Signal to Noise #52 - winter 2009

THE QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF IMPROVISED, EXPERIMENTAL & UNUSUAL MUSIC

delmark records' bob koester bad brains' HR philip gelb's dinner concerts

cheer-accident

WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #52 | 1

issue #52 ✹ $4.95 us / $5.95 can ✹ winter 2009

2 | SIGNAL to NOISE #52

WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #52 | 3

SIGNAL TO NOISE #52 8. ALLEN LOWE 10. CELER

12. CHEER-ACCIDENT 22. HR 26. BOB KOESTER 36. PHILIP GELB'S dinner concerts 40. LIVE REVIEWS 44. BOOK REVIEWS 46. CD / DVD / LP / MP3 REVIEWS 89. CROSSWORD HR in Washington DC, November 2008 Photo by Liz Flyntz

4 | SIGNAL to NOISE #52

WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #52 | 5

SIGNAL TO NOISE

THE JOURNAL OF IMPROVISED, EXPERIMENTAL & UNUSUAL MUSIC ISSUE #52 : WINTER 2009 MAILING ADDRESS 1128 Waverly Street, Houston Texas 77008 PUBLISHER pete gershon 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 ✹ cindy chen ✹ andrew choate ✹ jay collins ✹ dennis cook ✹ larry cosentino ✹ david cotner ✹ ethan covey ✹ michael crumsho ✹ raymond cummings ✹ jonathan dale ✹ christopher delaurenti ✹ tom djll ✹ nate dorward ✹ lawrence english ✹ gerard futrick ✹ andrew gaerig ✹ michael galinsky ✹ david greenberger ✹ kurt gottschalk ✹ spencer grady ✹ jason gross ✹ kory grow ✹ james hale ✹ jennifer hale ✹ carl hanni ✹ ed hazell ✹ andrey henkin ✹ jesse jarnow ✹ chris kelsey ✹ mark keresman ✹ steve kobak ✹ robert loerzel ✹ howard mandel ✹ brian marley ✹ marc masters ✹ libby mclinn ✹ marc medwin ✹ bill meyer ✹ sean molnar ✹ richard moule ✹ larry nai ✹ kyle oddson ✹ chris pacifico ✹ chad radford ✹ casey rae-hunter ✹ gino robair ✹ michael rosenstein ✹ elise ryerson ✹ ron schepper ✹ steve smith ✹ thomas stanley ✹ john szwed ✹ nathan turk ✹ dan warburton ✹ alan waters ✹ ben watson ✹ seth watter ✹ charlie wilmoth COPY EDITOR nate dorward

ADVERTISING operations@signaltonoisemagazine.org e-mail for rates & information DISTRIBUTION SIGNAL to NOISE is distributed by Ingram Periodicals, Source Interlink, Ubiquity Distribution and Small Changes. We are available in most Borders and Barnes & Nobles outlets, and we sell directly to Other Music (NYC), Downtown Music Gallery (NYC), End of an Ear (Austin), Sound Exchange + Domy Books (Houston), Newbury Comics (Boston area), Jackpot Records (Portland, OR), Bulldog Records (Seattle, WA), Jazz Record Mart (Chicago), Dusty Groove America (Chicago), Lunchbox Records (Charlotte, NC), Squidco (NYC), Bop Shop (Rochester, NY), Aquarius Records (San Francisco), Amoeba Music (Hollywood / San Francisco) and Volcanic Tongue (Scotland). We encourage you to support your local, independently-owned retailers! If you’d like to carry us in your store, please contact one of our distributors, or if you’d prefer to order direct from us (min. order 10 copies / no returns), drop us a line.

ATTENTION SUBSCRIBERS! STN is mailed at the 4th class bulk rate. This keeps subscription costs down, but if you move, the USPS won’t forward your magazine ... they just throw it out. Please apprise us of any address changes to avoid the inconvenience and extra expense of lost issues! Send your new information as far in advance as possible to: operations@signaltonoisemagazine.org MORE FINE PRINT The publisher accepts no responsibility for any opinions expressed by the writers or subjects of SIGNAL to NOISE. All contents are © 2008 STN Publishing LLC and/or its individual contributors. No portion of this document may be reproduced by any means without the written consent of SIGNAL to NOISE. 6 | SIGNAL to NOISE #52

LETTERS I want to thank you for the coverage of Song of America. I'm glad you gave it to Larry Cosentino as he's an excellent writer. Our project was greatly praised overall in the press and I'm glad Larry took us to task on a some issues. However, I have to take exception with a few points.

First, we went out of our way to make this project a non-partisan affair. That's why we tried to include as many views of American history as possible. For instance, I fought like a junkyard dog to not include the song “Where Were You When the World Stopped Turning”.

However, music is a collaborative effort and you don't win every argument. It was also pointed out to me how much that song meant and continues to mean for millions of Americans stung by the events of 9/11. Is it my first choice? No, but the other choices we had were not better.

In fact, I tend to agree with Larry that some moments in recent history such as 9/11 are too recent to be documented in a complete and impartial way (I lost that argument with the label folks too).

Second, the songs are part of our fabric.

The artists didn't write them so how can we be responsible for lack of irony? The arrangements were completely up to the individual artists and they had complete artistic freedom.

We took great pains and went through more than 1000 songs to whittle it down to only 50 (too little I admit but this is where I again ran into record label resistance....they wanted to keep it as short as possible). Unfortunately our history is indeed sad and sometimes depressing as the songs indicate. Plus, the artists gave of their time and forsook all royalties so that all the profits may go to the charities indicated in the liner notes (The Center for American Music, National History Day, the Folk Alliance and the Sing Out! Music Resource Center).

We are eternally grateful for their enthusiastic

participation.

This project was designed and intended to serve as an educational tool for over 40,000 public schools across the country so that students can learn about American history through music via popular artists. The University of Pittsburgh and the Center for American Music was also instrumental in helping us select the music that best represented that task. While popular music of the last 50 years may seem superfluous to some in this context those songs still connect people to the eras they represent and in some ways are more subversive than obvious songs of protest. It was also imperative that we kept our artistic integrity intact. Did we succeed? I dunno. It was a monumental task but I'll let the people who bought and listen to it speak for that. What I do know is that it took nine years to complete and almost didn't happen at all.

Apathy runs rampant in the music business as I'm sure you're aware of and it almost killed this project several times. I consider ourselves lucky to have got it out at all.

I want to thank Lawrence for pointing out the few weaknesses in our project. His review is probably the first I've seen that did so and it helps us to grow by seeing where we may have misfired a bit. Signal to Noise is still the strongest and best outlet for intelligent journalism I've read in recent years and it is my favorite music publication. Keep up the great work and stay vigilant.

Yours in tune, Ed Petterson

P.S. It was printed in the review as Songs of America when it is in fact Song of America, singular. A small thing no doubt but I thought it should be noted.

SUBSCRIPTIONS & BACK ISSUES 4 quarterly issues (US addresses): $20 4 quarterly issues (Canadian addreses): $30 4 quarterly issues (all other destinations): $50 single copies: $10 (US & Canada) | $20 (all other destinations) any twelve back issues (US addresses only): $30 sets of all available back issues (US only): $80 (see website for list of available back issues and contents) ✹ all rates are postpaid ✹ ✹ ✹ ✹ ✹ ✹

send check or money order: Signal to Noise, 1128 waverly, houston tx 77008 or PayPal to: zaeza@signaltonoisemagazine.org WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #52 | 7

ALLEN LOWE

Katie Lowe

Pan-genre polymath digs his cultural heritage and documents a broad swath of American music.

By Clifford Allen

Allen Lowe is a composer, saxophonist, guitarist, recording engineer, producer, author, discographer and documentarian, whose recent release Jews in Hell: Radical Jewish Acculturation (Spaceout, 2007) is a semiautobiographical tale and a thesis on Jewish post-structuralism. On the disc, Lowe recites half-buried lyrics on subjects like Lou Reed, Johnny Thunders, his parents, and self-hating suburbanite Jews. It’s a fascinating amalgam of broken Utah Phillips revivalist twang, Arto Lindsay spasms and shuffling country-rock rhythms alongside post-AACM creative compositions.

Born in Queens, raised on Long Island and currently living in South Portland, Maine, Lowe recounts an upbringing that put him in the right place at the right time: “There was always music in the house; I played oboe and my brother and sister also played instruments. I grew up in the classic sense—I listened to folk and the Beach Boys, the Band, Blues Project, Mike Bloomfield, and the first jazz I heard was Sonny Rollins’ Worktime and Booker Ervin’s Structurally Sound. The first jazz concert I went to was in 1969 at Town Hall—Sonny Rollins with fifteen or twenty bass players, famous also because he played for only fifteen minutes and walked off the stage.”

Luck has a lot to do with Lowe’s musical upbringing—on a trip to England in 1970, he saw cornetist Mongezi Feza and altoist Dudu Pukwana in an Ornette-styled freebop band playing to almost no audience; a couple of years before, he saw the Grateful Dead in their first appearance in New York’s Central Park.

This was all during Lowe’s teens—“I was somewhat ahead of my time when I was fourteen, and I met a group of like-minded people in high school who were politically active and into jazz. I was listening to Bud Powell and stuff like that; I remembered the phrases and solos and everything.” He and his mates attended performances at Slugs’ while underage—“I saw Ornette’s band around this time with Haden, Blackwell and Redman, and Haden came and sat down with us and explained the music.”

8 | SIGNAL to NOISE #52

After a short stint at the University of Michigan, Lowe returned east to attend SUNY-Binghampton for theatre, and he attended both St. Johns University in New York and Yale in the mid- to late-70s. Between New York and New Haven, he also spent time in Boston where he wrote for a local jazz publication and became friendly with musicians like Jaki Byard, Al Haig, Bob Neloms, Tommy Potter, Bill Triglia and saxophonist Dave Schildkraut—“I just looked them up in the phonebook, and they were excited that somebody was interested in what they’d done.”

“I moved to New Haven in the late ‘70s when I got admitted to the Yale playwriting school, and I met Richard Gilman. Under the sway of Barry Harris, whom I had interviewed for Down Beat, I got swept into the bebop thing and fed up with the free stuff. Gilman got me interested in the philosophy of art having to reinvent itself by continual questioning and self-criticism, so my perspective changed. I started picking up the saxophone in the early ‘80s at about age 30 to try and see what kind of answers I could come up with.”

It didn’t take long for the post-AACM school of New Haven improvisers to take hold on Lowe’s playing, for in his jaunts to New York he met third-wave improvising composers like Julius Hemphill, David Murray and Don Byron.

Alongside players like trombonist John Rapson, clarinetist Paul Austerlitz, and the rhythm section of bassist Jeff Fuller and drummer Ray Kaczynski, Lowe was able to bring players like Doc Cheatham into his orbit. That crossing of boundaries is part of a philosophy of reinvention; indeed, his shuffling no-wave blues on Jews in Hell is augmented by a diverse cast of artists: Matthew Shipp, Marc Ribot, trumpeter Randy Sandke and folksinger Erin McKeown all make appearances. “Some people thought my use of those people was forced—and yet one of the things I wrote in the notes is that Jews are the first postmodernists. I’m a dinosaur in the modern age, and I wrote music to reflect how lost I feel getting older

in this post-literate period. Cultural references become obscured, and it’s hard to relate to.

There is an ahistoricism about where I live now, in Maine, and people who should know better haven’t heard of the musicians who came before them.” A revitalized interest in rock and roll, coupled with “stifling boredom,” brought Lowe and the guitar together while in Portland, with results that are seemingly antithetical to his Hemphill/Anthony Braxton-inspired jazz writing.

Lowe’s writing has become as all-encompassing as his music—That Devilin’ Tune is his latest, a four-volume 36-disc set on Music and Arts that gives a massive and extremely varied history of jazz from the 19th century into the 1950s. “Using recordings that I own or that were sent to me, it took three years of mastering and sound restoration. I’m not sure how I did it and now it seems kind of impossible—I was broke at the time without much work. I immersed myself from 1998 to 2001 but it didn’t come out until 2006. I did include a lot of white musicians, territory bands, and since the white scene wasn’t usually dealt with fairly, I tried to integrate it into a fuller history of jazz, but not at the expense of black music.” That Devilin’ Tune follows a history of American pop song entitled American Pop from Minstrel to Mojo on Record, 1893-1946 (including 9 CDs, M&A 2000) and Lowe’s next project is a history of rock and roll from the evangelists to post-punk entitled God Don’t Like It. As Lowe puts it, “I think that my experience is unique as a performer and an intellectual— academic music reflects this cloistered thing and you can live the life without being antiintellectual. I learned more about the music by hanging out with Dave Schildkraut and Barry Harris, so I don’t get along with most academics.” That said, he’s clearly steeped in a broad history of American music, an interdisciplinary cross-weaving of the many niches in our cultural fabric. ✹ WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #52 | 9

From within their southern Californian abode, husband and wife duo Will Long and Danielle Baquet-Long parse mysteriously about their cloudland canyon soundscapes.

By Darren Bergstein

Alison Shildt

CELER To design this room never happened… to miss this room I remember... No doubt the MySpace phenomenon established the hospitable environs in which they thrive, but for Will Long and Danielle Baquet-Long, who operate sonically as Celer, their unstoppable thirst for exploring and linking up various artforms beyond the musical (photographic, literary, graphic) is informed by origins mysterious, intangible, poignant, and deeply personal.

Inaugurating their recording activities when they became a formal couple in 2005, according to Will, their chosen nom de disque derives from “a loosely-written reference to Dani’s French-Basque family history, a word that stuck out to us, both in the way it sounds and its true meaning of ‘concealment’ or ‘hiding.’” Such an air of latent mystery emerges from the oceanic dispersions of melancholic drift richly veined in their deliberately paced compositions. The hefty Celer back catalog, limned with dozens of self-released CDRs tucked in the duo’s painstakingly hand-crafted sleeves (originating “as love letters to Will,” says Danielle), needs be embraced as a continuing evolving entity of wondrously amorphous sound and vision.

Delaying the entropy; in emptiness, forms are born… “As a child I learned to play piano, but kept it in very basic stages,” Will explains.

“Early on, I also had a tendency to use tape recorders to make tapes of different parts of songs that I liked (usually only seconds) by recording, rewinding, and repeating it over and over. It drove my parents nuts but I think it had some influence on my future experimentation, hearing beauty in repetition.” Danielle’s trajectory differs: “I initially started by playing trumpet in Middle School. That opened the floodgates, learning piano, cello, other string instruments, and eventually electronics. My educational experience in Tibetan studies led me to India itself, where I learned to blow the conch and play sitar. My fascination ultimately became focused on the meditative and eccentric abilities of sound.”

The hatchlings of these formative years are self-evident, the models established, die-cut, 10 | SIGNAL to NOISE #52

sprayed-on, gentle plastique detonations of muffled, spiraling radiance: delayed-action shifts attend pitches bent and modulated on Elias; Sunlir and Scols quiver, decay and shine on like crazy diamonds. Dilué forms a Rothkoed puzzle, figuratively and literally, a single, evaporated piano note revolving in a mobius loop, one color distilled but vibrant en masse like the broken puzzle pieces its box reveals.

The twin pyramids holding the discs of Sieline act like neat time travel devices, its sounds agape, tones levitating. All these releases demonstrate Celer's distinctive approach, in which each project is built around a core idea, image, sensation, be it tonal, temporal, and/or tactile.

Says Danielle, “We utilize complete improvisation, with experimentation and development later, to wrap sounds around a larger, more specific concept.”

Will continues: “We always begin with completely raw material, whether it is field recordings, long form acoustic improvisations, or very focused and structured acoustic pieces.

The cutting and mixing process is completely visual, where we use chalkboards and larger sketchpads to draw the ideas we’d like to incorporate into the sounds, stretching, layering and including their echo tails, all relative to waveform structure and manipulation. Painting and brush strokes definitely are present in our sonic designs, even in multiple layers that are reduced to one single fine line of sound.”

The divine is not invisible… But Celer music, “minimal,” even “simplistic” upon hearing, bespeaks a massed application of instrumentation (on-site field recordings, resonating strings, generous electronic filters and processing) that effectively mashes genres, reducing their primal components to quicksilver, fomenting in its fuzzily immersive din the sweet, almost romantic blurs the duo love to sculpt. “Classical” drone music might be the correct epithet here, suggesting an affinity between Celer's music and the way that William Basinski crafts his nostalgic tone disintegrations or Philip Jeck his transmutative turntablisms. “Many parts of classical music are definitely influential to us,

from peaking layers of strings to instrumentation choices,” notes Will. “We fall into a similar, yet differing category, always listening for those notes that we want to experience again like a warm memory, manipulating them over and over, repeating that feeling for as long as possible.” Says Danielle, “It’s repetitive indeed, but I’ve glommed from artists who create for love: Edward Abbey's love for the desert, Nabokov's love for butterflies, Jerzy Kosinski's adage that ‘the principle of art is to pause, not bypass; the principles of true art are not to portray, but to evoke.’” Nowhere is that maxim more palpable than in Danielle’s illustrative track titles; in fact, it is her delicate poetics that grace this narrative’s italicized phrases above.

The duo’s most recent work, the absolutely splendid Discourses of the Withered, its companion disc The Everything and the Nothing (both on Infraction Records), and Nacreous Clouds (and/OAR), bespeaks nothing less than a true postmodern, 21st century “folk” music, smearing ex-pat remnants of “classicism” into a singular digital miasma. It’s a sound cultivated from two souls wholly aligned as one. Says Danielle, “We have spent so many years creating a figurative relationship that our closeness has deserved a sound.” Will notes, “We don't design our music as a means of 'escape' or to 'take you to another place'. We want listeners to feel some of our own experiences, hopes, and memories.”

Certainly the yearning to make such connections hasn’t stymied their productivity.

Upcoming is a release on new Japanese label Slow Flow, another on Mystery Sea; next year should see follow-ups on both and/OAR and Infraction, Danielle’s Chubby Wolf solo project, and a slew of the duo’s nigh-on essential handmade works. Meanwhile, Celer remain dedicated to both their artistic aspirations and each other—Will draws a parallel to their diaphanous creations: “Some things deserve to be experienced for more than a single moment.” ✹ WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #52 | 11

NO SUCCESS LIKE FAILURE

After sowing aesthetic mayhem for more than 25 years, Chicago's Cheer-Accident begins to make peace with maturity Story by Hank Shteamer.

Photos by Pete Gershon.

12 | SIGNAL to NOISE #52

WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAG WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #52 | 13

Cheer-Accident in Chicago, September 2008. left to right: Mike Hagedorn, Todd Rittmann, Jeff Libersher, Laura Boton, Thymme Jones, Alex Perkolup and Andrea Rothschild

Screeching to the choir It’s 11:30 on a sunny Sunday morning this past August, and Cheer-Accident is burning another bridge. The group is playing in a bandshell situated on a spacious farm near Chapel Hill, North Carolina, the site of the music festival known as Prog Day. As their hour-long set winds down, the seven members lurch around the stage, lie supine, dance, laugh maniacally or pantomime sobbing, each abetting the overall chaos. Drummer Thymme Jones approaches the microphone and addresses the audience in a deadpan: “We like to end every show with poop in our pants.” A few among the sparse crowd giggle; most stare blankly.

Cheer-Accident’s current core lineup (Jones, guitarist Jeff Libersher and bassist Alex Perkolup) and several regular guest stars (vocalist Laura Boton and trombonist Mike Hagedorn, along with multi-instrumentalists Todd Rittmann and Andrea Rothschild) have driven 800 miles from their hometown of Chicago to perform at the event, described by its organizers as “the world’s longest running progressive rock festival.” It’s the kind of gathering where attendees know that the middle-aged man sporting the Camel shirt isn’t advertising cigarettes, but his love of the vintage Canterbury prog unit. Fans buzz around the merch tent, obsessing over CDs by groups with names like Cirrus Bay, Schematism and Project Moonbeam. They peruse a program detailing highlights of years past, such as the 1997 edition, which featured violinist David Ragsdale of the band Kansas.

Cheer-Accident isn’t as out of place here as it might seem. Its set included plenty of what could have passed for prog, especially the intricate, metallic instrumental “Even Has a Half Life” and the lengthy art-rock suite “Salad Days.”

But the show also featured loopier moments that presaged Jones’s scatological concluding remark: “King Cheezamin,” for example, a marching-band-tinged jam over which Libersher delivers goofily cartoonish taunts. So while Cheer-Accident acknowledges a considerable debt of influence to many classic acts within the fest’s namesake genre, such as Gentle Giant, Genesis and Van der Graaf Generator, that influence is highly selective. The band has adopted all of those artists’ drive for originality and none of the self-important solemnity that has marked so many of their latter-day acolytes. CheerAccident, therefore, represents the difference between rock that’s genuinely progressive and a long-codified notion of Progressive Rock.

In theory, that’s a good thing, but not if you’re trying to win over the Prog Day crowd.

Cheer-Accident leaves the stage, and the day’s next act—flaunting flashy chops, tricky time signatures and philosophical lyrics—instantly reestablishes the fest’s status quo. A few gather 14 | SIGNAL to NOISE #52

around the Cheer-Accident merch table to debrief. Some rave, but others grumble. “My kids play with toys and that’s what they sound like,” one man quips. “And I take those toys away.”

The band is well acclimated to such dismissal, and even invites it. An old bio issued

by Cheer-Accident’s sometime label Skin Graft put it thusly: “At just about the point where you become convinced that any given [Cheer-Accident] song could make it on commercial radio, they ‘blow it’ with some left-field turn straight off a cliff.” And this tendency goes far beyond individual tracks. In essence, the band has made a pact with itself that if it can find a way to enliven a composition, album or performance, it will do so by any means, however jarring or self-defeating. Consider this cryptic manifesto printed inside Cheer-Accident’s 2003 album Introducing Lemon: “It [i.e., lemon] wilts the lettuce, but it freshens up the salad.” In other words, in the band’s eyes, aesthetic tension is endlessly fruitful.

Even for the most open-minded listener, CheerAccident’s constant insistence upon adding acidic accents can be both enlightening and agonizing, sometimes simultaneously.

But Cheer-Accident’s art is much more than merely provocative. Imagine a confluence of the grandeur of Yes, the range of This Heat, the irreverence of Ween, the poignancy of Elliott Smith and the mischief of Andy Kaufman, and you’ll be getting close to the net effect of CheerAccident’s musical output since its formation in 1981. Over the course of 13 full-length albums, including Fear Draws Misfortune—due out in January on Cuneiform, a label known for issuing Matching Mole and other old-school prog groups—the band has covered a remarkable amount of terrain, from eerie sound collage to gemlike song and burly math-metal. Figure in years’ worth of epic and bizarre live performances, stimulating extramusical happenings, collaborations with many key figures in the Chicago musical underground and an utterly inscrutable cable-access program, and the result is one of the most fascinating creative careers in the modern American underground, in any medium.

Fear Draws Misfortune is an important work for the band, and perhaps its most mature to date. Though the disc covers an impressive amount of ground—complex instrumental rock, eccentric chorales reminiscent of the French prog institution Magma and mournful, horn-abetted interludes—it does so without the aid of Cheer-Accident’s beloved lemon. What that means practically is that it avoids outright silliness, challenging the listener and yet never resorting to irreverence. In this sense it fits in perfectly with Cuneiform’s recent tradition of backing artists, such as the Claudia Quintet and Ahleuchatistas, that nod to prog’s past and yet

expand on it in tasteful ways. And this is no minor occurrence, considering that Cheer-Accident rarely fits in anywhere. Even more noteworthy is the fact that this harmony was intentional. The band had talked with Cuneiform several years before about releasing Introducing Lemon, but the deal fell through when Jones & Co. refused to unscramble the record’s mixed signals. This time around, though, the musicians actually took the tastes of label head Steve Feigenbaum into account when preparing the disc. In a late-September interview at his apartment in Chicago’s Humboldt Park, Jones puts it matter-of-factly: “There were specific aspects of what we do that I didn’t think should be included in this.”

Compromise? Maybe in a certain sense. But after so many years of battling convention—not to mention common sense—at every turn, Cheer-Accident has certainly earned the right to call a momentary truce.

Failstorm But don’t think the band isn’t proud of its war stories. Talking with the members of Cheer-Accident, one quickly comprehends that they regard self-sabotage the way Anthony Bourdain views ethnic food: the gnarlier, the better. What to others might seem like an unequivocal debacle, they tend to revere as a perverse sort of artistic triumph.

Sitting at an outdoor café in Chicago’s Lincoln Square a month after Prog Day, the tall, ultraheartfelt Libersher—a native of nearby Joliet and a member of Cheer-Accident for 23 years—and the bearded, impish Perkolup, the band’s fourth full-time four-stringer, who joined in 2003, reflect on the mixed reaction their antics received at Prog Day. It’s not long before they’re trading accounts of other instances when the band has knowingly counteracted its own best interests, each tale more cringe-inducing than the last.

Libersher, 47, recounts a time when CheerAccident was preparing a particularly challenging set for an upcoming gig. “We’re probably a week away from the show and in the middle of practice, Thymme looks over and he’s like, ‘Hey, I really want to have this loud click track playing through the PA for the entire set.’ And instantly my reaction was, ‘That’s awesome.’”

He cracks up, then continues, “[Former bassist] Dan [Forden] didn’t really see it that way. He said something like, ‘So let me get this straight: We just rehearsed this really complicated, intricate music for the past four weeks, and now you want to ruin it by having a click track playing throughout the set?’ And Thymme and I were like, ‘Yeah!’” Forden, who has made his living as a sound designer for the Mortal Kombat series and other video games, remains on good terms with his former bandmates. Looking back on his Cheer-Accident experience, though, it’s clear to WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #52 | 15

him that he wasn’t cut out for the long haul. “I wasn’t really interested in the extramusical elements,” he states firmly. “I was more interested in playing cool stuff, because there was lot of that, and I felt like the theatrics—or antitheatrics—took away from the music.”

Luckily Perkolup, 34, shares no such reservations with his predecessor. “To be a core member of Cheer-Accident is a twofold thing,” he explains. “First, you have to actually be able to play the music, and second, you have to be willing to do a lot of work, and then throw it in the garbage.” The bassist goes on to explain a third, potentially even more problematic facet of the band’s ethos: the thoroughly organic way it reappropriates everyday experiences into performance fodder. “You have to be careful what you do in the tour van, because you may very well end up being asked to re-create it live,” he says. “One time while we were driving, I was fake-crying to this Dionne Warwick song, and so we started the next show off with that song fading in and me just sitting on a stool onstage crying. And then we faded in a song that Thymme wrote that was like [Sings peppy melody], like this happy thing, and Thymme and Jeff jumped out and started throwing a Frisbee back and forth while I was looking at them and just sobbing.”

Not surprisingly, these weird psychodramas have resulted in many peeved audience members. Libersher remembers a Cleveland show where the band replicated a quizzical passage from 1994’s The Why Album, in which the quirky pop song “Transposition” loops three times identically. It didn’t take long for the heckling to begin. “These guys were just screaming, ‘Get off the stage!’ And of course we did the exact same movements each time and Thymme said the exact same things before the song—because you have to do that—and by the third one, these guys took these big bags of cat litter and they were throwing them at us.”

Another time, an unstable showgoer called in a bomb threat during a Cheer-Accident gig, and attendees, well-accustomed to such performative gambits, simply assumed it was the band’s doing. “Everyone said, ‘This time Thymme’s gone too far!’” Perkolup recalls with a laugh. The bassist welcomes the full spectrum of reactions.

“By setting up these situations, we’re basically saying that certain rules don’t apply when we’re in the room,” he says. “Whatever happens is beneficial, even if it gets you punched.”

Dual treasure However edgy their performance philosophies might appear, both men come off looking tame next to their bandmate. Thymme (say “Tim”) Jones, 46, is the musical and philosophical center of Cheer-Accident, and its only remaining founding member. He is the kind of man whose mere presence can incite hilarity.

Usually found sporting a frizzy, graying mane, a baggy T-shirt and running shorts, he is the epitome of unfashion. He speaks slowly, with an exaggerated Chicago drawl, and often explodes in fits of uncontrollable giggling. Over the years, he has most often made his living delivering pizzas.

Those who have seen Jones handle drums, trumpet, keyboards and vocals for the band marvel at his largely self-taught virtuosity. But thousands of Chicagoans who have never heard a note of Cheer-Accident’s music recognize him as the guy who incessantly shakes maracas and masterminds quizzical stunts as part of the obliquely hilarious cable-access program Cool 16 | SIGNAL to NOISE #52

Clown Ground, which the band has hosted weekly since the early ’90s.

Solicit descriptions of Thymme Jones from his associates and you end up with a curious mixture of benign bafflement at his sense of mirth and awed admiration of his musicianship.

Those who praise him as a player are effusive.

“Thymme struck me first as an astounding drummer,” says Jim O’Rourke, who worked with Jones in the early-to-mid-’90s in the noise outfit Illusion of Safety and his own conceptual rock project Brise-Glace. “I’d never heard anyone actually make that sound on a set in an actual room.” Jones’s sui generis percussion work is indeed something to behold. Playing openhanded, he pounds out devilishly complex patterns on a ride cymbal situated to the left of his hi-hat. His trademark off-kilter grooves, such as the one that leads off the Prog Day highlight “Even Has a Half-Life,” combine the knottiness of prog with the deep-pocket swing of funk.

And as Tim Garrigan, Jones’s former bandmate in the challenging experimental trio You Fantastic!, points out, high-end equipment has never been a concern. “On many occasions,” Garrigan notes, “I’ve witnessed Thymme take a snare, hi-hat and bass drum that look like they’ve been found in the garbage and make them sound like John Bonham.” Indeed, the drum kit in Jones’s apartment—which he used on Fear Draws Misfortune—is literally held together with duct tape.

Jones couples this resourcefulness with impressive versatility. He boasts a gorgeously plaintive singing voice, a gift for lush piano work and evocative trumpet playing, and a knack for constructing ominous beat collages out of his own distorted drum samples (a practice that nods to the electroacoustic experiments of one of his percussive heroes, Henry Cow’s Chris Cutler).

Violinist-vocalist Carla Kihlstedt—who cameos on Fear Draws Misfortune—has experienced Jones’s polymathic brilliance firsthand, having sung with Cheer-Accident onstage during the band’s 2007 tour with her group Sleepytime Gorilla Museum. She points out that Jones’s range is as much emotional as it is instrumental.

“Thymme is a wonder of my musical world,” states Kihlstedt, also a member of Tin Hat, Two Foot Yard and the Book of Knots. “What leaves me laughing and crying and baffled and inspired in an inexplicably perfect ratio is the balance in his music: He doesn’t choose head over heart, or heart over instinct, or intuition over structure, but you get the sense that all of the parts of Thymme that make him Thymme are having a great big sleepover and somehow every time, something inescapably perfect comes out of it, whether utterly ridiculous, or smart, or funny, or totally beautiful and sublime, or willfully cranky and stubborn.”

Many in Jones’s hometown have a similar appreciation for his wide-ranging talents, and he’s often served as a sort of utility player among Chicago’s avant-rock elite. In addition to BriseGlace and Illusion of Safety, he’s recorded with O’Rourke and David Grubbs’s Gastr del Sol, the eccentric glam-pop showman Bobby Conn and the bewitching post-Beefheart outfit U.S. Maple (of which sometime Cheer-Accident guitarist Todd Rittmann was formerly a member). Jones has also made connections with forwardthinking local jazz players, including trombonist Jeb Bishop, who has performed on several Cheer-Accident discs. Amid all this activity, Jones has found the time to record two remarkable solo albums, both released on Perdition Plastics in 1996: While, a set of enchanting multitracked

piano instrumentals, and Career Move, an often-devastating disc of melancholy piano-pop songs. Jones is, it seems, always at work, something that Libersher, as his longtime creative partner, admires greatly. “One of the many things I’ve always appreciated about Thymme is that he understands that accomplishing things as a band is not magic,” he explains. “You can talk for days about getting something done, but in the end, someone actually has to do something, and he always steps up.”

Jones’s prodigious musicmaking has clearly left an impression on many, but his penchant for impromptu performance art comes up just as often. Composer Weasel Walter, former leader of the Flying Luttenbachers—a band that often shared bills with Cheer-Accident and at one point included Perkolup—shares the following anecdote. “Once, after a show, Thymme decided that he was going to exist in slow motion, and he interacted with the world like that for at least 45 minutes straight,” Walter explains. “He headed towards his car—a travail that took about a minute per foot—got in, and proceeded to drive down a major Chicago street at about two miles per hour for as long as I could see him on the horizon.” Bassist Darin Gray, an occasional Cheer-Accident guest star, and a member of both Brise-Glace and You Fantastic!, sums up the guiding principle behind such behavior: “Thymme isn’t waiting for the creative spirit to strike—he’s swimming in it constantly.” Like many of Jones’s collaborators, Cheer-Accident lyricist Scott Rutledge didn’t quite know what to make of this at first. “I often couldn’t tell when he was being serious and when he was joking,” he confesses. “After 20odd years of knowing him, I’m still not sure I can tell the difference.”

That observation is nothing new to Jones.

“Yeah, there’s been a lot of that over the years,” he says, with a somewhat perturbed sigh. “I even have that problem with some of the people I’m closest with, and certainly as a band we have that problem.” But that doesn’t stop Jones from regularly conflating comedy and life on a whim. “Sometimes at parties, I play statues,” he says, referring to his love of standing stock still in public for uncomfortably lengthy periods. “I don’t feel like saying anything, so I think, Oh, I’ll just be a statue.”

Statues of liberty Jones was playing statues long before there was such a thing as Cheer-Accident. Growing up in Palatine, 30 miles northwest of Chicago, he learned early on that manufacturing one’s own fun was an essential part of surviving a suburban upbringing. He credits Jim Drummond, his close friend from middle school onward and Cheer-Accident’s first vocalist, with implanting this idea in his mind. Drummond, the youngest of ten children, turned Jones on to a variety of challenging music, from Randy Newman to the Mahavishnu Orchestra. (The two also bonded over the comedy of Martin Mull, whose absurdist rock number “Do the Nothing” was a particular favorite.) But beyond this, Drummond also conveyed a key philosophy that guides Jones to this day. “The most important door Jim opened was the idea that no one ever needs to be bored,” the drummer writes in a recent email. “Thus began the fascination with taking on the challenge of finding something interesting within any setting, no matter how mundane.” Sometime in high school, Jones applied that logic to his own name, Tim, and retooled its spelling, just for kicks.

WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #52 | 17

Music was another escape. Jones’s mother, Jane, a schoolteacher, recalls him sitting in front of the stereo as a young child, accompanying Herb Alpert & the Tijuana Brass records by drumming on an empty oatmeal box. She fondly remembers the time she and Thymme’s father, Wendell, a onetime mayor of Palatine, took their five-year-old son to hear Alpert live. “He sat on his dad’s lap and never moved or spoke during the entire concert—just soaked it in,” she says.

Perhaps following the suave mood-musician’s lead, Jones started taking trumpet lessons in sixth grade and began experimenting with the family’s piano. Around the same time, he and his friend Mike Greenlees—who would go on to drum for the ’90s noise-rock outfit Tar—began recording homemade cassettes, staging livingroom performances for family and friends, and learning Tijuana Brass covers on their recorderlike Tonette flutes.

In high school, these activities gave way to more experimental pursuits. Jones and fellow trumpeter Kevin Njaastad stumbled upon free improvisation during downtime in marchingband practice. “The first-chair trumpet guy came up to us one time and said, ‘What key is that in?’ And we just looked at him and said, ‘It’s in every key!’” Jones relates. A similarly whimsical impulse led Jones, Drummond and Greenlees to form a band at a 1981 New Year’s party, and more home recording soon commenced, abetted by Njaastad and drummer Steve Past.

Jones happened on a card display in a local Hallmark shop that read “Cheer-Accident,” and the group affixed that name to the third of three cassettes it would record that year—and eventually to the project as a whole. A 2004 reissue compiled recordings from this period as

18 | SIGNAL to NOISE #52

Younger Than You Are Now, and though Drummond’s surrealist rants give the material a unique sound within Cheer-Accident’s discography, the range of the sessions—from introspective prog-pop tunes like “Freedom” to menacing proto-Wolf Eyes soundscapes such as “Tiger with a Woman’s Head”—established a blueprint for the band’s next two-plus decades of activity.

At this early stage, Cheer-Accident was more an art collective than a band, but that changed as Jones went off to college at Northern Illinois University in the fall of ’81. During his one year there, he met many future long-term collaborators, including Libersher (whom, incidentally, Jones approached in the dorm laundry room to ask if his own Camel T-shirt advertised the band or the cigarette), Illusion of Safety’s Dan Burke, bassist Chris Block and saxist Ross Feller. “He was my best friend at Northern,” Jones states of Feller. “We would play statues in elevators for two hours at a time. It was kind of like one big acid trip, even though I don’t do acid and neither did he.” The pair formed a band together, but its initial lineup quickly fizzled and reformed without Feller. This outfit, Dot Dot Dot, whose concise yet strikingly elaborate compositions drew heavily on prog and fusion, was Jones’s first steadily gigging band, and it was also his introduction to the visceral yet formidably technical bass skills of Chris Block.

Cheer-Accident’s current incarnation grew out of collaborations among Block, Libersher and Jones. The guitarist moved in with Jones in 1985 and the two began playing together; the bassist completed the lineup soon after. By 1989, this trio had adopted the Cheer-Accident mantle, established itself as a live band— debuting on July 17, 1987, at a Chicago club

called the Igloo—and produced four full-length albums. Two cassette releases, Life Isn’t Like That and Vasectomy (issued on Complacency, a label Jones cofounded with Dan Burke), took a more elaborate and extroverted approach to the scattershot style of the Jones/Drummond/ Greenlees efforts. But Sever Roots, Tree Dies, released as a Complacency LP in 1988 and reissued on CD last year by the German Freakshow label, was something else entirely.

Even more so than Fear Draws Misfortune, Sever Roots is a prog album in the classic sense, complete with epic song structures, pyrotechnic odd-time breakdowns, lush production values and an angsty earnestness that the band has largely steered clear of since. Trading lead vocals, Block and Jones address big-picture topics such as conformity, capitalism and romantic fallout, veering occasionally into preachiness.

(Scott Rutledge, who began working with Cheer-Accident in 1991 and has since become its primary lyricist, would later take on similarly weighty subjects with far subtler and more potent results.)

The trio streamlined considerably on 1989’s Dumb Ask, recorded by Steve Albini in what the liner notes describe as a “squalid little basement.” And compared with Sever Roots, the music is also conspicuously raw, driven by Block’s fuzzed-out bass work and clearly influenced by the raucous post-hardcore of Albini’s Rapeman. But Dumb Ask ups the complexity factor enough that this Cheer-Accident lineup deserves to be considered as a math-rock pioneer alongside contemporaries like Don Caballero, Bastro and Breadwinner. In addition to the skronk-funk standout “Garbage Head,” a Cheer-Accident live staple to this day, Dumb

Ask also debuted a curious piece called “Filet of Nod,” which ended with a kind of manual loop, a jaggedly syncopated one-chord locked groove repeating for nearly six full minutes.

Infinite jest Asked how he would describe Cheer-Accident to a neophyte, Jim O’Rourke responds succinctly: “I would play them ‘Filet of Nod,’ and if they get into it, they’re all set.” For all its minimalism, the track is, in many ways, the quintessential Cheer-Accident composition. But over the years, it’s become much more than just another piece in the band’s repertoire. It’s the cornerstone of Cheer-Accident’s aesthetic of provocation.

Mulling the topic over, Thymme Jones estimates that he has spent over 100 hours of his life locked into “Filet of Nod.” This is due largely to the fact that starting in the mid-’90s, the song’s culminating riff evolved into a standalone performance piece. In 1994, the band set up in a park at the juncture of Chicago’s Lincoln, Halsted and Fullerton Streets and played “Filet” nonstop for an entire afternoon. It became an annual tradition: Once each summer, for the next five years, the band went to the same park and played the riff all day, for up to nine hours at a time. On July 15, 1995, at a music festival sponsored by the Skin Graft label, Cheer-Accident assembled in the entryway of Chicago’s Lounge Ax and proceeded to trance out on a low-volume “Filet.” Mark Fischer, Skin Graft coproprietor, recalls, “They played from the moment the door opened until the last guest left—through sets by five other bands and skits in between.”

The drummer makes a direct parallel between playing “Filet of Nod” and playing statues. “It’s very meditative,” he explained. “It doesn’t really matter what else is going on. You just get to this amazing state of mind, but at the same time, you’re fully conscious—you’re even hyperconscious, and you’re completely aware of your surroundings. It’s really interesting to be the one constant in a scene and still be able to perceive what’s going on around you. You get to conduct this social experiment while being in a meditative state. So it’s a win-win [Laughs].”

Another key facet of Cheer-Accident’s social experiment is Cool Clown Ground, a weekly Dada-esque comedy program that Jones and his bandmates have hosted on Chicago public-access television since 1993. It’s the ultimate reality show, in the sense that very little of consequence actually happens. One exemplary episode consists of Jones sitting in a chair facing the camera, against a plain black backdrop. Over the course of an uninterrupted half hour, he eats an apple, munches on some pretzels and fields listener calls, discussing local sports and other mundane topics. Some viewers seem tickled by his poker-faced inaction, others disturbed by it. Further episodes have shown Jones conducting man-on-the-street interviews outside Wrigley Field, playing a leisurely game of Scrabble, having a conversation with several prerecorded versions of himself and performing interpretive dance in drag. Viewer phone calls are often a key component. But whereas a talk show invites commentary on a predetermined issue or onscreen action, Cool Clown Ground refuses to provide a coherent framework for such participation.

Like “Filet of Nod,” these episodes can be grating at first, but they tend to gradually develop a bizarre sort of charm. Jones’s further comments on performing the locked groove seem perfectly suited to describe the Cool

Clown Ground ethos. “Everyone’s multitasking every minute of every fucking day,” he says. “Here’s something that’s fine just being a constant thing without having an agenda.” The same lack of agenda that sets “Filet” apart from traditional songs, then, distinguishes Cool Clown Ground from explicitly entertainment-driven television. “I don’t think Thymme tries to be funny, which is a good thing,” says the show’s producer, Fred Krueger, who recruited Jones and the rest of Cheer-Accident with the intention of casting them as a sort of late-20th-century Monkees. “So a lot of times people aren’t sure if what they’re watching is supposed to be funny or not.” Jones wouldn’t have it any other way.

Personnel best If Jones stands out as the band’s chief extramusical provocateur, several ex-members have also been vital to this aspect of the project. In addition to Libersher, whose ace deadpan has anchored many a Cool Clown Ground segment, former Cheer-Accident bassist Dylan Posa and guitarist Phil Bonnet were well-attuned to the practice of what the group often refers to as “id vomit.”

In the years preceding Posa’s 1994 arrival, the band had difficulty finding a steady bassist. Chris Block had left in ’92, when disagreements arose over what direction Cheer-Accident would take after Babies Shouldn’t Smoke, the follow-up to Dumb Ask. Dan Forden, present during the infamous click-track incident, replaced Block and appeared on the next two Cheer-Accident records, 1994’s The Why Album and 1996’s Not a Food. But Forden exited Cheer-Accident soon after tracking ended for the latter, and the band turned to Posa—like Perkolup, a former Flying Luttenbacher.

The new bassist’s first performance with Cheer-Accident was also the first annual outdoor “Filet of Nod” marathon, and unlike Forden, Posa immediately embraced this conceptual side of the band. “It was so refreshing to be involved with a bunch of guys that didn’t take themselves so seriously,” Posa reflects. “We were interested in tweaking the conventions of ‘the rock band’ without losing the ‘rock’ or the ‘band’ parts.” The first two installments of Variations on a Goddamn Old Man, CheerAccident’s free-form compilations of live and practice-room fragments, give a good taste of the sort of openness Posa describes. (Another excellent example of the band’s mid-’90s flowering is Enduring the American Dream, which spans the Block, Forden and Posa years and is perhaps the band’s deepest and most unsettling full-length.) Posa proved to be a strong live asset as well. During his tenure, Cheer-Accident’s shows achieved a Grateful Dead-esque level of seamlessness, collaging several albums’ worth of pieces together along with pop fragments (“Celebration,” “Back in Black,” etc.) and copious interludes of patience-testing comedy.

Along with Posa, Libersher and Jones, the band’s other core member during this period was guitarist Phil Bonnet. A busy Chicago sound engineer who had recorded Sever Roots, Bonnet joined Cheer-Accident in 1990 and helped compose Babies, a thorny, sprawling effort that shaded the Dumb Ask approach with left-field pop elements. The new member proved uniquely adaptable to the group’s rapidly expanding aesthetic, making important contributions to both The Why Album, which featured skewed yet boldly tuneful pop—a direction the band would revisit on 2006’s moving What Sequel? —and Not a Food, a fantastically brutal WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #52 | 19

clockwise from top: Cheer-Accident's Chris Block, Jones and Libersher in the late '80s, the late Phil Bonnet at Solid Sound, and C-A's 2000 lineup: Jamie Fillmore, Libersher, Jones and Dylan Posa.

20 | SIGNAL to NOISE #52

courtesy Thymme Jones

and largely instrumental album that built on the mathy dissonance of the Chris Block era.

Bonnet was, like Posa, also sympathetic to the band’s penchant for oddball onstage behavior.

During one especially aggressive show on January 22, 1999, he ambushed the rest of the band by taking an impromptu blues-harmonica solo in the middle of “Garbage Head.” A little more than a week later, Cheer-Accident entered Solid Sound, the Hoffman Estates studio where Bonnet worked, to begin recording the intensely ambitious effort that would become Salad Days.

Shockingly, Bonnet suffered what appeared to be a sudden brain aneurysm on February 2 and died instantly at age 38.

The tragedy left Cheer-Accident reeling, yet it set the stage for perhaps its most fruitful period up to that point. The band regrouped in May and added final overdubs to Salad Days, whose title track was Cheer-Accident’s first major extended work. The piece interweaves knotty, hard-hitting instrumental rock with spare, elegiac sections for murmuring trumpet and chiming guitar. The context of Bonnet’s death adds and extra layer of poignancy to an already masterful piece of genre-transcendent musicmaking.

As Darin Gray puts it, “If you can listen to Salad Days and not be moved, I don’t want to know you.”

Making Lemon-ade But the band would soon surpass even that outstanding effort. Traumatized by the loss of his bandmate, Jones found himself questioning Cheer-Accident’s future in the summer of ’99.

He commiserated with his friend Jamie Fillmore, an encounter that led to the latter, a guitarist, offering to step in and help refocus the project.

In January of 2000, Fillmore debuted with Cheer-Accident at its first show since Bonnet’s death, where the band assumed the guise of a Christian acoustic-folk outfit, engendering a typical mix of confusion and wonder. Over the next two years, the new lineup, centered on Jones, Libersher, Posa and Fillmore, composed a wealth of new material, and in January of ’02, it entered Steve Albini’s Electrical Audio to record.

Introducing Lemon, the resultant full-length, is hands-down the best weird rock record ever to emerge from Chicago—and that’s no faint praise, considering that the town has churned out countless sterling examples of same over the past two decades. But Lemon has them all beat, topping Gastr del Sol’s Camoufleur for visionary genre-blurring, Tortoise’s Millions Now Living Will Never Die for atmospheric beauty and Shellac’s At Action Park for sheer skronk factor. And by incorporating both exuberant horn-abetted grooves and insular high jinks, the record references two other important, yet utterly disparate strains in its hometown’s musical history: those of Chicago (the band) and the Art Ensemble of Chicago.

Two brilliant 20-minute-plus suites bookend the disc, nodding to Salad Days and offering further proof of the band’s immense range.

Opener “The Autumn Wind Is a Pirate,” the perfect 21st-century retort to the classic multipart Rush instrumental “La Villa Strangiato,” traverses

spiky math-rock, a tender acoustic bliss-out and flailing antigrooves before arriving at a funky, exuberant sax- and brass-driven strut that nods to classic Afrobeat. Introducing Lemon also contains the single funniest Cheer-Accident song: “Camp O’ Physique,” during which Libersher recites a hard-boiled surrealist monologue over a chintzy drum-machine beat. The text pivots on quizzical yet evocative lines like “Then they put the white pills in your fruit cocktail, and make you play tag around the raft.” Libersher’s performance is a spot-on piece of character acting, perfectly capturing a Philip K. Dick-ian mood of tweaked-out paranoia.

Concession stand In the eyes of Cuneiform’s Steve Feigenbaum, though, that particular introduction of lemon didn’t do much to freshen up the salad. At the time, he had expressed interest in releasing the record, but “Camp O’ Physique,” a four-minute song on a nearly 75-minute album, stopped him short. “I remember telling the band that I thought the record would be improved immensely if they got rid of that track,” Feigenbaum says over the phone. Cheer-Accident met his constructive criticism with silence and Lemon came out on the edgier Skin Graft imprint.

But there was no such conflict over Fear Draws Misfortune. Feigenbaum kept in touch with Jones & Co. and retained hopes that he would someday work with them. When contact resumed, he agreed to issue an upcoming fulllength, while at the same time offering a sincere, yet nonbinding request. “I just said to them, ‘Give me your strongest foot forward. Don’t go out of your way to be subversive or funny,’” says the label head.

Such a request seems tantamount to asking Bill O’Reilly not to go out of his way to espouse conservative views, but judging by the content of the record, the band actually took Feigenbaum’s words to heart. Jones’s explanation for this is a level-headed one. “When Jeff and Chris and I were first getting together, I don’t think we had any goals at all,” he says, pacing around his living room. “It was just a matter of coming up with songs; we didn’t even have it in our heads that we were going to play live initially. But now that we have so many years under our belt, it becomes more goal-oriented. So like with this record, this is the one we’re making for Cuneiform.” Fear Draws Misfortune isn’t a predictable release by any means, but its lack of blatantly sore-thumb elements contrasts with much of the band’s past output. And this was entirely by design. “I knew that I didn’t want there to be anything particularly silly on the record,” Jones explains.

This sentiment represents a form of restraint that Jones has frequently railed against in the past. During the Chris Block years, the band got word that representatives from Touch and Go, a label that has championed many of Cheer-Accident’s peers in the Chicago underground, would be scouting out its next show. A modest-length but still potentially off-putting “Filet of Nod” appeared second on the proposed set list, yielding a conflict between the members. “Chris

said, ‘You do realize this is an audition for Touch and Go, don’t you?’” Jones recounts. “And I’m like, ‘It’s not a fucking audition for Touch and Go, or for anything else: It’s a show.’ And Jeff just agreed and said, ‘We are what we are, you know.’” Touch and Go, for its part, never came calling.

Dollars and sense Weirdly it may have been the megasuccessful Herb Alpert, Jones’s childhood favorite and a musician whom he admires in a very sincere way, who engendered this chronic—and even self-destructive—distrust of compromise. “I read this article where [Alpert] was talking about how his fifth record, Going Places, went gold before it had even been released, just through preorders,” Jones relates. “And he started freakin’ out, like, ‘I’m just a commodity! It doesn’t even matter what I do; people are gonna buy it.’ And he started overthinking that and had a total nervous breakdown. He couldn’t even coordinate his fingers on the valves of his trumpet anymore, just totally lost it. And I think that story planted an interesting seed. Maybe I don’t want to get to a certain level because I don’t think I’m above freaking out.”

It seems highly unlikely that Jones and Libersher will ever contend with Alpert-level fame, but there’s definitely a relative degree of underground acclaim that could be theirs if they stepped up to meet it. And circa 2008, it seems like they’re coming around. Both men are well into middle age. Libersher copes daily with debilitating back problems and despite his formidable guitar skills, and a remarkable talent for painting—his nightmarish tableaux have illustrated the band’s shirts and the Variations album art—he still makes his living as a computer programmer. He demonstrates his current mindset when discussing preparations for an October show at which the duo of him and Jones would open for Peter Hammill, leader of Van der Graaf Generator, one of Libersher’s most beloved bands. “This is not the time for shenanigans,” he observes, commenting on his desire to prepare a straightforward set of Cheer-Accident’s more reflective songs for the gig. “I don’t want to shit on my only opportunity to open for one of my heroes.” (All reports suggest that he and Jones ended the show without a trace of poop in their proverbial pants.)

In Jones’s case, he’s stopped delivering pizzas, but he's struggling financially. “I guess there’s still this romantic notion of the starving artist,” he observes, sounding especially weary. “But you can hit walls in the realm of poverty in the same way that you can hit walls within the realm of selling out.” Prog Day offered convincing proof that the band hasn’t reneged on its ethos of constant destabilization. But after years of gleeful selfsabotage, Cheer-Accident now seems ready to take on the one taboo it has thus far left largely unexplored: success. ✹ Hank Shteamer is a staff writer at Time Out New York. He contributes to The Wire and maintains a personal blog, Dark Forces Swing Blind Punches.

This is his first feature for Signal to Noise.

WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #52 | 21

WHAT THE SPIRIT KNOWS ...

Thomas Stanley connects with the Bad Brains' HR for a wideranging conversation about his new album, Rastafarianism, and his Positive Mental Attitude. Photos by Liz Flyntz.

HR stands for Human Rights. It also stands for Hunting Rod. His other names are Paul Hudson and Joseph I. He calls the group that as lead singer he helped push into the early vanguard of the punk rock movement the “Good Brains.”

Words are very important to HR. There are words he will not and did not use during our sit-down.

Every major metropolitan area in these United States has a “side” or an “end” that has become synonymous with urban blight, chaos, and danger. Hudson and his brother Earl lived across the line in District Heights, Maryland.

With Earl behind the drums, Daryl Jennifer on bass and Dr. Know (Gary Miller) rounding out the team with virtuosic lead guitar, the Bad Brains were incubated in Southeast DC—that part of the capitol most resistant to the scouring tide of gentrification. After one aborted gig as Mindpower in March of ’79, the group opened for the Damned in June of that year as the Bad Brains. Henry Rollins and Ian McKaye were in the house, and were so impressed by the group’s speed and chomp that they became ardent Brains supporters and began modeling their own music on the four’s energy and punch. During the group’s early apogee they were underrecorded, releasing in December 1979 a 7” single (“Pay to Cum” b/w “Stay Close to Me”) that appeared on a couple of compilations and on their self-titled cassette-only debut album on the ROIR label (released in 1982). In 1996, Caroline Records released the first Bad Brains studio sessions from 1979 as Black Dots.

The Bad Brains are like the tennis-playing Williams sisters, showing up in a field that many had tagged as the antithesis of Black expression.

In a short period of time both the sisters and the Brains reworked the standard of their respective 22 | SIGNAL to NOISE #52

games around their extraordinary talents and assets. And like the Williams sisters, the Brains checked all reserve at the door and poured something like their totality into their work. Punk rock owes much to the quartet, who brought a needed precision, refinement and mad explosive energy while helping to launch the art of hardcore speedrock.

After attending a 1978 Bob Marley concert at the long-since-demolished Capital Center in Landover, Md., the group adopted the style and ideology of Rastafarianism, taking on the Rastas’ characteristic locks and imperial Ethiopian tricolors. Rastafarianism and reggae soon figured prominently in their music, with cannabisgrounded dubbin’ and skankin’ unapologetically woven into their sets of unbolted, adrenalized hardcore. Vocalist HR’s commitment to the messianic movement birthed in Jamaican sufferation was overwhelming, and soon became a wedge splitting the group into opposing camps over the question of how much reggae to perform and record. In concert, HR was a movement unto himself—juggernauting his small, wiry frame on, off, and around the stage while articulating the Brains’ lyrical message in a polished, lilting tenor. Off-stage, there were sporadic incidents that cultivated an aura of volatility and abuse, the dark side that is as much a part of the Brains’ legacy as the legendary stage shows and seminal recordings. Although a series of solo projects, often backed by some version of the Human Rights band, have allowed him to sing Jah praises to his soul’s content, HR still plays a role in the mercurial existence of the Bad Brains, reprising a more subdued version of his position as front man.

On the eve of the release of a highly anticipated solo project, I sat down with the singer

on the third floor of a hulking shell of a building in downtown Baltimore that serves as rehearsal space for the HR band and residence for HR’s saxophonist Doc Night. HR smoked a cigarette before and after our 45-minute interview; he wore a brown tweed jacket and politely spoke in a near-whisper, preceding most of my questions with a perfunctory “yes sir.”

“This is HR—Human Rights with the Good Brains outfit—and we do have a new release called Hey Wella. It’s a culmination of soul, reggae, hip hop, rub-a-dub-love, groove-on music, a little bit of pop and some modern rock and jazz.” HR explains that the title is about “all the happy people and we belong together.”

He describes the title track as “crunchy and raw, with a very pleasant danceable type of rhythm to it. The song is about what the modern day African and Jamerican, Asian and white (Japhite) go through, and their ability to pass through that emotional space test that sometimes may stand in the way of human beings being able to reach their optimal pleasure and grasp the essence of the music.”

HR professes a philosophy of positivity. His sax player is proud to point out that there are no bad words anywhere on the album and underscores how rare that has become. That PMA (Positive Mental Attitude) thing was there back in the Mindpower days, and has imbued HR and the Brains with a resiliency that has secured their survival, but I sense that this Paul Hudson (he’s 53 in February) has mellowed: “Well, it requires a little bit of meditation and preparation psychologically, trying to stay as pleasant and positive as humanly possible, but as honest and vindicated to the commitment of authenticating the production. So one has to take time out to meditate and reach an essence with the One, WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #52 | 23

24 | SIGNAL to NOISE #52

Stevie Wonder, David Hinds, Ziggy Marley and Chick Corea among numerous influences, sees his new project as a chance to reclaim a legacy that has to some extent been marred by controversy and false starts. “I’m doing much better,” he volunteers. “I did finally get the album out; it took me about 17 years. From New York, I went to Atlanta, and then went to Richmond and then we went to New York and then from there we went to DC and then from there we went to California, and while I was in California—like I said it took me about 17 years, but finally I was able to get the Human Rights album completed.” He and the Brains have reconciled enough to play together, and HR envisions a kind of symbiosis between his solo act and the original quartet: “I wanted to try to get a marriage together and eventually try to put on a production show where we can have both groups playing, and perhaps work as a co-billing, [HR] headlining and co-billing alongside the Brains.” In 2007 the Brains released Build a Nation, produced by the Beastie Boys’ Adam Yauch, another of the group’s rock elite patrons (along with Madonna and Ric Ocasek of the Cars). Hey Wella is the second salvo of a one-two punch that should create new performance opportunities for both acts, in situations calling for either punk revival or roots reggae.

Today, HR measures his words against their consequences. He seems aware that he has at times been his own worst enemy and that he will only be allowed so many comeback efforts: “I would think the more important principles to remember are to stay away from trouble, stay away from troublemakers, violence, violentminded people, and to remember the love I-and-I concept: to love oneself, to love others.

It’s so important to balance out oneself, to take time out with your loved ones and to remember the consciousness of the universal love for the proper understanding. It is still in the philosophy stage. It sounds good to talk about it, but doing it does require a little bit more time, so I would say to eat good food, exercise, and when playing one’s instrument, between 30 minutes to an hour every day.”

Achieving balance and health does require a little more time, and the admonition to keep clear of trouble and troublemakers has not always been easy for HR to heed. Whether he felt he was pursuing an ideal of the rock’n’roll bad boy or was just seriously impaired, the Bad Brains’ front man has on more than one occasion found himself at the center of troubles that fed his miscreant mystique. In 1995, for example, he was jailed on battery charges after wielding a mike stand against skinheads attending a Brains show in a Lawrence, Kansas nightclub. The incident is a dozen years old, and while defenders of HR claim the skinheads were racially taunting him, most eyewitness accounts describe the attack as the unprovoked fallout of a psilocybin mushroom freakout. Drugs have been an acknowledged part of HR’s meandering path. He beat a heroin addiction before bringing the band and his life under the PMA banner. His embrace of Rasta went along with an enthusiastic embrace of cannabis—the Rastafarian sacrament. In 1985, HR was jailed for four months for possession with intent to distribute.

When I asked him about the arrest, he dismissed it as a case of “mistaken identity. They thought I was somebody else.” While incarcerated, HR recorded the vocal to “Sacred Love,” a tune that has become a Brains signature piece precisely because it is anomalous—a nasty blackadelic ode to physical love that isn’t in triple tempo

Bad Brains, early '80s

Laura Levine / courtesy ROIR

with the almighty I, and then to be able to clearly and consciously focus upon the objective of the victory or the production and to try to refrain from as much stereotypes and peer pressure as possible, and then one will be able to channel and create the type of groove that the masses would appeal to.”

That professed positivity came under attack early and cost them critical support when the group developed a reputation as homophobes in a gay-friendly hardcore scene. Darryl Jennifer has described the events that led to that label as the one thing in the group’s history that he would “go back and change,” and attributes the misbehavior to his inexperience as a young convert to Rastafarianism. He was quoted on Exclaim.ca as stating that he had needed to learn gradually that “how you roll out here with your sexuality is your business and your life and what a human being chooses in those respects should have nothing to do with being accepted as Jah children.” HR won’t go that far, but speaks somewhat obliquely about the excesses of judgment: “[Rastafarianism] has a direction, and it teaches young students as well as elders important instructions that are needed, but one must be able to then rise above the genre and the scenarios and keep on seeking, because it does not require for one to allow oneself to become judgmental. One might be still in [the] theory level of the production instead of actually having answers and solutions. One has to remember, it’s so important because listeners when dealing with that kind of music look to it [for] a prophetic solution. And so for the teachers, it’s so important to remain as innocent and as humble as possible, because some listeners might [get] the wrong interpretation from your interpretation. I would suggest that teachers try not to be as judgmental as possible.”

In spite of an association with unsavory beliefs and behavior, HR’s charisma, tenacity, and talents have won believers in his music, if not his message. Bill Warrell’s DC Space was one of two venues in Washington where the group’s early efforts could be regularly heard. DC Space started a year or two ahead of the Brains, and hosted a mixed bill of national and international advanced jazz acts along with mostly local punk and rock. “I knew HR from the start,” recalls Warrell. “We were always close. I still try to keep up with what he’s doing.” While much more of an avant-garde head than a punk kid, Warrell remembers HR at the center of a sound that was making Washington, DC one of the freshest scenes in the country. The building that once housed DC Space is now a Starbucks, but back in the day you might have heard Don Pullen, Julius Hemphill or Sun Ra in the same week as the Bad Brains, Minor Threat or State of Alert.

The main stage was upstairs directly over the café/bar area on the ground floor. Warrell can still remember anxiously watching the Brains and their audiences taking a toll on the aging structure. “Early hardcore dancing wasn’t as organized as it is today; they mainly jumped up and down. We had these banks of eight-foot fluorescent tubes downstairs, and when they played the lights would drop a foot, and there were some nights where we lost a tube or two.

That was getting scary, so we started asking that they put their shows on downstairs. It wasn’t the music I was following, but I was impressed enough that later when I was working on a [jazz] opera I seriously explored using HR as the male lead. He had great energy and an amazing voice in its limited way.”

The singer, who counts Earth Wind and Fire,

and isn’t reggae either. HR’s flattened, slightly distorted wail fed through a prison payphone is answered by Know’s searing guitar lines and the rhythm section’s trademark crunch. “It was on a Sunday, and they did have to do some previous testing. The producer [Ron St. Germain] came up with the idea, and said that at the same time that they were synchronized—the same time that they called and the phone line was open— they would then channel it into the speaker and play the music at the same time from the studio console. So we did it and I could faintly hear it, but I had been studying the song and working on it, and we said we’d give it a try, and that’s how we came up with it.”

This seemed like a good time to ask HR about the use of drug laws for social control, especially marijuana prohibition: “It’s still being negotiated.

In some states the laws have been decreased, in some states they’re still the same, but my word to the wise would be again to try to not be judgmental, not to hurt oneself, because it’s not the actual consuming of the product that’s illegal, but the abuse of the consuming of the product.

So, we have to remember that. Parents do love their children. They just don’t want to see them get strung out on dope, so that is fair to say that.

What’s also fair is that it is their right to decide their example of living. So you have two sides—I do have the right and then the other side saying don’t abuse that right. And so take time out to measure, put it on a scale, see how it balances out and then make a decision.”

Clay Harris is a 44-year-old African-American musician and illustrator who has lived in or near Washington, DC his entire life. He remembers the Brains as a social symbol and movement of particular importance to brothers like himself who fell through the fissures in Black mass

identity. “Black popular culture in the early ’80s was primarily disco,” recalls Harris. “There was the early beginnings of rap music; there was not yet a political movement within rap. Black kids had soul music on the oldies stations, and disco, disco, disco. But when I discovered punk and then the Bad Brains, I was like, ‘what was I missing all this time?’” He also remembers seeing HR and Human Rights at Pratt Institute in the ’90s: “He seemed like he didn’t want to talk, much less be at the show. He had that look like he resented most of the white faces he saw there. But his set was brutally, precisely performed. The band wasn’t just tight. They were playing this kind of slower, gritty, edgier version of old rock-steady reggae. HR just stood there singing and smoldering.”

But the soft-spoken HR I met is rather affable and sees in his music a healing balm for young people in crisis. “Yes sir, a lot of times kids are looking for a solution, looking for answers, looking for help,” he explained. “In some cases, it can get over-dramatized, not really as hard as they think, but at the tender age that they’re at, their minds are still developing. They’re trying different things out like cocaine, crack, angel dust, etc., so it’s for us as conscious elders to try to direct them, and that’s what music can do. It can give you direction in life and help you to rise above those temptations that exist: sin, mental deterioration and also spirological [sic] insurrections. Some [rough] times come in the way, so one can go out and obtain a good song that they might have heard on the radio, do a little research, and find out through the scriptures or through personal help, social workers, sometimes a good friend can give them good advice and they are able to be reborn again and transform and do something very good with

their lives in society.”

Harris reminded me that the original meaning of “punk” was “prison bitch,” and said that his understanding of the music and its cultural milieu is all about “snotty-nosed kids hanging out, causing trouble, listening to raggedy rebellious music just for the sake of rebelling. No real hardened politics. Not truly lefty or right wing. Antiauthority. Political incorrectness is the watchword of any punk movement. If everyone is too agreeable, then it’s not punk, music or otherwise.” I asked HR if youth could still serve as a catalyst for revolutionary/anti-authoritarian change. “Musically, yes.” But politically and socially? “I would try to stay away from that, because it does have its infringements on others’ personal rights, and sometimes people don’t want to hear a whole bunch of people outside protesting and rioting in the streets. So I would try to remain as humble and non-forward as possible in one’s conversation and speech, and if one does have a strong desire or strong will to change a particular law then to do it as discreetly as possible, because one never can tell who hasn’t been invested in different styles of living—like, you know, during the Prohibition era of alcohol with that whole thing, with the FBI, the Mafia and everything, so to keep one from going through any unnecessary complications, I would suggest for one to try and remain as discreet as possible.” Punk discretion?

“I think that politicians do have good intentions and they do mean well, but it’s for the kids and the American people to ultimately decide to govern themselves. Because politicians can only offer so much.” ✹ Thomas Stanley interviewed George Clinton for STN#22

WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #52 | 25

MUSIC MAN

As the driving force behind the country's oldest independent record label and its biggest retail outlet dedicated primarily to jazz and the blues, Bob Koester has made an indelible mark on American music.

Story and photos by Pete Gershon.

Bob Koester at Delmark House, Chicago, September 2008.

As I walk off the plane and through the gate into Chicago’s O’Hare airport, the easy shuffle of Junior Wells’ “Hoodoo Man Blues” is playing over the terminal’s sound system. Recorded September 23, 1965, the track and its LP of the same name popularized not only the singer and harmonica player at the album’s center, but an entire genre of authentic West Side Chicago blues as well.

It’s an auspicious beginning for my journey to meet Bob Koester, the producer of that record and hundreds more. As the head of Delmark Records, the country’s oldest independent record label still operated by its founder, he’s released some 350 titles, running the gamut from traditional jazz and vintage blues to seminal works of the avant-garde and cutting-edge contemporary music. Also a pioneering retailer, Koester runs the Jazz Record Mart, the country’s largest brick-and-mortar store devoted primarily to jazz and blues.

Two hours later, I’m stepping off the El train and walking a few blocks through the city’s North Center neighborhood to Delmark House, an unassuming warehouse building on North Rockwell Boulevard that’s just a stone’s throw from the north branch of the Chicago river. Inside, I’m greeted by members of the Delmark staff: Koester, his wife Sue, his son Robert Jr., and their shipping clerk, Frank Corpus. Today they’re busily prepping the new issue of Rhythm and News (their in-house newsletter and catalog) for mailing, and reeling from the news of the deaths of Little Arthur Duncan and Phil Guy, two legendary Chicago bluesmen with ties to the label. Delmark is feeling the effect of dovetailing crises in the production and retail sides of the music indus26 | SIGNAL to NOISE #52

try, but its importance is only underscored by the passing of such artists, whom Koester has doggedly documented since 1953.

“Let’s step into the back so I can indulge my vices,” Koester says. He’s talking about coffee and donuts, and we settle at the linoleumtopped kitchen table in Delmark’s breakroom for a four-hour journey through jazz and blues history, full of false starts, side trips, switchbacks and pitstops. Koester loves to talk, and at 75, cuts a grandfatherly figure with tousled gray hair and beard, clad informally in a rumpled Laurel & Hardy tee-shirt that signals his other lifelong love, classic cinema. He can talk about old movies as easily as old records, and his knowledge of both is encyclopedic. He’s forgotten more about the music of the 20th century than most people will ever learn in a lifetime.

Delmark’s day-to-day operations are now run by Steve Wagner, who came to the label in 1987 after getting his start in college radio and then working behind the counter at JRM in the mid-’80s, but Koester is still maintains a daily presence at Delmark House and the Record Mart. “Just staying out of the way,” he jokes. “Trying to make myself dispensable and obsolete.”

Born October 30, 1932 to a petroleum geologist and a housewife in Wichita, KS, Koester (rhymes with “Lester”) recalls formative experiences like listening to the family’s maid singing spirituals, and sampling his grandfather’s collection of 78s, which included the Original Dixieland Jazz Band. “I had polio when I was in sixth grade,” Koester recalls as he talks about his developing interest in music. “I spent a lot

of time listening to the radio, and got awful tired of pop music. But Fats Waller was getting a lot of airplay, and Count Basie, and Duke Ellington. In fact, not too long after that I had the opportunity to hear Count Basie at the Miller Theatre, when Jimmy Rushing was still with him, so that would have been right around the end of the war.”

“I do remember one experience,” Koester remarks as he sinks a donut into his coffee, “and I’m not sure I didn’t make this up. Our doctor had his office on the third floor of the Farmer’s and Banker’s Insurance building, and on top of it was a radio station. And I remember going to the doctor’s office and hearing this marvelous music upstairs. You could go up to KFBI and watch them doing shows, but by the time I got in and out of the doctor’s, the musicians had left. And I’m quite convinced that it had been the Jay McShann group with Charlie Parker. Now I’m not sure the timing’s right. It would have been ’41, I would have been nine years old, and that would have been my first live jazz listening experience.”

When Koester’s father bought a side-loading radio phonograph, junior began collecting records: “I learned about jukebox operators having second-hand record sales in little stores.

I didn’t have the money to buy them out, but one guy, Gordon Battey, had a basement where he kept all of his records, he didn’t even have a store, and that’s where I got my first Robert Johnson records. In Wichita, jazz was so scarce that you’d settle for blues. But really, any black music would turn me on. Even white swing bands, or ‘trad jazz’; I don’t like to call it ‘Dixieland,’ which has become a demeaning term. And Pee Wee Russell doesn’t deserve WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #52 | 27

to be demeaned. Nor Kid Oliver, or any of my other favorites.”

By the late 1940s, the advent of 45s and LPs began to phase out 78s, and Koester continued to scour second-hand stores and Salvation Army shops for jazz and blues sides. He vividly remembers purchasing, for example, “my first Charlie Parker record on Dial for a quarter... and old Gennetts and Supertones and Paramounts.

Not that many, those labels weren’t very well distributed in Wichita.”

Soon, the resourceful young man was finding a creative way to finance his growing collection. “If I saw an Okeh at the Salvation Army for a dime that I already had, I wouldn’t just leave it there, I’d pick it up, and then trade it. There were three other collectors in Wichita that I knew. One guy specialized in Glenn Miller, poor guy. One guy specialized in Fats Waller, and the other guy had pretty broad tastes, so we’d swap records. Before I was out of high school, I ran an ad in a Canadian collector’s magazine that specialized in Glenn Miller.

Glenn Miller was always my racket. Because of a hassle with his widow, RCA didn’t put out much [of his music], so there was demand for Glenn Miller among people who weren’t that into jazz. As long as 78 was the idiom, you could buy ’em five for a dime, sell ’em for a dollar and a quarter. That was my first com28 | SIGNAL to NOISE #52

mercial deal. I built up a collection, and by the time I was ready for college I probably had two or three thousand 78s.”

Koester’s parents were devout Catholics with reservations about the musicians and collectors their son was befriending (“they didn’t want me hanging out with all these alcoholics and drug addicts” is how he puts it), and they insisted he go to a Jesuit school. He first considered Loyola in New Orleans or Chicago, but worried that their live music scenes would distract him from his studies, so he settled on Saint Louis University, where in 1951 he planned to take some business courses before eventually moving on to a cinematography program in UCLA or USC. Alas, it wasn’t long before Koester was swept up in the music surrounding the SLU campus. “Two blocks north of the dorm was a place where the Windy City Six played. Across the street from the campus, less than a halfblock from me, Tab Smith was playing at a club called The Hurricane. Three more blocks away, Charlie Thompson, who won the last Booker Washington ragtime contest in 1916, had a bar, and he could be prevailed upon to play sometimes. A few doors down was Peacock Alley, a black jazz club where you’d find Art Blakey, Miles Davis, whoever. A twenty-five-cent streetcar ride would take me to the Delmar and Oliver area, which had four, sometimes as

many as six, jazz clubs with traditional jazz. And that’s the stuff I really liked, the stuff I had on records, and so I wound up getting seduced by the music after all.”

During Koester’s freshman year, he read in the newspaper about the founding of the Saint Louis Jazz Club and attended the group’s first meeting. “It was a great musical evening, because a lot of musicians came and volunteered to play. I don’t know who the bop guys were, but it was some stunning shit! There were arguments about whether they should let the beboppers play, and likewise there was an arrogance among modern jazz fans. It wasn’t at that first meeting, but I remember once somebody said, ‘well, you wouldn’t want to have a 1928 car if you can get a 1952 car, would you?’

And I said, ‘well, that means this music they’re playing now isn’t going to be worth anything in 10 or 20 years.’ To me, if jazz is good at any time, it’s good forever. Anyway the club eventually took a vote and decided to concentrate on traditional jazz.” At one of the club’s early meetings, Koester met an RCA record distributor named Ron Fister who shared his love of Billie Holiday, Duke Ellington and Mildred Bailey. Before long, the two had established K&F Sales, running ads in a pioneering magazine called the Record Changer and peddling LPs out of the aspiring cinematographer’s dorm room.

courtesy Delmark Records

Bob Koester at the Jazz Record Mart in the late '60s.

Business began to grow, and the pair eventually graduated to a tiny commercial retail space and reopened as the Blue Note Record Shop in a second-floor space above a Woolworth’s.

Having dropped out of school during his junior year, Koester made his first attempts to document and distribute the music he loved. In 1953, at the age of 21, he recorded drummer Jerry Fisele’s traditional jazz group the Windy City Six at a Westminster College performance and chose it as his first release. Financed by a local jazz promoter, Koester first offered the musicians two cents per record sold, then upped it to double union scale (Koester: “I found out years later that the drummer kept all the money”). With the help of a fellow Jazz Club member, a beat cop named Charlie O’Brien, he sought out a handful of Saint Louis bluesmen whose careers had gone fallow and recorded them, too.

“That was the first outstanding thing that we did, was recording blues, and blues that wasn’t commercial, wasn’t R&B,” says Koester. “(Charlie and I) knew about Edith Johnson, somebody had told us she was operating the Deluxe cab company and restaurant near the train station. Edith told Charlie about Mary Johnson, Mary told him about Speckled Red, and Henry Brown, the piano player, he eventually found Barrelhouse Buck McFarland. And word got out that Bob Koester was interested in interviewing old blues guys. When Big Joe Williams came to town, somebody sent him over to me. Of course, I didn’t have the money to record all of them.”

Koester’s mind is drawn to an even earlier recording experience where he lent a fellow student a hand with his campus radio program.

“This was my first year in college, and I had not yet taken the speech course that liberated my tongue,” laughs Koester. “I haven’t shut up since! So, he did the on-air thing, and we did a show for that first semester. We borrowed a tape recorder when a marvelous band was playing at the Barrel out on Delmar, with Lee Collins, one of the old New Orleans guys, and the musicians were Chicagoans. Lee played two nights, and he had to go back to Chicago, so they talked an old river ballad guy named Dewey Jackson into playing, and this was so good we taped the thing. In fact, we just recently reissued it. We had to wait for ProTools to be able to repair the tape; I had loaned it to a fan of Don Ewell’s, the piano player, and when I got the tape back there was some damage. And we finally put it out, it’s great stuff.

Back then I had no idea I’d get into producing records, I just felt like someone should tape this shit. They had a marvelous clarinetist named Frank Chace, and everyone says, oh, he imitates Pee Wee Russell. But you play Frank Chace, and you play Pee Wee, especially two versions of the same tune, and they’re totally different. But that’s how much critics pay attention to traditional jazz players. They say, oh, they’re just doing stuff that’s been done before, and it isn’t really true.

“That’s one of the sad things that’s happening in jazz,” he continues. “The total lack of respect for tradition. They bow their heads to the classic greats, and dismiss everyone ever since. It’s like, if you’re twenty years old, you should be playing avant-garde, but it’s okay if you play bebop. Avant-garde [jazz] is now 50 years old, if you date it from the first Sun Ra record, which happens to be on Delmark— now, that’s a fifty-year span. You can’t call it new music, it’s 50 years old. But it’s OK to play

avant-garde, even though it’s old. It’s OK to play bebop, which is what? 65 years old? It’s OK to play swing, what’s that? 75 years old?

But if it’s older than that, oh man, leave it alone, that’s just some primitive shit and if you play it, you’re imitating Louis Armstrong or whatever.

They don’t say that about Wynton Marsalis, I guess, even though I’m not really into his records. The critics don’t know. They don’t want to learn, they don’t want to get in touch. I tell you, there are young guys playing this shit, and they’re playing their asses off! That’s why I keep producing these records, even though they get ignored.”

During an early visit to Chicago, Koester met a man named John Steiner, who was operating the Paramount Records label from a secondfloor apartment at 1637 Ashland. Not long after, he received a letter from Steiner, who by then was looking to get out of the business and offered to sell Koester the Paramount masters, including music by Ma Rainey, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Louis Armstrong and Baby Dodds.

“He said he’d help me out, make it easy for me,” remembers Koester. “He closed the letter by saying ‘get going, young fellow.’ I got the money together to buy an old Buick for $250 and two trailer hitches to haul all my records to Chicago, and rented an apartment at Chicago and Wabash where I re-opened the store.”

Ultimately the Paramount deal fell through, with much of the best material having been sold out from beneath Koester to the Riverside label, but nevertheless he was happy to be closer to where some of the best music was being made.

By the time Koester moved to Chicago in August 1958, the fledgling Delmar label (named for the street on which it had operated in St. Louis, and soon to gain a ‘K’ after a trademark conflict with a European instrumentmaker) boasted a catalog of five ten-inch LPs, and Koester had spent a $500 windfall gift from his parents on paste-over covers for four more, including sides by the Dixie Stompers and clarinetist George Lewis. But then ten-inch LPs were phased out, literally overnight. “I paid $1.75 one Friday night for some ten-inch LPs, and then I read the next day the entire Columbia catalog was on sale for $1.49. And I learned one way to make money in the record business. Buy the obsolete product. I went around to distributors and paid ’em a dime apiece for 78 jazz records, and I could still sell ’em for fifty cents or a dollar. I still have some of ’em today! Then I did this with twelve-inches.

Riverside’s Bill Brower called one day and told me if I ordered two hundred copies at a time, I could have ’em for a half-a-dollar apiece. And [selling those is] how I made enough money to come back and get the next round of Delmarks released.”

Koester kick-started his retail business in March of 1959 by buying out a successful record shop run by trumpeter Seymour Schwartz, which continued to flourish under Koester’s ownership until he was edged out of his lease at the Roosevelt Union building in 1963. The store, renamed Jazz Record Mart, found new digs at 7 West Grand, with 600 square feet of street-level space and another 100 downstairs.

When Koester’s employee Joe Segal, who’d go on to found Chicago’s Jazz Showcase, was unable to help move the store, three visitors from Boston leaped into the breach. “A guy named Joe Boyd, who became a famous producer, his brother Warwick Boyd, and a guy

www.TomHeasley.com

WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #52 | 29

who married... Sue? Who was the semi-famous blues singer who married that female vocalist and helped us move the store?” (“Geoff Muldaur” is hollered back from the next room.... Susan continued to fill in blanks in this manner all afternoon).

“All of a sudden it’s poverty,” remembers Koester. “I’m running the store myself and what little money we had was going to producing records and buying ads in Downbeat.

Sometimes we didn’t even have the money to get out the record we’d advertised.” In the liner notes to an anthology issued for Delmark’s semi-centennial in 2003, Chicagoan Howard Mandel wrote that the Grand Street location was located “near a steam-table restaurant frequented by pensioners, a currency exchange used by short-term laborers, and a busy entrance to the subway. The store became a de-facto cultural center for Chicago’s most hardcore music, a place to call or stop in at to find out what was happening in town, the site where Muhal Richard Abrams might run into Big Joe Williams and Rahsaan Roland Kirk could strike up a conversation with Junior Wells. There was nothing fancy about it, but like jazz, it was alive.”

Indeed, despite economic hardship, in the mid-to-late ’60s Koester’s label and shop incubated a generation of up-and-coming musicians, music writers and record producers. Alligator Records’ Bruce Iglauer began his music career as Delmark’s shipping clerk. Jazz writer John Litweiler worked at JRM, as did Jim O’Neal and Amy van Singel, who’d go on to start Living Blues magazine simply by posting a sign-up sheet in the store.

“Charlie Musselwhite came in one day to meet Big Joe and some of the other blues artists, started hanging around and later he worked at the store. [Mike] Bloomfield hung around a lot, as did Jimmy Dawkins. We didn’t even know he was a blues artist for a while, we just thought he was a blues fan from the West Side. Then one day he’s like, ‘I’m playing at a place tonight…’ So I went to go see him... different singing, soft feathery voice, great guitar, we’ve got to record him!”

Delmark had by this point cut a handful of modern jazz sessions by the likes of Chicago trumpeter and saxophonist Ira Sullivan and St. Louis vets Bob Graf and Jimmy Forrest, and had simultaneously been making inroads into recording authentic blues music with dates by Big Joe Williams (who often camped in the store’s basement when in Chicago) and Sleepy John Estes. But it was the success of Hoodoo Man Blues that would ensure the label’s longterm survival.

A few years ago, Koester wrote of the session in Rhythm & News: “I had really gotten my head into the Chicago sounds but was nervous about the folk-blues audiences’ tastes and the additional costs of extra sidemen and studio time needed to properly deal with the newer idiom. We were really scuffling in those days and any recording session screwed up the JRM budget for months. I finally decided that the music was just too damn good not to record!

I told Junior he could pick his repertoire, sidemen and did not have to limit himself to two or three minutes per song. Junior used Buddy Guy for the session. During the session Buddy had a problem with his amplifier and, while engineer Stu Black repaired it in the control room, he wired Buddy through the Leslie system of the Hammond B-3 in the studio. I’ve always been amazed at how rarely reviewers 30 | SIGNAL to NOISE #52

commented on the guitar-organ tracks.”

“Junior Wells was the nicest guy, and the most self-producing guy, I ever recorded,” says Koester, shaking his head and sinking another donut into his coffee. “He had ability as a leader, and he didn’t need anybody to ‘produce’ him. I’m not a producer, I’m a watcher.

Junior came into the studio for a total of seven, eight hours, tops, and we got enough material for the beginning of a second album. He could record a forty-minute album in a half-hour.”

Koester surmises that three unreleased tracks from the session featuring Guy’s vocals were wiped out when a young blues band crashing at Delmark’s offices mistook an unmarked reel for blank tape and recorded a rehearsal over it. No matter; Wells’ record was released in November of 1965 and it would go on to be Delmark’s all-time best seller. Koester estimates more than 150,000 copies have been sold over the years.

“Very surprising. I think it did twelve hundred copies in the first year, and now I think it does three, four times that every year. After that, [we did] Magic Sam. Then Sam’s record with Shaky Jake, Luther Allison’s first session and some other odds and ends, J.B. Hutto, the second Magic Sam, a Sleepy John with modern blues guys which we recently remixed and reissued on CD a year or two ago. Arthur Crudup. I loved Arthur, he was a very uncomplicated guy who just wrote songs. He would say that they came to him out of the sky. He wrote two of Elvis’s early hits and a lot of really classic tunes.”

The documentation of these important, aging country blues artists continued to enrich the Delmark catalog, and the busy retail shop brought the maturing record impresario together with his wife of forty years, Sue. “Sue came in with a Paul Butterfield record and what should she get next? She said she liked blues harmonica, so I told her [to check out] Little Walter, and then after that, Hoodoo Man Blues. And we started dating. I always say she fell in love with Junior Wells, but she settled for me. She hates it when I say that, so please print it.” The couple married a few months later. “It’s been pretty good,” says Koester with charming understatement. “With two kids and one grandkid. We can still stand each other. I love her deeply, and she must too, to put up with me. When we married, I started thinking a little straighter about the business, and there have been periods of time where her day job helped support me, and I could put money back into Delmark. Now she works here, we see each other all day.”

Breaking for a tour of the facilities, Koester leads me through a maze of framed photos, vintage recording and playback equipment, desks piled high with paperwork, and metal shelves groaning under the weight of stacks of LPs, CDs, movie reels and master tapes. The accumulation of materials gives the warehouse a claustrophobic feel; it’s difficult even to turn around without threatening to topple a stack of boxes. But amidst the clutter, he seems to know exactly where everything is. Here’s Jimmy Dawkins at the Ann Arbor blues festival in 1970. Over there’s a cache of tapes recorded by engineer and former Basie trumpeter Paul Serrano, who’s worked extensively with Delmark over the years. A small crowded room in the back houses Koester’s earliest tapes, still sheathed in the tartan boxes of the Scotch company. Vintage promo glossies and posters decorate any exposed wallspace.

Making our way back to the kitchenette, Koester unlocks the door to Delmark’s Riverside Studios. Boasting a range of equipment from the state of the art to the nearly antique, the control room is well suited for the label’s diverse needs, from recording new sessions to repairing and rescuing crumbling tape reels.

Most of the hardware was in fact purchased from Serrano when he was ready to close his own studio; he oversaw everything from its installation to the carpentry, and trained label manager Steve Wagner on its use. Having an in-house studio facility helps to reduce costs on new sessions, and studio rental provides Delmark with an additional revenue stream.

Not only have most of Chicago’s significant blues and jazz artists recorded in the room, so have punk, reggae and Cajun bands, cutting sessions for other labels. Koester shows off the Steinway piano and Hammond organ with pride. “We almost always set up the drums in the main room,” says Koester, sticking his head into the drum cubicle, “Whoever used this last, though, it still smells like pot.”

Despite Koester’s championing of traditional jazz and blues, for some listeners the label’s greatest claim to fame is a string of groundbreaking albums by members of Chicago’s Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. “I didn’t understand the music,” Koester admits, “but I could feel the vitality there. Chuck Nessa was working for me at the time, and he was in charge of Roscoe Mitchell’s Sound, of Joseph Jarman’s Song For, and he encouraged me to buy the Sun Ra masters [for Sun Song and Sound of Joy] from the money man at the Transition label at auction. I’m ashamed to tell you how little I paid for them.”

“It was either April or May of 1966,” Nessa says of his arrival in Chicago, speaking by phone from Whitehall, Michigan, “and my wife and I didn’t have a place to live yet. I stayed on a mattress on the floor in the kitchen of Bob’s apartment a few blocks from the Jazz Record Mart. I really wanted to learn how to make records and I didn’t know anything about the business, so I was delighted to be acquainted with Bob, who had this struggling little record label run out of his store.”

Nessa had been studying at the University of Iowa but had made numerous trips into the city see live music and to shop for records. “Bob always loved it when people showed up with cars,” says Nessa, “so he could hit the south and west side blues clubs.” They’d catch Junior Wells at Theresa’s, Howlin’ Wolf at Silvio’s, or Muddy Waters at Pepper’s, sometimes all in the same weekend, and eventually Koester invited Nessa to join his team.

“He had offered me this job to manage the record store for a grand total of fifty dollars a week. But the deal was, I had to do enough business during the week so there’d be fifty dollars cash in the till to leave with on Saturday.

I said I’d take the job managing the record store if he’d teach me how to make records and do sessions. At some point we agreed I could find three artists to sign to contracts and do a record a year with each.”

In point of fact, the mentorship was less hands-on than Nessa might have expected.

“There wasn’t any! He was at that time living off the success of Hoodoo Man Blues, and I don’t think he had been in the studio since then. So I was on my own. He never went to the studio with me. I just made it up as I went along.”

Inspired by Pete Welding’s Downbeat review WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #52 | 31

of a Muhal Richard Abrams concert with Roscoe Mitchell, and further pumped up by the recommendations of young writers John Litweiler, Jamil Figi and Terry Martin, Nessa grew inspired to document the artists of the then-fledgling AACM. “Bob cautioned me not to be overly influenced by those people, but to go out to clubs and see what was really going on. And I did that, but nothing struck me like this Roscoe Mitchell concert I went to. I immediately ran backstage after the show to talk to Roscoe and schedule a meeting about making a record.

The next week he and Muhal came downtown to the Record Mart, and we went out to a restaurant and came to an agreement. I was a novice, and was still trying to figure out what this music was that they were playing and how it all worked, so I’d go to rehearsals and every gig possible, and I asked Roscoe who else I should pay attention to. Joseph Jarman had been in Detroit for the summer, but when he came back to town, Roscoe told him to come and see me. We went over to Bob’s apartment and played his tapes, and I said, ‘yeah, great, we’ll do you, too.’ This was all within maybe sixty days. It was very casual.”

Nessa would organize a third session, for Muhal Richard Abrams’ Levels and Degrees of Light, but alas, he “had a fight with Bob and I stormed out before Muhal’s session was recorded. But since I had set it up, he wanted me to be there as his guest. I sat out with the musicians, and Bob was in the control room with the engineer, and I don’t think he ever walked out into the studio because I was there. I mean, we were not on speaking terms at that point.”

Nessa, who went on to produce many more historic records by various AACM members and kindred spirits, found himself working at a competing record store and receiving a visit one day from Mitchell, who was ready to cut another LP. Though Nessa had left Delmark, Mitchell was eager to continue to work with him, and Nessa said he’d approach Koester about the possibility of recording another session. The visit, he remembers, didn’t go well.

“When I walked into the store, Bob looked up and said, ‘what do you want?’ I said, ‘well, maybe it’s time to do a new Roscoe Mitchell record,’ and he exploded, just started yelling at me, so I left. So I decided, maybe I’d just go ahead and record this group, because they were playing at just such a high level. I scraped together the money with no intention of putting it out myself, I just felt like the band was so good it had to be recorded. I figured I’d just do it and wait until Bob cooled down, and maybe

32 | SIGNAL to NOISE #52

he’d want to put it out eventually. One day at work, the phone rang, and it was Bob, and he was just screaming bloody murder. When I got him to calm down enough to understand what he was talking about, turns out he had gone to the recording studio and seen this stack of tapes there with my name on it, and here I was stealing his artists, blah blah blah. And I hung up the phone and figured, well, I guess I’ve just started my own record label.”

The two men have long since mended fences. “Yeah, that’s long gone. In fact, lately I’ve been using Delmark’s studios for all the mastering and mixing of my reissues. Over the past six months, I’ve probably been there six times. Bob and Sue and family have been my friends for a long time, we’ve gotten along famously. Looking back, I’m still amazed at the freedom Bob gave me. He had no money, but whatever we could scrape up together, he trusted me and let me do my thing. I’ll be forever grateful for that.”

Nessa may have been out of the picture, but Delmark continued to support Chicago's avantgarde, with the release of Anthony Braxton's solo debut For Alto and Humilty in the Light of Creator, the first record by the young saxophonist Kalaparusha Maurice McIntyre, who also worked for the label as a shipping clerk.

By the early ’70s, Koester had moved the store a few doors down on Grand into a 3000square-foot space, and Delmark moved from the basement space into a new building at 4243 N. Lincoln into which Koester invested his life savings. Michael Frank was a young music fan who’d met and kept in touch with Koester and Iglauer, and when he moved to Chicago in 1972, he too began working at JRM, where he often spent his entire paycheck on records.

He befriended numerous bluesmen, notably including David “Honeyboy” Edwards, and by 1978 had started his own label, Earwig.

In an interview for Blues Revue Quarterly in 1993, he observed, “A lot of us have started labels and gone into the music business directly after working with or for Bob; learning from him. We would not have ever gotten to that point if we were not blues fans who bought all of his records.” Moreover, Koester became a friend and an endless source of wild times. “In the early seventies there was a bunch of us that used to go out to the clubs,“ Frank reported.

“Sometimes we’d get pretty drunk. Bob as he drank got more and more wild and louder and more risqué and more verbose. The craziest thing we did was in 1978. There was this club called Else Where on Clark Street. There was

this female vocalist, Arlene Brown, playing at this club. She had a local single called ‘I’m a Streaker.’ It was a smaller club, so they couldn’t afford to hire her whole revue, which in bigger clubs, she’d have male streakers. We figured we liked her record, we liked her, and [felt] she should be able to have the whole effect of her show. She started into this song and Bob and I went into the men’s room and corralled this Japanese blues fan to watch our clothes.

We took off our clothes and danced from the men’s room around into the other room up to the front of the bandstand and back through the room and then out. Amy van Singel took a picture of it and published it in Living Blues.”

“I first got a job with the label in ’85 as a shipping clerk,” says blues guitarist Dave Specter. “I was probably 21, just out of college, and trying to immerse myself in the Chicago blues scene. Delmark was not very active during that period; The Blues World of Little Walter was the big release at the time, but Bob was maybe more focused on the store, it was nothing compared to how much music he’s released since the early ’90s when he started up the studio and moved to the warehouse on Rockwell.

I was quite impressed with his encyclopedic knowledge of jazz and blues, and he was a terrific storyteller, but he wasn’t the easiest guy to work for. Eventually I had to quit... I mean, I just couldn’t take getting reprimanded for not putting 78s in their sleeves correctly anymore.

I remember he wished me ‘good riddance,’ then signed me to the label!

“My first record, Bluebird Blues, which was recorded in 1990 and came out in 1991, was my first professional recording session,” he continues. “I was 27, pretty green, and it was slightly intimidating. Bob was tough, but pretty much let us do our thing. That was the only record I did where he had a presence in the studio, and I saw then that he pretty much wanted the artists to just play, and didn’t interfere. I think he likes having artists who are prepared to go in and record. I think he feels that in jazz and blues the role of the producer should be pretty limited. It’s almost like playing for another fan when he’s in the studio.”

As the music business continues to change at lightning speed, the label has taken steps to keep apace. Digital downloads are available as an alternative to recorded media (“though they really account for a paltry percentage of our income,” notes Koester) and in recent years Delmark has launched a line of DVDs recorded on location in local venues like the Green Mill and the Velvet Lounge, pointing backwards

towards Koester’s first love of cinematography.

His brother Tom, a cameraman who’s worked on various television shows, is often behind the lens. “Our DVDs look a little bit better than most people’s,” Koester assesses. “We have eight to ten cameras. Me, I like to shoot the cutaway stuff … the people drinking and dancing, the barmaid picking up drinks at the bar. I guess I’m not that bad, but Tom’s great.”

Following in the tradition laid down by the original AACM releases, Chicago’s contemporary experimental music scene has certainly found a home with Delmark, from truly legendary figures like veteran saxophonist Fred Anderson (a founding AACM member who made his recording debut on Joseph Jarman’s Delmark LP Song For in 1966) to established talents like cornetist Rob Mazurek and guitarist Jeff Parker to up-and-comers like bassist Jason Ajemian, trumpeter Corey Wilkes and drummer Ted Sirota.

“I have friends who understand the new music better than I do,” admits Koester. “[Delmark artists] Josh Berman and Keefe Jackson work in the store, so I gave them some studio time and we liked what they did enough to issue them.

If Josh and Keefe both think something’s pretty good, as far as what I call ‘North Side avantgarde,’ we consider doing it.”

“Any sort of curatorial role that Josh or I have is informal in the extreme,” cautions Jackson in a follow-up e-mail exchange. “Of course we talk about music with Bob, about specific musicians and releases even, and I would love to exaggerate my role, but as the saying goes 'there's no story here'. I don't know if it would be accurate to describe any sort of unified curatorial approach to the more modern music that is coming out on Delmark in the last 10 or so years.” Jackson also points to the production efforts of Delmark associates Raymond Salvatore Harmon, a filmmaker who recently worked on the overtly psychedelic visual component of the Chicago Underground Trio's DVD Chronicle, and those of Steve Krasinsky, a writer and fan of the music who also has spent time behind the counter at the Record Mart, efforts that, Jackson points out, were “not only not coordinated but [which had] different goals and motivations.” Clearly it's an open and intuitive approach that's paid dividends from an artistic standpoint.

Berman adds that when Krasinsky first suggested that Delmark record Rob Mazurek's Chicago Underground project, “it wasn’t easy to convince Bob how important that music was. Bob had heard Rob play bebop with [late tenor saxophonist] Lin Halliday and remembered liking him, but I think it was Bob’s trust for Steve that made those records possible.

Like the example of Bob with Nessa, he let Steve bring a new set of artists to the label that wouldn’t have been there without some pushing.”

Further, Berman comments on Koester's influence on his own playing: “I started playing the trumpet pretty late, I was about 19, I met Bob for the the first timer right around then. I would see him out at the Get Me High listening to Lin and drinking Manhattans. I learned a lot about music listening to him talk; the suggestion that Bobby Hackett was a great cornetist, but so clean, maybe I should hear Dewey Jackson and Johnny Windhurst. I knew I liked free jazz and Miles Davis when I started working for him, what became clearer though my association with him was what became some of the most important music to my per-

sonal development: Rex Stewart, the Austin High folks, Bix Beiderbeck, Pee Wee Russell, Coleman Hawkins, Jelly Roll Morton... He has great understanding of what makes early blues and early jazz work and is willing to share his opinions.”

Though the label’s 50th anniversary celebration in 2003 is still fresh in memory, a number of projects were organized to highlight their 55th year of operation. An anniversary blues show took place at Buddy Guy’s Legends in March, and early October saw another celebration at the Old Town School of Folk Music, featuring the jazz trio of Delmark artists Ari Brown, Nicole Mitchell and Corey Wilkes plus a set by Dave Specter’s blues band. Two new anthologies present highlights of the label’s catalog in CD and DVD formats. Koester and his staff unfailingly strike an eager, enthusiastic tone, but there’s no denying that times are difficult for any label favoring substance over style.

“Recently the record business has gotten so bad that in some instances we can’t afford to pay a band except with records,” admits Koester. “On the other hand, bandstand sales are improving since record stores are disappearing. If people go see a band and like what they hear, they’ll just buy the CD then and there rather than look around for it. I mean, the Record Mart will have it, but maybe they’re in Cleveland or live in a suburb or something.

That’s one of the ways we get by. I presume we’ll lose money this year, which’ll bring it pretty close to $400,000 that we’ve lost on Delmark Records. We got audited by the IRS after we had $200,000 in losses. But I can afford it, because the other set of books in my head tells me if I record a master, I have to write it off in five years, but I can still sell it ten and twenty years later. Well, even if I’m not around... somebody can!”

This kind of long-term thinking is reflected in a letter published in the October issue of the Jazz Institute of Chicago’s JazzGram in response to an editorial entitled “Those Endless Reissues.”

“We Americans no longer toss out the old as we used to,” writes Koester. “Today’s jazz listeners are aware that a lot of great music from earlier generations is worth listening to. Bop was not killed by the avant-garde and swing didn’t kill trad any more than this year’s avant-garde means we should toss out those early AACM albums. The facts of record biz life cause many performances to disappear. Does that mean they should be available only to the collector who can pay a high price for the original?”

The office’s operations having wound down for the day, Koester offers to drive me to my train stop. His white Subaru wagon is as cluttered as the office, papers and boxes piled high everywhere, and as we negotiate our way through Wrigley Field traffic, Koester points out favorite lunch counters, rejected store locations, and other neighborhood attractions. There are more remembrances of obscure sidemen, licensing deals, and retail strategy, flashbacks and flash-forwards and montages, which, taken as a whole, comprise a kind of elaborate miseen-scène of jazz and blues history. “I enjoyed the talk, Bob,” I say, disembarking at the Montrose CTA station. “A million thanks.”

“Yeah, right,” he answers with a wry smile.

“More like a million words!” ✹

HOLIDAYS FOR QUINCE RECORDS

holidaysforquince.com POB 576 CHAPEL HILL NC 27514

Pete Gershon is the publisher of Signal to Noise. He wrote about Pauline Oliveros in STN#21 WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #52 | 33

34 | SIGNAL to NOISE #52

WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #52 | 35

FEAST YOUR EARS!

Bay Area chef and shakuhachi player Philip Gelb dazzles diners with a series of intimate dinner concerts pairing creative cuisine with creative music. By Derk Richardson. Photos by Jennifer Hale.

Philip Gelb in Oakland, CA, October 2008

“Why is this night different from all other nights?” The question was pertinent not only because this spring evening was the first night of Passover 2008, and Philip Gelb was hosting an unconventional vegan Seder in his converted warehouse loft space in Oakland, California, but because the question was being asked— and musically answered—by bassist Mark Dresser. After three courses of the meal—which included matzah ball soup, a roasted beet and endive salad, collard greens stuffed with fava beans, buckwheat and herbs, asparagus, and roasted pureed root-vegetable cakes—Dresser, employing his famed extended techniques on double bass and bow, performed a series of improvisations inspired by the traditional “four questions” invoked during the Passover Seder.

Dresser was standing in an undefined space between the dining area and the kitchen where Gelb and two assistants prepared the meal. As the pink light of dusk streamed in through windows that faced west into the long-depressed industrial/residential neighborhood of West Oakland, Dresser explained that he would probe beneath the literal Passover questions (about eating matzo and bitter herbs, dipping twice, and reclining) and traditional rituals (setting an extra place for Elijah, uttering “next year in Jerusalem”) to find metaphors and themes (the slavery and emancipation of the Jews, transcendence, compassion) that he would use as “improvisatory triggers.”

The Los Angeles-bred and -based musician, 36 | SIGNAL to NOISE #52

known for his long tenure in the legendary Anthony Braxton Quartet of the 1980s, then proceeded to play—employing two-hand tapping, rich and melancholy bowing, and the complexly textured electronics of his bass’s multiple-pickup neck and his amplified bow.

The capacity “crowd” of 20 was dazzled and enthralled. And when Dresser was finished, Gelb and his helpers served dessert: apples stuffed with walnuts, oats, and raisins, accompanied by homemade vegan vanilla ice cream, created from a non-dairy cashew base.

In more ways than one, this night was different. It represented a dramatic departure from the cuisine of most restaurants in the intensely food-obsessed San Francisco Bay Area, including the region’s many vegetarian restaurants (few of which take Gelb’s haute cuisine approach) and the underground bistros that have increasingly cropped up in people’s homes in recent years. And it distanced itself from other house-concert series, both by serving a four-course gourmet meal, and by presenting world-class performers from a wide gamut of genres—avant-garde jazz, free improvisation, contemporary classical, world music.

“There are a million house-concert series in this country,” says Gelb, “but if you go to their websites, you see they’re just about all guitarplaying singer-songwriters and that’s it.” Taking a different tack, Gelb inaugurated his program in August 2006 with a concert by his mentor, Yoshiro Kurahashi from Kyoto, Japan, a master

of shakuhachi (Japanese end-blown flute). The Dresser Seder concert was the 19th event in Gelb’s monthly series. The impressive roster of performers has included bassist Joëlle Léandre, saxophonist/clarinetist Frank Gratkowski, harpist Diana Rowan, electronic musicians Tim Perkis and John Bischoff, Turkish oud player Sinan Erdemsel, electric bassist Michael Manring, pipa player Jie Ma, oboist Kyle Bruckmann, bassist Marcus Shelby with trumpeter Darren Johnston, saxophonist Jon Raskin with trumpeter Liz Albee, and multiple reed virtuosos Roscoe Mitchell and Vinny Golia.

“Dresser may have been my favorite overall so far. Talk about a class act,” Gelb said on a sunny late summer morning as we sat in his kitchen and savored a brunch of a morel mushroom frittata (made with tofu instead of eggs), sweet potato hash spiked with serrano chilies, and a grilled peach half. “I was so touched and honored that he took this gig so seriously.

When he showed up, he had three pages of written notes about what he was going to do in terms of his ideas about Passover and how he was going to approach the music. It’s really nice when you’re presenting something, and someone takes it to such a personal level like that. The concert was about that night, and it was truly one of those in-the-moment gigs, and a serious virtuoso performance, too.”

Gelb, 43, was born in Brooklyn and went to high school and college in Florida. He’s a virtuWWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #52 | 37

Liz Albee and Jon Raskin performing for diners, October 20, 2008.

oso himself, known in international music circles as an improviser on the shakuhachi. His interest in food has been as passionate and deep as his interest in music ever since he was a teenager.

“I’ve always been interested in cooking, for as long as I can remember,” he says. “It started for health reasons. I had leukemia when I was a child and underwent chemotherapy on and off for nine years. That led me into studying things about health on my own.”

Gelb became a vegetarian in college and a vegan a little over three years ago. “I have to admit I liked a lot of cheeses, especially some of the stinky goat cheeses and blue cheeses, like Humboldt Fog,” he says. “When I see meat, it doesn’t appeal to me, but there are some cheese things I do miss, I’ll be honest, but it’s not that big a deal. As soon as I start to think about where it comes from, I no longer have the taste for it. I was always grossed out by the whole situation of dairy farming and chicken farming. At home, I’m a strict vegan.

Outside the home, I’m as vegan as I can be. I always stay vegetarian, but if there’s some butter in sauce I don’t freak out about it.”

38 | SIGNAL to NOISE #52

In 1997, Gelb moved to California and crashed in the East Bay apartment of pianist Dana Reason, a friend from his days at the University of Florida. “I didn’t realize how great the food was going to be,” he recalls. “One of the first days I was here, I got on my bicycle and rode into Berkeley and came across the Tuesday farmers’ market. Organic? Whoa!

Everything’s organic? Damn! Oh, man, look at this! It was June, and I just started stuffing my backpack with peaches and apricots. I thought, this is gonna work. The next day I took my bike down to Chinatown in Oakland, and oh, yeah, fresh noodles here! This is food heaven. No question.”

Once he was settled in Northern California, Gelb started cooking for roommates and friends, and they started encouraging him to pursue his culinary craft more seriously and become a personal chef. “I’d heard of that before,” he says, “but I thought you had to be a CIA [Culinary Institute of America] graduate, have worked at Chez Panisse [Alice Waters’ legendary California-cuisine flagship in Berkeley], and have five years’ experience. I thought

you had to have those kinds of credentials before anyone would even think about hiring you as a personal chef.”

Besides, Gelb had moved to California determined to make a living as a musician—as a performer and teacher. “I managed to pay my bills just doing that for a while, but I was never doing more than just paying my bills. I was always pretty broke,” he recalls. “When you’re in your 20s and early 30s, that’s OK. When you’re in your late 30s and early 40s, it gets old.

“The only other skill I had was cooking, and the idea of working in a restaurant had no appeal to me,” he continues. “I cooked in restaurants and cafes in grad school and college, and I found myself constantly working under coked-out and alcoholic chefs and owners.

It’s an assembly line for the most part. You’re producing the same thing over and over. That’s not the way I approach cooking, and that’s not the way I like to approach music, either.”

Eventually, Gelb advertised himself on Craigslist as a vegetarian personal chef and landed a gig within a week. “So I put up another ad that said ‘experienced personal chef.’

” Before long, he was cooking in the homes of single parents and new working parents who wanted to be sure their kids were eating healthy foods; preparing meals for cancer and AIDS patients; and landing a growing number of catering jobs. Dubbing his business In the Mood for Food, Gelb uses fresh, organic, and locally grown produce and constantly invents new recipes and menus that incorporate elements of Japanese and Chinese cuisine. He specializes in preparing individualized vegan meals as a personal chef, but also caters events for as many as 150 people. In the fall of 2008, he moved his vegan cooking classes into a high-profile Berkeley facility called Kitchen on Fire, virtually next door to Chez Panisse.

At the time of our brunch-interview, peach season was peaking, and Gelb had just wrapped up a catering job for a peach-themed bachelorette party. “It’s all peach stuff this week because the Masumoto Farms heirloom peaches are in,” he said, going on to detail the ingredients of a grilled-peach salad with peach-miso dressing; seitan with long beans and spicy peach sauce; and a peach-rosewater tart (with a shell made of walnuts and dates and flavored with homemade vanilla extract) served with homemade peach-vanilla ice cream. “The ice creams, made from a cashew base, are one of my specialties.”

Making vegan ice cream from nuts is a feat that took Gelb many months of experimentation to perfect. His crowning achievement, however, remains his dinner-concert series. The notion percolated in the back of his mind for years, but he lived in a small studio apartment that couldn’t feasibly double as a performance space. Then, in 2005, he found a spacious and affordable first-floor loft space in a modestly renovated old brick building. He decorated the big combined kitchen/dining room with posters from his favorite food-oriented films—Big Night, Tampopo, Eat Drink Man Woman, In the Mood for Love—and suspended paper globe lamps from the high ceiling. He put a communal table for eight in the middle of the room and installed small wooden tables that fold up from the walls. He breaks out candles and fresh flowers for the dinners.

“At first I wanted to do a house-concert series, but the idea changed into this underground restaurant–concert series,” he explains.

After the dot-com bust, when new restaurant openings virtually ceased in the Bay Area, a plethora of speakeasy bistros offering upscale fare attracted a hungry following. Gelb was shocked, however, by “how bad the music was for the most part. And even when it was good, it was mostly background music during the meals, and the musicians weren’t getting paid, other than a meal. I never want to do that to a musician. Music should be listened to and not be wallpaper.”

It’s hard to imagine Mark Dresser, Roscoe Mitchell, or Vinny Golia as musical wallpaper.

In May 2008, Golia made the trip to Oakland from Los Angeles with five instruments for his solo performance in Gelb’s series. After the main meal—homemade won tons (served with a dazzling pesto that the self-taught Gelb tweaked from a cookbook by San Francisco’s posh vegan Millennium restaurant); a subtle soup graced with seaweed, tofu, greens, and lotus root; and pistachio-crusted homemade tempeh with bamboo shoots, asparagus, and shiitake mushrooms—Golia improvised on contrabass flute, clarinet, bass clarinet, bass saxophone, and saxello.

“I play way too many notes,” he joked during a question and answer session during which he explained circular breathing and multiphonics and blew through his clarinet without a reed to make it sound like a Bulgarian kaval. “The Chinese don’t consider these ‘extended techniques,’ ” Golia added. When he concluded, the audience dug into Gelb’s strawberry-rhubarb pie and chocolate-pecan ice cream with the same gusto and appreciation they demonstrated during Golia’s set.

In early October, Gelb hosted a duo concert with Jon Raskin, well-known in the Bay Area and around the world as a member of the longstanding Rova Saxophone Quartet, and Liz Albee, a rising star in the improv scene, highly regarded for her use of, well, extended techniques on trumpet. Gelb primed patrons with a fall menu of velvety pumpkin soup with cubes of homemade soft tofu and wakame; butternut squash risotto with chanterelle mushrooms; and eggplant halves filled with cranberry beans, accompanied by pureed acorn squash, quinoa pilaf, and a pool of stewed spiced cranberries.

Raskin and Albee’s challenging set bristled with tightly entwined, spiraling lines, pointillistic bleats, burst, and brays, as well as pretty melodies and rhythmic pulses that feinted toward pop songs and blues before veering back into staccato notes, overblowing, and distortion. Their set was a series of complex, kinetic 3D sound sculptures, with Raskin switching between baritone and sopranino saxes. At times the musical vortex seemed about to pull the food processors, cast iron pots, and knife racks off the nearby kitchen counters and walls, and into the sonic maelstrom. Some listeners appeared stunned; others willingly, almost giddily, lost themselves in the music. Gelb provided the encore with homemade pumpkin pie (featuring a nutty-tasting crust made with spelt flour) and delicate rosewater-saffron ice cream.

In just over two years, Gelb has established his dinner-concert series as a cornerstone of creative music performance in the Bay Area. A coterie of new-music regulars and aficionados of vegetarian haute cuisine keeps abreast of his schedule through his MySpace page (www. myspace.com/inthemoodforfood) and regular email updates. Up to 20 people regularly fork over $50 for the experience and bring their own beverages. As of late October 2008, Gelb was looking forward to booking guitarists Nels Cline and Fred Frith, violinist/vocalist Carla Kihlstedt, singer/composer Amy X. Neuburg, and tuba player Bill Roper through the winter and spring.

Gelb notes that ultimately he’s not catering to anybody’s taste but his own. “It’s definitely not a new music series,” he says, “it’s about music I want to hear. It’s a food-and-music series, and the only credentials required of the musicians are extremely high quality and something unique. I have no one to answer to—there are no grants, there’s no gallery owner, there are no committees. This is me.

It’s purely selfish. I don’t hide that. It’s strictly musicians I want to hear play.” But it turns into a banquet for all. ✹ Derk Richardson writes about music and reviews restaurants for the San Francisco Bay Guardian. This is his first feature for Signal to Noise.

WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #52 | 39

LIVE REVIEWS

Top: Taylor Ho Bynum Sextet Below: Peter Brötzmann Tentet

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

Jazz em Agosto Various Venues, Lisbon, Portugal 8/1-3; 7-9/2008

There are music festivals that pack in so many performances that you end the day in audio overload, trying to sort one impression from another, sonic bits from a halfdozen sources competing for attention in the memory’s ear. Jazz em Agosto—the Lisbon showpiece for advanced jazz and related improvised music—isn’t like that: split over the first two weekends in August, it presents one principal concert a night, usually in the outdoor amphitheater of Gulbenkian Park, a forest-like setting that houses a museum, traditional and modern art galleries and a host of performance and lecture spaces, including an indoor concert hall that is itself a symphony of glass and wood and which is occasionally pressed into service for the largest-drawing acts, or when Lisbon’s August weather goes awry (a rare moment). Most days the festival provides one or two other events, whether films, discussions, lectures or performances, in one of the smaller indoor halls. In recent years the big events have included some of the great large-ensemble projects of improvised music, including OrchestRova’s Electric Ascension and the Globe Unity Orchestra.

This year, Jazz em Agosto was celebrating its 25th anniversary. While artistic director Rui Neves has programmed recent editions to include themes of nationality (Canada in 2004; the U.S. in 2006), personalities (John Coltrane in 2006), and even register (the bass clef in 2007), this year spotlighted the general idea of extensions, emphasizing music of Japan and the notion of generations, including associations with Eric Dolphy and Anthony Braxton.

The biggest events at Jazz em Agosto are the opening and closing nights, and this year opened with a performance of extraordinary dimensions: Otomo Yoshihide’s New Jazz Orchestra performing mostly compositions from Eric Dolphy’s Out to Lunch with several European guests: trumpeter Axel Dörner, pianist Cor Fuhler, and baritone saxophonist Mats Gustafsson. What makes Yoshihide’s orchestral adaptation of Dolphy both intriguing and successful is that he has thought through the original on so many levels, preserving the original timbral elements (flute, trumpet, bass clarinet, alto saxophone, vibraphone, bass and drums) but also reaching forwards and backwards for his interpretation. While the horns created a rich blanket of sound reminiscent of such Dolphy models as Ellington and Mingus, Yoshihide also employed elements 40 | SIGNAL to NOISE #52

common to his own heterodox music to create dense, involving textures: Ko Ishikawa’s traditional Japanese sho (a high-pitched poly-flute), Sachiko M.’s sine-waves, Taku Unami’s amplified objects, pop singer Kahimi Karle’s evanescent voice, and the leader’s own electric guitar.

This year’s emphasis on Japanese music included another East-West collaboration, pianist Satoko Fujii’s Min-Yoh Ensemble, with stunning brass work from trumpeter Natsuki Tamura and trombonist Curtis Hasselbring, who seemed to stretch their lyricism from mainstream jazz models (Miles Davis and Bill Harris would be the likely ones) to eerie, flute-like sounds suggestive of the shakuhachi.

Andrea Parkins used her accordion and laptop to extend the rich textures of Fujii’s compositions, which often merged piano strings and electronics with an evocative use of Japanese folk materials. Another Japanese group, the youthful trio PAAP, never quite connected its screamed vocals and noodling improvs, but the three groups together provided a window on current modes of Japanese free jazz.

The first weekend drew to a close with an intensely focused duet performance by guitarist Fred Frith and saxophonist John Zorn, the two moving deliberately through compound squalls of noise and intensely repeated micromelodies to some soulful and expansive modal improvisations that drew on all of their resourcefulness. Their solo pieces were every bit as good, Zorn building complex music out of shifting and contrasting elements and Frith using delay devices to build towards an orchestral density.

When the second half of the festival opened on the following Thursday, it unfolded as a virtual seminar on improvisatory methodologies, starting out with two groups of younger performers who have been recently associated with Anthony Braxton. The Taylor Ho Bynum Sextet is very much a forum for the cornetist-leader’s developing compositional methodology, and it was striking to hear how differently the group handled material from their debut CD (The Middle Picture on Firehouse 12), stretching the themes and springboarding off them in different directions.

Bynum often uses a combination of composition and collective improvisation to create off-kilter collocations of traditional sonorities and approaches, including elements of swing (Ellington and Goodman were apparent) as well as Schoenberg and Xenakis.

Contrasting approaches were highlighted the next day when reed-player Matt Bauder, a member of Bynum’s sextet, appeared with the trio Memorize the Sky. While Bynum’s compound methodology had brought out Bauder’s roots in jazz, the trio’s drone-based improvisation emphasized extended techniques, from circular breathing and key-click-

ing to the use of electronic foot pedals.

There was further contrast in Sylvie Courvoisier’s quintet project Lonelyville, which favored linear melodic development and a sequence of incrementally shifting materials. Violinist Mark Feldman employed cadenza-like melodic variation, while Ikue Mori used a laptop computer to create digital transmutations of Courvoisier’s acoustic timbres.

While the outdoor evening concerts attract large, rapt audiences, there are often stunning performances among the more intimate daytime concerts. Recent years have included solo performances by percussionist Lê Quan Ninh (a brilliant disquisition on physical materials and sound) and saxophonist Evan Parker, on a rare occasion when his solo performance included tunes like “Inch Worm” in simultaneous tribute to John Coltrane and Steve Lacy. This year, the festival’s final day began with Fritz Hauser essaying the limits of solo percussion, first developing a rhythmic pattern across a stageful of drums, cymbals, blocks, bells and gongs, then creating densely involving layers of harmonics on a small gong alone. In a first-time duo meeting, accordionist Pascal Contet and bassist Barre Phillips seemed attuned to one another’s smallest gesture, magnifying each moment’s listening into brief but fully realized pieces.

The festival ended as dramatically as it began, with the Peter Brötzmann Chicago Tentet, the free jazz juggernaut expanded to eleven musicians with the presence of two trombonists, Johannes Bauer and Jeb Bishop.

While the largely improvisatory character of the band contrasted with the dense arrangements of Yoshihide’s opening-night performance, there were intriguing symmetries beyond scale and Mats Gustafsson’s athletic baritone saxophone playing. When the Brötzmann band slowed down the tempo to something resembling a ballad, the dense, spontaneous chords assumed some of the richness of the Ellington sound, an effect highlighted here not just by the sonic breadth of the reeds but by Bishop’s upper-register lyricism (reminiscent of Ellingtonian Lawrence Brown). It’s testimony to the sense of roots in current jazz that so many radical practices (Yoshihide’s, Bynum’s and Brötzmann’s) could allude directly to Ellington, or perhaps that opulent sound is particularly apparent in the grounds of Gulbenkian Park.

One rarely encounters radical music in so beautiful a setting, and the most volatile music somehow fuses with the illuminated trees, rustling in the perpetual night breeze. As a result of that setting and—even more—the quality of the music presented, some Jazz em Agosto concerts can linger in memory years later. It’s definitely a program worth looking into if you’re planning on being on the Iberian Peninsula in August. Stuart Broomer WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #52 | 41

Top: Turtle Island String Quartet in Texas.

Below: Lou Reed and John Zorn in New York

Turtle Island String Quartet Roxy Grove Hall, Baylor University, Waco, TX 9/23/2008

John Coltrane would have been 82 on September 23rd. Of the various tributes that likely occurred on that Tuesday, the Turtle Island Quartet’s performance at Baylor University especially suggests how this revolutionary music has become the mainstream benchmark for jazz performance. And yet the music retains its power, its sharp edges, its emotional urgency, even when modified for the unlikely format of the string quartet. The concert was a testament to the durability, adaptability and strength of Coltrane’s master work forty years after his death.

The classical string quartet dates to the days of Haydn, and there are many groups still working in the format today, some of which explore nontraditional idioms. What sets Turtle Island apart is its jazz orientation, evident in the use of improvisation, its textures, and its choice of repertoire.

That so much of the music here is arranged or composed by the performers themselves is also a jazz characteristic. Even when it explores other forms—funk, R&B, bluegrass, Latin American, Indian—Turtle Island maintains its jazz footing, reaching out to blend with other styles rather than imitating them.

The tricks and techniques they use were explored in a workshop the afternoon of the concert (founder David Balakrishnan, who was joined by violinist Mads Tolling, suggested that if all four had shown up, nobody else would have gotten a word in edgewise). Working with a student string quartet that played charts of “Cantaloupe Island” and “Stolen Moments,” Balakrishnan pointed out the stylistic modifications needed to make those compositions sound “right” when played by the strings—jazz terminal vibrato versus classical vibrato, bowing techniques to give lines a jazz shape, the use of ghost notes. The Danish-born

Lou Reed with John Zorn

Le Poisson Rouge, NYC 9/2/2008

Turtle Island: Greg Bashara | Reed/Zorn: Stefanos Tsigrimanis

A little over a year and a half ago I witnessed the first ever on-stage collaboration between Lou Reed and John Zorn, two towering figures of any kind of music that uses avant as a prefix, at an event celebrating the twentieth anniversary of the Knitting Factory, one of avant-rock’s key venues.

The two reunited in early 2008 (joined by Reed’s wife, Laurie Anderson) for a benefit at Zorn’s performance space The Stone. The first show displayed less fire and brimstone, less pyrotechnics, (much) less improvisation, since it centered on Reed’s songs. The latter was an all-improv show that was later released on CD. Hoping that improvisation would be the evening’s main focus, I headed down to Le Poisson Rouge, a new venue housed in the space where the legendary Village Gate once stood in Greenwich Village. Like a slew of similar places that have opened in NYC over the last couple of years (even as others have sadly fallen prey to rezoning projects), LPR caters to an audience of sophisticated listeners looking for smaller shows with outstanding production and sound quality.

With an admission ticket of $75, the concert had an impressive and varied turnout. From old Velvet Underground followers to Zorn’s too-cool-forschool devotees, the house was packed.

42 | SIGNAL to NOISE #52

Tolling made particular note of the quartet’s instinctive acceleration of tempo to emphasize one arrangement’s climax, warning that such classical performance practices will destroy a good jazz performance.

The quartet began the evening’s concert (in the intimate Roxy Grove Hall) with a set of Coltranerelated material, opening with “Moment’s Notice.”

Violist Jeremy Kittel and Tolling each took solos, with cellist Mark Summer (its arranger) providing a walking bass line and the violinists contributing short, chordal down-bow strokes which functioned like a rhythm guitar or a pianist comping. “Naima,” arranged by Balakrishnan, emphasized the melody and harmonies of the meditative piece, with a bit of a 12/8 feel halfway through. “La Danse du Bonheur,” a John McLaughlin/L. Shankar composition originally recorded by Shakti, gave Balakrishnan room for a long modal solo hinting at his bluegrass roots, his arrangement retaining much of the original’s fire despite the absence of tablas and percussion.

The quartet then essayed the centerpiece of the concert, Coltrane’s A Love Supreme. His 1964 masterpiece is a four-part suite from the zenith of his career, a span of roughly a year (fall of 1964 to fall 1965) which produced Ascension, Meditations, and a host of unmatched quartet performances.

Comparing this version with the original is in a sense meaningless; Coltrane, like Duke Ellington, wrote for specific musicians, and any other performance suffers for the lack of their individual sounds. Turtle Island’s lack of percussion could have been a drawback; it’s hard to imagine this music without Elvin Jones’s polyrhythmic power. Yet Balakrishnan’s ingenious arrangements retained much of the energy and texture of the original, providing a new perspective on the original masterwork.

“Acknowledgement” opened with the familiar clarion call traded amongst the four, followed by the four-note bassline, first on violin and then from pizzicato cello. The violinists built quartal harmonies under the melody, and the arrangement intertwined fragments of Coltrane’s solo along with newly improvised material. “Resolution” started with the theme in unison before giving way to solos.

Summer’s walking cello lines and edgy chords from the violinists kept a sense of the original’s powerful swing. Tolling’s solo was particularly noteworthy

in how he moved in and out of the changes, and Summer’s pizzicato solo was also effective.

The quartet then segued into “Pursuance,” a fast minor blues featuring solos by Kittel and Balakrishnan. The final movement, “Psalm,” showed the most signs of adaptation. In the original, Coltrane declaims a long prayer-like solo over suspended rhythm, which builds to a natural climax. That solo would not have translated easily to the strings, and wisely Balakrishnan’s arrangement used only a few minutes of the material, closing by recapitulating the “Acknowledgement” bass line and theme. It made for an interesting alternate ending to the suite. Turtle Island closed out this set with Stanley Clarke’s “Song to John,” its rubato introduction followed by fast swing (actually a loping “two”), with solos and trading from Kittel (almost Western swing at times) and Tolling.

Set two moved away from Coltrane material. The quartet opened with a composition whose name I missed, with a bluesy and at times almost Gypsy feeling to it. They followed with an arrangement of Chick Corea’s “No Mystery,” from the fusion Return to Forever period, with solos backed by pizzicato accompaniment. Next up was Tolling’s arrangement of Cedar Walton’s “Bolivia,” a jazz standard given a straight-ahead reading (Tolling’s solo the most idiomatic, Kittel’s more blues-oriented). An original

by Balakrishnan, “Guiu Vayur” (named for an Indian temple), showed hybrid vigor in its blend of bluegrass and Indian music.

“Waltz for Pudgy Bird,” a jazz waltz by Summer, had interesting changes and a nice melody, with solos by the composer and Balakrishnan. Corea’s “Señor Mouse” had a marvelous cello part anchoring the whole and solos from Summers and Tolling. The obligatory (but well-deserved) encore was “Model Trane,” a collectively composed outing on an “Impressions”-like foundation.

A string quartet that plays jazz and other nonclassical music could be a novelty, a sort of musical sideshow, an elephant wearing shades and a beret.

The effort the Turtle Islanders have made to master the idioms and find solutions for the requirements of a jazz performance, however, take this out of the realm of sterile crossover. After a while you don’t notice the accent, and it’s just good music, fluently performed. David Wild

Opening the show was Phantom Orchard, the power duo of laptop artist Ikue Mori and harpist Zeena Parkins, who improvised over a series of glitches and scratches without ever really reaching ear-shattering levels. Parkins was, as usual, debonair and agile onstage, switching from one harp to another and using her various props (screwdrivers, brushes, etc.) with ease. Mori sat motionless behind her two MacBook Pros, while Parkins leapt from harp to harp to drumpad.

Towards the end of the set, Parkins pulled out a piece of golden aluminum foil and began strangling her mic with it.

During the break, the stage was carefully set.

On Lou Reed’s side, racks of boutique pedals were ranged around his chair. At the back you could make out a number of unusual guitars, some of which later elicited excitement from audience members during the performance, especially the custom-made guitar crafted by luthier Carl Thompson.

Zorn and Reed unassumingly made their entrance through the audience, to warm cheers and applause. From the very first notes of Reed’s guitar, one could tell that this was not going to be a “songs” concert like the one a year and a half ago. There was no singing from Reed; instead, he was kicking it up in the playground of his stomp boxes, trying one after another, as if he were in a guitar store playing with them for the first time.

He followed a reticent path, plucking a few notes here and there or stubbornly attacking a chord for some time, while Zorn unpacked whatever was coming his way from the guitar. Their dynamics and chemistry made their performance

endearingly intimate, as Zorn listened attentively for Reed’s loud but scarce notes and launched blaring, caterwauling improvisations on top of them. Visually, that made for a striking juxtaposition: Reed sitting behind a stack of pedals; Zorn strangling a zillion notes at time, then walking around before halting to deliver another manic tirade.

Midway through the set, Zorn called Mike Patton up on stage, the shape-shifting vocalist who can go from crooning to barking in a split second.

Both Patton and Zorn deferred to Lou Reed, waiting for him to signal a direction before they exploded. Patton achieved the unthinkable—that is, to turn the loudness up a notch or two. His beat-boxing, growling, and animal serenading raised the level of sonic mayhem, but things were still pretty well balanced. Patton had a few tricks up his sleeves, like when he attempted to penetrate his monitor speaker with his mic, thus creating some cool feedback, but most importantly his movements onstage, his neurotic dislocating of his body, added an extra dimension to this performance.

Le Poisson Rouge is located in the heart of darkness—a few blocks of frat-type watering holes and tourist traps disguised as restaurants.

Hopefully, the neighborhood will be open to the new type of shows offered right on the corner of Bleecker and Sullivan and the distracting sound of ka-ching from every other corner will be covered by the sweet noises spiraling up from LPR’s basement. Stefanos Tsigrimanis

WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #52 | 43

BOOK REVIEWS

Turning up the volumes: writers' looks at books, 'zines and other printed matters

Sticky fingers: The SF Tape Music Center's Tony Nartin, Bill Maginnis, Ramon Sender, Morton Subotnick and Pauline Oliveros

The San Francisco Tape Music Center: 1960s Counterculture and the Avant-Garde David W. Bernstein, ed.

University of California Press

When Stewart Brand, Ken Kesey, and Ramon Sender produced the three-day Trips Festival in San Francisco’s Longshormen’s Hall in January 1966, showcasing the diversity of the Bay Area’s thriving experimental arts and music communities, nearly all of the key figures of the moment were involved: Allen Ginsberg read poetry; Big Brother and the Holding Company and the re44 | SIGNAL to NOISE #52

cently formed Grateful Dead played; the Merry Pranksters distributed LSD to the thousands of spectator/participants; Henry Jacobs and Bruce Baille projected works on film; the SF Mime Troupe, the Open Theatre, and Ann Halprin’s Dancer’s Workshop performed. By all accounts, the festival was a catalyst for the emergent countercultural era. Alongside the musical groups and wild personas that would come to dominate the psychedelic era, the festival was significant as it also included important figures from the non-rock avant-garde, most notably members of the San Francisco Tape Music Center.

While Ramon Sender, Tony Martin (whose light projections flooded the walls of the festival), Don Buchla (whose newly invented light-sound mixing console was integral to its multimedia experience) and Pauline Oliveros (who performed her A Theater Piece as a “side-trip” to the festival) were the only members of the Tape Music

Center directly involved with those three storied days, the Trips Festival represented the passing of torches from one moment of the avant-garde to the next. It acted as a farewell to the era of the Tape Music Center’s most pioneering work and to their reign as the focal point of the West Coast’s new music scene.

Using that time in 1966 as the bookend to a dense and fruitful piece of contemporary music history, David Bernstein’s marvelously rich book The San Francisco Tape Music Center: 1960s Counterculture and the Avant-Garde chronicles the most intensely productive years of the Tape Music Center’s relatively short lifespan. From the origins of the Center, when Ramon Sender and Morton Subotnick pooled their ramshackle equipment into the attic of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, to the subsequent phase, when the Center was awarded a Rockefeller grant and moved to Mills College in Oakland (where it resides to this day), the

book traces this vibrant time through a deep oral history. Comprised largely of interviews with the Center’s key figures (Ramon Sender, Pauline Oliveros, Morton Subotnick, Tony Martin, William Maginnis, Don Buchla, and Michael Callahan) and the peripheral, though equally important, participants (Terry Riley, Ann Halprin, Stewart Brand, and Stuart Dempster), the book presents the Center as not merely as an important group within the history of electronic music, but as a seedbed for many of the most important ideas within contemporary experimental arts.

As the many interviews testify, the members of the Tape Music Center were among the first to explore themes that are now standard within the languages of electronic and improvised music. Oliveros talks of her early experiments with Terry Riley and Loren Rush in group improvisation without reference to any genre, predating by a few years the work across the pond of Derek Bailey, Tony Oxley, and Gavin Bryars’ group Joseph Holbrooke and any idea of what came to be known as “free improvisation”. Sender speaks of having Tony Martin’s pioneering fluid-andlight visual improvisations and Ann Halprin’s abstract dance pieces playing alongside the works on tape in non-theatrical settings, predating the Fluxus notions of “Intermedia” and “Happenings” by some time. Don Buchla casually discusses his invention of the first voltage-controlled modular synthesizer. Terry Riley elaborates on the premiere of In C, a commission for the Tape Music Center, where the tight-knit community graciously worked together to produce what would become one of the great signature pieces of minimalism.

The interviewees all attribute the wealth of creative output to the loose and highly collaborative environment they created around themselves, working outside the scope of traditional academic or conservatory restraints.

In his essay “The San Francisco Tape Music Center – A Report, 1964,” which is included in this volume, Sender states: “I would like to see the center become a community-sponsored composers’ guild, which would offer the young composer a place to work, to perform, to come into contact with others in his field, all away from the institutional environment.” It is this kind of community-based non-academic sensibility that comes through in these pages.

Though it can occasionally be repetitive and overly digressive to read through a book of interviews, with the same anecdotes repeating and refracting through a dozen different voices, that rarely is a problem in this volume.

The full spectrum of the 20th century avantgarde seem to have crossed paths with, and contributed to, the activities of Tape Music Center at one point or another: John Cage, David Tudor, Stan Brakhage, Charles Olson, Bruce Conner, Robert Duncan, Steve Reich, among the many others. So when there are repetitions and digressions, it tends not matter as they provide such deep and fascinating insights into these creative interconnections.

Where the book falls short on true analysis, with the exception of Bernstein’s introduction to the volume and a few brief insightful essays – especially Morton Subotnick’s piece “Music as Studio Art,” which is especially important for understanding the impetus behind the creation of the Tape Music Center – it more than makes up for in its prismatic approach to examining a musical community through many angles. Though perhaps lacking the blend of

poverty, LSD, resourceful determination, and communal living peculiar to that era, the spirit of the old San Francisco Tape Music Center lives on to this day and will undoubtedly carry on into the future. Matthew Erickson

DIY: The Rise of Lo-Fi Culture Amy Spencer Marion Bowers

Covering the history of the DIY ethic that has become such an important part of the cultural landscape over the last twenty years, zine writer and record label founder Amy Spencer tracks the idea across a variety of fields and cultural styles, but focuses on two: writing and music.

The book is written in an approachable style, obviously designed to appeal to teenagers who are getting into making zines, forming bands or engaging in other aspects of the DIY ethos.

The “reader-friendliness” of the book is something of a problem for older, more jaded sophisticates such as myself, since the level of analysis is often condescendingly basic and resembles a strange children’s TV show or high school textbook, designed to educate teenagers about things like the Situationists or Riot Grrrls, without offending the sensibilities of their parents.

The histories that are set out here are well known, but putting them alongside each other is both useful and original. Thus, the history of zines is tracked back through punk, the alternative press of the 1960s, the Situationists, fluxus and the Beats, back to the little magazines of the early 20th century avant garde. Alternative music is likewise surveyed from grunge and indie, through punk and post-punk to the 1960s and skiffle, with sections on pirate radio and independent record production. There are some notable absences, such as the lack of any mention of Japanese or non Anglo-American fandoms or alternative scenes, but at the level of content it’s pretty good.

The book is clearly aimed at an audience for whom the internet is second nature and for whom the 1960s might as well be the 1690s.

But what does DIY or lo-fi (terms which are by no means equivalent) mean to such an audience?

The book’s refusal to take the politics of culture serieously (the Situationists are dispatched with the observation that they were “typically abstract and difficult to understand”) ends up replaying and repeating the fate of DIY itself: the transformation of a set of practices of cultural autonomy, generated in opposition to the prevailing economic and political system, into a set of styles that can be appropriated by the mainstream culture and sold back to individuals as a smorgasbord of “choices”. MySpace. MyIndieRock.

Or, to quote the back cover of the book: “if you can’t find the cultural experience you are looking for, create your own alternative!” Even the folkloric aspect of DIY, which suggests that since the beginning of time, people have come together to make and do things using whatever comes to hand (what Lévi-Strauss called bricolage) is skipped. All of this is unfortunate because the relationship between the internet and subcultures, alternative scenes and the like is something that badly needs to be understood, as does the amazing proliferation of hacker type activities today. In her attempt to provide a “useful” “service”, Spencer seriously undervalues DIY – one only hopes that some people will be turned on enough by the book to investigate further. Marcus Boon WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #52 | 45

CD / DVD / LP / MP3 The season's key releases and reissues from the world of creative music ...

Anthony Braxton

Him again? Perennial STN favorite Anthony Braxton, with the Creative Orchestra Music band in 1976

Anthony Braxton

The Complete Arista Recordings

BillSmith Smith Bill

Mosaic MD8-242 CD x 8

It’s difficult to imagine a time when radical music loomed sufficiently large in the general consciousness that a major American record company would put out recordings of genuinely new music, but that’s certainly the case with Anthony Braxton’s recordings for Arista, 13 LPs (now eight CDs) recorded between 1974 and 1980. What’s most remarkable about this music is that much of it seems to 46 | SIGNAL to NOISE #52

have been produced without an accountant’s eye on the bottom line.

Throughout jazz history there have been instances of a great innovator intersecting with a supportive record label for a period of sustained creativity. Often it was small independents, like the Parker Dials and Savoys; the Monk recordings for Riverside; the Coltrane Prestige recordings. However, there’s something different about a major label and the resources it can command: hence the Dizzy Gillespie big band recordings for RCA Victor; Miles Davis’s collaborations with Gil Evans for Columbia; Ornette Coleman’s Atlantic years; the Coltrane years with Impulse, an ABCParamount subsidiary that could underwrite the large bands of Africa/Brass and Ascension.

Further, major labels could help musicians reach a larger public and even a broader critical base. It’s evident here. In the midst of this eight-CD set appears Creative Orchestra Music 1976, an LP that would manage to garner the Down Beat critics’ award as record of the year for 1976. Comparable music released on a small label wouldn’t reach enough critics to garner that attention.

In 1973 Braxton was living in Paris when Michael Cuscuna (significantly both the original and the reissue producer for this music) contacted him, asking him to return to New York. Two major American labels were interested in signing Braxton: Atlantic and Arista, a new label just getting underway with former Columbia head Clive Davis at its helm

and Steve Backer in charge of jazz. Braxton selected the latter and for a six-year period saw some of his most ambitious projects brought to fruition. What’s most startling about the work heard here is that it is, in a sense, still music in advance of an audience. It’s music that was in part creating its own audience, in part arising in one man’s genius out of a collective need.

Through the years bits and pieces of this music have reappeared on CD, usually emphasizing the jazz side of the Braxton personality, presumably the more marketable one. Thus the single CD version of the two-LP Berlin/Montreux Concerts included tracks by quartets with Dave Holland and Barry Altschul but overlooked the piece with Braxton and Lewis performing with a German chamber ensemble. Similarly, Creative Orchestra Music 1976—with its roots in the jazz big band tradition—has appeared; the throughcomposed For Four Orchestras and For Two Pianos have not.

Approaching the Arista Mosaics will be a surprise for many listeners. Few musicians have exploited the temporal possibilities of the CD as Braxton has, setting his music free in extended recordings. Given the recent scale of Braxton’s music, the eight CDs of the Arista relationship don’t look particularly daunting. What’s remarkable, though, is the skill with which Braxton worked with the limitations of the LP format, sometimes compressing his music into loaded bits that allowed him to deploy an extraordinary range of compositional and performance techniques within the limited playing time.

Many of the threads that have developed throughout Braxton’s career are heard here near their origins, whether it’s music that’s close to its inspirations in European and American practices, or more likely a compound. Part of what’s extraordinary is the number of musical connections that Braxton had achieved. The key Chicago connections are here, Roscoe Mitchell and Muhal Richard Abrams, along with Leroy Jenkins and Leo Smith, who’d gone with him to Paris in 1969; the rhythmic core of the quartet Circle, formed in 1971, is present in Holland and Altschul; Braxton is also connected to the post-Cage “classical” avant-garde in Fredric Rzewski, Garrett List and Richard Teitelbaum, all members of the group MEV; New York studio mainstays like Seldon Powell and Jon Faddis contribute creatively to the big band music. In this array of riches, Braxton assembles a saxophone quartet for one piece—the minimalist-inspired “Opus 37”— and it includes Julius Hemphill, Oliver Lake and Hamiet Bluiett, three fourths of the future World Saxophone Quartet. While third stream music may have lost currency as a tag, the vision of an ultimate musical synthesis is at the core of this work.

The Arista relationship begins with two recordings—New York, Fall 1974 and Five Pieces 1975--that explored Braxton’s work in small, rhythmically based ensembles. The Braxton small bands have represented a visionary extension of the qualities that have long propelled great jazz ensembles, the celebratory interaction of talented individuals who have arrived at a new language. With a core personnel of Braxton, trumpeter Kenny Wheeler (superseded by George Lewis), bassist Dave Holland and drummer Barry Altschul (later Jerome Cooper), the Braxton quartet

may be numbered among the singular achievements in small group jazz, extending the sequence of Armstrong, Parker, Davis and Coleman.

Operating within the same piano-less instrumentation as the Gerry Mulligan and Coleman Quartets, Braxton would extend the ensemble’s range with an extraordinary arsenal of reeds, stretching from sopranino saxophone and high E flat clarinet through every permutation until he arrived at the monolithic sound world of the contra-bass reeds. With tempos expanding at the same rate, the group developed a collective virtuosity that has rarely been equalled. Braxton’s facility is such that he virtually duets with himself in the extreme upper register of the sopranino. Textures and forms move from invocations of bop to dense explorations in texture with little rhythmic impetus. Braxton described the high-speed “23B” as an atonal “Donna Lee,” and it’s an ideal place for Braxton to present his jazz roots, first crafting an energetic solo full of leaps and whistles that invoke Parker and Dolphy (and Coleman and McLean), then returning after an interval with a calmer take on the subject that suggests Paul Desmond and Warne Marsh in its lyricism and unexpected intervals. Another highlight of the first disc is the long “23 E,” its beautifully sustained, slow and high pitched line played

by Braxton and Wheeler against driving bass and drums. It has affinities with the great free jazz dirges—Coleman’s “Lonely Woman” and Mitchell’s “People in Sorrow”—but Braxton’s extended exploration of different sound worlds—sopranino sax, contrabass clarinet and flute—puts it in a class by itself.

Duets 1976 provided an extended forum for Braxton to work with Muhal Richard Abrams, an early mentor. In addition to Braxton’s originals, there are accounts of Scott Joplin’s “Maple Leaf Rag,” Dolphy’s “Miss Ann,” and a lovely collective improvisation called “Nickie.” If there’s a comfortable sense of dialogue achieved here, there’s another exploration of the Chicago background on For Trio, two versions of “Opus 76” that explore layered reeds and a host of little instruments and percussion. Braxton plays one version with Henry Threadgill and Douglas Ewart, the second with Roscoe Mitchell and Joseph Jarman.

Creative Orchestra Music 1976 remains one of the most startling of Braxton’s recordings. Working with instrumentation that resembles the conventional big band, Braxton both summarizes and extends the possibilities for interaction between rhythmic elements, ensemble writing, texture and improvisation.

It belongs with such rare adventures in the big band genre as the Gillespie Band of the 1940s and Coltrane’s forays in the ‘60s. Part of its achievement is the combining of unlikely contributors, from a brilliant piccolo trumpet solo from Jon Faddis to translucent electronic environments from Richard Teitelbaum. You catch, too, the influences of Ellington, Ives and John Phillip Sousa.

Alto Saxophone Improvisations 1979, originally a two LP set, comes from one of Braxton's most active periods as a solo performer (it was recorded within months of the Köln and weeks of the Pisa solo recordings available on Leo Records’ Golden Years label).

Like all the material here it focuses on the particular breadth of Braxton’s musical thought and his unusual ability to embrace what ap-

pear as contraries to everyone else. Beyond expressionism and cool abstraction, his jazz conception also embraces the accessible and the challenging, here spanning source material from Lionel Hampton’s R&B-driven “Red Top” to the changes of Coltrane’s “Giant Steps,” and commemorating Benny Golson’s commemoration of Betty Carter—“Along Came Betty”—somewhere in between.

Braxton’s grasp of the classical world is just as all-encompassing. While much minimalism music has been read as a repudiation of Schoenberg and the Second School of Vienna, Braxton finds a kind of concord, dedicating the combinatory “26F” to Phillip Glass while elsewhere deriving inspiration from Stockhausen. It’s not just the principle of the collision, but the quality of the collision that matters, and Braxton was already defining his ultimate synthesis in the first decade of his career.

As the Arista relationship developed, Cuscuna and Backer supported Braxton in ever more challenging projects that would take him further and further away from the assumptions of jazz to through-composed atonality.

There’s the stunning fluidity of the LP-length “Opus 95 for two pianos,” which begins with the performers Frederic Rzewski and Ursula Oppens walking onstage playing the initial theme on melodicas before turning to the piano keyboards. That initial shift in timbre and physical placement becomes emblematic of the movement that characterizes the piece, which moves both forward and back and forth between specific tonal values, occasionally contrasting even piano timbres with the clang of zithers.

While the two-piano piece is the last recording, the Braxton-Arista relationship climaxes with “Opus 82,” for four orchestras, perhaps the most ambitious Braxton recording until he undertook the Trillium Opera series in the 1990s. With four conductors each conducting a 39-piece orchestra, the vast resource is dispersed in both space and time.

Originally stretching over three LPs, the work’s 113 minutes now reside comfortably on two CDs. While Braxton has sustained a voluminous recording career, he’s done so largely in Europe, abetted by dedicated labels like Hatology, Leo, Soul Note and a host of others.

The Aristas mark the last time that a major innovator enjoyed such a positive relationship in the American recording industry. This 8-disc set remains as testimony to a time when the business side of music wasn’t immune to the claims of the creative. The result is some of the best achieved and most ambitious music recorded in the 20th century, a monument to Michael Cuscuna and Steve Backer’s vision and Braxton’s singular creativity.

The set is up to the usual impeccable Mosaic standard, with extensive notes provided by Mike Heffley and excellent photo documentation by Bill Smith and Martin S. Gold. For those seeking more, Heffley has posted excised portions on his web-site. Jason Guthartz, who maintains the extraordinary on-line Braxton resource, www.restructures. net, has posted the original liner notes, many

by Braxton himself. Some of the best writing ever done on this music is also available there, including pieces by Ran Blake and Art Lange from the now unavailable Mixtery: A festschrift for Anthony Braxton, edited by Graham Lock.

Stuart Broomer

WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #52 | 47

Rabih Abou-Khalil

Rudresh Mahanthappa and Vijay Iyer

Em Português Enja 9520 CD

Fieldwork Door PI 26 CD

Vijay Iyer Tragicomic Sunnyside SSC 1186 CD

Rudresh Mahanthappa Kinsmen

Bill Douthart

Pi 28 CD

What’s happening in New York today? These three recordings provide a pretty good snapshot of the coterie of jazz musicians clustered around the Brooklynbased label Pi Recordings. These guys are reworking the bop tradition from the inside out, determined to maintain certain formal boundaries while infinitely deepening the genre’s possibilities. Technical rigor is matched by intellectual restlessness, a need to build new structures without reverting to mere nostalgia for the past, always searching, searching...

Fieldwork’s third long-player, Door, is a good place to start, as its current lineup represents a nexus of creative work in the NY area. Vijay Iyer leads on piano and Steve Lehman is still providing his colorful alto sax to the group, while up-and-coming drummer Tyshawn Sorey makes his first appearance with Fieldwork. The trio has produced eleven relatively concise pieces (nothing over eight minutes), sharing composing responsibilities among themselves. While Sorey weighs in with the majority of writing credits, Fieldwork remains essentially an Iyer project—not only because he has been the group’s only constant member since 2002, but also because of Door’s stylistic similarity to his recent body of work. The disc is, overall, very strong, though it has a tendency toward aesthetic homogeneity that can feel a little tiring; the music is best experienced in short, concentrated doses. That said, the album does not tolerate being treated as background noise. Door is serious contemporary jazz that demands a space of its own, preferably a very dark one, so that the listener can actively engage with its compositions. Each track begins in medias res, setting out crystalline structures that often seem to repel any emotional involvement. “Cycles One” and “Two,” both penned by Sorey, are pretty much throwaways, with doom’n’gloom piano and rather forgettable horn lines. His “Bend” plies similar territory to better effect, but it doesn’t keep Iyer’s restrained phrasings from 48 | SIGNAL to NOISE #52

sounding heavy and somber, matched as they are by apocalyptic drum drama. The highlight of Door is certainly Steve Lehman, one of the most remarkable new saxophonists to emerge in the past ten years.

His knotty alto immediately calls to mind Steve Lacy, a smooth sound that is nevertheless warped and unsettling—”Balanced” and “Rai” show him at his best, while the very fast “Pivot Point” forces him into Evan Parker-style spluttering. In general, Fieldwork’s music depends on velocity for success; when it dips below a certain minimum tempo threshold it begins to sound flat and joyless. An Iyer tune, “Less,” is perhaps the best at bridging the two extremes in the group aesthetic: its stop-start sax line and churning drums work toward a rhythm with much more lurch than bounce to it. The high conceptual strategies and frequent changes of time signature make for an experience of retarded movement that will likely alienate some listeners, but the strength of Door is its puzzle-like structure, which will warrant many repeat plays for those intrigued, to say the least.

Iyer’s Tragicomic, released not on Pi but Sunnyside, is a similar affair. Here he is joined by labelmate Rudresh Mahanthappa on alto sax, Marcus Gilmore on drums and Stephan Crump on bass. The format is, again, shorter compositions, and it’s a good medium for Iyer to display his eclecticism. The most-played track from this release will likely be “Macaca Please,” which grows organically out of the slow and elegant “Weight of Things.” It’s a protest song in the vein of Clifford Thornton, starting at breakneck speed with an infectious theme played in unison by the quartet, who continue to conform themselves to Gilmore’s furious rhythm throughout. The substitution of Mahanthappa for Lehman across recordings makes for a decidedly different experience; the Indian-born altoist’s playing feels freer of conceptual baggage, flowing in a continuous stream of bebop phrasings. “Aftermath” is a dramatic piece, with beautiful staccato punctuations from Mahanthappa over Crump’s bass. On this track and others, Iyer explores a minimalism that calls to mind certain works by Glass or Ichiyanagi. It’s particularly effective on the trio piece “Comin’ Up,” where the piano subtly investigates themes of repetition and minute variation over the bass and drums’ breakbeat rhythm.

Iyer heightens the mystery by gradually revealing more and more fragments of melody, ghosting notes, and playing across octaves. On “Age of Everything,” he begins with a theme that could almost be mistaken for township jazz before the ensemble’s mathy onslaught kicks in; it’s the kind of deconstructive entanglement of wholeness and abstraction that Iyer loves. There are several forgettable excursions, but the album finishes with a quartet of strong pieces. Two deserve particular mention: “I’m All Smiles,” once a vehicle for singers like Nancy Wilson and Barbra Streisand, is torn asunder in a solo piano performance that beautifully

balances high concept and naïveté—it’s perhaps the only song here that truly deserves the title “tragicomic.” The album’s penultimate tune, “Threnody,” is an intense piece that shifts midway from trio to quartet as Mahanthappa jumps in with another winding solo; his bandmates’ consistent crescendo-decrescendo swell makes the whole thing feel like it’s constantly about to break from darkness into the light of day.

Mahanthappa’s new recording, Kinsmen, tosses its hat into a different arena: world fusion. Despite the altoist’s and Iyer’s shared Indian heritage, their work together on Tragicomic produced very little that nodded to Eastern forms. That’s the main focus of Kinsmen, though, which pairs him with Carnatic music legend Kadri Gopalnath (otherwise known as the “Saxophone Chakravarthy”) and the Dakshina Ensemble. Many consider Gopalnath’s adaptation of the Western saxophone to Indian classical music to be a near-miracle and certainly a first in the genre’s history. Kinsmen was commissioned by the Asia Society of New York and recorded in 2007, and it is far stronger than the recent attempt by Amir El-Saffar to combine jazz with traditional Maqam music (also on Pi, also featuring Rudresh...). “Introspection” begins with a duo alap (in Carnatic music, an introduction to a longer composition), whose ominous chords from guitarist Rez Abbasi and snaky Mahanthappa solo are the quiet before the storm. It gives way to the electric “Ganesha,” which finds the whole Dakshina Ensemble flexing some muscle but mostly displaying their versatility in an array of styles. Carnatic music is by nature less demanding than jazz in terms of improvised soloing, in that it favors the hypnotic over the endlessly new; after decades of work within the field, it’s only natural that Gopalnath may sound a little out of place on a modern freebop recording. But it makes for an interesting contrast between the two altos. Gopalnath takes the first solo on “Ganesha” and tends to stick closer to the melody than Mahanthappa, who unleashes effortless cascades of sound over Poovalur Sriji’s mridingam before again returning to the theme; the song culminates in a fantastic call-and-response exchange between alto (Gopalnath) and violin (A. Kanyakumari), introducing another Carnatic trademark into Kinsmen’s East-West hybrid. It’s a tough act to follow, but “Snake!” has a wonderful groove, the two saxes and violin creating a dense weave that proceeds relentlessly for several minutes before bursting into solo sections; its rhythm is that of the chase, hurried and breathless. The final, fifteen-minute “Convergence” works as a summary for the album. While it makes no significant aesthetic developments on the previous sixty minutes, it allows the most room for each member to stretch out and show what he’s made of. This is consistently fresh music that defies audience expectations, and the interaction between Mahanthappa and Gopalnath is downright sublime. Seth Watter

If oud player Rabih Abou-Khalil were merely a brilliant improviser, he would certainly dominate the tiny field of jazz oud. But Abou-Khalil is more than that: a composer who makes connections among cultures no one has made before, combining sounds in ways we’ve never heard. His latest is a merger of the musics of his native Lebanon and Portuguese fado, with bits of jazz and other et ceteras thrown in to make it difficult to categorize—an “imaginary folk music,” as the liner notes put it. Abou-Khalil’s great conceptual leap here is to realize that the same unfulfilled yearnings, the same noble romantic suffering and nostalgia— what the Portuguese call “saudade”— underlie both musics. So he bends them toward each other in beautiful ways, setting lyrics by some of the best fado poets to Middle Eastern-inflected melodies and rhythms. Tenor Ricardo Ribeiro is capable of conveying great tenderness and great anguish, and he brings both sensuality and dignity to the music. He finds ever subtler layers of suffering on “Beijos ateus,” ever more nuanced torments in loneliness on “A lua num quarto,” and he makes it all beautiful. Abou-Khalil’s oud—intimate as a whisper, soft as a summer breeze, and fragrant with the same longing and regret that perfume Ribeiro’s voice—seems just as well suited to the music as the guitar that traditionally accompanies fado singers.

His solo on “Como um rio” grows out of the song’s melancholy soil, curling around and clinging to sadness until it flowers into a cathartic display of virtuosic picking that nearly, but doesn’t quite, lift the heavy emotional weight from his heart. Long-time collaborators accordionist Luciano Biondini, tuba and bass player Michel Godard, and percussionist Jarrod Cagwin play with perfect sympathy and understanding of Abou-Khalil’s unique vision. They add touches of jazz, Italian folk music, and rhythms from various traditions that broaden and deepen the music, but never make it sound anything less than organic. It’s another gorgeous and inventive album from one of most fertile imaginations in world music–jazz fusion. Ed Hazell

Acid Mothers Temple & the Cosmic Inferno Journey to the Cosmic Inferno Very Friendly VF046 CD

Acid Mothers Temple is more like a family of rock bands than just one band, and the differences between various AMT configurations are not always discernible. This Japanese collective’s best-known variation is Acid Mothers Temple & the Melting Paraiso U.F.O., but a newer lineup calling itself Acid Mothers Temple & the Cosmic Inferno emerged in 2005.

And then there’s something else called Acid Mothers Temple SWR. Leader Kawabata Makoto explains it this way in a press release: “The future may see yet other groups bearing similar names. But each and all of them will be true manifestations of Acid Mothers Temple.” The nomenclature is confusing, and the collective’s prolific output

is uneven, but the latest Cosmic Inferno recording is both strong and strange. Pikachu, a drummer and singer from Osaka “grenade-girl” duo Afrirampo, has joined the group, and her vocals (including a fair amount of yelps and breathing sounds) are a welcome reminder of the days before another female singer, Cotton Casino, parted ways with AMT. While some AMT records are all-out guitar assaults, this one deftly alternates between noisy psychedelic jams, meditative interludes and sonic experimentation.

In addition to the standard rock-band instruments and lots of oscillating synth, the band members play everything from hurdy gurdy, bouzouki and sitar to Japanese instruments such as taiko and shamisen. Yet it sounds less like world music than something otherworldly. When Pikachu and Koji Shimura are both pounding away at their drums, the cosmic colors become propulsive and a little chaotic. The six tracks are all movements of one suite, and the mood ebbs and flows in great waves. At the disc’s high points, when the guitars groan and moan like inhuman voices and the synthesizers shoot up and down like sci-fi sound effects, the Cosmic Inferno reaches ecstatic peaks. Robert Loerzel

Paolo Angeli Evan Parker Ned Rothenberg

Free Zone Appleby 2007 Psi 08.04 CD

Northern England’s Appleby Jazz Festival is on ice after 18 years, a victim of growth unmatched by funding and 2007’s disastrously soggy summer.

Do an online search for photos from the last event and you’ll see that most of the patrons wore sweaters and raincoats, but those who ventured into Saint Michael’s Church for the Evan Parker-curated Free Zone concert could at least toast their extremities in the warmth of music. Parker and fellow reed master Ned Rothenberg are rarely associated with fire music these days, but even small movements can generate considerable heat; the whirring activity they generate when they lock into synchronous activity on “Shield (Blue) Duo 2” could toast your sandwich and melt the cheese. Those who have missed Parker’s trademarked approach to the straight horn, which has been rationed on recent albums, can rejoice in the moments of hurtling, circularbreathing–driven sound-streams, which are enriched but not hindered by Rothenberg’s simpatico stylings. These two men have worked together for years, and it shows in the intuitive flow that they sustain, but guitarist Paolo Angeli manages to hold his own in challenging company. At diverse points he makes his bulky, modified Sardinian guitar function as a berimbau and cello.

On “Shield (Blue) Trio 4” he also resorts to that most familiar of electronic instruments, the radio, to inject sputtering static and distant orchestral melodrama into the mix. If you’ve followed the various Free Zone Appleby releases over the years, the presence of only three players rather than seven or eight might seem like evidence of downsizing. But here the listener gets to hear the players develop the music at length. This CD may document the final Free Zone, but it feels more like a beacon held aloft

than a snuffed torch. Bill Meyer

Lotte Anker Sylvie Courvoisier Ikue Mori Alien Huddle Intakt 144 CD

Henriette Groth Lotte Anker DuFugl ILK 145 CD

Danish saxophonist Lotte Anker has a career dating back more than two decades that includes work with John Tchicai, Peter Brötzmann, Pierre Dørge and Thomas Lehn. But she has recently gained Stateside attention working with some fine American musicians, notably such pianists as Marilyn Crispell, Craig Taborn and now Sylvie Courvoisier.

Alien Huddle finds her with the everinventive rhythm section of Courvoisier and Ikue Mori (two-thirds of the New York supergroup Mephista), and the results are staggeringly effective. She’s an alarmingly quick-witted and responsive improviser, and the unusual percussive sounds of Courvoisier’s prepared piano and Mori’s laptop push her to extremes.

The album’s title, combined with the 11 track titles referencing types of birds, give a nice indication of the soundworld the trio creates, and Anker—in a sense playing the most conventional instrument here—fits in remarkably well with the beautiful (and occasionally explosive) alien birdsongs.

The sounds are less alien on DuFugl, her duo with Henriette Groth (interestingly, the CD has a photo of birds in flight on the cover—perhaps the avian interest is Anker’s). Across four of Groth’s compositions and nine improvisations, Anker again proves to be a controlled listener, responding with dexterity to the the pianist’s sudden changes, moving with ease from quiet, wandering melodies to fast and free workouts. While even the composed pieces never feel locked in formula, it’s a more straightforwardly musical set, less rooted in sound exploration, than Alien Huddle, closer to her work with Crispell.

Taken together, these CDs show a player ready to respond to a variety of situations, as unafraid of the outer edges as of simple beauty.

Kurt Gottschalk

Mark Applebaum Sock Monkey Innova 706 CD

Mark Applebaum is a contemporary American composer (b. 1967), and Sock Monkey is a dizzyingly wide-ranging collection of his compositions for assorted configurations, both acoustic and electronic, from solo performer to full orchestra. “Magnetic North,” for brass quintet, percussion, and electronics, superficially sounds like fairly typical post-Cage mod-classical—lots of turbulent, darting horns recorded with a bit of (harsh) echo—but it also includes some droll, vaguely Ives-, Ellington-, and Carl Stalling-like burlesques. “Variations on Variations on a Theme by Mozart” for 18 prepared pianos is like unto a cross betwixt an affectionate parody of Mozart by Conlon Nancarrow (and his maxi/mondo-player-piano) and Cage’s late ’40s prepared piano pieces—it’s infinitely charming and daffy. One section of “Martian Anthropology,”

played by the Paul Dresher Ensemble, evokes the icy, surreal dream-scapes of Main, Fripp & Eno, and Terje Rypdal.

Though Applebaum is well out of his teens, this disc could be subtitled I Was a Teenaged Elliott Carter, and I mean that as a compliment—it’s Carterian modernity from a fellow who likely grew up with some of the same rock ’n’ roll and cartoons that we post-1960ers did. This Monkey is brainy, visceral, and fun—good stuff. Mark Keresman

Kevin Ayers

What More Can I Say...

Reel Recordings 009 CD

Kevin Ayers was an original member of the then-psychedelic UK ensemble Soft Machine and life-long member of the Loveably Eccentric British Singer/ Songwriters League (other members have included Tom Newman, Roy Harper, and the late Kevin Coyne).

What More Can I Say... collects Ayers’ own private recordings—early 1970s studio outtakes and alternates featuring David Bedford (keys), Mike Oldfield (bass), Eddie Sparrow (drums), and guest Robert Wyatt (drums; also a Soft Machine alumnus), with the focus on Ayers’ singing, guitar, and on one track, keyboards. The sound quality is fine—unpolished, very demo-like, and eminently listenable. Ayers’ voice is in excellent form, a deep, creamy-smooth, crooner-like baritone. While a few tracks are merely song-sketches or pleasant jams (“Crystal Clear,” “Clarence in Oyster Land”), there are some rough gems here. “Dreaming Doctor” is Ayers at his most harrowing, and “What More Can Anyone Say” is a skeletal songblueprint (his spoken voice instructs) for his archetypical, romantically whimsical psych-folk idylls. Mark Keresman

Pierre Bastien Visions of Doing

Western Vinyl WEST053 CD

Some artists produce a small body of work wherein each piece is distinguished by its radical difference from every other. The other dominant trend is an artist’s eternal elaboration on one distinct theme. The discography of Pierre Bastien is firmly in the latter category. For the past twenty years, the French composer has been making music from a growing repertoire of mechanical, homemade instruments that function as autonomous units of an ensemble. Listening again to his first LP, 1988’s Mecanium (ADN), it is shocking to hear how little the Bastien aesthetic has progressed. Even more surprising is how vital and contemporary it still sounds to 21st-century ears. Visions of Doing, Bastien’s latest release for Western Vinyl, is not exactly new material to begin with. The pieces date from the late ’90s to the early 2000s and were composed in conjunction with multimedia projects by the Rotterdam film and video artist Karel Doing. An excerpt from a 2002 performance of “Four Eyes” is included on the disc to give a sense of context: rich black-and-white 16mm images picture the metropolis as a series of repetitive formal actions, in which citizens have been reduced to a parade of lonely silhouettes against the steely architecture of modern life.

Digital video images of a mechanized instrument and an engaged turntable are repeatedly superimposed atop the

WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #52 | 49

Nancarrow at home in 1990

Conlon Nancarrow

Studies for Player Piano Other Minds OM 1012/15-2 CD x 4

Various

The Player Piano Project

photo: John Fago, courtesy Other Minds

Vera Ikon CD

There’s a historical connection between music and mechanization, from the bellows-operated organ to the chimes in clocks and the perforated cylinders in wind-up music boxes. In the 18th century, French inventor Jacques de Vaucanson fabricated complex automatons, among them a mechanical flute player (he also made a mechanical duck that seemed to defecate, but the history of technology and excrement may be another story). The height of pre-electronic musical mechanization came with the player piano, developed throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries to use perforated paper rolls to trigger a pneumatic system that in turn sounded notes. The device was so popular that during the 1920s more player pianos were produced in America than the conventional kind. They were central to family sing-alongs and many of the great pianists of the era recorded piano rolls (an excellent introduction is available on the Biograph CD The Greatest Ragtime of the Century with piano rolls by Scott Joplin, Jelly Roll Morton, Fats Waller and others).

While the 1929 stock market crash and the rise of electrical recording and reproduction effectively concluded the instrument’s domestic role, the player piano remains a great emblem of our history. Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Player Piano grants it a special human status in a world dominated by machines, while its arrival is celebrated in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ One Hundred Years of Solitude. William Gaddis planned for years to write an epic history of the instrument before finally settling on the posthumously published novella-monologue Agapé Agape. The player piano is celebrated at the zenith and nadir of American culture, simultaneously discovered by the avant-garde and celebrated in nostalgia.

In 1949 Cy Coben (1919-2006) composed 50 | SIGNAL to NOISE #52

“Old Piano Roll Blues,” a novelty tune intended to sound like it was written decades before.

Even the lyric emulates mechanical reproduction (“I want to hear it again/ I want to hear it again”) and it became a hit the very next year for Al Jolson, whose blackface minstrelsy—to paraphrase Walter Benjamin-- might have been considered a work of reproduction in the age of mechanical art. Coben touched a mechanical nerve: the song was subsequently recorded by the Andrews Sisters, Liberace, Tennessee Ernie Ford, Eddie Cantor, Floyd Cramer, Hoagy Carmichael, Freddie Cannon and likely not last but probably least, The Carnival Cuties.

The player piano would be largely consigned to nostalgia, histories of technology and Coben’s ditty were it not for the work of one startlingly original composer: Conlon Nancarrow (19121997). A veteran of the Spanish civil war and a man hounded by the FBI for his socialist politics, Nancarrow abandoned America for Mexico City in the 1940s. There, far from developments in electronic and percussion music, he began devoting himself to the player piano as a means of escaping the traditional tyranny of the performer in western classical music. The piano roll provided Nancarrow with the same autonomy that electronic tape would soon provide others.

He could create superhuman music of a level of mathematical detail that would otherwise have to wait for computer music (the piano roll and the computer have common roots in the cards used in textile making, and one can readily find affinities with John Cage’s compositions using the imperfections in manuscript pages).

Nancarrow could punch out parts so fast and intervals so wide no pianist could execute them, stretching and frustrating the listener’s ability to distinguish musical events. More importantly, he could explore extraordinarily complex rhythmic and harmonic relationships between multiple voices that no ensemble could readily negotiate.

In 1977 Robert Shumaker recorded Nancarrow’s rolls on the two pianos in his studio, producing four LPs on the 1750 Arch label that were released between 1977 and 1984. They are now gathered in this four-CD set with the original, extensive liner notes by James Tenney (whose detailed descriptions run to nearly 20,000 words).

There’s even more sonic detail apparent on the

CDs and it’s one of the great bodies of work in 20th century American music. As he began experimenting in the late ‘40s, Nancarrow often began with materials from the classic pianists of the 1920s, stride and boogie woogie figures recalling Fats Waller and James P. Johnson.

However, these jazz elements are soon immersed in difficult rhythmic relationships, with fast and slow parts proliferating over one another, usually with continuous repetition and transformation of the thematic materials. “Study No. 31” has three parts in three tempos in the ratio of 21/24/25--relatively simple when compared to the ten-minute-long “Study No. 37,” which overlays 12 distinct parts and required both of Nancarrow’s pianos to execute. The music is brilliant and liberating, as if Nancarrow had fulfilled the musical potential of a machine that had been limited by its representation of the humanly possible.

The Player Piano Project was organized by composer Veronika Krausas at University of Southern California. It presents 23 pieces by 22 composers, drawing inspiration from Nancarrow often with the intermediary influence of James Tenney. It begins with Tenney’s own “Spectral CANON for Conlon Nancarrow,” which was itself punched by Nancarrow in 1974. The work is extraordinarily varied and it often combines interests in non-standard tunings and harmonic approaches as well as the potential for rhythmic detail. Several pieces began life as pieces for pianists but have take on added detail and dimension with the player piano’s unique resources.

One piece requires a live pianist to add additional detail. There are fascinating variations on extant pieces, including Krausas’s own “Blue,” based on a transcription of Earl Hines’s performance of W.C. Handy’s “St. Louis Blues”; Gayle Young’s “Forest,” with its sources in Charles Ives; and Cein Tonjussen’s remarkable transformation of John Williams’ “Raiders March” from Raiders of the Lost Ark. The piano roll’s innate flexibility inspires variety, from Gordon Monahan’s sparse “Just Another Turkey Track Horizon” to the dense complexity of Brian Current’s “Banjo/Continuum” or Shaun Naidoo’s “B-Sharp Wallah.”

More than a tribute to Nancarrow, the collection demonstrates the player piano’s usefulness as an experimental instrument. Stuart Broomer

analog portion as a Bastien score plays in the background.

The rhythms on Visions of Doing are decidedly more relaxed than previous releases. While Bastien’s work often veers toward a jittery, nervous, almost sexual tempo, the nine compositions here languish with a newfound ease and grace that suits them well.

“The American on the Highway,” for instance, uses melodic percussive effects to buffer a muted trumpet, with an unidentifiable razzing noise adding texture. These pieces are usually simply structured, often involving three or four primary units, and the machines operate like clockwork, unvarying in rhythm and tone. This makes it all the more striking when a warmer, more organic instrument makes its presence felt, as the traditional violin melody does toward the end of “Visions of Shanghai” or the picked lute on “Tides.” Bastien has always had an interest in world musics, which can be seen here by titles like “The Girl from Surinam,” “Turkish Boys at the Harbor,” and “South African Lady.” Though it was occasioned by Doing’s various performances, Visions is remarkably coherent: the whole thing has a dreamy, sleepwalking pace for its first forty minutes, before giving up the ghost in the dissonant and somewhat irritating “Bubblin’.” “Energy Energy,” a suite of four (to my mind) independent movements, is quite perfect, the trumpet dissolving into sustained organ-like tones before a dynamic shift to a jazzy second half whose trashcanmeets-razor-blade percussion propels the ensemble. The mechanisms do what they want; only the human voice sounds alien in Bastien’s motorized universe, because it is the machine today that is most in need of our humanism.

Seth Watter

Bik Bent Braam Extremen BBB 10 CD

Lively, intelligent, serious, fun... this album by Dutch pianist-composer Michiel Braam’s 13-piece big band is a blast from start to finish. As he explains in his detailed liner notes, there is no setlist for a Bik Bent Braam concert; instead, the musicians determine the course of the performance in real time, using sonic cues and hand gestures to choose among compositions, directed improvisation, and soloing. It’s a complex system for making a performance, but the test of the intricate methodology is whether good music results.

Happily, with this group of musicians, it does. It helps that Braam writes witty and melodic compositions such as the boppishly bouncing “Michaelx” or the film noir ballad “Puttex.” It also helps that everyone in the band understands the collective responsibilities that Braam’s concept places on them. The spontaneous decisions that guide the structure of the performance are reached without struggles for control or regard to individual ego. It’s orderly and free at the same time. Each of the players can call on a detached curiosity about sound and timbre or a strong, expressive linear approach to soloing.

Most of all, they have a keen sense of play and an enthusiasm for the music that make the disc a vibrant and joyous affair. It’s a giddy patchwork that segues from one style or approach to another quite naturally. Braam’s liner

notes have pretty much done the job of mapping out the particulars of this evening at the Bimhuis, so a critic’s blow-by-blow is superfluous.

But there are plenty of individual and collective highpoints—bassist Wilbert de Joode’s arco work on “Wilx,” the contrabass clarinet duet by Frank Gratkowski and Peter van Bergen on “Pjax,” the band’s spontaneous riffing on “Angelox,” the rhythm-section interaction and laughing saxophones on “Haeks.” This album carries its avant-garde baggage lightly, maintains its sense of humor, and still delivers substantial music. Ed Hazell

Raoul Björkenheim William Parker Hamid Drake DMG at the Stone, Vol. 2 DMG/ARC 0722 CD

Steve Rust Trio Bottom Feeder

and fragmented funk of “Cereal Killer” (which resembles a stripped-down Decoding Society jam); and the space and electro-frippery freakout on “Gyre and Gimble.” Things are nicely funky throughout (including the entirety of the percolating “Pith and Vinegar”), and Björkenheim gets into more volume and slide work here than I’ve previously heard—he’s almost Fuze-like in places. Significantly, it’s the longer pieces that are the best. I’m especially fond of “River Road Ramble,” with some great mimetic exchanges between Björkenheim and Ligeti; its drowsy feel recalls some of Krakatau’s strongest early performances. The long “Devil’s Tombstone” is the best piece, and it makes you crave a live outing from this trio, whose energy, empathy, and ideas are pretty damn convincing. Jason Bivins

Dan Burke and Thomas Dimuzio Upcoming Events

Dane 0065 CD

Guitarist Raoul Björkenheim has become better known over the last few years. Downtown Music Gallery’s Bruce Gallanter and Manny Maris have long championed this incisive player, not only in the days of the mighty Krakatau but all the way back to Björkenheim’s associations with Edward Vesala’s Sound and Fury. This disc captures his trio’s sparkling first set from Boxing Day 2006. Björkenheim’s tone is a little sharper, a little more biting these days. He’s also more inclined to crank out long spooling lines and less interested in textural asides than he once was (though he still favors that robotic processing sound every now and again, and he still takes a turn with the viola da gimbri). Back in the day, Vesala once told Björkenheim: “Raoul, that’s great guitar, but I need shooting stars.” Well, his playing’s exultant these days. In other words, he’s feeling his oats in a big way and he’s got just the right players on board. They bustle, they rumble, they’re always limber— well, is there any point in expanding the catalogue of Parker’s and Drake’s virtues? The only question is whether their playing ever gets stale (nope) or whether their partner possesses the imagination and stamina to hang (emphatic yup). Björkenheim seems to be particularly simpatico with Drake, responding to even the subtlest of inflections with a double-time run here, a wah-wah riff there. But it’s not all open-throttle all the time: Light and shade abound, and dynamics are considerably varied. Over the 54-minute course of “Lithotone I,” the trio cycles kaleidoscopically—and, this is key, joyfully—through searing rock, elastic free playing, nimble swing, and coloristic excursuses. On the funkedup encore “Lithotone II,” Björkenheim gets particularly raucous with the viola.

The disc with Parker and Drake will get all the ink, but the robust session with bassist Rust and powerhouse drummer Lukas Ligeti is also worth hearing. Rust’s pieces offer a series of brief and provocative ideas (small rhythmic figures and so forth) that catalyze without constraining. While the course of the music isn’t as memorable as the DMG disc, many of the ideas are quite juicy: the sharp, almost metallic arpeggiating on “Slipstream”; the booming bass chords

No Fun NF32 CD

Upcoming Events gives a first impression of post-millennial paranoia delivered with irony so heavy it could break some bones in your foot if you let it slip. The sleeve design depicts a bunch of cops in riot gear under a marquee trumpeting the title. The tracks have names like “Deregulation,” which tellingly slinks so slowly from silence into audibility that you might not notice it until something bad has happened, and “Freedom Fries.”

Fortunately electronicists Dan Burke (of Illusion of Safety) and Thomas Dimuzio understand the merits of balance, pacing and subtlety; it takes them over forty minutes to get around to confronting the listener with brute power, as personified by a sample of a cop busting a reporter who won’t move on. But quieter doesn’t mean easier; “Closed Circuit’s” layers of pulsing electronics are initially quite lulling, but tiny details gradually magnify, inviting you to wonder who’s turning up the telescope’s resolution. Bill Meyer

Eugene Carchesio Trances

Rhizome rhcd 19 CD-R

Well-known in Australia as a visual artist, with an equally lengthy musical history going back to the late ’80s, Eugene Carchesio has recently surfaced in combination with the likes of Leighton Craig and The Deadnotes. With Trances, he sets aside his interest in melodious instrumental improvisation in favor of rhythmic minimalism. Each piece dwells on a slowly evolving set of rhythms and tuned-percussion hits that gently pulse, blending one form into the next and ultimately creating a passive but engaging 50 minutes of music. Tracks such as the “untitled #7” have a dub-like flair, as delayed pulses ride on top of clicking sputters, while “untitled #10” is more frenetic—just add a kick drum or two and it’d make for a great piece in a Richie Hawtin set. At its most techno (“Untitled #3”), the music references the outer orbit of house and even hints at the softer end of Acid. Carchesio’s ear and history as a drummer come to the fore here, and these pieces offer a rewarding journey through the realm of minimalisminspired techno. Lawrence English

Carrier Band Voice Coil

Deep Listening DL 039 CD

Carrier Band coalesced in 1998 when Pauline Oliveros, Peer Bode and Andrew Deutsch improvised together at Alfred University, New York, where Deutsch teaches Expanded Media and Bode is co-director of the Institute for Electronic Arts. The title track of Voice Coil was improvised by the trio five years later at Deep Listening Space in Kingston. Deutsch subsequently added overdubs to reflect more accurately the sensation of hearing this music live. It’s remarkable for its lack of linear momentum; listening, you are drawn into a bewildering yet involving swirl of sound that saturates rather than steers.

Oliveros plays accordion and operates the computerized sound-processing environment she calls the Expanded Instrument System. Bode uses a Vocoder invented by his father Harald. Deutsch feeds in material from the Bode family archive of electronic sound together with posthumous voices of Harald Bode and his cinematographer brother Ralf. The cover notes describe this 40-minute piece as “an improvisation emphasizing the integration of analog systems and new digital tools between performers both living and dead.” Time runs through “Voice Coil” by means of resonant intersections, between technologies, amongst the acoustic traces left by human beings—melodic fragments, reedy exhalations, digital reconstructions, analog scrawl—in continuously shifting realignments of enveloping sound. The second track, “Frozen Speaker,” is a composition

by Deutsch sourced from “Music for Expo 70,” which Oliveros made initially for installation in a Pepsi-sponsored pavilion in Osaka. Another negotiation with history: time is again revealed as a transformative channel for the nonlinear flow of energy, as ghosts of Japan 1970 flicker onto Deutsch’s auditory screen in the form of a grainy layered wash, fizzing with rogue sonic particles.

The piece’s agitated stasis is strangely compelling. “Video Voice” concludes the CD, mining two further Oliveros compositions plus elements from recordings by sound artist Stephen Vitiello to arrive at a radiant shimmer of angelic ambience. As ever, this necessary music is being made by those who really know time and understand the profundities of recycling. Julian Cowley

Christina Carter Original Darkness Kranky krank122 CD

Tom Carter

Shots at Infinity 1 Important imprec 202 CD

Whether together as the Charalambides or apart with their solo projects, Christina and Tom Carter create some of the most evocative and vulnerable music around. They share a love of the spatial and the spectral, and take an unhurried, thoughtful and deeply probing approach to their idiosyncratic conception of the blues. But their new solo projects are a study in contrasts, at least on the surface.

Original Darkness is an act of raw intimacy, uncut and cutting, every note packed with enough emotion and startling honesty to put divas like

WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #52 | 51

Pandelis Karayorgis with Mi3

Mi3

Free Advice Clean Feed CF098 CD

Pandelis Karayorgis Trio Carameluia Ayler AYLDL-076 download

Pandelis Karayorgis Nate McBride Curt Newton Betwixt

Michele Macrakis

hatOLOGY 652 CD

Over the past two decades, Boston pianist Pandelis Karayorgis has produced a body of subtle, revelatory work that extends and reworks the jazz tradition.

Whether playing his own originals or abstracting the compositions of pianists like Monk, Ellington, Sun Ra, and Tristano, he builds improvisational forms rooted in probing explorations of the harmonic and rhythmic underpinnings of the pieces. Karayorgis has put out a number of strong releases in a variety of contexts, from solo to quintet, but some of the best have been in a trio setting. These three, recorded over the last four years, offer up a view of two working trios, both with master bassist Nate McBride.

The trio Mi3 began during a regular series of gigs that McBride hosted at a Boston dive called the Abbey Lounge. The bar didn’t have a piano, so Karayorgis hauled along a Fender Rhodes which he patched through a series of effects pedals. McBride and Karayorgis were joined by drummer Curt Newton, whom they both had been playing with for years. Those initial live gigs were captured on We Will Make a Home for You on Clean Feed. On Free Advice (recorded a year later—in 2004), Karayorgis switches to acoustic grand piano, and while the sonorities are different, the trio doesn’t lose any of the edgy sensibility of their electric incarnation. Five of the nine tunes are the pianist’s originals, rounded out by readings of Ellington’s “The Mystery Song” and “Warm Valley,” Hasaan Ibn Ali’s “Almost Like Me,” and Sun Ra’s “Ankhnaton.”

(Why aren’t more pianists digging into the small but distinctive book of “the legendary Hasaan,” whose one release with Max Roach is a modernist gem?) The trio constantly toys with harmonic centers and time, morphing the pieces as only a true collective unit can do. Karayorgis splashes clusters against McBride’s stalwart bass, who in turn provides propulsive force and melodic counterpoint to the pianist’s angular flights.

52 | SIGNAL to NOISE #52

Newton dances across the drums with an edgy sense of time that spills across the phrasing while always keeping a tie to the underlying swing. The pianist’s own tunes also stoke some bristling collective interplay, as on the loping blues deconstruction “Fink Sink Tink” or the skewed stagger of “Spinach Pie.” What makes this music work so well is the way the trio teeters on the edge between swing and freedom.

Carameluia is part of Ayler Records’ growing catalog of digital download-only releases. Here, Karayorgis and McBride are joined by drummer Randy Peterson.

This trio gigged regularly from 1997 through 2005. Recorded toward the end of their time working together, this set captures them a few months after they returned from a European tour. Karayorgis and McBride provided a new set of originals for the session, capped off by two collective improvisations. While there is an angular lyricism that carries through all the pieces, time and harmonic structures are stretched even further than on the session above. Karayorgis and McBride hint at themes and then deconstruct them while keeping a tensile connection between conceptualized forms and relaxed swing. Rather than struggling with the dichotomies of tradition and freedom, the three players combine the two with a seemingly effortless directness. Tune titles like “Liwisies,” “Liptowthreea,” and “Ydidnan” come from words invented by Karayorgis’s six-year-old daughter, and that whimsical experimentation carries through to the music. Blues, stride, and Monkian clusters crash up against bounding bass lines and Peterson’s restless, shuffling drums.

The three can synch up, break off, or play at overlapping odds with each other, only to hit back together with crack precision, often ending pieces mid-phrase with a hanging tension.

The most recent entry, Betwixt, captures Mi3 in an electric setting. The defining sound is Karayorgis’s Fender Rhodes, which is flayed and refracted by distortion pedal, ring modulator, and filters. The pianist explains in the liner notes that the setup allows him “the option of choosing from a wide array of attacks, timbres, textures, etc., that can become little unexpected musical events in themselves or suggest completely new directions for the music to go in.”

Oddly enough, this is also the release that dives into jazz tradition the most, the setlist including readings of pieces by Monk, Sun Ra, Ellington, Hasaan, Misha Mengelberg, and Wayne Shorter, along with three of the pianist’s originals. The tune choices aren’t the obvious ones: Ellington’s “Heaven,” Monk’s “Brake’s Sake” and “Humph,” and Shorter’s “Pinocchio.” As on the other two releases, it is the tension between inside and outside that makes this so captivating. Karayorgis’s attack and sense of time and phrasing carry through from the acoustic piano to the electric instrument, but he also screws with timbre and sustain to come up with a wholly unique sound. McBride and Newton respond keenly to the pieces’ harmonic contours and frayed angularities: they’ve internalized the tradition and can toss it back, indelibly stamped with their own sensibilities. Michael Rosenstein

Celine Dion and Mariah Carey on suicide watch. Singing to the sole accompaniment of her guitar and occasional bells and keyboard, Christina Carter laments and never shies away from her own inner darkness. Her words and spare, gently plucked notes dangle and linger; the stillness and sad beauty of this record will stop you in your tracks.

Shots at Infinity is the inverse of Darkness’s stark, unbridled solemnity. This collection of wistful pickings, dangling arpeggios and stacked, looped drones generated by Tom Carter’s solo guitar may begin at the same still, delicate place as Christina’s disc, but gradually it takes flight. By the midpoint of the beatific 25-minute raga “What We Knew When We Knew It,” one experiences the full effect of the chiming, shimmering Frippertronics-meets-Sandy Bull harmonic overtones. The exquisite, lyrical solos on “Psyche Kinein” flow in a stream of ascending and descending progressions like Carlos Santana in duet with Loren Connors. It’s a sonic balm that soothes the sores of Original Darkness.

Richard Moule

Eugene Chadbourne David Sait

as well as bassist Herb Bushler, electric pianist Eddie Martinez, guitarist Paul Metzke and reedman Dick Meza on five tunes, including Herbie Hancock’s “Theme from Blow-Up” and Shorter’s “Rio.” The set is rather short, clocking in at a hair over a half-hour, and this terseness and the tight arrangements make this a far cry from the languid pulse of much post-In a Silent Way fusion. After a terse call from soprano, guitar and phased piano, the ensemble launches into a lickety-split variant of “Caravan” on the title track. Mantilla sketches interweaving holding patterns as Meza and Metzke explore minutiae, before the leader skips stones over bass upswing, conga and wood blocks. Clay’s cyclic “Chung Dynasty” finds Chambers on marimba and vibes in a trio with guitar and piano: M’Boom meets American minimalism. Meanwhile, Hancock’s theme is rendered in loose impasto at the outset, before Meza (on flute), Bushler and Chambers lock in. Metzke’s guitar lines alternate between muted scumble and dated wow-and-shred, but Meza’s heel-digging tenor is the real treat on this highly enjoyable and colorful slab of electric jazz. Clifford Allen

Auspicious Fish: Postage Paid Duets Vol. 1

Michael Chapman

Eugene Chadbourne recorded a set of solo banjo improv in a bar in Basque country in 2007, and a hemisphere away, David Sait taped a series of solo guzheng improvs at his home in Toronto. The idea all along was to combine the recordings for release, but Chadbourne and Sait never listened to each other’s tapes before John Oswald got the task of mixing and mastering the solo recordings. The resulting CD alternates between extracts from the original solo recordings and overdubbed “duets.” While overlapping and chance combinations can be fun, I usually prefer the humanity of interaction, especially with improvisation, and especially when someone so completely human as the Doc is involved. But inevitably there will be a form of meshing that develops between the overlapping materials, and when it occurs it feels as startlingly right yet unexpected as an orchid discovered in its swamp habitat.

“Catalysts and Tourguides” starts in too much of a tangle, but the final twenty minutes of this track tease out multiple layers of contrast between the lush guzheng strums and the sharp banjo pickings. Andrew Choate

Guitarist Michael Chapman’s songs are steeped in nostalgia, but a nostalgia with millstone grit rubbed into its seams. The grit manifests itself as worldweariness and a sense of personal loss fed by an undercurrent of anger (at self, mainly; regrets about things unsaid, things undone). He’s had a long career, much of it spent on the road, and he has an equally long discography, taking in albums of Americana and a brief lurch into Windham Hill-style New Ageism, as well as a semi-autobiographical novel, guitar tutorials, etc., all of which have been done with conviction and to a high standard. Released to coincide with a two-month-long American tour, Time Past and Time Passing—its title taken from the refrain of perhaps Chapman’s most famous and most nostalgic song, “Postcards of Scarborough,” from perhaps his best-loved (and not just by me) album, 1970’s Fully Qualified Survivor—finds him in a relaxed and ruminative but far from mellow mood, alone with his lightly amplified guitar, singing as much for himself as for an imagined audience. His voice, aged by cigarettes and alcohol, is little more than a whispery, intimate croak, which draws the listener in and serves the songs well.

Nearly all of the tracks on Time Past and Time Passing are new, and there’s no falling off in quality from his best work. He is, as anyone who knows his material will know, a fine finger-picking guitarist, a player with jazz technique drawn to express himself in a Yorkshire version of the blues. Like John Fahey (given a dedication on “Fahey’s Flag,” a track which features the tape slowing down and speeding up at times), there’s always something off-kilter about his approach, and even in the late 1960s he stood apart from the folk scene of the day (which favoured traditional songs reinterpreted rather than personal evaluations of self and society—Chapman is, in this respect, one of the archetypal singer-songwriters). Among the new material he revisits “In the Valley,” one of the stalwarts of his catalog and live

Apprise AP-02 CD

Joe Chambers New World Porter 1505 CD

Those familiar with drummer Joe Chambers’ work on mid-1960s Blue Note sides under the leadership of Wayne Shorter, Andrew Hill and Bobby Hutcherson might find New World a bit of a surprise.

Recorded in 1976 and originally issued on the obscure Finite label, it’s his second album as a leader and precedes by a year his duets with Larry Young (Double Exposure, on Muse). Rather than the sparse, open-form suites he penned for the Blue Note dates, New World has a plugged-in sound that also borrows from the intricate aesthetic of Max Roach’s M’Boom, of which Chambers was a member. He’s joined here by percussionists Omar Clay and Ray Mantilla, who would remain regular working partners,

Time Past and Time Passing Electric Ragtime ER001 CD

shows. It was first recorded on Window (1970), and versions of it have appeared on several subsequent albums. On this one, there’s a variation on the raga-like introduction and he semi-narrates rather than sings the lyrics, which is characteristic of his vocal approach in recent years.

It works well, as does everything else on this splendid album. Brian Marley

Gloria Cheng

Piano Music of Salonen, Stucky and Lutoslawski Telarc 80712 CD

For centuries, piano music was generally written by composers who were virtuosi themselves. Witold Lutoslawski’s 1934 Piano Sonata was only recently published, but it served as a showpiece for the Polish composer-pianist early in his career. Gloria Cheng presents its premiere recording here, but the Sonata sounds nothing like Lutoslawski’s daring mature music; it leans heavily on Ravel’s brand of Impressionism with dashes of Stravinsky. However derivative, it’s wonderfully constructed: a real charmer! In recent times, a number of non-pianist composers have significantly contributed to the solo piano repertoire. Steven Stucky and Esa-Pekka Salonen fall into this category, and both contribute pieces to this program. While they sometimes eschew idiomatic passagework, they explore virtuosity of another kind: imaginatively pushing the boundaries of what pianists can do. Cheng is up for the challenge, attacking the copious glissandi and perilous leaps of Salonen’s monstrously difficult Yta II with nary a flinch. Three Preludes and Dichotomie were composed “in transit,” so to speak, while Salonen was traveling from one conducting engagement to the next during his busy tenure as music director of the LA Philharmonic. The works owe a debt to Ligeti’s Etudes as well as the Spectralists, but are refreshingly relentless: energetic and perpetually in motion—much like their multi-talented creator. Stucky’s contributions are tantalizingly brief occasional pieces. Cheng revels in the varieties of sonority and articulation found in Four Album Leaves, blitzing its sforzandi and delicately voicing bell-like chords.

Three Little Variations for David was composed in honor of conductor David Zinman’s 65th birthday. The Giocoso presents jauntily syncopated chordal stabs, the Sognando is diaphanously mysterious, and the Molto Vivo is filled with machine-gun repeated notes.

Salonen and Stucky may not call the piano “their” instrument, but thank goodness they’re writing for Gloria Cheng. Christian Carey

Chop Shop

audio hiccups. Konzelmann is best known for his provocative “junk-made” installation work, in which he labors to create unique speaker configurations that alter the way in which his inputs are heard. His archive of tapes documenting his various works was damaged by accidental exposure to moisture, and on Oxide these tainted drones, industrial whirs and corroded tones are crudely (and no doubt intentionally) placed side by side in counterpoint. At times this release is like a drive along a highway dotted with industrial plants— each new texture filling the sound field entirely. It’s at times harrowing stuff, but as the work wears on the textures are reduced and by the end of the piece you’re left with something that could be an air conditioner in your window. This could easily have been a dry exercise in monochromatic sound, but the results of Konzelmann’s salvage project are a worthy journey of considered density.

Lawrence English

Nicola Cipani

The Ill-Tempered Piano Long Song LSRCD 108 CD

Nicola Cipani’s ill-tempered piano is an instrument that is rarely played, hard to find and hauntingly beautiful. Neither the prepared piano (in the Cage tradition) nor the unprepared piano (in an orthodox, say Marian McPartland, manner), it’s what might be called an “unprepared piano”: an instrument not in any condition for a traditional concerto. Unprepared piano players are rare; perhaps the only other musician to make a name on the instrument is Australian Ross Bolleter of the World Association for Ruined Piano Studies (an institution which seems to have two members, Cipani not being the other), whose experiments on pianos left to decay and rot have been collected on the excellent 2006 Emanem release Secret Sandhills and Satellites. But with the unprepared piano, as with any performance, what counts is the singer, not the song. Each weathered keyboard must, like a handmade steel drum, be approached on its own terms to learn the idiosyncrasies of the instrument.

Where Bolleter seems to strive for being as pianistic as possible—playing slow suites on his found detritus— Cipani seems to seek out the most off sounds he can find. The 24 brief tracks on The Ill-Tempered Piano, recorded on found instruments in New York City, are achingly gorgeous. To say they often sound like a gamelan is something of a cliché in writing about experimental music (rather akin to “tastes like chicken”) but the melodic percussion of his improvisations make for an unusual and wonderful listen. Kurt Gottschalk

Alex Cline

Oxide

Continuation

23 Five 012 CD

The oxidation and ultimate corruption of magnetic tape has inspired a wealth of creative endeavors in recent times, perhaps most notably William Basinski’s elegant Disintegration Loops.

Increasingly in the post-glitch age, other elements of failure in our media have become opportunities for inspiration and compositional/improvisational chance—something clearly articulated on this new release by Chop Shop, aka Scott Konzelmann, which takes full advantage of chance drop-outs and other

Cryptogramophone 140 CD

Nels Cline Coward

Cryptogramophone 141 CD

Percussionist Alex Cline’s latest features violinist Jeff Gauthier, cellist Peggy Lee, pianist Myra Melford (also on harmonium), and bassist Scott Walton.

Cline is one of the few players who’s able to use gongs and the like without sounding hokey. On tunes like the opening “Nourishing Our Roots” his

interest in ritualism makes him a kind of sonic cousin to Don Moye. Mournful lines from Lee slowly move the piece into a piano ballad that’s by turns hopeful and downcast. Unapologetically sweet and lyrical, it’s a refreshing piece, not saccharine at all, and filled with open sections and detailed percussive work. String-heavy music like this could wallow in elegiac waters, but Cline’s too interested in shifting moods and colors for that. Indeed, he twice indulges his fondness for lengthy suites, with two 20-minute workouts. But what’s enjoyable about a Cline record is the way opportunities emerge for spotlighting individuals or sub-groupings. For example, Walton’s robust, woody tone anchors the mid-tempo swing/swagger of “Clearing Our Streams.” Melford’s spacious, slow-moving piano repetitions anchor “Fade to Green,” shot through with harsh, jagged commentary from the strings. And Cline avails himself of the superbly crisp recording to explore the full range of his kit during the expressive opening to “Steadfast,” which is also the tune where the band gets the most conventional solo time (Gauthier in particular sounds good here). Some may complain that there are a few too many slow and mournful passages throughout. But can you resist the blend of Melford’s harmonium and the strings?

Nels Cline’s solo record is a very personal one, anchored by a lengthy dedication to fellow guitarist Rod Poole, senselessly murdered in 2007. For a player like Cline, whose guitar style has been crafted in a dizzying array of ensembles and contexts, the temptation is there to simply devote each of these fifteen tracks to a single idea or texture.

The “bag o’ tricks” solo album is usually a snore. Cline’s avoided this, and instead gone to the melancholy heart of his music, something that’s there no matter how fervently he blasts into the sonic maelstrom or how many arch detunings he concocts. From the opening dronescape to lush multi-tracked 12string fantasies where he gets in touch with his love of Towner and Gismonti, Cline the romantic is on display here.

This doesn’t mean that he avoids skronk; indeed, he regularly goes to it—on the theremin-like “Thurston Country” or the raucous pulses and licks scattered throughout the lengthy “Onan Suite.”

But such gestures don’t compel here in the way they do in a group context; severed from interplay, they lose much of their bite. Clearly, his heart is in the lengthy “Rod Poole’s Gradual Ascent to Heaven”—a slow-developing suite of shimmering arpeggios and delicately constructed figures, which transform slowly into a pinwheeling cluster of multitracked strings—and a wonderful rendition of one of my favorite Cline pieces, “The Divine Homegirl.” Overall, though, the album doesn’t quite feature enough of Cline’s virtues for me, even if there are several excellent pieces.

Jason Bivins

Bill Cole's Untempered Ensemble

Proverbs for Sam Boxholder 056 CD

When reeds player Sam Furnace passed, it left many musicians with a heavy heart. Furnace’s work with the Jazz Passengers and the Julius Hemphill

WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #52 | 53

Greg Kelley

The Epicureans Introducing Semata 001 CD

Greg Kelley

Religious Electronics No Fun LP

Self-Hate Index

Bryony McIntyre

Semata 002 CD

The sassy combo The Epicureans comprises saxophonist Dave Gross, bassist Ryan McGuire, and drummer Ricardo Donoso, and their collective experience extends from Boston reductionist improvisation to post-metal polymaths Kayo Dot. There’s nothing flashy or demonstrative about their music, nor necessarily an all-consuming appetite for genres and influences. Instead, the trio seems to head in an opposite direction, paring gestures down until the tiniest, most remote or alien sounds remain. It’s the kind of thing all improv music fans have heard many times before, but it’s done really well here. The opening “Sweetly Violent Revisionists” is smallscale, with close-miked clicking and slurring.

There’s tortured wood and metal on “Scum of the Earth,” with fantastic bass mangling from McGuire. Things return to the hush arbor on “Not Produced by John Cale but Don’t You Wish It Was,” before the trio shifts to the unsettling squall of “Benefits, Disclosures and Accommodation of Nothing,” where Gross’s vocalisms through his horn recall Isabelle Duthoit. The music’s got excellent dynamic range, a decent array of (sometimes surprising) instrumental techniques, and a mischievous comportment that’s refreshing in a corner of the improvisational world that’s often quite sober.

The Kelley LP on No Fun has some of the unhinged, caustic character one might expect from this imprint. There are two side-long tracks and not a lick of trumpet to be heard. One might hear the nasty, crackling, speaker-rattling electronics—with cavernous analog delay—as conceptually related to previous solo releases like I Don’t Want to Live Forever, which also 54 | SIGNAL to NOISE #52

contained a fair mix of electronics, but this one is much more pure, much more intensely focused, much more relentless. I don’t think Kelley actually uses tapes here, but the music’s got a skittish feel to it that suggests intense, brutal splicing experiments. Some of the early moments on “Despair Is Sin” are a bit too outer-space for me, but the piece soon becomes squealingly violent.

“O Lord the Star Torments Me” is considerably less loud, though its pitch-shifting affects the head in a way that’s no less jarring, no less disturbing—long signals disrupted and staggered in a way that’s almost psychedelic. But the piece slowly morphs into a grinding, guttural, bile-spewing beast. Great stuff.

Self-Hate Index is a solo trumpet record, and it’s as weird and singular a beast as his previous entries in this field. Upon first hearing the muffled hushes and whooshes that open the disc, I thought it sounded like bisected nmperign. But soon Kelley reveals the methodology of the disc, and seems to wrap the trumpet in sonic gauze before going on to break up the signal, morph it, mutate it until it’s like radio code. While this record features plenty of the same analog delay and echoes heard on Religious Electronics, the peaks here are caustic, densely mangled, and usually quite heady. “These Are Distractions” is clanky and metallic, with some Dixonian flutters and spurts resounding amidst audible instrumental disassembling (and, courtesy of some very effective use of multi-tracking, what sounds like a wet bow on old strings and a rusty tricycle).

Pure static and crackle begin “Shearing Husks,” the track here that most effectively integrates some of Kelley’s broadest influences and strategies into a coherent voice. “Accumulating Errors” gets off to another breathy start, but then a pressure release valve opens up: ominous heat and steam rush out, and distant screaming noises and overtones add to the sense of menace. The wet metallic gurgle of “Vessel” gives way to the hammers and jolts of “Anxious Drift,” where squealing, squalling feedback so thoroughly transforms the trumpet that it sounds like an early Christian Marclay turntable assault.

Once again, Kelley surprises and impresses.

Jason Bivins

Sextet was much loved, perhaps most of all by multi-instrumentalist Bill Cole.

As a dedication to his longtime friend and bandmate, Cole chose to release this 2001 live date from the Vision Festival (with one track from Burlington, Vermont earlier in the year), where Cole (sona, shenai, nagaswaram, didgeridoo, and Ghanaian flute) and Furnace (alto and flute) are joined by Joe Daley (baritone horn, tuba, trombone), bassist William Parker, Cooper-Moore (Diddly Bow, percussion, flute, and vocals), percussionist Atticus Cole, and Warren Smith (percussion, marimba, whistle, and vocals). It’s a joyous set, rooted in strong grooves and filled with interesting textures from the wide assortment of instruments. Each piece is based on a Yoruba proverb, and consists mostly of lengthy collective jamming. But the jams are not unwavering rhythm plus solos; rather, aside from all the instrumental color (and I just love Cole’s blistering, intense work on shenai and sona), Smith, Parker, Cooper-Moore, and the younger Cole continually create subtle fluctuations and modulations to the rhythms (altered meters and accents, polyrhythms, ace syncopations, you name it) that keep the energy up and the grey matter focused. The superb bluesy swagger of the second piece (the titles are so long, I won’t bother) is a real highlight, with rolling percussion, bluesy alto and Diddly Bow, plus raw vocalizations from several members. But the secret weapon is, as always when I hear him, Daley, whose resourcefulness is without peer in these settings—bumping grooves, lithe counterlines, sudden monkey wrenches to jar the ensemble out of a rut, whatever it takes, this guy is a clutch player. Playful, dancing flutes open the Vermont piece, whose relatively light and airy feel in the opening minutes—mostly winds in the upper register and some impressionistic marimba—make a nice contrast with the heated momentum of the previous selections. Overall, a fitting memorial. Jason Bivins

Lol Coxhill John Edwards Steve Noble The EarlyYears Ping Pong PPP 003 CD

Steve Noble John Edwards Alex Ward

Deadeye Tricksters Bo'Weavil 030 CD

There are plenty of lyrical saxophone players out there—a term that usually means someone specializing in the enshrinement of the pretty, the bland, and the ingratiating. Then there’s Lol Coxhill, the inebriated songbird of the soprano sax, a caterwauling Johnny Hodges who stretches out his lines like saltwater taffy. His pliable tone has the air of someone pulling faces in the mirror, and while Coxhill bypasses the precise harmonic calibrations of the beboppers he captures bop’s sheer linear plasticity better than any retro stylist. It’s unlovely music, to be sure, but Coxhill’s best work exists in a state of self-pitying grace suggesting the teetering dignity of a silent-film comedian. Now that’s lyricism. He’s now 76, but—as the ironic title of The Early Years, his new collaboration with bassist John Edwards and drummer Steve Noble, makes clear—

still plays with undiminished force and imagination. Though these nine pieces are freely improvised, they’re more conventionally jazz-based than is usually the case nowadays with Coxhill. Edwards and Noble frequently bear down on a groove like a nutcracker working over a walnut—on “Out of the Past” there’s some of the nastiest slap-string bass since Mingus—and Coxhill responds in kind with desecrated jazz and blues licks, even tossing in a Dizzy Gillespie flourish on “Endgame.” Marvelous stuff.

There couldn’t be a greater contrast to The Early Years’ lean, nagging lyricism than the psychedelic whirlpool of Deadeye Tricksters, though the discs share the Edwards/Noble rhythm section. Alex Ward was already a formidable clarinetist at the age when most teens are picking up a guitar and learning to bang out their first three chords.

The earliest tracks on his excellent duo with Noble, Ya Boo Reel & Rumble (Incus, 1990), were recorded when he was 16, and he’s since gone on to become a regular in Simon H. Fell’s ensembles, as well as playing on some of Derek Bailey’s final recordings. He has been generally less recognized as a guitarist, which is a shame—aside from a few CDs featuring his powerhouse work on electric guitar, he’s also responsible for Crypt, an excellent all-acoustic duo with John Bisset. On Deadeye Tricksters there are occasions where Ward’s guitar slices across the rhythm section with the nonchalant arbitrariness of Derek Bailey’s bizarre jazz-funk outing Mirakle, and there are also a few touches of Billy Jenkins’ “spazz.” But this is basically tight, clangorous freeform guitar-driven rock that covers a lot of ground, from the sulphurous continuous crescendo of “Empty Ballroom” to the mutant rock riffs of “The Persuaders” to the splatterjazz of “Nerve Ending.” Ward’s playing is busy but always purposeful and varied, cobbling together bits of angry melodies, festering blues-metal riffs, Sharrocky fuzzed-out slide guitar, and scritchy handfuls of notes that wriggle like worms. Edwards and Noble keep things feeling spacious and relaxed even when the music gets furiously intense. Too often when rock meets free improv the results are self-consciously arty noise or goofy antics: no such problems here—Deadeye Tricksters gets the balance between mayhem and playfulness just right. Nate Dorward

similar to the more recent structures issuing from Cecil Taylor’s pen. Small cells of material, each hinting at some sort of traditional chordal sonority, are manipulated in strings of complex interrelations.

Margolis seems less concerned with unified harmonic relations, preferring to juxtapose sonic events on the basis of timbral similarities. Yet both composers are fascinated by the sonic microevent and by what can be achieved through its repetition and reexamination in shifting contexts.

Take “Shadow of a Doubt,” which exemplifies one aspect of Creshevsky’s hyperrealistic language. Violin and flute arpeggios, wordless vocals, brass fanfares and percussion are strung together at regular intervals and repeated, amidst musical laughter and sitar twangs, to create a constantly morphing post-romantic structure of frenetic beauty. “Xyloxings,” one of Margolis’s compositions, explores the sounds of processed piano and vocal syllables, and thrives on repetition of a much more disparate sort. Microintervals abound, filling each moment, but the whole unravels much more slowly, allowing reflection on each gesture.

Essentially, both composers seek to amplify each moment via elasticity, Creshevsky through speed and crisp articulation, Margolis through stretching and the emphasis of certain frequencies.

His “Issue” and Creshevsky’s “Mary Kimura’s Redux” illustrate this similarity.

The latter, according to the composer, is a study of what a virtuoso violinist might accomplish if given superhuman powers. Broad sweeps and death-defying leaps are presented at lightning speed, their huge intervals rendered with frightening ease. “Issue,” and its accompanying “An Innocent, Abroad” suite, highlight frequencies in flute and voice that are usually inaudible. Through filtering, electronic doubling and dynamic changes, Margolis fashions microtonal melodies out of extremely high frequencies. These works by both composers bridge the aesthetic gap between Pierre Henry and Alvin Lucier, and the results are stunningly original music. Marc Medwin

Noah Creshevsky / If, Bwana

On the evidence of his couple of decades’ worth of releases, Vic Chesnutt is a bit like an American Robyn Hitchcock.

They don’t sound like one another, but Vic, like Robyn across the sea, favors recording quickly, frequently and with a wide variety of collaborators and accompanists. Their similarity is given further credence by dint of each man’s ongoing lyrical explorations. Though their preoccupations may be strikingly different from one another, they both build their songs around idiosyncratic, poetic wordplay, using obfuscation, smoke and mirrors, and linguistic torsion to create compelling phrases and fractured narratives. Vic’s latest was recorded with a sprawling ensemble in the attic studio of his Athens, Georgia home. The nine songs are filled with images of foreboding and decay, as politicians wobble across the stage, weather turns mean, and Dickensian characters cast shadows across the landscape.

Chesnutt’s working here with an existing

Favorite Encores Pogus 21049 CD

If, Bwana

An Innocent, Abroad Pogus 21046 CD

The latest disc on Al Margolis’s Pogus label is split between the compositions of If, Bwana (Margolis’s nom de plume since 1984) and those of Noah Creshevsky, student of Luciano Berio and practitioner of what he calls Hyperrealism. As superficially dissimilar as Margolis’s and Creshevsky’s compositional philosophies seem, Favorite Encores and Margolis’s latest solo offering, An Innocent, Abroad, demonstrate striking similarities at the level of innovative sonic manipulation.

Creshevsky’s compositions often veer toward fairly conventional rhythms and tonality, or perhaps pantonality, in a way

Vic Chesnutt, Elf Power and the Amorphous Strums Dark Developments Orange Twin OTR031 CD / LP

band, as he has done in the past, and this gives the sessions a lived-in feeling.

Elf Power’s sly smarts means that there’s a potent sense of shared experience and musical hijinks bubbling through the set. David Greenberger

Andrew D'Angelo Skadra Degis Skirl 008 CD

Andrew D’Angelo has been an ear-grabbing sideman for several years—notably in Matt Wilson’s quartet and on Reid Anderson’s The Vastness of Space—as well as being part of the collective Human Feel (described by the blogging Ethan Iverson thus: “the analysis of New York Downtown jazz by some Boston prodigies”). I like his offhanded take on squalling post-Ornette alto—his lines have a canny lyricism but always seem a bit shopworn and messy, the intonation a bit battered, the notes wilting and fraying in the heat; his explosions come off not as singleminded aggressiveness but as hoarse, exasperated lashings-out that seize on tiny moments of victory or crumple up in defeat. (Though he plays a metal sax, he conjures up echoes of Ornette’s plastic Selmer.) Sadly, he’s been in the news lately for reasons other than his music, having been diagnosed with a brain tumor early this year (like most jazz musicians he’s uninsured; several fundraising concerts have been held in the jazz community for him). As of this writing, post-operation, he’s actually still getting up there on the bandstand to blow: way to go, Andrew!

Anyway, if you get a copy of his new disc Skadra Degis you can feel good on two counts—from the knowledge you’re defraying his medical costs, and from the excellent music contained herein. The tune titles are amusingly literal—“25 Hits” is just that, “Boo Be Boo Bee Bee” sounds just like that, and “Gay Disco” is a self-explanatory blast—when they’re not weird phonological quiddities like “Egna Ot Waog” (snaky groove), “Fichtik” (tender ode to lives of quiet desperation) and “Rutloosic” (a bass clarinet/arco bass duo suggesting an encrypted “Something Sweet, Something Tender”). Ace work throughout from bassist Trevor Dunn and drummer Jim Black, and really my only reservation is that the studio sound, though agreeably truthful and deglamorized, makes the cymbals sound a tad scruffy. Otherwise, it’s a great listen, full of smart, prickly and (yes) live-affirming music. Nate Dorward

Greg Davis and Sébastien Roux Merveilles

Ahornfelder AH12 CD

It’s the very nature of electro-acoustic laptop concrete that makes Merveilles, the second collaboration between Vermont composer/guitarist Greg Davis and French sound artist Sébastien Roux, substantially similar in effect to their debut, Paquet Surprise, despite being part live album, part remix suite. The new disc draws on a series of performances in 2005 and 2006, in which the duo used pieces from Paquet Surprise as source material, so the basic ingredients remain the same: articulated drones, finger-picked fragments, backwards-masked bells, cuts, splices, field recordings of water,

and the sound of thick air. Glitchy crackles and whooshes, like slabs of expressionist paint-splatter, hold the project together, often giving the four extended tracks fairly uniform vibes, though they break into granular beauty when examined under headphones.

On Paquet Surprise, the music scattered quickly in chains of abstractions.

Here, Davis and Roux let the music breathe more. Sometimes, this means that burbling collage turns into drifting ambience (“Eugene”) or a structure builds so slowly that one can never get a sense of the whole (“London”). More manically chopped works like “San Francisco” (which reminds one to never underestimate the narrative primacy of the acoustic guitar) and the 17-minute “Aalst” are nearly the opposite, inviting intense moment-to-moment listening.

Merveilles is lucid dreaming for headphone sleepers. Jesse Jarnow

The Dead C Secret Earth

Ba Da Bing BING-059 CD

Free-rock icons The Dead C—guitarist/ vocalist Michael Morley, guitarist Bruce Russell and drummer Robbie Yeats— have always seemed to be a band that is spoken of more than they are listened to. That said, the past few years have seen a spike in activity from the New Zealand trio and a corresponding bump in interest. In 2006 the group dropped the staggering career retrospective Vain, Erudite and Stupid; 2007 found them staking their claim as “The AMM of Punk Rock” on the solid Future Artists. This year has been the busiest yet with their first proper US tour in over a decade, two deluxe LP reissues of long out-of-print early works and their latest full-length, Secret Earth. It’s been touted in the blogosphere as a “return to rock” from a band that in the past decade has increasingly experimented with deconstructed noise, electronics and tape-loops. While the album fulfills that promise with a heavier reliance on drums and Morley’s slurred vocals, the reality—like most everything in Dead C world—is far less simplistic. “Mansions” begins the album with a catastrophic wallop of cymbals and a surge of grating guitars. It is rock ’n’ roll of the most damaged, electrically fried variety: end-time punk for a corrupt century.

Following its initial animalistic pounce the track slowly spirals outwards with strummed chords, shivering harmonics and scattered percussion before abruptly cutting off. The glacial “Stations” is the album’s longest track, a 16minute amplifier sacrifice where Russell lets loose choking storms of feedback that are pushed shoreward by the pulse of Yeats’ drumming. Like Sonic Youth—one of the few bands they are frequently, and deservingly, compared to—The Dead C carve a trench into the intersection of rock, free-jazz, minimalism and noise, often in the span of a single song. “Waves” provides a fitting close to the record. A long, slow-motion slide through downtuned chords and hissing noise, the song plays like a descent into encompassing, cocooning darkness. Secret Earth may be The Dead C’s “rock comeback,” but ultimately the album harmonizes with their entire catalog and succeeds mainly in reinforcing the band’s position as journeymen of the ever-shifting underground. Ethan Covey

WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #52 | 55

Eden & John's East River String Band

could mark the beginning of a new world for these players’ collective activity. Lawrence English

East River CD

Garrison Fewell Eric Hofbauer

Some Cold Rainy Day

This here string band is two folks, Eden Brower, ukulele and lion’s share of vocals, and John Henegan, guitar and vocals, plus guest Terry Waldo, occasionally contributing an 88-string keyed gizmo commonly known as “piano.” Their repertoire consists entirely of acoustic country/rural blues songs from the 1920s and ’30s, originally performed by Skip James, Mississippi John Hurt, Bertha “Chippie” Hill, Pink Anderson, and their contemporaries.

Noted cranky old-time music fan and cartoonist Robert Crumb liked the contents of this disc so much that he contributed its cover art. Now that we’ve got the basics covered, how is it? It’s rather fun, that’s how it is. Brower and Henegan aren’t wizards as singers or players but nor are they dilettantes.

Their affection for and devotion to the material is palpable, but they happily don’t take the lo-fi route to engender any hokey feeling of “authenticity.”

Their music has a cozy, unaffected back-porch ambience (even if they are from NYC, where back porches are, at best, rare). While it won’t make fans of this music forget about their Lonnie Johnson or Hokum Boys discs, Some Cold Rainy Day is indeed an entertainment, and it’d make an OK introduction for country blues neophytes.

Mark Keresman

Christian Fennesz Werner Dafeldecker Martin Brandlmayr New One Is Created Mosz 016 CD

Compositions that draw on improvisation can be uncertain, ineffectual affairs unless the editing and structuring of the sources provides it with a strong backbone. This is most certainly the case with this edition from Mosz.

Based on recordings from Christian Fennesz, Werner Dafeldecker and Martin Brandlmayr, the results of this project are offered over two discs—one long-form composition and three short vignettes. The extended composition “Till the Old World’s Blown Up and a New One Is Created” is a tempered work setting out a considered sonic environment replete with acoustic instruments and thoughtful processed detail. The piece undergoes some sweeping dynamic shifts, emerging without warning like massive cliffs from static savannah plains, but often it still feels inert. By the time the 34 minutes of the piece plays out, the journey we’ve taken remains unclear—and whilst this blurriness is pleasurable it also feels unresolved, as if the piece has ended before it’s taken complete form. It’s as though the “New World” spoken of in the title has yet to solidify—perhaps that’s the point?

By contrast the three shorter works on disc two are realized with a more vigorous sense of freedom. The musicians each take a fairly simple tack; together, they create a genuinely engaging flurry of activity. Fennesz’s “Tau” is generously ambient, like a warm mist; Dafeldecker strikes a softly caustic posture, which leads effortlessly into Brandlmayr’s distant highway-like reprise—an ideal closing gesture that 56 | SIGNAL to NOISE #52

The Lady of Khartoum Creative Nation CNM010 CD

Eric Hofbauer and the Infrared Band Myth Understanding Creative Nation CNM011 CD

Guitarists Garrison Fewell and Eric Hofbauer have worked well together in Boston jazz ensembles the past couple of years, so it's only natural they’d pair off as a duo. The Lady of Khartoum treks into nonwestern climes (Arabic, West African and Moroccan), with jazz ever-present in the rearview mirror. Muezzin calls float over post-bop plucks and rippling chimes in the oddly swinging “A Bourbour’s Spell,” while snakecharmer trills get help from bluesy bent notes and earthen clatter in “We Need Your Number.” Fewell and Hofbauer occasionally add percussive accents through preparation: they hang antique Moroccan jewelry and Oruba bells from their tuning pegs, plant metal clips on the neck to create thumb piano thumps, and (on the title track) summon up drones by striking a guitar with an African ribbed drumstick. This freewheeling pan-cultural duo helps show that jazz’s family tree has some pretty deep roots.

Hofbauer is a prolific member of the Boston jazz community, helming other recent recordings as a solo artist and with the highly-regarded Blueprint Project. But he’d never really had a full-time working group devoted to his own compositions until he formed the Infrared Band, a lithe, smart quartet that he calls “creative heaven.” The nine tracks on the group’s debut, Myth Understanding, all fall into sub-categories based on their source material (“myths,” “sung phrases”) or structure (“puzzle pieces”), and all have interesting back-stories. “A Drunk Monk,” for instance, emulates the drunken kung-fu style, while “The Shady Lambert Circus” references a nightmare of Hofbauer’s in which the band is menaced by a gang of trolls. Ed Hazell’s liner notes explain the connections between the music and the album’s various storylines, but all listeners really need to know is that Myth Understanding’s music speaks, flows, and evolves as well as one could hope, as Hofbauer and saxophonist Kelly Roberge blow loping heads over the furled rhythms of bassist Michael Montgomery and drummer Miki Matsuki. It’s great stuff, and Hofbauer’s definitely found the right voices for his brand of avant-lpostbop. Nathan Turk

Fine Arts Quartet

Four American Quartets Naxos 8.559354 CD

Ralph Evans’s String Quartet No. 1 had a protracted genesis; begun in his student days, it wasn’t completed until 1995. But the new Naxos recording by the Fine Arts Quartet, in which Evans performs as first violinist, suggests that he was wise to share the piece with the world. While there is a patchwork quilt of styles at work, including allusions to Stravinsky and Ravel and even (slightly more central) iterations of Berg, the

piece contains lovely string writing and some wry, often delightful, harmonic swerves. In addition to this in-house offering, the Fine Arts Quartet—Evans, violinist Efim Boico, violist Yuri Gandelsman, and cellist Wolfgang Laufer— presents three additional pieces from 20th-century America. The most familiar is Philip Glass’s Second Quartet, “Company.” Named after a Beckett text, it is cast in four brief movements. Each encapsulates one of the composer’s signature manners. The slow ostinato with a sustained upper line found in the 1st movement, the bustling arpeggiations of the second movement, the fragile oscillations of the third, and the wave-like undulations of the finale are all likely to sound familiar to listeners even remotely familiar with Glass’s music. But what makes the Second Quartet so effective is the freshness and energy with which these gestures are employed.

As brief vignettes, none overstay their welcome, a problem that occasionally arises in the minimalist composer’s protracted works. George Antheil’s String Quartet No. 3, written in 1948, shows the maverick composer experimenting both with genuine American folk music and with the pastoral Americana then in vogue. The result sounds at times like a mash-up of Virgil Thomson and Antonin Dvorak; but the quartet’s deliberate angularity and even its occasional Bartokian bumptiousness contain considerable wit and charm. Bernard Herrmann was best known for his film scores, but Echoes for String Quartet, written in 1965, demonstrates that the epic sweep of his cinematic style could also be applied with good results in chamber music. Christian Carey

and amorphous, orchestrated and haphazard. Indeed, on parts of “Blue Nile,” the band’s application of Eastern symbolism to collage-art buffoonery— in Dymphna’s artwork, a man in full head-wrap and robes wears a Marshall amplifier as a backpack—seems an appropriate summation of modern art-kid culture. “Vacuum” rumbles and lunges like vintage DJ Shadow, and “First Communion” makes a rave out of fluid guitar leads and blue-sky loops. That GGD cannot maintain this momentum through the remainder of the album is neither surprising nor wholly disappointing. Having finally sort of mastered the game of hopscotch they’ve been playing, GGD find new ways to test their limits: on “Princes,” a Dizzee Rascal soundalike shouts out the band’s moniker and wonders about Bathing Ape; “House Jam” is singer Liz Bougatsos’ first star turn and the strongest-yet indicator that this band jams KLF’s White Room openly.

“House Jam,” in fact, is Gang Gang Dance gone loft party, and it deserves the 10,000 remixes it’s sure to receive.

Its pillow-soft “ooohs” cushion the stony fall of “Afoot”’s mindless ramble or the dubwise hanging-on of album coda “Dust.” There’s going to be accusations that “Gang Gang Dance is a pop band!”, but that’s not quite true: Dymphna is still far closer in spirit to, say, Black Dice than M.I.A. But no longer does the band merely feel like they’re dredging up a bunch of objectively “good” things—found sounds, world music, noisy improvisation—to no real end. On Saint Dymphna Gang Gang Dance busts and churns and, for the first time, dances. Andrew Gaerig

Erik Friedlander Trevor Dunn Mike Sarin

Frode Gjerstad

Broken Arm Trio Skipstone 02 CD

The name of cellist Erik Friedlander’s Broken Arm Trio (featuring bassist Trevor Dunn and drummer Mike Sarin) is a sly homage to Oscar Pettiford, who in 1949 found himself unable to play his bass while recuperating from a basketball injury; he took up the cello, and pioneered the instrument’s use in a jazz context. Friedlander’s dozen compositions place his pizzicato melodies in the music’s center, but fully utilize the interplay of all three instruments. There are times when Dunn’s bass joins in on the melody and other times when gently bowed cello chords create a landscape for a gently delineated melody on the bass. Sarin’s supple technique has tremendous breadth, and he approaches his role in the trio orchestrally, though he’s also quite capable of making his chamber-volume grooves become invitingly ferocious. Wonderfully varied, this disc sounds fantastic whenever you listen to it, whether you’re driving on a highway or daydreaming on a couch.

David Greenberger

On Reade Street FMP 256-0208 CD

Circulasione Totale Orchestra Open Port

Cirulasione Totale 09 CD

It’s been a decade since reeds player Frode Gjerstad last played in a trio with bassist William Parker and drummer Hamid Drake, and their partnership remains a bracing, vigorous one, as evidenced by these three long tracks from January 2006. Mind you, just

about anyone could sound good with Parker and Drake in the engine room.

But there’s something so graceful about Gjerstad’s playing that it’s hard not to concentrate on him, regardless of his company. However hard-nosed he gets, with those gruff intervals on “The Street” and the alto shout he favors at moments of peak intensity, there’s an avian quality to his lines that’s really winning. That said, I certainly think this group constitutes one of the finest settings for his style. Whether Gjerstad is cooing gently or emitting nasty shrieks, the assemblage of contrasts and slow grooves Drake and Parker concoct at will are really what makes this trio go.

For the former, proceed directly to the reflective duo section in the middle of “The Street” (some of the best Parker I’ve heard in quite some time) or the dour opening to “The Houses,” with baleful clarinet, skittering strings, and brushes pattering away nervously. And in terms of grooves, two highlights come on the second part of “The Houses” and the long closing piece (a vigorous funk-swing). Perhaps best of all is the way the trio still takes left turns, whether in flamboyant gestures or in a series of quiet confessions among musicians who still have secrets to share.

The large ensemble recording shows a different side of Gjerstad’s musical personality. Dedicated to the great Johnny Mbizo Dyani and John Stevens, Gjerstad’s long-time playing partners in Detail, this big band takes its cues from that trio's energy and fleet movement even as it incorporates more contemporary developments in improvised music. It’s a pan-national unit comprising cornetist Bobby Bradford, drummers Louis Moholo-Moholo and Paal Nilssen-Love, bassists Nick Stephens and Ingebrigt Haker Flaten, Kevin Norton on vibes, Morten Olsen on percussion and electronics, tubaist Borre Molstad, Lasse Marhaug on electronics, and Sabir Mateen joining Gjerstad on reeds. Open Port is quite a romp, a sprawling expression of energy, but thankfully one that doesn’t sacrifice detail, empathy, or dynamics. Particularly important is the way the drummers and Norton leave a lot of room when it would be simplicity itself to crash through the hour. The moments of electro-squall are quite bracing, but they’re always terse and well-placed:

Marhaug, Olsen, and Hana both frame and derail some of the conventional free jazz blowing, which by itself has real pleasures (Gjerstad and Mateen work wonderfully together), and Hana’s got some great twanging reverb going in the third section. I confess to tiring quickly with hour-long large ensemble pieces , but this is one of the better ones I’ve heard lately. Jason Bivins

Hans Glawischnig Panorama

Sunnyside SSC 1179 CD

Donny McCaslin

Recommended Tools Greenleaf Music 1008 CD

Panorama is bassist Hans Glawischnig’s second disc as a leader, featuring a stellar, rotating cast of New Yorkers tackling nine of his charts. A quartet performance is up first, a rugged waltzy vamp stoked by the mighty drummer Jonathan Blake, with Migel Zenon’s serpentine alto soaring over pianist Luis Perdomo’s full-fledged poetics and Glawischnig’s taut lines. The same assemblage also casts its magic on the picturesque romanticism of “The Orchids” (with exquisite arco work from Glawischnig), the undulating “Beneath the Waves” (much like Keith Jarrett’s “Rose Petals”), and the record’s closer, “Rabbit Race,” a brisk swing venture replete with a blistering Glawischnig solo spot. There are also two cuts with a different quartet lineup: the ballad “Set to Sea,” featuring the smoldering tenorist Rich Perry, as well as the Latinized “Barretto’s Way,” a melodically rich tribute to the great percussionist Ray Barretto, Glawischnig’s former employer. Chick Corea is the linchpin of two trio pieces, the effervescent “Panorama” and boppish “Oceanography.” Though the focus here is on Glawischnig’s well-executed blueprints and skilled musicianship, a quintet featuring guitarist Ben Monder, saxophonist David Binney and drummer Antonio Sanchez rips it up on the hypnotic workout of “Gypsy Tales”: Binney and Monder’s performances here are surely the record’s most frenetic moments.

Despite the variety of settings, the record is consistently rewarding due to Glawischnig’s impressive structures and the strong individual performances.

Glawischnig and drummer Blake also undergird tenor saxophonist Donny McCaslin’s spirited trio disc, Recommended Tools, recorded for Dave Douglas’s Greenleaf label and produced by Binney. McCaslin’s customary teetering-on-the-edge solo flights are front and center, as are his bandmates, who easily bridge the harmonic gap left by the lack of the presence of a chordal instrument. Uptempo highlights include the barn-burning intensity of “Eventful,” the ridiculously fast swing of “Excursion” and the Blake feature, “2nd Hour Revisited.” Elsewhere, the band takes a coloristic approach, as on their recasting of two pieces from previous McCaslin records, the sambaesque “The Champion” and the buoyant “Fast Brazil,” as well as the blues “Recommended Tools” and the free-flowing “Margins of Solitude.” The trio moves into a quieter realm on the moody “Late Night Gospel” and a gorgeous take on Billy Strayhorn’s “Isfahan,” a moving feature for McCaslin’s warm lines. With Recommended Tools McCaslin adds yet another important document to the tenor-bass-drums tradition established

by Sonny Rollins, Joe Henderson and Joe Lovano, to name a few. Jay Collins

Group Inerane

Guitars from Agadez Sublime Frequencies SF 034 CD

Niger's Group Inerane fits squarely within the Saharan “desert blues” movement that has burgeoned in recent years due to the popularity of Mali’s Festival in the Desert and the international success of such groups as Tinariwen, Etran Finatawa and Ensemble Tartit. Inerane’s sound is scratchier and less polished than many of the other representatives of this style, with a sparse instrumentation of two electric guitars and drum set, accompanied by a chorus of voices. Bibi Ahmed plays lead guitar and sings lead vocals, and takes the ensemble into extended sections of raw, dissonant, psychedelic improvisation, as if channeling the Velvet Underground or Robert Quine. Abubakar Agalli D’Amall’s drum set has a distinctly trashy sound, and the handclapping and support vocals are spontaneous and energized.

These ten tracks were recorded in a rough-and-ready manner during live

Gang Gang Dance Saint Dymphna Warp 171 CD / LP

There is a moment, about four tracks into Saint Dymphna, Gang Gang Dance’s fourth album, when the band’s duplicities really do seem possible: that they might actually be simultaneously hip and disconnected, rhythmic WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #52 | 57

performances in the Saharan outpost of Agadez, Niger, and there is little that is stately or gentle or reserved about them. I can honestly say that this is the most garage-sounding music I have ever heard from Africa! The songs rumble along mostly in a 6/8 feel, with interwoven guitars and vocals exuding an atmosphere of tension and struggle, which expresses the fact that Inerane’s style originates in the Tuareg people’s rebellion going back to the 1980s.

When this recording was initially released last year by Sublime Frequencies as an LP, it sold out almost immediately.

So this is the first CD release of this music and it is sure to establish Group Inerane at the forefront of the Kel Tamacheq (Tuareg) guitar revolution.

This disc is easily recommended for its unique and uncanny merger of a noise rock sensibility with the traditional music of the Sahel. Alan Waters

Charlie Haden Family and Friends Rambling Boy Decca B0011639-02 CD

Over a career spanning more than 50 years, bassist Charlie Haden has proven to be as tireless in seeking out new projects as he is understated in executing them. Still best known for his membership in Ornette Coleman’s classic quartet, Haden has worked with Yoko Ono, Joni Mitchell and Rickie Lee Jones, and shown a strong interest in Cuban, Portuguese, Salvadoran and Spanish music and political history.

With such a wide-reaching career, it’s surprising that it’s taken him this long to return to his roots, the country music he performed with his family as a child.

By and large, Rambling Boy borrows from the earliest days of recorded Americana, opening in fact with the Carter Family’s “Single Girl, Married Girl,” sung by his triplet daughters Petra, Tanya and Rachel (all of whom have musical careers of their own).

His son Josh (of the band Spain) also appears, singing the latter’s song “Spiritual” (which Haden previously recorded with Pat Metheny), as does his wife Ruth Cameron on the William Butler Yeats song “Down by the Salley Gardens.” Rambling Boy is essentially a family affair, just like those radio shows circa 1940 (a short clip from Haden’s singing debut on the show, at age 2, is even included on the CD). To Haden, it seems, this is family music, reminding him no doubt of working around the piano as a child, except backing them now are some of today's best country players, including Sam Bush, Russ Barenberg, Jerry Douglas and Stuart Duncan.

The album’s only weakness is some of its star appearances. Roseanne Cash, Vince Gill and Ricky Skaggs are in fine form, and Haden’s son-in-law, comic Jack Black, is more than passable on the Appalachian tune “Old Joe Clark.” But the strong presences of Metheny and Elvis Costello push the proceedings off center. When Haden premiered the project at New York’s Lincoln Center Out-of-Doors festival in August, it was with the family and session players but sans superstars.

When it works, Rambling Boy hits what makes early country music great: it’s about the songs, not the showcasing.

Fortunately, that’s more often than not.

Kurt Gottschalk 58 | SIGNAL to NOISE #52

Mary Halvorson Trio Dragon's Head

Firehouse 12 FH12-4-01-007 CD

Mary Halvorson Jessica Pavone Devin Hoff Ches Smith

Calling All Portraits Skycap CAP 049 CD

Guitarist Mary Halvorson’s name has been popping up with increasing regularity. There are gigs with members of the burgeoning Brooklyn improv scene as well as participation in releases

by Anthony Braxton’s large ensembles and Diamond Curtain Wall Trio, projects lead by Taylor Ho Bynum, and Trevor Dunn’s Trio-Convulsant. But until now, aside from releases by her duo with Jessica Pavone or her noise-rock duo People with drummer Kevin Shea, there have been few with her as a leader or co-leader. These releases rectify that.

Halvorson’s trio recording Dragon’s Head, with John Hebert on bass and Ches Smith on drums, pulls together her disparate musical interests and individual approach. There are compositional structures which allude to songforms while subverting the thematic kernels and melodic threads. There are resonant voicings that draw on jazz vocabulary and phrasing while steering clear of clear harmonic centers or linear development. At times, a rollicking rock energy comes through as the three dig in with raw textures and propulsive momentum, but this is chopped and fractured into angular shards. Themes are introduced and lope along only to be refracted by odd starts and stops.

Halvorson’s lines skitter off of Hebert’s bounding rich-toned bass, while Smith’s percussion drives things along with a loose, stuttering free swing. Melodic flows develop and then get twisted and bent into barbed dissonance. Sections of lacy intricacy and roiling, insistentlylooped patterns of intersecting lines work through to hammered vamps full of fuzzed-out overdrive, then explode into bristling freedom. This is all pulled off with a keen ear for collective balance. The three work together to navigate the forms, anticipating every shift and turn. This is a finely honed trio, but they never sound constrained by the complexities of the pieces. Instead, the recording reveals a group that revels in the way that the forms allow them to explore such broad musical territory.

On Calling All Portraits, Halvorson and Smith are joined by regular cohorts Devin Hoff and Jessica Pavone on two pieces by each of the members along with two collective improvisations. This has the relaxed empathy of back-porch freedom, with equal dashes of punkish stomp, folk lyricism, and thorny interplay. There’s a more overt melodicism here, accentuated by Pavone’s gritty, blues- drenched playing, and the music has a scrappy energy, with themes sawed and scratched from riffs woven into loose collective counterpoint.

Pavone’s unfettered dynamism drives the pieces with wild flurries of scrabbling arco. Halvorson’s dark chords and cleanly articulated lines complement Pavone’s loose lyricism with skronky energy and jazz colorations. Hoff dodges and weaves, locking in on vamps and insistent patterns or prodding the improvisations during sections of arcing freedom. Smith knows how to play

around the edges, with a light touch that skips across the string sonorities.

The pieces show off the various members’ sensibilities: Pavone’s cracked lyrical bent, Halvorson’s more texturebased approach which puckishly screws with tonal centers and momentum, Smith’s splintered rhythms and overlapping lines, and Hoff’s brooding songforms. This music doesn’t blur stylistic boundaries, it completely ignores them.

Michael Rosenstein

Roy Harper

Flat Baroque and Berserk Science Friction HUCD028 CD

Stormcock

Science Friction HUCD047 CD

Roy Harper & Jimmy Page Jugula

Science Friction HUCD032 CD

For a long time, Roy Harper was mostly known as the answer to rock trivia questions: Who sings lead vocals on Pink Floyd’s “Have a Cigar”? Who is Led Zeppelin referring to in the song title “Hats Off to (Roy) Harper”? Harper had friends in the world’s biggest rock bands, but his own music was not always easy to find. Just about anyone who was a fan in the 1980s probably had cassette tapes made from someone else’s rare Roy Harper records.

The Science Friction label is making it easier to hear Harper’s singular folk rock, reissuing many of his records. The latest releases include one of Harper’s earliest albums, 1970’s Flat Baroque and Berserk. The record’s high points include “I Hate the White Man,” a protest against imperialism that practically bursts with full-throated righteousness. (But you’ll probably want to skip past the song’s momentum-killing spoken-word introduction after you’ve heard it once.) On songs such as “Tom Tiddler’s Ground,” Harper sounds like a traditional English folkie, while other tracks show him moving toward a folk-rock style reminiscent of Led Zeppelin’s acoustic tracks. His performances took on epic proportions on 1971’s Stormcock, which has just four songs, two of them stretching on for 13 minutes. Usually working with little more than his acoustic guitar and his fine, strong voice, Harper creates a feeling of grandeur that evokes the artrock suites of his day, sounding like he’s exploring every facet of every chord.

Flat Baroque and Berserk and Stormcock rank among Harper’s best records, but 1985’s Jugula is lackluster, despite the presence of Jimmy Page. The interplay between Harper and Page never really ignites—or if it does, the moment gets lost under the layers of leaden 1980s production. The demos for this album would probably sound less dated, but the songs are simply not as memorable as Harper’s early classics.

Robert Loerzel

not dwell in concepts, but in deeds and in facts. Words butter no parsnips....”

Drummer Royal Hartigan is a voracious student and teacher of ethnomusicology and has adapted a stunning variety of musical traditions from Africa (particularly the Ewe and Asante people of West Africa), India, China, the Philippines, Cuba and elsewhere to the western drum set and jazz quartet. The spiritual intensity and emotional directness of Blood Drum Spirit resonates in a decidedly visceral way. Hartigan’s music is masterfully structured yet never aridly intellectual: it’s of the earth and fire as much as of the water and air. His ensemble with tenor saxophonist David Bindman, pianist Art Hirahara and bassist Wes Brown takes a time-honored “standard” jazz instrumentation and stretches it in hitherto unexplored ways, very different from but cattycorner comparable to the Moutin Reunion Quartet.

Whether juxtaposing a traditional love song from China’s Yunnan province with Charles Mingus’s “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat” or steaming through the amazing 22-minute “Anlo Kete” (derived from the social dance drumming of the Ewe people), Hartigan and the Ensemble are unfailingly creative. The breadth and depth of this music is staggering.

Ancestors is both an ardently personal and somehow universal acknowledgement of roots. Hartigan salutes his mother, father, and Uncle Ray Hart in a series of musical vignettes that nod to early 20th-century folk music, popular song, classical, ragtime and traditional jazz as well as tap and clog dancing, poetry and prose. The characters in these vignettes are vividly portrayed and lovingly remembered. Ancestors of a more indirect nature also come into play through the resonant and passionate voice of Baomi, the saxophones, flute and Persian ney of Hafez Modirzadeh, Hartigan’s own drumming and tap dancing, and a small cast of sympathetic collaborators. Bill Barton

Kieran Hebden & Steve Reid NYC

Domino WIGCD 219 CD

Aside from his musical contributions to the world as Four Tet and Fridge, we can thank Briton Kieran Hebden for

bringing maverick drummer and jazzfunk innovator Steve Reid back into the public eye. Toiling for years in and out of obscurity, the Bronx-born/Luganobased percussionist has hit a creative stride in the 21st century with Hebden at his side. Soul Jazz has begun reissuing some of his classic LPs from the ’70s like Rhythmatism and Nova, originally self-released, as well as hosting him in England for new sessions like 2005’s brilliant Spirit Walk. He seems, however, to have found a new home at Domino, on which his last three outings have appeared, each with Hebden as either co-leader or group member. Their latest album, NYC, returns to the duo setting initiated on both volumes of The Exchange Session (2006). After so many recent triumphs, NYC can’t help but feel like something of a letdown. It’s certainly the most marketable record the two men have produced together, surging forward in a nonstop groove for nearly forty minutes; on occasion, the album lapses into a kind of tepid jam session, a form far too shallow for musicians of such talent. Hebden’s electronics are less abstract than before, often acting as a substitute for rhythm guitar rather than textural accompaniment, while Reid keeps strict time in the background. We rarely hear Reid solo; he’s a group player through-andthrough, a philosophy most likely culled from years as a session man for artists as diverse as Martha Reeves, Peggy Lee, Sun Ra and Fats Domino. But I don’t want to dwell too long on the album’s shortcomings—mostly because even the worst record these guys lay down is still far, far above the average pabulum that still passes for jazz fusion. The album opens with a trio of stompers, “Lyman Place,” “1st and 1st,” and “25th Street.” Reid’s drumming is powerful, muscular, tumescent, while Hebden’s electronics favor repetition coupled with a continuous sonic threecard-monte—hard to explain, but each song feels like it’s being pushed again and again to its breaking point with the addition of new elements (or old ones that just keep rising in pitch). “Arrival” loosens things up a bit with ambient sound effects, but the only composition that doesn’t sound insistent from start to finish is the very fine closing track, “Departure.” Gently tapped cymbals in 4/4

time ride up against chiming music-box melodies, but the repetition of sounds in such short intervals has the CD-skip quality one associates with eRikm; it’s lovely, as is the caesura opened up midway by Reid’s rolling tom-toms. While it may not be their most complex performance, NYC is an excellent introduction to the unfashionably joyous avant-funk these musical bedfellows create with great consistency. Seth Watter

Wyatt, Herbert makes politics in music an intimately personal experience, and also like Wyatt, he communicates with conceptual clarity and syntactical simplicity through that most august of forms: pop music steeped in jazz tradition. Jon Dale

The Matthew Herbert Big Band

While bass, cello and even viola improvisers have the luxury of bowing or plucking, the back and forth of bow across string just can’t be escaped in violin improv. If you do start getting plucky with a violin, you quickly discover that your range of possible action is severely limited. Hernandez understands all of this, and spends her time investigating the warbly rainbows of notes created by deliberate, slow bowing of multiple strings at the same time.

She creates harmonies that are perfectly balanced yet completely bizarre, since they are made of practically pure dissonance. The four unnamed tracks on this vinyl-only release were recorded to analog, unmastered and untouched by any digital equipment: the violin, in all its specificity, is the real focus.

Hernandez’s touch moves from boggy and dredgelike, as if she’s scraping slime off the bow, to solid and pelting, as if the gangly chords she’s uncovered need to be shot like an arrow into the ear. Like violinists Polly Bradfield, Leroy Jenkins and LaDonna Smith before her, she doesn’t deconstruct the violin in the course of her improvisations, but rather extrapolates a personal method of envisioning new music and releasing it into orbit. Andrew Choate

There'sYou and There's Me !K7 232 CD

Like Matthew Herbert’s previous Big Band album, Goodbye Swingtime, There’s You and There’s Me works with the iron-fist-in-velvet-glove principle, sneaking polemic past your ears through sumptuous arrangements and neo-classicist songwriting. In a recent interview, Herbert said one of his key interests is trying to “amplify political narratives through sound”, and he’s almost alone in the nuanced manner by which he treats sonorous objects, daring to suggest that each sound carries almost untold socio-political weight. While this position is often glibly presumed by cultural studies types, it’s rarely dealt with in such a concrete way by artists: Herbert bucks the trend by front-loading his material with theory. But the great achievement in the best of his recent records is that the theoretical spine of the album is evenly balanced with intelligently arranged, articulate songwriting and arrangement, and this is also where this album succeeds – the opening “The Story,”critical of media agenda-setting and complicity, slinks into view with a decorous melody that part-cloaks the potency of the lyrics, while “Waiting” has vocalist Eska rolling and tumbling “come and feel the murder” with urgency, the Big Band’s playing itching with energy. But the disc's most potent moments come with its dark heart, “Nonsounds” and “One Life,” where the Big Band play undercover while Herbert uses sonic material such as Israeli soldiers shooting unarmed protesters, and the alarm from Herbert’s premature son’s neonatal special care unit, in baldly disconcerting sound pieces. Much like Robert

Katt Hernandez Unlovely Sprout 5 LP

Lejaren Hiller A Total Matrix of Possibities New World 80694 CD

Lejaren Hiller (1924–1994) is probably best known for his collaboration with John Cage on the 1969 multimedia work HPSCHD, a piece that incorporated both harpsichords and (then) newfangled computer-generated sound tapes. Hiller is a key figure in the history of computer-generated music, having written The Illiac Suite, a 1957

The Royal Hartigan Ensemble

Blood Drum Spirit: Live in China Innova 690 CD x 2

Royal Hartigan Ancestors Innova 702 CD

As C.G. Jung wrote in Memories, Dreams, Reflections: “The spirit does WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #52 | 59

piece for string quartet that is generally regarded as the first work to employ a computer in its composition. He was also a research chemist who taught at the University of Illinois, and, unlike many of his contemporaries, his musical interests were far-ranging. Serialism and microtonality come into play on this album’s opening piece, 1963’s “Computer Cantata,” which also employs chance-based systems in the creation of its music and text. System-based music can yield bloodless results, but that isn’t the case here. The electronic material and the performance by the University of Illinois Contemporary Chamber Players and soprano Helen Hamm pull you into a variegated and mysterious world.

“Quartet No. 6 for Strings,” from 1973, draws on environmental sounds and uses the I-Ching in its selection process.

The piece, performed by the Concord String Quartet, is tonal at times, but it rustles with edgy effects that point to its inspiration in non-musical, everyday sources. 1974’s “A Portfolio for Diverse Performers and Tape” features recordings of children singing, bell-like tones, and other sounds. In this version of the piece, the Gregg Smith Singers interpret the work’s live performance score, which contains material based on earlier Hiller compositions. The overall effect is simultaneously somber and playful.

Hopefully this release will bring attention to this innovative and multifaceted composer. Fred Cisterna

Guus Janssen Out of Frame Geestgronden 26 CD

While Misha Mengelberg is probably the most well-known Dutch pianist, there is also a younger generation of players like Cor Fuhler, Michiel Braam, and Guus Janssen with consistently provocative releases. Janssen’s been working since the mid-’70s with the regulars on the Dutch scene. He’s been part of the instant composing school, a member of a killer trio with brother Wim and bassist Ernst Glerum, all while diving into formal composition with equal interest. This live set from a concert at the Bimhuis is one of his rare recordings as a soloist, offering a great way to experience his broad-ranging stylistic interests.

Things start out with “Pasquil,” an elliptical study built from fragmented phrases looped and reassembled with a persistent inner logic that moves from hammered clusters to filigree to free-stride torrents to quiet crystalline repose. That introduction is a summation of the way the set proceeds. Like Mengelberg, Janssen has a wry sense of humor filtered through an encyclopedic knowledge. He’s a structuralist with a deep vocabulary, as likely to dip into Scarlatti as Bert Kaempfert, the German band-leader and composer of “Strangers in the Night.” There is also the explosive free barrelhouse blues of “Toe-tapping Tune,” and the overlapping lines of the title tune, building with a wild energy anchored by the pianist’s indefatigable sense of time and form. He finishes off with “In the End,” built from stop-start stride fragments pieced together with pregnant pauses and false endings.

Janssen doesn’t record often and this is one of his best in recent years; it’s well worth searching out.

Michael Rosenstein 60 | SIGNAL to NOISE #52

Daniel Jones David Papapostolou

Edward Ka-spel

Adjacent 001 CD-R

Legendary Pink Dots

Leaving Room

David Lacey Paul Vogel

The British Isles Homefront No.3 CD

Though Daniel Jones (turntables, dulcimer, acoustic guitar) is based in Brighton, the compact English city in which I live, until I received Leaving Room I’d never heard of him. It’s a fine way to make his acquaintance. He and London-based Frenchman David Papapostolou (mixing-desk feedback and computer with pickup) are relative late-comers to EAI, but they’ve got something valuable to offer this once vibrant but now (alas) fading genre of improvised music. The six tracks on Leaving Room, recorded in February 2008, are stealthy, sinewy improvisations using one or two traditional instruments and various creatively adapted and abused items of sound recording and reproduction. As the title suggests, each of the musicians leaves room in which the other can operate; theirs is a sparse music, low-volume and low-key, in which space and time are of equal importance. But a leaving room is also a point of departure, which implies starting afresh, destination (as Sun Ra would have it) unknown. Jones and Papapostolou seem always to be searching for new lines of development; their attention is firmly on the moment of becoming, with very few glances over their shoulders. In fits and starts, progress is made, but the outcome is uncertain. As with much EAI, it’s hard to fathom (never mind explain) why the music works as well as it does, so I’ll say merely that this is one of the most pleasing CDs I’ve heard this year.

A composerly approach sets Irishmen David Lacey and Paul Vogel’s The British Isles apart from Leaving Room—and from most EAI, for that matter. Although much of the disc’s primary material was improvised using percussion/electronics and computer, extensive editing has created new contexts in which environmental sounds have a valuable role to play. These sounds aren’t used solely for their sense of dislocation or otherness—the clamorous everyday world leaking into the controlled environment in which the musicians operate, with (perhaps) ironic consequences; rather, their movement and texture are woven deep into the fabric of the music. Post-production of this kind was applied to parts of Poor Trade (Cathnor, 2008), a trio CD on which Lacey played percussion and electronics, but on The British Isles it’s fundamental to all four tracks. Two of the titles—“The Matter of England” and “Just Like America at Home”— hint at social critique, and the CD is dedicated to Alan Clarke, whose films were unflinchingly critical of the British establishment. Whether music’s high abstraction can serve a similar function to film is dubious, but to make no effort in this regard would be to concede the point, which I suspect Lacey and Vogel would find unacceptable. Politics aside, the music on The British Isles marries the fluidity of improvisation with all the advantages that post-production can confer, with impressive results.

Brian Marley

Dream Logic Part 2 Beta Lactam Ring CD

Plutonium Blond Roir 8305 CD

The Poppy Variations exposed the trip in full flower, or maybe just opened a new chapter; perhaps one of the Chemical Playschool series initiated this new love of half-connected sound and fanciful vision. I can’t be sure, as the Legendary Pink Dots’ discography is daunting, not to mention that of lyricist and vocalist Edward Ka-Spel. One thing is certain: The bright but somehow distant structures that pervade even the most accessible moments of the new Dots release had their genesis about eight years back, and the Dream Logic series continues apace in the friendly but bizarre fashion we’ve come to expect. “Is a Bird”’s first part reveals a cartoonish world of half-waking, the breaths of the sleeper punctuating a semi-silly clarinet march, until a female voice ushers in electronics and spare beats that confront you at every turn in this continuous voyage. Song structures appear and fade, saturated with KaSpel’s laconic mutterings and breathing: “Send a postcard, this I must... this I must... I must run... Far.” The stereo spectrum is his plaything as multileveled timbral complexes encroach on recognition, snatches of speech ride atop motoric rumbles and the delicacy of dry autumn leaves fade, leaving the sleeper’s breathing again. It’s all like this, and it’s quietly mesmerizing, as was the disc’s predecessor last year.

Plutonium Blond inhabits a similar

soundworld, but these are fully-fledged songs as envisioned by Ka-Spel and the ever-present Silverman, whose dignified guitar contributions are especially poignant on the hard-edged “Torch Song” and “Rainbows Too?” There is the usual melancholy present on “Faded Photograph” but totally unexpected are the whimsy (and banjo) of “Mailman” and the world-beat percussion of “Savannah Red,” but “Oceans Blue” spurs introspection with beautifully transparent textures and long keyboard loops.

Together or separately, the Dots produce some of the most sonically and structurally interesting flirtations with that strange, multiheaded beast we call pop, a commendable accomplishment in this post-everything world of nogenre eclecticism. Marc Medwin

Annette Krebs Toshimaru Nakamura Siyu

SoS editions sos4 CD

Like the other releases on the SoS label, this limited edition CD comes in beautiful packaging: a handmade paper construction that unfolds like a delicate sculpture. Deciphering the blindstamped lettering and carefully slipping off the paper band to pull out the CD from the package prepares one for this contemplative music. Annette Krebs utilizes guitar, mixing board, tapes, and “objects” to create enveloping skeins of electrically charged fields which coalesce with the sine waves, crackles, and hiss that Toshimaru Nakamura coaxes from his no-input mixing board.

Over the course of two improvisations, Krebs and Nakamura lock in to each

other, creating music with a palpable presence. While the music is full of motion and detail, the two performers connect around resonance, activity, and weight of sound rather than through more gestural notions of interaction.

There’s a totally engulfing dramatic tension as the pieces evolve. There’s no ascent to dynamic peaks; no pools of silence that build to teeming density; no hushed crinkles that explode into crashing salvos. Instead the two carve out improvisations from balance and articulation by tapping into the nuanced physicality of sound. Krebs and Nakamura have delivered two subtly hued, beguiling improvisational structures that are as elegant as the disc’s packaging.

Michael Rosenstein

Adam Lane Lou Grassi Mark Whitecage Drunk Butterfly Clean Feed CF 116 CD

Paolo Curado Trio

The Bird, the Breeze and Mr. Filiano Clean Feed CF 113 CD

Forty-four years on from Albert Ayler’s Spiritual Unity (ESP) and fifty from Sonny Rollins’ Village Vanguard recordings on Blue Note, it’s safe to say that the reedsbass-drums power trio has become both a standard format in adventurous jazz, and one that leaves an extraordinary amount of room to toy with.

Lisbon’s Clean Feed label is home to many recordings in this format, from fullbore saxophone preaching to limber postbop to more sparse explorations.

Two new discs helmed by bassist Adam

Lane and Portuguese wind player Paolo Curado provide ample variety using this lean instrumentation.

Drunk Butterfly finds Lane in a delightfully pared down unit with altoist/ clarinetist Mark Whitecage and drummer Lou Grassi on nine original tunes.

Though the group is a cooperative, the bassist’s four contributions are slinky standouts. “Sanctum” finds Whitecage on the woody horn, weaving sinewy lines through a loose rumba propelled

by Grassi’s airy ride cymbal, echoing Billy Higgins’ straight-time sashay.

“Chichi Rides the Tiger,” a knotty stop-time theme, has been recorded several times by Lane’s aggregations.

Lane and Grassi subdivide their figures as Whitecage brays and nags in sharp, high-register bursts, his clarinet whirls peppered by an occasional chalumeau aside. The title tune opens with Whitecage unaccompanied on alto; as the piece progress his ebullient bluesy figures are supported by burbling free time, Grassi alternating between distracted chatter and pliant groove.

Unbridled and raw, Drunk Butterfly retains an insistent groove that keeps one following wherever it darts.

Altoist/flutist Paulo Curado is joined on the eleven improvisations of The Bird, the Breeze and Mr. Filiano by American bassist Ken Filiano and drummer Bruno Pedroso. All three improvisers have worked together in various combinations, and all have spent time in the Lisbon Improvisation Players, though this is their first recording as a unit. Though the group is as equilateral as any improvising trio, the music is a far cry from Drunk Butterfly. Curado’s squirrely, acrid alto trades sparse volleys with Filiano’s muscular classicism and

WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #52 | 61

Pedroso’s knitted brushwork in an ebb and flow of duets, trios and soli.

Curado’s breath is birdsong and insect wings, buzzing and flitting on the three movements of “Triptico,” sharp jabs of flute and snare buoyed by Filiano’s pizzicato. Lyricism, muscle, and forward motion—three essential characteristics of modern jazz, present in spades in both trios’ music. Clifford Allen

Thomas Lehn Marcus Schmickler

Navigation im Hypertext a-Musik A34 CD

Kölner Kranz a-Musik A31 LP

Cologne-based musicians Thomas Lehn and Marcus Schmickler met as members of the collective MIMEO in 1998. They first collaborated as a duo back in 2000 for the CD Bart on the Erstwhile label (now unfortunately out of print). On that release, they carved out a series of pieces constructed from the common ground of Lehn’s hyperactive analog synth and Schmickler’s more considered layers of digital whorls and glitch. These two releases are culled from the pair’s tours of the US and Europe between 2004 and 2006.

The overall structure of Navigation im Hypertext is somewhat confounding. It proceeds episodically over 22 untitled tracks, some less than a minute long and only two passing the ten-minute mark. These are fractured and juxtaposed snippets of what were clearly longer improvisations. Reedy, organ-like wheezes stutter and moan; electronic blips careen and clang; percussive, skittering pops sizzle like water dropped on hot oil. The overarching form is elusive, as the timbres and textures jump around like a catalog of aural snapshots. Even the longer tracks, like the ghostly “15,” waft by, eschewing any notion of developmental arc. The activity level starts to gather towards the end: some segments crash and rumble; others gather into layered oscillations of menacing buzz. But then the final minutes break that arc with spattered tones against a quavering field. Lehn and Schmickler are musicians who carefully chart things out. It is clear that there is a compositional structure at play, but it will take many listens to fully tease it out.

Though recorded during the same tours, Kölner Kranz, a limited-edition LP, stands in sharp contrast to Navigation im Hypertext. Here, two side-long constructions kick in with an almost claustrophobic density. Like the CD, each piece is constructed from a number of live performances. Here, though, Lehn and Schmickler let loose fusillades of gnarled textures and flayed timbres.

Glitches and blasts of sound pile on each other; sine-tone squiggles rise out of the rumbling roar of shredded detail.

But there is also a thoughtful sense of form and control at play. The first side is a 20-minute barrage which builds to a frenzy and then comes tumbling to a close, as if the air has finally started to clear after a storm. The 15-minute piece on the second side starts with crackles and pops, which slowly intensify around low-end thunder and flitting chirrups.

Halfway in, the two have reached the same level of intensity as on side A, but here they play a bit more with dynamics and density, letting things subside a bit, only to charge back in again. Taken 62 | SIGNAL to NOISE #52

together, the two pieces make for a potent listen. While Navigation im Hypertext is a bit bewildering, Kölner Kranz shows the volatile intensity the two can deliver. Michael Rosenstein

London Improvisers Orchestra

Andrew Liles

Orchestral free improvisation seems to belong in the same category as birds flocking or deer migrating—collective action coordinated from within, deeply reliant upon individual sensitivities.

Beyond that level of intuition, when self-regulation communicates itself through music it can resemble the anarchist miracle described by Thomas Pynchon in his novel The Crying of Lot 49—“another world’s intrusion into this one.” In his liner notes to this rewarding release, saxophonist Evan Parker rails against Thatcher, Blair and the murky figures who have engineered their grotesque transformation of everyday life in Britain into an “unrestrained capitalist mad-house.” The music is dedicated to George Riste, proprietor of a hotel for the poor in Vancouver, who has successfully withstood corporate pressure to close down and move out. For Parker, a defining figure of the music and the scene, the London Improvisers Orchestra is clearly a necessary intrusion from a world of mutual respect and creative cooperation. The LIO meets once a month in a room at the Red Rose public house a few miles north of the city’s centre. Some of its music is guided by conduction, although Parker makes it clear in his notes that he prefers more radically uncontrolled situations. These recordings (dating from 2003, currently the Orchestra’s historical midpoint) persuasively show the subtleties of coloration, shape and intensity that can arise in such free

Vortex Vault: Parts 7-12 Beta Lactam Ring mt CD x 6

Andrew Liles is a versatile composer whose music resists categorization; those who insist on his encampment in drone territory neglect his fantasmagoric sound collages, while those espousing the surreal elements in his work seem unaware of his massively glacial sound sculptures. The Vortex Vault series encompasses all aspects of Liles’s art, and it is his definitive musical statement. As with parts 1 through 6, these six installments were released on a monthly basis, each volume further elaborating upon the project’s various emotional and conceptual threads.

Liles’s music can be hilarious or dark.

Dark indeed is the “Crows’ Feet for Monkeymouth” motive, which opens Black Sheep with death-ridden whispering and organ chords that are then ironically taken up by the disarming voices of children. This spoken invocation recurs throughout the entire series; in fact, Black End, the final installment, ends with a reverberant voice intoning the mantra. Then there is, of course, the “black” motive that runs throughout the series. One of its most powerful manifestations is when the single word “black” is uttered at the opening of “Dark Economics” (Black Pool), the reverberant monosyllable giving a sinister twist to the colloquial street banter and marketplace field recordings.

Yet every volume also has its own themes. Black Panther is replete with weird Americana, pervaded by crickets and banjoed back-porch goodness, as on the laid-back charm of “Fang.”

There are also the bizarre and sometimes whimsical bits of poetry that serve as palate cleansers between some of the longer tracks of Black Market.

Sample the brief “Taking Bumblebee to France for an Afternoon”, which consists largely of a multilayered droning figure, beautifully spread out in the stereo spectrum, washing the silence away until, out of nowhere, a plane traverses the soundstage, fades and then returns, ending the track. It prefigures the epic “Religion, a Valiant Attempt at Rationale” (Black Out), whose 15 minutes unwind like a “Bumblebee” slowed way down. The softly crystalline structure even ends on a similar note to the airplane, bringing another level of sonic continuity to the series.

Black End is the perfect close to the series, summing up Liles’s multifaceted aesthetic with humor and dark beauty. From the vocalizing of fellow experimentalist Matt Waldron on “Kojack without the Hat” to the deep rumblings of “OM,” the disc encapsulates the series’ inclusiveness; then there is “Kay-loong-meu-tuk,” a piece lasting almost 40 minutes but broken up into 95 connected fragments. This symphonic work transgresses stylistic boundaries in a massive summation of music history, from orchestral pantonality to universes of raw sound. Light and darkness merge, and the final disembodied utterance brings the series to completion in gentle desolation.

Marc Medwin

Improvisations for George Riste Psi 08.06 CD

playing. An evolving organism, the LIO contains veteran improvisers such as soprano saxophonist Lol Coxhill, trumpeter Harry Beckett, violinist Philipp Wachsmann, pianist Steve Beresford and drummer Tony Marsh. And it accommodates subsequent generations of players, some formed squarely in the slipstream of those older musicians, others arriving from quite different contexts.

American visitors Amy Denio and Annie Lewandowski separately contribute accordion to two of these four pieces.

Strong individual improvisers such as bassist Simon Fell, alto saxophonist Caroline Kraabel or Adam Bohman and his “amplified objects” make their contributions without causing any distress to the LIO’s musical contours.

For some that may be a weakness—the pronounced individual voice in more idiosyncratic context may seem more satisfying. But if the scope of LIO music is circumscribed by collective priorities, its sweep remains impressive in its evident self-regulated coherence and shared purpose. Julian Cowley

Charles Manson Sings

ESP 2003 CD

Pre-Family and pre-Tate, these recordings document not the infamous raver with swastika-carved-in-forehead nor the scion of cultic violence, but a fairly modest and mostly uninteresting folkie alone with his guitar and occasional accompaniment. Recorded in September 1967, this release combines the material found on Lie with the errata previously collected on All the Way Live. It’s very much of its time thematically: “And they called it... your

subconscious... remember Freud?”

Manson mostly uses the guitar to keep time, with but a limited range of chords at his disposal. His voice is a slightly nasal tenor, not completely unpleasant (“Eyes of a Dreamer” tells the tale).

He sometimes sings with freewheeling optimism, while elsewhere he wistfully laments the condition of the species. The language is usually about as convincing as the music, which is to say not much at all. Especially pitiful are the attempts at backporch Americana like “Arkansas” and throwaways like “Garbage Dump” or “Big Iron Door,” which might be a Beefheart knockoff if it weren’t entirely serious here. Only pieces like the somewhat spooky “Mechanical Man” (half-confessional: “I play in my mother’s backyard... postulated myself through confusion”) hint at the larger persona that would later develop.

And the very earnest reflections (with percussion) on “I Once Knew a Man” at least win points for authenticity. I found myself most attentive during the 3-minute interview, the selection with the greatest historical interest (“You’re a free soul trapped in a cage”).

Ultimately this stuff is about as interesting as those folks who keep Manson paraphernalia around their apartments, hoping to impress or shock folks with their vanguardism, or whatever it is that motivates them. That is to say, it’s pretty tedious, even if it’s not nearly as bad as I’d anticipated. Jason Bivins

Mars

Mars LP

No More NO 014 CD

Starting life as an unnamed Velvet Underground cover band in 1975, it

took a couple of years before Sumner Crane, Nancy Arlen, Mark Cunningham and China Burg stepped out as Mars. After recording a scarce single on Rebel, four tracks for Eno’s No New York compilation, and an EP on Lust/ Unlust, they disbanded in late 1978.

Mars LP compiles all three of these sessions, which, when added up, barely scratch the half-hour mark, though their impact—visceral and aesthetic— is extraordinary. The single, containing “3E” and “11000 Volts,” is a pretty good indication of their early trajectory.

“3E,” propelled by Cunningham’s funky bass and Burg’s dry snare and relentless kick, is a tweaked affirmation of the adage that “everyone who heard the Velvets in the ’70s started a band.” The flip is pretty much a blueprint for early Sonic Youth, a surrealist metronomic drift with Arlen’s vocals oozing out around damaged bursts of strumming. “Helen Forsdale,” which starts their set on No New York, was intended as an aural reproduction of Crane’s experiences with insect sounds. He and Arlen play behind the bridge and at the head of their guitars as he delivers whining, ear-splitting rants, while Cunningham and Burg propel the disturbing mass forward with a relentless groove. The EP tracks are the most extreme of Mars’ recorded output; they emphasize hoarse mewling and Crane’s caged shouts, along with drilling guitars, feedback and a hauntingly regular basic pulse.

“The Immediate Stages of the Erotic” is the blueprint for madness, a mass of squeaking, yelps and glossolalia atop distantly pounding toms. Clearly, Mars organized sound by rules that were defiantly their own. Clifford Allen

WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #52 | 63

Rob Mazurek

Abstractions on Robert D'Arbrissel Adluna AR001 CD

In 2005, Rob Mazurek held a residency at the Abbey de Fontrevaud, a 900year-old monastery renowned for its exemplary acoustics. Mazurek has documented his time there with a CD that also serves as an art object, packaged with stirring photographs of the capacious spaces in which he created the music, as well as original paintings inspired by the contemplative surroundings. Fontrevaud seems to have brought out a different side to Mazurek’s playing. In contrast to the numerous post-rock and avant-jazz ensembles in which he busily engages when Stateside, the trumpeter had only the resonant reverberations of the Abbey with which to collaborate, engendering a certain spaciousness in the music and encouraging long, sinuous lines and overtone experiments.

One also gets a sense of haunting melancholy while Mazurek explores gestures with a decidedly neo-Romantic sweep. Also engaging are the tracks employing electroacoustic music and keyboards, where the resonance of the space imparts a gravitational shift to the pre-existing materials. Those who enjoy the jaunty swagger of his jazz persona needn’t worry; it’s present here in “Ici en Crève” (“It’s dark but I sing”), a post-bop banishment of the abbey’s looming silence, and the busy free-jazz piano of “Sound and Silence.” One is grateful that Mazurek went on this trip, recorded the results, and took lots of pictures.

Christian Carey

Meat Beat Manifesto Autoimmune Planet Mu ZIQ 202 CD

During the 1990s, Meat Beat Manifesto’s Jack Dangers defined a generation of West Coast beat-led electronic music. His interests in experimentalism and alien pop song forms allowed him to forge a connection between the dance floor and the fringes. A decade or so later, Dangers is still working with his curiously expansive beat-scapes, though times and tastes have changed, and the explosion in audio technologies and software has rendered Meat Beat’s once hypnotic beats almost nostalgic-sounding. “(Live) and Direct (Live)” sums this up to a tee: classic breaks and classic samples of people talking about “the drum” in a way that brings to mind the sampler revolutions of the late 1980s and the turntablism blow-ups of the 1990s. There’s a reference to dubstep in the press materials for the record, but it appears to be marketing more anything else, as the music has only loose links to that current global trend. “Lonely Soldier” certainly has a dubstep murkiness to it, but the pacing and construction of the beats are more aligned to scattered drum and bass or “breaks” than dubstep. By the end of this disc you don’t find yourself disappointed, but there’s no real sense of excitement either. One can’t help but wonder if Dangers needs to revisit the Manifesto and check exactly what it was that made records like Actual Sound and Voices or Satyricon such classics. Lawrence English 64 | SIGNAL to NOISE #52

Merzbow

Dolphin Sonar

Important IMPREC 205 CD

Zophorus

Blossoming Noise BN024 CD

Richard Pinhas and Merzbow Keio Line

Cuneiform Rune 278/279 CD x 2

It’s taken a while to quell my suspicions about the Merzbow racket—not the noise, but the way Masami Akita is framed by fans as the be-all and end-all of Japanese noise. This is due mostly to often uncritical acceptance of his profligate release schedule. More problematic has been the unfortunate homogenizing effect of certain Merzbow phases. But the arc of his career proves he’s a mutable creative force (from analogue to digital and back again), and you can tell Akita’s hit one of his creative strides when a clutch of albums articulates something new.

This is the case with his latest stretch, of which Dolphin Sonar may be the most impressive effort. Recorded to protest annual dolphin slaughter in Taiji, Wakayama Prefecture, Japan, it’s a highly disciplined set, and while its language is typical Merzbow—speaker-rupturing noise, gusts of hot air, whirls of analog chaos that sound like paper tearing at 132 decibels—its expressive moments, like the tangled high tones that buckle and whirr toward the end of “Part 3,” really elevate it beyond everyday Merzbow. Perhaps the political content demanded greater focus of Akita. Dolphin Sonar passes the test for quality Merzbow: after extended immersion, its lacerations of your eardrums become pleasurable, its imposing façade reveals both structural integrity and unexpected lyricism, and you lose the capacity or desire to map sound via time.

Zophorus initially appears a slightly more prosaic CD, replete with Merzbow's familiar full-channel overload and assault system electronics.. Its first two parts are absorbing enough, but with “Part 3” Akita adds a definable rhythmic undertow to his noise, which opens the field. For good portions of the track he foregrounds this pulse, scrawling psychedelically informed analog calligraphy over the top, but the rhythm’s the real standout, for the paradoxical amount of space it reveals. From there Zophorus returns to type, and by crossing contaminated noise with incessant loops (and crowing roosters), it’s almost a Merzbow primer.

Keio Line, where Akita teams up with French guitarist and leader of prog outfit Heldon, Richard Pinhas, is the most anomalous thing here, and the most beautiful, largely due to the filmy layers of plastic Fripp-esque guitars from Pinhas. He admirably coaxes different dynamics from Akita—where Zophorus is mostly in-the-red, on Keio Line Akita progresses with great subtlety. He’s more interested in pulse than whiteout, and often makes way for Pinhas to build loop upon loop until the whole thing’s spinning in the air. Imagine Terry Riley subduing a bulldozer and you’re halfway there. Jon Dale

in 1977, a bristling collection of Roscoe Mitchell’s most challenging compositions and performance practices assembled from solo performances and small-ensemble studio recordings.

It’s most daunting at the outset, with a 22-minute performance of the title composition from the Willisau Jazz Festival. The performance insistently repeats a short figure, its wide-ranging intervals squawked and blasted as they’re incrementally—even microscopically—varied. At times there are audible protests from the audience, but Mitchell sticks to his insistent program, repeating the motif until a listener is trapped in the grain of his sound and the monomania of the repeated figure.

That reductivism is balanced by the lyricism that Mitchell elsewhere displays, as in the extended performance of Joseph Jarman’s keening “Ericka,” also from WIllisau, and the 13-minute “Improvisation 1,” from a Berkeley concert. The small-group performances include a piquant duet with Anthony Braxton; a warm, relatively melodic duet with bassist (and Art Ensemble of Chicago colleague) Malachi Favors; and a witty trio with George Lewis and Muhal Richard Abrams. Mitchell’s rigorously structuralist compositions somehow serve to focus the personalities of his partners, creating distinct characteristics for each ensemble. A second “Nonaah” receives a very different performance from a quartet of alto saxophonists, Joseph Jarman, Henry Threadgill and Wallace McMillan joining Mitchell in a performance that combines minimalism with dense and subtle variants. The new CD supplements the original LPs with an additional 34 minutes from the Berkeley solo performance, including the final

“Off Five Dark Six” which ends with some moving extended upper register playing. Nonaah remains provocative, even daunting, music. It's the rare sessionthat still sounds “outside” decades after it was made. Stuart Broomer

Juana Molina Un Dia

Domino DNO 196 CD / download

Isn’t technology wonderful? In the old days, it took several people singing the same thing over and over to get a decent round going. With delays, Juana Molina can do it all by herself.

Her latest album is probably her most loop-based yet. It’s certainly her most overtly rhythmic, with patterns of voice, drum, and synth wheeling in time to each other like a good old-fashioned Swiss watch. Despite having lived in the USA for several years, Molina once more sings all her words in Spanish to punish us for having made her hear so much English on the radio growing up. (Hey, she said it first, not me.) But it really matters less and less what she sings; often the words are one more rhythmic element in songs that conceal their catchy melodies within matrices of beats and pulses. And sometimes, as on “Dar (Qué Dificil),” she skips the words altogether, instead scatting with ingratiating playfulness. One thing that Un Dia does share with its predecessors is the surreptitious demands it places upon the listener. While her recipe of propulsive grooves, lilting acoustic guitars, plush synthesizers, and agile singing doesn’t sound like a challenging one, the music has a certain surface glare that requires you to take a step back, squint, and try to see past the

shine to grasp the intricate designs before you, the same as it might take a while to see the design in a brightly tiled mosaic. This principle works across the record as well as within each song: although they don’t seem to try too hard to relate to each other, the album accumulates gravity as the songs add up. Feel the pull. Bill Meyer

Will Montgomery [Heribert Friedl] Non-Collaboration

Non Visual Objects NVO 014 CD

Heribert Friedl’s name appears here in square brackets here because he and Will Montgomery initially planned to make a CD comprising the latter's electronics and the former's improvisations on the hackbrett (a hammered dulcimer), but their material refused to gel. Rather than abandon the ailing project, Montgomery took it over (at Friedl’s suggestion), processing most of the hackbrett material and adding new material of his own. As with his first CD, Water Blinks (Selvage Flame, 2006), the tracks tend to be short, stripped of inessentials (rather than minimalist by intention), and more often than not they employ small gestures at the quieter end of acoustical perception. Elliptical in form, they seem to bear an affinity with the poems of Robert Creeley and Lorine Niedecker. Morton Feldman is also a touchstone, particularly in the way brief passages of sound are isolated from one another by beautifully judged periods of silence, and the clean lines and structural rigor of the pieces is reminiscent of the music of John Wall.

But, of course, every single thing we encounter reminds us of something else,

and comparisons will only take us so far.

It might be better to concentrate on the qualities that mark Non-Collaboration out as something special.

The squashed/squelched tutti at the beginning of the first track, “Amore,” introduces the hackbrett material, but, as the piece continues, episodically interleaving passages of sound with periods of silence, Montgomery’s electronics assume greater prominence.

Friedl’s hackbrett occasionally surfaces here and elsewhere but is usually so heavily processed that it’s unrecognizable or reduced to such faint residue that it’s more akin to background radiation. The tracks dovetail nicely, making the CD seem suite-like rather than a set of disparate pieces, though occasionally within each piece there are surprising and often dissonant juxtapositions of sound materials. What Montgomery seems primarily to be interested in is breaking down the perceived narrative of the pieces, though each brief episode may possess its own narrative integrity. Full of fascinating small details and lively invention, avoiding grandiloquence and, at the opposite extreme, the soporifics that can occur when microsound meets Ambient, this complex but unfussy electroacoustic music demands much of the listener.

Ah, but the rewards, the rewards...

Brian Marley

Mostly Other People Do The Killing This is Our Moosic Hot Cup 082 CD

The boisterous, playful MOPDTK (trumpeter Peter Evans, saxophonist Jon Irabagon, bassist Moppa Elliott,

Roscoe Mitchell Nonaah

Nessa ncd-9/10 CD

Nonaah first appeared as a two-LP set WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #52 | 65

and drummer Kevin Shea) return with an exuberant third disc, following the smokin’ Shamokin. It’s music fueled by equal parts Ornette (not just the title, the heads too—consult “Biggertown” for evidence), Matt Wilson, Roland Kirk (“Drainlick”), and School Days. As with earlier efforts, it’s a lively and protean way with tempo that’s key to the group’s successes. The quartet is expertly driven by leader Elliott and Shea, who together exult in repeatedly setting up a killer pulse, then staggering or toying with it; or maybe it’s more accurate to say that they navigate and capsize it at once.

Aside from these visceral rhythmic joys, though, it’s hard for me not to focus on the kinetic Evans, even though Irabagon is superb (a more inside, cooing, fluttery presence, with a Newk influence that contrasts well here). The trumpeter is resourceful as Herb Robertson in his use of manifold techniques in this genre-mangling music; some of his stuff in the lower register is pretty amazing.

It’d be unfair simply to liken MOPDTK to Breuker, even though the Dutch mischief-maker comes to mind on the insouciant romp through Dixieland on “Two Boot Jacks.” And it’d be too limiting to cite the Mingus influence on “Fagundus,” with its superbly exultant howls from the horns and the slamming bassline, even though you can hear the great one in there (you might also think of it as a more caffeinated Adam Lane piece—yes, more). Rather, this band is now defiantly and joyfully occupying its own musical space, heard in the soulful bustle of “My Delightful Muse,” the shifting structures/tempos of “The Bats in Belfry,” and the fractured pop of “East Orwell,” with a nice descending line as the turnaround and sassy mute work over a suddenly emerging funk line. And for those seeking the undiluted pop goods, there’s an even more perverse gesture than the hip-hop “Night in Tunisia” from the last disc: an unironic (I think) performance of Billy Joel’s “Allentown” to close the disc. What’s next, “Sister Christian”?

Jason Bivins

Jair-rohm Parker Wells Trio Brotherly Love in Philadelphia Ayler ayl DL-101 download

Copperhead Trio Labyrinths

Ayler ayl_DL 080 download

Jan Ström continues Ayler's excellent download series with these diverse and satisfying releases, both recorded in the US. The Parker Wells date explodes into life, roaring through bursts of sound and silence that reference the cinematic forms engineered by the mid-1970s Miles Davis group. When “Kosher Clash” becomes “Afro Black and Blue,” the change has already been prefigured several times, unifying the two tracks with postmodern elegance. Maybe it’s because the performance took place at Philly’s Paul Green School of Rock, but there’s a penchant for funky modality throughout; just sample “Sultry Ultraviolated Violet” for some of Parker Wells’ slitherings around E, as Elliott Levin emotes, first in words and then on flute.

Up and down the scale he goes, Eric Slick’s drumming suffusing everything with mounting energy. Another jumpcut initiates “Persuasive Planning,” 66 | SIGNAL to NOISE #52

opening avenues of heavy funk à la Primetime or Ronald Shannon Jackson’s Decoding Society. But all this is but a prelude for the stunning “Knowledge of Allegiance,” whose full-bore flames threaten to engulf the listener even as the track swings the album toward its conclusion, Levin shouting surreal political warnings over the slowly dying fire.

By contrast, the Copperhead Trio date, recorded in Massachusetts in 2004, is more contemplative, even though it certainly has moments of high-volume release. “Corridors of Time” is typical of the overall sonic landscape as pianist Alon Nechushtan, bassist John Lockwood and drummer Bob Gulloti probe their instruments for the unorthodox sounds within. Even when higher dynamic levels are reached, as in “Road Map,” there is still a degree of introspection present, an endearing sort of freeform serenity. Nechushtan’s harmonic vocabulary is always right on the verge of becoming traditional; like Veryan Weston, he has an extraordinary grasp of early 20th-century tonality, channeling Scriabin and making his links with Bill Evans apparent. Yet the biggest surprise comes with the aptly named “Fantasmagorial,” not because it features a guest appearance by Bob Moses, but because somebody’s got an effects box! How else to explain the backwards high-register piano?

As always with Ayler, these are valuable releases, documenting fine boundary-blurring improvised music in superb recorded sound. Marc Medwin

Parts & Labor Receivers

Jagjaguwar / Brah JAG 133 CD

Dan Friel

a robotic cadence and sing-songy melody so catchy you’ll need a coat hanger and some luck to get it out of your head. Not surprisingly, parts of the record sound like a shrunken-down, vocal-free version of Parts & Labor, but even with machine rhythms it sounds like a distillation, not an unfinished demo version. The EP runs a hair over 24 minutes, long enough to enjoy but not so long that you get bored with its reduced palette of pixilated synth tones. Here’s hoping that Friel finds more room for those raw digital timbres on the next Parts & Labor record.

Bill Meyer

Mario Pavone Double Tenor Quintet

Musillami to arrange the pieces. The heads provide a great launching pad, displaying some of the angular lyricism of Thomas Chapin as the tightly voiced horns play off of Madsen’s floating, nuanced harmonies. Malaby and Greene (who both double on soprano) are a great fit, diving in with a canny sense of melodic invention and just the right touch of grit and muscle. They often edge toward freedom, but always circle back to the pieces’ melodic center.

Madsen’s piano anchors the music with a light touch and incredible sophistication, and Cleaver propels the music with a lithe sense of swing. The leader steers things with an assured sense of pulse and flow, his stalwart bass a guiding force throughout. Michael Rosenstein

Playscape PSR#011508 CD

Pendulum

Ancestors

Bassist Mario Pavone started out working with pianist Paul Bley in the late ’60s and went on to spend time with Wadada Leo Smith, Bill Dixon, Anthony Braxton, and the late, great Thomas Chapin. Along the way, he’s also managed to record an impressive series of sessions as a leader. For Ancestors (which is dedicated to Andrew Hill and Dewey Redman), Pavone’s assembled a two-tenor group that draws on several of his current working relationships. He’s collaborated with both Tony Malaby and Jimmy Greene over the last decade, but the two reed players had never played together before. Pianist Peter Madsen has been a long-time collaborator, while drummer Gerald Cleaver is a more recent associate.

Pavone wrote new compositions for the date, and then brought in Steven Bernstein, Dave Ballou, and Michael

Live at the Village Vanguard Mosaic Select CD x 3

From time to time, a group's improvisational chemistry is so complete and natural that every tune they play somehow becomes more than the sum of the parts. Similarly, once in a great while, a box set is released whose out-takes and alternate material clearly should have seen the light of day from the beginning. Such a group is Pendulum, and every track on this set is essential. In early 1978, veteran improviser Dave Liebman assembled a quintet to play an engagement at the Village Vanguard.

Though he, pianist Richie Beirach, bassist Frank Tusa, trumpeter Randy Brecker and drummer Al Foster would only release one album of these recordings, two nights of music were taped, and we are treated to the complete recordings 30 years later. Liebman’s long-fostered

collaborations with Beirach and Tusa— the former documented on another Select—provide the groundwork for Pendulum’s explosive synthesis of in-the-tradition harmony and outwardbound chromatic explorations, while Brecker and Foster fuel the flames in the manner of Miles Davis and Tony Williams’ mid-1960s partnership.

As with Davis’ Plugged Nickel box and Coltrane’s 1961 Village Vanguard recordings, hearing Pendulum blow through a series of originals and standards, sometimes in multiple versions, is revelatory. Indeed, Pendulum’s reverence for Trane is represented abundantly here, most obviously in a scorching version of “Impressions.” In a Coltrane conference held in Southern France in November 2007, Liebman remarked that Coltrane was like the elephant in the room—no player of the time could ignore his innovations, and it simply became a question of how they were incorporated into a new musical language. In this performance, Liebman breaks headlong into a series of late-Trane atoms, those gemlike, harmonically ambiguous motives that Coltrane perfected in his final period.

Beirach follows every nuance and harmonic implication, reimagining modality afresh with every chord, and the rhythm section imbues the tune with the raw vitality and high energy of Coltrane’s classic quartet.

“Impressions” presents a microcosm of the controlled freneticism and telepathic exchanges throughout the set, as when Beirach and Foster swap rhythmic ideas on disc 1’s “Pendulum,” Brecker emoting with wild post-bop freedom over the exchanges. Tempi are uniformly quick, save for the two

versions of Liebman’s beautiful “Picadilly Lilly,” taken at a graceful stroll. It is Foster and Tusa who make the quicker tempi work, Tusa responding with ease and sophistication to everything Beirach lays down, while Foster’s soloing is a wonder to behold. He sculpts his solos around the cymbals, slowly introducing timbral differentiation without changing dynamics or tempo, never letting a ride pattern go until he deems the moment right. His solos emerge rather than begin, each edifice erected brick by brick until the structure becomes crystal clear.

Energy and virtuosity feed each other on every track, creating perfect balance and keeping interest sky high.

Marc Medwin

Morris Pert

Desert Dances Buckyball BR021 CD

The Music of Stars Buckyball BR019 CD

Scottish composer Morris Pert’s long, storied career and continued trajectory (now over 30 years in the making) might surprise those who are only aware of his work shoring up ’70s jazz-rock outfits such as Brand X or on loan to Peter Gabriel, Mike Oldfield and Kate Bush.

Having studied under master percussionist Stomu Yamash’ta no doubt laid the groundwork for his own accomplishments, but Pert’s a restless spirit who aligns himself with any number of folks operating outside common spheres of influence. He’s made inroads into avant-garde composition and experimental electronics; what’s surprising is how extraordinary these recordings are, rich with textures obvious and arcane, innovative in so many respects

Ghost Town

Important IMPREC187 CD

On Stay Afraid and Mapmaker, Parts & Labor perfected a new wrinkle on over-the-top monster-hook punk rock by putting Dan Friel and BJ Warshaw’s cheap toy keyboards as well as guitars through their fuzz boxes, then having drummer Christopher Weingarten overplay with unerring precision and unstoppable energy. The effect was a bit like a low–bit-rate digital version of Hüsker Dü, and like Hüsker Dü, it couldn’t last.

This album debuts a new version of Parts & Labor that’s been updated in the same way that new car models are: bigger, slicker, but not necessarily better.

Joseph Wong replaces Weingarten, and he doesn’t even try to compete with his predecessor’s insane energy.

Instead he provides a more streamlined groove, one that gets the job without ever getting in the way. New guitarist Sarah Lipstate frees Friel to play electronics full time, but again, the move is in a more conventional direction. His accompaniment on “Little Ones” adds harmonic cushioning behind a massed sing-along, not the don’t-cut-yourfingers edge of the single melodic lines found on earlier records. Lyrically, Parts & Labor are still fighting the good fight, slinging missiles of doubt and distrust at the powers that be, and they might attract new listeners with this more accessible sound, but some old fans will find Receivers a bit watered down.

Friel’s latest solo record, Ghost Town, on the other hand, distills his knack for making splendidly trashy-sounding electronic tunes. “Desert Song” has WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #52 | 67

that Pert’s relative obscurity is a situation now in sore need of amendment.

Desert Dances goes a long way towards balancing the scales. Pert’s assimilation of far-flung drumming techniques, not to mention his commandeering a staggering assortment of rhythm-makers to augment his piquant electronics, melds into a sonic tour-de-force. Though the tracks have some obvious signifiers—Jon Hassell, Steve Shehan, Wally Badarou, Steve Roach—their vertical constructions also allow for noise (delayed synths occupying the heady climes of “Baktra”) and even broach Pert’s prior jazz affiliations, as on “Casablanca” and the nighttime piano cascades of “Tangier Nights.”

Still, the record is naggingly difficult to pin down—pianos that descend as much from avant-garde soundtracks as Bowie’s Low, synths that iris out of a fourth-world steambath, and an interlocking percussive maelstrom that recalls Mickey Hart or a noisier O Yuki Conjugate. Desert Dances marries primitive soul tribalisms to front brain acrobatics in a way not seen since the heyday of Hassell’s Power Spot.

The Music of Stars is a whole different animal. Here, Pert’s broken free of his earthly moorings to travel the spaceways, as itinerant an explorer as any dozen bedroom boffins mainlining their Moogs. The music brings to mind space critters past (pre-sequencer Klaus Schulze, Tangerine Dream, et al.) and current (Heldon and even Biosphere creep to mind); Pert’s either kept his ear to the ground, channeling contemporary wizards of the drone and dark ambient arts, or somehow within the vacuum of his studio has stumbled on to what might one day be considered a diehard electronic classic. Isolationist not only in concept but design, layered yet disarmingly subtle when it needs to be, there’s plenty on The Music of Stars to stimulate the cerebral cortex and inner ear canals. The gaping abyssal synths of “Spica” rise up out of breathless silences amid strange twinkles and deepspace gasps; “Arich” relies on reverbed gongs and pulsing liquid rushes to catapult you far into its ominous core; the extraterrestrial metallurgy of “Heze” resonates with a latent power that is nearly overwhelming. Pert’s managed to realize a work that finds a unique middle-ground between the Alien soundtrack and the solipsistic ambient of artists like Sleep Research Facility and Tholen. This is one of the finest pieces of dreadzone electronica you’ll come across this year. Darren Bergstein

Barre Phillips & Joëlle Léandre A l'improviste

Kadima Collective KCR 16 CD

Joëlle Léandre Akosh S. KOR

Leo LR 522 CD

Joëlle Léandre and Barre Phillips have met before, notably in the bass quartet with William Parker and Tetsu Saitoh captured on 2005’s After You Gone (Victo), but going back at least as far as 1983, when they performed together in duo and trio (with George Lewis) on Léandre’s Les Douze Sons (Nato). It’s a slippery prospect, the double bass duet, but Léandre and Phillips clearly have the history and sensibility to keep from 68 | SIGNAL to NOISE #52

driving into the mud. A l’improviste was recorded live in 2007 (in her native and his adopted France), and it’s a joy to listen to. Their combined mastery makes for a record that is at once serious (in the “high art” sense) and playful.

They give each other plenty of space, homing in on different pitch-ranges and varying arco and pizzicato; it’s quite easy to distinguish who’s playing. The sense of familiarity is evident throughout the seven tracks, but is brought home with a little spoken teasing at the end. It would be an insult to call this session “effortless,” but to their credit they make it sound that way.

Quite the opposite is true of KOR, Léandre’s duet with Akosh S., aka Hungarian reed player Szelevenyi Akos.

Léandre is perhaps at her best in duo, seemingly able to read and respond to any player she meets, and KOR is a muscular session, made all the stronger by the close, bright recording. When Akosh has his flute or clarinet in hand, she goes a bit easier on him, even backing him up with a walking bass line—though she then starts absolutely pounding, as if to see how hard she can push him. But when he picks up the soprano or tenor sax she explodes, giving him (and even the listener) a fullon workout. Together they raise a level of intensity that shows through even in their respective solo passages. Léandre is always a powerful player, but at times KOR jumps to surprising levels, as if it’s somehow leaping out of the confines of the stereo. Kurt Gottschalk

Odean Pope with Sunny Murray and Lee Smith Plant Life

parts powerful feelings and intelligence, bursting with ideas and life. He ranks among the most original players to expand on John Coltrane’s legacy.

Serenity is an unusual entry in Pope’s discography. An unaccompanied solo album of mainly gospel songs and spirituals (and the “Star-Spangled Banner” just for the surreal heck of it), it was recorded outdoors, complete with the sound of singing birds and falling rain, in the early evening and at dawn at the CIMP label’s Adirondack Mountains compound. Performing at the times of day most conducive to reflection and reverie, Pope plays in a contemplative mood. Although he’s solitary, it’s actually not an entirely private recital. Pope seems to want to share with the listener the solemnity and sustaining strength of the old tunes; he often plays as if he were singing. On “Wade in the Water” and “There Is a Balm in Gilead,” he maintains a connection to the song as he improvises or simply embellishes the tune as he plays it. “Go Down Moses” features an improvisation worthy of the spiritual’s humility and piety. The early morning session is more exploratory and far-ranging, especially “What a Friend We Have in Jesus,” “Variations on Ellington’s Come Sunday,” and the completely spontaneous “Serenity.”

But this is by and large a humble and even selfless performance, and all the more powerful for it. Ed Hazell

Ratchet Orchestra Live at the Sala Rosa Ratchet CD

Montreal has a rich history of big band music, from Vic Vogel’s large jazz ensembles to the agitprop post-rock

of Godspeed You! Black Emperor. For his Ratchet Orchestra, bassist Nicolas Caloia draws upon members of the city’s musique actuelle, free jazz and avant-rock communities, including Jean Derome, Sam Shalabi, John Heward, Gen Heistek, Chris Burns, Gordon Allen and Gordon Krieger. Just by virtue of the sheer number of personnel involved, this 26-piece orchestra—two violins, two violas, a 12-piece reed and horn section, two electric guitars, piano, bass, and four percussionists—could have been an unwieldy beast, but Caloia succeeds here with aplomb.

This CD includes three Caloia originals as well as two Sun Ra pieces and one by (Guy?) Lombardo; they are fine examples of his ability to tip a hat to the history of jazz big-bands from the 1930s to the present while putting his own stamp on the music. Caloia wastes no time letting the orchestra stretch on the opener, “September”; it builds from a romantic, autumnal, string-swooning swell to a free-for-all climax, ending with a robust, percussive coda that segues into Sun Ra’s stately “Love on a Faraway Planet.” A triumphant horn fanfare acts as a call to the clave rhythms and silky strings of “Carmine,” which should have Ellington smiling down from above. The strings turn acerbic on “T(h)rust,” which quickly blasts off with heaving, jostling interplay then soars into some serious fire music. The temperature lowers somewhat on the brooding, vaguely Eastern vistas of Sun Ra’s “Tiny Pyramids.” Forlorn trumpets and ruminative piano figures signal the beginning of “Unconditional,” which (though it’s a Caloia original) definitely comes from Ra’s solar system. Throughout the disc, the playing is top-notch,

offering plenty of strong solos (though they never take away from the cohesion of the orchestra). After being around for more than a decade, this is one ensemble that deserves wider exposure.

Richard Moule

Bruno Råberg Lifelines

Orbis OM0508 CD x 2

Chris Speed Chris Cheek Stephane Furic Leibovici Jugendstil

ESP-Disk 4048 CD

Aaron Irwin Group Blood and Thunder

Fresh Sound New Talent FSNT320 CD

Tenor and soprano saxophonist Chris Cheek makes appearances on a trio of recent albums that highlight his ever-evolving instrumental voice.

Maybe best known for his work with Paul Motian’s Electric Bebop Band and Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra, the 40-year-old New Yorker checks in here with his fifth record with bassist Stephane Furic Leibovici and debut efforts with bassist Bruno Raberg and alto saxophonist Aaron Irwin, all of whom give Cheek plenty to work with and the listener plenty to discover.

There’s a moment in “Agni,” the second track off the Swedish-born Raberg’s new double disc Lifelines, when you swear you’ve been drugged. Ben Monder’s snaky reverb bends around Cheek’s sax lick, sways alongside it a while and falls into Ted Poor’s beats; amid the dizziness, Raberg’s between-

the-beats plod hands you a little bit of light, but try tracing a straight line toward it and your head starts to hurt.

Like hallucinogens, Raberg tricks your senses; just-slightly-off rhythms and textures dot his compositions, and though he works in relatively straightforward post-bop formats, his personal touches come straight from the impressionists. Dig how the cymbal-shimmers lap at the tips of Cheek’s floating lines in “Gymnastics/Skyscapes,” before vanishing in Monder’s lattice of picked lines. At nearly 130 minutes, Lifelines is no small investment of your time, but it goes by deceptively quickly. Tempos ebb and flow cyclically: each disc begins with contemplative, carefullycomposed pieces before loosening up toward the end with several straight freely improvised numbers, then ends with affirmations. “Ballad for Summer’s End” concludes disc one with warm rhapsody, decorated by Monder with dollops of Jim Hall-style comping. Disc two’s “New Land,” with huge basschords swooping across the progressions, bears all the promise of shorelines after an excursion in a wide sea: familiar, attainable, exploding with color.

While the idea of a drummerless jazz trio is no longer a novelty, bassist Stephane Furic Leibovici goes one step further to suggest new permutations of the skins-free format, even with the ghost of Jimmy Giuffre’s landmark Free Fall hovering in the background.

Jugendstil has the sense of ethereal stillness that marked Giuffre’s early ’60s group, as Leibovici’s bass rises into the ether alongside Chris Speed’s clarinet lines and Cheek’s sax licks. Close listening reveals worlds of wowing interplay: Cheek and Speed converse in helix-like

Porter PRCD 4017 CD

Odean Pope Serenity

CIMPoL 5002 CD

The combination of tenor saxophonist Odean Pope and drummer Sunny Murray is counter-intuitive; neither is an obvious choice of partner for the other, despite their shared roots in the Philadelphia scene. On Plant Life there’s clearly plenty of mutual respect between the two, but there’s none of the chemistry that Pope shares with drummer Craig McIver or that Murray displays with saxophonist Sabir Mateen.

Unfortunately, Murray often ends up sounding like the odd man out in this trio. The mix puts him way in the background for one thing. And there’s an obvious affinity between Pope and bassist Lee Smith, who is the sort of supple, interactive groove-definer that suits Pope best. But given the high level of musicianship among these three, there are still moments on the disc to savor. Murray’s willfully perverse, off-balance swing is full of surprises.

During Smith’s solo on “Happiness Tears,” he enshrouds the bassist in a mist of cymbals, then lays out, leaving him exposed except for an occasional rim shot. And no matter how much Murray’s attention appears to wander, he will pull some move—an accent that falls dead on, or a fill that sets off a phrase just right—that shows he really is on top of the action. He’s still a stubborn original after 40-odd years. Pope, no youngster himself, still sounds robust, driving, and precise. His solos on “Plant Life” and “Scorpio Twins” convey equal WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #52 | 69

spirals in “A Music of Tranquility,” while Speed lays down laconic low-end beds under the bluesy “Three Kinds of Folks” with a subliminal sense of placement.

The trio’s rhythmic precision is astounding considering there’s no overt beat present; “Les Nuits de la Chapoulie” and the five-part “Carter Variations” (a tribute to composer Elliott Carter) are paced with the discipline of classical music. To be sure, the 45-minute album isn’t too far off from chamber music at points, but there’s no academic flavour, just the candor of jazz stripped to its essence. It’s pretty hard to believe that this is only the fifth record in almost 20 years by the bassist, who previously has been known simply as Stephane Furic.

“Blood and Thunder,” the title track on alto saxophonist Aaron Irwin’s second full-length, has all the bluster its name implies: brass lines tangle, drums skitter and guitar lays distorted filigrees over the proceedings. But what could easily signal free-blowing release gives way, instead, to the rhapsodic vamp of “Back to You,” where the blood and thunder become genial café warmth.

Irwin is awesome at such U-turns, and perhaps because of his early days on the mainstream bop scene, there are plenty of traditional elements in his music. “Until We Say Our Last Goodbye,” a lush ballad with guest violinist Eliza Cho, wouldn’t sound out of place on a Bud Shank record. And covers of “From This Moment On” and “Very Early” treat Cole Porter and Bill Evans reverently. But Irwin’s original compositions are far from backwards-looking, and the band—featuring Cheek, Monder, bassist Matt Clohesy and drummer Ferenc Nemeth—turns them into the dynamic staircases of lines. “Like the Sunshine,” while not as incendiary as the title track, is full of uneasy sonorities as the saxes lap restlessly at the melody.

“Little Hurts” stages a cat-and-mouse saxophone chase amid Monder’s furious guitar soloing and barely stops for breath to let the choruses unfold.

Somewhere between the city’s refinement and the wilderness’s blood and thunder, Irwin suggests room for lyrical middle ground, and succeeds beautifully. Nathan Turk

Religious Knives The Door

Ecstatic Peace! E#100 CD

On The Door, Brooklyn's Religious Knives continue their shift away from the incense-fog drone of their early sides, further evolving their heady psychedelic garage slop. Now fleshed out to a four piece—organist/vocalist Maya Miller, guitar/synth/vocalist Michael Bernstein, drummer Nate Nelson and bassist Todd Cavallo—the band’s sound is thicker than ever. Miller and Bernstein trade off vocals but each favors an icy monotone that stacks nicely against the propulsive plodding of the rhythm section. “Downstairs” and “Basement Watch” thrive on this interaction, threading organ notes and repeating guitar licks through a percussive haze. Album centerpieces “On A Drive” and “The Storm” are the heaviest, darkest material here. The former is a blissed-out dirge that packs enough spine-tingling chill to make any nighttime drive seem like a trip through a demon underworld. “The Storm” is overheated and gooey; the dank basement equivalent of an ap70 | SIGNAL to NOISE #52

proaching summer squall. For all its epic atmosphere, The Door fails to achieve the one-mind cohesion glimpsed on some of the band’s live sets, such as last year’s Live at Big Jar bootleg. Still, it’s difficult not to want to sink into the depths of The Door’s atmospheric urban decay.

Ethan Covey

Revolutionary Snake Ensemble Forked Tongue Cuneiform Rune 269 CD

Ken Field

Under the Skin Innova 208 CD

Boston-based saxophonist Ken Field is a key member of the eclectic Birdsongs of the Mesozoic and the leader of the good-time gonzo collective Revolutionary Snake Ensemble. Forked Tongue is the RSE’s second record in 18 years together, and the septet provides rousing good fun on twelve slices of boisterous horn interplay and rock-solid funk grooves spurred on by the tandem drumming of Phil Neighbors and Erik Paull. Think of a brass-band mindset mixed with the zaniness of Sun Ra and P-Funk. The New Orleans influence is clear: aside from the RSE’s penchant for colorful dress, you can hear it in their opening march through the traditional “Just a Closer Walk,” the funeral air of “Speak to Me Jesus” and the moody “Down by the Riverside.” But out from left field comes their take on (yes, really) Billy Idol’s “White Wedding,” a brass fantasy that is full of laughs. Equally off the wall are “Que Sera, Que Sera” and Ornette Coleman’s “Chippie,” the latter transformed into a slow drag. As far as Field’s compositions, they mix well with the repertory material: check out the splendid funk of “Slots,” the pennywhistle and alto mélange of “The Large S,” the crime jazz of “Minor Vee,” or the swirling farewell march of “Under the Skin.” The RSE is a gloriously humorous and creative group that makes great music with tongue firmly in cheek.

The EP Under the Skin is an eightselection compendium presenting the musical segment of Field’s multimedia dance collaboration with Art Bridgman and Myrna Packer. On his first solo outing since 1999, Field stacks multi-tracked horns against the shifting rhythmic undertow of bassist Jesse Williams and RSE drummer Phil Neighbors. Field sticks to his keen fascination with groove throughout, though the tribal vibe of the crescendo of “Om the Range” is perhaps the record’s most potent excursion. The serene sax choir of “Five Saxophones in Search of Meaning” is in a quieter vein, and Field’s wall of reeds is thoughtful, yet slightly foreboding on the sax-plus-percussion dance of “Slits in the Curtain.”

Jay Collins

Rusted Shut Hot Sex Dull Knife LP

Since 1986, Houston’s foremost purveyors of pure nihilism and scum rock have waged an unforgiving blitzkrieg of prodding bass, pounding drums and slash-and-burn guitar dissonance.

Despite their tiny recorded output (Hot Sex is their first album in 10 years and only the second in their 22-year career), the band has managed to develop a

cult following. They survive on a formula co-opted by many of today’s most effective hardcore bands: noisy riffs, growled vocals and violent execution.

Each chord from leader/founder Don Walsh’s guitar bleeds a wall of psychotic rabbit squeals and splinters of molten rage. The band piles their charms atop the demonic “Woman,” slowing the tempo to a sludge metal snail’s pace and letting Walsh’s cigarette-hampered vocals explore Texan debauchery. During each song, the rhythm gets sucked into a void dominated by chaotic guitar spasms and apocalyptic drumming, before developing into a frustrating mess of repeating sound samples. “A Night in Hell” starts with a serial killer sound sample and devolves into a sharp-edged, filthy sludge punk assault.

It serves as a reminder of why, even with the Chinese Democracy-like wait between official albums, Rusted Shut remains vital. The band’s music warrants the most disgusting, degenerate descriptions in the best possible way. The band oozes this sort of primordial sleaze that works like a thick coating around their person, rendering them immune to the conventional rock ’n roll death. If you’ve never witnessed the drunkenly intense live show, be grateful they came out from under their rock to create this record. Steven Kobak

Alexander von Schlippenbach Evan Parker Paul Lovens

Gold is Where You Find It Intakt 143 CD

When the Schlippenbach Trio recorded Pakistani Pomade back in 1972, what they created was a revolutionary response to the music and culture of the time. Thirty-five years on, this group has become part of the tradition without losing their revolutionary edge.

The recordings they made during the ’70s have gone on to become classics, which continue to spark new generations of listeners. After an extended hiatus during the ’80s, they returned to recording with Elf Bagatellen, which seemed to renew their ongoing commitment to the group. Since then, recordings have continued to drift out at a fairly regular pace, most capturing live

performances from what has become an annual European tour. This release is a return to the studio, and it is marked by a few things. First off, most of the ten pieces are quite short, half of them clocking in at less than five minutes.

Next, seven of the pieces are compositions, with three by Lovens, two by Parker, and two by Schlippenbach. And finally, Parker sticks to tenor, forgoing the snaking intensity of his soprano.

That said, the music still draws on the rich vocabulary the trio has established over past decades. There is Schlippenbach’s structural freedom, encompassing everything from serialism to angular stride to crashing intensity. Parker’s garrulous tenor is in full force, full of stabbing intensity yet able to drop down to quiet deliberation. Then there is Lovens’ sense of time combined with a keen ear for percussive color, aptly summed up in the credits of a recent release as “selected drums and cymbals.” Even an initial listen reveals how highly developed the interaction is between the three. But dig in a bit more and the telepathy is astounding. At any point, any of them can provide a subtle nudge and the others seamlessly follow.

The sense of tension and balance never flags through the session. On “Z.D.W.A.” and “Cloudburst” the three build collective improvisations with blazing force, while on the title track, Schlippenbach shades his carefully placed notes with plucked and scraped strings; Lovens responds with pin-prick damped drums and cymbals, and Parker unfurls stop-start, fragmented melodic loops and flutters. This is the type of mature statement that only comes from a group that has played as long as this has. It makes a great complement to Winterreise, the live CD released a few years back on Parker’s Psi label. Michael Rosenstein

The Sea and Cake Car Alarm

Thrill Jockey thrill205 CD

The talented guys who make up this Chicago outfit usually take some time off between albums for other pursuits, but right on the heels of 2007’s Everybody they apparently went back into the studio to record Car Alarm, their seventh album. They sound as

tight as they ever have, as if after 14 years of playing together the band has developed a kind of musical mindmeld. If there’s a problem with the Sea and Cake, it’s that over the years they’ve kept returning to a similar sound. These are subtle songs that reveal their inner secrets after many repeat listens, but the shimmering surfaces may lull you into thinking that you’ve heard it all before.

Still, Car Alarm does show the Sea and Cake occasionally breaking out of its customary jazzy grooves. The first track, “Aerial,” opens with an unusually brash riff and ends with a guitar solo over the sort of cycling chord pattern that the Feelies used to play. On “Weekend,” the synthesizer lines point in the direction of electronica. On the energetic title track, the amps are turned up a couple of notches, and the interweaving electric guitar lines during the breaks between the verses feel like the song’s true “chorus.” They suggest the power that the Sea and Cake might have if the musicians really let loose, but this band is more about precision than abandon, even if Sam Prekop and his bandmates (Archer Prewitt, Eric Claridge and John McEntire) do achieve a certain power by bearing down on their compositions with careful concentration. Car Alarm is a solid collection of songs that Sea and the Cake fans are likely to embrace, but whenever the musicians tinker with the band’s standard formula, it leaves you wondering what else they might be capable of. It's fitting when Prekop sings: “When I find inspiration, I keep it locked up, I want more.” Robert Loerzel

Christine Sehnaoui Michael Waisvisz Shortwave

Al Maslakh AL 008 CD

Stéphane Rives

Much Remains to Be Heard Al Maslakh AL 009 CD

Al Maslakh, the label helmed by Beirutbased trumpeter Mazen Kerbaj, usually restricts its releases to music made in Lebanon or by Lebanese, but the selection of non-Lebanese artists whose music they've issued says as much about this scene’s aesthetic as anything contributed by the locals. They’ve generally been players who test their

instruments’ limits or challenge notions of what constitutes an instrument at all. And so it is here. Dutchman Michel Waisvisz directed the electronic music research institute STEIM for 27 years before his death from cancer last June; the instruments he invented and the software that he helped to midwife were all about transferring control from manufacturer to creator. This is especially true of The Hands, the sensorbased MIDI system that he plays here.

His Lebanese partner in spontaneous sound, alto saxophonist Christine Sehnaoui, may be an acoustic musician, but she’s a kindred soul nonetheless; her chosen vocabulary of pops, squelches, and twitters constitutes a flat rejection of the way her horn “should” be played.

A quirk of timing—this is Waisvisz’s first studio recording in decades as well as his first posthumous release—confers a sense of import upon Shortwave. But the music isn’t terribly concerned with trying to be special: unique, disorienting, confrontational, comic, certainly, but not special. Sehnaoui has reimagined her horn as a compositionally creative fishtank filter, bubbling up shapes from the deep. Sometimes the man with The Hands meets her on her own turf; “The Bottom of the Pond” sounds so squelchy it’ll make you want to tuck a towel under your CD player. But on “Wig Wag,” undulating electricity and metallic scrapes fillet and fry the hypothetical fish in her horn’s bell, eliciting a marvelous death rattle from the saxophonist just before the track’s end.

These musicians may not be able to own the world, but on a few days in the fall of 2006 they made sound their own.

Soprano saxophonist Stéphane Rives’s second solo CD is as radical and more severe. Five years ago, Fibres (Potlatch) applied severe reduction to the straight horn’s potential materials, concentrating on single tones at the edge of hearing in ways that eliminated the player’s personality from the played sound. It was all about unsettling the listener’s experience of listening. Much Remains to Be Heard is even more challenging. The last shreds of saxophonishness are gone, leaving mainly wavering tones and degraded buzzes that sound more like something Toshimaru Nakamura might get out of his no-input mixing board than any product of

Jack Wright on free improvisation and politics: the imaginary interview free copy Email jackwri444 at aol.com with postal address More info: www.springgardenmusic.com WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #52 | 71

breath, reeds, and metal tubing. The CD presents an hour-long house performance unbroken, the better to preserve the stretches of silence that isolate and frame each discrete sound exposition.

This isn’t really music, it’s sound creation as a means of inquiry into its own nature and the effect it has upon the listener.

Get it for the trip, not the destination.

Bill Meyer

U. Shrinivas Samjanitha Dreyfus 36281 CD

Niladri Kumar Zitar

Dreyfus 36280 CD

These two divergent releases both feature Indian musicians in their thirties who have been associated with Zakir Hussain. Mandolinist U. Shrinivas is familiar to Western audiences through his work with John McLaughlin and Remember Shakti, while Kumar, a native of Calcutta who plays the electric sitar, has recorded with Swedish bassist Jonas Hellborg.

Of the two recordings, Shrinivas’s has the more traditional sound. The opening tracks have a devotional feeling, but gradually the pieces move into what sound like extended jams over the elastic rhythms laid down by Hussain and bassist Dominique de Piazza. The staccato sound of the mandolin is set off against the fluidity of U. Rajesh’s Hindustani slide guitar as the musicians get into some serious grooves. John McLaughlin guests on one track of an album full of virtuosic fireworks.

Kumar, whose father studied with Ravi Shankar, calls himself a fifthgeneration sitar player. He’s active on the Indian music scene, including Bollywood soundtrack work, and that pop influence is very evident here. Lush, dreamy backgrounds created by the programming of Aggi Fernandes melt into unabashed pop sweetness and fluff, particularly on “Love in September,” which features a very Claudine Longet-inspired vocal (in English) by Dominique Cerejo. In fact, the album often sounds more like a feature for Fernandes than for Kumar, and it appears to be aimed at a squarely middle of the road audience. Michael Chamberlain

Skogen Skogen

Bombax bombax Bb001 CD-R

Unforgettable H2O Flatefjäll

Bombax bombax Bb002 CD-R

Anders Dahl Doorbells

Bombax bombax Bb003 CD-R

Bombax bombax is a new CD-R label from Sweden with an appealing, consistent packaging aesthetic—each disc in a slipcase, wrapped in a screen-printed sleeve with artwork from Ellinor Ström —and an equally considered release schedule. Their first batch of titles remind me a little of the glory days of the Swedish Häpna imprint, something reinforced both by the music contained on the releases, touching as it does on modern composition, sound art, minimalism and chamber/post-rock, and the personnel, as Skogen’s Magnus Granberg and Henrik Olsson also make 72 | SIGNAL to NOISE #52

up Sheriff, whose self-titled album from 2001 was Häpna’s fourth release. But Bombax bombax feel more refined, perhaps ascetic, and less given at this early stage to populist moves. The Skogen album is a good case in point— featuring one forty-minute composition

by Granberg, played in understated manner by a quintet, it reminds this listener of several things, from Gastr Del Sol’s quieter moments, to some of Christian Wolff’s pieces, and even a touch of Morton Feldman (in the piano, at least). Granberg’s mostly interested in short sounds, which means that his piano, Erik Carlsson’s percussion and Leo Svensson’s cello drop tiny cells and phrases of asynchronous melody into deep wells of silence, as Olsson’s bowls and percussion slowly patter away, and he and Petter Wästberg let high, ringing tones sing out as though they’re strung across the piano’s strings.

It’s beautiful, heavy on the restraint, and quite gorgeous in its becalmed yet austere way.

Unforgettable H2O’s lineup features Carlsson, Olsson and Wästberg from Skogen, alongside Mattilda Nordenström and Anders Dahl. There’s an amount of conceptual consistency between Flatefjäll and Skogen, though Unforgettable H2O are more interested in the amusical properties of percussion and electronics. There’s a junkyard aesthetic to parts of Flatefjäll—scrapings on metal and percussion, blasts of fuzzed-out radio, weeping feedback spilling through clanking cymbals— that’s appealing in its roughness, but the playing is also very decisive, with sharpedged cutoffs determining much of the dynamics, alongside a tendency toward incrementally changing repetitions of blocks of audio roughage. Imagine an EAI/musique concrete take on The New Blockaders’ anti-art noise.

On his own, Unforgettable H2O’s Dahl builds electro-acoustic processionals which cross over into the world of modern laptop art: much like the music of Swedish trio Tape, Dahl’s compositions are sturdy and considered, but their sounds are welcoming—there are touches of drone and folk throughout, even as the opening “Doorbell, feedback, tapes, electronics” whittles away quietly, sculpting form from blocks of electro-abstraction. As the title suggests, the humble doorbell is the hinge for the three pieces on here, though it’s sufficiently alienated from one’s mental impression of the doorbell’s sound and function. Dahl’s compositions are long and lovely, intricate and patiently wrought, and slyly experimental—they reward patience even as they also allow the listener to float and bob in the ‘now’ of sound. Modern collage, beautifully realized. Jon Dale

songs demonstrate more extended uses of the computer’s mixing desk potential. “Aqueduct” features an acoustic guitar doodle backgrounded by snapping electronic windowpanes, while “Fluxgate” embellishes that troubadorian combination with virtuallyextended drum pops. It’s like the round bwoop you get when you remove your arm from the bottom of a talking drum, tweaked extensively. The surf-rock aesthetic of the Ventures informs “A Real Woman,” the one track with lyrics. The manifesto/rant-like quality of the words seems directed against folks who think that every opinion they have is important and should be documented, and the lines are pretty funny when understood as ironic criticism: “you think a lot about the world today / you think a lot about what to say / everything you say it should be listened to / everything you say it should be understood.” My only concern is the title: why is the critique directed at women and not men? The flexible membrane between reality and online living should inspire more fruitful scrutiny. Andrew Choate

Marnie Stern

This Is It and I Am It and You Are It and So Is That and He Is It and She Is It and It Is It and That Is That Kill Rock Stars KRS CD

Marnie Stern could sing exclusively about tanks or speedboats or the type of crane than can only be constructed with the help of many smaller cranes.

Such is the depth of her talent and the shine of her style. “I’m like a raging animation,” she coos during “Steely.”

See? She’s a belligerent cartoon. This Is It... offers big-britches sloganeering—see the title, but also “Roads?

Where We’re Going We Don’t Need Roads”—but Stern levels her voice and her guitar, trebly instruments of destruction, at small, thick barriers: the future, companionship, triumph. For This Is It..., Stern moved into a studio, once again pairing with Hella’s Zach Hill. The effect is a sturdier, full-band construct that gives tunes like “The Crippled Jazzer” or, less successfully, “Vault” a lurching, post-punk aura that feels philosophically different from the whisking strands of her debut, even when the overall sound

is unmistakably her own. Stern’s physical voice takes up more space: the echo effects on “Shea Stadium” conjure its namesake; “Ruler”’s sighing choruses are buoyed by Stern’s worn-in leads.

On “The Package Is Wrapped” Stern talks of “Dimensions I must enter to see what I am made of,” and Hill provides the sort of rhythmic depth that makes those dimensions almost tangible. “I’m drawing ideas in the sand,” Stern sings during “Simon Says,” but her guitar suggests a more permanent etching.

This Is It... thrives on the tension between Stern’s untouchable instrumental explosions and her soft-skull wanderings; she is more present on this album, but there is the sense that pressing one spot too hard could result in permanent damage, if not outright collapse. On “Roads?”: “I present two sides! / My hopelessness and my faith / My ego and my heart.” That guitar, it’s a buttress; an incandescent, laser-y buttress.

Andrew Gaerig

Suarasama

Fajar Di Atas Awan Drag City DC364 CD / LP x 2

World music takes some well-deserved criticism for being a market niche shaped by westerners unconscious of or unconcerned about their motives for consuming exotica. How would music made by trained ethnomusicologists who come from a favorite target of world music purchasers sound? In the case of Suarasama, an ensemble of academics from Northern Sumatra, startlingly like the work of American amateur ethnomusicologists. For what are today’s audio omnivores if not self-appointed musicologists who skip the methodology and go straight to the listening? (And if you say that’s like skipping the peas and going straight to the pork chop, I say, “But of course!”)

If like me you’re so linguistically challenged that you can’t identify Indonesian languages by ear, you might not even realize where Suarasama comes from. The guitar playing owes a lot to flamenco; mixed with Persian and Indian drums, pan-Arabic ud, Indian sruti box, and vocal harmonies that would sound just right on an Espers record, they’re one Chuck Berry cover short of calling themselves The Sons

Of Sandy Bull. The record oscillates between pleasantly mellow vocal numbers and more kinetic instrumentals led by Irwansyah Harahap’s tart forays on several different stringed things.

What sets this apart from the work of American amateurs is a certain polish and professionalism, which makes it go down smooth but extracts some of the kick. The music makes its point without any hash-addled noodling or attitudinal mumbling. While the vocals taste more like margarine than chili powder, they’re spread judiciously enough that the record skirts blandness. It’s only when the ud and gambus get going that things get thrilling. Bill Meyer

Sun Ra All Stars

Milan, Zürich, West Berlin, Paris Transparency 0311 CD x 5

Transparency continues its series of archival Sun Ra releases with this fivedisc set documenting an all-star lineup that toured Europe in 1983. Drummers Famoudou Don Moye and Philly Joe Jones are joined by trumpeters Don Cherry and Lester Bowie and saxophonists John Gilmore, Archie Shepp and Marshall Allen, while bassist Richard Davis anchors the proceedings. Of course, Ra’s inimitable piano is at the center, along with the sense of mysterious fun that pervades most of his concert recordings. The sound is by no means perfect, but it’s certainly passable, apart from a few rough moments at the beginning of all but the Milan shows. At full bore, such as the louder moments of “Over the Rainbow” on the Paris date, some fairly substantial distortion occurs, but it somehow enhances the experience, bringing the music so close to your face it feels dangerous. Check out the wild version of “Stars That Shine Darkly” for some of the more organized chaos.

Then there are the moments of supreme but transparent beauty, such as Archie Shepp’s distant but rapturous playing on “Over the Rainbow.” He builds his solo out of miniscule motivic ideas, a quiver here, a wow-and-flutter there: the results are one of the most vibrato-laden, heart-breaking versions of the old standard I’ve ever heard. Equally poignant are Ra’s piano solos, especially

the one from West Berlin, which ranges from the angelically sweet to full-on combat mode, rife with glissandi and powerful octaves. It’s not strictly a solo, as silky trumpet, triangle and percussion can be heard in the background before, unfortunately, the recording fades. As with the best early 1980s Ra, tradition and innovation are unified happily, as can be heard in the exciting rendition of “King Porter Stomp” that opens disc 2 of the Milan concert. This rollicking run-through gives a new meaning to the phrase “collective improvisation,” bringing some of the Arkestra’s serious humor into play as solos fade wittily in and out.

These shows have circulated on tape for years, but Transparency is to be thanked for making them available to a wider public. With many more releases on the horizon, the label keeps giving devotees and new converts something to look forward to. Marc Medwin

Taj Mahal Maestro

Heads Up HUCD 3164 CD

There’s something kind of sad about the cavalcade-of-stars album, like a plea for attention by someone who—by virtue of their guest list—shouldn’t have to ask. Commercial concerns might dictate that a boost is needed, but the “judge me by my friends” approach can be disappointing. Fortunately, Taj Mahal’s personality is huge enough to overshadow those of his guests on Maestro. The fact that Los Lobos, Ziggy Marley, Angelique Kidjo, Ivan Neville and Ben Harper all appear on the album is inconsequential. Mahal gets it, deeply. He has internalized the many languages of the blues and, 40 years after his debut album, continues to deliver it effortlessly. Anyone on stage with him is just set design. Which doesn’t mean he always fires on all cylinders.

His albums vary from in-the-gut integrity to bland full-band recitations, and the presence of his Phantom Blues Band on the new disc is evidence that Maestro leans toward the latter. It’s disappointing to hear that his approach to “Further On Down the Road” hasn’t changed since 1971’s The Real Thing, even if it’s nice to hear a nothing-new cut with kora master Toumani Diabate, with

Squarepusher Just a Souvenir Warp 161 CD

The most surprising thing about Squarepusher’s new album is the one big influence it wears like a favorite athlete’s jersey across its chest: Weather Report. Tight, prog-like changes— always led by the bass that is the center of Squarepusher’s sound—blend with cheesy synths and guitar lines from MOR metal bands in a fantasy goofball kingdom. Very listenable, but quite the opposite of compelling. Some short interlude-type cuts between the main WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #52 | 73

whom he recorded the excellent 1999 album Kulanjan. It’s hard to imagine Mahal making an album that’s less than solid, and even if Elvis Costello and Ry Cooder had been involved, the album would still be his and his alone. But it’s been a long time since he’s had a band project better than his solo shows, and another mid-tempo r’n’b trot just seems superfluous, at least while 1976’s Satisfied N Tickled Too remains out of print.

Kurt Gottschalk

Vassilis Tsabropoulos Anja Lechner U.T. Gandhi Melos

ECM 2048 CD

On the 2004 album Chants, Hymns, and Dances (ECM), cellist Anja Lechner and pianist Vassilis Tsabropoulos explored the music of the ArmenianGreek philosopher/composer G.I. Gurdjieff, as well as a handful of Tsabropoulos’s own compositions. This follow-up again addresses some of Gurdjieff’s music, but gives a great deal more play to Tsabropoulos’s works. There’s a thread of consistency running through this music; like Gurdjieff, Tsabropoulos evinces a fondness for modal, folk-like melodies. Unlike Gurdjieff—who was, after all, active a century ago— Tsabropoulos writes music colored by late 20th century jazz. It doesn’t swing, certainly, but it often grooves gently, helped along by U.T. Gandhi’s subtle percussion work. Cellist Lechner is a wonderful player, her sound full-bodied, her technique spot-on, and her expressive choices invariably appropriate.

Tsabropoulos is a Jarrett-esque pianist, both as an improviser and an interpreter of the written score. Always, his work has a fresh, improvisatory cast. As a duo, Tsabropoulos and Lechner are remarkably sensitive to one another.

Gandhi does nothing but add to the overall sense of collective empathy.

Chris Kelsey

Toshiya Tsunoda

Low Frequency Observed at Maguchi Bay Hibari 11 CD

There’s a certain cheekiness to this release, since few who purchase this

CD will possess equipment capable of reproducing the sounds documented here—sounds that are often below what the human ear can detect. It’s even more funny when you think about what will occur when this edition hits the torrents, as the “perceptual coding” of MP3s will really struggle with this one: much of the material will be filtered out by the codec.

Beyond his good-natured taunts, Tsunoda is one of the most inventive and thoughtful artists working in the area of field recording. His thoughtfulness is demonstrated through a series of conceptually driven extended techniques for uncovering the inaudible or overlooked sounds of a given space.

Large portions of his recorded works dwell on this process of drawing out and exhibiting the tiniest of sound spaces, transforming them through the process of documentation into much larger sound events.

Low Frequency Observed at Maguchi Bay is a fitting title for this particular collection. Tsunoda presents recordings from the specified location, both in their original form and a processed version, filtering out everything except very lowfrequency sound events (below 20Hz).

Using nothing more than a contact mic and a DAT recorder, Tsunoda manages to create a visual artwork through sound—speakers fluttering trying to express sounds that are just beyond the range of regular sonic reproduction. It’s an astounding undertaking—simple, scientific and humorous all in the same moment. Returning to the unedited recordings after hearing the filtered versions, it’s amazing how the ears are “retuned” to the lower register. Detail gives way to sheer physicality of sound in what is one of the most charming conceptual records to be released this year. Lawrence English

Max Tundra

Parallax Error Beheads You Domino 168 CD

If Max Tundra were some savant, jagoff guitarist stretching three-minute pop songs to eleven minutes, it’d be easy to snicker and make Jeff Beck comparisons. But since 2000’s Some Best Friend You Turned Out to Be, Tundra has used

his wild programming talents—and mischievous pop instincts—to envelop listeners in his slightly musty, wholly odd universe. His third album, Parallax Error Beheads You, makes a good case for him as a capital-A artist in the Robert Wyatt mold: a purposeful British recluse with major chops and a tendency to literalism and humor. It’s nothing new: Tundra chose the title of 2002’s excellent Mastered by Guy at the Exchange after Guy Davie mastered his album at London’s The Exchange studio. Slyly poetic, maybe, but Tundra is also the type of guy who can’t help but admit, during “Will Get Fooled Again,” to finding women using Google image search and Friendster, and while bidding on Jim O’Rourke albums. “All through my life / I have been distracted by / A potential wife,” he sings during “Which Song,” not referring to a particular flame but rather any hypothetical wife. Musically, Parallax is sunnier and more coherent than Mastered. Tundra’s voice is more robust, and he no longer entrusts his disarmingly straightforward tales to anyone but himself (his sister, Becky Jacobs, sang on Mastered).

“Which Song” is a funky, digitalized Prince-ode. “Orphaned”’s synthesizers seem sort of like an ant farm sped up x10, so busied it troubles the soul. “The Entertainment” begins, shockingly, as a straight-man piano ballad before adopting warm, enveloping chords and a clubby kick. Tuff, tiny songs like “Nord Lead Three” and “Number Our Days” are refreshingly aggressive. “Until We Die” flits between a spattering of lite-funk keyboards and lighter-waving balladry: “Think of all the songs you sang / And the love that you made.”

The song’s stadium applicability peters out as Tundra’s words become more frenzied, desperate. “I will be your mate until we die.” Silly, sad kids of the world: unite! Andrew Gaerig

The Tucson Electric Fan Appreciation Society

Electric Fan Sound Works SonicAnta CD-R

The ephemeral quality of downloadable music—MP3s, iPods, file sharing, and secret invitation-only servers stocked with thousands of albums—

has inspired astute artists and labels to make “physical releases” special, as a smartly packaged art object, a pocket exhibition of sound, or, in the case of Electric Fan Sound Works, part of a limited-edition, subscription-only series.

Available as a premium for joining the Tucson Electric Fan Appreciation Society (or by subscribing to Glenn Weyant’s SonicAnta D-Construction Sound Subscription Series at sonicanta. com), Electric Fan Sound Works is a single 30-minute composition based on a Honeywell electric fan. Recorded by, according to the liner notes, “a variety of microphones strategically placed to ‘play up’ the fan’s assorted tones, drones, and nuances,” this is industrial ambient music in its purest form. You hear the fan click on and whirr; drones gradually accumulate, and on headphones, gently tilt from left to right. I also listened at multiple volume levels through speakers at ambient sound levels and at full attention with the disc blasting. Heard in the background, Electric Fan Sound Works creates an insulating, almost comforting aural wallpaper; turned up loud, the disc unfurls scattered knocks and pings as well as sumptuous drones piled atop one another, as if the distant din of a longabandoned factory could echo into our ears. Christopher DeLaurenti

McCoy Tyner Guitars

McCoy Tyner Music 4537 CD

When talk turns to legendary artists who crowned their careers with all-star duet albums, the first who comes to mind is Frank Sinatra—not an encouraging model. But McCoy Tyner’s Guitars is the very antithesis of the phone-in, cash-in duets model patented by Old Blue Eyes. After one of jazz’s most heroic careers, it hardly seems possible, but Tyner’s towering talent has again been placed in a new light, this time on a stunning series of encounters with five guitar greats. Just check out the opening salvo, a stabbing free-form improvisation with Marc Ribot. It’s only a minute and a half long, but it sends a clear message: this is no trip down memory lane. A second Tyner-Ribot improvisation, later in the disc, takes a soft impressionist walk, with an open-

ended give and take seldom heard in Tyner’s oeuvre. Not that Tyner changes, or even tweaks, his grand, elemental sound here. He rolls on as ever, strong and deep as the ocean, and the guitarists bob over him on a series of brilliantly wrought rafts, lashed together by the superb rhythm section of Ron Carter and Jack DeJohnette. After the opening blast, Ribot charges ahead with a distortion-drenched take on “Passion Dance.” Tyner’s muscle and Ribot’s snarls make a fine tussle, and then Ribot changes things up with a lovely “500 Miles,” gliding over Tyner’s iron rails like a slow locomotive. John Scofield goes for headlong, exhilarating engagement with Tyner on “Mr. P.C.,” then hangs out with him on “Blues on the Corner.” (The guitarists picked the music, and while there are fine originals, they all seemed drawn to timeless Tyner classics.) Bela Fleck joins Tyner for the minor modes of “Trade Winds,” perhaps the gem of the set, a gently exotic melody reminiscent of “Ole.” If a banjo were ever needed for an Egyptian burial, Fleck would have to be dragged from this century by time machine. In a deeply touching homage, Fleck nimbly drops note-perfect Tyner fills into “Amberjack,” their second tune together. The Tyner-Fleck meeting never sounds like a summit of legends, but rather a rarefied conversation, even on “My Favorite Things,” a supreme showcase for Fleck’s sensitive virtuosity and Tyner’s magnificent restraint.

After Fleck, Derek Trucks, the youngest guitarist on the set, goes head to head with Tyner, with just as satisfying results.

Trucks hurls a hearty, rough blues attack at no less a relic than “Greensleeves,” spanking it into freshness. Finally, Bill Frisell draws ironbound Tyner into his own free-floating world for “Contemplation,” an exquisite exercise in equipoise, and two other tunes, all of them sublime. When Frisell’s pale yellow sound illuminates Tyner, it’s like seeing the far side of the moon for the first time.

Guitars comes with a bonus DVD that documents seven of the CD tracks and throws in another duet with Ribot. The four-way video controls let you home in on one musician or all four at once, and the studio chatter and rehearsal stuff is great, but all that is just frosting on this tasty late-career cake from one of jazz’s greatest legends. Larry Cosentino

Various Artists

Como Now: the Voices of Panola Co., Mississippi Daptone DAP014 CD

File this recording under Deep Southern Roots Music, and cross-reference under Fierce Devotion to God. Daptone has put out a magnificent document of a capella gospel music form Panola County in northern Mississippi, former home of Mississippi Fred McDowell and stomping ground of Alan Lomax. By stripping away any and all instrumentation—no tambourine, hand clapping, or even finger snapping— the singers at the Mt. Mariah Church in the town of Como express their pure, unadulterated passion for Jesus with supreme conviction, using just the original and most basic musical instrument of all, the human voice.

Irene Stevenson, one of several lead vocalists represented here, is quoted in the liner notes explaining it this way: “Real religion is something that hap74 | SIGNAL to NOISE #52

pens in church when folks don’t allow things to get in between themselves and the worship of god.” And that direct connection to their god is audibly manifest in every syllable we hear from Mary Moore, the John Edwards Singers, the Como Mamas, the Jones Sisters, and Brother and Sister Walker.

Struggle, redemption, peace, turmoil, joy, infinite longing, and many other stirrings of the soul are all harmonized in these songs. The titles of the songs tell you just what is at stake for these singers: “I Can’t Afford to Let My Savior Down,” “Somebody Here Needs You Lord,” “When the Gates Swing Open,” ”God’s Unchanging Hand” and “Jesus Builds a Fence Around Me.” Spirituality and music have been intricately linked in many ways across many of the world’s cultures, but in Como, Mississippi the connection seems especially solid, direct, unassailable and irresistible.

The word “now” in the title is vitally important for this recording. It tells the listener not to view this impassioned music as some historical relic or to pigeonhole it as folklore. These sounds are now! These singers are now! Jesus is now! Alan Waters

Torben Waldorff

Mersault (with Korber and Christian Wolfarth) and the killer CD 3 Suits & a Violin on Hatology. And there’s the limited edition 3” solo CD, Osaka Solo, that came out in 2006. Not to mention more jazz-based sessions with Co Streiff, Day & Taxi, and Michel Wintsch. This time out, Weber was recorded solo in the reverberant Zürich art space Walcheturm. As on the Osaka Solo album, he seems to be playing the room as much as he plays his bass.

From the first low groans and growls, Weber feels out the room, playing with the live resonances to build a palpable sense of the space. With phenomenal control, he builds dark, roiling densities. As the piece progresses, sawed rumbles evolve into pitched tones and shadow overtones. Plucked pizzicato pops sound out like percussive shots, building like the first heavy drops of a summer shower. As the piece builds to its bracing conclusion, notes are hammered out against the space, tolling with a mounting tension. Few bass players can pull off solo performances without resorting to mere technical showmanship. This session, like Osaka Solo, shows that Weber is well up to the task. Michael Rosenstein

Afterburn

Windy & Carl

Danish guitarist Torben Waldorff is a relative unknown, though he’s made several recent dates in the company of young New Yorkers, including last year’s Brilliance: Live at the 55 Bar. Afterburn, Waldorff’s fourth leader date, uses the same group as the previous disc (saxophonist Donny McCaslin, bassist Matt Clohesy and drummer Jon Wikan) and adds keyboardist Sam Yahel. These nine cuts offer understated, polished modern jazz with a pleasing amount of compositional variety. Waldorff and McCaslin work together with great sympathy, and the saxophonist is in typically coruscating, dramatic form: sample the uptempo “Daze,” the colorful swing waltz “Espresso Crescent” and the cheery drive of “Squealfish.” Known primarily for his organ work, Yahel also offers a glimpse of his skills on Fender Rhodes (the easygoing, 70s-style “Heimat”) and piano (a feature on “Squealfish”).

The group visits the tango on Maria Schneider’s lovely “Choro Dançado,” rides the gentle waves of “Eel Thye Deeflat,” swings joyously on “Skyliner” and takes it home on the blues walk of Wikan’s “Man In The Black Hat,” with the drummer channeling the spirits of Tony Williams and Elvin Jones. While Waldorff is strongly featured and has his name on the marquee, Afterburn is a group effort that succeeds due to its collectivity. Jay Collins

Kranky krank125 CD

Artist Share AS0078 CD

Christian Weber Walcheturm Solo Cut 025 CD

Bassist Christian Weber has been on a tear lately, putting out one strong disc after another. There’s the Signal Quintet’s Yamaguchi with Jason Kahn, Norbert Möslang, Günter Müller, and Tomas Korber, as well as the Signal to Noise series (no relation to this magazine) documenting a variety of collaborations by members of the quintet during the same tour of Japan.

Then there are his releases with the trio

Songs For The Broken Hearted

Windy Weber I Hate People Blueflea bf014 CD

The music of Michigan duo Windy Weber and Carl Hultgren has always been about the infinitesimal—an incremental dissolution of the gradual into nothingness. Their gently oscillating curlicues of delay and reverb, E-bow and keyboard effortlessly lull the listener into a somnambulant reverie. But their work since returning from a four-year hiatus, which commenced after releasing Consciousness in 2001, has occasionally aroused suspicions of creative complacency, and even a propensity for droned-out waffle. 2005’s Dedications to Flea (a paean to a recently deceased and much beloved pet) and The Dream House both somehow lacked the musical richness and depth of earlier pieces, leaving the listener with the feeling that Weber and Hultgren had simply set the controls to autopilot, content to allow the emerging tones to percolate listlessly on their own accord.

A similar sense of ennui infiltrates these two sets. Despite their disparate moods (Songs for the Broken Hearted is the light to I Hate People’s far darker, more unsettling ride), there are moments on both when the default setting of expansive oceanic bliss is disturbed by a pang of guilt that senses this is all too easy. Songs for the Broken Hearted may swirl about happily enough in its ambient distillation of other tropes, an atomization of ’80s-era 4AD guided by maps of territories first navigated by ambient explorers such as Eno and Cluster, but there’s really nothing here to send a shiver down the spine. And while I Hate People’s brooding evocation of misanthropic alienation ticks all the right boxes (guitars wailing in agony as layers of vocals build up into a haunting declaration of despair), it suffers from a dearth of ideas, becoming just one more directionless doom-dirge to add

WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #52 | 75

to the pile. Windy & Carl are capable of exquisite music, and sometimes they still hit those highs, only now you’re going to have to wade through a hell of a lot more fog to discover them. I only hope that they wake up before we fall asleep. Spencer Grady

Sort of/AOB CD

all collapses in multitimbral waves, everything is starkly differentiated.

Acoustic manipulation ranges from extreme subtlety—a few moments of heightened reverb—to wild and unpredictable changes in pitch and speed. Sounds emerge and fade with slow grace on the long and beautifully multiregistral drone “Dry” and the buzzing, thrumming “Enough Pain,” which tingles and pulses with erratic internal rhythms. Marc Medwin

John Berndt

Seymour Wright

Jack Wright Alban Bailey

Harmony of Contradiction

The Private Language Problem Sort of/AOB CD

Here are two new releases in Raymond Moran’s Abstract on Black series, and diverse they most certainly are! The worlds of electricity and its seemingly polar opposite are merged in creative ways on both releases, as befits these innovative artists.

Every release by the prolific Jack Wright provides a reason to celebrate, so broad is the world of sound he creates with a single gesture. In his hands, the saxophone becomes a small orchestra, replete with the myriad emotive and timbral possibilities of much larger forces. A perfectly-timed pitched or non-pitched sound can speak volumes, so intimately familiar is Wright with his instrument on every level. His first utterance on “The Innocence of Old Men” is an extended complex of light microtones skirting around a high F but executed at a spine-tingling pianissimo, seeming to fade but constantly rejuvenating, only petering out quietly after some 20 seconds. Guitarist Alban Bailey is Wright’s equal, as is evidenced by his twitterings and melodious scratchings on “The Beauty of the Ugly.” His musings take off and soar, as high-pitched twangs are transmogrified into the cries of birds, Wright giving strangely contrapuntal council in lower registers. These are isolated moments, culled almost at random from a disc brimming with invention and interplay of the highest order.

Wright is also responsible, in large part, for the conceptions underlying John Berndt’s electroacoustic pieces of the past seven years. Berndt acknowledges the saxophonist as one of his primary teachers, and it is tempting to hear Wright’s free thinking transformed into Berndt’s multileveled but clear language. Even in The Private Language Problem’s densest moments, such as the opening passages when

Seymour Wright of Derby Seymour Wright CD-R / download

Keith Rowe and Seymour Wright

3D: three views of guitar and saxophone on a November evening in Derby, 2002 w.m/or 33 CD-R / download

The mainstream press and major labels continue to debate over how to harness the internet to keep their business models rolling. But there are musicians like British reed-player Seymour Wright who are benefiting from the viral nature of internet communication. This allows him create projects which would otherwise be prohibitively expensive to release and distribute things which might otherwise go unheard.

Wright’s self-produced solo disc Seymour Wright of Derby (subtitled “alto saxophone solos 2005-2008”) is garnering some well-deserved attention.

The CDR, nicely packaged in a beautiful marbled-paper sleeve, is available for free upon request (and is available for free download on his site). In a brief statement, he writes, “The music is improvised and about the saxophone— music history and technique—actual and potential.” This plays out as four hyper-focused solos recorded over the last three years. What makes Wright’s music so compelling here is how he draws out and extends a personal vocabulary rather than just stringing together techniques. The collection opens with two shorter pieces, “in the Wright place at the Wright time (three years earlier)” and “REED ’N’ WRIGHT!” The former (dedicated to Steve Lacy and Keith Rowe) is especially memorable: Wright’s semaphored streams of breaths and pops seem to trigger wafts of radio static and chatter—an effective twist on Rowe’s use of radio. On “The Wright balance,” for Billy Higgins and Eddie

Prévost (someone with whom Wright frequently collaborates), it sounds as if Wright uses the saxophone in much the same way that Mark Wastell uses a tam tam, more as a metallic resonator than as a reed instrument. Buzzing fans beat against the instrument, providing a humming undercurrent for skirling scrapes, pinched overtones, and low groans. The 26-minute improvisation builds thoughtfully placed waves of textures and densities. The closemiked intensity of “Wright-O!,” for Trevor Bayliss and Evan Parker, ends the release with percussive, ratcheting sputters against hissing streams of air which are barely recognizable as coming from a saxophone. Contact Wright for a copy of this gem if there are any left. If not, grab a download and spread the word.

Wright’s duet with Keith Rowe on the w.m/or label documents their meeting at the Dance Centre in Derby, England in November of 2002. But it also serves as somewhat of a metastatement about recordings as documentation of musical events along with their subsequent distribution. First off, the recording can be ordered as a set of 3 CDRs or downloaded for free from the w.m/or website, which clearly states: “This label is completely against the idea of intellectual property and supports copying so if you have a copy feel encouraged to distribute it.” Next up, the set comprises three recordings of the same concert, captured with different equipment from different locations in the hall. In the thoughtprovoking notes, Wright states: “What is especially and specially interesting about these three recordings of this one improvisation from 2002 is less the respective discrete ‘flat’ objective documents themselves than the cumulative subjective space and time I find between these three views, juxtaposed. It is within this void space and time between these views and the listener that I suggest something more substantial and profitable may, with work, take shape perhaps echoing, simultaneously illuminatingly and obscurely....” So how does one approach the discs? Does memory serve the listener well enough to contrast and compare the extended 40-minute improvisation? Do you put the three discs in different CD players and distribute them spatially around the room? How about piling all three files into a soundediting program and layering them into a single file? Does the ambient room noise and shuffling differ enough

MADE YOU LOOK! STN offers affordable ad space for cash-strapped improvisers.

This space available for only $25.

Inquire within:

operations@signaltonoisemagazine.org

76 | SIGNAL to NOISE #52

from one disc to the next to provide a different perspective? Setting aside such musings, the release captures Rowe and Wright in a particularly interactive mode, with timbral threads teasing back and forth, shot through with bursts of squelched overtones and percussive textures. This one is well worth searching out, offering both a strong performance and intriguing conceptual statement.

Michael Rosenstein

SOUNDWATCH

Kurt Gottschalk turns on and tunes in for the season's key DVD releases.

Savina Yannatou and Primavera en Salonico Songs of An Other ECM 2057 CD

The Greek singer Savina Yannatou and a collective of gifted instrumentalists interpret a selection of traditional (mostly Eastern-European) songs, skillfully combining folk forms with avant-jazz and contemporary classical touches. Yannatou’s diaphanous voice is an exceptionally delicate instrument, capable of the most shades of expression. It’s simultaneously evocative of early musics as well as the most modern, improvisation-based musics. She’s joined by a string-based sextet playing arrangements written by the group’s accordionist, Kostos Vomvolos. Arrangements aside, the music is often heavily improvised—for example, “O Yannis kai o drakos” incorporates simmering scary-movie vocals with a non-tonal, pointillist accompaniment that’s as free as the free-est free jazz, yet as emotionally focused as a Schubert lied. “Albanian Lullabye” is another very free piece, featuring an abstractly grooving bass line over which Yannatou is melodically engaged by Vomvolos’s accordion and Harris Lamrakis’s nay (a wind-blown flute of Persian origin). All have a keen sense of space, contributing just the right amount at the right time. On the more strictly formal and arranged pieces, the group’s cohesion is even more pronounced, at little cost to spontaneity. While Yannatou’s name is above the title, this is very much a group effort. A shared vision permeates this music, to very good effect.

Chris Kelsey

CORRECTIONS!

Maarten Mooijman was erroneously uncredited for his photo of James Blackshaw and Jozef Van Wissem in STN#51.

Threw Manure on Flower Power: Iggy and the Stooges In a world still dominated by live concert releases on DVD, it’s refreshing to find a collaboratively created audio-visual release, and it’s hard to imagine a more beautifully crafted pairing of sound and image than Block Gibson Recorder (SoSEDITIONS). It’s a gorgeous 40 minutes of black-and-white imagery by Sandra Gibson and Luis Recorder—a bit like falling asleep while a projector burns through celluloid— with an equally ethereal yet familiar soundscape

by Olivia Block. Static and light define and escape the visual frame in a manner so mesmerizing it’s easy to watch three or four times in succession. The ridiculous packaging—a silver mylar bag (difficult to open and impossible to reseal) with a piece-together cardboard easel to display your disc (hard to imagine anyone using it)—doesn’t take away from the beauty of the contents. After five or six viewings, switch on Pan Sonic’s Kuvaputki for a black-and-white abstraction double feature. It’s an exciting pounding of rhythm and manipulated performance images, an assault of sound and visuals as completely dizzying as Block’s is serene, like a hellish kaleidoscope complete with a seizure warning on the back cover.

Another stunning use of made-to-measure video is found on Sensurround (Everloving), the DVD companion to the 2006 CD Sensuous by Japanese pop genius Cornelius. He is a master of using little sounds to create huge Brian Wilson-inflected orchestras, and the videos (most by Koichiro Tsujikawa) recreate that world beautifully, with drops of paint and dancing sugar cubes in psychedelic Sesame Street scenes.

The package also includes a CD of b-sides including a new piece with Ryuichi Sakamoto, two Petra Haden a cappella covers, and remixes by The Books and Prefuse 73, along with some other non-album tracks.

Visuals is what GX Jupitter-Larsen’s Cinema Noise: Selected Video 1983-2006 (Icefactory / Tronix) is all about. Best known for his noise band The Haters, Jupitter-Larsen has worked in performance art,

the cassette underground and zine culture, as well as making films which often seem as much about sound as visuals. The ten short films contained here range from factory scenes and lesbian vampires to bikers and snow skiers, with soundtracks created from amplifier hum and feedback. Not all hit, but some are quite effective, and the noise score is effective throughout.

The making of noise is considered quite thoroughly in People Who Do Noise (Cold Hands), an nicely done documentary on the Portland, OR, noise scene.

With lots of interviews and a second menu of performance videos, the film considers the development of a relatively isolated scene where, as the subjects say again and again, artists are free to try things. Ranging from scene elders Smegma to a blooming younger generation (Daniel Menche, Yellow Swans, God and others), it does a great job of putting extreme sound into a historical context - from atonal composition to rock experimentalism and the punk explosion—and considers where music could possibly go next, after the notion of any pleasing sound has been stripped from it.

There are any number of origins one could point to for noise art, but one would certainly be The Stooges, whose extreme concerts threw manure on flower power. The band’s reunion shows of 2005 got mixed reviews, but there are two things that make the double DVD Escaped Maniacs (Charly) worthy of note: how good Iggy Pop, at 58, looks, and how good Ron Asheton, all but disappeared for the last several decades, sounds. The set includes a full show from Belgium during the reunion tour as well as a casual, no-holds-barred 60-minute interview with Pop as well as shorter segments with brothers Ron and Scott Asheton. Another on the fringes of punk is Lydia Lunch, who gets retrospective treatment in Video Hysterie: 1978 - 2006 (Atavistic). Not surprisingly, it’s the six Teenage Jesus and the Jerks clips

(a video for “Orphans” and five live cuts) that are the most exciting here, despite the handheld camera and occasional audio drop. The collection steers clear of her spoken word performances, but even still—as the chronology progresses and Lunch becomes more artiste—the energy loses out to witchy pontificating.

Darker than Lunch’s blackness is the black metal scene in Norway, where suicide and ritual church burning are seen (by some) as dedication to one’s art. It’s a fascinating and frightening subculture that has been dealt with in books and documentaries before, and there’s nothing exactly new in Black Metal Satanica (Deadline) except the choice of bands to spotlight (including Mordichrist, Rimsfrost, Svartahrid and Watain). Other tellings have taken a more condemning stance, which may be this documentary’s strength. By telling it from the inside, talking to musicians who are thoughtful and intelligent on the subject, a disconcertingly even-handed picture emerges of the development of a subculture under the influence of Viking lore, sunless days and a sincere resistance to Christian hegemony.

The development of very different scene is considered in the excellent documentary Kraftwerk and the Electronic Revolution (Sexy Intellectual).

Although centered on the seminal synth band, the three-hour film takes a full 40 minutes to get to the band, setting the German music stage with beat band imitators, free jazz experimentation and early electronic composition, all of which came together when a group of art students forged a new kind of art rock. While Amon Düül, Can and Kluster worked within the hippie rock movement, Kraftwerk created a very different, stylized approach. Interviews with former band members Karl Bartos and Klaus Röder, as well as contemporaries from other bands and generous footage, tell the story from early experiments through the emergence of disco and new wave bands that were influenced by and would ultimately eclipse them.

Two anniversaries for two homes for jazz, improvised and new music are all marked this year with worthy DVD releases. Chicago’s Delmark Records celebrates its 55th birthday with 55 Years of Jazz, a CD/DVD set which covers the range of their releases. While the CD tends more toward tradition, the DVD focuses almost entirely on the AACM. Delmark has done an outstanding job of pairing its CD releases with DVD issues, and this collection is something of a best-of, with live clips from Nicole Mitchell, Ari Brown, Fred Anderson and Kahil El’Zabar, as well as the Chicago Underground Trio and Dixie band Jazz O’Maniacs. It’s an excellent introduction to the label’s laudable work documenting the city’s creative music.

Longstanding New York performance space Roulette marks 30 years with a two-DVD collection from its cable-access program Roulette TV (Einstein). Each 30-minute segment includes a performance and an interview by the show’s surreal host Phoebe Legere. Included are episodes with Marilyn Crispell, Andrew Cyrille, Oliver Lake, Lois V. Vierk, Joan La Barbara, Blue Gene Tyranny, Kathleen Supove, Margaret Leng Tan and David Behrman (episodes can also be streamed at www. roulette.org). The sound and camera work are always exceptional, and Roulette’s vaults are filled with riches—with any luck Henry Hill’s films of early downtown improvisers (which have been aired on the program) will also make it to DVD. ✹

WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #52 | 77

CIRCUIT BREAKERS

Darren Bergstein monitors electronic music's vital signs.

Machinefabriek

Got a nice gaggle of five artist-split (some obscure, some notorious) 3-inchers from British label Awkward Silence. Warning: the sounds aren’t as small as the formats. Maps & Diagrams and Verbose share a common love of rhythmic chopup, but the latter feints with his right (crushed cymbals, guitar and synth confectionaries) while the former jabs with his left (software squiggle, squeezebox beats, jagged edges). Nautilus and Uga each bring on the noize, unafraid to spread its wealth across fiery percussive volleys and equally uncompromising bled-dry synths, kinda like a less gnarly Venetian Snares, all a bit too texturally abrasive for these ears. Tomcats in Tokyo and Isan get much love from their Autechrian ancestry, narcotized beats spilling their liquid toxins across nuclear winter atmospheres, meticulously drawn-out and quartered—excellent.

Both Matthew Rozeik and Ylid tinker with electroacoustic tympani instead of strict software manipulation, the injection of good ol‘ acoustic guitar folkifying the spit and polish of their mainframes: Pink Floyd goes Ableton? Cheju and Shoosh use Spanish guitar (!) and even vocals in their buzzing rhythmic matrices, though Cheju’s trademark dusky swells and artificial handdrums hold his pieces in better stead. Tiny bundles of joy the whole lot are, elastic, spastic, and drastic.

Both Alio Die and Martina Galvagni on Eleusian Lullaby (Projekt) act as master and “servant”, making a Faustian bargain with the devil in order to revamp the new age. Alio Die’s (real name: Stefano Musso) pedigree is unimpeachable, his ever-burgeoning catalog sumptuous enough for virtually endless revisits; vocalist Galvagni “serves” as AD’s muse throughout this deeply evocative recording, her natural aeolianesque pipes coursing through the music’s bloodstream and enriching its vitality. But in all honesty this is 78 | SIGNAL to NOISE #52

AD’s show: wordlessly fetching Galvagni might be, but Musso’s texturally complex interplay of loops and drones, a potpourri of psaltery, kalimba, metals, and other ingredients, weaves a journey through tempestuous mystic valleys, spiritual never-never lands, and semi-lucid waking states fraught with teleological mystery. Gorgeously recorded, detailed with a painterly finesse that articulates each sound in three-dimensional bas relief, this is an understated monster.

Guitar-not-guitar drones are a dime-a-dozen these days, but on Sirens (Twenty Hertz), British tone poet Paul Bradley approaches such compositional monochromaticism at differing angles.

Perching his stark notes and brooding contrasts right at the precipical edge demonstrates an intention not necessarily conducive to warm and fluffy ambient descents. The opening piece on Sirens distills that essence to what sounds like maybe three smeared chords, a pearlescent opulence whose poles are tugged and stretched by gravity-defying forces. The other two pieces inhabit quieter realms but are no less powerful, soaring striations of light that ebb in pitch and volume and trade shimmering layers off one another; marvelously tendered stuff. You’d also be criminally misinformed labeling Monos simply another drone crone. Darren Tate’s post-Ora project actually has more in common with dadaists Christoph Heemann and Nurse with Wound then any one of a hundred atmo-isolationists.

The single 32-minute track on Promotion (Twenty Hertz) is a dandy earfuck of sucking whirlpools, molested drywood, banging pipes, and other unidentifiable bits of close-miked industrial ephemera. Fascinating non-musical agitprop, as if Tate were left alone in Eraserhead’s apartment, seeing what trouble he could get into as the kitchen walls cracked and gaskets burst in the

radiator. Shudder, shudder, hiss, hiss…

Consistently reliable Canadian imprint Data-obscura offers two superb slabs of speculative digital hijinks. Entia Non is all over the proverbial netlabel map, his scattershot EPs replicating across the bandwidth like a pernicious supervirus. Yet, it’s on Dataobscura where he truly shines. Fold draws its inspiration from Australia’s otherworldly topography, most of its sounds mutated field recordings that faintly echo their origins: the punch of wind through the bush, insect armies chattering away at twilight, and the caterwaul of mythic beasts altered electronically become drones bent sinister and tarnished by staticky, purple atmospheres that itch with glitch. One would be hard-pressed to associate these prickly squalls of proudly electronic sound with anything organic, but the sense of drama built throughout makes for arresting listening. Geographic expanse and the shifting sands of memory bulk up the sonic aggregate of Timeless,

by Nunc Stans, the disc’s graying synths conjuring the brap of permafrost crackling against the hulls of abandoned vessels. “Labrador Sunrise,” nine minutes of arctic effigy and sisyphean chords, rivals the best of early Lull, Biosphere or Thomas Koner, every bit as riveting. Epoch-shattering ambience, naked, whooping and such-like.

When the machines rock, at least when programmed by mad scientists out of their minds on ganja weed, it no doubt sounds like Gaseous Opal Orbs (Record Label) by Fluorescent Grey. The disc’s spluttertastic orgasms might very well arise from a social congress consummated between pre-idiom IDM and dubwise electronica, but the apopoleptic mentality informing this recording smacks more of the renegade lunacy of the 80s underground cassette network. What is heard (Whale song? Hassell-esque trumpets? Washboards rubbed?) cannot be trusted; absorbed into the gelatinous mix is the recombinant DNA of everything from dancehall mash-up and fourth-world jungle rhythms to Mimir-like zones of weirdness and mutato-dub waveforms. Apparently many of these resolutely innovative noises were sourced not from a witch’s cauldron of softsynths but from sine wave compression and decompression—so that explains the breathless psychedelia funking up these bastard acid offspring. Color me impressed.

Questionable nomenclature aside, leave it to Russia’s cheekily obscure boutique label Doodley to release two of 2008’s finest IDM/electronica records. Judging from the surgical masks covering their faces in the booklet of Is.Life, Livelectro want to nurse clandestinism while drawing tenuous links to 90s British stadium ravers Altern-8. It goes deeper—brittle rhythms and queasy interludes instantly recall everyone from Caustic Window to early B12 to the regalia of As One—yet the rambunctious ingenuity on display mashes those influences into synthetic pulp, every crunchy byte washed down with a great swig of bleep: wham, bam, thank you ma’am. Raise a great many specters of the past (Bigeneric, CiM, Nev, et al) it might do, but that doesn’t change the fact that Dots by Modul might well be the best post-IDM hunk of plastic to hit this year. Rustic synth patches from old Klaus Schulze records mix it up with beatbox squelch (“Wooden Elephants”), “Broken” does the cosmic Hale-bopp, “Unfocused” uncannily revisits the half-lip machine moves and transconti-

nental ambiences of its namesake (the late Defocus label). However, “Match Box Collection” is the corker, seven stunning minutes of frosty synth revolutions, aquatic blips, and surging expanses that distill what gave 90s “electronic listening music” its pneumatic phenomenology. Tremendous.

Dauw (Dekorder) is the stunning new work from Rutger Zuydervelt, whose prodigious output as Machinefabriek effortlessly harnesses quantity to quality. That he can not only keep up his relentless release schedule in such crimped timespans but elicit a seemingly inexhaustible wealth of invention from delimited means (here, mostly guitar and piano, plus dictaphone and turntable, albeit sampled, reintegrated and processed) makes him one of our secret (inter)national treasures. Familiar sounds are transmogrified into foggy, unnaturally attuned shapes, Zuydervelt forging new sonic metallurgies (the artist’s very scrapyard feelings imbuing “Engineer”) while managing to make even the venerable acoustic guitar preen and blush (witness the title track), thanks to generous amounts of strategically applied echo and discreet software massaging. Zuydervelt’s plowed furrows of intelligent noise, ascended brokeback dronefaces; now he turns out a disc aching with daring and subtlety, where even the blue aftershocks of vinyl surface grit become ravishing elements. Where to next?

Phosphordot images pulsing and dilating, liquid crystal displays throbbing in sunlit technicolor, Sakana Hosomi and Masaki Narita, better known collectively as Maju, make laptop hiccup music sound positively erotic. Their fifth outing, the appropriately titled Maju 5 (Extreme), doesn’t find them doing anything to their true-and-tested formula other than efficiently refining it. If you’ve heard previous Maju volumes, you know the drill: soft machine purrs, cooing plug-in burrs, billowing hums, pops, clicks, and numerous other silicon-buffered ions sourced from their lively positronic networks. Daresay it be ambient? Not in the strictest sense, as the thorny digital percussive tics don’t waft so much as linger, moving relentlessly along the same kinds of horizontal planes as groundfog, plus the duo’s atmospheres can get relatively toxic at times (the auburn fuzzstrokes of “Fbk1”). Theirs is a deeply invasive yet quiescent music, and if you thought that mathematically-precise digitalia couldn’t fondle the brainstem, bask in the terse icy-brisk climate changes of “Fbk2” for reinforcement. Integers might get compressed in their compositions but after five consistently excellent editions Maju’s quality control sure hasn’t. These are good sines.

An adolescent glee dances across the sprightly silver surfaces of Untree (mOAR), the sophomore effort by Mou, Lips!, but it’s that sense of precociousness, of a kid discovering their father’s (Pro) tool(s)box in the attic and rummaging about in it, that makes this autodidactic romp so endearing.

Andrea Gabrielle launches and/OAR’s sublabel mOAR with a bang—nothing is sacred, everything is permitted. Samples and handheld acoustics are put through the (digital) wringer so that truly weird hybrids emerge: “Non è Colpa Mia!” is like a laptop nationalist anthem with a beat; “Vit Virt” a thick hide of stringstrung drone and dampened noise(s); “Bora” a Hassell/Eno trope of delicatelyhued, otherworldly ambience. A virtual beehive rampant with ideas and imagery, Gabrielle’s obstreperous dynamics cohere the last ten years of computer-assisted sound design into a 46-minute menagerie of magic realism. °Sone, on the other hand, truck in more site-specific realities. The CD itself anoints Passerelle (and/OAR) as “a recorded walk through a sound installation.” Removed from whatever context that might have been focuses outsiders on the inherent fundamentals, a series of abstract, horizontally shifting, sometimes coarse, sometimes raspy drones folding large swathes of Rothko space. A trio that includes experimentalist Yannick Dauby in its ranks, °Sone bring substantial weight and measure to a minimalist clutch of sonic sculpture whose occasional bursts of factory noise imagine Alvin Lucier’s long thin wires grinding away in a city of industry. Unquiet slumbers for the sleepers.

Recorded live in Philadelphia at the Stars End 30th anniversary concert in June 2007, React (DiN) finds starcrossed synth artisans Robert Rich and Ian Boddy doing just that, bouncing ideas off one another with telepathic ease, the spark of their imaginations the lubricant, their equipment the fulcrum. Who adds what to this kaleidoscopic stew can only be guessed at, save for Rich’s trusty flutes and lap steel guitar, both of which attempt to cut starkly acoustic paths through the undulating glurp. “AxD” is one of the best pieces here, Boddy willing up dense cyclonic eddies and brash synthetic firestorms that Rich winds serpentine sequencers through, though it’s important to note that as a live workout, the mix flows seamlessly as one psychedelic journey comprising multiple episodic eventides. And the denouement, an edgy bit of angelic choir strafed by molten metal synths and percussive pingpongs that tempts us to the “Edge of Nowhere,” sends the duo out on a glorious high note as electronics curlicue into the darkness amidst the audience’s tacit approval— wish you were (t)here. For further investigation, indulge in the third volume of DiN’s Index series, a handy label primer showcasing singular redressings of the Boddy electronic. Aided and abetted by representatives Surface 10, Parallel Worlds, Tetsu Inoue and others, it’s a superb cross-section of talent arcing across numerous shadowy genres.

‘Course, once tainted by these label spoilers it’s a sure bet you’ll be seeking out their corresponding full-lengths, eager to hear what all the DIN’s about.

On In Between (Porter) and Luxated Symmetry (Porter), Polish sound artist Dawid Szczesny performs some slice ‘n’ dice acoustic alchemy that essentially takes jazz passengers for a ride.

Szczesny’s 2003 debut was a solid if unremarkable trek into the hinterlands of clicks and cuts, a delving into cracklesnap microsonics that Mille Plateaux would’ve once given their eyeteeth for.

Leaving those quaint utopian notions behind, Szczesny’s largely abandoned digital abstraction for a more graspable jazz trope hijacking that’s a bit too smug for its own good. Both the EP and its longer follow-up suggest an alternate universe where Gil Evans’ weapon of choice was a sampler instead of an orchestra. Unfortunately, Szczesny’s no Evans; superimposing samples of vibes, bass riffs, and drums on top of a marginalized digital environment only serves to highlight the enormous redundancy factor in such a project.

Szczesny’s skills aren’t necessarily suspect, but the concept’s nothing new—Penguin Café Orchestra’s similarly-striped faux jazz made quite the to-do ages ago, without the attendant sampler.

This is progress?

Finally, there’s two highly recommended discs of “new music” from Israeli experimental label Interval. Amnon Wolman has apparently scored for full-scale symphonic productions as well as solo laptop composition; Sustains occupies the happiest medium between the two. Provocative in its organizational heft, oft disturbing in the savvy constructs of its architecture, Sustains merges the what and the ‘ware with bits of classical flotsam to yield bracing new forms. “Hazardous Material” pitchbends Dvorak into the drone zone; “Incline” could be Gil Melle scoring Night Gallery while assisted by Francisco Lopez. Wolman’s clearly onto something here—he so thoroughly Sustains our interest that following up this debut’s gonna be one tough nut to crack. Interval’s two-disc compilation Nothing Works As Planned marks out yet more challenging territory, a compendium of happy accidents and wry adagios recorded live by mostly unknown artists carving out new strains of electroacoustic discontent. In addition to Wolman, highlights include Jonathan Chen’s intense bifurcation of ambient noise and video, Neil Leonard’s acousmatic suite of Luc Ferrari-esque tonalities, and Arie Shapira’s shrew taming of violin and electronics. Proof indeed that art abhors a vacuum—if the label plays their cards right, what with their enigmatic digipaks, unclassifiable sounds, and the proper planetary alignment, they might well be bigger than God, or at least Tzadik. ✹ WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #52 | 79

ALL THAT JAZZ

Larry Cosentino examines modern-day manifestations of bop and beyond.

This fall, numerous new jazz releases knocked at my door two by two, as if hailing an ark. With one or more artists in common, they make natural pairings, but which ones to let in? Unlike Noah, I can play favorites, so I shooed the flies, petted the platypi, and catalogued the keepers below. Two of the most impressive beasts came from Creative Improvised Music Projects, a label that has long combined aural adventure with unfussed, hyper-real sonic presence.

Clandestine (CIMP 367) and Conspiracy a Go Go (CIMP 369) are bracing blasts of improv with drummer Andrew Cyrille, pianist David Haney and bassist Dominic Duval. Clandestine pairs Cyrille and Haney for a scintillating duo set; Conspiracy brings Duval into the mix for a vibrant, tense trio encounter. On Clandestine, Haney and Duval are riveting even as they pursue the flimsiest shred of thought. Haney’s hard-driving piano motifs seem to set the agenda, but Cyrille is the dominant spirit. If Max Roach played speed chess on the drums, Cyrille goes three-dimensional with the game, putting out a relentless spray of ideas that soaks Haney like a grumbling, blinking bear. On the trio disc, it’s Duval’s turn to swamp Haney with aggressive comping that recalls Charles Mingus’s machete hacking in Duke Ellington’s Money Jungle. Duval’s solos can run soft and hard, suggesting flamenco filigree or Moe Howard with a ball peen hammer. All three musicians give their all every second, sustaining interest on the slower tracks as well as the barnburners. The interplay never sags on either disc and CIMP’s no-gadgets engineering blows the session’s very air, not just the vibrations, into your living room.

Up the gangplank they come, two by two. The New Jazz Composers’ Octet, a collective led by trumpeter David Weiss, fools you with its complex, cleanly executed charts and mid-tempo swing on two new discs, The Turning Gate (Motema) and a new set with hardbop legend Freddie Hubbard, On the Real Side (Times Square). Under the professional sheen, there’s a lot of meaty music in the classic Blue Note mold, but with a generous peacock fan of harmony.

The charts are like Jewish mothers, ladling on more and more material, and the soloists don’t get a chance to chew it all, but that’s part of the fun. The blowing is fairly buttoned down, but there are many delights, as when dense harmonic expositions drop suddenly into relaxed piano swing, or the horns turn an elegant canon. At the end of a track called “New,” the front line whips out a faux-ancient-Roman flourish out of Ben-Hur. On “David and Goliath,” the rhythm section rolls along on the medium burner as saxophonist Myron Walden bubbles up with increasing violence.

Apparently, hard bop and hard candy are made the same way. The disc with Hubbard, On the Real Side, goes on in the same vein, but it’s a bittersweet listen at first. It’s a small shock when Hubbard comes in for his first solo, sounding wobbly and muffled after a lifetime in the hard bop fast lane and a long recovery from lip damage. But his phrasing still swims like a minnow, his ideas are strong and his weathered sound—the real side, I suppose—sets off Weiss’s crisp, creased, drycleaned arrangements like a leathery wrist protruding from a designer suit. Hubbard weighs in as a composer with the title tune, a swaggering soul original.

The group doesn’t make a fuss of him, but folds him into the meringue like a layer of sugary grit.

But enough well-bred post-bop. Look up—way up— as next two releases sway into the ark like a pair of mtant giraffes. No music on Earth shambles, floats, sways and slithers like Adam Rudolph’s Go:Organic 80 | SIGNAL to NOISE #52

Orchestra, a huge assemblage of exotic woodwinds, percussion and strings. Thought Forms (Meta 18) isn’t a blowout, but a series of vivid sound pictures that mix sonic media with a startling freedom. Several tracks lay angular stabs of serialism over gut-soup African percussion patterns—Arnold Schoenberg goes native.

Despite the huge forces involved, the mood is quiet and exploratory, making the bigger moments in this live performance more cathartic. Rudolph is back, in a much smaller setting, with multi-reed master Yusef Lateef, on Concerto for Woodwinds, an innerspace journey as far from the conventional concerto as you can imagine. Rudolph manipulates a Carlsbad Cavern full of weird percussion, from buzz sticks to frame drums to zithers, while Lateef plays a battery of winds, including his ever-fat tenor sax and several exotic flutes. (Lateef also plays a leaden, austere piano on some tracks.) Some listeners might give up after hearing the hearts-of-space, flute-y stuff at the beginning, especially when the electronics get spooky, but in doing so, they would deprive themselves of the mean tenor work at the heart of the disc, backed by outrageous smacks, boings, ratchets and booms from Rudolph. The mood recalls Lateef’s Eastern Sounds, desiccated by decades in the desert.

Another pair of related releases, both from the Pirouet label, brings us back to hard-bop neon. The common element is pianist Marc Copland, the leader on Another Place (Pirouet 3031) and sideman on trumpeter Tim Hagans’ Alone Together (Pirouet 3030). Hagans is a driving, swinging bop practitioner, and Copland excels at bringing out his thoughtful side. On “Not Even the Rain” (an over-referenced e. e. cummings line), Hagans glides through umbrae and penumbrae of left-hand chords from Copland.

The standards satisfy almost as much as the originals.

When any trumpeter slaps in a mute and launches into “Stella by Starlight,” eyes will roll, but Hagans gets away with it because he’s so solid, secure enough to take Miles’ ideas into his own end zone. Miles had a way of playing a standard as if he were up to his belly in water, on a sinking raft. Hagans’ gloriously decaying cadenza on “You Don’t Know What Love Is” takes it all the way down. Toward the end, Copland joins him with some refracting piano lines. When the bell of Hagans’ trumpet disappears beneath the waves, Copland sends up a string of cold bubbles.

Without the autumnal sun of Hagans’ trumpet, Copland’s Another Place falls into winter shadow, with guitarist John Abercrombie on hand to etch ice crystals on the windows. The mood is lyrical, but Copland seems to regard the world as rather cold, and the sonic texture is more gauze than blanket.

That makes the band’s rapport crucial—they have to huddle together for warmth. The introduction of “River Bend” paints a bleak winter landscape, with shimmers of high-hat and blinding glints from Abercrombie’s guitar, but the tune segues into a bracing ski run, and you sense the warm earth under the snow.

After a run of pairs like that, it’s almost disappointing when a new release straggles in by itself, but the experimental trio Yuganaut—Michigan-based Stephen Rush and New Yorkers Geoff Mann and Tom Abbs—stretch two discs’ worth of fun out of their many toys. The trio’s debut release, This Musicship, (ESP 4044) is a mischievous dispatch from Sun Ra’s sonic universe, with meandering Fender-Rhodes melodies, spacey vibraphone atmospherics, and a huge battery of effects, from mbira to didjeridoo to duck and elk calls to something that sounds like a lawn

mower chewing up a chainsaw. Despite the anarchic, open-ended exploration and stream-of-consciousness episodes, Yugunaut’s music, like Sun Ra’s, has an internal consistency, a firm air of determination, that keeps your ears belted in.

“Blueprints of Jazz,” a new series from Talking House Records, launched this fall with a heavy salvo of bop and post-bop spotlighting lesser-known artists.

Tenor saxophonist Billy Harper leads Blueprints No. 1, but the central figure is poet Amiri Baraka, who is knob-twiddled into the music in a way that will delight some and dismay others. “Africa Revisited,” the sixteen-minute opener, steers into the same deep ruts Coltrane made in the savannah long ago, but the vehicle is updated—Harper revs up a more uptown sound than Coltrane’s—and there’s a sort of news crawl along the bottom of the screen, as Baraka delivers a panoramic history of black America and jazz, beginning with the words, “Where that stuff come from?” The band surges like mad, but Baraka sounds like he’s in another room, and their logic is at odds— the poetry pushes forward, but the music goes around in circles. The poet’s elegant voice falls into Harper’s ocean of sound like spit from a bridge, and when Baraka sings snatches of spirituals and blues over Harper’s music, the two elements nullify each other completely.

Both Harper and Baraka might have been better served by separate dates. (I don’t much care to hear a lecture on the history of jazz on top of jazz—stop reading me the menu, I’m eating it!—but that issue is perhaps best left to a longer discussion.) Strongest of the first three “Blueprints” is a 2006 session led by Donald Bailey, designated No. 3 in the series. Bailey, a journeyman drummer who apparently hasn’t lost a beat, goes all the way back to the mid-fifties Jimmy Smith trio. Bailey’s work is sensitive and versatile, but reedman Odean Pope all but steals the show. Pope is a supple soloist and a glorious honker, and here he runs a full-bodied tenor decathlon that all but defines post-Coltrane saxophone power. Soulful bassist Tyrone Brown is a huge asset—it’s impossible to zone out while he solos. To crown the disc, trumpeter Charles Tolliver swoops in for the final, clarion track, “Blue Gardenia,” a classic late-hard-bop energy blast. The remaining “Blueprints” release (designated No. 1) is another 2006 session from drummer Mike Clark, best known for his work with Herbie Hancock’s Headhunters in the 70s but deep in the jazz groove here. Clark’s strong band features alto saxophonist Donald Harrison and bassist Christian McBride. The tunes are varied and full of punch, the soloing is fine, and the sectional work jumps the trickiest hurdles. If the series goes on in this vein, it has a fine future.

This roundup of recordings began with a highintensity drum and piano duo, but Andrew Cyrille and David Haney haven’t cornered that market this fall.

Anyone who thinks of pianist Larry Willis purely as a limpid, lyrical soul will be surprised by the grand ferocity of his work on Expose, a totally improvised duo set with drummer Paul Murphy on Murphy Records.

There’s an overt political stance in the disc’s title and the poetry on the liner. The music, though highly abstract, pops with the same spirit of urgency. Reflective moments, a Willis specialty, are rare but effective. On most tracks, Murphy rolls out a tumbling, skittering carpet for Willis, who practically orates through the piano.

On these, as well as the more ruminative tracks, the spacious, no-frills engineering dusts and documents the lightest fingerprints of thought and emotion. ✹ WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #52 | 81

BURNERS AND BACK FLIPS Joel Calahan samples the season's best underground hip-hop releases

Heltah Skeltah's Sean P

Aside from being just another loosely-bound crew who can't seem to put a full-length to tape, the four members of the HRSMN (Canibus, Ras Kass, Killah Priest and Kurupt) all share rhyming skills to some degree: raw edge growling verses so stuffed with polysyllabic internal rhymes and hyperextended similes and imagery that it can really only be called entirely unnecessary. Of the four, erstwhile Wu-Tang affiliate Killah Priest is the most prolific member, with three new records out since May—the latest is a duo joint called Beautiful Minds with Chief Kamachi, a Philly MC who’s part of the Wu-Tang copycat crew Army of the Pharoahs. Commercial rap, mics and the OED get torn apart while mystic religious icons, carnage and Hobbesian street survival are idolized; the solo string and electro-organ samples with both men shouting doubled chorus verses make for some admittedly rousing moments, but it's too hard to keep listening to put-on anger for twelve tracks. Ras Kass, the elder HRSMN, proves again to be a prodigious talent with Institionalized, Vol. 2., a sequel to his 2006 release.

Cut while serving time for a DUI conviction, the disc features competent production with a few well-timed flourishes to back up Ras Kass's inimical rasp and croon antics. He coasts for most of the album, then peaks on the killer “Behind the Musick,” a hallelujahfuck-you ode dedicated to fickle major label reps with whom he's battled in courts for years over contract issues. Forget melodrama—Ras Kass plays this one for tragedy because he knows the struggle.

The GZA retains a legendary status in large degree because he's a spendthrift with his studio releases, allowing his status as the ascetic hermit of the group to canonize his skillful contributions to group records.

Part of the steadiness also seems to be avoiding the assumption that Wu-Tang members have a Midas touch when it comes to the recording studio. His latest return from meditation in the desert, ProTools, main82 | SIGNAL to NOISE #52

tains a typically even production style despite work by a myriad of producers that suggests his oversight of the backing instrumentals stretching as far back as his seminal Liquid Swords was comprehensive. While not thematic like his previous post-36 Chambers releases, ProTools is a gallery of pristine artisanal craft. Over a stripped-bare rock beat and a guitar strum on “0% Finance” GZA calmly and carefully dissects bourgeois American culture from the viewpoint of cars. The lead single “Paper Plates,” produced by RZA, is a whirl of lyrical complexity over a somber electronic riff, while “Alphabets” pumps a 4-bar Premo-esque guitar sample by True Master; both offer the Genius ample canvas for rhymes, and that's all he needs.

Lawrence Muggerud or DJ Muggs is often left off best producer lists, but it's hard to argue that his work with Cypress Hill wasn't as influential as Dre's G-Funk in defining West Coast sound for an era. But unlike Dre, DJ Muggs hasn't made himself scarce, releasing a spate of singles and collaborations over the past few years with GZA and Sick Jacken of latino group Psycho Realm in a series titled “DJ Muggs Versus.” The latest partner is Fresno MC Planet Asia, a Wake Up Show staple with a vanful of mixtapes and underground releases under his name but little in the way of name production to prop up his freestyle cred.

Pain Language is not one of Muggs' best-produced albums, but it's the culmination of a steady movement into the cool new century, flaunting a diversity that's the accomplishment of twenty years in production.

Melodic samples are less overwhelming for a producer who wrote the book on gritty atonality, but Muggs still has an ear for hot drum breaks that buoy even the few places where the soul strings get a little schmaltzy.

You have to give Massachusetts MC Termanology props for self-promotion. DJ Premier jumped on his demo tape several years ago, which led to a surprise Premo-produced 2006 single “Watch How It

Go Down” that proved Termanology has few lyrical hangups he can't shake with a steady flow heavy on end rhymes. His much-hyped debut Politics As Usual is all the poorer for the growing suspense of two years.

Premo, Large Pro, Pete Rock, Alchemist and other legends provide the backing, but Term's verses bloat with metanarrative: you aren't dope because you found name producers to push you into the spotlight.

Unfortunately, this one's all hype.

Pick your poison with Left Coast ladder climber MURS: swinging from gracefully ephemeral underground EPs with 9th Wonder to overhyped commercial hooks per a new Warner Bros. contract, the only real question to be asked is how he gets the encouragement to keep dropping bread crumbs as he wanders the woods. Sweet Lord is a half-cocked affair, as 9th Wonder serves up B-side worthy beats underneath a few notepad sketches. MURS for President is prime time, but even will.I.am and Snoop Dogg can't make him glitter enough to distract from the fact that, despite a rich voice, MURS can't deliver a punch line.

French producer Dela samples jazz liberally, expanding the studio space with atmospheric brushes of ambient sound. Only one French MC appears on Changes of Atmosphere; the rest of his cast reads like a Rock the Bells lineup: Large Professor, J-Live, Talib Kweli, Blu, Naledge (from Kidz in the Hall). J-Live and Kweli are both particularly well-suited for Dela's sixteen-bar structures: for J-Live, “The City” and “I Say Peace” are beautiful wallpaper tracks, while Kweli finds a downtempo wasteland that is both unearthly and truer to his syncopated flow than the soul jams he normally jocks. The distribution labyrinth coughed out copies in Japan, but no worldwide release is slated as this went to press.

Canada's contributions to the rap game have been eccentric, though hardly visible in the U.S. Vancouver is where two of the country's avant-garde MCs reside, Moka Only and Josh Martinez. Moka pursues a prolific art appropriately embodied in one of three 2008 releases, Clap Trap, a smattering of 21 two-minute tracks that crackle with fragmentary glitchpop textures, and linguistically dense lyrics. Taken individually, the impatience of the maker is evident, but as a whole, Clap Trap is nearly literary in its stream-ofconsciousness built brick by brick. You'll be right to brand Josh Martinez, though, a dilettante. His distinctly nasal voice shoots along recklessly slurring and careering around 4/4 rock fills with so idle a demeanor that this diminutive pothead makes Devin the Dude tense by comparison. Martinez hasn't ever made a good record, per se, because he can't carry concept well; but World Famous Sex Buffet, his latest attempt, has jams dance synth “Underground Pop” and stoner opus “Hurricane Jane”; his live band Pissed Off Wild works here and pumps up Martinez's live shows as well.

DJ Revolution has built a formidable infantry of MCs for his latest compilation, King of the Decks, out of his work with Power 106's legendary Wake Up Show, a gig he's held for over a decade. Though his scratching manifests a virtuoso technique—noted conspicuously on this record with a DJ Qbert duo— Rev recedes into the background with a radio-friendly production angle that's careful and steady. Though he's a taste maker by dint of an audience of millions, there's also a sense that King of the Decks offers an encapsulation of a distinctly southern California sound, post-G-funk era. That, of course, doesn't restrict the kind of variety that always comprises a scene. DJ Babu

(Dilated Peoples, Beat Junkies) presents a contrast in effects if not styles with his latest comp, Duck Season.

While DJ Revolution works scratches like trumpet solos in a jazz piece, DJ Babu uses heavy doses of scratch samples for chorus hooks and integrates them fully into the rhythmic base of each track. Babu has always been an eclectic, and his taste is in fine form here: the dark bounce of “The Unexpected" with MF Doom and Sean Price, the drunk-stumble dub fill base on “2 Feet” featuring Kardinal Offishall and Rakaa Iriscience.

Babu gets credit for party jams with Dilated Peoples, but these experiments are far more challenging and satisfying.

Seattle producer Jacob Dutton (a.k.a. Jake One) teams up with an enviable list of indie A-listers for a full-length production debut that joins his fellow Rhymesayers clique with a few clout names (Royce Da 5'9", MF Doom, Busta Rhymes) for grins. Dutton has produced for 50 Cent and G-Unit, so his casting choices on the full-length reflect some concern for appearances of artistic reputation. He needn't worry, as White Van Music is an archetypal exhibition of deftly spun soul samples. Pete Rock is the sine qua non of Jake's hard kick beats, but he's got the nose for finding multiple breaks that can't be taught. No better proof is the beautiful drum breakdown he employs on “The Truth” featuring Freeway and Brother Ali, but he finds new ways to switch up his cuts all over the place.

Heltah Skeltah (Sean Price, Da Rockness Monstah) represents the hard gangsta cadre of the Duck Down supergroup Boot Camp Clik, one not afraid of a little self-parody to temper the worst instincts of oneupsmanship that cram much of their new LP, D.I.R.T. “Rappers are embarrassed to say they're rappers—but they're proud to say they sell crack” complains Sean Price on lead single, “Everything is Heltah Skeltah”; the two drive against that mentality, though when the subject is all the time self-reflexive, it's easy to pump the metanarrative too much and let the lyrics eat themselves. The sensationalist production doesn't help here, but it doesn't overshadow a few rough gems hidden toward the back of the disc, including a guester with Smif-n-Wesson called “W.M.D.” A late summer morsel that shouldn't be overlooked is Universal Dominance, a mini-retrospective collecting single appearances and remixes of the Long Island duo Tha Connection. Absurd monikers (Hus Tha KingPin and SmooVth Dude) belie cosmopolitan lyrical flourishes with a stirring level of inclusiveness, from dodging bullets to spiritual mysticism to etymology. Layers of heavily-filtered jazz create a steady movement that spills across the strictures of sixteen bars, pushing Hus and Smoovth into extended verses, only doubling back for choruses when you assume they'll keep on into the sunset. Phrases and images recur in lyrics across tracks, evincing a concern for the album's effect as a whole despite the fact that it wasn't originally recorded as such.

Comic book rap is a chapter to skim through in the hip-hop almanac; yet a few MCs thrive creatively far afield from the daily hustle among superheroes and galactic warfare, chief among them Kool Keith. Under the alias Dr. Dooom (who kills his played-out Dr. Octagon character in “R.I.P. Dr. Octagon”), Kool Keith returns with a Kutmasta Kurt-produced full-length presenting a steady barrage of dark missiles with his signature grotesque imagery and absurdist black humor. Part of the thrill is Kutmasta Kurt's perfect sense of how to steer the ship; mostly it's the freedom that the characters give Kool Keith to push his vocal energies into generative material. He isn't afraid to get personal, either, in tracks like “Always Talkin' Out Your Ass” where he upbraids promoters, groupies, and journalists for hypocrisy. But we always come back for more!

Count MF Doom as another of the comic book surrealists whose work bears mention. On the new Trunks EP Unicron, Doom plays producer, doling out beats from his Special Herbs collections under the EP's first two cuts. For production heads, Special Herbs collections are as dense and rich as it comes, long, inscrutable mixes that unroll like an On the Road scroll to beats. Trunks has a boundless well of ideas and sure talent, but it's all he can do to keep up with Doom's winding tunnels of sound—even on the cool riding “Who's a Hero?” Doom chops the beat a millisecond early, a beautiful move that constantly frustrates Trunks' attempts at holding steady rhythm. ✹ WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #52 | 83

THE WEIGHT OF THE WORLD

SMOKING THAT ROCK

Let’s start this column off with some basics. Sotajumala is a very precise and polished Finnish death band, whose Teloitus (Woodcut Records) is just the right kick in the ass when you’re up for grunt/ scream vocals, downtuned riffage, and blast beats.

Nothing very experimental or chance-taking about it, unfortunately, but the ferocity and chops give you sort of a decaffeinated The Red Chord (with, every so often, hints of the squealing intensity of Gojira).

Rudimentary Peni’s been around forever, playing unaltered old school British punk that defiantly resists change. So the pleasures of the band’s No More Pain EP (Southern Records) are found in its conciseness (10 tracks, 20 minutes), its proud embrace of bluntness, and in the sheer misanthropy of the lyrics. Dark without the florid excesses of Goth, heavy without the mannerisms of a lot of metal, this is great music to mainline, several nasty tracks at a time.

For fans of somewhat traditional Scandinavian black metal, LA quintet Sothis serve up De Oppresso Liber (Candlelight), a precise and more or less by-the-numbers salvo filled with “demonic” shrieking, Gothic keyboard flourishes, blindingly fast sweep-picking, and “brutal” riffs propelled by chugging guitars and double-kick drumming. I think fifteen years ago this sort of thing was moderately interesting, but it now strikes me as conservative in its way as a Marsalis record. Terribly, terribly boring.

I’m immediately partial to Finnish combo Alghazanth, because they tell Myspace to fuck off. But it doesn’t quite redeem the formulaic black metal of Wreath of Thevetat (Woodcut Records), alas. It’s atmospherically rich, melodramatic, with vocals in place, and expected elements checked off like a car inspection form. But while some bands can slot into this category while still being at least musically competent and occasionally interesting, these guys . . . not so much. Only the relatively gritty “Future Made Flesh” sounds like it’s not going to be used as part of a video game soundtrack. I’m much more interested in Sigh’s Venom tribute record.

Germany’s Destruction have been carrying the torch for old-school thrash since the 1980s.

On D.E.V.O.L.U.T.I.O.N. (Candlelight), they play a ridiculously tight (but not mechanical) hybrid of early Metallica and contemporary metalcore like Unearth.

Like some of the above releases, it wins on its vigor and conviction, but fails in its reliance on all-tootired gestures like excessive breakdowns, Mercyful Fate-style lyrics, and twinned leads. When it’s at its strongest, it just makes me want to go back to the source material, like Belladonna-era Anthrax.

Boston quartet Ehnahre is an odd one, thankfully.

On The Man Closing Up (Sound Devastation), they use the dynamics of doom and death metal in tricky, polymath compositions that sit at the intersection of experimental cut-up masters You Fantastic! and unclassifiable heavy stuff like Kayo Dot (indeed, some members of Ehnahre have passed through that ensemble). It’s great, gritty stuff, filled with texture, dynamics, and yes, sonic experimentalism too. The five-part suite reminds me a lot of the late, lamented Mare in its colliding influences (oddly Queen-like multi-tracked vocals over Swans noise), ranging from pounding dirge and long, noise-filled expanses to brilliantine lyricism. Perhaps the most surprising moment occurs on the fourth part, which has a kind of diminishing sound like the first Black Sabbath album being played by church mice. After this, the final section delivers the most conventionally death-y dynam-

Welcome to the third installment of Smoking That Rock, where various sub dermal rawk foodstuffs are clinically examined and sampled with a variety of expensive, trendy organic wines. Our modus operandi so far has been to dissect a dozen or so recent CDs per column; this time, we're halving that number and presenting our hard-earned findings to you, the eager reader, in the form of a buyers' guide. Thus, when you're trawling online shoppes with your Paypal account , you'll know exactly what to get for that twisted uncle or precocious tween on your Kwanzaa/ Christmas/Hanukkah list who has, like, everything. No need to thank us now; that sorta quid pro quo can wait—until the late December clearance sales, that is.

In the interim, let's get down to brass tacks.

Deerhoof—splashy, bi-coastal art-punkers who never let a year pass without at least one release - are back at it again with Offend Maggie (Kill Rock Stars/5 Rue Christine). Throughout the group's storied and varied career, there's been something persistently notquite-there about its music, as though the goal was to perfect some hyper-real, child-like state of affairs: playful, teasing riffage and rainbow strafing noise, Kidz Bop lyricism, bite-sized tunes (mostly). In that sense, last year's Friend Opportunity felt like a milestone, stretching Deerhoof's inherent artificiality a few inches beyond its limits via gratuitous Pro Tooling. They'd recently shrunk from a foursome to a trio—longtime guitarist Chris Cohen had flown the coop—and this seemed like a way for singer bassist Satomi Matsuzaki, singer/drummer Greg Saunier, and guitarist John Dieterich to compensate for that loss, by twisting their sound into something even more explicitly plastic than ever before. Offend Maggie, on the other hand, comes across as unusually mortal and down-toearth—in a good way. Matsuzaki still sings like an unusually gifted Japanese schoolgirl prodigy and Saunier continues to rep, indirectly, for uber-sensitive dudes everywhere, but otherwise Deerhoof just sound like a great rock band doing great rock band stuff sans ostentatious trickery or alchemy. Aside from whippet hit-induced interlude “This Is God Speaking,” there's no more genre hopscotch or weirdo avant-garde-isms.

These tunes are mid-tempo, polite, and to the point: “Snoopy Waves” flexing jazzbo muscles, “Don't Get Born" a neat lil folk interlude, the skeletal “Basket Ball Get Your Groove Back” revisiting one of Matsuzaki's favorite themes—bunnies—in an entirely new way.

Some of the credit for this unusually organic shift may be due to the addition of new guitarist Ed Rodriguez.

In any event, score this one for the Pitchfork readers on your list.

Houston's Indian Jewelry are one of psych-folk's hottest tickets right now because they get that this shit's gotta be heavy to scorch the cerebellum; on Free Gold! (We Are Free), they're like the late Wooden Wand & and the Vanishing Voice on codeine or something. The formula's simple: tons of distorted, just-out-of-tune guitars, variously filtered vocalisms, and hummable, rock-solid melodies. Hardcore stoners everywhere will appreciate discovering this one under their trees and in their stockings.

The late Wino was based in Louisville, Kentucky, but its sound was pure, undiluted Chicago: grunting, grumbling, downtuned guitars, distressed (in both senses) vocals, thrumming blackjack bass, extremist sentiments, no holds barred. A Bottle of Pills With a Bullet Chaser (Temporary Residence) collects everything the band committed to tape between 1994

Jason Bivins digs metal, doom and heavy music in all its permutations.

84 | SIGNAL to NOISE #52

ics and riffs, but that’s only if Gorguts is conventional (and would add horns). Awesome stuff, gents.

Chingalera is a band that’s really underwhelmed me in the past. They crank out a lot of records, but they’ve always struck me as sort of generic stoner sludge, trying to craft a middle path between Fu Manchu and Electric Wizard. But with Dose (Pacific) I was really quite pleasantly surprised. They’ve stripped things down considerably, going for minimalism and repetition over the first half of the album, with a lot of long atmospheric sections (particularly the long “You Were Happy When You Came in Here”) that wouldn’t be out of place on an early Floyd or a contemporary black metal record. The grinding heaviness recalls the mighty YOB, always a good thing.

ASVA’s What You Don’t Know is Frontier (Southern) comes straight from the same desolate landscape as Sunn0))), Nadja, and Ocean, the long-form, speakerrattling, doomriders much loved by this magazine’s readership (and by me). For a long time, this record focuses on frosty mood settings, with wind noises, church organ, and downtuned chords struck at great length and over long intervals. As it develops, it opens up room for grinding feedback, low end rumble, and toms. Its third section obsesses over a brightly strummed chord (Trey Spruance, presumably, who’s listed as a member but must be sublimating his tendencies) until you’re surprised by some Sainkho-like vocals from Holly Johnston (where’s she been?). It’s almost like Dead Can Dance playing doom, an impression that’s deepened with the organ-driven drone tapestry of the closing section.

Lawrence’s Samothrace can lull you in with some deceptively simple and gentle moments. On Life’s Trade (20 Buck Spin), there’s a clarity to their brand of doom that contrasts with the dirty, amp-busting fuzz of many practitioners—you can pick out notes in a chord, even as the hallucinatory drone swirls in your head. They’re closer, in other words, to groups like Mouth of the Architect than to early Boris in the way they favor clean guitars, arpeggios, Western-movie pluckin’ and caveman vocals. The twin guitar harmonies on the ponderous “Awkward Hearts” don’t entirely convince, but there’s some serious emotion behind this music. And when they succeed, they do so powerfully, with a kind of expansive, psychedelic, power doom, the sort of thing Esoteric would play if they were from the desert.

Campbell Kneale’s doom project, Black Boned Angel, is far closer to the fuzzed-out dronescapes of Birchville Cat Motel than is often acknowledged. The Endless Coming Into Life (20 Buck Spin) is supremely minimalist at the start, with just a slowly intoning tympani or bass drum. The single, hour-long track moves slowly and gently into some clean guitar chords, struck with the kind of bell-like minimalism of a Jozef van Wissem piece, oddly enough. Exactly at the midpoint, rhythm returns, but as more of a nasty thwack that cues up long unspooling distorted figures.

Kneale slowly draws together strands of feedback, choruses of clangor, almost like wool to a loom, until the whole resonates, almost levitates (I could swear some of the specific sonic properties of “Expressway to Yr Skull” creep in towards the end). Very fine.

Any fan of American doom/sludge metal over the last fifteen years will have at least one Eyehategod record, and rightly so. From a pissed-off, post-Katrina NOLA comes Outlaw Order (consisting entirely of EHG vets, who also moonlight in hard luck combo Soilent Green), whose Dragging Down the Enforcer

(Season of Mist) focuses its misanthropy on public authority. Michael D. Williams is still one of the few singers I’d call bilious (he opens “Safety Off” with the line “God damn every one of us” and somehow it doesn’t sound trite), and there’s something unsettled about the downtuned grooves, choppy garage explosions, and Williams’ sheer howl. Deep into a Steve Austin-like endorsement of survivalist selfdetermination, this band swaggers like it’s ready to go at any moment. This one’s a motherfucker.

The combination of metal and prog is pretty standard these days, with tons of dudes who might otherwise have been Berklee chops warriors writing the most complex, multi-sectioned metal tunes they can imagine. But without Cynic, much of it would never have happened. After a long furlough, the quartet returns with Traced in Air (Season of Mist).

One thing underpinning their particular brand of complexity —as far from the pop aspirations of Queensryche as from Dillinger—is a limber sense of groove. However far they range (from the twinned guitars of “Nunc Fluens” to “The Space for This,” a nearly Kayo Dot-like tune that will stump on many blindfold tests) is not only real musical integrity but almost a sense of swing. The soling is demented, Gorguts-like, and there's a consistent focus on melody, almost like they’re a post-death metal Yes or something. The sweep and scope of tunes like “The Unknown Quest” will certainly appeal to Opeth fans. Then there are groan-worthy moments like the children’s/women’s chorus that opens “King of Those Who Know.” But that’s what you get with Cynic – singular, self-determined, mostly quite rocking, but occasionally a tad Renaissance fair.

The marvelous Grails have delivered one of the year’s darkest recordings with Doomsdayer’s Holiday (Temporary Residence). Here they combine the instrumental scope of their early discs for Neurot with a more synthetic sound; genres aren’t quite so distinct any longer, as they merge metal dynamics with Morricone, early Floyd, and Sun City Girls. Now a quartet (Emil Amos, Alex John Hall, William Slater, and Wm. Zak Riles), the band seems to be diving deeper into American vernacular musics, investing them with renewed energy courtesy of psych-metal intensity even as they maintain recognizably idiomatic features (as on the apocalyptic howl of “Reincarnation Blues,” with guest vocals from Alan Bishop himself). There is lovely piano and some windy atmospherics on “The Natural Man,” and banjos and fiddles float up regularly. There’s also something of the doomy minimalism (or minimalist doom) of recent Earth here. But the gorgeous expanse of “Predestination Blues” is so singular, so uncategorizable, it’s almost hypnotic.

Their half-hour EP Take Refuge in Clean Living (Important) is more singular in its musical direction, with the band seemingly perched atop a high rock formation and picking up dark signals from across the firmament. There’s still enough instrumental texture here to tickle your fancy, but it’s a more obviously “rock” record in a lot of ways, from the swaggering 70s groove of opener “Stoned at the Taj Again” (despite the use of harps and multiple percussion) to the Ventures cover “11th Hour.” The pieces blend together, knit by spacey textures—keyboard swells, delay and other effects, resounding percussion—in some movie of the mind. Their improvisational skills aren’t quite at their best here, but it’s still an absorbing listen (the hazy sitar-driven jam of “Take Refuge” is infatuating). ✹

Ray Cummings gets down with messed-up modern rock.

and 1999, and it's a damned doozy: the searing roar of an underground that would never quite capture the national public imagination the same way other alt-scenes would. (Unless you wanna count the Jesus Lizard getting ink in Rolling Stone and playing Lollapalooza '95.) Vocalist/axman Aaron Hodge conveyed the sort of growling, in-your-face cartoon menace popularized by the likes of Steve Albini (with Shellac, Big Black, and Rapeman) and recently revived by Pissed Jeans; when, on “Dog,” he asks—rhetorically?—“What've you got that I could steal?” the threat still carries some residual weight. Much of the Wino catalogue bears that sort of heaviosity, but there are lighter-hearted surprises every now and again, like post-rock-y instrumental “A Minute Fifty-One” and the maddeningly murderous calm of “Downtown”—you keep expecting the music to bulge and contort angrily along with Hodge as his temper comes unstuck, but it never quite does. We’d recommend getting this two-disc set for people you admire but are slightly scared of. Be forewarned: this is two hours of Wino, of high-voltage angst and frustration. By the end of your pre-holiday drive—assuming you decide to spend it with Hodge & company—your facial expression might not match what you’d like your relatives to see.

In my long-bygone undergraduate days, there was a particular species of collegiate scum that I found myself simultaneously repelled by and drawn to, who I envied and despised in equal measure: the drama kids. They wrote, directed, lit, and starred in on-campus plays. They staged legendary wrap parties. They swapped lovers like baseball cards. They were gloriously alive, giddily self-destructive, and hideously emotional. They listened—almost exclusively, it seemed—to annoyingly exuberant pop fare like the Barenaked Ladies and the Violent Femmes. If someone told me that their spiritual progeny are all about Of Montreal at this point, it wouldn't surprise me in the least. Of Montreal's Kevin Barnes—not actually from Montreal, but Athens, GA—has spent his entire career whipping out over-the-top, peppy pop platters, but in recent years he's abandoned his 60s pop template, opting for a more electronic, synth-driven sound.

Last year's Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer? scorned the barbed, routine hijinx of albums like The Sunlandic Twins and Satanic Panic in the Attic, leaping feet first into the probingly personal. Hissing, which chronicled the near-dissolution of Barnes' marriage to band mate Nina Barnes, was a fantastically sonic ornate confessional and a profoundly difficult record to listen to more than a few times. Skeletal Lamping (Polyvinyl) finds him plumbing the sordid depths of his unconscious—casual ejaculations like “I'm just a black she-male” are the norm here—while playing up the disco and post-R&B elements he began playing with on Hissing. Opener “Nonpareil of Favor” sets up this conceit with dinky keyb hotfooting that segues into skull-crushing noise, then the going gets really, really weird. “Wicked Wisdom” oozes sassy falsetto funk and quotes Queen's “We Are The Champions.”

Booming and throbbing flirtatiously, “Gallery Piece” catalogues frisky, iffy desires aimed at an unknown subject. More outrageously, “And I've Seen A Bloody Shadow” celebrates youthful prostitution in classic rock/Love As Laughter fashion. And so it goes, and goes, and goes: unflinchingly honest declarations most of us wouldn't share with our closest friends laced lubed-up hooks, feminist theory twisted into perverted shapes, id dissections, oblique Mountain Goats

references, blatant rejections of traditional rhyme conventions, indirect Simon & Garfunkel quotes. Lamping is certainly Barnes' finest work to date, but where does he go from here? I'm not sure, but I'd definitely recommend this disc for the aspiring thespians in your social/ familial circle.

Next, let's talk about Crystal Stilts, a duo from Brooklyn, NYC, who, given the hype swirling about, should suck at least a little. But I find myself enjoying the holy heck out of debut Alight of Night (Slumberland) nonetheless. Their métier is a sort of murky garage rock stew that's on excellent terms with Morrissey and surf rock. So the mood is exceedingly droll and lysergicly nocturnal, as if these dudes were puffing joints and rocking out at 3 a.m. just for kicks. The instrumentation is pleasantly swampy and thick but not so much that the hooks aren't discernable; the drums mind manners, move things briskly forward, and serve the overall purpose. Singer Brad Hargett—who is somehow able to make the state of being hopelessly bored seem fantastically fabulous—gilds this shrouded lily with some deeply disturbing and/or complicated verbiage that gets lost in the overall neon gloom. For example, it's only when one consults the lyric sheet that the burnt-out keyboard reverie of “Prismatic Room” shifts from wasted amble to downer-routine mope: “Been building my life out of distorted fragments/Absorbing light through a prismatic tomb/My mind imbibes the city's madness/Projecting worlds on the walls of this magic room.” We'd recommend picking this one up for your loner friends/relatives who hide in their basements or attics at all hours, surgically attached to oversized headphones, zoning out under cover of darkness.

But maybe you're looking for sonic adrenaline for someone a bit less depressive, defeated, or reclusive.

Someone more innocent and idealistic, perhaps; someone with an extremely short attention span, maybe. Someone for whom questions like “Which way is up?” and “Who's gonna care?” and “Don't you know?” and “When will it finally end?” occur on a daily basis. Well, guess what? It's Time (Slumberland), the debut from caUSE co-MOTION!, is only twenty minutes long. Better yet, it's full of kicky little songs about the stuff teenagers care way too much about: girls, boys, love, always being true to one's self, etc. caUSE co-MOTION! go the raucous twee-punk route, meaning notes are mashed, production values are horrible, songs were probably recorded in one-take fashion; also, since this is a singles collection, there's no sense of overarching continuity. Frontman Arno Kleni has that sort of prototypical indie-rock dork voice: wobbly, hesitant, just plain awkward; the songcraft's accordingly fumbled and dinky. But with an average song-length of less than 90 seconds, caUSE coMOTION! don't give you anywhere near enough time to tire of its carefree artlessness. I'm especially fond of the flanged, clipped riffs on “This Time Next Year”— they add an air of sophistication to the proceedings.

“Say What You Feel” consists solely of heroically creaky guitar chords, barely-there drum pum-pound, and Kleni's gawky, repeated entreaties to “Say what you feel, it's okay/No-one will judge you!” Man, if only, right? But one gets the sense that Kleni believes what he's singing, which makes just about every message here seem all but undisputable.

And with that, we’re done for another edition of Smoking That Rock. Next time we’ll be smoking a lot more rocks! ✹

WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #52 | 85

REISSUE REDUX

Bill Meyer surveys the season's key reissues.

courtesy ECM

Jack DeJohnette

Whether you admire the label for its immaculate production values, canny visual merchandising, and bridging position between lyricism and abstraction, or condemn it for those same qualities, you have to admit that ECM has loomed large over jazz for nigh on 40 years. Lately the company has dipped into its back catalog to serve up the Touchstones series with nifty new gatefold cardboard sleeves. At 40 titles, there’s too much to survey, but I have to plug a few personal favorites from the pre-CD era.

Colin Walcott’s Cloud Dance is a 1975 session that brings Oregon’s late sitarist/tabla player together with Miles Davis alumni Dave Holland and Jack DeJohnette plus guitarist John Abercrombie for a session that captures a lot of what was cool about ECM back in the day. Walcott’s accompanists put enough calcium in the backbone of his exotic, pastoral compositions to put paid to any negative rumination about vegetarian jazz. Sargasso Sea is Abercrombie’s duo with another Oregon member, guitar and piano player Ralph Towner. This 1976 date’s alluring amalgamation of folk, jazz, and classical string stylings has plenty to offer anyone who has been spending time with James Blackshaw and Jozef Van Wissem records lately. Towner’s Batik, which was recorded two years later with DeJohnette and bassist Eddie Gomez, turns one of ECM’s more problematic aspects to its advantage. The highly compressed recording wipes out the low end, turning DeJohnette’s usually colorful cymbals and powerful tub-thumping into an airy tattoo that sounds like it’s being tapped out with knitting needles. But this allows them to twine with the guitar and bass, which come to the fore in a dark and intricate tone dance. But DeJohnette took no chances when he recorded Special Edition with a band featuring David Murray and Arthur Blythe, two of New York’s most promising saxophonists, and featuring three of the best tunes he ever wrote, 86 | SIGNAL to NOISE #52

one year later; the tape rolled in NYC, not Oslo or Ludwigsburg. The result is a punchy, impassioned, and insanely catchy celebration of the legacies of Eric Dolphy, John Coltrane, and Sun Ra. Another Central European label, Hatology, has been putting out its back catalog in cardboard foldouts for a while now. The Multiplication Table, a 1999 effort from the Matthew Shipp Trio, now feels like a transitional effort. He's backed by William Parker and Susie Ibarra, who played alongside the pianist in the David S. Ware Quartet; here, though, they keep the rumble and roar in check, the better to hear how his structures fit together. The disc's architectural concerns foreshadow strategies he would pursue in some of his more beat-oriented efforts for Thirsty Ear in the coming decade. Sweet Freedom — Now What? is a fascinating one-off by Joe McPhee, Lisle Ellis, and Paul Plimley. McPhee has never been that big on repertoire projects, but here he took Max Roach’s civil rights-era classic Freedom Now Suite, which was all about the voice and drums, using bass, piano, and reeds. This material affords McPhee plenty of opportunity to showcase the gospel-steeped, vocalized side of his playing, but just as absorbing are each player’s solo improvisations slotted in between the tunes. This is a most welcome return.

Blue Note’s Rudy Van Gelder Editions keep rolling out hard bop sessions by the likes of Lee Morgan, Hank Mobley, and Curtis Fuller that are as satisfying as your mom’s best meat and potatoes served up hot after a cold walk in the rain, but most exciting is the reappearance of two 60s-vintage sessions from the label’s dalliance with the vanguard.

The prescient greatness of trombonist Grachan Moncur III’s Evolution only grows with time; in recent years Chicago- based bands Arrive and Rolldown have borrowed liberally from its vibes, no piano line-up and tight ensemble sound. The six-

piece band, which includes Tony Williams, Bobby Hutcherson, and Jackie McLean, plays Moncur’s multi-segmented and still-surprising compositions with enormous good humor and unassailable intelligence. If you have Moncur’s Mosaic box, you already have this record, but otherwise now’s your chance. Don’t blow it. Sam Rivers’ Dimensions and Extensions has been released on CD once before, twenty years ago. This time they spelled the name right on the spine and Van Gelder’s remastering feels much more three-dimensional. The album’s music feels like it wants to split in two under the pressure that results from the leader and drummer Steve Ellington vigorously pulling at a 90-degree angle from the straighter arrangements executed by the rest of the band. No matter what horn he plays, Rivers always sounds completely like himself.

The Keepnews Collection version of Thelonious Monk’s Thelonious Himself (Riverside/Concord) is substantially revised from the 20 Bit remaster that Fantasy put out in 2004. The original album, which comprises seven solo pieces and a closing trio version of “Monk’s Mood” that introduced his new saxophonist John Coltrane, is essentially untouched, which is a very good thing; you can’t improve upon perfection. And the sound really isn’t that different. But Orrin Keepnews has swapped the 21-minute-long edit of Monk’s multiple takes of “’Round Midnight” for four complete alternate takes and a false start of “Monk’s Mood,” which make this an unavoidable repurchase for Monk nerds who don’t already have the Complete Riverside Recordings box.

Atavistic keeps up the news feed from Saturn with Secrets of the Sun by Sun Ra and His Solar Arkestra. This 1962 recording is one of the first that they did in New York City, and it is a transitional effort that bridges the exotica-tinged but essentially melodic work of the Arkestra’s late Chicago period and the far more freaked-out material they recorded as the 60s got freakier around them. It’s mastered from vinyl, but you can hardly tell, and the music easily transcends its rehearsal-room recording. The 17:35” long bonus track “Flight To Mars,” which features both a rare Ra excursion into tape manipulation and some hard-swinging performances featuring a guitarist — a real rarity for the Arkestra — make this an extra-special find. The label has also released Shut Up And Bleed, a compendium of late 70s-era recordings with the no wave bands Teenage Jesus and the Jerks and Beirut Slump. Even if you have no patience for the no wave revivalists running around these days, or la Lunch’s subsequent career in complaint poetry, you should hear the Teenage Jesus material. Lunch’s detuned guitar assault and pitilessly yowled poison poetry was an enormously permission-granting influence on Sonic Youth, every bit as important as Rhys Chatham or Glenn Branca. This set pulls together pretty much everything the two bands did Tom Verlaine may have played in the same neighborhood as Lunch, but Dreamtime, which was released in 1981, is rooted in the very traditions Lunch wanted to destroy. Not that there’s anything wrong with that; it’s the former Television guitarist’s most succinct and successful amalgamation of the Byrds and the Stones, and the closest he would ever get to the great pop record Warners wanted and never really got from him.

Collector’s Choice’s reissue could have been better handled; the cover reproduction is murky and marred by the label’s gratuitously placed logo, and they actually excise two highly pertinent bonus tracks that appeared on the Infinite Zero version of this album in 1994. But you’d have to eat storebrand soup for a month to pay for a copy of that on eBay, whereas you can pick this up at a budget price. And while you’re at it, pick up its successor Words From The Front, which is finally being issued for the first time on CD in its country of origin 26 years after the LP came out. This is a more challenging record, genuinely experimental but not at all “experimental music.” Verlaine used major label resources to get a massive stadium drum sound out of Mink DeVille’s rhythm section, then applied it to metallic dub, an off-kilter Sir Douglas Quintet rip. Between its lyric and the guitar solo that follows, the title track is one of the most harrowing war narratives ever put to song. And we haven’t even gotten to “Days On The Mountain,” a gorgeous foray into trance music with a towering melody played by Lene Lovich.

No one ever talked trance quite like Klaus Dinger, the originator of the famed and much-imitated Neu beat. And since he sadly passed on early in 2008, no one ever will. Instead, just savor the first two albums by his post-Neu band La Düsseldorf, which have just been given their first American release by Water. La Düsseldorf was released in 1976 and shifted more units in Germany than Neu ever had; David Bowie and Brian Eno nicked its production style for their Berlin trilogy. The sidelong title suite prescribes a path to ecstasy that no one else was thinking about at the time — civic pride. Dinger used driving beats, dreamy synths, and soccer-fan chants to celebrate his hometown and all of humanity. Viva, which came out two years later, uses glistening keyboards to jack up the pomp quotient and paints a joyously optimistic vision of the future. This record must have been a tonic to a country still split in two and reeling from memories of World War II. Damon and Naomi were reeling from a split of their own when they made More Sad Hits in 1992.

Their old band Galaxie 500 had gone out in acrimonious fashion, which probably has something to do with their choice to make a very studio-bound psych-folk record with producer Kramer. The album was originally issued on his Shimmydisc label, which wedged the door open for prog to make inroads into the American indie scene. Which of course makes it hard to bag on this record’s clutter and feyness; it’s idiomatically correct, man. This version on D&N’s 20/20/20 imprint comes in a nice oversized gatefold, the better to appreciate the Man Ray cover image.

The current ascendance of outsider folk music has done wonders for the availability of music that used to be pretty much impossible to find. In the early 80s Kath Bloom and Loren Connors (then going by the name Loren MazzaCane) steered a course into a Bermuda Triangle of singer-songwriter fragility, country blues soul, and avant-guitar hysteria. No one followed, and after the duo stopped working together their LPs couldn’t even be bought at concerts. Chapter Music makes a strong argument for the worth of Sing The Children Over and Sand In My Shoe. The two albums have been bolstered with three 7” tracks; new liner notes join Nat Hentoff’s original essay to give a bit of context to music that had none in its own time.

Despite some questionable song choices, these albums work better as complete entities than the cherry-picked collection 1981-1984 that Megalon put out a few years back.

Despite having a real budget, a heap of great songs, and a photogenic young woman singing them, Linda Perhacs’ Parallelograms didn’t do much better than Bloom and Connors’ records when it came out in 1970. Most likely no one really knew what to make of a woman whose Laurel Canyon-style reveries occasionally flowered into Dali-esque dreamscapes of electro-acoustic sound. Even today, it’s pretty sui generis. The record has come out a couple times already in grey market and low-rent versions; Sunbeam’s version adds a recent interview and seven demos to the

original, and competent mastering finally renders this music in its full synesthetic glory. You’ll find no electronics on Anne Briggs (Water); most of it is a cappella, and most of its songs predate the invention of the automobile. Even so, it is every bit as transporting. Anne Briggs was an enormously influential English folk singer—Sandy Denny, Bert Jansch, and Led Zeppelin covered her repertoire, Richard Thompson wrote about her—whose discomfort with straight world strictures and studio walls kept her from getting her due. She finally got around to making this record in 1971, after most of her audience had already moved on, and shortly afterward she moved on herself, abandoning professional performance altogether. It has never been released in the USA before, although you have everything on it if you picked up Topic’s Briggs anthology some years back.

Tompkins Square has started up a sideline to its efforts to document the permutations of modern acoustic guitar music. The label has started making vinyl-only reproductions of classic private press solo guitar records like Richard Crandell’s In The Flower Of Our Youth and Harry Tausig’s Fate Is Only Once. The pressings are clean and rich sounding, the sleeves faithful to the low-budget originals. Tausig’s music is essentially what John Fahey’s would have been if Fahey had knocked off the self-mythologizing, obfuscation, and experimentation: a learned and engaging but not terribly hurried rags and blues picker. Crandell’s music is more cheery and melodic, sometimes in love with its own intricacy but not in an indulgent way. He has a flair for weaving multiple lines—no wonder that when he set down the guitar for health reasons, he picked up the mbira.

The Japanese Em label tends to be guided by eccentric obsessions, but they do what they do way too well for accusations of madness to stick.

Earl Rodney’s Friends & Countrymen is a case in point; it’s part of an ongoing exploration of the farther reaches of steel pan music. In this case a posse of Trinidadian expats blended the sounds of home with wah-wah guitar funk that would have been quite up to the minute when the record was made in 1973. The result is pure delight, presented with love. The original LP’s garishly trippy sleeve is reproduced both as an oversized gatefold and on a foldout poster, the better to ponder its images of Caribbean life and tribal revolt. Another Em obsession is Yoshi Wada, the Japanese-born sound artist and Fluxus figure. Wada only made a couple albums in the 80s, and with the first CD issue of the old FMP LP Off The Wall they’ve put it all back in print. Wada’s recordings deal with sound as a physical thing, much like Phill Niblock does. The title of this one tells you quite literally what Wada bid that thing to do—bounce madly off the wall. Since the sounds issue mostly from homemade pipe organ and bagpipes, it’s a dense yet highly detailed sound. To sweeten the pot, Em has added one half-hour bonus track that nearly doubles the album’s length Ronnie Hawkins rates a rock and roll footnote for having assembled the Hawks, who were later recruited by Bob Dylan and ultimately became The Band. But his music deserves better than that; while he was hardly an innovator, his take on the tunes of the times—we're talking late 50s and early 60s nuggets like “Suzy-Q,” “Who Do You Love,” and “Bo Diddley”—had teeth and spirit to spare. Mojo Man / Arkansas Rockpile (Collector's Choice) compiles two fine LPs originally released

by Roulette on one CD. They're testimony to what he could do with a hot combo behind him; sidemen like King Curtis on sax, Robbie Robertson on guitar, Levon Helm on drums, and Rick Danko on bass and piano certainly qualifies as hot. The label did deign to give both front covers a full panel in the booklet, which allows you to display one without their usually ubiquitous logo. Unfortunately the Mojo Man portion also has a totally scrambled song order. Reportedly this has been fixed in a second pressing, but Collector's Choice is mute regarding whether they'll trade in faulty copies. If you care about such things, then it is best to buy this one from a store with a no-questions-asked return policy. ✹ WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #52 | 87

CROSSWORD

BASEMENT VALKYRIES

By puzzlemaster Ben Tausig. This issue's theme: "DJ Mixes"

David Cotner scopes out 7” records, 3” CDs, cassettes and other odds and ends.

Amsterdam, Antwerp, Athens, Berlin, Cairo, Dresden, Dublin, Geneva, Lisbon, London, Marseilles, Milan, Moscow, Rome, Seville, Toronto and Warsaw.

These are all towns in Ohio. Not even remotely related to any earthy town or their earthly, more cosmopolitan counterparts is Blue Sabbath Black Cheer and one of their latest, the No Escape 7” (Static Caravan). On beautiful white vinyl and with absolutely no indication of the speed at which it should be played, it seems to hover motionlessly on the turntable, insidious and conversely inviolate. What to expect: abrasions, howls and subguttural expectations. At 45 RPM, it’s over in a flash of hot wet lightning. I want more for my entertainment dollar! So, the flip-side is 16 gut-wrecking revolutions per minute of a vacuum tearing itself inside out and then sweeping up the remains. The fade-out this time is almost unbearably long and, quite possibly, true to the nature of the sound itself, which is to say: persistent.

From the sublime to the ridiculously beautiful: Nicolas Tone and his I’m Tone Deaf (musicpourlessourds) 3” CD (Thor’s Rubber Hammer). Frederic D. Oberland plays “subtle slide guitar” on the eighth track, while Tone (real name: Nicolas Laferrerie) plays “voice, flute, saxophone, guitar, synthesizer, sampler, electronic treatments & computer cut-up.” And yet a menu does not tell you precisely what the food actually tastes like, so consequently: it’s the chaos of a one-man band who, mid-cymbal crash, has realized the full extent and scope of his schizophrenia and moves accordingly. The drums sound like someone building something and the saxophone sounds like someone evolving a new species of animal mid-millennium. It’s not always so epochal and cataclysmic; “8=MONO,” featuring the aforementioned subtle slide, is reminiscent of those summer days during which you just laid out in the grass and listened to the sound of a far-off motor, watching the jets make lines overhead and breathing in your daily dose of state-approved inoculations from all the chemtrails descending. Is Nicolas Tone in fact tonedeaf? No, just modest.

Deific now: the Einschlagskrater 7” by Norbert Möslang and Ralf Wehowsky (Meeuw Muzak). I haven’t the faintest clue at which speed this record is supposed to be played but I’ve tried them all and they’re all great, as though a sunset had unfolded geometrically right in front of me and I got to see all sides whichever way I pleased. This is Meeuw Muzak’s 36th release so far, judging from the catalogue number, and while they may have begun scrimping a bit on the colored vinyl and extravagantly exorbitant packaging of earlier releases, the quality and vision of their back catalog remains on par with Vinyl-on-Demand, Folkways, and Drone Records. Möslang is from Voice Crack and Wehowsky was RLW, part of P16.D4 and also founded the late (?) yet terminally pretty (!) Selektion label with Achim Wollscheid. The B-side (or A-side – the labels come black and silent) is like a low and slowly thrumming U-boat ride straight up into the pineal gland; it’s a transcendent few moments the likes of which are generally not present in the weekly life of modern man, birth and marriage notwithstanding.

Speaking of all things Wehowsky, I have this lovely little forgotten 7” flexi disc (double-sided!) titled Freiheitsgeschmack by Skartrack, a super-group made up of Jochen Pense (of LLL and Permutative Distortion), Joachim Stender (also of P.D.), and Ralf Wehowsky. And while you were going to see “Terror Train” or “Motel Hell” or mourning the death of Buckwheat, in autumn of 1980 these three wizards were releasing this bizarre 88 | SIGNAL to NOISE #52

slice of Valhalla that needs constant supervision as its tracks switch from needing 33 rotations per minute and then 16. I don’t speak German—well, I do know a little German; he’s sitting right over there—but basically it’s a lot of singing and exposition over concrète whooshing and creakiness. Occasionally there are snatches of things that seem to be only peripherally musical: some power chords could just as well be roosters crowing and vice-versa. No clue as to how many were ever pressed up but they’re likely extortionately scarce now; AMK over at Banned Production would probably just cut one up and make it into audio-collage if he found one.

A little less Teutonic now: Michael Johnsen and his latest two 3” CDs, both bearing the rather prosaic title of Live Electronic Sound, elucidated thenceforth by those always-popular recording details. Likely this is the Michael Johnsen of Pittsburgh who appeared on a couple of Manny Theiner’s SSS label compilations.

His record’s sleeves are printed in bright red inks on soft paper that smells vaguely of candy and honey.

Unassuming and somewhat transcendent in their sonic humility, the first 3”, twenty-three minutes (something iTunes seems humorously inclined to credit as “Misty Whitman Call-Edited” by someone named Arbonne) could conceivably be a soundtrack for small animals like silverfish and moths, so unpretentiously does it drape itself across the zeroes-and-ones. There’s no swell, no big finish, no salesmanship. It just is. In this day and age of the meticulously handcrafted public image and the billion-dollar bailout, I can respect that. It’s nothing more than itself. The …made by the tuning & spatial manipulation of two closely spaced portable AM radios having loopstick antennae-titled CD is the sonic equivalent of a massaged balloon, capricious in its tuning-in to various sounds, one of which just happens to be the endless sound of sonic eulogies and analogies. It touches on an essential truth of experimental music: that the listener will try to associate an alien sound with pre-existing touchstones of sounds heard and filed away in the vast memory banks. Again, it is what it is but when defining what “is” is, often we choose the more familiar of two unfamiliar sounds to cleave to.

Paul Hegarty’s Dot Dot Dot Recordings label has two sweet little marbled grey-green 7”s by Charles Hayward, and The New Blockaders. “Out of Order” —the A-side of the record by This Heat drummer Hayward—is a languidly chirping affair, spiraling into syncopated oblivion as it does, slowly and then more quickly as he does his Dinger thing and pounds the skins with the ever-circling force of a cyclone tamed.

Almost. “Beside,” suitably on the B-side, is a bit more abstract, flanging and whirling until it eventually stops.

Prettiest sonic afterthought of 2008, claws down. The New Blockaders suggest that their Force Majeure 7” is supposed to be played 45 RPM, but anyone with half an ounce of cosmic understanding knows that any speed at which a New Blockaders vinyl record is played is merely just another handy entry into the anti-matter universe of universal consciousness. Fifty lucky New Blockaders fans got a hand-painted sleeve to go with this sky-killing record. Imagine all fifty of you in a room at once! Someone should bring snacks. The overall effect is, to take a page from the sound poetry playbook, as if the poet had fallen asleep at the keyboard on the X key.

Like so: XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXX. And so on. B-side: more of same, but with a silent “E”.

Sujo—a band so criminally obscure that even with 25 records in their label’s back catalog they haven’t even

made it into Discogs—offers up Arak, their latest little 3” CD of occluded goodness on Inam Records. It’s twenty minutes and fifty-two seconds of floating guitar lightning slowed down so mortals like us can study it in-depth, it comes to you from Bloomington, Indiana and proves that not every state in the Midwest is flyover territory.

Reminiscent of a slightly more soporific mid-period Skullflower, it tickles the cockles of the cochlea in less time than it takes to fuck proficiently and leaves infinitely less mess on the hand. The ears—that’s another story.

This is a genre known to most maniacs who pay attention here and there as “nice noise,” and it’s what I wish everyone could have in varying degrees on their birthdays.

Like your birthday every day: whenever a new record

by Fennesz comes out. This time it’s the Transition 7” on Touch and this one comes out like Rock Hudson, so heavy an experience is it. Judging from the liner notes, however, at first glance “Eight different guitar recordings made at Amann Studios, Vienna, between 2005-2007.

The acoustic guitar was recorded with an Oktava mic.

Other sounds were made using a Fender Stratocaster and a Vox ac15 amp” doesn’t sound like the most apocalyptic epoch in the world but the truth is in those Fennesz tones as he does his doctor thing. These are powerful meditations on twilit emotions and moments that may as well be the new blues for all the depth and illumination shining through the grooves. It sounds like trains leaving stations towards their ends, and we all know how fraught with metaphor and romance those sounds are. AER (Alpha Echo Romeo) is Touch cofounder and in-house photographer Jon Wozencroft; he notes on the back cover of the Project 7” on Touch, “Film soundtrack for Now.here, ‘The Overcoming of Hazard’ by Brad Butler/Karen Mirza, August 07. Uses four atmosphere recordings, radio and an organ stop —an attempt to confuse inside and out. Mixed with Mathias Gmachl (Nb. of Farmers Manual) at Loop.ph using Digital Performer. 16mm projector loaded by Al Rees.” Indistinct voices, an aqueous hum and the feeling that it’s all part of a larger piece that, like Hermann Nitsch’s six days of orgies and mysteries, finds conniving duplicity in the prim and proper, sitting back to autopsy all the failings of that particular tightness of human nature. The record falls somewhere between “Down to the Sea in Ships” and “Down to the Sea in Tweed,” continuing that venerable Touch / Ash Intl. (RIP) tradition of cherishing and nurturing the mystery inherent in electronic music, less a shushing usher and more an alternative to all that loud shouty or grunty sound that people think needs to come out of every circuit they can get their hands on. The inclusion of the film projector is reminiscent of Club Moral and the early ‘80s work of ProduKtion Hair in London’s Kensington Gardens; they often included their own films with their sonic onslaught —an aspect of the British avant-garde that’s gone sorely under-chronicled all these years. Also, this just in: Jon Wozencroft has just lent the first letter of his last name to replace the “H” in “Jesus H. Christ” because his photographs gracing the cover of this and almost all Touch Records are so fucking serenely grandiloquent that it’ll make you switch religions. Or shit. Either/or. Jesus W. Christ he’s amazing.! ✹

Across

1. Genre for Roy Wood and Bryan Ferry 5. Watson's boss 11. Zag's partner 14. Word on a once-ubiquitous Smashing Pumpkins shirt 15. Heroin, e.g.

16. Singer Sumac 17. Charges, as a price 18. Bol who was a giant in 32-Across 19. Photo spec 20. One who fixes certain classic arcade consoles?

23. Shoulder decorations 26. Unit of land 27. "And so on ..."

28. Witty sayings 31. Penn of the "Harold and Kumar" franchise 32. See 18-Across 34. Threatening offshore blip on the radar?

40. Without gall 41. Hogwash 43. Meet 46. Eerie feeling 49. Second word in many a fairy tale 50. Environmental conditions 52. Dark, foreboding figure?

56. Dope, in old hip-hop slang 57. First half of a hard core workout slogan 58. Talk oneself up 62. Tiny Asus PC 63. "Search me ..."

64. Grand Ole ___ 65. Football scoreboard abbr.

66. Fourth-largest music retailer in the U.S. 67. Marvel Comics group

Down

1. Chess-obsessed producer 2. Recording pioneer Paul 3. Sun Ra's "The ___ & The Ankh" 4. Where to see a Whirling Dervish, perhaps 5. Class with cooking and sewing 6. Eye-bending pictures 7. Dryer collections 8. Noted graphic novel 9. Caesarian accusation 10. Wise one 11. Boozoo Chavis' genre 12. Overpriced album, perhaps 13. Garth Brooks alter ego Chris ___ 21. Sub alternative 22. Anwar's predecessor 23. "Gah!" 24. Egyptian god 25. Rights-defending org.

28. "Good!" in Genoa 29. Hit for U2 or Metallica 30. "30 Rock" station 32. "Waffle Cone Wednesday" chain 33. Defiant computer of film 35. Major re-release label 36. Neighbor of Ukr. 37. World Bank cousin 38. ___ the crack of dawn 39. Roof overhang 42. Sore subject?

43. 1964 Rolling Stones cover 44. Java product 45. Shop worker 46. Childish denial

47. Genre for 48-Down 48. 90s D.C. band 50. "Can't Stop Won't Stop" author Jeff 51. Scat singer Cleo or standards singer Frankie 53. Work with needles 54. Sage with a long Wookieepedia entry 55. Goad 59. Technics adjustment 60. You ___ here 61. OB/___ for answers, see: signaltonoisemagazine.blogspot.com

Send 3” CDs, vinyl measuring between 4” and 11”, and other assorted nonsense, to Box 1211, Ventura CA 93002. As with most fair-and-balanced / overworkedand-underpaid journalists, no promises on coverage— but, I shall try.

WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #52 | 89

90 | SIGNAL to NOISE #52

David Kopperman

WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #52 | 91

92 | SIGNAL to NOISE #52