miller, Smith, trumpeters Kenny Wheeler, Harry Beckett and Ian Carr, guitarist Ray Russell, and drummer Alan Rushton.

Downes is in his element here, merging British R&B, beat poetry and rock-solid arrangements into short, single-ready nuggets with a healthy dose of soul and instrumental fire. Though Stan Kenton’s music was banned from the Downes household when he was young, its influence is audible in the dense writing, as when punchy brass arrangements back the leader’s rasp on “No Time Like the Present.”

Fuzz, beat, and hurling tenor volleys break up rough blue-eyed soul/ scratch on “Don’t Let Tomorrow Get You Down,” pushing this music far to the left of hitsville. “Dawn Until Dawn” presages Mike Westbrook’s Metropolis, and “Crush Hour” similarly takes off into the stratosphere, its dueling overdubbed tenors, husky baritone and grubby strum supported by a slinky vamp.

Calypso rhythms, meanwhile, enter “West II” and hark back to an earlier time in British jazz. Electric City is an impressive statement from an overlooked musician, and hopefully these archival recordings will set the record right. Clifford Allen

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Arthur Doyle Rudolph Grey Ghosts 2

Foreign Frequency 7" LP

Rudolph Grey Sumner Crane Rudolph Grey w/ Sumner Crane Foreign Frequency 7" LP

By and large dealing with electric guitarist Rudolph Grey’s connection to saxophonist Arthur Doyle and their erstwhile group, the Blue Humans, as well as his brief flirtation with the No Wave era’s most impenetrable band, Mars, these two singles seem to have been out and about for over a year now. But that doesn’t matter any more than the fact that all but one of the tracks, 2007’s “The Real Evelyn McHale?”, are thirty years old.

“Ghosts 2” is practically a solo piece for Doyle, with Grey sputtering in the background. It’s a feral five-minute blast, split across both sides of the single, recorded at a time when free jazz in NYC was just beginning to merge with the downtown rock scene, leading to all kinds of acrossthe-spectrum musical hookups and some pretty sweltering results.

The other single’s B side, “4 Hands Is Better Than None,” finds Grey dueting with the late Crane, who plays piano. Grey’s guitar here is more like a series of shotgun blasts and clipped string maulings, while Crane rumbles away, first in the piano’s higher registers before making his way into the instrument’s lower keys. It’s a two-minute shootout that wastes not a note. But it’s “McHale” on side A that’s the real keeper here. Grey, who has never been so much interested in notes or chords as textures and pure sonics, sets up a squall and rides it like a dinghy in a tempest. The piece, which suspends itself on some subtle up and down motion, is held together by the sheer fact that, for three minutes, it never lets up. Bruce Miller

Paul Dunmall & Chris Corsano Identical Sunsets ESP-Disk' CD

Rangda

False Flag Drag City CD

Chris Corsano bridges musical worlds with his roiling trap-kit thwack, reaching levels of intensity not unlike being pummeled by unseen fists.

On Identical Sunsets, Corsano and tenor saxophonist Paul Dunmall lock horn-n-drum on four tracks that can’t help but conjure Rashied Ali’s eviscerating duets with Frank Lowe and John Coltrane. “Living Proof” stretches for some 17 minutes, and manages to leave room for sections of near-silence between stealthily constructed climaxes. “Better Get Another Lighthouse” has Corsano going it alone for the first three-plus minutes before Dunmall enters, suggesting variations on a phrase, worrying over them for a few seconds before using them as a point of possible reference. His tone is more than a little like Coltrane’s on his final quartet recordings (Expressions and Stellar Regions), and his phrasing 64 | SIGNAL to NOISE #59 WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM

circles territory marked out by the late master. In a world where every post-free tenor player owes at least something to the man, it’s baffling how big a similarity there is here.

In fact, the only place where this disc strays from this is on the title track, which features Dunmall alone on Scottish border pipes. Here, he ululates in the highest register while simultaneously creating a low drone.

Rangda’s False Flag is the debut by a supergroup including Corsano (who, aside from drums, gets in a bit of organ and clarinet), guitarist Ben Chasny (Six Organs of Admittance, Comets on Fire) and the all-shredding dominance of Richard Bishop, late of the Sun City Girls and a string of solo LPs. “Bull Lore” features plenty of Bishop’s noodling as Chasny holds down a repeated riff. It’s the kind of American desert rock ZZ Top might have made had they been less concerned with the blues and perhaps not at all with sales. “Sarcophagi” is pretty, quiet, contemplative and deliberately melodious. The 15-minute “Plain of Jars” crawls around in the same kind of quasi-Middle Eastern drugginess that Robbie Krieger conjured with the Doors on “The End”; yet it reaches ecstatic heights that are truly gorgeous. What works less well are the two tracks, “Waldorf Hysteria” and “Serrated Edges,” which concern themselves with giving the listener an undeserved beating, as speed and suspension supersede tact. However, “Fist Family,” with Chasny and Bishop riding a single note while Corsano flails away behind them as if they’re all involved in ending the most intense rock and roll song ever played, is the keeper here.

It holds onto its fury and becomes almost unnerving in its relentlessness. It should’ve also been placed last on the album.

Bruce Miller

Henri Dutilleux

D'ombre et de silence ECM New Series CD

Born in 1916, Henri Dutilleux remains one of France’s most important living composers. In the first ECM recording to feature his work, Robert Levin and Ya-Fei Chuang tackle his music for one and two pianos. The works collected here are an eloquent overview of Dutilleux’s gradual refinement of his musical language. His early Sonate (1946-48) is best described as post-Impressionist, inhabiting the lush yet fluid world of Ravel and Debussy with several knowing glances at the rhythmic vitality of Francis Poulenc.

Already by 1950, Dutilleux is exploring birdsong in a manner sympathetic to Oliver Messiaen in the brief but charming “Blackbird.” Conversely, 1976’s Figures de résonances demonstrates an awareness of the postwar avant-garde. This two-piano work is a stirring essay in sostenuto verticals, with dramatic outbursts followed by an intricate unfolding of reverberating overtones. A collection of preludes from the 1970s and ’80s (which combine exquisitely shaded delicacy with ferocious clangor) and 1981’s Petit air à dormir debout distill this intricate vocabulary into limpid miniatures. The excellent sound-quality and ardent

performances make D’ombre et de silence an excellent introduction to this elder statesman’s music.

Christian Carey

Emeralds

Does It Look Like I’m Here?

Editions Mego CD

This is, in all likelihood, the album that will put Emeralds on the map.

What that means is that those who discover the Cleveland-based synthesizer-informed trio via Does It Look Like I’m Here? will hear the band conjuring, not only the more melodic analog synth-based pulses of contemporaries such as Gavin Russom, but also the pre-new age spaciousness of Tangerine Dream.

And there’s nothing wrong with this, other than, with a catalog of some 40 releases, many only available as cassettes or CD-Rs, this album doesn’t give a complete sense of just what these guys have been up to. Much of their work is darker and more drone-based, not unlike GAS without the subtle, rainy day grooves, but “claustrophobic” and “harrowing” are not words one would use to describe this record. Instead, there are shorter songs that stick to lyrical themes, or in the case of the few longer cuts, repetitions that build into ecstatic rapture. The 12-minute “Genetic,” for example, pins down the chords while a buoyant swirl of vintage synthesizer works alongside another synth, this one providing the melody. The chords get larger, the instrumental voices more like human ones, as the whole thing threatens to lift right off the ground. Finally a flurry of blips and whooshes takes over, yet the melody never quite gives way.

The entire ride is pleasant, beautiful, perhaps cathartic.

The title track is more urgent and pent-up, its fury building until the original melody is buried under massed layers of sound. But even this is nearly sonic wallpaper compared to “Allegory of Allergies,” where the music is much more intensely droning and not in the least concerned with notes or patterns.

Emeralds have shifted gears, making a record that sounds like they’ve come to some sort of delighted acceptance of things they had once perhaps found ephemeral.

Bruce Miller

Kali Z. Fasteau Animal Grace Flying Note CD

Animal Grace presents rawly energetic improvisations from the often-overlooked multi-instrumentalist Kali Z. Fasteau in two radically different settings. The first half is very raw indeed, and one could have wished for a better recording. That said, Fasteau and Louis MoholoMoholo tear it up at Big Apple Jazz Space in Harlem, just after the drummer’s appearance at the 2007 Vision Festival. Moholo-Moholo opens with a moment of visceral rumble before Fasteau blazes in on electronically-treated mizmar.

Some of her best work of the set is on piano, though, shimmering and hanging somewhere between Cecil

Taylor’s hyperchromaticism and Alice Coltrane’s modality; she also makes use of the instrument’s innards in a way that seems remarkably human. One highlight is the haunting “Mongezi’s Laughter,” which finds her on violin, while Moholo-Moholo unleashes crystalline streams and constructs polyrhythmic landscapes in honor of the late, great trumpeter Mongezi Feza.

For the album’s second half, Fasteau is joined by long-time collaborator Bobby Few, whose playing is as beautiful as ever. The performance hails from the 2005 Uncool Festival, and the outdoor recording is remarkably good. “They Speak Through Me” stands out for its power and for Fasteau’s voice, which was in fine form. She is given sympathetic support by Few, bassist Wayne Dockery and drummer Steve McCraven as they break through to the spirit realm. There is also the liquid grace of “Melting Ice,” an mbira improvisation.

The album serves as yet another reminder of Fasteau’s talent and of her ability to surround herself with excellent musicians. It also reconfirms her pioneering role, documented on earlier Flying Note releases, in shaping that nebulous construct we now call World Music. Animal Grace also suffers from some of the dodgy editing and variable sound quality that afflicts those earlier efforts, but the playing is wonderful throughout.

Marc Medwin

Gamelan Madu Sari Hive

Songlines CD

When I first became interested in world music in the mid-1970s, the only widely available recordings of indigenous music were from the Nonesuch Explorer label. As the 21st century rolls into its second decade, it’s possible to find practically anything that you’re looking for via the Internet, and nearly every decent college has a gamelan ensemble. Ethnomusicology is no longer an arcane specialty.

Young musicians are as likely to know something about ancient Persian modal scales, Vietnamese nhã nh_c, Tuvan throat-singing or West African griots as about Bach or Coltrane.

Based in Vancouver, BC, Gamelan Madu Sari utilizes the traditional instruments, scales, and stratified microtonal structures of Javanese gamelan but is by no means “traditional.” Several of the pieces use English lyrics, including texts from William Irwin Thompson and William Shakespeare (“Full Fathom Five”).

The performances are often stunning and the clarity of the recording is beyond reproach. Hive is a wonderful example of how structures and textures from a specific indigenous tradition can be reconciled with new approaches. Bill Barton

Stephen Haynes Joe Morris Warren Smith Parrhesia Engine CD

Parrhesia in classical Greek thought is analogous to free speech in an ideal democratic state—a nice

analogy to the egalitarianism of the best creative jazz. Trumpeter and composer Stephen Haynes has known guitarist Joe Morris and percussionist Warren Smith for years, and he chose them for this project because of his absolute trust in their musicianship and personalities (rather than what precisely they played). While a trio of trumpet, guitar and percussion might seem like a thin affair on paper, the players bring an orchestral richness of approach to the music: Haynes plays trumpet, flugelhorn and cornet with a number of different mutes; Smith adds marimba, tympani and metal percussion to the standard kit, and Morris’s guitar work is as spikily various as always. “Reclamation” has an earthy funk: Haynes’ wah-wah blasts unfurl into direct declamations, while Smith plays suspended time on brushes and Morris’s scrapes approximate a bass. Passages of golden fluff, guttural wow and crinkling sputter, feel remarkably weighty despite their minimalist leanings.

“Quietude” is built around contrasts between marimba, flugelhorn and plucked guitar: the bodily sharpness of brass and breath, the mallets’ snappy resonance and Morris’s flinty progressions. On “Invocation,” bass drum and low guitar rumble (sounding almost like Cooper-Moore’s diddley-bow) become a multiplying thrum, while Haynes’s muted statements are at times garish, at times cloudy. Parrhesia includes a political poem by Smith (as part of “Yet and Still”), but democratic ideals are implicitly woven into the whole disc’s sonic canvas. Clifford Allen

Erdem Helvacioglu & Per Boysen Sub City 2064 self-released CD

Long-distance collaborations are often more notable for novelty than quality, but this one delivers the goods. Per Boysen, a resident of Sweden, is credited with flute, EWI, tenor sax and guitars, while Erdem Helvacioglu, an electroacoustic musician from Turkey, is credited with Guitarviol and electric guitar; in any case, their extensive use of electronics tends to blur individual identity.

While it’s generally true (as the liner notes proclaim) that the music is “cinematic,” the film in question would have to be a rollercoaster: the moods here include ominous foreboding, pathos, lyricism, melancholy, dynamic action, pageantry, celebration and more. The sonic tapestry is rich and complex—even individual tracks have an impressive scope.

“Radiation Patrol” is grimy and hardedged, opening with an eerie synth wash which gradually accumulates stuttering electronics and abrasive guitar drones. “Legends of Lost Land” and “Wedding at Coral Plateaux” offer a languorous spaghetti western vibe which suggests a vast, open sky and panoramic vistas. Elsewhere, rhythmic sequencer pulses and anthemic rock guitar evoke a modern, more complex Tangerine Dream soundtrack. And one piece, “Reef Edge Race,” even combines techno beats with heavy metal guitar riffs. The CD ends with “Future Wide

Open,” a lush, chiming, guitar-driven duet with electronic embellishments and an understated reggae beat. It’s an impressive end to a consistently rewarding program. Bill Tilland

Hole

Nobody’s Daughter Mercury / Island / Def Jam CD

Nobody’s Daughter? Try nobody’s heroine, nobody’s savior, nobody’s marquee idol. If Hole’s fourth album—and first in 12 years—feels anti-climactic, it’s because the climax has already come and gone: for that, check America’s Sweetheart, Courtney Love’s disastrously, deliciously trashy solo album from 2004.

Daughter is all VH1/Behind the Music aftermath, but while myriad torrid backstories effectively made Sweetheart Love’s Nigga Please— guilty-pleasure gossip-rag rawk for ’90s addicts going through grunge withdrawal—the latest set of snipes, scandals, lawsuits, and crimes against grammar is less carwreck-fascinating than morbidly depressing in light of a case of career self-sabotage that’s run almost unchecked. Oh, right: you probably want me to talk about the actual music. Well, when Love and her young-ish wards go sulfuric supernova (“Loserdust,” “Skinny Little Bitch”), there’s a venomously feral intensity and bite that thrills even as it smarts; those two songs, back-to-back, would have made for a killer 7-inch single. Elsewhere, Hole plays the album’s ballads wrong by deigning to produce them. Because as washed out, desperate, and regret-strewn as this record already sounds—hey, if you’d done enough drugs and smoked like a chimney for most of your life, you’d squeak-sing like Bob Dylan, too—it isn’t stripped down enough. The definitive version of Daughter will be the unretouched live acoustic solo bootleg someone passes along to you via hyperlink file, someday. It will be a mess; it will actually feel alive.

Raymond Cummings

William Hooker Trio Yearn for Certainty Engine CD

This April 2007 recording from New York City’s Roulette performance space captures the distinctive sound of veteran drummer William Hooker’s intimate and welcoming trio. David Soldier is credited as playing mandolin, banjo and violin, although it sure sounds like he also plays guitar on at least the first track, which is poetry/ spoken word from Hooker in a duo format before Sabir Mateen enters on saxophone (he’s heard on flute and clarinet elsewhere). Hooker’s splashy, bottom-heavy approach to the trap-set is reined in a bit in this context and the disc features subtle yet energized playing in addition to balls-to-the-wall drive. Things hang together organically; it’s open-form music that breathes, morphs and creates its own space. When the intensity level and “busy-ness quotient” rises the pulse is potent and infectious. Space/silence isn’t ignored either, and the cliffhanger suspense of Hooker’s solo interlude on the title track (ushering in Mateen’s questing

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flute) is a highlight. All three players are in top form throughout. Hooker’s spoken word material provides some vivid images and is delivered with compelling rhythmic immediacy.

Bill Barton

Inclusion Principle

The Leaf Factory Fallback Discus CD

This new release from Inclusion Principle, a collaboration between saxophonist Martin Archer and sound artist Hervé Perez, falls loosely under the classification of electroacoustic music. Though sourced in a live concert, the music has subsequently undergone studio manipulation— including the addition of field recordings Perez made in southern Italy, as a kind of pervasive background ambience. The first piece, “regulating imaginary structures,” starts almost imperceptibly with muted clicks, scrapings, squeaks and high-pitched drones. Electronically enhanced sounds gradually take over: clicks and thumps vaguely resemble halting footsteps, while cavernous rumbles sound like an oil drum being rolled about. Electronic siren wails vie for attention before the return of the faint whistling drones and other small sounds. Track two, “nettles shall possess them,” introduces several new elements— notably a deep, irregularly-pulsed bass throb—and the sonic activity becomes more intense. On “traverse du fantasme,” foghorn blasts and electronic howls give way to jittery electronic scrabbling before the piece temporarily subsides. There are plenty of other unexpected turns of event—the treated saxophones on “factory upsetting,” the uncharacteristic industrial pulse that develops in “between square and circle”—and the finale, “north of the far north,” throws the listener a typical Archer curve with lyrical soprano saxophone which sounds like something out of Debussy. Inclusion Principle, like all of Archer’s projects, draws upon the entire universe of sound (electronic, electroacoustic, free jazz, rock, techno, ambient, industrial), and that’s what keeps it sounding fresh and surprising. Bill Tilland

Jeph Jerman Roadwork Lunhare CD

Field-recording pastiches like Roadwork worship at the altar of tape hiss—in this particular case, 26 years of tape hiss distilled into 40-some cloudy minutes. To listen closely is to gaze continuously into an abyss of the compiler’s idiosyncratic devising—an unfathomable chasm of static—and to either accept the incomplete picture displayed or attempt to assign some semblance of logic. Acceptance is bliss, sure, but there’s more to Roadwork than grated silence. From initial overcast static, the odd rustle and clatter protrudes, and once you’re acclimated to the monochrome buzz, shifts in intensity present themselves, the quizzical composite of scenes gradually enriched: gloomy, foreboding gray becomes roiling, stormy black, studded with the slam-bang bustle 66 | SIGNAL to NOISE #59 WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM

of shuttling trams, the whumps and whacks of unknowable construction or transportation, unintelligible PA announcements, idle chatter, a twonote, descending-scale keyboard motif that recurs periodically that may or may not have been created by the compiler. You’ve been compromised without realizing it, whisked willy-nilly from noisepolluted vista to noise-polluted vista, aurally blindfolded and swept off on an incredible journey as eternal and arresting, in its own way, as the antiseptic roar of a seashell. Sucker.

Ray Cummings

Tom Johnson

Rational Melodies New World CD

The twenty-one pieces that comprise Rational Melodies have been recorded twice before, by Roger Heaton (solo clarinet) and Eberhard Blum (solo flute). This new recording is the first for ensemble and it really does splendidly flesh out the bare bones of the melodies that Tom Johnson wrote circa 1982. His interest in non-intentionality derives from John Cage, and from his teacher Morton Feldman he took the idea of letting the music do what it wants to do rather than have the composer push the sounds around. Johnson works with numerical sequences of notes that involve cycles of different length, permutation, fold-ins, other automata, multi-tempo’d layered melodies, etc.—all pursued with a logical rigor that keeps subjectivity at bay. Played as solos, the Rational Melodies are as simple and direct as music can be. What Ensemble Dedalus brings to the work is instrumental colours in a variety of combinations, so that each piece not only has a unique shape, it now also has a unique sound. Johnson gives the music’s interpreters free rein to choose tempo, octave and whether to use transposition. Groups of instruments play in unison or alternate in antiphonal patterns. In all cases, the decisions that Ensemble Dedalus have made enrich the melodies without making them too expressive or too characterful—in other words, without detracting from the formalized rigour which brought the music into existence. Integrity and purity of intention are maintained, and yet something extremely valuable has been added in these interpretations, something which didn’t exist prior to this recording. Johnson flatly states that the players of Ensemble Dedalus have “added so much insight to the music that the music itself has grown.” He’s right; this is a gold star recording. Brian Marley

writing—adding another layer to an increasingly confusing reissue history.

I can remember eagerly snapping up the 20th anniversary issues at the end of 1989, and at the time, there was a significant improvement in sound, especially in the band’s classic first album. The ensuing decades have seen original tapes for that genre-busting document surface, not to mention the 30th anniversary editions and several box sets and all manner of archival studio and live material. As did Frank Zappa and Genesis, Fripp has recreated history to varying degrees, truncating tunes and swapping new vocal parts for old. In other words, the Crimson production arm has gone into overdrive with unpredictable results. That said, these new versions are the first to come with DVDs and to include a substantial number of bonus tracks, a tactic certainly meant to make longtime fans salivate while reaching for the wallet. Again.

Luckily, the results are uniformly good and often revelatory. The most radical differences are heard on Lizard, the third Crimson album and a transitional moment for the band’s sound. Robert Fripp and Porcupine Tree’s Steven Wilson have rethought the album in a way that is sure to polarize listeners as did the 1991 Henry Cow remixes or Frank Zappa’s reconstructions. Intertrack segues have been altered, effects have changed and certain instrumental moments have disappeared, such as a few synth breaks in “Indoor Games,” but the album’s dynamic spectrum is also shockingly different. Listen to Jon Anderson’s voice on the title track, now a model of clarity where before it was muddy and shallow. In fact, the entire “Lizard” suite is a marvel of constantly shifting timbres, each now sharply focused.

While the Bill Bruford-era powerhouse riffage of Red remains very close to its earlier mixes (a fortunate decision), In the Court has also been given a sonic brushup, though not nearly the overhaul afforded Lizard.

Early CD versions of the band’s 1969 debut were abominably hissy, a problem that was only partially mitigated in 1989. The 2003 reissue

offered a stunning improvement as each timbre stood stark against a much quieter background. Contrary to my expectations, the 2009 remix sounds even fuller and clearer, accentuating the album’s diverse soundworlds; the only modifications I can perceive are some changes in stereo placement.

The bonus tracks present alternate versions and works in progress.

The DVDs include 5.1 surround mixes, any extant relevant video material and the album’s previous remaster. Even if you don’t have surround capabilities, however, the new stereo mixes are well worth it. For those just introduced to Crimson, this new series is the way to go, and even lifelong fans might consider these packages as the definitive editions of each. Marc Medwin

Klangwart

Neu! and Can. Layers of electronic squeals, blips and glitches are added and subtracted, while drones of various timbre and texture come and go. “Schnappschuss” immerses the listener in a rather pleasant cacophony of electronic birdsong, while the appropriately named “Moloch” has a heavy industrial edge, with its lurching rhythms, deep bass pulse, squealing repetitive riff and abrasive drones. “Watehalle” is mysterious but not quite so hard-edged: barely perceptible voices, shimmering drones and sine wave pulses create a dream state which is alien but not malevolent. “Wellenbad,” while equally hazy and mysterious, has a great groove and builds to a state of cosmic consciousness before fading into nothingness. And so it goes— with every piece carving out its own little sonic universe. Bill Tilland

Annette Krebs Taku Unami

Sommer Staubgold CD

Though the German electronic duo Klangwart (Markus Detmer and Timo Reuber) has been together for 18 years, they have not been prolific; their work is nonetheless highly regarded by the cognoscenti.

Individually, they both play key roles in the fertile German electronic community—Detmer founded the Staubgold label in 1998 (which has just recently issued its 100th release!) and both musicians are in demand as remixers. This compilation of new, old and remixed selections from their personal archive is a compendium of electronic styles and influences. It is also consistently engaging.

Klangwart hasn’t been around long enough to qualify as first generation Kraut-Musik, but Detmer and Reuber have thoroughly assimilated the work of Eno, Tangerine Dream, Faust, Amon Düül, Neu!, Can, and Cluster, not to mention American minimalists such as Terry Riley and Steve Reich. Their own work always sounds familiar but is never overtly derivative. The seven tracks on this CD use ambient drones as a foundation, although many of the pieces develop a rhythmic energy through use of the motoric pulse favored by

Motubachii Erstwhile CD

This one of the most inscrutable recordings I’ve heard in quite some time. Even in a broad area of music—not always improvised, usually uncomfortable with naming, divided about instrumentalism and so forth—known for its often mysterious properties (or, perhaps more accurately, for the elision of properties altogether, with everything settled and stable that implies), this one’s a head-scratcher. Krebs (who nominally plays “guitar,” but really uses a contraption that hooks a rattling acoustic up to various tape machines, like one of Klee’s twittering machines) has produced some very provocative music of late, including the wonderful Kravis Rhonn Project on Another Timbre, and Unami has increasingly used not just computer and guitar but vibrating objects, a move that seems significant not just in terms of instrumentalism but in terms of his approach to sound. Together, across seven tracks assembled during 2009, they seem to just plunge into the void where reference is lost. And yet, that image is entirely wrong at the same time, since this music is so

close, so proximate, so mundane in a sense. I mean this last term not as a criticism but as a way of conveying how the pair use ordinary nontonal sounds as part of their basic language. There is a persistent aural effect of being in a subway station, or of being in the lobby of some vast building, eternally stranded as in a Borges story. One is consistently surrounded by, and reminded of, a certain environment in listening to this record.

Recognizable sounds, such as a flinty guitar string heard in the first minutes, are detectable. But such reference-points are always transformed or rendered alien, as if the music is awakening from some long slumber and isn’t sure what or where it is. And over time nascent patterns emerge—or at least we can imagine them into existence as we listen. Out of lengthy sparse sections, the musicians emerge with sudden, usually brief wells of noise. These seem to be made from crinkled tape, muffled spoken voices in Japanese, sounds mixed quite differently to bring Krebs’ sudden scrapes into vivid, even violent contrast. There are exhalations, objects being moved, an unsettling infant’s laugh, an elevator ding that might be the ghost of a vibraphone, and a passage that sounds like a bored intern making music with a file cabinet. These things occur often at the edges of audibility, making you wonder just how long that low hum or muttered voice has been there. The overall effect of Motubachii is like being confronted with the way we organize sound: making a structure of that distant clapping resonance, snatches of conversation, motors, and occasional guitar string. But Krebs and Unami also organize sound for us, just when it’s at its most immersive: a Krebs flurry of spooling tape, or an emphatic suitcase slamming shut.

If you were interested, I suppose you could relate this music to the musique concrète tradition. And there are places where the dry rattle of Krebs’ guitar evoked Alvin Lucier’s “Vespers” or early Parmegiani to me.

But those associations seem to be beside the point. It’s not often that a

King Crimson

In the Court of the Crimson King

Discipline Global Mobile CD + DVD

Lizard

Discipline Global Mobile CD + DVD

Red

Discipline Global Mobile CD + DVD

In 2009, the protean phenomenon known as King Crimson turned forty. To mark the occasion, yet another series of remasters was launched—the third as of this WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #59 | 67

recording so crisply evokes place, especially when you’ve no idea where that place may be. Jason Bivins

Ernst Krenek

Six Motets after Franz Kafka; Chroal Works Harmonia Mundi CD

Ernst Krenek’s pivotal 12-tone composition Lamentations of Jeremiah proved greatly influential on a number of American composers and, reputedly, on no less a figure than Igor Stravinsky. Indeed, Krenek’s technique of tone-row “rotation” would prove valuable to Stravinsky during his own late spate of 12-tone works. RIAS Kammerchor’s 2008 recording of Lamentations was widely acclaimed as a near-flawless rendition of this challenging, dissonantly thorny a cappella work. Six Motets is a worthy follow-up to the previous disc. It includes a wide range of Krenek’s shorter choral pieces, ranging in date from 1923 to 1959.

There is a disjunct, angular quality to the Kafka settings that resonates well with the author’s legendarily terse and often tart prose. The RIAS singers perform with superlative control; I was particularly taken with their nuanced renderings of dynamic shifts and articulations. Both sopranos and tenors negotiate the high notes with nary a flinch. The CD also includes Krenek’s charming arrangement of Claudio Monteverdi’s Lamento della Ninfa, which retains the original’s nimble rhythms and canny word inflections. Also winning is Krenek’s Op. 132 Kantate von der Vergänglichkeit des Irdischen. It pits 12-tone writing against free harmonic progressions, as well as effects: frequent glissandi and passages of sprechstimme. Caroline Stein performs the virtuosic soprano solo with dazzling runs and a warm tone; pianist Philip Mayers’ limpid filigree is equally impressive. Five Prayers (Op. 97) demonstrates Krenek’s talent for finely knit contrapuntal writing.

A bit less forbidding in harmonic language, the Prayers have a sumptuousness that is almost startling when heard in such close proximity to the Kafka Motetten. Thus, the disc provides an overall portrait of the composer as he should rightly be remembered: an adroit creator in a wide range of compositional styles.

Christian Carey

Steve Lacy November Intakt CD

Ideal Bread Transmit Cuneiform CD

Uwe Oberg Christof Thewes Michael Griener Lacy Pool hatOLOGY CD

November is a poignant portrait of soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy in his corporeal wane, artistic consciousness intact. It is a recording of his last solo concert, which he performed in Zürich on November 29, 2003, just six months before his passing. He had already received his 68 | SIGNAL to NOISE #59 WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM

cancer diagnosis and made it grist for his mill. The program is filled with remembrances of people who had preceded him, including the man who named the former Steve Lackritz Lacy, the women who gave birth to him and his wife, and various friends and fellow musicians who supported him along the way. He sings a haiku to the Reaper in a frail old-man voice, trying to name his terms (which Death soon enough ignored).

It’s a gesture guaranteed to get you in the gut, and after a lifetime on the stage Lacy must have known it. But he doesn’t just go for pathos; rather, he uses what he still has to take the measure of a life well lived, of loves and friendships savored, and of music magnificently played. He wasn’t at his virtuosic peak here, but he was totally in control of his instrument and material, exposing the bitterness of loss to defy its sting and wringing joy from the blues. Steve Lacy was an artist to the last.

Half a dozen years after his passing, the hole left in the world by Lacy’s passing has not begun to fill in, but people are gathering round it and taking a look inside. Transmit and Lacy Pool offer quite different perspectives on his work, one by an American quartet led by one of his late students and the other by a trio of Europeans. Neither features a soprano sax, but Ideal Bread’s pairing of baritone sax and trumpet recalls Lacy’s early partnerships with Charles Davis and Don Cherry. These players (Josh Sinton, bari; Kirk Knuffke, trumpet; Reuben Radding, bass; Tomas Fujiwara, drums) are still young, but hardly kids, and they bring as much maturity as enthusiasm to their second dip into the Lacy book. Their take on “Longing” is paced and articulated just so, patiently enough that you feel what it’s about; they transform “Clichés,” one of the more exotic tunes in the Lacy canon, with a dose of stout virility. There’s nary a wrong step here, and a lot of love.

The piano-trombone-drums line-up on Lacy Pool is just one way that these Middle Europeans hold their subject at a remove, far enough to catch the odd angles and hidden humor that are stashed all over Lacy’s oeuvre, but also far enough to see places to put their personal notions.

Christof Thewes indulges in plungerenabled ribaldry on “The Crust,” which sounds much jollier here than it does opening November. “Blinks,” on the other hand, is all business.

Uwe Oberg’s piano sweeps over it with a muscularity and harmonic floridness that Lacy rarely indulged, but Michael Griener flips the tune over and taps delicately at its innards like a mechanic with his head deep in the chassis of your aging sedan.

“Interesting stuff in here,” he seems to say with his brushes, and I’m disinclined to argue. Bill Meyer

early releases as Shalabi Effect over a decade ago, his effort has grown to two dozen players (and about half as many syllables) with his Land of Kush’s Egyptian Light Orchestra, the roots of which were an extended stay in the Middle East. The band’s first record was a set of songs based on Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day, and they return now with Monogamy, a puzzling yet hypnotic ode to sexuality.

Over the last few years, Shalabi has added to the mix some unusual ways of using voice: conversations about guitar collecting or spats between lovers are half-buried in the mix, lending them a sense of ominous importance that, if deciphered, they don’t really merit. On Monogamy there’s a kind of textual imp: a digitized feminine voice, foulmouthed and seemingly nonhuman, promiscuous whatever she is. She peppers the disc with provocative promises to the id, her glitchy voice wrapped in lush orchestration and in opposition to the real women, the five female vocalists who occupy the real world in this divisive song cycle.

Shalabi delights in misunderstanding, and titling a record Monogamy is about as loaded as when, shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks, he embossed his given name—Osama— in gold on a record cover. So it’s possible that the listener is being set up here, or maybe it is as simple as a morality tale pitting MotherSister LoverDaughter against cyberslut.

It’s hard to say, and in a curious way that’s one of this work’s strengths.

The other strength is his distinctive compositional sensibility: the blasts of free jazz invigorate the bath of strings and electronics, in a way that verges on delirium. The narrative may be somewhat alienating or offputting, but the music’s disorienting qualities suggest a more gratifying kind of dream state.

Kurt Gottschalk

Lawnmower Lawnmower Clean Feed CD

Chris Brokaw Geoff Farina

The Angel’s Message To Me Captain Records CD

Guitarist Geoff Farina is best known for his indie rock work with Karate

and Secret Stars, but these two new CDs find him in rather different company.

Polystylism is all the rage, but the musicians on Lawnmower don’t seem to be trying to blend genres as much as to allow musical practices to coexist, with folk rock guitarists Farina and Dan Littleton and avant jazzers Jim Hobbs (alto) and Luther Gray (drums) each speaking their own musical mother tongues. The guitarists produce some fascinating arpeggiated drones on “One,” over which Hobbs crafts an angular, angstladen solo, slinging bent notes in between the cracks of the guitarists’ perambulations. “Prayer of Death” provides two distinct commentaries on the 16-bar blues structure, with Hobbs’s caterwauling altissimo playing eventually taking over. Gray pushes the rhythmic lilt more overtly towards swing on “Glass”—the guitarists counter with a more ambient approach. Conversely, “Dan” revels in sustained tones from both sides of the equation, with penetrating feedback thrown in for good measure. Even if Lawnmower is a bit like a conversation in which the participants are speaking different languages, they seem to understand each other perfectly.

Guitarist Chris Brokaw is associated with Come and Codeine, and joins Farina on The Angel’s Message to Me for a set of unplugged acoustic blues and old gospel tunes whose beguiling textures are reminiscent of such acoustic luminaries as Robbie Basho, Richard Bishop, and Stephen Basho-Junghans. The results are adroit, though lacking the heft of the originals. The title tune is a case in point, a piece by Reverend Gary Davis in which Farina and Brokaw emphasize a limpid, undulating groove. Their preference for major thirds instead of ‘blues thirds’ similarly makes things sound less gritty.

That said, the guitarists’ knowledge of their sources is clear, and their reworkings are often pleasingly unexpected. On “In the Evening,” for instance, tasty chord voicings substitute for standard blues progressions, shedding new light on an old classic. They bring the vocal line of “Poor Wayfaring Stranger” back to its essence, closer to its original notation in the 19th-century Sacred Harp, denuding it of the dross that’s accumulated in successive renditions over the years. Though it’s not for

blues purists, The Angel’s Message to Me is nevertheless on the whole a successful venture. Christian Carey

Jim Lewis Andrew Downing Jean Martin On a Short Path from Memory to Forgotten Barnyard CD

The Element Choir At Rosedale United Barnyard CD

Toronto-based trumpeter Jim Lewis, bassist Andrew Downing and drummer Jean Martin’s improvisations walk the line between tradition and innovation. The program on their CD is muted and free of pyrotechnics, the musicians establishing an atmosphere of heightened awareness.

Lewis is a fine, expressive trumpeter whose fragile lyricism recalls early Miles Davis or fellow Canadian Kenny Wheeler, though he also makes sparing use of “outside” techniques (squeals, squeaks, smears, guttural growls) as the situation demands.

The slippery funk of “Fifteen” brings to mind Miles’ second great quintet, while the stark, contemplative “On a Short Path” could have been lifted from an ECM release. The longer pieces are more episodic: “Thirteen,” for example, opens with a pizzicato bass drone, complemented by Martin’s metallic clicks and chimes and Lewis’s long lines. At the 5-minute mark, this gives way to arco bass and busy, abstract trumpet, which evolves into Chinese gongs and small, forlorn cries. This Barnyard release is not a barn-burner by any means, but rewards the attentive listener.

Toronto’s Element Choir is led by singer Christine Duncan, who borrows from Butch Morris’s concept of “conduction,” John Zorn’s Cobra and several other systems which permit real-time shaping of an improvised performance. The Choir on this occasion includes 51 voices, plus Lewis, Martin, church organist Eric Robertson and violinist Jesse Zubot. Recorded over two days, the performances run the gamut from astringent and abstract to ethereal and even sacral. The sheer sound of the massed voices is impressive, like a synthesis of Karl Orff, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Gyorgy Ligeti and the Ramayana Monkey Chant. Even the

many muted passages contain a strong suggestion of latent power.

As with most improvisation, patience is required from the listener: some explorations are more productive than others, and some simply take longer to launch. Sometimes the pleasure is simply in the journey— the moment to moment interplay of voices and instruments.

The instrumentalists’ work is often striking. In “Funhouse,” the trumpet’s opening three-note pattern is picked up by the Choir, while organ and percussion establish a waltz rhythm which eventually gives way to ominous vocal chatter, shouts and drones. A lyrical exchange between violin, organ and trumpet occurs before the piece fades into silence. On the gorgeous “Cloud Hands,” a thin, ethereal blend of organ, trumpet and the choir’s subliminal murmuring is kick-started after four minutes

by Robertson’s crashing chords. The choir responds with nervous chatter, and then the piece expands organically into something quite rich and grand, with the ensemble soaring into the stratosphere. Bill Tilland

Chris Lightcap’s Bigmouth Deluxe

Clean Feed CD

Bassist Chris Lightcap has been an anchor in so many forward-thinking ensembles over the years, it’s surprising he hasn’t recorded more frequently as a leader. He’s at the helm of a punchy group here— tenor players Chris Cheek and Tony Malaby, keyboardist Craig Taborn, and drummer Gerald Cleaver, with alto saxophonist Andrew D’Angelo on three tracks—and the music is intense in its emotionality even as it’s always characterized by a limber bounce. A crisp, rolling beat unfurls the vaguely Latin melancholy of the opener “Platform,” which might well have been one of Malaby’s own themes (like “Cosas,” for example).

And from the start, you’re struck not simply by the wondrous interplay between Cleaver, Taborn, and the leader; it’s hard not to be smitten by the sound of the two marvelously contrasting tenorists, from Cheek’s rapid scalar statements to Malaby’s cry. It’s this kind of structured extrapolation from fairly basic rhythmic (and occasionally textural) ideas that Lightcap seems to favor here, like

Land of Kush’s Egyptian Light Monogamy Constellation CD

Montreal-based bandleader and oudist Sam Shalabi’s Middle-Eastern form of psychedelia certainly isn’t traditional, but it’s always within sight of his Egyptian heritage. From his WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #59 | 69

pieces of playground equipment on which you make up your own game.

“Deluxe Version” and “Ting” groove along like highlife dances, while “The Clutch” has them taking in a nearrhumba, and “Fuzz” a pumped-up funk. For hazy respite, they serve up “Year of the Rooster”—whose chordal development borders on the anthemic—and the grooving “Silvertone,” with an exquisitely tart contribution from D’Angelo’s alto.

It’s simply unadorned, great playing.

This would be an ace band to hear in a club, or blasting from cars cruising down your block. Either way, I’m in.

Jason Bivins

Magic Lantern Platoon

Not Not Fun Records CD

Based in Long Beach, California, Magic Lantern pushes their wah-wah pedals to the max in psychedelic guitar jams inspired by groups ranging from Can to Black Sabbath. If guitarist/keyboardist/singer Cameron Stallones is singing actual words, almost all of them are indecipherable, lost in the reverb and the mix of instruments. This is also a band that doesn’t care whether the songs have anything resembling a verse, chorus, hook or any real structure.

Each track is a vamp on a rhythmic riff, with spasmodic guitar soloing on top of those insistent grooves.

One high point is opening track “Dark Cicadas,” which begins with a lazily looping bluesy lick but eventually crystallizes into a sharper, more urgent variation for its climax seven minutes later. Nothing on “Platoon” is quite as gripping as the boldly minimalist Krautrock thumper “At the Mountains of Madness,” which Magic Lantern released on its selftitled 2007 debut (reissued this year by the Woodsist label). But while it’s slightly less inventive, the new album captures the power of Magic Lantern’s live act. Robert Loerzel

Joe Maneri Masashi Harada Pinerskol Leo Records CD

Masashi Harada Trio Breath, Gesture, Abstract Opera Leo Records CD

The Japanese-born, Boston-based performer Masashi Harada is a pianist and percussionist who also works with voice, dance and visual arts, and has appeared in a notable trio with Cecil Taylor and William Parker. He’s deeply committed to spontaneous creation, which he calls “generative improvisation”—a cycle where the group performance feeds the artist and the artist feeds the environment.

Such commitment may be his greatest, and most perplexing, talent: he can, at least on record, disappear so completely into a project that his own “self” can be difficult to spot. After studying with, among others, John Cage, Harada got his first major gig as an improvising musician playing with the Joe Maneri Trio in 1989, and it was to his former bandleader that he returned in 2003 for a duo session made in Boston that was left 70 | SIGNAL to NOISE #59 WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM

unreleased until picked up by Leo last year. Here they are two men on equal footing, creating sonic microcosms together. Maneri is heard on tenor and alto saxophones and clarinet and Harada on piano and flute. Both men also lay in vocalese passages, moaning chants that give a feeling of ritual to the recording. There’s a remarkable stillness to the disc, the dozen 5- to 10-minute tracks passing by like an audio montage. Sadly Maneri, who died on August 24, 2009, at the age of 82, didn’t live to see the album released. But it stands as a fine memorial to someone who, like Harada, was a committed improvising artist.

Harada’s own trio recorded Breath, Gesture, Abstract Opera just two months before the Maneri session, and it’s similarly slippery, focusing on microtones and small gestures. But where the language of the Maneri duo is still an extension of jazz improvisation, the so-called Opera is rather a stranger affair. With the unusual instrumentation of theremin (James Coleman), cello (Glynis Lomon) and Harada’s percussion, it bears some resemblance to the fringes of British free improvisation, with off-mike voices and cartoonish electronic interjections. The musicians also play characters (circle, triangle and square), so there does seem to be some linear intention to this improvised opera, although what the structure (or intent) might be is less than apparent. The framing of the album is, ultimately, somewhat alienating, detracting from an inventively rambunctious record.

Whatever Harada was hoping to realize, it shows if nothing else an adventurous spirit. Kurt Gottschalk

sions, it feels too calculated. Where’s the danger, the chaos, the impulsive spine-tingling thrill of making a pact with the unknown to venture forth towards the vast, labyrinthine unknowable? Listening to this album is like tuning into a Sun City Girls radio show after necking a handful of Citalopram, zapping out the peerless, precious highs as well as the pernicious, all too ubiquitous, lows. Nevertheless, despite the faint whiff of bromide, the Master Musicians continue to broadcast some pretty potent signals.

Spencer Grady

Mats/Morgan Band

The Music or the Money?

Cuneiform CD x 2

Zappaphiles consider the Mats/ Morgan Band (led by two prodigious Swedes, keyboardist Mats Öberg and drummer Morgan Ågren) to be the core of a Zappa ensemble that never was. Though Zappa died shortly after inviting the pair into his band, his spirit and iconoclastic ways still inform their output. Their intuitive musicmaking, honed over their 30-year history of playing together, inspires their unique brew of avant fusion jazz whose ebullient virtuosity is sprinkled with a peculiar sense of humor.

Originally released in 1997 on Ågren’s Ultimate Audio Entertainment label, The Music or the Money? was the group’s second record, which was originally split into “Mats” and “Morgan” sides. This welcome reissue by Cuneiform does away with the emphasis on duality by jumbling the track order, and it’s fleshed out with an additional 45 minutes of

music. The original tracks are still the strongest, and several represent the pinnacle of the group’s output even 13 years later. Ågren’s chops are displayed with authority throughout, with the excitable “Watch Me Pleasure” and “Inget Har Hänt” showcasing his head-scratching inventiveness. Öberg is also a busy technician, whether with jazz delights like “Advokaten and the Jazz” or the adept “Banned Again.”

Zappa’s synclavier experiments also get a nod on pieces like “Watch Me Pleasure” and “Tyrschon.” Many of the additional tracks are more experimental, largely consisting of keyboard-saturated sketches. Piano/ synth vignettes like “You Only Have to Wait in the Rain” and “Let’s Stay Positive” sit beside the weirdness of “Fortsätt Mats!,” the monster grooves of “Zepp” and “Baader Puff,” and Weather Report-influenced numbers like “Jeriko” and “Harmonium 4.”

With 34 performances, there are quite a few indulgent moments, and the record might seem scatterbrained, or worse, an example of form over substance. Yet the duo’s powerful musical bond, sense of adventure and instrumental ingenuity produces consistently engaging music; though Zappa’s spirit is strongly in evidence, the results are still highly original. Jay Collins

John McLaughlin and the 4th Dimension To the One Abstract Logix CD

Whatever the prevailing sound may be—modern fusion, indo-classical, blues-based jazz—when John

McLaughlin releases a new album, the building blocks remain largely unchanged. That’s not a bad thing: To the One is as compelling as ever, with its signature combination of surging leads, searching chordclimbs and Eastern modal hues.

With these six songs the guitarist pays homage to John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme: “By the release of this album I had begun my search for the answers to the questions existence will pose to us all, sooner or later,” McLaughlin reflects in the liner notes. The instrumentation is straightforward—guitar, keyboards, electric bass and drums—and though it’s slicker than McLaughlin’s early work the echoes of his 1969 debut Extrapolation are unmistakable. The music’s visceral intensity makes the Trane lineage clear: dig the way McLaughlin fire-walks through Gary Husband’s keyboard solo on “Recovery” (à la Coltrane and Tyner in “Resolution, Pt. 2”), or the fervent licks the leader weaves across the modal center toward the end of “Special Beings.”

In-studio footage from the recording session (accessible at mediastarz. com) reveals how the group’s sound is built. Etienne M’bappe dons thin gloves to finger-pick his electric bass, which some players employ to prevent finger pain but which also cushion the instrument’s tone.

Drummer Mark Mondesir, despite his fairly standard drum kit, produces unpredictable rhythms that sound like the work of multiple arms—and ironically enough, that’s indeed the case when, on “Discovery” and “The Fine Line,” Husband moves over to

a second drum kit. And despite the constraints of the studio, the group is in almost perpetual eye contact with each other, which brings us to another of McLaughlin’s building blocks: despite being the quickest guitarist in jazz, he never crowds out his group. After all, the search is more enjoyable with company, eh?

Nathan Turk

Nicole Mitchell’s Sonic Projections Emerald Hills RogueArt CD

Chad Taylor Circle Down 482 Music CD

Flautist and composer Nicole Mitchell has increasingly focused on conceptual projects in the last decade or so, imaginings of the possibilities of human interactivity whether on the bandstand or in the novels of Ursula K. LeGuin. With Sonic Projections—a quartet with pianist Craig Taborn, tenor player David Boykin, and drummer Chad Taylor—Mitchell realizes an ambitious suite that blends solemnity with abandon: it’s music as ritual. The disc grabs your attention immediately with punchy, powerfully articulated chords that turn suddenly to oblique harmonies and a lovely passage of repose for (mostly) solo flute. Even without the interesting compositional decisions that fill this disc, Mitchell’s playing is enough to sustain interest, her use of harmonics and overblowing compelling and inventive. And she’s surrounded herself with vibrantly contrasting musi-

Master Musicians of Bukkake Totem Two Important CD

This, the second in the Master Musicians’ ongoing series of ethno-occult missives, begins with the kind of rowdy ritualistic call more often associated with Finland’s Aural Hypnox collective. But unlike those po-faced pagans, Master Musicians of Bukkake (as their name suggests) are positioning themselves as fun-hugging mischief makers, drawing on an expansive esoteric palette to entertain, as well as bemuse, in much the same way as those tricksters of the fourth world, Sun City Girls (indeed, the Totem triumvirate is dedicated to the Bishop brothers and the late Charlie Goucher). But whereas the Girls always appeared wilfully erratic, seemingly intent on infuriating the expectations and defying the patience of their following, Master Musicians of Bukkake opt for a smoother ride.

Okay, so there’s nothing here as immediate as some of the recordings from the first Totem chapter—the medina mantra of “People of ohe Drifting Horses” or the dervish swirl of “Schism Prism”—but this set boasts a bounty of exquisitely performed and prodigiously poised sounds. From “Coincidentia Oppositorum”’s variation on Gorecki’s sorrowful strings, to the tantric weaves of the meditative “Patmos,” Totem Two captures the listener’s attention by offering different perspectives on an idiosyncratic brand of faux mysticism. Yet, on occaWWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #59 | 71

cal personalities: a subtle and quite musical percussionist, an urgent and lyrical saxophonist, and a probing, at times wonderfully elliptical pianist. I dug their interplay in and around the recitation on the hypnotic “Ritual and Rebellion” (“clouds of otherness... I am here”), with a huge, soaring tenor solo from Boykin and vivid harmonic shapes from Taborn. “Chocolate Chips” is noisy, fractious, even surly like the mood during a sugar crash.

“Wild Life,” however, is light and airy, with Mitchell’s piccolo in midair with Boykin’s keening mouthpiece. Taborn takes things in an almost romantic direction on the churning title track, as Boykin rides Taylor’s graceful swinging beat with churning lower-register discourse. After the brief squeakingdoor, rushing-wind fragment “Surface of Sirius” (almost a bagatelle), the group returns to the rapturous on “Affirmations”: the dense improvisations feature floating tonality, rapid registral shifts, and rhythms you could get drunk on, and Mitchell punctuates the music with tuneful utterances of the word “joy.” You said it.

Taylor’s trio session—with pianist Angelica Sanchez and bassist Chris Lightcap—has something of the lyrical grit of Jarrett’s early American groups: propulsive, free-thinking, muscular but with an ache at its heart.

I got great pleasure from listening to the way the group works up snappy implied rhythms, which tend to creep up on you unexpectedly (see “Box Step” and “Specifica”). Certain tunes (“Rock”) possess a feel that’s brilliant and fragile all at once, with a pronounced melancholy recalling Myra Melford, and the result is a compelling synthesis of emotional materials. This is a band with great chemistry and ears, as they bump and crackle with synergy on “Traipse,” casually tossing off sweet accelerandos against a steady pulse or dipping deftly into lyric sumptuousness. It’s terrific stuff, each performance terse and filled with creative tension. And as good as Taylor and Lightcap are, it’s a treat to be reminded of what a vibrant, fluid player Sanchez is. Hear the contrast between her introspection on “Miriam” and the racing intensity on “Pablo,” where she uses the full range of the keyboard effectively. Jason Bivins

Jason Moran Ten

Blue Note CD

The first time I heard Jason Moran was sitting about five feet from him at a Greg Osby gig, and I vividly recall being blown away by the fierceness of his creative energy, the elegant way he interpolated source materials, and the sheer thrill of his improvising. On Ten he’s again joined by his longstanding partners bassist Tarus Mateen and drummer Nasheet Waits: it’s not only a celebration of a decade of music-making but a vibrant statement by a trio that is simply in love with jazz in all its manifestations.

From the stately opening measures of “Blue Blocks,” you can hear why Moran’s omnivorous approach to jazz is often compared to Jaki Byard’s (and he puts together a wonderful reading of Byard’s “To Bob Vatel of Paris”). But Moran’s inclinations also 72 | SIGNAL to NOISE #59 WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM

take him in some fascinating free directions, as he unleashes sudden scurries and nearly Messiaenic tonal clusters. His mates are just as imaginative and capable, giving real sizzle and authority to the serious rhythmic experimentation of “RFK in the Land of Apartheid,” which flirts with kwela, and to the glitch-driven reimagination of “Crepuscule with Nellie.”

They show their humor again on the hilarious but still somehow respectful reading of Leonard Bernstein’s “Big Stuff,” where Moran simply unleashes his technique, doubling the tempo at will to sound like an old cassette on fast forward. The tasteful integration of electronics is also heard on “Feedback Pt. 2”: Mateen’s supple lines wend their way through space and Moran is at his most reflective.

For sheer thrills, there’s “Gangsterism Over 10 Years”—with lightning movement and three-way improvisational brio—and a brisk reading of Nancarrow’s “Study No. 6” (there’s a second, subtler version of this piece as well).

And finally, the pianist is accompanied briefly by his infant sons on the sparse, lyrical, assured closer “Old Babies” (followed by a secret hidden track containing the country gem “Nobody”). It’s joyful, inventive, and impressive all at once. Jason Bivins

sticker Dean Spunt keeps his foot to the floor, guiding their songs around by the nose like a fresh-baked pie with agile cartoon legs. Spunt also sings, which might explain his penchant for his single-pedal—when you are responsible for rhythm and melody you tend to consolidate your attack. He’s a big believer in the K.I.S.S. method (Keep It Simple Spunt), and his narrow focus both hinders and helps the duo get over, more the former than the latter in a live setting. Everything in Between is tight and all, but I find myself flashing back to their live show. The tandem, while familiar with each other to the point of instinct, put forth a pretty uneven batch. Weirdo Rippers seems a long way off, those gorgeous explorations taken down a shade. A lot of times, when bands strip things down, they’re trying to sound like they do onstage, on-record. Their intentions unclear to me, all I can do is assume they did what they felt was right. I just wish I could figure out why Everything in Between doesn't quite HIT hard enough. It's like the latest Wavves record, without those two-to-three songs that just MURder and, at the very least, make for good mixtape fodder. Grant Purdum

My Education

No Mor Musik

Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans Strange Attractors CD / LP

F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927) is often regarded by critics as the greatest of all silent films. And it appears to have been a splendid stimulus for My Education, whose music here (which began life as a soundtrack) is as moodily expressionist as the film itself but stands up just fine on its own. Musically, My Education falls into the amorphous “chamber rock” category, along with counterparts such as Rachel’s, Godspeed You! Black Emperor and Sunn O))). One obvious touchstone here is the hypnotic film scores that Popol Vuh did for Werner Herzog.

The heavy use of strings, along with guitars, percussion, keyboards, vibraphone and occasional French horn, creates a powerful sound filled with ominous foreboding. The mood lightens a little with the fifth piece, “Peasant Dance,” which signals the reconciliation of the married couple at the center of the film. The next piece, “A Man Alone,” is the darkest of the lot—basically a bleak wall of drone—as the man concludes that he has lost his wife in a boating mishap.

Finally, in “Sunrise,” after the wife is discovered alive, a cyclical string motif out of the Phillip Glass songbook strikes up; counterpoint and percussion are gradually added, leading to a triumphant and emotionally satisfying resolution. Bill Tilland

No Mor Musik UgExplode CD

Mark EdwardsWeasel Walter Group Blood of the Earth UgExplode CD

Weasel Walter Invasion

UgExplode CD

No Mor Musik is the trio of Kenny Millions (né Keshavan Maslak) on tenor saxophone, clarinet, guitar and vocals; Weasel Walter (usually a drummer, but heard here on sixstring electric bass); and on drums and vocals, the mysterious Nondor Nevai, a member of the group To Live and Shave in L.A. 2 as well as a composer in his own right who practically defined the term “Brutal Prog.” Even if this date appears to be collectively improvised (indeed, the six pieces here were culled from many hours of tape), Nevai’s frenetic, high-octane athleticism and throaty shouts are decidedly front and center. Free jazz, progressive music, no wave and metal may have been blurred elsewhere, but it’s hard to

imagine it having ever been done more powerfully. “No Mor Song” is a cathartic whirlwind, a sludgy stew of six-string bass, guitar feedback, saxophone peals, occasional yells, growls, acrid declarations, and Nevai’s take on a blast beat. When Millions stretches his multiphonics over a pounding rhythm section like James Chance in hyper-speed, the trio’s unwavering audacity is clear.

Blood of the Earth is the second volume of an ongoing collaboration between Walter and drummer Marc Edwards, whose most high-profile work has been with Cecil Taylor and David S. Ware. Though their first disc, Mysteries of the Deep, featured a rotating cast, the lineup has solidified to a sextet with bassist Adam Lane, saxophonists Darius Jones and Elliott Levin, and trumpeter Forbes Graham. The band’s closest affinity is the hell-bent-for-leather free music captured on looser Actuel and ESP sides, albeit played with a punkish gnash and recorded in crisp fidelity. Lane’s bass is supported by distortion pedals, and Jones and Graham produce a canvas of glossolalia that’s far from even traditional “atonality.” Yet as fierce as the set is, there is an undercurrent of—dare I say it—swing. Graham’s trumpet has a fat, full sound reminiscent of Jacques Coursil’s pre-bop bravura, while Levin’s tenor and flute work has a burnished gravitas. While obviously “of the now,” Blood of the Earth is a good old-fashioned free-jazz blowout, sometimes lyrical but in no way pristine.

Since Walter’s recent work has mostly been improvised, it’s easy to forget that some of his outfits, like the Flying Luttenbachers, actually played compositions. With Invasion Walter returns to the drummercomposer role. The four pieces here feature guitarist Henry Kaiser, reedman Vinny Golia, trumpeter Liz Allbee, bassists John Lindberg and Damon Smith, and percussionist William Winant—a cross-section of California heavies. It’s amazing what a little compositional input can do in this context—short bursts at marked intervals on “Nautilus Rising” act as a linking thread while horsehair flies, blasts of air heat up the proceedings, and phrases contract and expand.

A loose, rockish march from Winant might act as the keystone for trilling trumpet, soprano and arco bass, while in Walter’s hands, the music yields a more angular athleticism,

evolving into long-tone collectivity teased by continual percussive staccato. There’s a sick-sweet cruelty to “Flesh Strata,” drumsets played off one another in hacking, Toy Killerslike lock-step while guitar, trumpet and bass clarinet slide through a bent tone-row. Passages of extreme front-line density never stray too far from the rhythmic onslaught, Kaiser’s flinty comping and jittery accents a wiry prod to Walter’s juggernaut and the incisive flutter of soprano, bowed bass and trumpet. Invasion is one of the best documents of Walter’s Bay Area work, and it will be interesting to see how composition winds its way back into his arsenal.

Clifford Allen

William Parker Jason Kao Hwang Will Connell, Jr. Zen Matsuura Commitment: The Complete Recordings 1981/1983 No Business Records CD x 2

No Business Records continues their documentation of neglected loft-era free jazz with this package supplementing the sole release by the group Commitment with a previously unissued concert performance from Germany. These count among the first recordings of all four of the group’s members, as well as being an early convergence of free jazz and Asian folk music. This collective quartet formed when saxophonist Will Connell, Jr., a veteran of Horace Tapscott and Chico Hamilton’s groups, met violinist Jason Kao Hwang at the Basement Workshop, a center for Asian-American politics and poetry. The first (unrecorded) version of the group featured bassist Jay Oliver and briefly, drummer Denis Charles, before the rhythm section was restocked with William Parker and Zen Matsuura.

These four gigged around NY in the early ’80s, finding a home at Soundscape and, with the urging of Verna Gillis, recording an album which was first released on Hwang’s Flying Panda record label. The five pieces from the album chart an original sound. Hwang’s non-tempered harmonic sense marries Chinese string music and the searing intensity of free jazz. Connell switches between alto, flute, bass clarinet, and wood flutes, bringing a folkloric exoticism to the group sound. Parker hadn’t quite

hit the lithe muscularity of his mature style, but he’s still readily identifiable and provides a stalwart center to the music. Matsuura was a fortuitous find as a drummer, his lithe pulse and keen ear for textural playing integral to the group sound.

On the studio session the group moves through stately declarations of the heads (composed by Connell, Parker, and Hwang) and then spark off on impressionistic explorations that take their time to develop. Hwang and Connell sometimes stoke things with incendiary solos, but for much of the session they build improvisations from the dark hues of breathy alto and flute and quavering string inflections. Parker’s bass lines bubble along, countering the other two as Matsuura’s splashes and tuned rolls provide coloristic contrast and open momentum. But they also crank things up: sample the impassioned solos by Connell, Hwang and Matsuura on the violinist’s “No Name.”

The rest of disc one and all of disc two contain a live recording from the 1983 Moers Festival; what it lacks in sound quality, it more than makes up for with sheer energy. From the outset, the group locks in on a collective pulse and pushes the music along with coursing vitality. Two pieces stretch past the 20-minute mark, the musicians reveling in open-form sections for small percussion instruments, whistles, flutes, and percussive bass. There are also some splendidly thunderous excursions: listen, for instance, to Connell’s scorching solo and Hwang’s cyclone zeal on “Diary for One Night,” which set the stage for Parker to take off on the kind of roiling bass solo he has made his own over the ensuing years. Sure, the improvisations wander a bit at times, but the music’s energy offers plenty of rewards. Michael Rosenstein

Kevin Parks Joe Foster

Acts Have Consequences self-issued CD x 2

Based in Seoul, Korea, expats Kevin Parks and Joe Foster are part of a small but active scene of electroacoustic improvisation documented on labels like Manual and Balloon & Needle. The two put out the wellreceived Ipsi sibi somnia fingunt a few years back, and this self-released effort is a worthy follow-up. There are eight pieces over two CDs; each builds gradually, the discrete

No Age

Everything in Between Sub Pop CD

I explained the appeal of No Age to a friend during their performance at the Sub Pop anniversary festival thus: “They keep the kick coming all ... day ... long.” Everything in Between is a perfect example of this; singer/ WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #59 | 73

sonic events—glitched electronics, cushions of buzz and static, oscillating sine waves, hanging guitar resonance, feedback, and puffs and hisses coaxed from Foster’s trumpet—taking place against a still backdrop. Each disc has its own feel: the first is a study in slow tension and release that culminates in sputtering crackles and grit, while the second focuses on pure guitar tones and abraded electronic textures. The glacially paced drama of “Change by Means of Blood” is particularly effective, juxtaposing pealing guitar chords and detuned slides against the stippled sizzle of open circuits. This one is getting some just attention in the blogosphere and is worth searching out.

Michael Rosenstein

Tristan Perich 1-Bit Symphony

Cantaloupe Music microchip in jewel case

Electronic music composer and visual artist Tristan Perich is fascinated with 1-bit audio. 1-Bit Music, his first release for the Cantaloupe imprint back in 2006, featured a computer chip and on/off switch housed in a jewel case. Listeners looking for the CD found a headphone jack. All one had to do was plug in a pair of headphones, flip the switch, and voila!, a fragile yet supple music, redolent of early electronica, was revealed.

Perich has expanded his use of 1-bit audio in the past few years, developing it in several collaborations with classical instrumentalists. Thus, for his next music-maker in a jewel case, he has correspondingly expanded the ambitions of the work, having it reflect the formal issues addressed in symphonic music. 1-Bit Symphony utilizes on and off electrical pulses, synthesized by code and routed from microchip to speaker. Thus, a script of computer code (included in the liner notes) is transformed into sound. The results are reminiscent of the ambient looping of minimalist keyboard works such as Terry Riley’s late 1970s organ pieces. Occasionally, it replicates the soundtracks of early computer games, with the blips and loops far better finessed. The juxtaposition of 1-bit audio, and its relatively simple sound wave building blocks, with a more expansive musical design proves odd yet appealing. Gone is symphonic bloat, replaced instead by delicate circuitry. And the artifact itself is easily the coolest physical recording medium I’ve come across in quite some time. Christian Carey

Michael Pisaro Hearing Metal 1 Edition Wandelweiser CD

A Wave and Waves Cathnor CD

Michael Pisaro’s compositions force the listener to continually reexamine the very nature of sound and consider how it is affected by context. Minute details unfold gradually and take on vast importance as each piece travels its glacially colorful path. These two discs feature the excellent percussionist Greg Stuart, and a more sensitive interpreter of these innovative scores is difficult to imagine.

Hearing Metal’s first volume comprises three pieces for 60-inch

tamtam. Pisaro’s overriding concern seems to be the harmonics generated by the instrument, each bow and stroke birthing an intricate web of crystalline sonorities. Two works explore the myriad possibilities of bowed tamtam: slow sustains on “Sleeping Muse,” quicker waves and undulations on “Sculpture for the Blind.” The album’s centerpiece, “The Endless Column,” is constructed of very soft strokes which, through careful microphone placement, reveal a wealth of detail that is usually inaudible. As in his Transparent City series, Pisaro also adds sine tones to the music, which sometimes support the notes and harmonics of the instrument, and at other times clash with them to form internal beats.

A Wave and Waves follows a similar pattern to Hearing Metal in that the speed of events increases.

Here, various natural objects (seeds, pebbles, etc.) are dropped in bowls and on various surfaces to create waves of varying density and shape.

As with An Unrhymed Chord, the piece is in two parts with a silence midway, but bowed percussion takes the place of sine tones. The first part, “The World Is An Integer,” is a study in gradual accumulation and dispersal, the wave swelling, cresting and subsiding over 35 minutes; “A Haven of Security and Unreachable” presents a series of interconnected waves. According to the score, the audience is to be seated amongst the performers, and great care was taken with stereo placement to ensure that effect at home. Again, what we would call musical tones contrast and blend with other timbres, highlighting and offsetting them.

The overall effect of Pisaro’s music is to accentuate the musicality in sounds one takes for granted. After listening to his work, my attention is drawn to the infinite complexities in even the most mundane sounds. Like James Joyce, Pisaro transforms everyday events into something mystical and wonderful. Marc Medwin

Polar Bear Peepers

The Leaf Label CD

After a confusing start that had me flashing to everything from Dakota Dakota to Crime In Choir, Polar Bear’s Peepers ultimately brings a top-tier mix of jazz and rock to the table.

Stuffed with horns o’ plenty, Peepers does double duty, matching a consistent dedication to hard blowing and firm plucking with an almost sensual knack for the subtle and the soft. The first tune to draw sparks is “Drunken Pharaoh,” a nod-off mess of swirling-bee bass riffs, Leafcutter John’s upper-tier speak-’n’-spelling and just slightly sub-skronk sax, and from there Polar Bear settle into a groove they don't lose until yr 5-disc carousel has skipped over to your Richard Marx CD (Did I catch you? Did I?). “The Love Didn't Go Anywhere,” no offense to the rest, is so good it simply must be the fulcrum on which the remainder of this review rests. It's one of the best modern, jazz-related compositions I've ever had the pleasure of fixing my ears on.

It's perfect. It carries with it emotion so nakedly laid forth you'd think the

players shared their lungs, lives and hearts. Cheesy, sure, but tell me you don't absolutely melt when the sax keys start flowing fast, the guitars— which absolutely dazzle—melding to the horns, the bass humming and the swat-drumming like hot-ass solder, forming a formidable foundation.

Grant Purdum

Radar Favourites Radar Favourites Reel Recordings CD

For fans of Rock In Opposition, fringes of the UK prog scene, and that zone where the latter intersected with the experimental side of punk, this disc is big news. Radar Favourites was saxophonist/multi-winds player Geoff Leigh of Henry Cow; guitarist Gerry Fitz-Gerald, keyboardist/singer Cathy Williams, bassist Jack Monck of Delivery and Stars, and drummer Charles Hayward of Quiet Sun, later of This Heat and Camberwell Now. Radar Favourites is its CD debut, a collection of live and studio tracks from 1974.

By now, completist collector-types are getting all warm ’n’ runny, but the more discerning (or cash-strapped) among us are wondering, “Yeah, this sounds interesting but is it worth the gelt?” Happily, yes. Favourites, with its zigzagging motifs and Stravinskian touches, recalls Henry Cow circa its first two albums, but is more conventionally melodic and jam-y. Shades of the Grateful Dead circa Blues for Allah and Traffic (at their peak) can be discerned (the loping, earnest “Blues for Henry,” with blistering, smoldering guitar and rippling bass). Sometimes, the Radar Favs are like unto the contemporary Californian folk-proggroove collective Mushroom; other times, a pugnacious Caravan. Not to imply the music herein is derivative— it shares qualities with Mothership Cow but there be other marginally more “mainstream” influences to be felt as well. The lengthy closer “Blast Past” features some searing Sonny Sharrock-like rip-it-up guitar soloing, then takes on a psychedelic cast further in, ending in an Amon Düül haze with whispers of early (pre-1971) Jethro Tull. The sonic quality is fine— not crisp/crystal-clear but it’s certainly not bad. As a bonus, the cover design is by Barney Bubbles, the same fellow who did many of Hawkwind’s album covers. This isn’t merely a “historical value,” get-it-for-the-genealogy pick—just get it. Mark Keresman

Django Reinhardt

Integrale Django Reinhardt: Saisons 1-3 Frémeaux & Associés CD x 14/14/12

Djangologie: 1928-1950 EMI France CD x 20

2010 marks Django Reinhardt’s centennial, and as might be expected, compilations and tributes are the order of the day. Most Django completists will already own the 40-disc set by the French label Frémeaux & Associés. The company began releasing the gargantuan survey in 1996 and completed it in 2003, and it is truly a labor of love. All of the studio recordings are there, from Django’s first discs from 1928, on banjo, through every justly-lauded collabora-

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tion with Stéphane Grappelli, to his final electric guitar forays in 1953, shortly before his death. There are also private recordings, air checks and film appearances, not to mention some of his non-jazz compositions and an interview or two. In short, Frémeaux has attempted to collect every recording the guitarist made in chronological order, regardless of musical context and sound quality, which are both quite variable. Django’s jazz dates were often juxtaposed, especially in the early days, with sessions accompanying crooners; many sides survive in less than perfect condition.

Remastered with care by François Terrazzoni, the recordings sound as good as possible in the circumstances. Until this year, the project was only available as 20 pricy two-disc sets. Now, the label is releasing the material in three boxes, or “Saisons,” the third of which should be out in late September. The contents are unchanged, but the prices are much lower, especially if one orders them directly from Europe, putting these wonderful sets within reach of the average jazz fan.

EMI France was the first to attempt anything approaching a complete edition with its justly acclaimed Djangologie project from the early 1970s. It has now been reissued on 20 discs in a slipcase. With EMI supposedly owning the masters, one would expect fine sound, but alas, we are given fake stereo and indifferent transfers. Whereas the Frémeaux set is very nicely documented, discographical information in the EMI set is all but nonexistent. The disc timings correspond to the original LPs, so that each clocks in at around 40 minutes. Granted, the sound is better than on other compilations, and the U.S. price is very good, which might make the set worth acquiring for those who just want a sampling of Django’s work from 1928 to 1950.

But this reissue should be avoided by serious collectors, as the British JSP label’s sets constitute better value and information for money. There are also many other less complete options, such as carefully remastered sets from Frog and Mosaic; but the Frémeaux series now seems the best way to experience every facet of Django’s career. Marc Medwin

and hip-hop rigidity without ever compromising the huddled ’round the fire cadences of the ten old texts.

Alastair Caplin’s fiddle, Donald Lindsay’s Uillean pipes, and Ben Reynolds’ lap steel guitar all underscore and complicate the songs’ gory narratives (Roberts’ albums always come with a body count), and the band even gets to cut loose with palpable glee on a sprightly instrumental penned

by Roberts’ dad. Roberts’ singing has never been better; his diction is nimble, his emphasis of lyrical points deft and unshowy, his accent still spreadably thick. The only thing I can say against this record is that it feels like Roberts is reaching for things he knows are within his and his buddies’ collective grasp, which feels likes like a slight comedown after a career peak on which he outdid himself and everyone else playing the same game.

It’s lonely at the top. Bill Meyer

Jeffrey Roden

Bridge to the Other Place The Big Tree CD

Most solo instrumental recordings either revel in “extended techniques,” i.e., stretching the instrument’s physical limitations, or showcase the player’s chops. Bridge to the Other Place does neither. Roden’s new recording for solo electric bass is not quite the sound of one hand clapping, but it’s definitely a close sonic equivalent. The only other electric bassist I’ve heard who similarly inhabits the instrument is Steve Swallow, with his gorgeous, silky tone.

But Swallow’s approach is always jazz-oriented, whereas Roden favors simple, unadorned melodies (or just hints of melodies) with no appreciable development—all at slow tempos with only a faint suggestion of pulse.

What Roden delivers on this CD— and it may or may not be enough, depending upon musical tastes and mood—are 25 miniatures played with impeccable touch and prolonged sustain. To the extent that he evokes any tradition at all, it would be the piano music of Eric Satie. But there is also a Zen-like focus on simplicity and being “in the moment.” In fact, the listener’s ear may adjust after a time, in which case Roden’s small musical gestures begin to take on heightened musical

significance. And the other tradition evoked by Roden is Japanese classical koto—very austere and deliberate, using silence, nuance and the occasional unexpectedly astringent chord. Bridge to the Other Place is truly an exercise in listening, with its own unique rewards. Bill Tilland

Jack Rose with D. Charles Speer & The Helix Ragged and Right Thrill Jockey 12" EP

As the ’60s wound down, Link Wray noted the proliferation of rock and rollers trying on the accoutrements of what we now call roots rock, adding country and gospel stylings to their playing, salt of the earth sentiments to their lyrics, and group shots that looked like frontier daguerreotypes to their album covers. Although he was known mainly for carving the Rosetta Stone of bad-ass instrumental guitar rock, “Rumble,” the son of dirt-poor Shawnee preachers had grown up with all of that stuff and it was in his blood. In the early ’70s he joined up with drummer/producer Steve Verroca and keyboardist/singer Bobby Howard, a.k.a. Mordicai Jones, and showed ’em how it was done on three LPs currently collected on the double CD Wray’s Three Track Shack.

In 2008 that collection became the soundtrack for a joint tour by acoustic guitarist Jack Rose and D. Charles Speer & The Helix. At tour’s end they all pulled into their favorite studio, Black Dirt, opened a bottle of bourbon and ripped through four songs inspired by the loose vibe and straight-talking spirit of Three Track Shack. Rose returned to the electric guitar, an instrument he’d abandoned half a decade earlier, and contributed Telecaster and lap steel to three songs and one instrumental. Despite the billing, this is really The Helix’s set; the ensemble sound is pretty close to their last album Distillation. Singer Dave Shurford’s doleful baritone is just right for the regret-laden “Prison Song.” He performs “In the Pines” much as Wray did, subverting its broken-hearted lyric with the jubilation of a bunch of guys having a blast playing together. That thrill is palpable throughout, especially when

Rose, fellow guitarist Marc Orleans, and pianist Hans Chew trade licks on “Pines’” coda and a no-brakes blast through Rose’s “Linden Avenue Stomp.” Ragged and Right is a lot of fun, but it would probably be a mere curio if Rose hadn’t died of a heart attack last December. Now it’s his final release and a tantalizing hint at roads he might or might not have traveled given more time. Bill Meyer

Ned Rothenberg

Ryu Nashi / No School Tzadik CD

Quintet for Clarinet and Strings Tzadik CD

From the instrumental ambitions of his early solo improvisations to his genre-crossing experiments with pulse—in everything from his funkedup Double Band to his strings project Powerlines—Ned Rothenberg has always pursued music that isn’t so much between genre as interested in where genres melt into one another.

His interest in shakuhachi goes back to his earliest recordings for Parachute, three decades ago, and it’s nice to see some of his recent compositions for the instrument collected on Ryu Nashi. There is no cheap exoticism or cultural piracy in his work, but always a deep respect for the instrument’s musical history and its role in specific ritual settings. And of course, the distinctive timbre is central to each of these captivating pieces.

While Rothenberg isn’t the sole player here—Ralph Samuelson and Riley Lee also contribute shakuhachi, while Stephanie Griffin plays viola on one track and Yoko Hiraoka sings and plays shamisen on a pair—it is his conception of the instrument’s range that shapes the music. Amidst the general air of calm there are subtle growls and moments of tension. And of course the elastic pitch so central to shakuhachi playing is a central aspect of its attraction for the composer. The mood is deeply mournful on “Dan No Tabi,” the most compositionally detailed of these pieces, with the viola’s overtones merging seamlessly with the oscillating wood and air. Over the piece’s length, an ever-evolving rhythmic landscape takes shape, moving in and out of the foreground

even as Griffin and Lee continue to fold in texture. But perhaps the disc’s finest moment is “Shadow Detail,” a chance to hear how Rothenberg unaccompanied on the shakuhachi can approach the sublime.

The more conventional chamber instrumentation on Quintet for Clarinet and Strings suits Rothenberg quite well, but isn’t quite as sonically interesting. The dense pieces are structurally fascinating, though, comprising bitty fragments of melody, brief scherzos, occasionally blooming harmonies, and every so often a feature for clarinet multiphonics. In its ambition, this is the kin of one of those old Arcado records (think specifically of their meeting with Louis Sclavis and clarinets). The long “Terrace and Fold” takes a while to gain steam, but when a pizzicato pulse bubbles up, the music grows quite exciting. Its second section contains a beautifully mournful passage, sounding for a while like the Masada String Trio until its harmonies pile up so densely that it’s as if the piece is on the verge of breaking down. As it cranks along like an old calliope, a beautiful clarinet call dissipates the clusters once more.

At length, the piece emerges from cloudlike tonal shapes to settle into a subtle, quiet oscillation, a spectralist sheen of overtones that sounds like rubbed glass and sine waves.

“Interleaving” seems to emerge from Rothenberg’s writing for strings as far back as the Powerlines group, where all instruments are treated as sources of rhythmic momentum. It’s a heady effect, especially when Rothenberg digs into some bass clarinet circular breathing amidst a singing upper-register violin line that coils upward like a theremin. The melancholic “Finale” occasionally offers up playful or biting fragments, a compositional reticence that finds a kind of power in possibility, in what’s left unsaid. Jason Bivins

Archie Shepp and the New York Contemporary Five

Archie Shepp and the New York Contemporary Five Delmark CD

One, two three: In the opening seconds of this all-star live recording from 1963, Archie Shepp, Don Cherry

Alasdair Roberts & Friends

Too Long in This Condition Drag City CD / LP / download

On his last two records Spoils and The Wyrd Meme, Glaswegian singerguitarist Alasdair Roberts reconciled Scottish balladry with modern instrumentation and demonstrated an idiosyncratic but immaculate command of language. It’s lonesome work, re-imagining a centuries-old tradition in contemporary terms, so you can’t blame the guy for wanting to ease up a bit the next time out; Too Long in This Condition is essentially an outing with his pals. It is Roberts’ first album since he disbanded Appendix Out nine years ago to credit other participants up front, and the nomenclature is justified by the prominence given to the players.

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and John Tcichai thrust their horns to the sky with a clarion “all-for-one” fanfare. That’s the spirit! Tenor man Shepp is the nominal leader, but this is a collective, a super-group of new-thing firecrackers at full 1963 power, and they go off big-time when J. C. Moses hurls them on a hot grill of drums. (This is Volume One of a two-part set originally released on the Sonet Label.) When it comes to sheer presence, Don Cherry is first among equals, and his erstwhile partner Ornette Coleman is the off-screen avatar. Most of the tracks are straight out of Coleman’s happy-jitters bag, with Tchicai deftly dabbing the alto sauce. It’s grand fun to hear Shepp bring his Ben Webster heft and bigribbed humor to the Coleman sound, manhandling the mercurial Cherry as a bear would wrestle an otter. In the collective spirit, there’s a lot of congenial comping and front-line give-and-take. The pace slows for “The Funeral,” in which Shepp’s deep questions float over Don Moore’s bass and Moses’ insistent toms. Monk is heard from, too, in a boozy stagger through “Crepuscule with Nellie” and the disc’s melancholy closer, Tchicai’s “Mik.” On the head of “Mik,” Shepp, Cherry and Tcichai jump from distantsounding chords to impossible swirls of Monk at his most intricate. They make it sound as easy as taking a slow drag from a cigarette and tapping off the ash. Lawrence Cosentino

Sean Smith Eternal

Strange Attractors CD / dowload

Various Artists

Beyond Berkeley Guitar Tompkins Square CD / LP / download

Berkeley, California holds a special place in the hearts of fingerpickers as the one-time base for American Primitive guitarist John Fahey and his Takoma imprint. As part of Tompkins Square Records’ mission to advance solo acoustic guitar practice and documentation into the now, the label tapped Bay Area resident Sean Smith to anthologize the current scene, which resulted in the 2005 release Berkeley Guitar. Beyond Berkeley Guitar is Smith’s follow-up to that volume. Property values being what they are, most of the current crop now lives in Oakland, but why worry about the geography? More notable differences from its predecessor involve organization and content; where Berkeley Guitar featured multiple tunes by just three players, this one has seven by seven, with Smith the only holdover from the first installment. But no one is rocking the boat, stylistically speaking. No matter how much the bios emphasize the performers’ early engagements with punk or classical music, each track here involves one man or woman playing a tune that you can imagine an aspiring Takoma signee tendering to Fahey with knocking knees 35 years ago. If you think there’s too much acoustic guitar music around these days, this record won’t change your mind, but if you’re already on board the train, it’s a pretty swell trip. Aaron Sheppard’s “The Transmigration of the Old West” is as distilled and eloquent as anything on Glenn Jones’ solo albums. It’s a de-

light to hear Lucas Boilon repeatedly escape the pile-up that his fingers court, and Ava Mendoza puts a pleasingly woozy spin on pre-bop jazz and post-Chet Atkins country picking. But it’s Smith who brings the ambition; his melodic variations throughout the 11-minute “Ourselves When We Are Real” are sufficiently elegant that you might forget that he’s playing guitar, so involving is the music.

Smith releases his own records in private micro-pressings that don’t stick around for long. So if you’re in the know, you might already have a vinyl copy of the 2007 recording Eternal in its letter-pressed sleeve, but if you’re late for that bus, Strange Attractors’ CD version adheres to a schedule that’s easier to catch. Out from behind the Berkeley Guitar aegis, he reveals himself to be a composer of broad tastes and a capable arranger who knows how to profitably change things up with extra players and instruments. He also knows his roots and keeps up with his peers. With its modal progression and Middle Eastern-tinged percussion, “Topinambour” sounds very much like a Sandy Bull tribute, never mind that it’s credited to George Cromarty, and “Prompter of Conscience” explores the same quasi-Hindustani zone that lured Jack Rose around the time of Kensington Blues. Smith’s cover of Steve Mann’s “Holly” stretches past Primitive Guitar parameters with its bipolar swings between melancholy and flailing electric noise, but the latter passages feel overwrought.

A funereal procession called “The Real” more successfully combines rock instrumentation with tart stringtugging. Not everything works, but it’s worth hearing for the way it pushes the music ahead. Bill Meyer

So Percussion Matmos Treasure State Cantaloupe CD

If a percussion troupe specializing in contemporary composition and a duo specializing in experimental electronica can get along this well, why can’t the rest of the world?

Perhaps because both teams have flexible, inclusive, and fanciful views of sound-as-music and organizing said sound into music. So Percussion deal with items that are struck, tapped, and rubbed; Matmos with keyboards, laptop computers, samples, and assorted found objects (including water and its containers). Both have rhythm-inspired approaches—this set isn’t some pedantic “exploration” of sound artistry. Treasure State (recorded in Montana) consists of eight compositions, each exploring (though not in any sort of free-for-all fashion) patterns of rhythm channeled into tunefulness. Some of State evokes the 1950s/early ’60s quasi-Polynesian faux-exotica of Martin Denny and Les Baxter, albeit on the fringes of The Twilight Zone. Other junctures evoke Lou Harrison’s Pacific Rim, gamelan-influenced compositions and, imagine if you will, Steve Reich in a light-hearted, night-on-the-town mindset. There’s nothing somber or academic about State, which might lead some terminally highbrow types to believe there’s little of worth here—

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their loss. I experienced Matmos and So Percussion live. This disc, like that performance, is great fun. And in the words of TV cop Baretta, “Dat’s the name o’ that tune.” Mark Keresman

Aki Takase

A Week Went By Psi CD

Whatever setting pianist Aki Takase works in, she seems to approach it without a game plan. On this album she works in primarily in a trio with bassist John Edwards and drummer Tony Levin, but also in a quartet with saxophonist John Tchicai joining them, and as an unaccompanied soloist. And there’s no formula common to any of the different parts; each unfolds and develops in its own way, held together only by the artistry, wits, and daring of the musicians involved. “Surface Tension” pulsates over dispersed rhythms, Takase’s weighty notes punctuating the ebb and flow of the music. The title track begins with timbral explorations, the tension building until the trio falls into a stomping beat that they take great delight in alternately defining, disguising, and straying from. On “57577,” Takase sometimes jumps from one idea to another with no connecting development; at other times, she develops closely argued series of phrases in composerly fashion. Tchicai joins the trio on alto for “Just Drop In,” and provides a serene intensity for the others to embellish and work against. Takase is an especially good foil for the saxophonist, filling in the spaces around his phrases, disrupting them, developing motifs in parallel, and even breaking into a distorted stride accompaniment at one point. The two solo tracks are just as unpredictable as the rest, with “Yumatamago” bringing everything to a hauntingly beautiful conclusion.

Ed Hazell

Ali Farka Toure Toumani Diabate Ali and Toumani Nonesuch CD

The career path of Ali Ibrahim Farka Toure is one of the great stories of modern African music. Starting as a farmer from Niafunke in the Timbuktu region of Northern Mali, with his one-stringed guitar known as a jurkel and a one-stringed fiddle known as a njark, he moved to guitar and to the electric guitar, and then by the ’90s to the world stage, earning Grammys for his collaborations with Ry Cooder and the kora master and griot Toumani Diabate. Along the way he became mayor of his home village, drew worldwide attention to the West African origins of the blues, launched his son Vieux Farka Toure as the next generation to carry on this whole legacy, and then passed away in 2006. The overwhelming reception of Toure’s first collaboration with Diabate, In the Heart of the Moon (2005), led them back into the studio a second time. In the liner notes to the present release Diabate says: “I thought we had more to do. My idea was that he and I create one more album, for our pleasure first of all... and for the pleasure of those who would listen.” Toure was not in good

health during the recording, but the duo pushed through to completion. And the result is the 11 pristine tracks that make up Ali and Toumani, compositions and improvisations weaving together kora and guitar, with percussion and vocals by Vieux and several members of his band.

An especially nice touch is producer Nick Gold’s idea of including Cuban bass legend Cachaito on five tracks.

Most of the songs here are drawn from the Mande and Peul traditions, and there’s an undeniable chamber music quality in the stately blend of the stringed instruments and the slow, loping pace of the rhythm. The atmosphere of this music is serene and meditative, but not somber. Knowing as we do now that Ali Farka Toure’s life would end less than a year after this recording was made lends an unbelievable poignancy to the musical grace and delicacy documented here.

Diabate again: “I didn’t know whether it was I who was going to die before Ali, or it was Ali who was going to die before me. If he or I departed this life, I wanted there to be something left behind which our families could listen to and say, ‘Ah, there you are!’ Ali’s not here physically, but we can carry on listening to him.” Alan Waters

is a showcase for his loosely swinging lyricism (with a dash of bossa groove).

The quintet with Mats Gustafsson and François Houle never quite hits the mark, as the five jump their way across an episodic improvisation. The two numbers with Taylor Ho Bynum are particular winners: on the first, his burred cornet dances with Braam’s piano over de Joode’s grumbling arco and Vatcher’s sizzling pulse; on the second, he plays trumpbone, the pointillistic collective improvisation slowly cranking up to a raging free-blues vamp. Peter van Bergen is too rarely heard from these days, and the buzzing, prickly abstractions of “Q03” are nicely offset by the fractured Nancarrow-esque strut of “Q01,” with some particularly torrid tenor playing. Things wrap up with a bracing free improv with Paul Dunmall on bagpipes and soprano. Not a bad celebration of two decades of music making. Michael Rosenstein

Trio Braam DeJoode Vatcher

Ametsub

Bik Bent Braam CD x 2

Mille Plateaux CD

Various

Clicks and Cuts Five: Paradigm Shift Mille Plateaux CD

Kabutogani Bektop

Mille Plateaux CD

Quartet

The Nothings of the North

Dutch pianist Michiel Braam is a structuralist with a wry wit, whether composing for his long-running trio with Wilbert de Joode and Michael Vatcher or his large ensemble Bik Bent Braam. To celebrate the trio’s 20th anniversary, they embarked on a tour that took them from their home base in Amsterdam to Vancouver, New Haven, the Akbank Festival in Istanbul, and points in between. On each stop, they invited a range of guests, provided them with pieces from Braam’s “Q-book” of compositions to choose from, rehearsed a bit, and then dove in.

The trio is in top form throughout, working their way through his angular constructions with bows to everything from Ellington to Monk to blues stomp without sounding the least bit derivative. The pieces with guests cover a broad gamut while staying true to Braam’s musical vision.

The four cuts with Michael Moore feature his sinuous alto sax and clarinet playing: “Q14,” for instance,

Remember when electronica was cutting edge? Maybe you do, maybe you don’t; maybe you never cared.

For those of us who did care, though, the rise and rise (and eventual bankruptcy) of Achim Szepanski’s Mille Plateaux—the pre-eminent German electronica label, inspired by philosophers and ontological anarchists Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari—gave plenty of food for thought. Prising a Deleuzoguattarian praxis from the crucible of the laptop, mincing electroacoustics, techno, house, DSP and more into music that was by turns rigorously academic, unsettlingly beautiful and formally severe, the label’s catalogue (from the ‘90s to early ‘00s) was a minefield of contradictory impulses and compelling listening.

Fast forward to 2010, and Marcus Gabler has taken the name and restarted Mille Plateaux as... well, another electronica imprint. Which is all well and good, I suppose— electronica is established enough to

feed off its own until the electricity stops. But about seven or eight tracks into Clicks and Cuts Five: Paradigm Shift (that subtitle alone is tellingly cheesy), I couldn’t help but wonder two things... ‘Why?,’ and, ‘so what?’

The overriding tenor of these tracks is that of a polite, unthreatening gloss of glitches, ghostly drones, trickling rhythms, and the occasional third-rate Autechre-ish mindspasm (thank you, Iosdb and Manathol). If the results are sometimes pleasant as background music, they still serve to remind you of earlier, better Mille Plateaux artists.

For example, snd, please meet your lesser child, Marow, whose “e.coli” sounds like snd’s stdio album without the rigor, the punch, and the dryness.

Of the artist full-lengths, Kabutogani’s Bektop has a certain charm.

Sculpted from sine-waves, hissing, grainy noises, the buzzes of electrical circuits, and the rasps and spits of digital rhythm-boxes, its clinical air recalls lesser stops in the Raster-Noton catalog. Indeed, the new Mille Plateaux has the air of a Raster-Noton tribute, as though the latter has sculpted the modern paradigm for how to make compelling electronic music. Which is partly true, though the Raster-Noton aesthetic is so singular, you can tell their lesser siblings from a mile away.

Ametsub’s The Nothings of the North, similarly, has some good moments—the opening trio of songs reminds me slightly of Herbert’s house productions, with glinting piano refrains and deep chordal movement jump-cutting between flickering glitch rhythms. The album doesn’t really move too far beyond that, and it lacks Herbert’s touch with song craft, but it’s perfectly enjoyable to listen to, if a little underwhelming.

As Noel Fielding once said in an episode of The Mighty Boosh, ‘it’s all about context.’ Some of the tracks on each of these discs are fairly good—I dutifully made it through all three CDs several times, without my fingers straying too close to the eject button, which must say something.

But there’s barely a note on any of these discs that would have sat (un) comfortably alongside the liminal, questing, self-interrogating computer music of the Mille Plateaux ‘family’ at its finest, during the nineties. To talk in Deleuze-speak for a moment, it’s the ultimate re-territorialization of the fluxed up, nomadic noises that Achim Szepanski and the original Mille Plateaux crew essayed on compilations like the Modulation and Transforma-

tion series. (Indeed, the original Clicks and Cuts series was the closest Mille Plateaux ever got to wallpaper, cafe culture electronica.) I’d like to hear the next batch of releases, to see where they go from here—maybe they’re still finding their feet, and to be honest, old loves die hard. Jon Dale

Various

Ethnic Minority Music of Northwest Xinjiang, China Sublime Frequencies CD

Xinjiang, also known as East Turkestan, which stretches from Mongolia to Afghanistan and is currently only 5% Han Chinese, is China’s largest province. Though the Han are the largest minority group in the area, most people are Kazakh, Uyghur, Mongol, Huis or Kirgiz. Many of these ethnic groups come from a tradition of nomadic pastoralists, and the instruments they play, as well as the tunes, are no doubt part of that tradition, never mind that the Han have been pushing Kazakhs over the border into Kazakhstan for the past 18 years or so, or that the Uyghurs rioted last year over some appalling factory conditions that resulted from the Han’s increasingly industrialization of the region. In fact, Laurent Jeanneau, who was in the region not only to record musicians but to get married to a woman from Xinjiang, endured endless hassles as the region succumbed to military paranoia and the corruption that comes with it.

Recorded in the town of Ili, near the Kazakhstan border, the CD features almost exclusively solo traditional tunes played by all the above-mentioned ethnic groups save the Huis.

And like the many other compilations of traditional Central Asian music found on labels such as Topic, Yazoo, and Smithsonian Folkways, this collection features dombra and komuz players, plus a variety of other plucked and bowed instruments. Unlike much of the label’s typical field work, including Jeanneau’s Ethnic Minority Music compilations from Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam, these recordings sound particularly professional. They all seem to have been taped in settings where ambient noise is minimal.

Furthermore, the liners include the names of the players, where they’re from and a brief description of their instruments, taking SF closer to other ethnic music labels’ more traditional documentary approach. Yet, no matter how informative the disc is, it’s

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heavy rock riffs as indebted to ZZ Top as Led Zeppelin, and some stuff that’s just so intensely satisfying even on first listen that you can only call it pop. Seven bands get two tracks on this compilation. One of them, Mourning Sun, is responsible for my favorite cut on the disc: “Where’s Love Gone Today.” It starts with a cowbell, acoustic guitar strumming and some of the catchiest, most delectable vocals I’ve ever heard. A lot of what makes the song great is what makes a bunch of these songs shine: group vocals. Loud, semi-fuzzy electric guitar riffs that embed themselves in your ears and desires mark several songs, like the Lowlands Studio Band’s “Trash One” and Sassy’s “Take a Look at Your Friends.” That Parsons/Harris touch is undeniable on “Everyday Is Saturday” by Sage and “Dream Away” by Hope, and the comparison rings even truer because the songs by these totally unknown musicians are just as beautiful and memorable as anything on GP or Grievous Angel. Gorgeous country-rock. The best lyric from any of the tunes on here is on Boot Hill’s “No Control,” when the vocalist says “Get yer shotgun, drop yer flute”— especially because, two minutes later, there is a flute duet that picks up steam until the superbly heavy bass and guitar return. It’s like a Deep Purple or Sabbath solo melting in the humid lowcountry. While some records take some time before you become addicted to the songs, even on the first run-through of this comp I found multiple cuts that stuck right in my heart, and after a

few listens I was hooked on them all.

Andrew Choate

Jana Winderen Energy Field Touch CD

Thomas Tilly Cables & Signs Fissur CD

If you’ll allow me to paraphrase Capt.

James Kirk (while correcting his split infinitive), there might be one final musical frontier left, enticing field recorders to go boldly where no man has gone before. Not outer space, which is still fairly cost-prohibitive, but underwater.

Recordings from the depths are nothing new, of course. In the 1970s, the Wildlife Conservation Society’s LP Songs of the Humpback Whale moved 10 million copies and was reprinted as a flexi-disc in National Geographic. But underwater recordings have usually been aimed at documenting the language of a particular species. If the humpback whale was a soloist, in other words, than such documentarians as Jana Winderen and Thomas Tilly are more Various interested in making room recordings.

Lone Star Lowlands Technology, no doubt, has a lot to Numero Group CD / LP do with how much information can be culled from sound waves moving Mining the tapes of the almost-forthrough water. Winderen’s rig ingotten Lowlands Recording Studio cludes 8011 DPA hydrophones, DPA in Beaumont, Texas, the Numero 4060 omni mics, a Telinga parabolic Group uncovered a remarkable reflector mic and a Sound Devices survey of the American and British 744T digital hard disk recorder, a sonic zeitgeist of the early ’70s: the portable studio that would have been music includes Gram Parsons/Emmyunthinkable 40 years ago. The recordlou Harris-style country-rock tunes, ings collected on Energy Field were made in the Barents Sea north of her native Norway, deep within crevasses in glaciers, in fjords and in the open sea. What she finds there is a sonically busy environment (although while editing and layering tracks she no doubt opted against quiet moments).

Distant rumbles and low drones are interrupted by smaller, seemingly nearer, clicks and chirps. Sometimes the soundscape makes it clear we are above surface, but more often it’s impossible to tell. Mystifying.

Even compared to the otherworldly mysteries of Winderen’s northern world, Thomas Tilly’s Cables & Signs is downright perplexing. Unlike Winderen’s, Tilly’s is a captive environment. His recordings were made in the moat of a castle in the west of France, and while recording he discovered sounds that were modulated by the variations in sunlight on the water’s surface. He writes in a brief liner note that he was unable to identify the species responsible, but that they were coming from some species of insects and/or aquatic plant. Tilly doesn’t collage his sounds or alter them except to apply some equalization, and his aural fields are fairly chaotic. There’s no end of buzzes, caws and clicks of variable intensity, often regulated, sometimes abrupt, occasionally speeding or slowing in maddening ways. And again unlike Winderen’s recordings, this French moat barely feels organic. It has the variegated feel of a menagerie, only one made up of woodblocks, castanets, maracas and whistles.

What’s most surprising about both discs, however, is not how alien they sound but how familiar, even terres78 | SIGNAL to NOISE #59 WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM

SOUNDWATCH

trial. Noises the can be read as wind and crows cycle through Winderen’s recordings, and bugs and woodpeckers in Tilly’s. They are, in other words, evocative. We don’t know what it is we’re hearing, but we can’t help but picture something. Kurt Gottschalk

Kurt Gottschalk turns on and tunes in for the season’s blockbuster video releases.

Nate Wooley & Paul Lytton Creak Above 33 Psi CD

Nate Wooley

Trumpet /Amplifier Smeralinda-Rima LP

Trumpeter Nate Wooley and percussionist Paul Lytton spend most of Creak Above 33 looking for ways to work together, and happily, they never seem to settle on a definitive arrangement. Every individual gesture they make, every relationship they establish between them is questioned, discarded or gradually morphed into something else. Sometimes they like stark incongruities—the sounds of a koto and windshield wipers; a mosquito and a water faucet dripping.

More often than not, they employ sounds—many of them—without an identifiable natural or manmade inspiration, sounds that shock with their alien timbres. Sometimes you hear simultaneous unrelated events, sometimes the sound is so unified it’s impossible to distinguish whether one or two people are playing. The music’s distinctive qualities also arise from the duo’s use of electronics. The electronically processed sounds are not merely atmospherics or background, but fully integrated sonic resources that greatly expand what they can play. There are echoes of jazz, particularly Miles Davis and Bill Dixon, of John Cage and a couple generations of European improvisation, but clearly they are working beyond any one idiom or style. The restlessness and ambiguity of the music is leavened with a sense of play, reflected in titles like “The Gentle Sturgeon” or “Filtering the Fogweed.” There’s something oddly harmonious about the way these unconventional sounds co-exist and interact. Ed Hazell A small-run Belgian LP presents Wooley in two different solo settings.

Side one is simply titled “Trumpet” and features purely acoustic playing.

Wooley’s vocabulary is as challenging as always, a mix of high-pitched kisses, whistles and whines punctuated by clicks, huffs, and deep chatter.

The second movement begins with long, grizzled accretions and split tones that recall the scrapes of an electric violin (cue C. Spencer Yeh), or Albert Mangelsdorff at his most dangerous. Wooley isn’t necessarily concerned with recasting the sound of the trumpet—his sounds are physical but one often barely senses that they’re emanating from a brass instrument. Rather, these forthright, direct and shocking sounds create their own context. “Amplifier” is a feedback piece par excellence, breath, microphone and amp coming together in a tense and violent mélange of waves, shrieks, and stutters, and the piece’s harrowing first section would make Rudolph Grey proud. As long tones play out, micro-sounds pile into phantom phrases in this incredibly singular environment. Clifford Allen

GlennTudor Jones and Rose David and Jack Bandoneon

courtesy Strange Attractors

the music that matters, and is this set ever stunning. On “Margul,” young Uyghur musician Pa Hat strums a metal-stringed tambur, sneaking around in an ominous minor register.

Kur Ban, another Uyghur, with only a one-stringed, bowed satar, dives into a free-metered piece so exquisite, peaceful and heartbreaking it seems to erase the tensions rampant in modern Xianjiang. Elsewhere, the disc features Kirghiz komuz players, thrashing as intensely as clawhammer banjo player Hobart Smith or deliberately coaxing harmonics from these three-stringed, long-necked lutes. It’s as good a collection of Central Asian traditional music as any, made even more impressive by the fact that it’s from over the border and into China.

As such, it represents cultures that the presence of the Han has altered irreparably, their influence dominating a large swath of a vast country more geographically and ethnically diverse than most people realize. Musically, it provides links to everything from Persian maqam to the sympatheticstring-enhanced drones of classical India. Bruce Miller

Although they were 30 years apart in age, the guitarist Jack Rose seems to have suffered a similar career fate as the great John Fahey. Too structured for the avant crowd, too nebulous for bluegrass fans and a little too traditional for the freak folk scene, they both worked in relative obscurity playing what should be embraced as Great American Music. Rose’s story was made all the more tragic, however, by his death in 2009 at a mere 38 years of age. With him gone, one can only hope the reputation lives on, which the DVD The Things We Used to Do (Strange Attractors) will no doubt assist. The generous 2+ hour playing time is divided between live and private concert footage by Rose and fellow traveler Glenn Jones (who with his band Cul de Sac recorded with Fahey). There’s a brief seven minutes of Rose and Jones playing together and otherwise each player gets two solo sets, one recorded at a Brooklyn loft and the other at the theater Plays and Players in Philadelphia. The camerawork is wonderful throughout, the three-camera shoot offering artistic framing and occasional shots close enough that Rose’s transparent thumb pick or the two strings Jones leaves off his 12-string are readily apparent. The DVD concludes with a 30-minute interview with both musicians conducted by Bryon Coley.

As strong and perhaps misunderstood of figures in Americana as Rose and Jones are, Ian Dury might be equally misfiled in British song and wit, at least here in the New World. Ian Dury: Rare and Unseen (Wienerworld) depicts the songwriter (who died in 2000 at the age of 57) as more a part of the lineage of British comedic song than the 1970s “new wave” that

included his labelmates Elvis Costello and Nick Lowe. Packed with live footage and old television interviews, the 75-minute documentary shows Dury as a dogged commoner uninterested in fame and, in particular, in making it in America. Without voice-over or chronological timeline, the film nicely avoids overly fixating on Dury’s childhood polio, related disabilities and eventual death from liver cancer. Instead, Dury is, in a sense, able to tell his own story, from his pre-Blockheads band Kilburn & the High Roads to coming to terms his handicap later in life appearing on chat shows as a disability advocate.

Plus, of course, “Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick” and “Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll,” as well as a Mingus recitation.

Some great chunks of forgotten Downtown are to be found in Ericka Beckman’s documentary 135 Grand Street 1979 (Soul Jazz). It ups the ante on roughness to a glorious DIY, with a sequence of No Wave-styled bands playing a couple songs each in the same crowded corner of a Chinatown loft. The film opens with two sharp-edged cuts by Glenn Branca’s Theoretical Girls before moving into the fantastically angular female band Ut. The 52-minute film also includes the outre surf pop of A Band, a rhythm guitar workout by Rhys Chatham (with A Band’s Wharton Tiers on drums), plus The Static, Youth in Asia and others. The collection of performances carries the feel that they knew they were on to something, even if they didn’t know when there might be an audience for it.

At the other end of the spectacle spectrum is 77 Boa Drum (Thrill Jockey), a documentary about the Boredoms’ July 7, 2007 concert in

Brooklyn with 77 drummers — the first of a series of numerological percussion shows the band has taken on (08/08/08 with 88 drummers; 09/09/09 with, well, nine anyway). The filmmakers made the odd choice of not presenting the piece uninterrupted, although there’s no way the swirling electro-psychedelia could have been recreated in a recording. Instead they intercut the performance with rehearsal footage and interviews (including a brief conversation with frontman shaman Eye). There’s a bit of “wish you were here” to it, unless you were, in which case it’s a great souvenir. But if not, it’s still a vibrant film about an exercise in hugeness. Call it “BORE on a Summer’s Day.” The hugeness isn’t in numbers but in epicness in Aaron Aites and Audrey Ewell’s Until the Light Takes Us, which (along with Michael Moynihan and Didrik Søderlind’s book Lords of Chaos: The Bloody Rise of the Satanic Metal Underground) is the most dedicated and even-handed accounting of the extreme metal culture out there.

Using a mix of news footage and new interviews, the filmmakers neither pull nor throw punches in telling a loaded story filled with suicide, arson and bleak music. Aites and Ewell actually moved to Norway to make the film, and got such players as Fenriz, Count Grishnackh, Hellhammer, Frost, Abbath, Demonaz, Bjarne Melgaard and Harmony Korine to tell the complex and sometimes conflicting story. But the biggest contribution the directors have made is to ensure that the film isn’t exclusionary: unlike many attempts to tell the dark tale, nonfans interested in the musicology, sociology, or just the phenomenology or gossip of the black metal scene won’t feel left out. Until the Light Takes Us is excellent simply as a piece of filmmaking.

It’s hard to say just what Henry Gwiazda’s work is, but it would seem to be certain to please voyeurs with a thing for animation. The sorts of things that happen in Gwiazda’s animations are: a streetlight flickers, a woman looks out a window, a car drives past, a man stands in the street.

All without pretense of connectivity; There are no storylines here. Gwiazda’s previous DVD for Innova, She’s Walking, was a more domestic affair, where the new Claudia and Paul is about street life, to the extent that it’s about anything. But in a larger sense what both projects are about is attention to detail. Shadows and light shift as the perspective changes. Each joint moves and every space is filled. The audio field pans widely as a car passes by or a neighbor practices electric guitar. It’s an unusual work, simple and perfectly executed.

Not much happens in Bob Levis and Bill Desloge’s 1968 movie Gold either, although it’s not for lack of trying. The movie was made over a month’s time in the woods, no doubt with a healthy stash, and involves a tribe of nature children fighting for their right to not wear clothes, or something, against a sheriff who seems to be from the Old West. (Spoiler alert: the sheriff ends up going nudist and the hippies prevail.) Needless to say it’s a big goof with more than one mud bath, but it also includes an appearance by the MC5 and a title song by Ramblin’ Jack Elliot.

The movie wasn’t screened until 1972, and only then in England. It’s a pretty hilarious moment in time, frozen and now thawed and digitized. ✹

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CONTINENTAL RIFFS Peter Margasak travels the world in search of subversive sounds.

Despite making some terrific music over the last in Colombia 1975-91 (Soundway) captures more decade, Brazil’s Seu Jorge remains best known modern manifestations of such dynamic stylistic around these parts as the seaman who sang David fusions. The collection focuses on the effect of picos, Bowie songs in Wes Anderson’s The Life Aquatic. the DJ sound systems that emerged in the late ’50s Hopefully that will change with his stunning new and reached critical mass in the early ’70s, particularly album Seu Jorge and Almaz (Now-Again), recorded among black populations. DJs sought out records with a killer group including guitarist Lucio Maia and from Africa and the Caribbean and over time local drummer Pupillo (both from manguebeat pioneers musicians brilliantly adapted highlife, Afrobeat, soukNação Zumbi) and bassist Antonio Pinto. All twelve ous, merengue, and compas to local traditions, in songs are covers, including some unlikely western turn stumbling upon an incredibly original and excittunes like Kraftwerk’s “The Model” and Michael ing new sound known as champeta. It’s impossible Jackson’s “Rock with You,” along with a slew of Brazilto accurately convey the full range covered here, but ian gems by the likes of Jorge Ben, Tim Maia, and this music has it all: psychedelic guitars, passionately Nelson Cavaquinho. Almaz’s nimble, inventive archanted call-and-response vocals, fat funk bass, and rangements vibrantly remake the tunes using artfully dense, propulsive polyrhythms. Many of the records deployed traces of dub, samba-rock, and soul. Jorge were deliberately made for a new audience hungry presides over the performances commandingly, for African sounds—vallenato king Lisandro Meza wielding his deep rasp with great rhythmic authority turns to a howling, rustic strain of Afrobeat on the that touches on the originals while carving out new intensely funky “Shacalao,” while the group Wganda space. One of the year’s best regardless of genre.

Kenya (on three great tracks) was more or less a Since forming back in 1976, Cuba’s Sierra record-label creation, corralling some of the country’s Maestra have remained true believers in son, the finest cumbia musicians to put their spin on various decades-old bedrock of so much music across African styles, including the brilliant bandleader Julio Latin America, and the sound later reclaimed by “Fruko” Estrada. Palenque Palenque includes terrific the Buena Vista Social Club. The group has always notes by champeta expert Lucas Silva, yet as fascinatjuggled classic material with original tunes, and for ing as the story is, the music is just as compelling. its latest album Sonando Ya (World Village) the band The brilliant Malian singer and songwriter Salif sought out young Cuban composers to provide the Keita has had to deal with conflict and persecurepertoire—half torch-passing, half revitalization. The tion all of his life, as an African albino, but music has new pieces aren’t all son tunes, proper; there are clearly helped him transcend the strife. On his latest examples of fusion, changui, and country-style guaraalbum La Différence (Emarcy), he addresses his cha, but the band’s signature sound still glows with condition; as he sings on the title track, “I’m a black ebullient warmth and seductive grooves. The elegant man, my skin is white and I like it, it’s my difference polyrhythms support punchy trumpets, syncopated / I’m a white man, my blood is black, I love that, it’s patterns on acoustic guitar and tres, and typically the difference that’s beautiful.” The record is the excellent singing. Freshly minted compositions aside, third in a trilogy of acoustic-leaning work from the the music still sounds as old and classic as the hills. singer—a series that has witnessed him reinvigorate The Fania Records reissue program continues with his career after getting bogged-down in increasfurther label acquisitions. El “Ray” Criollo (Fania) by ingly torpid, over-produced crossover efforts—and it the great Ray Barretto comes from the formidable sympathetically frames his remarkable, soaring voice West Side Latino catalog, a gem from 1966 that in a delicate matrix of guitars, kora, n’goni, and hand came in the midst of the percussionist’s transformapercussion. Even the two tracks produced by Joe tion from fleeting boogaloo sensation to salsa dura Henry, which feature an American rhythm section, are juggernaut. There are still traces of the old flute-andperfectly pitched, their gently cascading arpeggios violin-driven charanga sound and a couple of overly and hypnotic grooves supporting Keita’s rippling sentimental ballads mar the proceedings, but for the gossamer cry. most part muscular brass, ferocious grooves, and the A new, eponymous release by Abdoulaye Traore, excellent singing of Willie Garcia get the job done. the latest from the fine Drag City imprint Yaala Yaala, The fact that an album this smoking is generally offers a very different side of Malian music. The considered one of Barretto’s lesser efforts speaks to album is actually a reissue of the first of Traore’s seven his power as one of salsa’s greatest bandleaders. cassette releases, but good luck tracking them down While salsa was taking hold on New York in the outside of his homeland. He’s a disciple of the great ’60s, cumbia was becoming the rage in Lima, Peru, Yoro Sidibe, another musician whose work has been where local musicians hijacked the rhythm and released by the label. This is classic, stripped-down applied it to local melodies to produce what’s now hunter’s music from the famed Wassoulou region— known as chicha. Although some previous releases known best for powerful female singers like Oumou on Barbès Records highlighted more consistent maSangare and Coumba Sidibe—driven by hypnotic terial, the sprawl of the music spread across two CDs grooves shaped by the singer on donso n’goni, a on Cumbia Beat Vol. 1 (Vampi Soul) is not without traditional kora-like instrument with a much lower its charms, even if many of the selections—recorded sound. On first blush Traore’s raw, keening voice and in 1966-76—transmit a cheesy vibe, a la Gershon elongated phrasing, to say nothing of the bass-heavy Kingsley’s “Popcorn.” The combination of fuzzed-out twang, suggest a connection to Gnawan music from surf guitars, Farfisa licks, and the irresistible, galloping Morocco, but Wassoulou music possesses its own cumbia rhythm (and occasional singing) sounds unrich heritage, and these eight gripping performances deniably dated here, but as a snapshot of a particular praise various aspects of the hunter’s life, from time and place the collection works well and, given acknowledging its dangers to celebrating its unique the right conditions, sure is pretty fun to blast loudly. skill sets. Traore’s gruff singing is answered in precise Cumbia, of course, was a product of culcall-and-response chants and spare hand percussion tural hybridization in Colombia, and the knockout frames the thick, heavy grooves with a steady pulse.

Palenque Palenque: Champeta Criolla & Afro Roots The third and final volume of Strut’s excellent Next 80 | SIGNAL to NOISE #59 WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM

Stop… Soweto series is called Giants, Ministers, and Makers: Jazz in South Africa 1963-1978, and the double CD provides a sprawling overview of some great jazz produced in the face of overwhelming oppression. At first glance some of the omissions are glaring; the great saxophonist Kippie Moeketsi isn’t featured with his best groups, there are no tracks by the equally important Blue Notes (although there are pieces by two of its members, Chris McGregor and Dudu Pukwana), and nothing from Abdullah Ibrahim.

But once the listener delves into these obscure riches, such quibbles seem minor. Many strains are included, from the funky jazz of Skyf to the soul jazz of Joy to the modal grooves of Mankunku Quartet to the free-ish post-bop of the Soul Jazzmen to the classic kwela-imbued grooves of the Heshoo Beshoo Group. Quality varies, but there’s an irrepressible sense of resistance, discovery, and joy that renders the issue moot.

Jazeera Nights is Sublime Frequencies’ third collection of songs culled from the voluminous cassette output of Syrian dabke singer Omar Souleyman. The lo-fi electronic beats and synthapproximations of traditional Arabic instrumentation have a range as limited as the singer’s gruff, low voice, but his presence can’t be underestimated.

While making his first American tour this past summer Souleyman wasn’t exactly a dynamic performer, but as with his vocal authority, he cut an impressive figure, strolling the stage with purpose, barking out hectoring singing as long-time sidekick Rizan Sa’id functioned as the all-electronic orchestra behind a bank of keyboards.

Hüsnü Senlendirici might be the most widely talented clarinetist in Turkey, but for most of his career he’s pushed his abundant talents into the commercial realm, suffocating his improvisation skills and breath-stopping virtuosity in placid arrangements and schlocky melodies that verge on smooth jazz. His new album Ege’nin Iki Yam (Doublemoon) finds him collaborating with Greece’s Trio Chios, who also seem to temper their talent with soft focus restraint. I can’t be certain since the liner notes are in Turkish, but most of the repertoire explores the shared heritage of Turkish and Greek music, including rembetika, and even if the performances are rather tempered, there’s a melancholy melodic richness that—combined with Senlendirici’s dolorous, gorgeously sculpted tone—ultimately transcends the schmaltz factor. Maybe one day the clarinetist will really let it rip, but until then this ain’t bad.

On her new album Zumra (World Village) the phenomenal Bosnian singer Amira is joined only by accordionist Merima Kljuco, but that limited tonal palette doesn’t prevent the duo from bringing startling creativity and heft to their interpretations of traditional sevdalinka tunes. The emotionally charged folk style serves a vaguely similar purpose as Portuguese fado or Cape Verdean mourna: conveying a sense of melancholy yearning for love. Most of the repertoire is traditionally sung by women, and Amira has emerged as one of the genre’s most dynamic young exponents. Kljuco generates an almost orchestral depth from his accordion on arrangements that freely adapt the conventional versions; in fact, his playing has an emotional impact on par with the singer’s. For her part Amira shapes the sorrowful melodies with dazzling clarity, bringing, alternately, a powerful sense of desire and mourning without ever resorting to bombast.✹ WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #59 | 81

Larry Cosentino examines modern-day manifestations of bop and beyond.

Bassist Charnett Moffett is virtuosic, eclectic, and eager to communicate, but sometimes he’s too good for his own good. There are times when Moffett’s graceful, studied steeplechases over carefully trimmed shrubs of swing, bluegrass, south Indian and classical music make me want to say, “Well played, sir.” Not so with his latest, Treasure (Motema), a tight fusion of craftsmanship, restlessness and fire that made me want to say, “Sweet Jesus, sir.” I’m not impressed with Treasure—I’m healed. To complement the varied hues of his acoustic and electric basses, Moffett draws exotic threads—Oran Etkin’s bass clarinet, Anjana Roy’s sitar—into a rich, tight sonic weave. On “The Celebration,” guest Stanley Jordan’s crisp guitar complements the outlaw snarl of the leader’s fretless electric bass. Moffett’s preparation and care are apparent as ever, but they don’t keep the music from gliding into new territory. Check the rear view mirror and you see miles of jazz history. “The Celebration” has the modal oscillation of “My Favorite Things” and “Swing Street” has distant echoes of “The Work Song,” but both are projected onto a more nuanced, varied landscape befitting the 21st century. Moffett’s chops on upright bass still make your jaw drop, but he puts real nourishment in your mouth while it’s slack. His solo track, “Country Blues,” is a curative stew of Jimmy Garrison, Ravi Shankar and Pablo Casals’ Bach.

While Moffett wanders the garden of styles, violinist Billy Bang creates a time-lapse series in Prayer for Peace (TUM). He fakes you out a bit with the opening track, a good-natured tribute to violinist Stuff Smith. Has the man gone soft? The music gets un-Stuffed quickly enough, as Bang jumps out of the rocking chair and runs the band through a half-century of styles and moods, ending with the jagged jabs of “Jupiter’s Future,” inspired by Bang’s mentor, Sun Ra. Bang hasn’t lost his edge, but he surrounds himself with a relaxed, confident quintet that envelops his astringent tone like the oils and spices in a vinaigrette. The overall sound is spacious and the pace is leisurely. You can feel your blood pressure go down 10 points when the quintet slowdances through Compay Segundo’s “Chan Chan,” made famous by the Buena Vista Social Club. There are new sounds here, too. When Bang’s violin and James Zollar’s trumpet play in unison, they fuse into a sonic alloy with modern and ancient, shawm-like overtones. The disc’s centerpiece is the 20-minute title track, one of those magnificent invocation-andgroove epics the jazz greats bestow on a troubled world every couple of years or so.

Perhaps because we don’t all live in peace and harmony yet, those invocations and grooves never seem to go out of style. The well of spiritual jazz, still sucking the aquifer of vintage Coltrane/Pharoah Sanders/McCoy Tyner, is running over these days.

Forgotten tracks from the ’70s are being discovered (check out the revelatory Spiritual Jazz compilation on the Jazzman label) and new recordings from acolytes rise like incense. Saxophonist Nat Birchall and his quartet hit all the marks on the respectful Guiding Spirit (Gondwana)—the searching melodies, left-hand piano bombs, heavy ostinatos, sunrise piano runs, even the little zings on the piano strings and the rain sticks. Birchall is from north England, so call this the Anglican branch of the church of Trane. (No honking allowed.) You may object—why should we listen to Birchall when we

have the originals? Maybe, but Coltrane is like Santa Claus. He can’t be everywhere. Why not let his local helpers spread the joy? Birchall does a creditable job delivering a whole disc of churning, surging spirituality. He cherry-picks the uplifting modes, unlike Coltrane or Sanders, who had the authority to tweak or trash the formulas they created. Birchall just basks in the presence, and his devotions give off a nice contact buzz.

Pianist Nobu Stowe’s Confusion Bleue (Soul Note) calls itself an exercise in “total improvisation,” defined in the notes as free jazz plus the option to adopt “temporary structure.” Some people might interpret this as a request for permission to cut and paste ready-made musical thoughts, violating the spirit of improv. Yes, Stowe has a romantic soul under his lust for chaos, but never fear—he’s not the type to interrupt a freakout to break into “Danny Boy.” Nothing is through-composed on the disc except a lovely take on “Blue in Green,” the only puppy in a litter of wolverines. The main body of the improv is divided into four movements, each with its own flavor. Stowe is adept at channeling the stinging surf and backwash around him, using the piano’s authority to sculpt the group’s energy into meaningful emotional arcs. Sometimes he tamps down the flames or pulls the car wreck apart with romantic gestures; sometimes he just looms. In the second movement, Stowe runs his hands up and down his Fender-Rhodes, stuck on a wheel, challenging the group to deal with the dizziness. In the shorter “Intermede” tracks, the group withdraws to a focused, almost trance-like state, as if they had been wallowing in mud and were now carefully daubing it into ritual patterns.

An exuberant fusion of romantic classical piano, café jazz and dervish-y Eastern sandstorms animates Matt Herskowitz’s Jerusalem Trio (Justin Time).

The pianist’s heart is so far out on his sleeve it’s hanging, torn and bloody, from his fingertips, but he’s clearly mad about this project, and his enthusiasm can sweep you through the intermittent kitsch if you’re in the right mood. In the first part of the titular “Jerusalem Trilogy,” Herskowitz rolls with headlong force, then constricts his grand style into a volley of dissonant hiccups in the third. In the middle, there are close brushes with Public TV Pledge Week piano—the buildups and silences are a tad contrived—but the sound was so fetching and curvy I gave in, sat back and enjoyed it. Classical violinist Lara St. John gets into the spirit and plays with gutsy abandon. After a string quartet interlude, the disc ends with a tour de force: “Prokofiev’s Revenge,” an outrageous mess of virtuoso classical piano piled on top an electric-bass groove like beluga caviar on a pork chop.

These East-meets-West mashups come in so many flavor combinations these days. Skeptics with sharp nails shouldn’t fondle the squeaky balloon of Indian-American drummer Sunny Jain’s Taboo (Brooklyn Jazz Underground). It’s a rainbow of euphoric, groove-based, jazz-infused feelgood multiculturalism, but it’s likeable as music, too. Jain blends the spirit of ghazals, millennium-old Eastern love poems, with a series of Indian ragas. It’s all topped with a gentle dusting of modern lyrics and spoken verse meant to engage the South Asian community on taboo issues of sexual orientation, inequality, violence against women, and religion.

This is more fun than it sounds. Achyut Joshi’s word-

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less vocal on “Jack and Jill” leaps like a flying dream over Marc Cary’s dawn-of-peace piano chords and droning pedal point of Gary Wang’s acoustic bass, nicely setting off honeyed snippets of spoken verse celebrating bisexuality from Sri Lankan poet YaliniDream. Aaron Copland would have enjoyed seeing money from his foundation go to help such a gay-friendly project. Sheetal Karhade’s accelerating, erotic vocals on “Ye mera khuda” pull a wet string and lasso you in, while Nir Felder’s effervescent electric guitar solo is in pure sunshine. The cool euphoria of Stereolab often comes to mind.

“Two Ladies,” a gauzy lesbian idyll sung by Shayna Steele, puts Jain’s sky-blue froth on top of a pumping ostinato similar to the groove from Coltrane’s “Equinox.” Representing for the boys, Sachal Vandani sings sweetly about preparing himself for his man in “A Sufi,” the set’s most straightforward jazz track. The party arc gently falls with the wistful “We Sinful Women” and a brief closing invocation, “Samaro Mantra.”

There’s a growing pool of jazz pianists without a collective label (yet) but with a lot in common.

Unconcerned with swinging or being free—yet drawing on both modes when it suits them—they’re writers, picture painters, philosophers. They sit you down and tell you tales with beginnings, middles and endings, sometimes delighting you, sometimes trying your patience. Minnesota’s Jesse Stacken is at the deep end of this pool. His new trio disc, Magnolia (FSNT), is an obsessive meditation on time’s elasticity. The title of the disc’s longest track, “Time Canvas,” spells it out. The trio’s spare texture exposes time until you feel it lurch, drip, slither, plod and drift, as clearly as you can see a lizard on a dune, an iridescent slug in the mud or a white dog on blacktop. On “Solstice,” Stacken accelerates from grim tolling to brusque clockwork figures that hasten the onrush of eternity. (A tuneful romp, “The Whip,” stands out like that watch in the desert theologians love to argue about.) The concept reaches its apotheosis in the final track, “Faces,” with Stacken madly toggling between an earthy rock backbeat and obsessive, digital dit-dit-dits.

New York pianist/composer John Escreet also belongs in the storyteller camp. Escreet’s Don’t Fight the Inevitable (Mythology) is packed with a novelistic density of incident, character and mood.

With co-producer David Binney on alto sax and electronics, Escreet has the perfect partner in storytelling, and it’s a good thing, because he seems determined to chronicle the recent history of mankind using the tools of acoustic jazz. It would take this whole page to describe what happens in the epic title track alone, from the symphonic turbulence of Mahler to interludes of swing to the pinging electronics that waft from Escreet’s acoustic piano at the end of the track, like seeds from a dandelion puff.

Those pings sound the soft alarm of evolution, a central theme here. This is episodic, complex music, but Escreet maintains a tensile tug from one end of a journey to the other. There’s a lot of struggle and upheaval, and electronics suggest that the machine is always poking at Escreet’s elbow. In “Magical Chemical [For the Future]” he double-bangs each note in his solo, sounding like a player piano run amok. Earlier in the same track, Binney’s alto is at its best, riding the thermals over an impeccably arranged horn section. The beach where chaos meets order has seldom been so carefully combed.

WORD MUSIC

Fred Cisterna reviews recent spoken word recordings.

Henry Jacobs—sound artist, radio show host, humorist, composer, documentarian, and more—is hard to pin down. He’s collaborated with Zen guru Alan Watts, sound designer Walter Murch, and experimental filmmaker Jordan Belson, associations that begin to hint at the breadth of his creative endeavors The still-active octogenarian came to the attention of a new generation of listeners when Locust Music released Electronic Kabuki Mambo in 2002 (originally released on Folkways in 1959) and Radio Programme No. 1 in 2003 (a 1955 Folkways release). Important Records put out The Wide Weird World of Henry Jacobs in 2005, and has now followed that up with Around the World with Henry Jacobs, which mixes archival material and recent work. The album provides the listener with another opportunity to tap into Jacobs’ one-of-akind sensibility.

“Persimmon” is an entertaining slice of fake ethnography, while “Microtonal” features an interview with an opera singer who says she has turned to singing microtones to reach a mass audience. If someone stumbled onto this exchange on the radio it might take a while to figure out that it’s actually a low-key comedy bit. Or is it? “John Gray, Poet” takes a broader approach, and the contrast between the serious interviewer and the inarticu-

late beat writer is a hoot. The lengthy “Words Is Words,” with a soundscape by Jack Dangers, makes you wonder if Jacobs had an influence on the head humor of The Firesign Theatre. Watts appears on “Donutty World,” where he asserts, “The human being is basically a donut.” And be sure to check out “Brown Pastures,” an absurdist conversation accompanied by atonal music, and “Abstract,” an early synth demo!

Around the World includes a second disc, First Night, which is truly a bonus. Jacobs the recordist has captured a lot of interesting phenomena; in this case, a 1957 live reading by Kenneth Rexroth and Lawrence Ferlinghetti where the poets are accompanied by a jazz combo.

A pair of recent CDs from PM Press present talks by two formidable leftist intellectuals and political activists, linguist Noam Chomsky and the late historian Howard Zinn. Crisis and Hope: Theirs and Ours captures an address Chomsky gave in June 2009 at Riverside Church in New York City, while Zinn’s War and Civil Disobedience was recorded in Denver in 2008.

At the beginning of his talk, Chomsky says that when the term “the crisis” is uttered in the West, it means “the financial crisis that hit the rich countries.” However, he points out that there are many

crises in the world at any given time, and proceeds to parse them. You may think you’re burnt out on hearing bad news from around the globe, but Chomsky’s lucid, calm speaking manner bring his subjects to life: the listener is presented with riveting analysis of current events and power dynamics.

Chomsky doesn’t sugarcoat what’s going on in Haiti or the problem of climate change, but his words are energizing rather than depressing. It’s a relief to finally hear someone discuss politics in a penetrating and logical manner.

In contrast to Chomsky’s cool, just-the-facts approach, Zinn comes off like a warm uncle offering sage advice. His talk has a very different vibe than the tone of his classic text, A People’s History of the United States. Here he could be speaking with his family at a get-together or a small group of students. Zinn often presents important reminders rather than new information, but the man is inspiring. He remarks that his attitudes towards war came out of his study of history and his personal experience—as a bombardier in the U.S. Army Air Force in World War II, he flew missions over Germany, Hungary, France, and Czechoslovakia.

As he talks about the bombing of Dresden and Hiroshima and the incarceration of Japanese-American citizens, he wonders if there could have been another way of doing things. Addressing the question of how people can become politically active, Zinn says, “Everyone starts in their own way.” He suggests that we look around and see what needs to be done or undone in our communities. Ever the historian, he points out how we can draw inspiration from the “small” acts of the past such as individuals resisting eviction during the Depression or Rosa Parks refusing to give up her seat. You can hear the excitement in his voice as he mentions two recent antiwar actions, a student walk-out in Chicago and a protest by West Coast longshoremen.

On Bigger and Blackerer (Sub Pop) comedian David Cross practices a ruder, cruder form of social criticism. It’s frequently pointed out that funnymen are driven by anger, and Cross is no exception. His nasally voice gives his words an agitated edge, his material is generally strong, and he has a particular gift for charged political comedy. (“Where We Are Now Back in Sept. ’09,” which takes on Obamabashing, the health care debate, and Tea Party hypocrisy, is hilarious.) At times, Cross titillates the crowd with material that can be seen as racist. Or is he critiquing that outlook? Cross holds the unofficial post of Indie Rock Comedian. It’s as if indie rock culture, which is rife with ambivalence and hesitancy, needs someone that can go out and wreck shit. ✹

“Trouble and Activity” juggles free blowing with a symphonic-scaled sequence of crescendi and diminuendi; “Avaricious World” stretches the music further in both directions. In the end, trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire’s elephantine wails and Escreet’s grand rumbling fight the electronics to an uneasy standstill.

Evolution isn’t a huge concern for everyone. It’s a wonderful thing to see jazz disperse into, and merge with, hundreds of styles and approaches, creating schools of music as small as one person in a basement. But it’s nice to get back to basics.

Chicago saxman Rich Corpolongo doesn’t tinker, blend or resuscitate. He just holds his ground and blows in Get Happy (Delmark). The trio work of Sonny Rollins is clearly the touchstone, but Corpolongo’s big-bellied tone and sauntering pace push the sound towards a boozy juke-box vibe. “Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams” and “Body and Soul” are almost illicitly leisurely. (Thank God he dispatches title track, surely the most inane Tin Pan Alley template in jazz, quickly and painlessly.)

The ritual jazz tropes are all here—Corpolongo and bassist Dan Shapera dim the lights for a nice

duet on “Lullaby of the Leaves”—but Corpolongo’s relaxed authority gives him license to scamper out of the box without warning. He may have a lower center of gravity than Rollins, but he has Rollins’ feel for the moment. At the end of “Without a Song,” he suddenly strings up a wildly segmented coda like jalapeno party lights on a porch. Then comes a gentle bebop cluster, a flash of a distant key, and—back to Rollins—a flicker of “St. Thomas.” It all goes by so fast, you don’t have time to put down your gin and soda and say, “Wha?” ✹

David Cross

Ariel Hertzoff

IN ‘N’ OUT

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THE WEIGHT OF THE WORLD

SMOKING THAT ROCK

Mouth of the Architect has made changes not just to their lineup but to their sound since their last full-length Quietly. On The Violence Beneath (Translation Loss), they move aggressively outward from the dreamy metalgaze of prior releases, taking their knack for arrangements and texture in an altogether more urgent and pissed-off direction. The title track launches like something off Neurosis’s latest, a midtempo grind that revs you up considerably. But they haven’t abandoned their texturalism or melancholy; rather it’s expressed in new contexts, as in the vaguely Morricone-influenced “Buried Hopes,” which has some of the grandeur of recent Coalesce.

The sweet motivic work and washes of sound at the end of this tune carry over into a live performance of “Restore.” And by the time they conclude with a soaring cover of Peter Gabriel’s “In Your Eyes,” the band feels poised for a leap into something new.

On A Determinism of Morality (Translation Loss), Philadelphia’s Rosetta hasn’t stretched quite so much. The density and crisply arranged layers of psychedelic, Isis-influenced sound are still a reigning characteristic, and the agonized vocals evoke something more than textural drift with occasional chug.

But after you get past the opening track “Ayil,” they reach a point with “Je N’en Connais Pas le Fin” that’s emotionally striking. “Blue Day for Croatia” is like a metal version of something on Eno’s Discreet Music. The trilogy of “Release,” “Resolve,” and “Renew” sounds introspective and a bit hesitant about the direction they’re taking, but the agonistic title track closes the disc like a confirmation.

East of the Wall’s Ressentiment (Translation Loss) starts out like Belew-era Crimson via Dysrhythmia. Okay, there are many bands out there getting in touch with their inner prog freaks; and certainly metal has long been a tech freak’s dream music, with complex time signatures and sprawling tunes very much the norm. But while it’s easy for a band to put together some sub-Meshuggah stutters, quiet-loud dynamics (and sing-shout vocals), it’s less easy for said bands to swing, to invest the formula with personality and emotion, and to leaven the mix with multi-part vocals and horn sections. By the time I was through listening to “Salieri,” I was smitten, finding in their complex sound equal parts Yakuza, Dillinger, Opeth, you name it. It’s expansive and ambitious like Mars Volta via Maiden in places (“Wisp of Tow”), and elsewhere giving off a heavy Kayo Dot vibe on “Ocean of Water” and “A Long Defeat.” Weird and fantastic.

Black Breath’s Razor to Oblivion EP last year was a nice, crusty slice of angry sound right where metal and hardcore slam shots of rail whiskey. But their debut full-length, Heavy Breathing (Southern Lord), is altogether more vigorous, bracing, and precise in its manifestation of power. Sharp edges abound, with tight riffs sewing together the raucous holler of their EP in a way that amplifies the attitude rather than dilutes it. On one level, they are riding the wave of the thrash revival helmed by bands like 3 Inches of Blood, Warbringer, and Municipal Waste. But there’s a blackened malevolence to their sound—especially on tunes like “Escape from Death” or “Black Sin (Spit on the Cross)”—that makes it about more than goofs and speed, but also not simply a rip of Entombed or Disfear. One listen to “I Am Beyond” and it’s easy to understand why this band has so much buzz. “Virus” actually reminds me of early

While I’d love to see a four-year moratorium on band names with “Black” in them, Black Mayonnaise crinkle my nose up so thoroughly—more than even, possibly, years-old Miracle Whip—I can’t deny them their share of the credit for this year’s global war on false noise. Dissipative Structure (Fedora Corpse) has a lot in common with the new Sean McCann release reviewed later in this column, but I’m finding a bit more to latch onto here. As much as I despise some of the toggle effects and drum-machine chirps, there are interplanetary elements at work, organized by a gravitational pull that could reign in the Millennium Falcon. You never get soulless repetition from Black Mayo—they’re too busy working on the next transition and asking all the right questions (“What does it take for an effects-driven noise/drone act to break-on-through to the other side?” “How much is too much?” “Would it kill me to have some fucking live drums in there somewhere?” [No, dude, it’ll set you apart.]). Air Conditioning and Metal Rouge are the closest relatives; make room for about a dozen of yr favorite Chicago paste-noisers (Panicsville, the like), Burning Star Core, Gang Wizard, Family Battle Snake and pretty much anything on Stunned, too. The second half of Side B even plumbs the softer depths of Sunn O))) growl-drone. I’m elated because this whole sub-harsh, pro-effects, long-form sound happening right now just might justify all those factory-line noise records yet. Green vinyl never hurts either, does it?

Of all the labels I’ve seen come and go over the past few years, Parvo Art Recordings, along with other do-gooders/masters of uniform-yet-diverse eye-poppery like NNA, Folkwaste and Goaty, is among the most distinctive in its audio and visual presentation. Like delicate little snowflakes, their 3-inch discs are conceived together, as a piece broken up into 50-unit chunks, Duncan ó Ceallaigh’s Psalms being one of the most recent in their fledgling line of teeny-tiny CDs. Psalms is one of those albums that has you cranking up your stereo, then scrambling to lower the volume once the throttling streams of bass intrude; then, you go back to turning it the-eff up. Stars of the Lidders and Rameses III-ers will get lost in this stuff. Thing is, the relatively short running time—3-inch discs are what, 24 minutes, at most?—ensures you the artist will do all it takes to cram an album’s worth of ideas into a tighter space.

Like labelmate/musican-and-artist Stephen Spera, ó Ceallaigh’s is a steady hand that never grows too complacent when it comes to crafting a hovering, living/breathing entity from but a few separate sounds sculpted to sedate and seduce. Achingly simple, unflinchingly beautiful ...

It’s not easy to sound this simultaneously weathered and youthful; how the hell do Man Benu do it? The Kindling EP (All Hands Electric) is, above all, a branching-out of the classic Sonic Youth sound, mixed with a lil’ Ex Lion Tamer. You don’t get too many of the build-ups, explosions or guitar-drilling, but that clean guitar-with-the-edges-sanded-off feel, coupled with matching vocals, is here in spades.

Think of “Rain on Tin” stripped of most its louder moments and expanded downward, or sideways, rather than upward. Big-time drowsiness causes Bentley Anderson, Brady Sansone and Taylor Davis to have that codeine crawl about them, that lurch where you wonder how they survive in NYC with all the fracas. Wonderful drumming from a guy who probably played in a few math-y bands back in the day, then progressed to the point where he didn’t

Jason Bivins digs metal, doom and heavy music in all its permutations.

Dag Nasty or Black Flag. They don’t quite pull off the ambitious instrumental title track. But then, “Unholy Virgin” swaggers with the syncopation of Pantera’s “Goddamn Electric” so vividly that they make you wanna break shit.

Another vital reissue from The Lord, after the crucial Burning Witch two-fer, is Goatsnake’s Flower of Disease. This 2000 slab of doom has the expansiveness of Kyuss, and Pete Stahl’s narcotic vocal harmonies (aided by Petra Haden on a couple tracks) certainly anticipate the more widely known stylings of Josh Homme. It’s also got the downcast, thick distortion and sheer inexorable crawl of vintage Sabbath via Electric Wizard or Cavity (Anderson’s tone is just so nasty). But there’s also a sense of serious play here that makes these tunes distinctive, from the high lonesome harmonica of the title track and “Live to Die” to the sweet stoner anthem “Easy Greasy” (with lap steel!) and “A Truckload of Mama’s Muffins.” They stitch everything together nicely on the stomping “The River,” with a memorably slow fadeout piled high with multiple vocal tracks, Haden’s violin, and Mathias Schneeberger’s piano.

Far less dreamy is the underground metal scene of Cleveland. This scene doesn’t play, and that’s even before Bron-Bron left for South Beach. No glitz, no posing, none of that has ever characterized their musical dens from Pere Ubu to the Craw/Keelhaul axis to the noise sludge of Fistula. The latter’s latest EP Goat (Crucial Blast) is a harrowing set of songs that is jagged, flooded with distortion, and slow not like stoner doom but like abjection and disgrace. That’s fitting, given that the music here reflects on a rash of serial killings in 2009. Heavily misanthropic, with an edgy midrange sound that brings out the knifeedge in the distortion and raspy vocals, the music is uncomfortable in the best way.

France’s Mono is certainly one of the most harrowing of doom acts out there. Vocalist Emilie’s banshee wails and guttural catharses are the most compelling element of their grimy, distended sound. On Mer Morte (originally a limited LP and now on CD via Crucial Blast), they again load up a single lengthy track. It’s more spectral than some of their offerings, with what sounds to me like a more pronounced emphasis on tonality. The effect is almost like that of a soundtrack, though the chordal progression is still slow enough that this effect is only faint. Emilie bends her vocals ethereally to match the waves of feedback.

But when the thud finally arrives, with howling vocals and all that comes with them, I found it interestingly enough to be far less effective than the buildup.

Portland’s Trees might superficially belong to the overstuffed hipster doom metal sub-genre, but they actually bring something distinctive to it by combining Sunn 0)))-like dynamics and ritualism with an audible affinity for certain kinds of actively glitchy electroacoustic music. On Freed of the Flesh (Crucial Blast), they fuse these approaches in mostly successful ways. The Dubin-like howls of “Hollow” resound in the cavern of noise, and they’re admirably attentive to resonance and decay. But the riffs could use some more memorable character (though this might be the point). It’s all worth it, though, when you listen to “Ashes,” which brings their approach to the feel of Naked City’s great Leng T’che.

And speaking of Naked City... Whorkr is a truly crazed duo whose mind-fucked blend of grind, electronica, and sheer sonic mischief will please

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fans of Discordance Axis and Naked City alike. On Concrete (Crucial Blast), the Parisian duo wield their laptops with a violence that’s utterly infectious. The brief tunes are restless, and move from jackhammers to distorted vocal squalls and stomping breakdowns. Skipping along like a Christian Marclay deconstruction, the sound simply crashes in on you from multiple directions. While sometimes their love of Mike Patton’s Fantômas and Yamataka Eye is—in the faux stentorian vocals of “Santo” or “Slaagt”—a bit too obvious, it’s still hard not to love this. And frankly, tracks like “Freugz” and “Squirk” (not to mention the hilarious sendup of death metal, “Tawakitawa”) are such dizzy electronic assaults that all is forgiven.

Out of the vibrant, polymorphous Montreal experimental scene comes AUN’s VII (Important), a drone-based project centering around Martin Dumais’ strings experimentation (guitar, bass, electric violin). The basic methodology on the five tracks— where he’s joined by Scott Ryan (looped guitar), Thierry Gauthier (guitar, bass, bowed cymbals), and Voivod’s Michel Langevin on drums—will be familiar to Sunn 0))) fans. But AUN’s music is simultaneously denser and more airy than that suggests, a matter of psychedelic lightness rather than inward collapse.

“Broken Hill” is super-distorted, full of pitch bending and crackle. Good for what it is, but at first I’m left wishing for more actual timbral relief, instead of sonic morass. But as the album lurches forward, you can really start to hear the violins, and the expanded textures sound great.

It’s hard to believe how many terrific bands are coming out of Savannah, Georgia, these days. You know about Baroness and Kylesa, but do spare a moment for Black Tusk’s Taste the Sin (Relapse), a filthy piece of Southern-fried metal with hardcore roots. The howled urgency of the vocals, the downtuned rattle, the sheer punch of the breakdowns on tunes like “Snake Charmer,” “Red Eyes,” and “Way of Horse and Bow” may not break new ground. But there’s a fluidity and musicianship to this aggression that are impressive. And if that’s not your thing, don’t worry: the minimalist obsessions of tunes like “Takeoff” show the range of this young band.

Baltimore’s Misery Index could almost be the USA’s answer to Napalm Death, our own fiercely leftist death/grind band. But on their latest, Heirs to Thievery (Relapse), it sounds like they’ve caught a flu from tech-masters like Necrophagist. Blistering!

There are some who will find the triggered bass drum patterns and high velocity sweep picking to be a bit too polished for this general idiom. But those people would be, as the kids say, haters. As you watch the tea partiers dancing madly through their weird suburban fantasy world, it’s hard not to feel the venomous denunciations of corporate greed on “Fed to the Wolves” or the guttural “The Illuminaut” or “Carrion Call.” Not that I want to vent political spleen in WotW, but if shit is going to be this fucked up you might as well have the appropriate soundtrack. Things change up a bit on “The Seventh Cavalry,” a withering look back on foundational violence. But regardless of thematic focus, this is racing, extremely violent music played with the chops and precision of a fusion band and the discontent of Napalm Death, Nasum, and Pig Destroyer. Misery Index is now most assuredly on that level. Coming soon to a tea party near you.✹

Grant Purdum gets down with messed-up modern rock.

need to prove anything any more. Oh, and that lack Assault Group, Hair Police; they’re all saluted here, of “build-ups” and “explosions”? Not exACTly true, Hannum reveling in harsh noise before pulling back folks; “The Kindling” blows up like a balloon, pumps a bit and blessing Mount of All Lands with a duller like a piston and pops like a tart, the rhythms suddenblade. ly turning a bit vicious and the guitars fluttering, then Foisy couldn’t have chosen a different mode flopping. Man Benu obviously have some influences for his After the Prophecy cassette. Talking about to work through; don’t give up on them, though, as starting from scratch, Prophecy seems like a whole this will be an interesting band to watch, all three of new template for the guitarist who’s known to offset its members blessed with distinct individual talents. his drone with black metal, ambiance and effects Ariel Pink ... Can I skip this one? HA! But serigrab-bags. Starting with a Neurosis-like guitar dirge ously, one thing that seems to be lost in all the hubwith plenty of picking above and around his frets, bubbling is how much of the original Pink persona he quickly shifts into an angular bass riff—and postwe can as good as kiss goodbye. Before Today (XL) is Fugazi I don’t use the term “angular” lightly—that a major departure for the home-recording maverick, churns and burns while hand-tom taps and a group a segue that, frankly, I wasn’t sure I was ready for. of instruments resembling strings takes the lead.

It’s a good record; his crack band was well-chosen, Pretty soon the b-riff is a forgotten relic, buried his ideas are overflowing as always and there isn’t among the other elements and lost, the strings really a single song you can point to as a culprit in some taking charge and higher, screech-ier squiggles— overarching leveling-off. That’s good, but what which fans of his recent Territories LP will recognize— pushes Before Today over the top is the moments joining the party. My favorite section is the second of pure, sugar-sprinkled backward-pop genius, the half of Side A, where all the recognizable sounds drift Lite Brite glow that will occasionally fill your listening away, leaving nothing but dancing, delayed bursts of room—and don’t forget, a computer desk doesn’t effects-juice. Like Mount of All Lands, Prophecy finds count as a listening room when multi-faceted tracks a comfort zone, a warm, gooey, loopy one, after a like “L’Estat,” “Menopause Man” and “Little Wig” hit striking introduction and truly justifies its creator as a their high(est), notes. This is when the Gerry Rafferty-/ solo entity to be reckoned with.

Bread-/10cc-isms truly pay off and the comparisons The standard touches of Sean McCann’s to Joe Meek and R. Stevie Moore (don’t forget about Chances Are Staying LP—some wah, oscillators set Dennis Wilson’s solo stuff, which factors in) make to stun, pitch bends—besmirch his DNT debut a tad. sense. For these sparkling nuggets I’ll forgive the It’s not exactly instinctive to equate the tropical trees flat-out embarrassing guitar distortion of “Butt House and dripping dew of Chances Are Staying’s LP jacket Blondies.” See the good I do for people? to synths and effects globs, either. Still, there are I could have reviewed Jandek’s Canticle of creatures moving in the distance, watching. I know Castaway (Corwood) without listening to a second because I can hear them taking furtive, measured of it. Who in the Know isn’t aware of ’Dek’s “plot” at steps. Attempting to encircle me, they are. And that’s this point? It’s hard for me to believe anyone but the what these sidelong, or close to it, jams feel like: An most deeply entrenched of indie freaks would even envelope captures you against your will then cradles comprehend how not to resent a Jandek record, you lovingly as long as you need it to, the overarchmuch less enjoy it. Yet here it is, 2010, and the guy ing fluidity and scope of the project winning out in demands notice. Pretty inspiring stuff, and I feel the end. Already a steady name to tape-traders and that much more enthused about Canticle knowing drone-mongers alike, McCann snaps a salute to how unlikely the whole mystery romance has been.

Nurse With Wound’s Space Music, Kyle Bobby Dunn The songs themselves? As I mentioned, they’re (a fellow youngster on the drone take), and stretching pretty typical. Out-of-tune guitars, weirdo yawling, out on the hot grass ... not the worst place to be. songs that don’t end; it’s like Lou Reed, without the Finally, I’d be remiss if I didn’t include Archie sunglasses, playing “Heroin” to himself on a twoBronson Outfit’s Coconut (Domino), if only because string beginner guitar in his mother’s closet. One of I was so very sure I’d hate it, and didn’t. That doesn’t them is even called “Don’t Go Out” (which Jandek sound like the firmest endorsement, I realize; but stay apparently didn’t do for what, 20 years?). It’s unusual with me ... You see, when you’ve spent years plowing —that goes without saying—but it’s also perverse like through piles of music you tend to go through stages only the most invested outsider art can be, short of where nothing seems original anymore and you venturing into Wild Man Fischer or Kommistar Hjuler wonder how much longer you’ll be able to review + Mama Baer territory (those two are just GONE). audio and still get that KIck from it that caused you Which is to say it will sound like music to about one in to venture into such an uphill battle in the first place. every 1,000 people.

Often, in the mad rush to find the next Oneohtrix Tip-toeing out from the shadow of their day job Point Never lazer-light show, we forget that somein Locrian, duo Terence Hannum and André Foisy times it’s nice to hear beats that wouldn’t get shunted have stepped away to offer a release each on their away by a club DJ or kicked out of bed by a normal, label, Land of Decay. Hannum’s Mount of All Lands non-audio-obsessed person. That’s where Archie 3-inch CD is a stretch of Condritic static that breaks Bronson Outfit come in, like Pumice skin-grafted to big-time from Locrian’s less-noisy oeuvre, chunked up Clinic covering Beck, or Cut Copy raised on Liquid by what sounds like a bomb blast, extended infinitely, Liquid and early-mid Wire. They tote in a foundation and other, less intimidating tones pressed on top. most Franz Ferdinand listeners would be comfortable Traffic, waves crashing to the shore, deathly demon with and spend 2-to-4 minutes jacking the shit out drones; that old chestnut. As I mentioned circa the of it with dull screwdrivers. There are tamer instances other 3-inch release covered in this column, when where disco persuasions are honored and the Britgiven less space to operate drone merchants tend club atmosphere gets too stuffy, but “Wild Strawberto cram more ideas into a smaller tank. Thank god, ries,” “Run Gospel Singer” and “You Have a Right again, for that, as these 20 minutes swim and swoop to a Mountain Life,” absolute ASS-kickers all, and the with ideas. Burial Hex, Wolf Eyes, Prurient, Nihilist other Winners are much too ripe to trifle about. ✹ WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #59 | 85

BURNERS AND BACK FLIPS

Joel Calahan samples the season’s finest underground hip-hop releases.

Even by rap standards, MF Grimm (né Percy Carey) has an enviable biography: after starting in show biz as a precocious charmer on Sesame Street, Carey’s involvement in drug dealing led to a shooting that left him partially paralyzed in 1994 and later a life sentence for narcotics and conspiracy charges in 2000 (subsequently reduced to three years). The bio is important to his latest disc You Only Live Twice (Day by Day), which accompanies a self-penned graphic memoir illustrated by Ronald Wimberly. Message rap takes on a serious mantle when it comes directly from the performer’s very life, and “Return to Eden” is uncomfortable and confrontational in its condemnations of the ice-n-glitter lifestyle, delivering a direct message to the jealous perpetrators of his shooting: “You’re a rich man / I’m just a poor man / You’re a rich man / I’m a poor man,” repeated over and over to harrowing effect.

Twiz the Beat Pro keeps the production dark, in line with the seriousness of the lyrics—he owes the Bass Brothers and Alchemist for the keyboard riffs he loves to drop over beats, but his slowdown on tracks like “Marry Mary” is unexpected and rich.

Though Autotune is ubiquitous on mainstream hip-hop singles, very few underground producers have stooped to using the vocal filter over beat loops. It’s a shame. Vocal distortion may be a crutch propping up the woeful inadequacies of some rap personalities, but it also has a rich potential for experimentation. LA’s DJ Nobody from the club Low End Theory and internet radio Dublab wades straight into middle of the ocean on One for All Without Hesitation (Delicious Vinyl/Alpha Pup). He makes beats and sings on ten tracks of psychedelic inspiration. The title track captures his bombastic side, with sung hooks and low end bounce; he runs to the other side of the rainbow for the album closer “Coming Down,” which anchors its fuzz and burble loosely on a series of voice tones. He’s most appealing when uninhibited, as in the breakneck speed drumming on “Sleep for Daze.” Ultimately, the ingenious misuse of Autotune is what stands out: fuzzed-up guitar plucks on “Psycho Alpha Theta”; off vocal arpeggios on “Hey Love (On Our Own).” I doubt too many others will follow Nobody’s lead in deploying Autotune this way, but that’s also why this is so worth listening to on its own.

Psychedelic IDM beats form vast girders for the album Only Mountain by fellow Alpha Pup Record artist Take. He keeps company with Flying Lotus and the outré beat crews of L.A. well—but a certain staid feel to the mixes sets him apart from his fellow experimentalists. “Don’t Look Now,” one of the album’s best tracks, keeps a delicate balance between the various themes and motifs, each with its own signature in the mix. Many tracks are excellent technically. But with each new mix, Take feels compelled to make use of every channel on the board.

Several dozen bars into the song, the same flange effect kicks in; recurrent burbling MIDI arpeggios feel like they never leave. It’s not exactly boring, but it never quite hangs together all the way through.

With now three solo joints in the bag, Chali 2na has moved far afield of the Jurassic 5 fold. Last year’s Fish Outta Water had a prescient title; he was ill at ease as he tried to buoy up production differences from Babu, Jake One and a host of others.

On Fish Market Part 2 (Decon) he proves he’s better on the mixtape format, paired with a producer (DJ Dez Andres) who pulls back to let that sonorous

basso voice move to the front of the mix. Part of the success lies in a return to backpacker posse tracks like “Greezy” and “Focused Up,” where his distinctive voice feeds into group harmony. And Dez Andres deserves much of the credit: Chali keeps plugging along lyrically but triumphs when his engineers hit the right swerve over tracks.

Che Smith, or Rhymefest, is a singular talent as an MC. His syncopated delivery is reminiscent of Common, but he’s got a casual tone that fits the rhythmic pull of his vocal lines. Ad hoc cipher style is his bread and butter on El Che (Allido/Sony), with tracks like “Chicago” (paying homage to his hometown scene) and “Talk My Shit” sounding like long-form improv as they cycle through structurallysimilar phrasing and permutations of related punch lines. At the same time, Rhymefest puts the chip on his shoulder from his 2006 major label disappointment Blue Collar to good use. In this sense, El Che is true indie: he grinds against the disrespect from rap’s household names by doing them one better.

The Jimi Conway-produced “Prosperity” plays tongue-in-cheek on the promises of evangelist rhetoric, but there’s a bittersweet subtext—a homily on lessons learned from fly-by-night recording contracts. If you make it, you never need to get wiser. Rhymefest proves the worth in having loved and lost.

The history of indie rap couldn’t be written without Paul Francis. As the venerable Sage Francis he not only issued a series of formative albums and mixtapes in the early Oughts but also had the business savvy to gather up likeminded easterners on his Strange Famous label, home to Francis protégés B. Dolan and Curtis Plum. The guy also knows how to grab attention: he inked up re-releases for luminaries like 2Mex and Buck 65 to move units for his label, and grabbed dan le sac vs Scroobius Pip from the UK for an American release. But unlike august agitators of backpack rap like Buckshot Shorty and El-Producto, Sage Francis sounded hackneyed from the start. His latest public offering is the (oh, so cleverly!) titled Li(f)e (Anti-/Strange Famous)— another spoken-word-based collection of cliché and pretension. The opening track, “Little Houdini,” is seven minutes of melodrama: a prisoner in federal pen escapes to visit his dying mother, and she pleads for his release on television. Still think I’m using too blunt an instrument? “The Baby Stays” is a pro-life adoption anthem practically pleading with the punning, “If we throw it out with the bath water / will you catch it?”—replete with bizarre objectification of the child-bearing partner (“first comes the head, then the neck / then the body avalanches out the tape deck”) and found recordings of a singing child wondering about growing up.

It’s tough to imagine what it must have been like hearing for the first time a musical genre—Leon Huff, say, regimenting a funk beat into disco—now thoroughly assimilated as a musical commodity. Lyrics Born, I will risk saying, is a revelation of this kind.

His sound on As U Were (Decon) is both dance and hip-hop, and captures the gritty beginnings of the genre as it transitioned from disco to rap. There is analogous balls-to-the-wall celebratory energy, and a kind of naiveté about the unwritten rules of production, as when he nails period ’80s synth beats or builds tracks from slap bass riffs. But most remarkably, his unique singing gathers its energy from pitch and rhythm shifts with a kind of effortless

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flow between the rhythmic monotone of Sugar Hill artists and parodic karaoke of world beat-dance.

“Pushed Aside, Pulled Apart” is a brilliant title for a Brit-pop reworking; “Funky Hit Records” is a worthy homage to crate-digging production. But it’s with the album fodder that he hits full stride, track after track in queue.

The intense dramatics of producer Alchemist and rapper Oh No deserve better than their ludicrous collaboration name Gangrene or the even sillier album title Gutter Water (Decon). A truer name ought to have come from one of the album’s late tracks, “Brass Knuckle Rap.” The piece is vintage Alchemist: heavy cross-fades, string samples of pitches at the upper limit of the human ear’s perception, spoken word interpellations that show Al’s pretention to the mantle of Premier or RZA. It is one of many cuts on the album where the appeal of the neo-thug style is purely performative, not bothering with the conceit of a persona: that is, it doesn’t much matter who’s delivering the lines, just that they’re appropriately clever and evocative. The production similarly conceives of a rap single as a mood more than a song (with “Not High Enough” and “Wassup Wassup” slick examples of the distinction). Hearing Alchemist take over 15 tracks instead of the odd chart single shows his unpayable debt to RZA in creating atmosphere needed to last an hour long—but it’s not without skill that he takes on the master and comes out with another production gem.

Flipmode Squad vet and Fugees collaborator Rah Digga returns with the geriatric hip-hop crowd for the overoptimistically-named Classic (Raw Koncept).

Producer Nottz keeps up a rapport with Snoop Dogg, and has had solid cameos on one-off tracks with Kanye West, Cormega, Termanology and The Game in the past couple years. Unfortunately, this collaboration is weak all over: “Check Me Boo” and “This Ain’t No Lil’ Kid Rap” are production nightmares backboned by video game blips and steel drums, blunted further by a really frantic Rah Digga trying to capitalize on her age in a graceless way. In interviews, Rah boasts of the message she conveys by this true collaboration with no guest verses and no shared production on the album. But precisely for this reason, the disc feels stultified: these two artists need the outlet of constant reinvention track by track.

Dirty Harriet from ten years past worked because Nottz was dosed with Pete Rock and Premier, among others. Classic would benefit from a Pete Rock horn lick—but then again, what MC wouldn’t?

Only producers of a certain stature can arouse excitement over a mere mix: in the underground world, El-P is certainly one of them. Weareallgoingtoburninhellmegamixxx3 (Gold Dust) is third in a series of laced-up instrumentals and remixes released to keep production geeks sated (and buying product) until his next full album leaks. If you like your hip-hop bordering on industrial—everything machinated, from robotic kick drums and hi-hats to distorted guitar riffs—then anything El-P is a mother lode. The instrumentals are variations on this machine aesthetic (sometimes tending toward the melodramatic when punctuated by chants and cop sirens). And remixes are well-chosen bits from Young Jeezy and Kidz in the Hall, but El-P makes them unrecognizable deconstructions of worthy tracks. The complaint with him is always a version of praise: he makes everything his own—mercenarily, masterly. ✹ WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #59 | 87

REISSUE REDUX

Bill Meyer surveys the season’s key reissues.

One era’s artifact of vain striving is another’s map to survival. Take the private press album.

In the 1980s they seemed like indulgences, the last ditch efforts of people who just couldn’t get a record deal. Nowadays anyone who tells you they’re looking for a long-term deal is also telling you they’re looking in the wrong place for a clue, and pressing up your own record is evidence of business smarts. Yoga Records is a label devoted to rescuing vintage private press releases from Salvation Army limbo by reissuing them digitally, and they’ve enlisted Drag City to put out vinyl versions of a couple choices releases.

Jeff Eubank’s A Street Called Straight (Yoga/ Drag City) might just scare you on first spin.

He sings a little like John Denver, smooth and earnest and as slick as he could be on a selffinanced budget in ’83. But if you skip over a few “Baker Street”-style sax and piano fills, the weirdness creeps up on you—tape speed tricks, lyrics about being a bug hitting the window as an entrée into spiritual contemplation hit—and you know this stuff has fallen far enough from the tree to be worth picking up and biting. The record actually comes in the original sleeve, which Eubank had to print in a number far greater than the original 500-LP pressing. A word about Drag City’s pressing job; it’s not heavy, but it sounds great and has no noise at all. Pressing and mastering count more than weight, kids, and DC has delivered where it counts.

Traveler’s Advisory (Yoga/Drag City), a 1986 effort by Matthew Young, is more overtly odd in ways that place it so far outside its time that it’s no wonder he had to put it out himself. The fusion of folk and electronic music certainly seems possible now, but trust me, in the middle of Reagan’s second term no one was asking for a synth-wrapped Michael Hurley cover, let alone Orff’s “Carmina Burana” arranged for hammered dulcimer. This record has none of the gaudy gaucheness that sold back in the day, nor slick stillness of Windham Hill-associated stuff, just intriguing ideas smoothly executed. Kudos once more to Drag City and Yoga for leaving the bar code off of the sleeve.

Plastic Crimewave’s Galactic Zoo Dossier imprint is also tapping Drag City to do the vinyl chores. Spur Of The Moments collects some of the finest moments by Spur, Belleville, IL’s best band of Dead and Byrds-wannabes. It’s not strictly a reissue of the almost identically-titled LP Spur Of The Moment, but lifts a few of its songs and adds in demos that never made it out during Spur’s late 60s heyday. This is a record for people who love a certain time and sound enough to be happy with a spot-on impression of the Pigpen-fronted Grateful Dead covering Babby “Blue” Bland. They nail it, and if that interests you, so will this LP. Speaking of the Byrds, Roland White is the brother of the late Byrds guitarist Clarence White as well as a former sideman of Bill Monroe and Lester Flatt, and to this day he’s a highly regarded mandolinist. When he made I Wasn’t Born To Play Rock’n Roll for Ridge Runner records in 1976 he was just getting back in gear after the awful road accident that killed

his brother. This is an affirmation of bluegrass verities, not an envelope-pusher in any respect.

One original aside, you’ll know the repertoire and what White and crew are going to do to it, but it doesn’t really matter; this is bluegrass comfort food, easy on the way down. Tompkins Square has added one outtake from the original sessions, given all thirteen tunes a mastering job that is clear but not coarse, and reimagined the LP sleeve as a six-panel gatefold for this for this CD reissue.

But back to the private press; the economics improvised music recordings dictate that no one is going to make much money, and many of them are going to be sold it gigs, not record stores. So it behooves an artist who gets around the world to make a few CDs him or herself to sell from the bandstand. It has fallen to Norwegian percussionist Paal Nilssen-Love’s personal imprint PNL to exhume a couple of albums that were quite briefly available as micropressed CDRs from Utech five years ago and put them out on the Volkswagen of formats, the CD. AM/FM is a duo with guitarist Anders Hana of MoHa and its moments of distorted, fractured abandon provide a bracing foreshadowing of the wooly racket that Nilssen-Love currently plays with members of The Ex. The glossy, oversized cover with its depiction of a young woman getting back to nature is just what the advice columnist ordered for lonely record collector dudes. 27 Years Later is a spectacularly recorded solo affair, each strike and stroke distinct, the space around them as palpable as the music itself. Drum kit records are always chancy affairs, but this one has an immediacy that sets it apart.

For a guy who claimed to have learned jazz mostly to show that he could, Louis Thomas Hardin certainly had a jazz presence in the 50s.

Better known as Moondog, he put some LPs out on the usually jazz-associated label Prestige which carried his unparalleled amalgam of jazz harmonies, baroque structures, and American Indian drumming around the globe. One guy who listened was the English tenor saxophonist Kenny Graham, who was so taken with the man’s music that he arranged it for a percussion-heavy little big band called The Satellites that included British jazz luminaries Phil Seamen and Stan Tracey. Moondog And Suncat Suites (Trunk) has been a high-priced collector’s item for decades on vinyl and had never been on CD until exotica connoisseur Johnny Trunk found a rare copy clean enough to be mastered from. Heard from a remove of over 50 years, the music sounds sweetly exotic and entirely charming.

Exotica was just one of the arrows in Hungarian jazz guitarist Gabor Szabo’s quiver when he made Jazz Raga for Impulse ten years later in 1966. Smitten with Indian music and eager to play his newly acquired sitar, he was also in the process of shedding his jazz snobbery and embracing contemporary pop. The priceless album photo says it all; he’s seated on a motor scooter, serenading a Mediterranean-looking beauty with his new instrument. Despite the tight time-keeping of Pretty Purdie, the record isn’t always smooth sailing; Szabo’s singing lacks the confidence of his picking and strumming, and

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his overdubbed sitar accompaniment occasionally lags behind his fluid guitar lines. But it’s still a swell time capsule from a moment when accessible jazz and pop psychedelia met on fairly equal terms, and Light in the Attic has done an excellent job of bringing a record that Impulse seems to have forgotten to CD and treating it like a pop hit. Inside the swanky, colorful digipak is a 36 page booklet with interviews and photos.

Clarity, the debut album by Michael Gregory Jackson (now simply known as Michael Gregory), was one of ESP-Disk’s final projects before the label went into hibernation in the ’70s. Not quite 23 years old when he recorded the record in 1976, he nonetheless mustered a truly heavy band in David Murray, Oliver Lake, and Wadada Leo Smith. Although the singer-guitarist drew as much from folk fingerpicking and soul vocalizing as loft jazz exploration, it’s the last style that registers most strongly today. This one has been left out most retellings of the ESP story, and it deserves another chance to be heard.

Loren Connors & Jim O'Rourke’s Are You Going to Stop ... In Bern? was one of just a handful of releases to come out on Hat Hut’s hatNOIR imprint. The label’s effort to gain a foothold in the rock underground probably failed for business reasons — it was still distributed through jazz channels, and its releases cost much more than the domestic CDs that Connors was releasing at the rate of about one every two months back in 1999. A decade on, the name and cover are the only things that have changed about the CD, but the context in which it is released is totally different. The Connors glut has dissipated, which affords a fresh opportunity for anyone who skipped the disc the first time around to appreciate its singularity. Connors’ bluesy introspections seem transformed by O’Rourke’s remarkably genre-free accompaniment into something less overtly emotional and full of subtle surprise.

Also worth reevaluation is the Dream Syndicate’s Medicine Show (Water). When A&M first released the record in 1984, it seemed like a classic example of major label excess obliterating a young band’s promise. The LA-based combo made their first record practically live in a night; this one took nine months of grueling tracking and re-tracking driven by producer Sandy Pearlman’s relentless perfectionism. Not much of their Velvet Underground-inspired explosiveness made it to Medicine Show, and if you bought the CD version you were treated to a typically brittle first-generation mis-mastering.

This version, with much improved sound, liner notes by David Fricke, and a live EP thrown in for good measure, tries to reposition the record as an under-recognized masterpiece. Bandleader Steve Wynn’s writing holds up much better if you’re focusing on his noirish scenarios instead of trying to figure out where the feedback went.

However, the shift from Wynn and Karl Precoda’s guitar sparring to glossy keyboards and grooving bass on the bonus EP This Is Not The New Dream Syndicate Album… Live! remains a low point for the band. ✹

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