Signal to Noise #53 - spring 2009

THE QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF IMPROVISED, EXPERIMENTAL & UNUSUAL MUSIC giuseppi logan | allen lowe: "when did the blues leave?" | harsh noise from iowa city

mary halvorson & jessica pavone

WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #53 | 1

issue #53 ✹ $4.95 us / $5.95 can

✹ spring 2009

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

WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #53 | 3

SIGNAL TO NOISE

THE JOURNAL OF IMPROVISED, EXPERIMENTAL & UNUSUAL MUSIC ISSUE #53 : SPRING 2009 MAILING ADDRESS 1128 Waverly Street, Houston Texas 77008 PUBLISHER pete gershon COPY EDITOR nate dorward 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 ✹ peter margasak ✹ brian marley ✹ marc masters ✹ libby mclinn ✹ marc medwin ✹ bill meyer ✹ sean molnar ✹ richard moule ✹ larry nai ✹ kyle oddson ✹ 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

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 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

FROM STN-HQ TOYOU . . .

Did you hear? Apparently there's a recession or an economic crisis or something.

Labels are going dormant, venues and record stores are shuttering, magazines are folding. It's a nerve-wracking time, whether you're a banker, a mechanic or an improvising musician. Here at the STN-HQ, we've seen production expenses rise and ad sales dip, though we're amazed at the loyalty of those who support our efforts. We couldn't do it without you. Still, you may notice this is a bit of a slimmer issue (remember those thick, 140+ page issues from just a couple of years ago?).

If you're a publicist, you may sense there's a little bit more competition for review space then in the past. This may well be the trend for a season or two, until the economy begins to rebound and operating expenses again become more plentiful. It's my hope that by keeping our rates at a rock-bottom level, while continuing to offer quality content (if not in the same quantity), we will persevere and survive. The media savvy businesspeople among you probably think I'm crazy for drawing your attention to all of this, but the point I'm trying to make is that ultimately, the extent to which we can hang in there is going to be up to you. If you value what we do, please continue to pick up the magazine, preferably at a locallyowned, independent retailer (maybe you want to buy a gift subscription for your buddy?). Please support our advertisers ... and tell them you saw their placement in STN. It makes more of a difference than you may realize! And if you're in the business and have a new release, event or a service to offer to the creative music community, we hope you'll investigate our rates and use the magazine as a means by which to connect with our unique readership. We've built a durable infrastructure over the years--readers, writers, photographers--and it would be terrible for these assembled resources to go to waste. We hope to continue to serve everyone involved for years to come, even in this crazy blogging digital world we live in.

We are by no means in a place of desperation, but we do want to reach our full potential as a publication, so we invite you to do something small to help fill up our tank. As has always been the case, the more people put into this project, the more we're able to give back. OK, that's enough from me, you get the idea. We've got some special material in this issue and we hope you'll enjoy!

Yours in music; pete gershon publisher SIGNAL to NOISE

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 ✹ ✹ ✹ ✹ ✹ ✹

MORE FINE PRINT The publisher accepts no responsibility for any opinions expressed by the writers or subjects of SIGNAL to NOISE. All contents are © 2009 STN Publishing LLC and/or its individual send check or money order: Signal to Noise, 1128 waverly, houston tx 77008 contributors. No portion of this document or PayPal to: zaeza@signaltonoisemagazine.org may be reproduced by any means without the written consent of SIGNAL to NOISE. 4 | SIGNAL to NOISE #53 WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM

WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #53 | 5

Australian sound-artist employs gore and humor in his conceptual noise music. By Nathaniel Roe

LUCAS ABELA Under the Justice Yeldham moniker, Lucas Abela is most infamous for playing panes of broken glass with his mouth. The sheet is amplified by a contact microphone, which picks up the vibrations of his lips against the surface.

A slew of pedals further manipulate the signal.

Over a quarter-hour, Abela grunts, squelches and farts with face pressed to pane as he gradually destroys the instrument. Afterwards, scattered glass, spit and blood cover the floor.

Abela has attracted global attention and, from my experience, has made noise's more esoteric content accessible. “One of the most important things when I play,” he tells me, “is that you can see the relationship between my actions and the resulting sounds. This is something that's been missing in a lot of contemporary music practice, whether it be lap-toppers or platinum selling singers.” With one multifaceted device, Abela offers a compelling physical analogy to his music.

Abela began as an experimental turntablist, destroying records on high-speed industrial motors with unconventional styli. He met some success; in particular through a questionable Otomo Yoshihide remix which Yoshihide himself admired. The always-ahead-of-its-time Bananafish requested a very early 1997 interview after Abela's first release, A Kombi – Music to Drive-By, a recording of his old VW van's death shudders amplified through its shoddily grounded stereo.

Over the years Abela has amplified sword fights, sucked on amplified skewers, performed while bouncing on an electroacoustic trampoline and played amplified dick piercings by touching his collaborative “partner” to complete their circuit. Then at one concert in 2003,

he saw a pane of glass in a corner and thought to play it. “When I first noticed the sheet, it was instinctual to pick it up and try it out.”

After his initial discovery, Abela began to focus on glass exclusively and has developed myriad playing techniques. Recently, Abela decided to form his first ‘real’ band while living in Beijing, called Rice_Corpse (which comes from the literal translation of the Chinese character for shit). The band includes Yang Yang on drums and Li Zenghui on piano. They have already recorded the album Mountain and at the time of writing are conducting a ten city tour of China.

Abela also co-runs Dual Plover records, which he founded in 1995 and funds by cheaply mass-producing CDs for other labels.

Dual Plover primarily features fellow Australian artists such as Naked on the Vague, Toxic Lipstick and the mysterious Volvox, but also includes a few international submissions as well, most notably from Deerhoof, Merzbow and Kevin Blechdom.

Although Abela's breakthroughs can be revelatory for the less-than-enthused with noise, it can also be a double-edged sword. He often has to combat a reputation as the avantgarde's freak show. “Early on at a show in Belgium someone described my set as being like GG Allin, an artist I personally feel no affinity with, since he’s all shock tactics without any real content. Basically a really bad rock band with a lunatic as a singer. I'm not interested in such infamy. It would be all too easy to play the psychotic sadomasochist role with what I do, but that's not me.”

While Abela certainly employs gore, humor is just as present in every contorted gesture.

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

Most importantly, it was surprising to see what precise and varied sounds Yeldham can produce. It's in these varying textures, Abela insists, that his primary interests lie.

“If you listen, you should be able to hear a vast range of sounds which I can conjure from just a random piece of broken glass.

That should create enough wonder in people without the blood and saliva, but people always tend to focus on that. Glass is the most perfect material I’ve ever come across on various levels, most especially aurally. Not only does it sound unique, it's also very warm and responsive to my nuanced vocal techniques.

Visually, it's humorous and powerful all at once.

Psychologically it strikes nerves within people, making it a wonderful three-pronged attack on the audience's senses.”

Abela also insists that his music is not violent and that he never screams or purposefully cuts himself. The energy is the same kind you would expect from a high-flying guitar or saxophone solo. “I prefer a live delivery every time. I may not have the range of sounds a laptopper can achieve but I enjoy my limitations and personally think it's more liberating to create music organically with such limitations and a finite amount of possibilities than to have to choose between infinite musical decisions on a sterile platform.”

As intense as Abela's performances can get, he maintains an unpretentious stage presence, determined to prove his normalcy. If the audience were expecting a psychopath to back up the legends, it found the unexpectedly normal.

Abela combats the gore and horror of his act with an matter-of-fact attitude, saying, “don't get too worked up, it's really not that strange.” ✹

WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #53 | 7

Chicago multi-instrumentalist and songwriter pares her music back to simpler songforms.

By Jon Dale

Marzena Abrahamik

AZITA “More notes,” is the simple answer Azita Youseffi gives when I ask about her instrument of choice, the piano. If you’ve spent any time with her discreet, charming yet sometimes unyielding body of solo work— three albums on Drag City, Enantiodromia (2003), Life on the Fly (2004) and this year’s How Will You?, plus an EP of songs from a musical, Detail from the Mountain Side (2006)—it’s not so surprising a response.

Azita’s songs are rich with character, but hard to pin down, and they slip between straight-talking and abstruse, the citrus tang of Azita’s voice carrying lyrics that are as much about language’s musicality as they are any putative ‘meaning.’

Her latest dispatch, How Will You?, appears straighter and clearer on first listen, but dollies out to reveal the same quizzicality that caught this listener unaware on her first two albums. Azita songs are mutable, shape-shifting things, and her own metaphor for what she looks for in songwriting is as good as any: “pleasing in the way a baby would want to grab it if it were in a crib mobile. That's my criteria.” As for any signals in the process that suggest everything’s going according to plan, she continues, “I feel like that, like I want to grab it and rotate it, engage with it. It’s a feeling of linkage and of believing that there’s depth to the thing, not an intellectual evaluation.”

Talking to Azita about her songs exposes a songwriter whose approach to the song takes on synaesthesic qualities. One moment, she’s analogizing the process to time spent as a visual artist—“When I was a visual artist I was always very line-focused.

I didn't do well in the exercise where you use the flat side of the charcoal, planes of shadow. I still feel that way”—the next, we’re discussing how the sonority of the

word dictates the shape of the lyrical line: “Sound is almost the most important consideration, down to a syllable.”

“I usually won’t accept a word unless it feels right in the mouth for the note it falls on and this limits the options pretty harshly,” she continues, exploring the process for writing the songs on How Will You?, and explaining the length of time it took to complete. “On this record, there were a lot of fake lyrics when constructing the melodies, vocal sounds I had my heart set on, and many hours spent matching lines with some kind of sense relevant to the song to those sounds. This was one major reason why the record took four years to complete from the time I started writing the tunes. It was an awfully inefficient way of working and I don’t think I'll be doing it like this again. But there are also combinations of words which could not have come about any other way (“some days fall all null in the logic of vast”), so I’m happy with the results.”

The struggle to finish How Will You? was given a kick up the proverbial by Azita’s involvement in Brian Torrey Scott’s musical, Detail from the Mountain Side. She describes this experience as “the missing link, in a way—I had already been working on [How Will You?] for a good year when Brian Torrey Scott hit me up for the project.

Most of the music was finished and I was in lyric hell. I thought, here’s a situation where I get to just write some music. I wrote and demoed those five pieces in two weeks. And it caused a big revision in what had been my rigidly held belief that you don’t end up with melodies as intricate or interesting composing to a lyric as you do vice-versa.” The end result is maybe the most plain-speaking of Azita’s records, and a gateway to the pared-back structures

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

throughout How Will You?—an interesting turn of events for songs written for an almost Beckettian musical.

Flicking through Azita’s history reveals someone who’s interested in alternate options, who shape-shifts elegantly, from the No Wave stridency of her previous groups Bride Of No-No and Scissor Girls, her appropriately titled solo LP as AZ, Music for Scattered Brains, and then her shift into singer-songwriter mode with Enantiodromia. She mentions that she was planning a solo piano songs record during Bride Of No-No’s tenure, though she confesses the idea was a lot tougher to accommodate at the time—“What I most recall about that time is I felt it was very hard to get things to happen, almost like a dream where you're trying to run but your legs won’t move—very uncomfortable.” But I find the movement in Azita’s ‘career’ intriguing, as the appearance of ‘paring back’ to simpler song forms, traced from those early groups through her three solo albums, is repeatedly baffled or complicated by the way she encodes the logic of opposites and equilibrium in her songs’ DNA. Indeed, the title of Enantiodromia refers to a Jungian concept that’s close to equilibrium, and “Scylla and Charybdis” from How Will You? is based on a myth that’s become a catch phrase for being straddled between threats. When I mention this, Azita corrects me—“Jung’s concept of Enantiodromia is more like the organic way the psyche moves in the direction of wholeness over time by incorporating the ‘not-me’ elements of the unconscious into consciousness, the most split-off elements exerting the most powerful attraction,” she asserts.

“So it’s a somewhat positive idea, I think, on balance.” ✹

WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #53 | 9

Cologne-based soundscape artist investigates the significance of the individual as he seeks to document a sense of place.

By Stuart Broomer

MICHAEL RÜSENBERG If a soundscape could be a hit single, it might well be “Lisboa Horn Concerto,” the track recently contributed by the Cologne-based soundscape artist Michael Rüsenberg to a compilation CD called OBST Almanach 2009 (www.obst-music.com). Comprising three minutes of found music recorded in Lisbon in 2003, it documents truck drivers queuing to get to their ships. Irritated by the wait, someone blows his horn. Others follow—some twotoned or oscillating, some very close, others distant. Someone favors extended, foundation blasts, another staccato rhythms. It’s as if they have a spontaneous sense of space—there’s little continuous sound and no overcrowding, but a deliberate and evolving sense of musical drama, great horns looming up like mythic figures out of a Wagner opera or a nineteenth century German symphony.

It’s been a century since the Futurists first celebrated industrial noise as music and Ezra Pound—genius poet and Fascist moron— speculated on factories orchestrated to perform musical compositions as a by-product. In “Lisboa Horn Concerto,” it’s the workers who are making art, seizing the means of production and improvising spontaneously in what Rüsenberg calls “’protest music’: bored and frustrated about the waiting, they transform this into a sonic sculpture.”

It’s a gorgeous accident of chance, but one Rüsenberg is prepared to capture. He’s attuned himself to the movement of sound and musical suggestion in the environment. Born in Essen in 1948, he’s worked for over thirty years as a jazz programmer and documentary maker for WDR 3, public radio in Cologne. Although Rüsenberg spent nine years near a coal mine in Essen, he has “no specific sonic childhood memories of that—except for the drone sound that was emitted from the mine day and night.

“My aesthetic has been shaped... much more through jazz and the works of Heiner Goebbels.

His ‘Shadow/Landscape with Argonauts’— where passers-by on the street spontaneously read texts by Heiner Mueller--has been most influential — bearing in mind that my influences mostly are non-linear.”

Rüsenberg began exploring soundscape in 1991, “when I was introduced to the works of Hildegard Westerkamp, Dan Lander, Claude Schryer and Murray Schafer. Hans-Ulrich Werner invited me to a radio documentary called CDN Soundscapes and my impression was, ‘what they can do, you can do also!’"

Since then, he’s crafted a series of CDs for his RealAmbient label, each focusing intently on a locale. The first was Lisboa: a soundscape portrait, recorded in 1993 with Werner.

It’s a processed documentary of Lisbon’s soundscape, capturing river sounds and trolley cars, snatches of fado and conversation.

Later works have pressed further away from documentary into sonic manipulation: Madrid: a soundscape collective followed in 1995 and La Palma: a soundscape excursion in 1997.

With 1998’s Roma: a soundscape remix, Rüsenberg gave some of his own primary recordings to other musicians: “To escape from the niche, I have somehow imported influences and techniques from other genres, for instance remixing: the first community of this type was built on Roma, where people from Francisco López to David Toop worked with my files. Essen.momente had ballet music.”

He’s continued to expand on the collective impulse: La défense: stage urbain (2003) is devoted largely to his own 7-part, 40-minute treatment of late-night recordings in the Paris suburb, highlighting a symphony of sounds from moaning escalators and loops of rap and a passer-by’s whistling. Steve Argüelles, Eric LaCasa, Ned Bouhalassa and Benoît Delbecq offer pieces developed from Rüsenberg’s raw materials. 2005’s Lisboa.reloaded revisits his first cityscape for a series of audio and video pieces that include Hans-Ulrich Werner’s remix of the original tapes as well as pieces by Christoph Korn, Carlos Alberto Augusto and Carlos Zingaro, each expanding on the idea of soundscape composition.

“Dr. Mussert’s Landing,” Rüsenberg’s own piece on Lisboa.reloaded, is a work of stunning depth that takes its title and a spoken text from Dutch novelist Cees Nooteboom’s The Following Story. The novella recounts

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

Mussert’s unexpected awakening in a Lisbon hotel room after falling asleep in Amsterdam, his Lisbon adventures and his eventual departure by boat for Brazil. Rüsenberg builds up the piece with layers of sound, meaning and association. Its fundamental source is a recording of a jetty in the Lisbon harbor near the Bridge of the 25th April. There are the high-pitched squeaks of scraping metal and the hollow percussion sounds of oil drums.

Rüsenberg uses repetition to build drama and adds musical elements, drumming that builds polyrhythms with the found percussion of the source tape and added synthesized sounds that suggest a zither. There’s a fugitive quality, a dream-like evanescence that connects the immediate sensory reality of the harbor to the events of Nooteboom’s narrative and sudden unidentifiable sounds, including a long ascending whistle like a plane taking off.

You can find the influence of jazz all over Rüsenberg’s music. It’s apparent in his love of collaboration, of handing materials back and forth with other musicians, but it’s also apparent in the percussive component, a love of drumming and melody whether accidental or deliberate, resulting in striking polyrhythmic textures throughout his work. “My listening experience is very much shaped through jazz—and rock music to some extent. That’s why ‘rhythm’ plays an important role in my compositions. And vice versa: that’s why I have a hard time producing in the recent fashion to ‘drones,’ although I like them and admire people who are experts in this, like Francisco López or Jim Haynes.”

He stresses the significance of the individual in soundscape: “I’d like to amplify the notion of soundscape-composition as a very personal account: two people experiencing the same sonic spot in two very different ways. Hence soundscape-composition to me is no documentary task, although I never mix recordings from different locations and times.”

Rüsenberg, who recently turned 60, hopes “to be able to work with sounds up to my last breath. As I don’t play an instrument, the computer has become my means of expression.” ✹

WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #53 | 11

IT’S IN THE STARS

Mary Halvorson and Jessica Pavone are two young, accomplished free-improvisers who also happen to be a quirky songwriting duo.

Story by Kurt Gottschalk.

Photos by Alexander Richter.

ALTONOISEMAGAZINE.ORG 12 | SIGNAL to NOISE #53 WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM

WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #53 | 13

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

Jessica Pavone and Mary Halvorson in New York City, January 2009.

The first 60 seconds of Mary Halvorson and Jessica Pavone’s new CD are a typically mystifying affair for the pair of eclectic songwriters.

Halvorson’s brusquely strummed guitar works down a sequence of four descending chords, sounding each four times in strict meter, before rising slightly and repeating. Their slow, unison vocals mirror the melody in dissonant harmony, growing closer together as the verse descends.

That that changed and is is him Take advantage you or them Everyday surroundings changed Clergy man restore the train Learn some shares that others do You forgetting life or you At 38 seconds the guitar pulls back, now playing each chord only once, as Pavone’s viola takes over the vocal melody. It sounds like the song is somehow stacked on top of itself. The vocals, the progression of the chords, are all impossibly close. Or it’s like looking at a song through a keyhole, a narrow view of the full picture. Is there something missing? Or too much there?

Such questions tend to crop up whenever you listen to this duo’s music. Over seven years—and with the release of Thin Air on Thirsty Ear this spring, three albums—Halvorson and Pavone have crafted a sound that’s almost impossible to peg. Outside the duo, separately and together, they have played avant rock, string quartet music and forwardthinking jazz—most notably as members of Anthony Braxton’s ensembles. But the sound they create together exists somewhere between formality and the resisting of formality, with the focus not on their considerable instrumental techniques but their modest singing talents. More than that, it’s a music that comes off as deeply personal.

It’s a risky proposition to say a musical group isn’t quite like anything else. Chances are, the claim will be disproved. But Halvorson and Pavone invite the sort of allusions that are quickly followed with the phrase “only not really.” They have been likened to notoriously bad 1960s pop band The Shaggs, but they are really closer to The Roches, or medieval song. Only, not really. In a word, they’re, oh, enigmatic?

Their music feels slight, while suggesting a rich complexity. Pavone’s violin and viola can scratch and moan with the extended techniques of free improv linguistics, and can sing with warm tones that reveal her conservatory training. Halvorson’s big Guild hollowbody has the familiar voice of classic jazz guitar, which she then runs through distortion or throws on a roller coaster, digitally swooping notes with her Line 6 effects box.

Sitting in Halvorson’s apartment in the Fort Greene section of Brooklyn—just blocks from where free jazz legend Cecil Taylor lives, she notes—the two themselves struggle to say just what their music is.

“There’s nothing fancy about it,” Pavone says matter-of-factly. “It’s really just bare-boned.”

The two are prone to finish each other’s sentences, or offer help when the other is looking for the right word. They often joke about being an “old married couple,” and just as often laugh about being asked if they really are a couple.

Halvorson attempts a different definition of their sound. “It’s kind of chamber music, I guess,” she says. Then another. “We refer to it as ‘folk music,’ not being trained singers and singing our own songs.”

Pavone then attempts from a more personal angle. “Our music is kind of like a diary. I can listen to a song we played a lot in 2005 and I can say, ‘Oh, I remember what was going on in our lives at that time.’”

The question of influences is only a little less perplexing. Their responses are more in terms of lyricists than musicians. They agree on Leonard Cohen as a favorite. Pavone adds Bob Dylan and Jim O’Rourke, to which Halvorson quickly agrees and tosses in Robert Wyatt. “I feel like I’m a word person and music is an accessible way to get poetry out there,” Pavone says.

As for their music, they are hesitant to cite influences, or maybe it’s just another tricky question. Halvorson lists Marc Ribot, Sonny Sharrock and James “Blood” Ulmer as favorite guitarists, and names Wyatt again, at least inasmuch as she’d been listening to his records while writing her contributions to the new album. If anything, that might be a key to their writing—whatever they’ve been listening to might end up reflected in their work.

“This morning I was transposing Sun Ra, just to see how it was put together, and then I started writing my own thing,” Pavone says.

“It’s going to seep in and come out your own way.”

And the idea of “influence” isn’t limited to musicians they admire. “For me it would be ideal to have so many influences that you couldn’t say, ‘This is like The Shaggs meet whatever,’” Halvorson explains. “I can be equally influenced by something I don’t like.

You go, ‘Ugh—why don’t I like that?’ If I have a strong reaction either way, it helps me figure out what I want to do.” (Pavone suggests Halvorson’s gag reflex is triggered more than anything else by Steely Dan, and the rough edges of Halvorson’s songs are, indeed, a far cry from the icy smoothness of Aja).

Maybe the only answer to the question of what kind of music Mary Halvorson and Jessica

Pavone make is the obvious one, even if it runs the risk of cliché. The music they make is their own, it sounds like them. “It’s not like we’re trying to be weird,” Pavone says. “That’s just what’s coming out.”

Halvorson and Pavone have the pedigrees of professional musicians, even if both harbored doubts along the way. Halvorson, 28, grew up in Brookline, MA, and started taking violin lessons when she was 6, switching to guitar at 12.

Her father, an architect, would paint at home, and her mother sang and played piano, so the arts were in her formative air.

“I did not like classical music and I wasn’t good at it,” she says. “After I switched to guitar, I was listening to rock musicians like Jimi Hendrix, but then I had a teacher who was into jazz. When I was learning jazz, I was listening to horn players and pianists. Jazz guitar has never been a passion or an influence. I don’t really like the traditional role of jazz guitar—the tone.

I thought, ‘I’d rather hear a piano.’”

By the time she went to Wesleyan University, she still wasn’t thinking of a career in music. She entered as a biology major, but fell under the sway of the school’s remarkable music program and its star professor, Anthony Braxton. She developed a passion for other nontraditional guitarists and took private lessons with Joe Morris (it was her introduction that instigated the phenomenal four-disc set of improvisations by Braxton and Morris, released by Clean Feed last year). Growing concerned about developing her technique, she later transferred to the New School in New York City for a more disciplined course of study.

“I used to practice eight hours a day because I hated my apartment,” she recalls. “I remember being frustrated, but then one day my fingers started moving in a different way and I was improvising.”

Pavone, 32, grew up in Queens and the New York suburbs. She came at the music from the opposite direction, starting with formal instruction and later discovering more experimental approaches to music-making.

“No one in my family was a musician, but I started asking for a violin when I was 3,” she says. “I think I saw it on TV. My dad asked why I wanted a violin when I was 5 and I said because I like the sound, and he said, ‘Oh, there must be something to that.’”

She added the viola when she was 12, and in high school band started playing upright bass and then electric bass—which she still plays.

But her thoughts weren’t on a career in music, or anything else, at the time.

“I grew up playing classical music and going home and listening to classic rock, and they didn’t connect,” she says. “It was totally frustrating. I didn’t want to go to college. I wasn’t

WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #53 | 15

interested in school or academics, but then I thought maybe music school would be fun. I thought it’d be creative, but it wasn’t.”

She attended the Hartt School at the University of Hartford in Connecticut, a short drive from Wesleyan University in Middletown, initially in the performance program but switching to music education. She also started playing with the Middletown Creative Music Orchestra, where she came to befriend a number of Wesleyan students—and eventually Prof. Braxton— and to discover broader, more philosophical thoughts about playing and composing.

“I’d go to Wesleyan and it was a totally different experience,” she says. “It seemed like they knew so much more about what was going on with music than the conservatory kids who were just like ‘I’m going to practice 17 hours a day.’

“I’m lucky I stumbled into Wesleyan,” she adds. “I was about to quit music and then I met Anthony and people who were studying with him. I wasn’t really forming any goals about being a musician until I was out of school. I almost feel like I’m self-taught—everything I’ve learned I learned after I was 21.”

For one of her classes at Hartt, Pavone wrote a palindromic rhythm pattern to be played by one finger on a tabletop. It didn’t go over well with her classmates, she laughs now, and probably would have been better received in Prof. Braxton’s classroom.

She graduated in 1998 and stayed in the area until 2000, organizing bands with people from the Wesleyan crowd, but didn’t meet Halvorson until they both ended up in Brooklyn in 2002. Pavone took over the room Halvorson had been subletting in bassist Chris Dahlgren’s apartment and they were soon spending time together. But making music wasn’t immediately the basis of their budding friendship.

“It was almost like an afterthought,” Halvorson says, looking back. “We were just hanging out.”

Once they started playing together, however, it quickly became a disciplined endeavor.

They discovered their compositional ideas were more than a little complementary and were soon getting together every week, making stir fry with soba noodles, watching Six Feet Under and The Sopranos, and honing an unusually fragmented, delicate sound.

“We didn’t just get together and jam, we each brought in sketches,” says Pavone. “We weren’t even thinking about playing a gig, but we were so adamant about playing once a week. When the power went out in 2003, I remember the two of us sitting there playing with no electricity, no ice, no lights. What geeks! It was like 100 degrees, there we were sweating.”

It wasn’t long, however, before they were being asked to play at small clubs, cafes and bookstores around Brooklyn, often by other Wesleyan alumni who were following the DIY ethic common among many of Braxton’s former students: finding new places to book shows and starting home-based record labels. (Much of Pavone’s music, in fact, and that of some of the Wesleyan crowd, can be heard on her own label, Peacock Records— “pavone” is Italian for “peacock.”)

And it also wasn’t long before the two were a central part of the increasingly impressive community of young musicians traveling the new music corridor between Middletown and New York City. Such Braxton alumni as Taylor 16 | SIGNAL to NOISE #53 WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM

Ho Bynum, James Fei, Chris Jonas, Jackson Moore and Matthew Welch have created a new vibrancy in the city, not just making their own opportunities but playing in each other’s groups, building the sort of musicians’ community more common in smaller cities than in the bustle of New York. And often—as in Bynum’s sextet, which can be heard on last year’s excellent Asphalt Flowers Forking Paths on hatOLOGY—the Halvorson/Pavone duo is to be found ensconced in those bands.

“It’s understandable that they get lumped together because of the strength and intimacy of their duo,” according to Bynum. “But for me, it’s the striking individualism of each of their respective musics that makes that duo so strong and unique. Like most bands, the sum can only be greater than the parts if the parts are pretty bad-ass to begin with. Their instrumental and compositional voices are really distinct, from Jessica’s soul-drenched lyricism to Mary’s quirky, angular surprises. It’s the way they balance and combine these distinctions that makes the duo thrilling for me.”

In addition to his sextet, Bynum plays with Halvorson and Pavone in a group with the sextet’s drummer, which inventively works as two duos and a quartet.

“I’ve done several tours with them in the Thirteenth Assembly, where their duo performs, my duo with Tomas Fujiwara performs, then we all play together,” he says. “I still dig Jessica and Mary’s tunes even when I hear them for eight straight nights. And I really enjoy playing their music myself. It’s interesting how different the quartet sounds from the two duos; really a sign of how in creative music, it’s all about how you mix the ingredients.

“I don’t think many people could take a blindfold test of their duo and guess they are Anthony Braxton protégés,” he adds. “I think that’s a testament both to Mary and Jessica’s originality and the strength of Braxton’s mentorship. Braxton’s influence is never dogmatic.

He doesn’t want us to play stuff that sounds like him, he wants us to explore our own interests and aesthetics as creatively as he has explored his own. And Mary and Jessica are doing that as well as anybody out there.”

Halvorson and Pavone agree that their friendship and their musical connection carry over into their work in other groups, especially in the complex systems of Braxton’s music, which demands a strict adherence to structure while allowing a remarkable freedom for interplay within those structures. By allowing band members to play his compositions within the framework of larger pieces—essentially letting smaller groups emerge within the ensemble—the familiarity of band members who have worked together in other contexts only increases the viability of Braxton’s vision.

“I always feel it because we have a very strong connection,” Halvorson says of playing with Pavone in other bands. “Especially in the case of Braxton’s music, it’s easy for us to anticipate each other and play together. Probably other people can’t sense it, but I do.”

Connecticut's Thirsty Ear label has released records by a wide array of song-based acts, but the duo of Halvorson and Pavone is an odd fit for the label’s Blue Series. Overseen by jazz pianist Matthew Shipp, the Blue Series contains records by some of New York’s strongest voices in free jazz (Tim Berne, Roy Campbell, William Parker and others) as well as by some of the more innovative artists in hip-hop

and electronica, including El-P, DJ Spooky and the British duo Spring Heel Jack—and has often brought the two camps together.

Whether you call them folk, chamber song or avant pop, the Halvorson/Pavone duo is like nothing else in the Blue Series.

Shipp no doubt understood it when he saw them play an afternoon set at the 2007 Vision Festival. They didn’t quite fit in there, either, but clearly he heard something he liked. He approached them immediately after their set and said he wanted to record them. They accepted the offer but, having just released their second record, On and Off (on Skirl, the label run by saxophonist Chris Speed), said they wanted to hold off while they developed new material.

“What Mary and Jessica do is completely fresh—no doubt about it,” Shipp says. “People sometimes compare them to The Shaggs but they sound like no one else. It’s a project born of a bond between them—cunning intelligence and a high degree of musicality. It takes balls to do what they do.

“The way the music is shaped is unpredictable but sounds familiar, even though you would be hard put to figure out who or why there is a familiarity to it,” he continues. “And it is beautiful. They push the envelope but are not afraid to just be musical when that is what is called for.”

While Shipp notes that their association with Braxton added to his interest, he hears their own work as completely different from what they do in Braxton’s groups—confirming, perhaps, Halvorson’s observation that the symbiosis might not be as apparent to outsiders.

“Even though they work with Braxton, they have the intelligence to keep their own project 100 degrees away from anything that Anthony is involved with,” he said. “In fact, the Mary and Jessica that play with Braxton and the Mary and Jessica that do this duo are almost two different entities.”

If they didn’t quite fit in at the Vision Festival, they may not have seemed a natural opening for the avant rock band Xiu Xiu on a ten-day U.S. tour last year either. Their strangely intermeshed melodies probably struck many as overly simplistic at the Vision Festival, where so much of the music is about instrumental prowess, and the quiet midrange of their songs likely slipped past many waiting for the main act at rock clubs. But they clearly enjoy the risk.

“It was fun to play for different crowds,” Halvorson says. “It’s always a challenge.

People were wanting something more like Xiu Xiu, and we’re not like Xiu Xiu.” “You’ve got to be kind of a music geek to like our music,” Pavone adds.

The Xiu Xiu tour came about through the band’s drummer, Ches Smith, who also plays in the Mary Halvorson Trio. That group released Dragon’s Head, a strong and very well-received record, last year on Firehouse 12. Like Thirsty Ear, Fire House 12 is based in Connecticut, providing a couple stops along the new music corridor. And like Thirsty Ear and the other labels the Halvorson/Pavone duo has recorded for, Fire House 12 is co-run by an artist, in this case Bynum. It’s fair to say that the two are musicians’ musicians.

The previous year saw the release of Pavone’s Walking, Sleeping, Breathing, a brief and fascinating set of dedications on Nowaki.

Clocking in at just over 20 minutes, the CD in-

cludes pieces for fellow violinist Leroy Jenkins and blues singer Elizabeth Cotton without trying to emulate them. The abstract and highly focused pieces, Pavone writes, “highlight functions that are easily taken for granted, but essential for survival.”

2007 saw the release of another CD by another group with Halvorson and Pavone at the core, Calling All Participants on SkyCap with Smith and Devin Hoff, as well as Misbegotten Man (I & Eye), the second record from Halvorson’s duo People.

People, with drummer Kevin Shea (also of the excellent bent bop quartet Mostly Other People Do The Killing), is far removed from—but just as perplexing as—the duo with Pavone. People possesses a loud and almost manic energy, an extreme amalgam of Halvorson’s simple singing and twisting guitar and drumming that could be likened to Keith Moon's. The collision seems almost accidental, but in fact is also highly composed, with Halvorson setting music to Shea’s inscrutable fantasias of lyrics. Shea’s titles—“But I Like My Rotten Head: Sleeper Cells Were His Bailiwick Until That Fateful Moment When the Heart Stopped Pumping,” for example—can have as many words as an entire song Halvorson might write for the Pavone duo. And if the Pavone duo is folk, only not really, People is a unique take on post-punk. Only, not really.

The pieces written for Thin Air follow the sound developed over the previous two records (the first, Prairies, was released on Lucky Kitchen, the label run by sound artists Alejandro and Aeron) but the album also shows some new directions. The pieces are longer, with more sections, and continue to expand their sphere of influence. Pavone based her “Barber” on the rhythm of Nirvana’s “Floyd the Barber,” while “Lullabye” was composed while she was studying medieval music. The album’s title track, written by Halvorson and at seven minutes the longest on the album, moves gradually through a slow melody then starts to fall apart, quickly unfolding into one of the noisier passages on the disc and just as quickly returning to the somber verse, repeating the process five times. While most of their songs are through-composed, the score for “Thin Air” includes otherwise blank measures with the words “Loud Improv” written over them.

The fact that the songs aren’t jointly written—pieces are brought in completed, with only minor changes made as they work on them—is surprising given the cohesiveness of the sound. And it reaffirms that they came together with very like aesthetics. Halvorson’s songs are knottier and more driven by shifting rhythms, while Pavone’s are more about putting the lyrics in front, but both write slow melody lines with close harmonies and neither seems very inclined to write choruses to their songs.

Nor do either of them seem inclined to change the writing process, or add other musicians to the mix for that matter. “Collaboration doesn’t really work for me,” Pavone says. “I’m an independent worker. This is the closest I’ll ever get to collaborating, because we’re so close.”

Halvorson, of course, is again quick to agree. Despite another close relationship, that with Shea in People, she doesn’t consider herself a collaborator, or primarily as a songwriter either: “I don’t think of myself as a composer.

I write for bands, but I think of myself as a guitarist. And I don’t call myself a singer. I hate walking around with my guitar because every freak on the subways asks, ‘Oh, do you sing?’ I hate that. I just say ‘No.’” Singing wasn’t initially a part of the duo’s work. When they first started playing together, Halvorson and Pavone were doing all instrumental music, but then Pavone brought in her song “Sometimes” with two vocal parts.

Although, as Pavone says, “neither of us are singers and that’s always been a point of contention,” something about singing together made it easier for both of them. The piece eventually showed up as one of only two vocal pieces on Prairies.

But as a singing duo, they don’t take it easy on themselves. They write dissonant, shifting harmonies. “It’s really hard if you’re not a singer to make that sound like it’s not an accident,” Halvorson says.

Convening again at Odessa, a humble bar in the East Village which retains the trappings (and, in fact, the menu) of its previous life as a diner, the two are considering their possible fates had they not found their muses.

“I’d be a step aerobics instructor,” Pavone says. “In a sense, it’d be like being a teacher, and I’m really into physical fitness.”

It makes sense given the whip-cracking personality that's earned her the nickname “Sarge.” She’s the one who gets people onto the proverbial tour bus on time, or gets the check at the restaurant. Halvorson, for her part, sees herself as being something more ethereal if performing hadn’t been in the mix.

“My interests are never normal,” she says.

“I’d probably want to be an astrologer. If I had to do something more ‘acceptable,’” she adds, making air quotes with her fingers, “I guess I’d be a therapist.”

In fact, the two regularly call each other to check on their astrological charts, especially when something unusual happens on a given day.

“It really pisses people off because they think it’s stupid,” Halvorson says. “But all this fluff astrology in pop culture gives it a bad name. Once somebody offered me a gig at The Stone with my trio anytime one week and I noticed on one day I had a particularly good astrological transit, so I said ‘Why not?’ And it turned out to be a really great gig.”

Pavone interjects: “It’s so mathematical—it’s an art, it’s a science, it’s a language.”

“And it’s nice to have an interest other than music,” Halvorson concludes.

With all their work and social networks being in performance and composition, they agree that its imperative to have interests outside of music.

“For me, it’s painting,” Pavone says. “I’m not a trained painter. With music I know too much, or not too much, but I know about technique. Painting helps be to be creative without getting in my own way.”

But with their third album out, at this point they’re not looking back. “We always say we’re going to do this duo until we’re 80,” Pavone says. “So we’ll see.” ✹ Kurt Gottschalk is a staff writer at All About Jazz New York. He wrote about Diamanda Galas in STN#49.

WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #53 | 17

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

ONLY WHAT IS DEAD CAN LIVE FOREVER

When David Morris moved to Iowa City from Austin, he traded the buzz of the live music capital of the world for the vacuum of what seemed like a cultural wasteland. Then he noticed a thriving, noisy subculture just below its surface...

Photos by David Morris and Sarah Dorpinghaus Jeff "Secret Abuse" Witscher marks Jason "Chouser" Miller for life in an Iowa City living room

A pudgy, pale kid banged away at a tiny keyboard and sang into a microphone, monotonous Casio beats and melodies forming nothing like structure, fighting their way over his Englishaccented rambling. The P.A., unable to contain the chaos, drenched everything in an ominous, gritty syrup of distortion, the final product useful as a tool of psywarfare but otherwise undeserving of a place in God’s universe. Amazingly, at least thirty more tragic youth were packed into this basement, their fists in the air, screaming their adoration through the storm, swinging from pipes, crawling over each other, sweaty.

They seemed to be listening to an entirely different performance, something pulsing, muscular, anthemic. Like Bacchus’s fevered troupe, they had let force and intoxication triumph over form and beauty, and screams of anguish now struck their deranged ears as the finest melodies.

Welcome to Iowa City.

I moved here a few years back from Austin, where on any given night I could choose between a half-dozen decent shows. Rock, hip hop, reggae, free jazz, klezmer, bluegrass—locals in legions and touring indie bands drawing hundreds, thousands. The excitement in the air, every night, that there was something new, something great crouched just around the next corner. The Live Music Capital of the World.

Iowa? I could hardly find it on a map. Iowa City’s just got a scattering of venues, nearly squeezed out by bars built like strip-mall church-

es that stack drunken fratboys ten deep. Bands that I’d seen in cavernous rooms packed to their rafters rolled into Iowa City to the greeting of a few dozen, in venues including one that’s been described as looking like “the first Bennigan’s.” It was dispiriting—the shadow of a music scene.

But then, little by little, I started to notice that the shadows were where the real music was. I can’t quite remember how I first met them— the freaks. Maybe you just stand around long enough, alone, and they come for you. I was invited to a show, not even at a real venue, just in the space left after a few stores closed up at night. The money went in a cigar box. In Austin, I’d grown soft on the glut of information, always in your ears or at your fingertips. But here you had to search it out, work the phones, find the right basements, living rooms, names like the Glory Hole, the Yellow Ghetto, sharing them with not a few hundred people but twenty, thirty, many of the same faces every time, like a congregation without a church, wandering the desert. I slowly got with the new program.

Eventually, like a C.I.A. man diligently working the angles, I was inside the operation.

I’ve found signs and portents. In the looming shadow of a second Great Depression, welcome to a sneak preview of what America will sound like five years from now. We will dig Jean Michel Jarre tapes out of the trash and worship them like atavistic space-gods. We will go next door to jam with our neighbor because

the cable’s disconnected. We will sew our own clothes, drink cheap beer by the crateful, and learn to love the apocalypse.

The Anti-Life Equation A place like Austin or New York turns the most passionate music fans into A&R reps in training.

Does this band have buzz? Are they tight? Who fucked over who? Are they gonna blow up?

Even house parties are tryouts. But in Iowa City, it doesn’t matter, because nobody is gonna “blow up,” everyone knows it, and nobody cares. There are no festivals here, no record industry. No justice—just us. Instead of an aura of competition and one-upmanship, it’s a mutual appreciation society—not a fishbowl, but an echo chamber. It shows in both the best and worst ways. Sometimes people go in monumentally bad creative directions, getting away with sloppiness that would be laughed off the stage elsewhere. By the same token, the safety of the net leads to risk-taking and monumental feats. The mastery of improv and chaos doesn’t come without long nights of sounding perfectly shit-tacular. You incubate, leaning on the people who, for whatever mysterious reason, believe in you, as much because of who you are as what you’re doing. Brendan O’Keefe, half of spacetrash-house jammers Cuticle, knows the value.

“Honestly, I don’t see how you do it without friends.”

And eventually, out of support and false steps

WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #53 | 19

Top: Sewn Leather at the Glory Hole. Bottom, left to right - Sadie Smith (Zooquarium), Cole Zrostlik (Fox Maidens, Zero Aggression), Ryan Garbes (Wet Hair), Shawn Reed (Wet Hair).

comes something bigger than the sum of its parts. The short, sharp ascent of Sullen Teen is a case in point, their shambolic dual guitars—out of tune, out of sync, totally enthralling—built partially on the years Evan Miller spent mastering his hypnotic mix of roots-blues and avant-improv for cheering audiences of ten. In those basements you hear moments that you know no one else ever will, real mystical ghosts entering the universe through human hands. Away from the delusionary forces that turn music into a step to fame and fortune it becomes a reason to live. The faith of your friends becomes a dare, a game of chicken, the desire to give them something so extreme that they’ll be rendered gibbering madmen, a fitting final reward. In this hothouse environment, everyone chases their own high under the glow of unconditional love, and weird, disturbing flowers bloom.

The British kid and his keyboard (which is, incidentally, duct-taped to a wheelless skateboard) are known as Baronic Wall, real name Jack Gilbert. In this strange, secret, momentary world, he peels off a retiring personality to kick out jams of maximum abrasion, improvising stream-ofconsciousness lyrics that meld T.S. Eliot and William S. Burroughs. The way was prepared for him by dozens of other people's projects, impromptu and harrowing, the list of which reads like code names for G.I.s: Driphouse, Lwa, Fox Maidens, Youth of the Beast, Sewn Leather, Taterbug, Hyperventilating Teen, Supersonic Piss, Cuticle, Pukers, Chouser, Trash Dog, Zero Aggression, Secret Abuse, Wet Hair.

The last two are particularly notable. Secret Abuse is Jeff Witscher, a dynamo who’s plied music along the spectrum from beauty to horror as Marble Sky, Impregnable, Rainbow Blanket, as part of Deep Jew, and as the leader/sole permanent member of Trash Dog. He’s taken the counterintuitive trip from Los Angeles by way of everywhere to come bask in Iowa’s long, brutal winters. He came largely thanks to Wet Hair’s Ryan Garbes and Shawn Reed, Iowa natives who crossed Witscher’s path over the course of a few tours, including with their preceding band, Racoo-oo-oon. Racoo-oo-oon and Witscher come closest of any on this list to having recognizable names, but even that’s only among obsessive followers of left-field music. Their influence/legacy/examples have been instrumental in creating Iowa City’s strange micro-scene— they made crazy music, put out tapes, toured America, toured Europe, made actual vinyl with their name on it, showing others that it could be done. But Reed isn’t quite comfortable with that role, with the idea that he might be a big figure in other people’s lives. “I don’t want to be any kind of leader.”

Reed runs frequent shows at his house, dubbed the Cave of Spirits. Like many shows before and since, in Iowa City and across America, these take place in the basement, in strange darkness. Along one wall in this Cave is a surface that is at first completely indecipherable, textured like wounded skin and the color

of twenty flavors of gum. It’s deeply unnerving until you get closer, and see that it is made up of innumerable plastic shopping bags, melted or glued onto plywood. While you stare at that strange trash-art another kind is probably being made in front of you—obsolete toys squawking through distortion pedals; cheap saxophones made to scream unnaturally; echoing, detuned moaning.

This is the sound of the broken, unwanted, cheap, and portable. Taterbug’s music revolves around obsolete Dictaphones that can pitchdown cassette tapes, making old pop chestnuts rage like demons. The clicking short-circuit in Chouser’s thrift-store organ turns it into a soulless machine of genius. For a while a one-man band called NIMBY was centered around a drum kit made out of plastic margarine tubs attached to Radio Shack contact mics. There is no right way to do anything. Instruments are not revered, just one more element moving along the circuit of contingency. Witscher makes all his records with a keyboard, a few pedals, and an eight-track.

All this corner-cutting and recycling has also provided an easy label for scenes like Iowa City’s.

Listening to the tape hiss, the layers of echo and delay and distortion, the crackling, broken circuits, it’s easy for journalists (including this one) to talk about “noise.” But look beneath that layer of fuzz, and things explode out of neat categories: “It’s not noise, it’s not psych rock, it’s everything—it’s metal, it’s girl-pop with a cello, it’s punk,” says Chouser (aka Jason Miller), not mentioning the dance producers and no-wave bands. Sewn Leather could be considered a rap group, albeit in a dangerously twisted sense. But they all perform together, trading tapes, sharing one big tent, issuing that clarion call of the “noise” scene: “Support!”

It’s a cry that echoes—Iowa City is not unique in much of this. Replace it with Baltimore, Minneapolis, Ann Arbor, and replace Racoo-oo-oon with Dan Deacon, Gay Beast, Wolf Eyes—all places with their own trailblazers and their own crews, like gangs, dubbing tapes and occupying basements. People don’t come to Iowa City because it’s some mecca, or because there’s a scene here that’s special, exciting, or unique— things are special, exciting, and unique all over.

People stop here, on their way to somewhere else, part of some circuit that will eventually see them back to their own rich turf. Others are here because it’s home, but they’ll eventually pick up stakes for a few days or a few months and travel to other strange and wondrous locales, where other people have built new worlds for the discovering.

There’s nothing else to do but sit around the house and get stoned.

Talk to a few people and you start to get a clue as to the common thread that holds such disparate flavors together, and across such distances. “I wasn’t born with a chunk of change in my pocket,” says Daren Ho, a.k.a. Driphouse,

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

whose gothic kraut trips are released in editions of something like 20. “I’ve been given crude tools and they’re prone to play crude music.”

Iowa isn’t poor, but it’s a long way from Wall Street, Hollywood, or any other place where cash has spent the last quarter-century falling off the backs of trucks. Most of this isn’t music that’s made for the purpose of sounding cheap. The “noise” isn’t an effort. It’s an inevitable, almost incidental effect of working with what you’ve got.

A lot of these kids came to what they’re doing now through various strands of punk rock.

Racoo-oo-oon started life as a hardcore band called Hugs. Both Chouser and O’Keefe did the thing. After one tour, O’Keefe decided he “didn’t want to pretend to be angry every night for fun.” The progression from punk to noise fits well with a story we’ve heard a lot—that punk is about scraping away the aura of rock gods, discrediting expertise, doing it yourself.

This is the sound of punk’s logical extension.

Every bit of tape hiss is a declaration that money isn’t the same thing as excellence, and what comes through that hiss ditches even the briefest outlines of a rock structure—less because it’s tainted by the paper chase and more because it’s boring. Instead you get brief squalls and blurts, or hypnotic long tones that you sink into full-length, improvisation, screaming, moaning. When records like this turn out sounding good—even great—it’s tempting to think that you’re bearing witness to some kind of singular genius, a gateway to individual talent, greatness untainted by the hassles of discipline, practice, regulation. No rules, dude—just a straight conduit to the spirit.

How many people have looked at a Jackson Pollock and thought the same thing—“My toddler could paint this!”? And how we rightly disdain those people. Wet Hair can sound like an ensemble in a ritual frenzy of inspiration, chanting calls to dark gods in something not-language, not-music. And Secret Abuse can sound like twenty different effects pedals haphazardly chained into a self-generating automaton of ever-mounting feedback. But the process of getting there is disciplined, even grueling—for much of the band’s existence, Racoo-oo-oon would pull three eight-hour practice marathons in a row, twice a month. The clearest testament is the band’s penultimate record, last year’s jaw-dropping Behold Secret Kingdom (Release the Bats), a cleanly-recorded tour de force of intricate orchestration and mind-searing musicianship. Witscher’s discipline is more iterative, visible in the dozens of releases that chronicle the evolution of his projects and talent.

We should already be accustomed to these contradictions—by the standards of anti-excellence and pure not-giving-a-shit, we’ve just lived through eight years of the most punk rock Presidency on record. We’ve seen the real effects of discrediting knowledge, dismissing expertise, and telling the rest of the world to go fuck itself.

The tape underground pulls us back from the edge of worshiping chaos for its own sake, fills

WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #53 | 21

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

Racoo-oo-oon's farewell hometown show, The Picador, October 29, 2008.

in the other half, the half of punk rock that was about liking people instead of hating them, building things instead of tearing them down, making the world more beautiful instead of spitting on it. “We’re just these kids from these small towns, and if we want anything for ourselves, we have to make it happen,” says Reed.

I Live Like This Cuz I Like It Charles “Taterbug” Free is getting a tattoo, but he's not in a tattoo parlor. Ten of us are sitting around a coffee table, and Sadie is jabbing Taterbug’s arm, over and over again, with a pair of sewing needles wrapped in thread and dipped in India ink. Witscher is doing the same favor for Jason “Chouser” Miller. The masterpieces to be committed permanently to flesh are, for Taterbug, a freehanded campfire surrounded by the legend “Feelin’ Good,” rendered as big as a dollar bill on his forearm.

Chouser will become the proud bearer of a gaping, snaggle-toothed mouth, “Swamp” emblazoned on its wagging tongue.

Maybe twenty at the core of Iowa City’s music cadre sport this sort of body anti-art. Triangles on the backs of hands, “Sunbear” slanting drunkenly across a pectoral, “Falafel” asymmetric on a set of knuckles. Absurd symbols rendered crudely, ink bleeding like fungus under the skin, some already fading into false age, each one its own joyfully wrecked misadventure. In the words of Paige, singer for Supersonic Piss, “I think prison tattoos look a little better than that.”

Then there’s the clothes—tattered, torn, crudely patched, barely holding together, filthy. The missing seat of a pair of paint-sprayed jeans replaced by a triangle of purple dishtowel, a black do-rag lined with old thermal underwear, strung around the face against negative ten windchills.

These people, they are not cool. They are not attractive. These are the marks of, as Witscher gleefully puts it, scumbags.

There’s a lineage to the make-do of crust-punk travelers, dreadlocked hoboes with This Bike Is a Pipe Bomb patches on their black hoodies.

But here it’s infused with a crazed surrealism— that hoodie now has a rabbit-fur collar and a spray-painted third eye. A suit-jacket has its sleeves ripped off and a mandala sewn on the back. Reconstructed from the decaying parts of clothes that were last beloved twenty years ago, scumbag fashion turns its wearer into a walking Cornell box, decline and decay circling around to become beautiful. Of course, there is some distance from reserved, sober Cornell, his care replaced by its opposite. I asked Chouser about the tattoo, and he first, jokingly, gave me the standard “punk” line—“It forces me to stick to principles, man.” But then he laughed, insisting instead that he was just doing it for the endorphin high of pain. “I just don’t give a fuck.”

Not giving a fuck has always been a marketable commodity in America, and in their own small way, so are these obscurantist bands. Most of the music is distributed on cassette tape, a format just this side of extinct but kept alive here

with a vengeance. “I’m going to dub twelve hundred tapes this month,” Shawn tells me.

Not Capitol Records, but the proceeds from Night People, the label that started with Racoooo-oon’s first record, help him live without a day job—no compromise. Witscher also gives himself a hand up, not a hand out, flogging tapes online, largely on the Chondritic Sound noise message boards. “That’s just my little hustle, trying to pay the rent.” Brendan O’Keefe, a.k.a. NIMBY, half of Cuticle, runs Detrivore Records (that’s “trash eater” for you non-Latin types), managing to break even on small runs of cassingles sold to a knowing and committed but miniscule audience.

The tape thing is a mystery because it’s not mysterious—you hold that piece of obsolescence in your hand and it just makes sense.

Reed and Garbes have honed the craft of cassette design to an understated perfection, with simple two-tone inserts and scrawling designs as evocative as the music. It’s one more way of reclaiming music from the intangibility of the internet, making it more than bits and bytes. “It’s definitely for nerds,” Witscher says, confessing that he’s a huge collector himself. There’s a solidity, a certainty to cassettes, both in the warm imperfections of a frayed j-card and in the blunted edges of the analog sound within. By contrast, “CDs are the most disgusting format I can think of.”

Other aspects of the appeal are less aesthetic than practical. “I can definitely hear that the CD [sounds] better,” says O’Keefe, “But the tradeoff is that you’ve gotta treat it like a baby, like hold it and kiss it.” A tape “can sit in the bottom of my backpack and a year from now I’ll still be able to listen to it,” says Will Kapp, the other half of Sullen Teen. Tapes are rugged enough to survive a sometimes harsh transient lifestyle, attractive enough to satisfy the needs of music nerdology, and ultimately, without the sense of permanence that makes vinyl such a nightmare if you don’t own your own home and/or moving company. “A whole lot of scumbags were like, oh yeah, tapes totally make sense, I can trash ’em, I can lose ’em,” Witscher explains. “They’re like, I eat in a dumpster. And oh yeah, I like tapes.” Both are the leavings of industrial society, a trail of the unloved that’s enough to support a separate human ecology and culture. “Twenty years ago, tapes were the most popular thing,” O’Keefe says wryly. “And now if my Walkman breaks, I can go buy a new one at Goodwill for two dollars.”

Around the country, there are dozens of small labels living in the entrails of technology, putting out tapes dubbed by hand in loving, limited runs. Names like American Tapes, Fuck It Tapes, Tapeworm Tapes—again, some covered in a recent issue of this magazine. There’s an audience, some known to drop upwards of a Benjamin when out-of-print releases show up on eBay. That’s one kind of commitment, though for some at the other end of the transaction, the people buying tapes with button-clicks are an

afterthought at best. “I’m open to the idea that someone I don’t know might hear my music,” says Will. “But the people who matter are my friends.”

But dude, he put his whole life into this.

These scumbags are what you might call gainfully unemployed, their hours spent not as sandwich artists or commodity traders or ophthalmologists, but hunched in front of a bank of keys and knobs, producing sound the way medieval cobblers made shoes. The cassette format allows them to package their sounds with just as much handcrafted detail. “It’s inevitable that this person is going to be in this tape,” Witscher explains. “They sat down, they recorded it, they mixed it, then they made the master, they got the tapes, they cut out the images, they typed the notes ... that’s what’s so attractive, you’re looking at this tape and you see everything from this person.”

Kapp lived outside of Iowa City for a time, working on a farm. I remember him coming to shows after the long trip into town, mud still spattered on his boots. “Andy [Spore, a.k.a.

Youth of the Beast] and Shawn would send me anything that got put out on Night People. I’d just devour it and be like, Andy, what the fuck are you thinking, making these sounds? It’s better than having a phone conversation with the person, to get something that they recorded and listen to it.” Even at Night People, Shawn dubs every tape himself (albeit on a nearly mythical chain-synced tower of scrounged cassette decks), screenprints the inserts, folds, and mails them. While machines stamp Chinese Democracy out of black gold, tapers are the least alienated workers on the planet, with total control of the means of production. Maybe what those obsessive high-dollar collectors are gathering greedily to themselves are the fragments of soul stubbornly clinging to each product.

Don’t get the wrong idea—money is the exception rather than the rule, and that’s part of what makes it all so attractive. Tapes are the blueprint for another way of being. “[In high school] I really wanted to travel or be in the ’60s, but there was nothing in my daily life that echoed that at all,” I hear from Brendan O’Keefe, half of Cuticle. “Music, for a while, was my only connection to people who were living different from, like, going to college or whatever.”

Gilbert, like others, figured out how to live the blueprint. “I try to have a reasonable part of the year where I don’t have to work, do temp jobs or whatever.” It’s not what most Americans would consider a normal lifestyle.

“It’s really, really hard for a lot of those people to understand that it’s okay to live without a job,” Kapp points out.

“Or to spend your last five dollars on photocopies,” Witscher throws in. “And you’re like, cool, that was my last five bucks.”

We’ve all known those who suffer for their art,

WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #53 | 23

Top: Cuticle Bottom: Trash Dog

bemoaning the society that doesn’t give them what they deserve. But that’s just another form of ladder-climbing, being outside and wanting to get in. “There are people who are like, interns in music,” says Witscher. Sacrifice everything to chase the brass ring. But what about the people who don’t even want to get in? How long can the system hold up when people start to realize that, to paraphrase The Wire, the music can’t save you?

Well, you wisen up and replace the brass ring with a loop spliced between you and the next guy. The compulsively networked aspect of the new tape culture seems particularly tailor-made for the harsh necessities of growing up weird in the Midwest. In Williamsburg, you can comfortably exist in the thirty-minute triangle formed by a coffee shop, a record store, and a bar, and every day you’ll meet someone new, who will be in a cool new band, or have a cool new haircut—and who gives a shit? Compare that with the distances, the walls of snow, the scant capital, the legions of indifference that spring to mind when you so much as think “Iowa.” Out here, you fight to find the people like you, and you don’t let them go.

Nobody around here even cared about what we were doing.

Ryan and Shawn describe high school years spent in frantic Brownian motion, pulsating and gyrating across the state—Des Moines, Cedar Rapids, Cedar Falls, Sioux City, Muscatine— finding tiny pockets here and there of people on the same wavelength, then helping draw the lines between them. “You could play any of those places and it’d be pretty good,” says Reed. “You could get a hundred or 200 people in some little town, who’d drive a couple hours.”

The music is sometimes dank and foreboding, but the people who make it are often the opposite, smiling idiot grins and introducing themselves to you if you so much as look in their direction. Witscher in particular has the kind of personal magnetism and self-assured generosity that’s usually reserved for Mormon quarterbacks and Latin American dictators.

Over the years, as one goes from devouring and excreting hardcore thrash to things less wholesome, little scrabbling jaunts multiply and extend—Detroit, Columbus, Oakland. Inevitably, things grow, and you enter the zone where the personal edges into the artistic, even the professional. “When Eat Skull comes to my house, they play a show, and I cook them three meals and we hang out and have a good ol’ time,” says Reed.

“Then, when I wanna go play a show in Portland, they’re like, let’s do it.” In Oakland on their tour as Wet Hair, Reed and Garbes knew every single member of the audience. The line between friend and stranger, local and national, collaborator and audience, becomes a blurry mess. Do you “know” the guy who buys a copy of every single tape you and your friends make twenty copies of? Maybe not. Does he know you? “It’s Native American style,” adds Reed. “You meet the other

tribe and trade your goods.”

For some, this is what it’s all about—the connections, and the objects that index them.

“Sometimes it’s like the music doesn’t matter,” says Witscher. “We could be making rubber ducks, and it’d still be in editions of ten, and they’d be really weird, and we’d still all be doing our own thing.” For others, though, it’s exactly the opposite—none of it would matter if not for the blown-out, crazed pleasures of the music, an infection that seems to be in the air. Though Josh of Supersonic Piss says Iowa City is more of a “noise town” because Reed and Racoo-oooon have been here for so long, the paths that brought people to total conversion weren’t so simple as worshipping local heroes. “We totally got into harsh, weirdo noise by ourselves,” Will tells me of one of his high school bands. “We thought we were the only band that had ever done any of the shit we were doing. And then we heard, I dunno, Sightings, and realized we were hacks.” Josh had never even heard of “noise” until the Yellow Swans’ stop in Iowa City as he puts it, “fucking blew me away.”

By the same token, the early years of building a community around weird music were more focused outward than in. “Racoo-oo-oon never played return shows [when we got back from tour], because it just didn’t seem like it would be that big of a deal,” Reed told me. There’s a twisted logic to the local-national interplay.

It’s the people next door that make it spiritually possible to keep going, who make life itself worth living. But it’s people across the country who provide ongoing musical inspiration, keep the horizons open, make it financially feasible.

Conversely, Reed points out to me that even in a town as small as Iowa City, there are working bands plying formulaic funk and dance music who can make a decent living—but nobody in Missouri is going to give a shit.

Another friend of mine has made huge strides in organizing a national indie rock festival in Iowa City, and is fond of saying that he wants the town to “blow up”—just like Austin did in the late ’90s. Certain people do play a crucial role in the noise scene—organizing, finding space, making things happen—but there’s little of that sort of self-aggrandizing evangelism. No one goes around yelling about how “This is the NEXT BIG THING!” Because it’s just the thing— how can it be next if you’re already doing it?

Release you away, towards greater pig shit The fuzz of the tape, the crackle of distortion, the speckling of a crudely-photocopied cover, the twist of a not-quite pitch may be the relics of poverty, or the personalizing errors of handcrafting. But they are also the mask that promises more. If you peel away these imperfections, might there not be something unimaginably beautiful beneath? Racoo-oo-oon’s record makes the promise explicit—Behold Secret Kingdom. The mad symbols on skin, on cardboard, spraypainted on cassettes, suggest

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

some code to crack. “I always liked bands that I thought were smarter,” Brendan remembers. “I used to think someone had figured out some completely underground way of living, and that’s why they’re making this fucked-up music.

Like they have some reality that I don’t even know about.” There is another world, another life—just listen.

I also grew up in a nowhere suburb, sure that just over the next hill there’d be something great, something amazing, something that would change my existence, break me out of isolation. For me, the dream was of the Big City. It’s easy to romanticize cultural meccas, to think that there’s something about Oakland or New York or Chicago that’s going to change your life, blow your mind. The thing that bothered me for the first couple years— bothered me a lot—was how the hell there could possibly be anyone worth knowing in Iowa City. With Chicago three hours away, wouldn’t all the cool kids have pulled up stakes and moved? Most of the Night People axis have been here since high school, traveling but never really leaving. Didn’t they have a gnawing hunger to be somewhere else, to see something else?

These people, they were different from me. They were comfortable in their own skins, something I rarely am. Garbes had right what I had wrong for so long: “Places are different, but it’s not going to be some kind of magical wand.” You go to someplace like Austin, with excitement and entertainment before your face constantly, and you don’t have to think of yourself. When there’s a band in the room you don’t have to talk to anyone. You tell yourself that you’ve found the other world, that you’re living the other life. But it's just consumption by another name.

A place like Iowa City doesn’t let you get away with it. You’re not allowed to just stand around watching. You realize that the other world wasn’t behind the mistakes, the distortion, the obscurity—it was in them, in the imperfections of the process of doing.

“Something about how weird the music was just helps your imagination go where it needs to go,” Brendan remembers. “But that mystery is gone. I still love the music, [but] I’m an adult.

I don’t need to wait for some band to tell me how to do it.”

And so you stop looking somewhere else and start looking in front of your own feet. You make a tape or photocopy some drawings and hustle them for money and love. You play a show in your basement, or under a bridge.

You do it with the leftovers, the butt-ends of someone else’s largesse. You scrape and down there you find there are other people scraping along, just like you.

Take a good look, America. In your future, you are starving. ✹ David Morris wrote about underground Japanese hip-hop in STN#49

WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #53 | 25

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

OUT FROM THE SHADOWS

Multi-instrumentalist Giuseppe Logan was a unique voice on the front lines of the '60s New Thing movement. Then, in the early '70s, he vanished from the scene. Some four decades later, he's back in New York and ready to resume his career. Story by Pete Gershon.

Giuseppe Logan at Roswell Rudd's Everywhere session, Capitol Studios, New York City, July 8, 1966, photographed by Raymond Ross

Two short video clips, both accessible via YouTube: The first, a short piece from 1966 by filmmaker Edward English. The camera pans from a flyer advertising a jazz concert at Judson Hall to an apartment building facade, on which hangs a carved wooden sign, which reads, “Giuseppe Logan - Music Teacher - All Instruments - Vocal Coach.” Cut to a sharply dressed man in his early thirties who looks relaxed, happy, walking his dog in the sunshine and watching his young son frolic with friends on the playground in New York City’s Tompkins Square Park. As Logan’s composition “Dance of Satan” unspools in the background, he states in an interview voiceover, “I feel if people in other professions are able to support their families, doing what they do, than why can’t I, or other musicians, that are doing something that’s good for society?”

The second clip was shot 42 years later, in December, 2008 with a handheld digital camera by artist and activist Suzannah Troy. The same man stands in the very same park, playing a beautifully fractured rendition of Cole Porter’s “Begin the Beguine” in the bitter cold on a battered alto saxophone. Only his snowy beard is visible underneath the fur-lined hood of his rumpled yellow parka. What happened to Giuseppe Logan in the intervening years has been one of the biggest mysteries in the world of jazz.

“The man had a very great depth of understanding of the music and its forms,” says Bernard Stollman, who produced all three of Logan’s recording sessions as a leader, only two

of which have seen the light of day. “He wasn’t a primitive. You know, because of his robust and brusque, distinctive style he was disparaged by people who didn’t understand his approach.”

Stollman was first introduced to Logan by percussionist Milford Graves, who’d befriended the multi-instrumentalist in Boston and who hoped to help him find his feet when he first moved to New York City in 1964. “He came to me as a mystery,” says Stollman, as we sit in the offices of his storied ESP-Disk label on Brooklyn’s Bedford Avenue. “I had no prior awareness of him before Milford brought him to me. He came out of the blue. He wasn’t a young man, he had a son, must have been in his thirties then.

According to the reports, he’d attended New England Conservatory.”

In Ben Young’s Dixonia, the trumpeter Bill Dixon recounts that in the summer of 1964, Logan “was ’studying’ with me, meaning: he wanted to know certain things, and I needed an alto player, so he played all of my concerts, and occasionally I would let him have some of his things played in the group. He had a great deal of difficulty with getting people to play his music.

I think at the time I was the only trumpet player who could play his music, and I loved playing it.

No one sounded in an ensemble like Giuseppe.

He held his head back all the way, explaining once, ’This way my throat is completely open,’ so he could have more air coming through his windpipe. He used to pride himself on playing up to the fourth octave on alto. The things that made him different as an improvisor were the

way he placed his notes, that sound he got, and then what the others in his group played behind him. His pieces were very attractive for those reasons. Giuseppe had his own points of view about music, which is what this music is supposed to be about. We got along.”

Logan performed with pianist Paul Bley’s quintet alongside trumpeter Dewey Johnson, bassist David Izenzon and drummer Rashied Ali on September 14th of the same year, and already Logan’s playing was provoking raw emotion in listeners. The late Canadian poet Paul Haines possessed a reel-to-reel recording of the session and in his discographical notes, remarked, “it’s during Logan’s alto solo on ’Turns’ that a customer begins his violent shouting.”

Stollman first heard Logan play on October 4th, 1964 at the groundbreaking October Revolution in Jazz, a three-night festival at an Israeli coffeehouse called the Cellar Cafe that gathered the best and brightest talents from the emerging creative new music. Logan would be one of the first artists to lead a session for Stollman’s label, cutting five tracks on November 11th. Stollman had originally offered the session to Graves, but the drummer yielded leadership to the older man, who provided all of the compositions.

Don Pullen was the pianist and Eddie Gomez handled the bass. The Giuseppi Logan Quartet was the first recording session for all four men.

Stollman’s recollections of the date paint the picture of a brilliant instrumentalist and arranger but also that of a troubled personality.

“As the session began, the musicians walked

WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #53 | 27

Pete Gershon

Giuseppe Logan in New York City, February 18, 2009.

in a line as they went into the studio, and I was standing at some remove, in a doorway about fifteen, twenty feet away. And as he walked by and saw me, he turned to me and said ’If you rob me, I’ll kill you.’ And they went on to do the session. Milford was mortified, since he’d brought him to me. I don’t want to go into details, but in those days he was just unpredictably assaultive.”

In 2005, Stollman shared this memory with Clifford Allen in the pages of All About Jazz: “At one point, I was standing with the engineer in the control room, and I thought the piece they were playing was stunningly beautiful. It sounded totally spontaneous, as if they were ad-libbing and commenting like a gorgeous conversation. Suddenly, I heard a ’thwuuunk,’ and I realized that the tape had run out. The engineer and I were so absorbed, we hadn’t been paying attention. I thought “oh God, this remarkable thing is lost. It was interrupted in the middle, and it’s gone.” Richard Alderson was the engineer, and he got on the intercom and said “Giuseppe, the tape ran out.” Without a pause, Giuseppe said “take it back to before where it stopped and we’ll take it from there.” So he did, he wound it back and played some bars of it and took down the record button, and they resumed exactly what they were doing—there was no way of telling where one or the other ended. It was unreal.”

About Logan's playing on the record, writer and critic Ed Hazell says, ”his alto sound is totally riveting, caught between beauty and despair, anger and compassion. It’s an anguished cry, a gritty, unsentimental lament that longs for a peace and joy that always seem just out of reach. It’s both tough minded and tender hearted and so genuine, so human, so honest.

There are moments on ‘Dance of Satan’ and ‘Dialogue’ when Logan’s phrasing seems to cut against every received idea of swing. His big, blocky sounds sit awkwardly in the rumble and flow of one of the period’s great rhythm sections.

Yet his notes assemble themselves into melody, connected to a greater or lesser extent to his composition; he’s using the melody as he improvises. ‘Bleeker Partita’ crowns the album with a performance that sums up all of his strengths.

It’s a modal/free piece [and] once again the attraction of melody governs his soloing, even the sonic extremes. The more directly lyrical passages stubbornly resist the commonplace modal phrasing and melodic contours, while his multiphonics fly upward with the grace of ecstasy without entirely leaving the tune behind. ” Nearly six months later, in April of 1966, ESP assembled a week-long package tour of college campuses in upstate New York involving various artists from its roster: pianists Burton Greene, Ran Blake, Sun Ra, Dave Burrell, singer Patty Waters and of course, Logan. On her College Tour record, drawn from these concerts, Waters is backed on several tracks by Logan on flute, Perry Lind on bass and Scobe Stroman behind the drums.

On May 1st, Logan’s band (with bassist Reggie Johnson in place of Gomez) shared a bill with Albert Ayler’s group at a Town Hall concert organized by ESP-Disk. Twenty-seven minutes of their set (two pieces and a piano solo by Logan), plus a leftover cut entitled “Wretched Saturday” from the October studio session, comprise More, which would be the second LP under Logan’s leadership. An exotic tableau of soaring flute and Graves’s gongs and lithe percussion, it’s a fascinating record and a leap forward (or at least sideways) from the initial Quartet LP, presaging a more open, contemplative free music that’s still practiced today. Logan’s turbulent, ruminative piano solo “Curve 11” sounds like nothing else, past or present.

Allen, who may have immersed himself as deeply into the music of the ESP catalog as any writer, remarks that “for me, what has always been striking about Logan as both ‘soloist’ and in more collective situations is that he appears to be in a dialogue with himself. He was often at a parallel with the music, or seemed to be, which changed the landscape or ‘type’ of collectivity immeasurably. He's not the only player to do this, but it is very marked and was probably fairly influential.”

An ESP press release of the period lists a mysterious third title that was never released, The Giuseppi Logan Chamber Ensemble In Concert. Stollman explains, “having made two albums, I decided I was going to do something [else] for him. He was a genius, a talent that most people hadn’t recognized, but I felt as though there was something very important there. So I hired Judson Hall, and I got him four classical musicians, and he did what was essentially a recording session concert. He played violin, trumpet, saxophone, flute and piano. When the session was over, I went back to the recording engineer, who was Marzette Watts. He said that it didn’t record, the tape was messed up. The concert was beautiful, and it didn’t record? A catastrophe! Then, some time later, I got a call from Marzette; I hadn’t heard from him in many years. ’Bernard, I have to explain something to you,’ he said. ’When I told you it didn’t record, I didn’t tell you the truth. I thought I had to protect Giuseppe from you. The tape is fine.’ It still exists.

One of his sons, Eli, is a physician in Nashville, and he has his dad’s tapes. Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been trying to contact him, but he doesn’t return my calls. I’m mortified. So wrote him a letter. Told him that tape’s important, that the music should come out. I said, ’I’ll pay you a recording fee, thirty-five years later! You’re entitled to it, but it’s my tape. I had a contract with Marzette!’”

Though it would be the last time Logan recorded for ESP-Disk, he’d make one more appearance on record, in the frontline of the group trombonist Roswell Rudd assembled for his debut LP Everywhere. Rudd and Logan (who for this date played flute and bass clarinet) were joined on the July 1966 session by saxophonist Robin Kenyatta, bassists Charlie Haden and

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

Lewis Worrell and drummer Beaver Harris.

While Rudd politely declined to be interviewed for this piece (”I’ve been asking folks re: a place where G.L. can practice / Am in touch with his social worker” he reports in a brief e-mail), in Nat Hentoff’s liner notes to the release he says, “Ever since I first heard [Giuseppe], I looked forward to the time that we could make some music together. He’s a very imaginative player who can draw a great many ideas into a very short space of time and put them together so they make sense. He has an imagination which can free-associate very fast, but even though the ideas are sometimes very different from each other, the overall effect is cohesive.”

One of the highlights of the session is Logan’s “Satan’s Dance,” a recasting of his piece “Dance of Satan” which appeared on his ESP debut. In the flourish that opens the piece, his flute is a train whistle blowing hot steam; Rudd’s throaty trombone gives the tune’s anxious, see-sawing head its full realization. It’s one of the real gems of the late sixties free jazz movement.

Pullen, Graves and Gomez weren’t consistently available, and Logan’s neighbor Dave Burrell often occupied the piano bench in Logan’s working unit.

“I met Giuseppe in the East Village in 1965.

He came by my house at 77 East Third Street, my $40-a-month flat on the third floor with a bathtub and a kitchen and Sunny Murray’s drum kit permanently in the corner. Giuseppe at that time was writing a lot of beautiful 5/4 compositions. I had never played in 5/4, but I had always wanted to since I’d heard Brubeck and Desmond on ’Take Five’ of course. But this piece that Giuseppe wrote was not as cut and dried.

You couldn’t hum it like you could hum ’Take Five.’ It was a bluesy piece that sounded sometimes like it was in four. And his playing style, he looked up at the ceiling and he danced around in a ritualistic African way that was very hypnotic.

So you can imagine us trying to figure this out, me and [drummer] Bobby Kapp and [bassist] Sirone in this little room, with this master musician looking up at the ceiling playing this 5/4 piece for easily an hour. We got really entranced, and every time I’d look up at Giuseppe I’d just see the whites of his eyes.”

Burrell remembers one particularly wellattended concert with this lineup at the Festival Theatre on Lafayette as well as at St. Mark’s Church and elsewhere in the neighborhood.

“He was working a lot and he thought everything was going to be fine forever. Patty Waters was on the scene; we were all friends. We used to rehearse at Patty Waters’s house, in fact. We’d rehearse with a couple of bassists and a couple of drummers since you never really knew exactly when the next gig was or who was going to be available, and we wanted to be sure Giuseppe had a band who knew the music when the hit actually jumped off.”

“I never saw him push for a gig,” he adds.

“He was always so soft spoken, and rather

WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #53 | 29

reserved in that regard, compared to a guy like Archie Shepp. He was very comfortable being what I would consider a pure artist, he didn’t think about those kind of things, about whether he had an article in the paper or whatever.”

“I’d say it was intense until about ’70 or ’71,” Burrell continues. “He was still on the scene then even though I wasn’t playing with him that often anymore.” By 1969 Burrell was one of the many free players who had gone overseas to play at the Pan-Afrikan Festival in Algiers and had stayed on to record for the BYG label and pursue better opportunities in Europe. “I would say for Giuseppe, he was very comfortable around the Bowery, around the East Village, so when he heard that everything was moving over to Paris, he probably didn’t want to stop doing what he was doing. Everything seemed to be working for him. My recollection is when I came back, I moved to the South Bronx and I’d ask ’Hey, where’s Giuseppe?’ Maybe someone would say, ’Oh yeah, I saw him over at Slug’s’ but eventually you’d hear, ’No, haven’t seen him around in a while.’”

This is where music historians begin to lose the scent. Valerie Wilmer’s essential dcoumentation of the scene, As Serious As Your Life, contains a photograph of Logan holding a flute and wearing a serene, almost blank, expression while seated on a low mattress beside two music stands, which, according to the caption, depicts the “influential reedsman” in New York City in 1972.

For some years, musicians would occasionally encounter Logan as a ghostly presence around the city. In a 2001 interview for Signal to Noise, drummer Sunny Murray told Dan Warburton, “Giuseppe Logan lost his mind, which was really sad. He had an affair or something and his wife left him and took his son with her. He had a twelve-year-old son who could read music backwards, play the trumpet and was a real genius.

Giuseppe was very proud of his boy. When his wife left that threw him into a tailspin he never recovered from, and he searched down south, everywhere, and he could never find his son or his wife. When I came back to New York years later they told me Giuseppe Logan was a bagman, a clochard. I ran into Roger Blank, who was another very good drummer, and his wife on the corner of 137th Street and she said, ’I just saw Giuseppe Logan, Sunny! He’s got a room somewhere round here.’ I said ’Where? I want to see him! People say he’s crazy, I don’t believe it.’ She said ’He sure tried to get me up there in that room! That sound like a crazy man to you?!’

I guess that was about twenty years ago. Now someone told me he died. But I’m sure he didn’t die crazy.”

Stollman encountered Logan as well: ”When ESP went out of business, the tapes went into a safe deposit box at the Manufacturer’s Hanover Trust building at 9th Avenue and 57th Street.

My wife and I went to that branch sporadically to pull out tapes and so forth. So one time we went there, it was cold, maybe it was November or December, sometime in the early ’80s, I don’t know if I could tell you exactly when it was. And Giuseppe was there standing on the corner, playing a wired-together clarinet. And I greeted him, but he showed no reaction. So I went up close to him and he bent over and said in my ear, ’Nixon set a bomb off at Amchitka’, talking about the nuclear bomb Nixon had ordered under the waters off Alaska. So he acknowledged me in his own way. I gave him twenty dollars and he said, ’Good, now I can go home and practice.’ He was living in the Theresa Hotel in 30 | SIGNAL to NOISE #53 WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM

Harlem, I heard, I guess at that time he was just making music on the street.”

As the years went by without any new sightings, people naturally began to assume that Giuseppe Logan was dead.

Fast forward to May of 2008, when a startling note is posted to the message board at freejazz. org by user Carolyn_1: “announcement: For those interested Giuseppe Logan returned to NYC about three months ago. I was introduced to him by a mutual friend. Giuseppe states that he would like to make musical contacts.”

Weeks later, Stollman is in attendance at the 2008 Vision Festival in New York. “Somebody said ’Giuseppe’s here! Giuseppe’s here!’ and he came up to me, very cordial. I embraced him, I hugged him and said, ’Where have you been?’

He told me he’d been in and out of institutions.

That summed it up for me, I wasn’t going to press him. Then he came to visit us [at the ESP office]. He said, ’I’m going to play again. I’ve got some ideas! But I’ve got to fix my horn.’ So I gave him some money, and he said, ’Good. I’m going down to Norfolk’, he said, ’There’s a store down there where I can fix my horn, and my daughter lives there.’ So he took the money and went down to Virginia to fix his horn! What else is there to say?”

Even stranger: a video clip appears on the website sermonaudio.com in October. In it, pastor Bill T. Jones interviews Logan in Tompkins Square Park. “I hadn’t played [the saxophone] in twenty years,” Logan tells him. “Somebody stole my instruments and I got incarcerated in a mental institution, my wife had me put in there, for using substances.” He loosely sketches the sequence of events since his release: he raised money cutting grass, traded a trombone given to him by his daughter “for this raggedy ol’ horn here” and returned to New York. He’s then pressed by Jones to speak about his conversion to the Christian faith. “If it wasn’t for God, I’d probably be dead,” he remarks.

Two months after that, in a city filled with portable video cameras, Logan is filmed again in the park by Suzannah Troy playing “Begin the Beguine.” At the clip’s end, text scrolls by: “Giuseppe Logan Needs Your Support and A Home to Write Music As Well As Play.”

Logan had returned to New York with $600, which he’d thought would get him through. His money now gone, he’s been living at Brooklyn’s Kingsbridge homeless shelter, one of the 38,000 individuals who sleep in New York City’s shelter system every night. He spends his days playing music in the park and on subway platforms.

In the midst of these scattered sightings, Logan begins to visit the symphonic instruments section of the Sam Ash retail store on 48th Street near Times Square. Matt Lavelle, a talented trumpeter and bass clarinetist who’s worked in the groups of William Parker, studied with Ornette Coleman and released his own music on the Silkheart, CIMP and KMB Jazz labels, notices the man and has an intuitive moment. “He started coming in here and I knew something was up,” he tells me. “And I asked him, ’Are you Giuseppe Logan?’”

It’s the end of Lavelle’s shift on February 17th and we’re waiting for Logan to appear. The young horn player has helped to arrange a performance at the Bowery Poetry Club which will involve Lavelle, his usual bassist François Grillot and the veteran drummer Warren Smith. There’s a hint of nervousness in the air, as nobody’s been able to get hold of Logan for two weeks. Lavelle had helped him find a cellphone, but he’s not

sure that Logan fully understands how to use it. “I’m not worried about the gig itself,” he stresses. “Once brother G arrives, we’re going to be all set.”

Turns out there’s been no need for worry— Logan steps in exactly at six, just as planned.

Lavelle introduces me to Logan and while he counts out his register drawer, I take original LP copies of Logan’s records out of my pack and show them to the man. “I haven’t seen any of those in forty years,” he says, turning them over and curiously studying the unusual artwork by Howard Bernstein that graces their covers. We leave the store and take a cab to Lavelle’s apartment in what used to be known as Hell’s Kitchen to pick up his spare bass clarinet, a 1926 Penzel Muller low E model which he presents to Logan as a gift. Logan assembles the instrument and gives it a try. “I haven’t played one of these in a long time,” he says with an uncertain chuckle, but he draws sound from it immediately.

The three of us squeeze into the back of another taxi and we’re hurtling through neon-lit Times Square traffic toward the Bowery for dinner, then the gig. But first we drop by the Downtown Music Gallery, the record store which has been a mecca for creative music enthusiasts for eighteen years, to say hello to proprietor Bruce Gallanter and his staff. Logan seems amused to see a sealed CD reissue of his self-titled record in the bins; he looks up to find the face of his old friend Don Pullen staring back down at him from the cover of his solo record on Sackville.

Conversation at dinner is relaxed and casual, but punctuated with silence. Time and trouble seem to have worn much of the detail from Logan’s memory of his heyday, or maybe he’s simply a modest, plain-spoken man of few words. Questions about his goals and motiva-

tions as an composer, improviser and instrumentalist yield no real revelations, but he does share some interesting bits and pieces from his personal biography.

According to handed-down accounts, Logan was born May 22, 1935 in Philadelphia. Asked to confirm, he shyly looks down, saying “Yes, I’m an old, old man.” In fact, considering his trials and tribulations he looks to be in remarkably good shape physically. His family moved to Norfolk, Virginia when he was very young. “I came from a big family, my father played spirituals, religious music, on the piano, you know. I guess that’s what got me interested in playing. I started messin’ with the piano when I was young. My daddy bought me a sax.”

At 15, Giuseppe (he himself spells his name with an ’e’, although all of his record credits give his name a final ’i’) began playing semiprofessionally with saxophonist and bandleader Earl Bostic. “Yeah, I played with Bostic. I just went up and asked if I could play with him, and it happened. I played with Dizzy Gillespie down in Virginia, way back there, when I first started playing jazz. The piano player I was playing with was named Joseph Jones, ever heard of him? Then Dizzy hired him. He had Leo Wright on alto, but he couldn’t make the gig one night, so I played with him. I just played what Leo Wright played.

I got married when I was young. I didn’t want to get married, I wanted to go to school, but my mother and her mother made us get married.”

He soon felt limited by the work available in Virginia. “I wanted to play music so bad, but they didn’t have any down there, so I went to Philadelphia, stayed there a long time. That’s where I met Don Pullen, Rashied Ali.” He managed to accumulate enough savings to enroll at Boston’s New England Conservatory,

though he doesn’t recall which year he started or the names of any of his instructors. Lacking the money to complete his studies, he moved to New York in 1964. “I wasn’t gonna stay,” he says, “I was gonna go back to Virginia, but Milford got me a record date, introduced me to Bernard Stollman, so I stayed. I was just tryin’ to play. Still tryin’!”

He reports that in those years he played with many of the music’s heavy hitters: a tour of Germany and Japan with Sam Rivers’ group, sit-ins with Eric Dolphy, Sonny Stitt and Roland Kirk at club dates in Boston, with Sun Ra at Slug’s Saloon in New York, and with Charles Mingus’s band alongside his friend Pullen. “I played flute with John Coltrane’s group at the Village Gate, with McCoy Tyner, Jimmy Garrison, Pharoah Sanders, Rashied Ali, two drummers. ’Trane came on my gig, too, I must’ve impressed him, I guess.”

Of his music he wrote for the ESP sessions, he says only, “I heard things differently, I heard a lot of things and wanted to write something special.” Amazingly, he says the material for his first record was written over the course of just 5 or 6 days. A briefcase full of unrecorded compositions was consumed by fire.

“I had every kind of instrument,” Logan says.

“I messed with saxophone, trumpet, trombone, flute, bass clarinet, piano, bagpipe. It all gave me a better understanding of music. I guess maybe that’s why my wife thought I was goin’ crazy or something, had me confined to a mental institution. I was never with her much anyway, always gone. I did buy a home, a car, all that stuff, but I was never there.”

Logan is remarkably candid about the problems that derailed his career. “I’ve been in the dumps for so long. Twenty, thirty years, I was

WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #53 | 31

From left, Giuseppe Logan, Warren Smith, Matt Lavelle and Francois Grillot at the Bowery Poetry Club, February 17th, 2009

Peter Gannushkin / downtownmusic.net

wasting my life. If I’d’ve been practicing all of that time, I don’t know where I would have been now. My wife divorced me and I couldn’t live in the house that I bought anymore, so I drifted around, went homeless for a long time. Until my sister’s husband saw me on the streets and offered me a room. But my sister treated me so bad, I guess because of my personal habits.

I never hurt her or anything, but people try to take you over, try to run your life, and I ended up back in the mental institution.”

Logan is certainly not alone among creative musicians in having spent time on the streets.

Free jazz saxophonists Sonny Simmons, Sabir Mateen, and Charles Gayle all spent years without a place to call home. Logan’s labelmate, the bassist Henry Grimes, famously dropped off the scene in the late ’60s and worked odd jobs in obscurity, only to resurface in 2003 (see Marshall Marrotte’s interview in STN#28) and resume his musical career almost exactly where he’d left it.

Once discharged and with a saxophone in his hands for the first time in decades, Logan dedicated himself to practicing the instrument, and after years in the Carolinas and Virginia he made his way back to New York in early 2008.

We head a few doors south to the club and cool our heels in the cafe in front while a poetry slam occupies the performance area. As we talk, I learn that in fact this won’t be his first on-stage appearance since his return to New York. He’d played a few low-profile gigs with bassist William Parker and guitarist Bruce Edwards at the Middle Village Adult Center in Flushing, and in August, Lavelle had invited him to a run of three shows by trombonist Steve Swell’s improvising big band, the Nation of We. “He was a little shy, a little reluctant [to play],” Swell tells me later.

“The first night he turned me down, actually.

The second night he played a little bit, and I just had to coax him a little, and by the third night he finally came out with this solo, this extremely beautiful, appropriate, ballad-like statement that was the right thing at the right time. Everybody was rooting for him. You know, those guys from that generation don’t get nearly enough credit for their accomplishments. You couldn’t be timid and play that music. For what we [in the music] take for granted today, we owe people like Giuseppe a debt of gratitude.”

People begin to trickle in and it’s clear there’ll be something of an ESP-Disk reunion. Here’s the label’s crew, Stollman and members of his staff including production manager Tom Abbs and designer Fumi Tomita, carting boxes of CDs and T-shirts. They stop to let Logan know he’ll be leaving with all of the proceeds from the sale of his CDs at the merchandise table tonight.

Gunter Hampel, the German multi-instrumentalist who also made his recording debut for ESPDisk, is opening the show with a solo set and he and his son struggle down a narrow aisle with his vibraphone. Alan Sondheim, who released two albums on ESP in the late ’60s, enters and joins us at our table, presenting Logan with a case containing a flute. “Logan was one of the first people I was listening to on ESP,” he tells me.

“And it was freeing for me, because in a way it’s not jazz, it was something else. I couldn’t do that whole Coltrane thing, working through changes like that. Giuseppe’s music was different.”

Everybody wants to shake the man’s hand (perhaps to see if it’s really him?) and extend their well-wishes. Ubiquitous downtown free-jazz musicians Sabir Mateen and Roy Campbell arrive and greet the legend. Lavelle is sought out by some who furtively ask if Logan can still play the horn. “From my perspective, he’s on a higher level than anyone on the scene,” Lavelle

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

says. “Chops and power, not his bag. But I think he’s past the point where he should be judged by that. He’s got everything he needs to tell his musical story.”

The performance bears this out. The lack of group rehearsal is apparent in the somewhat ragged transitions between sections and solos, and there are moments where Logan seems a bit lost in the glare of the bright spotlight, Lavelle placing a sympathetic hand on his shoulder for support. But that's all beside the point, and there’s no denying that Logan has retained, or perhaps more accurately, regained the same plaintive wail in his playing, the sobbing human voice, that’s heard on his records. He no longer lifts his face ceiling-ward, instead remaining seated, bobbing his head only slightly as he plays. He bravely tries out his new bass clarinet, despite the antique’s imperfections and his lack of recent experience with the instrument (”It never really worked because I play so hard,” Lavelle says later, “But for G, it’s perfect ... I just knew that it was supposed to be his all along.")

But it’s with the alto that Logan really makes his statement tonight. “At the end of his alto solo, that’s when he got to the mountaintop,” remarks Lavelle after the thirty-eight minute set.

“He did supremely well, I thought,” says poet Steve Dalachinsky, a longtime free music aficionado who acted as the night’s master of ceremonies. “Let’s put it this way, he always played within this framework of waves, it’s not like he was an intense player, he had his own basic feeling and style, and I think it’s all still there.

My wife, I don’t think she’s ever even heard his records, she remarked at how beautiful and fragile his tone was. By the fourth alto piece I thought he was much more together, much less tentative. I thought the bass clarinet started shaping up [throughout the set]. There were

people in the audience, a couple of young kids right in front of me who were kind of laughing, and I can only imagine what was going on in their heads. I got very angry and wanted to say ’look, you probably read about this in Time Out New York and came down wanting to see some kind of freak show.’ But the people who genuinely knew why they were there, we all got what we wanted. I mean, I got what I expected, and I was very happy. I was extremely happy that Matt and Warren and François didn’t pamper him. They treated him with respect, and nobody stepped on him. This was a great chance for Matt to show off his chops, and he didn’t do that. He was beyond respectful.”

The club stays abuzz long past the point at which its employees have lost their patience.

Logan is seated onstage with the lights dimmed, his head down and with headphones pressed to his ears, reliving the set via the video recording made by Antonio Ferrera. Ferrera is an accomplished filmmaker whose credits include an HBO special on Christo and Jean-Claude’s Central Park installation The Gates, a concert film by John Zorn’s Masada and a segment for Bill Moyers’ NOW entitled Before I Leave, about what ordinary people would want their loved ones to know before they die.

“I live near Tompkins Square Park,” Ferrera recounts, with Logan still absorbed in the recording, mere inches away. “One particular spring day, hydrants were running and kids were playing, and in the background here was someone huffing these broken-down notes on a brokendown clarinet, which was somewhat harsh on the ears but very beautiful at the same time. And just filming around, I came to meet the person playing the clarinet, and it was Giuseppe. He told me his story, which was incredible, and that his dream was after thirty years to be back on the top of the jazz scene. And over the course of the summer I was inspired by his discipline, dedication and stick-to-it-iveness, never giving up, which to me in my own life as a young artist, you know, you get pushed down a lot, so it was incredible to see him constantly with this positive attitude. It’s an incredible triumph of the spirit that I was fortunate to bear witness to.”

“It was beautiful,” he continues. “If you had told me in May or June of last year that we’d be here tonight, I’d never have believed it. Forget about the music, just the will and belief of this man. It’s a gift to have been able to witness that in a time when people don’t see their dreams come true. Here he was on this park bench, his family had put him into a nut house for twenty years, and at seventy-five he’s thinking he can come back. And he has!”

Logan, Lavelle, Mateen, Ferrera and I are the last to leave the club, still standing on the curb out front in the chill night air at two thirty. Logan seems not to have a plan about how to get back to Kingsbridge. “I’ll just hang around, find someplace to sleep,” he tells us. It couldn’t be any warmer than 25 degrees, with the threat of snow. We hail a taxi and I give him money for cab fare. I ask him what he’s doing tomorrow and he tells me to look for him at the 34th Street subway stop.

At ten o’clock the next morning, I arrive at the 34th Street - Herald Square station. It’s a vast expanse of interconnected platforms and tunnelways, the third busiest in the city. At first there’s no sign of the man and I wonder if I’ll see him again. Then, as I head down the ramp towards the stop’s lower level, I hear the unmistakable woody warble of a bass clarinet. It’s Giuseppe.

He doesn’t notice me as I approach and I listen in silence for a few minutes as he works the horn. Eventually he looks up, greets me and we compare notes on the previous night’s concert.

He’s wearing the same clothes and tells me he hasn’t slept. Still, he seems to be in great spirits and very happy about the previous night’s gig.

“I enjoyed it, but I don’t know if I played good enough, I wish I could’ve played better,” he says.

“Well, that’s why I’m out here practicing, anyway.

I’m trying to get better every day. I don’t have anything else to do, I don’t have any money, but I can play, I can do that!”

Sitting together on the subway platform, we talk and he plays as the trains roll in and out.

Asking about musical influences from his youth, I mention Ray Charles’s name, and Logan stares ahead in a moment of concentration before offering me a lovely, cubist rendition of “Georgia On My Mind.”

“Hey, someone just put a dollar in my case, you see that?” he says, sounding surprised to have been noticed at all. After some time, Logan packs up his horn and he invites me to come along as he picks up a check at the Musician’s Union headquarters on 48th Street, payment for the gigs at the Adult Center with Parker and Edwards. “Yeah, I need this!” he tells the receptionist as he signs the log book and accepts his envelope. Around the corner we find an Indian buffet and duck in for lunch.

There was some discussion the previous night about some recording oppotunities. Something new for ESP, perhaps, or for a label based in Dallas that contacted Lavelle and expressed interest in Logan. “Well, first I gotta get me a room so I can sit down and be by myself and write some music,” he says. “I’ve got some new theoretical approaches in the back of my mind, but for me, I want something outlandish, something different.” Instrumentation? “I want piano, two basses, two drummers, trumpet player and saxophone player. That’d be good, to have two basslines in there.”

In the meatime, more gigs. Lavelle has already fielded offers for a March 21st date at New York City’s Brecht Forum, and an April 6th performance at a yet-to-be-determined venue for a Vision Festival-sponsored series. It appears that Logan’s in demand and truly back in action. I’m headed back to my hotel to get ready for my flight home, and Logan’s off to the Jazz Foundation, a musician’s advocacy organization where he’s able to use a practice booth. We walk back to the station, through an accelerated cityscape of flashing fiber-optic video screens, citizenry talking on cellphones as they scurry down the sidewalk and tourists with digital cameras on every street corner. I ask Logan, “it’s a pretty different kind of place now since the last time you were in New York, huh? Could you ever have imagined anything like this?”

“No, I certainly didn’t,” he says. “I never expected to see anything like this.”

Back in front of my computer the next day, I look again at the short film from 1966. “I think the main part of music is beauty,” Logan remarks. “I imagine when you search for beauty and peace and love and happiness, brotherhood, it has to be done in a very simple way, to get closer to your creator, because that instills in the individual a love for everything in God’s heart.” ✹ Pete Gershon is the publisher of Signal to Noise. Special thanks to Ed Hazell, Zaeza Wolk and especially Matt Lavelle who were instrumental in the preparation of this story.

WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #53 | 33

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

WHEN DID THE BLUES LEAVE?

W

B

A brief and uncomfortable encounter last fall with trumpeter Wynton Marsalis left Allen Lowe dazed and confused and asking the musical question: What is the Blues? And When Did It Leave?

Illustration by Lou Beach.

So, what are you doing now?

Writing another book. On the blues. But where to start? Well, let’s look backwards. Some years back, in response to an article in the NY Times, I sent the following letter (which they actually published): “LOUIS ARMSTRONG: Against the Ideologues” (this was the Times-given headline) “To the Editor: “While I am second to none in my admiration for Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, I am becoming increasingly weary of Wynton Marsalis and Stanley Crouch’s politicization of the blues. In their hands (as with their fellow Lincoln Center advisor Albert Murray) the blues has become something of an ideology, a club with which to beat all who do not share their aesthetic leanings. Last year, Mr. Marsalis told us what a blues-dependent art Ellington’s was [‘Ellington at 100: Reveling in Life’s Majesty,’ Jan. 17, 1999], when in truth Duke used the blues so effectively because he was not dependent on them, but rather came to them, in terms of class and background, as something of an outsider. Now Stanley Crouch comes

to tell us that Armstrong ‘figured out how to articulate the sound of the blues through Tin Pan Alley tunes without abandoning their harmonic underpinnings,’ and quotes Mr. Marsalis as saying that ‘not even Art Tatum, Charlie Parker, Monk and Coltrane did anything that sophisticated’ [‘Wherever He Went, Joy Was Sure to Follow,’ March 12]. Once again, this is a case of fitting facts to ideology. Armstrong was truly a great blues player, but what he did most effectively was to expand the expressive possibilities of jazz in a way that made the blues only one element of many, in a manner that actually reduced their relative importance. Certainly Armstrong continued to play with the kind of tonal and rhythmic nuances that reflected the powerful dominance of the African-American performance tradition, but these were not necessarily related strictly to the blues. They reflected the larger picture of African-American performance styles. And Monk, Coltrane and, indeed, Charlie Parker devised musical systems that were every bit as sophisticated as Armstrong’s.”

1999? If you cared so much, what took you so long to write a book about the blues?

I did write a book, some time ago (American Pop from Minstrel to Mojo) that talked about the blues a great deal. Writing that book changed my life, if almost by accident. Though I did have a strong sense of where I was going from the start, American Pop represented a constant discovery, or, really, re-discovery, of American music. For a long time I had listened, on my own time, to nothing but jazz. Slowly, however, and for various reasons—happy accident, boredom, curiosity—I found myself going back to music for which I had once held a greater affinity. Some of this was sort-of-theblues—because rock and rollers playing blues was a different but very interesting animal— and I’d been a big fan of Mike Bloomfield, Super Session, the Butterfield Band, and Eric Burdon and the Animals in the 1960s. But my new listening turned into much more than that.

But let me go back even further in order to explain.

Around 1973 while I was attending the State University of New York at Binghamton I heard an Appalachian-style folk festival. It was like a folkie smorgasbord—country singers, blues singers, songsters, just plain folk. It was

WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #53 | 35

Isn’t that the point? For the oppressed group to take the tools of its own oppression and use them to their own personal and constructive ends, to further take the means of oppression and turn it into a force for liberation?

organized by a campus concert group called Straight Country and Blues. What struck me at the time was how “real” these people (the performers) were. For example, though it may sound a little silly, I particularly noticed how one guy, a guitarist/singer who sang with a soulful country tenor voice, wore clothes like my father.

Now, my father was a bit of a sartorial slob, and that means that this gentleman’s clothes were plain and a little bit shabby. So he reminded me of my father (not necessarily a good thing) but he sang like an artist (dare I use that word?).

But he was an artist of a much different stripe from that which we usually associate with the term. His songs were plain (there is that word again) yet poetic, his self-accompaniment on guitar “ordinary” but perfect. The festival performers (which included the great Libby Cotton) were almost all like that. Just plain folk (maybe it’s a Southern thing, as I remember once hearing the billionaire H.L. Hunt, in a televised profile, singing a song that went, “We’re just plain folk”). I don’t mean this, however, in that old, vulgar, popular-front-people’s-artsocial-realist way—though these performers would have been the apple of any old Socialist’s (and Stalinist’s) eye. No, these were just plain folk poets, the language of their songs sharply imagistic but completely straightforward, yet never stiflingly or photographically “realistic.” Like some of the blues I had listened to (and like some of the poetry I would later read, by Bertholt Brecht and Samuel Beckett, and like the plays I would read by Brecht and Georg Büchner and Harold Pinter and prose

by Isaac Babel and Peter Handke and Isaac Rosenfeld), it was a poetry built on the sharpest of observations, though those observations were rarely made in any kind of simple and merely representational or documentary style.

This kind of realism was deceptive, because it was, as in certain kinds of painting, selectively representational, isolating those elements of socalled reality (or, really, consciousness, as Handke would say) that, though sometimes appearing in free association, gave MUCH more accurate representations of “reality” than a hundred books transcribed by kitchen-sink realists (as they used to be called), in which the writer did nothing but point out the obvious and socially “meaningful.” To recognize this is to recognize that, for example, a Norman Rockwell painting is less “realistic,” in any deep sense, than a Van Gogh painting. The Rockwell painting is just there, a sentimental lump on the canvas.

The Van Gogh painting, on the other hand, seems to rise up off the canvas, with the kind of multi-level consciousness that most of humanity experiences as reality: part hallucination and part mathematically precise reality; the precision of day-to-day life as blurred by sometimes violentlyconflicting inner and private visions; a confused amalgam of dream-world and the irrational associations of memory and impulse. Kind of like in a Nathaniel Hawthorne novel.

Is that your inner life?

Yes, and I think it’s everyone’s inner life. To wit: about a year ago I was certain, in a completely irrational way, that my mother was still alive. At about the same time that I had been having very vivid dreams in which I spoke to her as though nothing had changed in our longseparated lives (she died in 1988), I found a woman with the same name and exact same (and somewhat uncommon) profession listed on the internet. For a moment (actually longer) I was completely thrown by this. Had she rejected me and gone into hiding? Where was she? Was I asleep? What did this other woman look like? I knew this was irrational, but I’ve always thought that by refusing to observe her dead body at the pre-funeral “viewing” back in 1988 I was allowing the possibility that she might still return. So I am rational and irrational at the same time. This does not make sense, yet it does. The dream blurs with the reality, yet sometimes the reality has never really occurred.

I want the reality that I prefer, but I accept the reality that I have.

So what’s this all got to do with a few Appalachian singers?

Everything. These singers, in ways which I apparently suppressed internally for another 25 or so years, were, in their apparent and detached innocence, like spiritualists at a séance. The things which came out of their mouths, the disembodied poetry that was both personal and “lived,” yet at the same time somehow detached from the singer’s expressive reality, were plainly representative of the “new consciousness” (meaning that of the post-“new novel” as represented by certain European novelists), even if it was now appearing in archaic disguise. I was not able to articulate this at the time (I was only 19 years old) but these performers were true (if maybe unknowing) carriers of what I would call the modernist ethos.

A few years later, in trying to express my frustration with cliché-ridden contemporary short story writers and novelists, I came up with a concept I called “the impersonal I.” This was how I saw not only the technique of great past novelists but also how I saw the future of literature. The “I” in a work of fiction, in order for the writer to avoid cliché and the tired schematics of “modern” psychology, had to be thought of, I believed then (as I do now), as being in the third person. Writing about yourself? Use the first person, fine, but write about the first person as though you are really writing in the third person. This is the only way to detach yourself in such a way as to see the greater and deeper reality. I was, of course, far from the first to conceptualize this idea: Büchner did this, Brecht did this, even Camus did it. Handke did it. Babel did it. And these were (or were to become) my literary idols and models. And I was gratified recently to read that Rimbaud espoused basically the same idea (the impersonal “I”) over a hundred years ago. So maybe I was on to something. But enough of this literary talk, as, though I once thought otherwise, in

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

this area I am a completely failed writer on all accounts.

So what happened after you saw all these jus’ plain mountain folk?

Nothing. Or very little. Or disappointment, the same kind as that which followed my seeing Muddy Waters in 1969 at the Newport Folk Festival. In person this music was astoundingly tactile. Witnessing Waters in performance was, to resort to the kind of received comparisons that I do not like to use generally, like visiting the Grand Canyon or some other such natural wonder. His very presence was a revelation, akin, perhaps (though I cannot say precisely because I’ve never really had one) to a religious experience—and by the way, I felt the same way when I saw Buddy Guy in Central Park in New York City in 1969 and John Lee Hooker at a small club in Cambridge, Massachusetts around 1975 (not to mention the Grateful Dead in Central Park in 1967). In all of these cases, after hearing the real thing from a close distance I went and chased the recordings. But these were talents that, somehow, could not really be captured, in essence, in a recording studio. And even though they were still accessible in public performance, my interest in them as musicians wandered, especially as I got deeper and deeper into jazz.

It’s not that I did not still try to listen to records, it is just that the medium did not work well for me with certain kinds of music. On, for example, certain Folkways recordings of mountain singers there was always, to my ears, too great a distance from the singer to the record.

There was something about these kinds of performers that was harder than even jazz to capture on disc, an essence that disappeared in the mediated form of recording technology.

Of course, as just about everyone knows, “live” music is nearly always better than recorded music (though I am not counting stadium concerts here). But something about the (relatively) primitive older recording technology of the 1920s, 1930s, 1940s and 1950s still gives us a more accurate portrayal, I believe, of how this music sounded, at least as I remember my own experiences. Muddy Waters singing “I Can’t Be Satisfied” in 1947, John Lee Hooker recording in the back of a store around the same time, Charlie Poole on 78 from the 1920s—all sound closer to what I heard on those few in-person occasions when I had this music right in front of me than any contemporary recording by those same players. And this is not just a romantic pandering to the idea of the “good old days” and the sonically debilitating scratches on those old 78s. It is a recognition of the emergence, many years ago, of a new kind of American musical consciousness. It is an understanding that old American music is expressive just because it combines those very elements—beauty and coarseness, direct experience and imagination, image and grunting reality, vulgarity and delicacy—which place it in the realm of high art (while we’re at this, think

also of Jean Genet).

Is there a solution to this problem? Of hearing yet not having— I’m not really looking for a solution. I am just looking for a way to resolve certain dilemmas that exist mostly in my head.

Such as?

Well...I recently did a videotaped interview with a famous jazz musician for a film I am trying to make. The film itself is somewhat free-form, as a matter of fact my ideas for it change daily— no, hourly. Or sometimes as I film. But, anyway, as I conducted the interview I realized that, for the subject being interviewed, the responses given were the equivalent to stump speeches for politicians. There are certain things that people like this want or need to say, that they feel their audiences have come to expect of them. It is also very difficult for them to retain fresh viewpoints when they are so constantly exposed to the same questions over and over again. Given the level of interview-fatigue they seem to feel, they cannot even remain fresh when exposed to DIFFERENT questions. After a while it’s just a matter of more questions, more questions, more questions. They are tired. They are bored. It is not their fault, and someone like me, to whom the world is basically indifferent, cannot even begin to imagine what it must be like to face such constant scrutiny, and in a way that is not particularly challenging or interesting. Day in, day out.

So you gave up?

Almost. As we talked and I began to realize that, cordial as he was, I was not really getting anywhere inside of his mindset, I began, in my head, to search desperately for some topic that might open him up, might trigger some kind of association that would take the conversation away from the intellectual equivalent of a discussion of the weather.

Any luck?

Sort of. Now, in retrospect, I worry a little bit about what I asked him. My wife thinks it was insensitive, on a subject that might be predictably sensitive for an African American (which he is). I simply like to believe that I was just trying to find a subject upon which I had not heard him expound previously. I think I am being honest with myself in saying this, but wonder if maybe the negativity of his response was predictable. But really, I did not see it coming. It was predictable, I think now, though it wasn’t, if you know what I mean.

I don’t.

Well, sometimes we (or maybe, just me) think that, in asking a difficult question, we are challenging the person who is being asked, but for their own good—meaning, for the purpose of taking them out of some self-constructed shell, a reality that has been constructed for the purpose of, perhaps, public image, or selfpreservation (as in, how can I get through these damned interviews which all seem the same— like the politicians I just mentioned, who work to sound fresh as they repeat the same speech they’ve made so many times before. Or the actor who is playing to his tenth or eleventh audience of the week). It is a little bit different in this case because the famous musician sees interviews, after a while, as mere promotional inserts, and if they all sound the same on paper, it matters little as long as they get out there into the wide world to be seen by people who maybe have not seen them before.

What was the subject that was so provocative?

Minstrelsy—

Oh...big surprise that a black person would be sensitive about THAT— Wait a minute, because that’s not the whole story. Aside from the fact that I feel that I presented the subject in an empathetic and understanding way, the whole question as I posed it was completely appropriate, only mildly challenging, and built on certain assumptions of mutual agreement that I felt completely justified in making.

Such as?

Well, I had just read a book in which this person had compared contemporary rap and hip hop to minstrelsy. So I said to him, isn’t that the point? For the oppressed group to take the tools of its own oppression and use those tools to their own personal and constructive ends, to further take the means of oppression and turn it into a force for liberation? I was thinking particularly, but not solely, of Louis Armstrong and Fats Waller, and, when he disagreed with the general thrust of my argument, I mentioned black minstrelsy and medicine shows as two closely-related forms. Well, this did not get a good response. He told me that all forms of minstrelsy, medicine show or not, were nothing but examples of racial degradation. And I said that though I agreed that there were compromises involved, these forms and formats were still forces of liberation and of revolutionary changes in American music. Still, he firmly and testily dismissed it all as racially degrading— and than he wounded me with a comment that hit me like a slap in the face. As though someone had briefed him before I came into the room, had said to him, “Listen, if this guy gets difficult, maybe too aggressive and too close, there’s one quick and easy way to push him back, to throw him off his game, to get a stick into his eye, to blind him temporarily.”

Wow. Sounds like Extreme Fighting, or maybe professional wrestling. What did he do? Did you have to call security? Did you file a formal complaint? Did you fear for your own physical safety? What did he say?

He basically called me an academic— Oh...

Yes, I know, it was a low blow, a kick to the gut, a knife to the groin, an elbow to the eye.

I was temporarily blinded, like Cassius Clay in that fight with Sonny Liston when some kind of ointment got from Liston’s gloves and into Clay’s eyes.

But Clay won that fight— And who says I didn’t win this one? Well, maybe it was a draw. I calmed down and tried to make a few points but each time I was met with the charge that it was all racial degradation, with the addendum that I was looking at all this in a detached, ACADEMIC way. With the additional addendum that I was some kind of musical dilettante, that I had never done or seen or known anyone. Adding insult to my initial injury.

But I thought I was right and I still think so.

Let me make this point in a more roundabout way: This particular musician has made a particular ideology of the blues. He has asserted that it is not just an important element of jazz playing but an essential element, without which, basically, there is no jazz. In my own thinking about just this particular issue, I have come, almost but not quite, full circle. Whereas I once rejected his point of view entirely wholesale—I believed that, first of all, it made a bit of a fetish out of the blues, second of all, that it ignored other and persistent forms of African American music, and that, anyway, there was much great WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #53 | 37

jazz or improvised music in which it barely existed, or not at all—I have come, through my own playing, to value the blues more than ever. I started playing the guitar a few years ago, and in my own playing, which seeks to fuse old American musical forms like hillbilly/ country/blues with free improvisation, I see the blues as either a central element or as constant punctuation within my own playing. The blues in my own music is a point of reference, it is a jumping-off point, or it is a formal organizational element. HOWEVER— However?

Yes, however—I believe many jazz advocates of the blues haven’t a clue as to its essence and play, I hesitate to say, the race card, as though THE BLUES is a genetic birthright. Though I don’t believe they are necessarily conscious of doing this. More importantly, I don’t think they have a true blues consciousness, though they would be highly offended if they heard me say this or if they read me saying this.

What is blues consciousness?

Let me answer the question from a distance. I believe the blues is essentially a vertical music, and that most contemporary jazz advocates of the blues are horizontal performers and improvisers.

Explain.

The typical post-bebop improviser thinks and plays in terms of melodic exposition—of a melody spontaneously composed in linear— or horizontal—fashion. This is how the great majority of jazz performers improvise, and it is, at its best, an astonishingly fertile means of invention. Brilliant improvisers have played, using this method, solos of great and lasting musical importance. But the blues, on the other hand...

I find the deepest blues performances (with some real and significant exceptions) to be essentially vertical musical expressions—quick and motivic, notes and phrases played with an aesthetic of repetition, with the kind of invention that is more in the moment, that is of the bar-line, a stationary statement that does not necessarily progress in a forward motion, or in linear musical time. It is like stranding up straight and bouncing a ball. Some blues players are more stationary than others; think of the difference between Charlie Patton’s self accompaniments and, say, T-Bone Walker’s. Walker is more jazz-influenced and has something much more linear going on, but I believe retains his verticalness through the use of a more narrow scalar and harmonic palette than that of the typical jazz player. Now, jazz and other performance styles have come a long way, supposedly, since the early 1920s documentation of blues instrumental styles. And there are great horizontal, linear blues improvisers—Charlie Parker and Jack Teagarden, to name two good examples. But apart from the fact that both Parker and Teagarden use many “vertical” elements like sonic punctuation and repeated notes in their playing, they are the exceptions to the rule. I simply find that most jazz players, using the linear, horizontal method, have lost touch with the sonic and melodic essences of the blues. They can certainly do great blues things by horizontal means if they try, but in order to do this, I believe, they need to find the verticalness within themselves.

So it’s not a matter of either/or...

Think of the late trombonist Dicky Wells, one of the first great retro-modernists who still, in the 1970s, was pulling, out of the bell of his trombone, old blue-isms probably learned on the streets of whatever place in Kentucky that he grew up. I know this because one day I was lis-

tening to a recording by the 1920s black fiddler Eddie Anthony, and he played this amazingly atonal phrase, in which he slid his finger up a fiddle string into the equivalent of the altissimo register with a sustained and beautiful screech like a field or street cry—well, 50 years later I was sitting in the audience of the West End Cafe, a jazz club in New York City, and I heard Dicky Wells play almost the identical phrase— So it’s not a matter of either/or.

Absolutely not. Though, once again, I believe the blues is, in its essence, a vertical form, it can coexist very well with horizontal approaches.

Look, there are almost as many styles of blues playing as there are players, and some of those players, as in the field of jazz, are brilliant players. For some—maybe most—of them, the blues is simply another set of chord changes.

But for a select few, it is a unique form and feeling, a way of being at a particular musical moment. Think, for another example, of the great early jazz clarinetist Frank Teschemacher.

His playing contained a near-perfect combination of vertical and horizontal elements and was a positive influence on the early playing of Benny Goodman, among others.

But, once again, I believe the essence of the blues is a vertical approach which, with certain important players, interacts with horizontal musical impulses.

Now, your definition, in this case, does not appear to coincide with established “jazz” definitions of the idea of horizontal versus vertical aspects of performance. Can you explain?

Possibly—jazz people like George Russell and even Martin Williams have described “chordal” improvisers like Coleman Hawkins as being vertical players. This is because they see the chord as a vertical, upright structure through which improvisers like Hawkins play. Hawkins, in this view of things, picks through the appropriate intervals of those chords, plays up (and down) these intervals, and is thus a vertical player. This is as opposed to Lester Young, who picks his intervals with greater amounts of musical and rhythmic space and parses them out in a more linear, “horizontal” way, sort of like a long-distance musical runner (I am accepting Hawkins as the sprinter in this strained metaphor). With my blues theories I am approaching this whole idea quite differently, as I mentioned before. I see verticalness as representing a kind of harmonic and melodic stasis, as though the player is just standing in one place and not moving forward in the conventional way, is instead moving with relatively little physical (psychological?) progress within that relatively narrow (but deep) space, creating in the process an alternate reality. It is something of a modernist conundrum, a way of rejecting conventional notions of continuity and “story” (and jazz people are very big on telling a story).

Yes, the blues guy will often tell some kind of story, but it is one whose stanzas (chapters) are connected only in the vaguest thematic way.

Much of the blues is a narrative without narrative, containing small and “true” episodes, little vertical unconnected stories as opposed to the nice and tidy well-made story with a clearly identifiable beginning, middle and end.

So great blues players are natural modernists.

Beyond this, my theory of the vertical versus the horizontal is not meant as an argument with Russell or Williams or as a true alternative to their theories. It is completely independent of their ideas on harmony and melody. Basically I see linear development as horizontal, cellular

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

development as vertical. It is like Peter Handke, the Austrian writer, pointed out—all the stories have been told, so contemporary art must instead strive to portray states of consciousness. The vertical artist and in particular the vertical musician realizes this, if sometimes only instinctively. This artist has nothing, as Beckett once pointed out, to say, only a way of saying it. To me that is a modernist credo.

So what does all of this have to do with minstrelsy?

The same ideological blinders that result in the blues-as-ideological-construct, the resultant fetishization and thus paradoxical and ironic obscuring of a form—the blues—which is not only so concretely functional but so essential to much of American music and American life, repeats itself in this knee-jerk reaction to minstrelsy. Because minstrelsy, in its interaction with commercial and non-commercial sources, its weird but effective hybridization of populist and elitist attitudes (think of the cakewalk), is a form which, in its contradictory embrace of both vulgarity and refinement, deep artistry and off-handed invention, racialism and broad tolerance of difference, is classically and essentially American. As Casey Stengel once said, if about something else, “you could look it up.”

Where?

Well, for one, in Doug Seroff and Lynn Abbott’s amazing book, Ragged But Right, a chronicle of early 20th-century black music as seen through the eyes of early 20th-century black musicians, newspapers, and interested observers, which tells us, quite plainly, that the minstrel/medicine-show form evolved into something quite different from its racist and degrading heritage. It became, as they document with overwhelming detail, the vehicle through which black performers infiltrated all of American life, through which black performers changed our entire history (because, for example, what is Barack Obama’s success but the ultimate legacy of African American culture’s dominance of America’s conscious and subconscious life?). Seroff and Abbott conclusively demonstrate that the minstrel form became a tool of liberation, and that in black hands it was anything but degrading. This is not to say that certain remnants of the old racist South did not filter through—blackface, for one thing—or that black performers did not, off the stage, suffer the vicious side effects of racism, only that the whole picture, when it comes to minstrelsy, is much broader and deeper and MORE INTERESTING than the glib characterization of the whole thing as evil and racist. Yes, to cite W.C. Fields’ observation, Bert Williams was the funniest yet saddest man he ever saw; and the anchor of racism undoubtedly weighed him down. But simply to call the form in which he worked degrading is to degrade and ignore his own humanity and to write off the personal heroism of not only Williams but an entire generation of performers who, after all, were navigating without benefit of a political compass, without the benefit of the kind of hindsight that allows us to dismiss latterday advocates of their music and lifestyles as detached, delusional academics. ✹ Allen Lowe is a musician and historian in Southern Maine who can be found on the web at www.allenlowe.com. This is the first chapter from his work in progress, "Massa Jesus, Can You Hear the Darkies Sing? (Can You Blame the Colored Man?) or: When Did the Blues Leave?”

WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #53 | 39

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

Big Ears 09 Various Venues, Knoxville, TN 2/6-8/2009

Just before noon on a balmy Saturday morning, Central Street—an appropriately named locus of nighttime revelry for University of Tennessee students in Knoxville—stands mostly silent. The occasional car comes by slowly, and a small video crew rolls tape a few blocks up. But a warm drone floats just above the steady breeze, glowing overtones leaking, it seems, from the side streets that empty like rivulets onto Central. Seeking the source of the sound leads to Old City Java, a two-room coffee shop with weak espresso and strong cupcakes. Their backs to the windows overlooking the streets, three musicians play gentle notes on guitars fed through pedals and knobs and into small amplifiers that flank their ensemble. The hum drifts through the room, floating beneath and around the steamer’s whir and above the shuffling feet of those who amble in and out of the space.

These musicians—Bob Deck, John Baker, Todd Steed—come from Knoxville and today call themselves Ampient Café. On this otherwise still morning, they’re a reflection of a weekend of creativity- and communitybased symbiosis that swept through Knoxville via Big Ears, a three-day experimental music festival that challenged concepts of free speech and gender identity, boundaries between pop music and experimental avenues, and the relationship between the artist and the performer.

Big Ears built itself around the taunting question, “Do you have big ears?” As such, a surprising array of performers— to name about half, New York’s Antony Hegarty, Philip Glass and Ned Rothenberg; Memphis native Jon Hassell; the Midwest’s David Daniell, Burning Star Core and Nicolas Collins; Australia’s The Necks and Austria’s Christian Fennesz—shared stages, hotels and audiences. Intriguing collaborations happened: Rothenberg fluttered and sighed with his reeds above a Sunday

afternoon set from The Necks, and Daniell and Fennesz drifted into a sonic blur with drummer Tony Buck. Unlikely enclaves of listeners mixed on the small Southern city’s streets, and college students heading to the bar for the night saw Matmos build music by blowing bubbles.

The expanding ears fostered de facto communities: Michael Gira passed a bottle of George Dickel No. 12 whiskey around the auditorium Sunday night and lauded The Necks’ triumphant performance in the same space the night before. Though Gira’s reputation as a curmudgeon (somewhat unfairly) precedes him, he sat onstage during the domestic premiere of the collaboration between Sparklehorse and Fennesz, playing a keyboard, smiling beneath his white cowboy hat and drinking a beer.

The day before, C. Spencer Yeh and Mark Linkous sat side-by-side, silent and attentive during Antony’s performance, while Nicolas Collins flitted about the room and between speakers as Pauline Oliveros fed her accordion manipulations into a circle of eight speakers. In turn, she watched Negativland’s deconstruction of religion and its dangers on a Sunday afternoon, and they high-fived audience members during intermission.

When Matmos’ set had to be moved because of one venue owner’s qualms with a planned projection of male nudity, the new Baltimore residents simply let its set bleed into Dan Deacon’s Round Robin of Baltimore acts. Boundaries felt blurred.

Relationships felt real.

Sense of community aside, the performances were, by and large, worth the price of admission (348 festival passes sold for $100 and $195 each, but tickets to individual shows were also popular) or the expense of traveling to Knoxville. With several of his Études and “Opening” from Glassworks, Glass mostly mesmerized Saturday afternoon behind the piano. Wendy Sutter’s visceral cello mastery captivated as well, her fluid phrases punctuated by heaves and strikes against the 400-year-old instrument’s neck. Gira was powerful and deliberate in solo form, conjuring the darkness of Swans’ “Failure” and the faulted humanity of several unrecorded songs even as he told jokes. San Agustin floated

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

guitar luminescence above waves of circular drums, and Antony gave renewed bravado to the delicate songs from his third album, the excellent The Crying Light.

“We don’t have anything like this in New York,” he said during his Saturday night set. The audience laughed, assuming that he was kidding, that New York fostered stuff like this all of the time. And, one supposes, it does, but it’s spread too thin in such a big city to feel centered. Big Ears worked because it sequestered the music from cultural centers like New York or Chicago or Paris, allowing for senses of place, commonality and kinship.

“Several people who attended the festival have described it as a vacation, and that’s one way of putting what we were hoping to create,” said Ashley Capps at festival’s end. “It’s a getaway to have this common experience. It doesn’t need to be Knoxville, but being away was a big part of it.”

Capps is a longtime Knoxville resident who’s booked in the town and across the country for decades. He formerly ran a Knoxville rock club, but he gave that up to focus on his booking-and-promotions firm, AC Entertainment, and the other major rock festivals he books, the nearby Bonnaroo and Las Vegas’ Vegoose. Just as those events were meant to reflect major European rock gatherings like Roskilde or Glastonbury, Capps hoped Big Ears would mirror smaller European events centered around experimental music.

“There’s some fabulous music that deserves better exposure and a higher level of awareness in the United States,” said Capps, who speaks of seeing Matmos in Spain and making his first phone call to The Necks when he decided to do the festival. Despite lower-than-expected attendance numbers, he plans to host the festival in Knoxville again, possibly even later this year. “You see it presented more frequently in Europe. As a fan, I see myself looking at festivals in Europe similar to Big Ears and wondering, ‘Why not here?’”

Given the weekend’s artistic and personal successes, and the gumption of a big-time promoter willing to try something different, there seems to be no reason at all.

Grayson Currin

Robert Loerzel

Top: Pauline Oliveros Bottom left: Negativland Bottom right: San Augustin

WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #53 | 41

Evan Parker (second from left) with David Prentice, Pamela Attariwala and Matt Brubeck in Toronto

AIMToronto Interface series with Evan Parker

Marek Lazarski / cooljazzphotos.com

Somewhere There, Toronto, Canada 2/13-15/2009

Let’s cut to the chase: the Interface Series with Evan Parker was a great success, and another entry in an ever-growing list of improvised meetings between guest musicians and some of Toronto’s finest.

Coordinated by the Association of Improvising Musicians (AIM Toronto), and programmed with imagination and insight by guitarist Nilan Perera, the three-day series confirmed—with only a few minor caveats—the validity and productiveness of the approach. The seven sets heard over the weekend featured Parker, on tenor and soprano saxophones, in a variety of improvising contexts: a quartet of brass players; electronics and percussion; a string quartet; trios of saxophones and voices; bass and drums; and a closing, additional set that featured shô (a traditional Japanese mouth organ) and electric guitar. The series

took place in a buzzingly busy Somewhere There, the Parkdale venue opened by local musician Scott Thomson a year and a half ago, and now one of the most active improvised music spaces in Toronto (and, indeed, in Canada). The hushed ambience and dry acoustic of the space offered an ideal context in which to engage with some fine music-making.

The challenge of the Interface format, in common with the Company projects of the late guitarist Derek Bailey, is for improvising musicians to make meaningful music—or, at least, music with some degree of meaning—on first meeting. In sharp contrast to some of the saxophonist’s long-standing collaborations with fellow ‘first generation’ European improvisers such as Barry Guy, Paul Lytton, and Alexander von Schlippenbach, Parker had neither met nor previously played with the majority of the musicians he encountered over the three days, and the results were as rewarding, frustrating, and, yes, meaningful as the format tends to suggest. A common approach in such contexts is for musicians to be overly deferential, lending the music a tentativeness that can stand in the way of a more balanced interaction. Alternatively, and often highly revealing of the individual personalities involved, the tendency is to overplay, filling

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

the aural space in a manner that can have an equally adverse effect on the possibilities for productive dialogue. The musical ideal, of course, lies somewhere in the middle, and although the weekend had its fair share of both acquiescence and bluster, there were enough moments of startling beauty and genuine excitement to offset those water-treading passages that required considerable reserves of patience on the part of both listeners and performers.

The opening set with the brass quartet highlighted Parker’s roles as both guest and Elder Statesman—roles that he filled in an admirably modest and generous fashion, nudging, pushing and cajoling his initially somewhat hesitant partners into some fertile exchanges, with the flugelhorn of Jim Lewis offering the most thoughtful responses to Parker’s flurries. The trio with electronics and percussion was dominated by the contrast between John Kamevaar’s drum pad triggered effects and his often wayward live electronics, the latter vacillating intriguingly between the sound of surprise and the threat of incoherence. But the set also offered a fine example of the sheer power of Parker’s improvising skills, as he took centre stage for the first time that evening, with a muscular passage of circular breathing on tenor that lifted the bandstand.

The first set on Saturday evening provided one of the highlights of the weekend, with Parker in the company of four string players, in a ‘standard’ quartet format: two violins, viola and cello. The string context is one that Parker knows well, having recorded his Strings With Evan Parker project for Emanem, and worked extensively with the violinist Phillip Wachsmann. The comfort level was evident immediately, and the three improvised pieces were thoroughly engaging and consistently rewarding. The string players’ free movement between arco and pizzicato lines dovetailed seamlessly with the saxophonist’s alteration between long tones and reed-slapping pops, creating a rich musical texture.

Although it is something of a cliché to observe that an improvised piece was so coherent that it “might have been written” —the implied hierarchical inferiority of improvisation representing a form of rhetoric that irritates Parker no end—one needn’t subscribe to such spurious arguments in noting that these three pieces possessed elements of structure and form that were all the more remarkable for the very fact of their having been improvised in real time by a group of relative strangers. And it’s in moments like these that the richness of free improvisation as a now well-established musical form is most clearly evident.

Indeed, such moments convincingly put the lie to Derek Bailey’s oft-quoted line that free improvisation represents a “non-idiomatic” form of musical practice (a perspective that, in conversation earlier in the day, Parker had characterized as “preposterous”). On the contrary, it is specifically the form’s idiomatic elements that engender and enable the sophisticated musical communication witnessed on Saturday evening.

Against the constantly chattering backdrop of David Prentice’s violin scrabblings, the other players made their own individual contributions, but always with the bigger musical picture in mind. Parmela Attariwala’s thoughtful viola interventions were paralleled by Monica Westerholm’s initially reserved violin statements, which grew in confidence and significance as the evening progressed. Matt Brubeck’s cello anchored the three pieces in a constantly imaginative manner, not shying away from recourse to tonal and metrical elements, thereby offering passages of welcome release from the textural tension. His prepared cello introduction to the second piece of the evening opened up a sound world that would have otherwise been unavailable, and introduced a degree of musical contrast that was perhaps missing in some of the other sets heard over the course of the weekend. One particular moment in this set, a swelling crescendo with Westerholm’s singing melodic lines soaring above the dense musical textures, was alone worth the price of admission.

In an exchange that left few complaining, the saxophone quartet that followed replaced the subtle interaction of the string group with squalling enthusiasm. This was one for the boys—four good-natured blokes having a good, old-fashioned blow (the “real thing,” as Attariwala noted drolly in her introduction). Richard Underhill’s unabashed confidence set the tone early, with some fervent, fast-paced runs, which were

echoed by Evan Shaw—a distinctive voice on alto, but one that seldom, in this context, rose above the collective. Meanwhile, Parker and Kyle Brenders—big of stature and big of sound, and one of Toronto’s treasures—threatened to introduce some space to the proceedings, but, most of the time, they were simply happy, or virtually compelled, to go with the busy flow. Although the set was enormously enjoyable, a little more breathing space would have been welcome at times. At one point, with both Parker and Brenders on soprano (and Brenders sounding alarmingly more like Evan Parker than Evan Parker), it would have been interesting to hear how that particular duo might have developed outside the quartet setting.

The quartet of three voices and tenor saxophone that opened Sunday’s concert was perhaps the least satisfying musical meeting of the weekend. Parker was at his most gracious here, leaving plenty of space for his collaborators to fill—and fill it they did, with assorted squeaks, burbles, and dramatic gestures that seldom coalesced into a musical whole. Like a sports car driver edging his way gingerly through a busy throng of pedestrians, Parker offered us only fleeting glimpses of his capabilities during this set, and the manifest talents of the remarkable Christine Duncan—another of Toronto’s treasures—remained pretty much latent on this outing (although her instantaneous, pitch-perfect imitation of the ringing office telephone brought smiles to a few faces). The subsequent trio performance with Wes Neal on bass and Joe Sorbara on drums found Parker on perhaps the most familiar territory of the weekend, the instrumentation similar to that of Parker’s well-established trio with Guy and Lytton. Notwithstanding the challenge inherent in filling those particular shoes, the fleet-fingered Neal and the endlessly resourceful, ever-imaginative Sorbara rose to the occasion magnificently, engaging with Parker as equals, and spurring him on to some of his most unrestrained tenor playing of the weekend. After a 45-minute set that seemed all too short, Sorbara commented that he felt like he’d been on stage for “only a minute”—always a good sign.

Originally scheduled as the middle set of the evening, the entire proceedings were brought to a close with Parker, playing soprano for the first time that evening, in the company of Sarah Peebles on shô and Nilan Perera on electric guitar, often prepared, and sometimes played, à la Fred Frith, employing the ‘guitars on the table’ approach. As it turned out, the scheduling change was a happy accident that rounded off the Interface series with a memorable and contemplative performance—one programmed at Parker’s request, and one that was rivaled only by the string group as the highlight of the weekend. Both Peebles and Perera are sound sculptors of the highest order, Peebles’s delicate chords and lines intertwining elegantly with Perera’s always highly creative textural inventions.

All thoughts of deference, tentativeness, or verbosity were pushed to one side as these three improvisers created an utterly compelling soundscape, with Parker demonstrating both his musical range and his exquisite sensitivity. Alan Stanbridge

www.TomHeasley.com

HOLIDAYS FOR QUINCE RECORDS

holidaysforquince.com POB 576 CHAPEL HILL NC 27514

WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #53 | 43

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

Anthony Braxton

Francisco Lopez

Francisco López TechnoCalyps Alien8 ALIENCD077 CD

Conops

GD Stereo GD 020 CD

Over a career spanning two decades and hundreds of releases, Francisco López has proven a tireless innovator, a man whose sonic endeavors rarely fail to excite and inspire.

Rather than offering thunder and lightning, his is the music of distant storm clouds just visible over the horizon, or of howling winds heard through thick, insulated walls. López uses a wide array of source material, and these recent releases showcase two sides of his music: TechnoCalyps is rife with industrial and mechanical sounds, while Conops is constructed wholly from field recordings and the sounds of the natural world. Both explore, in

a sense, environments sans humans, but they do so in strikingly different ways.

TechnoCalyps is a soundtrack for a Frank Theys film that explores the idea of transhumanism—the idea that technology may someday eclipse the limits of human life, and that the human condition as we know it may someday be a mere memory. The music covers a wide territory, transitioning between tonal atmospheres with perhaps a bit more briskness than is typical in López’s work. Much of it comes straight from his usual bag of tricks, but that’s no complaint: the ambient hisses, muddled rings and clangs, and lowend drones all evoke a post-human future.

Theys’s film isn’t as unrelentingly ominous as López’s soundtrack might suggest, and it’s interesting to see how music that seems so affecting on its own can become almost incidental as a scientist explains the workings of the brain. On its own, though, it’s certainly a

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

powerful musical experience in its own right.

On Conops, López takes a wholly different approach. The piece is constructed out of the sounds of the natural world, using recordings made in various international locales over a fifteen-year span. López edits his sources together in an uncharacteristically constant stream: there’s no silence, only slow fades between environments, and the results are an enveloping swath of sound that feels quite alive. At times, the listener can practically see and smell the foliage of the surrounding forest; at others, López focuses on the sounds of insects, obscuring any other sound behind their insistent undulations. Conops features López working his material with greater sustained emphasis than ever before, and as on Untitled #180 (from 2006) the shift in López’s method proves the catalyst for one of his most conceptually and aurally interesting works. Adam Strohm

Jeff Albert Quartet SImilar in the Opposite Way Fora Sound 0801 CD

Trombonist Jeff Albert knows that if you come from New Orleans, you have to deal with the groove. He gives it to you coming and going on Similar in the Opposite Way. Drummer Dave Cappello and bassist Tommy Sciple kick the record off with a rhythm that’s part insinuating swing, part rubbery bounce, and all fun; “Rooskie Cyclist” closes things out with a low-end swagger that implies that the titular biker has a pretty bearish physique. But what lies in between amounts to a declaration of independence; as he and alto saxophonist Ray Moore move from action sound-painting to intricate construction to leisurely testing of a sturdy melody, he shows that geography may bequeath a hefty legacy, but it’s not an inescapable destiny. Albert has played a lot in recent years with Chicagoans like Jeb Bishop and Dave Rempis, and this record shows why he works so well with them; he’s another omnivore who has digested heaping helpings of jazz history and bolstered it with the sounds of other styles, but learned best the lesson that you have to come up with a strong self-statement to be a creative musician.

The image on the cover shows Albert’s shattered reflection staring up from a tiled floor; in his music some things fit, some split apart, and others can cut you if you’re not careful, but they’re all part of an image worth regarding.

Bill Meyer

Susan Alcorn Curandera

Majuma Music MM 8 CD-R

The pedal steel has suffered an ignominious fate, culturally read as the instrument that makes country music weepier and, by supposedly logical extension, cheesier. The tone of the pedal steel—either pearl-like and teardrop-fragile, or wantonly cheery— doesn’t help its case. But for the pedal steel player to drop her lexicon and explore outer space seems as cheap an option as unthinkingly playing to the instrument’s chintzier excesses, which is why Susan Alcorn is the instrument's greatest current exponent. She’s aware of the instrument’s history and language, but is equally careful to draw on those signifiers only when they advance the cause of the composition she’s exploring, whether an original or cover. Curandera features both, and it proves Alcorn’s compositional and improvisational mastery is just as potent when she moves into interpretation.

On the title track and “Twin Beams,” episodes where single notes are fired into silence’s gaping maw alternate with periods of seismic disturbance, yet the transitions always feel logical, natural; her transcription of Messiaen’s choral piece “Sacrum Convivium” finds humility at the heart of the composer’s tendency toward grand gestures. But it’s the two takes on popular music here that most resonante—Alcorn sources the pathos and warmth in Tammy Wynette’s voice in her version of “You and Me,” and finds a new kind of joy in Curtis Mayfield’s “People Get Ready.”

Both versions are true to the personal and public politics of their originals while giving Alcorn space to comment

on current times, and in this respect her interpretive approach recalls that of Diamanda Galás. But most of all, Alcorn’s playing reflects her own description of Wynette: “[she] sang with an aplomb, an intelligence, and a precision of emotion.” Jon Dale

AMM with John Butcher Trinity

Matchless MRCD 71 CD

John Butcher Resonant Spaces Confront 17 CD

John Butcher Gerry Hemingay Buffalo Pearl

Buffalo Pearl is a very different encounter, which makes sense; drummer and electronician Gerry Hemingway may be as imposing as a Scottish rock formation, but he moves a lot faster.

His drumming is full-on, infused with the thrill of its essential athleticism, and Butcher pitches in with equal gusto.

Which isn’t to suggest that they spend the whole set (recorded in concert in Buffalo, NY) blowing their brains out.

Sections of “McGeist,” the stouthearted 17-minute journey at Buffalo Pearl’s heart, are highly detailed and restrained. But even in the quiet moments, there’s a feeling of unyielding intent here, of two men determined to make their points. Bill Meyer

Astral Social Club Sieben Stax

Auricle AUR-7 CD

Eddie Prévost plays on only one of these records, but the theme of his text inside Trinity’s nifty gatefold sleeve applies to all three. He writes of necessity and intention, qualities that John Butcher brings to everything he plays.

Writers often comment on the strangeness of the sounds he generates, and while it’s true that he doesn’t trade in his horns’ conventional lexicon, the one he uses is essential to what he wants to do. His intent is twofold: to create works of sound that affect the listener in non-obvious but extremely direct ways, and to bring these creations to life in a non-hierarchical way that reveals the essential natures of the participants and their surroundings.

Recorded at Trinity Music College in Greenwich, England, Butcher’s encounter with AMM is a signal effort for both parties. Prévost and John Tilbury bring acute focus and enormous respect for sound, but they also sound more purposeful and to the point than I’ve heard them since well before Keith Rowe left their company.

If you know AMM, you’ve probably felt this atmosphere before, but on Trinity these elements seem especially present and charged. Butcher manages to enter into their world with complete respect and yet remain totally himself, heightening the music’s effects in marvelous ways, totally stripped of ego and free of confusion.

Resonant Spaces, which was recorded in various non-standard performing locations around Scotland, may appear to be a solo recital, since Butcher is the only musician present.

But it nonetheless puts his skills as a responder and adapter to the test.

He’s an old hand at exploiting spaces that resonate, and the tracks where he confronts reverberation are quite marvelous. “Sympathetic Magic (stone),” the first piece, uses feedback and resonance to twist two distinct strands of sound into remarkably elaborate and complementary shapes; on “Floating Cult,” long feedback tones give way to a crisscross of echoes like colliding boat wakes. But he also finds the voice of places that are far less friendly to a horn player, and then finds something meaningful to say back to them. It’s no small trick to play outside in a stiff Scottish breeze, but Butcher turns the rumble of wind on a microphone, the cries of nearby seabirds, and his own fragile, textured whispers into something that’ll put a shiver up your spine no matter how warmly you’re wrapped. Magnificent.

Bottrop-Boy B-BOY 034 CD

Neil Campbell’s Astral Social Club explores and intensifies the hallucinatory properties common to techno, noise, drone and post-Velvets rock music. Like his closest peer Karl Bauer a.k.a. Axolotl, Campbell gives short shrift to the depiction of misery through audio that’s so prevalent in underground culture, but unlike, say, Animal Collective, who in some ways share similar motives, his productions aren’t so sweet they’re cloying. If anything, the best ASC music goes beyond these emotional and responsive archetypes: it’s not as simple as joy or pleasure etc., but rather about immersion to the point of disorientation, something close to (but nowhere near as pretentious as) jouissance. And while Campbell’s released a lot of music, it’s hard to tire of it, largely due to the way the best of it overwhelms you, shortcircuiting your faculties. On Sieben Stax, Campbell’s traversing similar ground to previous records—synths squall over tremolo drones, gas hisses through space while flangers are stuck on 11, pulses weave in and out of correlation like the intricate patterns of traditional African music. The key moments come when Campbell’s compositions reach their peak and you willingly fall into the inevitable—it’s incredibly seductive stuff. The underground’s needed a dose of day-glo psychedelia with a gnarled edge for some time now, and Campbell’s recent form is rainbow-rich.

Jon Dale

ASTRO

The Echo from the Purple Dawn Important IMPREC 197 CD

Where some Japanese noise aims to alienate, or dominate through totalitarian volume, Hiroshi Hasegawa’s sheets of electronics have always felt more psychedelically inclined, even—or especially—at their most overwhelming. Like Merzbow, Hasegawa regularly reaches whiteout, but there’s breathing space amidst the maelstrom, and if benign saturation’s what you’re after from noise, Hasegawa’s productions as ASTRO are just the ticket. It’s no coincidence he predominantly uses an old-school analog synth, which allows for a particularly tactile approach to texture and grain.

The best parts of The Echo from the Purple Dawn are sculptural, treating the screams of equipment as pliable putty for Hasegawa’s eager hands. There’s a fetishistic aspect to his relationship with these instruments, something ampli-

fied by Important’s cover design, all modular panels of knobs and switches.

That fetishism, coupled with hours of woodshedding, gives Hasegawa a surprisingly light and lithe touch with analog circuitry. If the opening “Live at Art’s Birthday 2008” starts tentatively, within two minutes ghost choirs are singing through the machinery and Hasegawa is scrawling spirographic patterns in the air; soon after, everything’s meatballed, with entire architectures collapsing into the void. This track and “Cobalt Insect/Artificial Lake” are dry runs for the lengthy “Violet Pulse,” where spores and pollen move at high density through the air, painting fractal patterns across your eardrum, while wind and sleet batter your earlobes.

Dense but glorious, it’s impressive—not oppressive. Jon Dale

Aidan Baker

I Too, Wish to Be Absorbed Important IMPREC 214 CD x 2

Aidan Baker Tim Hecker

Fantasma Parastasie Alien8 81 CD

Aidan Baker's best known for his longstanding duo Nadja, in which the Toronto guitarist pairs up with Leah Buckareff to produce heavy, long-form, multiinstrumental drones. Over the years, Baker’s been sneaking out solo recordings of varying scope—and quality—in limited editions, compilations, and the like. Many of these tracks are collected on I Too, Wish to Be Absorbed, a two-disc release from Important. Baker’s work has been characterized by a desire to free guitar playing from most of its idiomatic associations (even as he works in the “doom” genre) and an interest in processional, ritualized improvising— and similar preoccupations are audible throughout this set. Sometimes the stuff comes together marvelously well. On “Element #1,” for instance, we hear echo-drenched scrapes and thwacks, sounding like the bowels of a machine being excavated. On the lengthy “Melusine” and “Eskin (Bonedweller),” the music climbs into rarefied air, its lengthy textural developments making for rich comparison with Nadja’s process-driven playing in a different idiom. And Baker takes a nice metallic harmonic and lathers it up into an immersive sound environment on the frosty “Pretending to Be Fearless.” But elsewhere the music doesn’t cohere. The ticking electronica on “Summer Chill” is a miss. “Merge” seems torn between late-period Swans and something that might be on a Dead Can Dance album.

And the beautiful circular lines of “K” are unfortunately garlanded with multitracked drum machine and strings, undermining the power of Baker’s bell-like guitar. Overall, though, the collection is unified by its airy, wintry feel and Baker’s consistency of vision.

In the company of Tim Hecker, Baker sounds fantastic. A single 35-minute piece (in six movements, divided into 66 index spots), this one has great dynamic range and sonic depth. The gleaming glitchy monuments of vintage Fennesz spring to mind in the opening phase, but soon feedback eats away at the foundations of the piece, leaving ruin and static. From there the duo rebuilds things atop guitar arpeggios, a process that’s really beautiful and

WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #53 | 45

Your quarterly photo of Anthony Braxton

Anthony Braxton and the AIMToronto Orchestra Creative Orchestra (Guelph) 2007 Spool Line 30 CD

Anthony Braxton Kyle Brenders Toronto (Duets) 2007 Barnyard BR0308 CD x 2

Anthony Braxton Quartet Quartet (Moscow) 2008

PeterGannushkin Gannushkin/ /downtownmusic.net downtownmusic.net Peter

Leo LR 518 CD

“An orchestra is a family,” Anthony Braxton told Toronto's community in his keynote address to the 2007 Guelph Jazz Festival. The Association of Improvising Musicians Toronto rehearsed intensively for a couple of weeks with their artistic director, erstwhile Braxton student-cum-fellow reedsman Kyle Brenders, before Braxton himself jumped in for three days leading up to the concert documented on Creative Orchestra (Guelph) 2007. Their prep time is magnificently apparent. Any good organizer of large family gatherings can tell you the key to their success lies in artful orchestration of maximum spontaneity. Compositions 306, 307, and 91, in that order, are interwoven with three “language improvisations.” They showcase the powers and talents of the players while the listener is kept comfortably on the edge of his or her seat, pondering images such as world tennis championships played by four-armed deities, or a troupe of ancient hominids conversing in a language that clearly has complex rules and

syntax, but is still a year or so shy of connecting the first semantic meaning to its sounds.

The exquisitely recorded CD crackles with the energy of a live performance; all 19 of the orchestra’s voices are as distinguishable to the ear as each member in a fine family photo to the eye.

Recorded the next day at Toronto’s Orange Lounge studio, Toronto (Duets) 2007 is a different beast entirely. In contrast to the AIM's full-court press, Duets is a pickup game of hoops, punctuated by placid spells of nearby off-the-pier fishing, between the family’s father and grown son, unwinding together the day after the big family reunion. As such, its interest lies in aspects other than the spectacular. One of the two CDs is Composition No. 199, the other No. 356--the former among the earliest and latest, respectively, of Braxton's 11-year Ghost Trance Music (GTM) series of works. The concept's evolution is thus captured: both are at bottom lines of quarter-note-like rhythms snaking endlessly through written notes and their chance pitches/harmonies (depending on clef, instrument, other factors). 356 is clearly the fancier in terms of phrases, patterns, rhythms built from that base. 199’s mostly straight quarter notes assemble like self-replicating bio-cells of a cyborg solar sail. By 356, the cells have morphed into multi-cellular organisms doing an elaborate line dance, suggesting new strategies for capturing the light, now as wave, now as particle, and for storing and directing it with more intention, dreamy desire, and passion. The improvisational exploits of the (five different) saxophones and clarinet, from most intense and facile to most spare and gentle, invite us to eavesdrop on these two cloistered in their studio, playing to no audience but one another, working the private processes that gave rise to the bafflingly ordered wildness of the creative orchestra.

Quartet (Moscow) 2008 presents one of several new buds on the same family tree.

Like Brenders, cornetist Taylor Ho Bynum, guitarist Mary Halvorson, and bassoonist Katherine Young have cut their teeth on

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

Braxton’s music as his students. If the orchestra is the fully extended family, the quartet (and sometime trio, sans Young) comes across like an industrious and engaging nuclear family, serving the family business’s select clientele with relaxed but exuberant joy. Braxton's post-GTM “Diamond Curtain Wall (DCW) Music” blooms of poetic whimsy, marked by the addition of a laptop sound generator from Super Collider software that backdrops the music’s audio-virtual stage with silverings loud, soft, cold, hot-glassy and hard. It radiates without intruding, and although the four are shown with music stands in the YouTube videos of this live gig at the DOM Cultural Center in Moscow (“dom” is Russian for “home,” Moscow’s vital new home of such music), the line between the written and the improvised is less clear than on the Canadian CDs. It shares a spiritualaesthetic link with the post-Perestroika musical amalgam living and thriving in that place.

The amazingly expressive Taylor Ho Bynum plays bass trumpet and valve trombone here, as well as cornet, flugelhorn, and piccolo trumpet, carrying the torch once held by brass masters Wadada Leo Smith, Kenny Wheeler, Hugh Ragin, Ray Anderson, and George Lewis in Braxton's previous groups.

Halvorson and Young lay down a bottom line of low-frequency timbral, harmonic, and rhythmic motion-and-drone that seems uniquely resonant with the Eurasian aura (the bassoon evokes Russian high music culture, the guitar sometimes invokes a Chinese zheng, or Korean kayagum).

These CDs bring to mind Edward Said’s last work of music scholarship, On Late Style, about artists who, after years of prodigious output on the highest level, enjoy a still greater burst of creative brilliance that seems counterintuitive, compared to the more stereotypical arc downwards into mellow laurel rests, serene wisdom, and diminishing returns. Instead of some stately grace toward the ever-nearing end, these artists react to it with the opposite impulse of even more, usually thornier, vitality. Mike Heffley

entrancing. The piece dips and rises, again and again, from crushing walls of noise to burbling notes and rippling loops and back again. A heavy Fennesz feel re-emerges in the fifth phase’s long arcing sounds. But somehow the piece doesn't seem derivative. Instead, I found myself wanting to hear the music live, where I imagine audiences would just melt into themselves. Jason Bivins

Steven Bernstein's Millenial Territory Orchestra We Are MTO MOWO! CD

Steven Bernstein Marcus Rojas Kresten Osgood

Tattoos and Mushrooms ILK 150 CD

Indefatigable trumpeter Steven Bernstein—mastermind of the Sex Mob and the Diaspora series on Tzadik, among a host of other projects—got the idea for the Millennial Territory Orchestra back when he was doing the music for Altman’s Kansas City, which featured on-camera performances recreating the sound of swing-era jam sessions.

The MTO is a nine-piece group plus the occasional guest; though they draw their spirit (and much of their repertoire) from 1930s dance bands, they refract it through a sensibility weaned on funk, pop and modern jazz. They’ve been going strong for ten years, developing their music on the bandstand through extended New York residencies at Tonic and the Jazz Standard; their second CD, We Are MTO, is a studio album, but it aims to capture the band’s rowdy good-time vibe. The opening title-tune is an aggressive blast of funk, garnished with Charlie Burnham’s moaning violin solo; a ragged chorus of old-timey clarinets and soprano saxes drifts in, and the sense of a fruitful collision of time-periods and genres is complete. The rest of the CD is rarely so bold in its stylistic collisions, which is a pity, but it’s still a nicely judged trawl through Americana old and new; there’s even an R’n’B-inflected take on “All You Need Is Love” which disproves the general rule that jazzbos should keep away from Beatles covers.

The slow-drag blues of Don Redman’s “Paducah” is a treat, and there are thoughtful updates of rarities by Cecil Scott and Preston Jackson. A blistering run through Prez’s “Dickie’s Dream” lacks the streamlined pulse of the Basie rhythm section—Doug Wamble and Matt Munisteri’s snappy guitarwork plus Ben Perowsky’s jumpy drumming make this sound more like the Hot Club de France jousting with Gene Krupa-—but the track nonetheless features tasty solo work from Burnham, trombonist Clark Gayton, and tenor saxophonist Peter Apfelbaum (who brings some anachronistic post-Brecker muscularity into play). The vocals on two tracks veer towards burlesque, but otherwise this is a strong second outing.

Tattoos and Mushrooms is a likeably modest trio outing, setting Bernstein, tuba-player Marcus Rojas and Danish drummer Kresten Osgood loose on several choice, not-overly-familiar items from the jazz canon, plus Hank Williams’ great cri de coeur “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” and three Osgood originals. A pair of rustle-sigh-mutter-cough improvs function as palate-cleansers,

without really generating much heat or internal tension. It’s really the rep stuff that grabs the ear: the somber modal chant of Charles Brackeen’s “Prince of Darkness” makes for an arresting opener, and the band picks a jaunty path through Monk’s “Thelonious” and Mingus’s “Eastcoasting.” Good stuff, though the disc cries out for a touch of the MTO’s uproariousness—Bernstein’s bent-wire lines touch on everything from Rex Stewart to Kenny Dorham to Don Cherry to Paul Smoker, but their twists and kinks feel too neat: even on the Williams tune and Osgood’s “The Beat-Up Blues” he’s too decorously wistful or fanciful to really make those blues ache. Nate Dorward

Birdsongs of the Mesozoic Dawn of the Cyads

Cuneiform Rune 274/275 CDx2

Who’d have guessed that one of America’s top not-that-commercial-butnot-that-outré progressive rock combos was a spin-off from one of America’s edgiest—and best—post-punk bands?

Roger Miller and Martin Swope, two members of Mission of Burma, a killer amalgam of Cream (minus the blues influences and excess), the Stooges, and Pere Ubu, formed Birdsongs of the Mesozoic in 1983 with producer/ composer Erik Lindgren and Rick Scott. While there were faint echoes of old-school prog-rock—Emerson Lake & Palmer, Focus, Todd Rundgren’s Utopia—Birdsongs was closer in spirit to Clearlight Symphony, Frank Zappa’s knottier instrumental stuff and Eurochamber-rockers such as Univers Zero.

Stravinsky and the early minimalists— Terry Riley, Philip Glass—were also an influence. Dawn of the Cyads collects the complete output of the group’s original lineup from 1983 to 1987, plus a clutch of bonus tracks. Outfitted with keyboards (Miller’s specialty here), synthesizers, guitar, rhythm machines, and myriad percussion, BOTM’s approach embraced alluring themes, inspired (and judicious) use of minimalist repetition, melodious solos, and rousing, occasionally thunderous percussion.

Bombast is kept to a minimum—heck, there’s barely any extraneous riffage to be heard at all. Unlike some prog, most of the compositions are pretty concise, between three and seven minutes apiece. Maybe the coolest thing about BOTM is the way they balance earnestness and humor ... note the nifty cover of “Theme from Rocky and Bullwinkle.”

And unlike some prog, BOTM is neither solemn nor ham-fistedly quirky, neither dreary nor goofy. This set is a boon for fans and a fab invitation for neophytes.

Obtain! Mark Keresman

Ran Blake Driftwoods

Tompkins Square TSQ2097 CD

Ran Blake has made 36 albums during the last half-century, but one could nonetheless argue that he’s a neglected artist. His discography began on an Olympian high with The Newest Sound Around, a duo album with the late, great Jeanne Lee (a vocalist woefully undersung). Since then, despite the fact that Blake’s most celebrated album, The Short Life of Barbara Monk, is a traditionally formatted quartet date of tenor saxophone, piano, bass and drums, his

recording career has consisted mainly of solo piano albums, several of which are devoted to the work of a single composer or performer. Thelonious Monk (the focus of Epistrophy) and Duke Ellington (Duke Dreams) have benefited from Blake’s original approach; as, on Unmarked Van, has Sarah Vaughan and the songs for which she’s famous. As an accompanist with Jeanne Lee or Christine Correa, Blake is wholly supportive, hewing to the singer’s interpretation of the song, creating counter-melodies and a scaffolding of elegant, cloudily dissonant chords that seem more feint than emphatic and are often marked with an aura of sadness. When playing solo his approach is boldly radical; a song’s harmonic and rhythmic potential is explored rigorously and the melody, though never forsaken, is heard only in snatches, often fractured in rhythm.

What he does—and what most jazz pianists rarely do—is find a deeper emotional level to a song than the song originally seems to possess. Moreover, he creates an atmosphere, a contextual space, in which emotions hold sway.

A song in Blake’s hands is more than the sum of its parts, and this tribute to singers and their songs touches on aspects of the lyrics at which Hank Williams, Billie Holiday, Nat King Cole, and others may only have guessed. Inspired by the gospel tradition, Blake plays Pastor Hubert Powell’s “There’s Been a Change.” It’s a startling heart-on-sleeve performance, as emotionally naked as the music of Charles Ives, whom Blake admires. Do I have anything bad to say about Driftwoods? Not a word.

Ran Blake should be celebrated for his half-century of achievements and Driftwoods encapsulates neatly what he does best of all. Brian Marley

Blue Notes

The Ogun Collection Ogun OGCD 024-028 CD x 5

The Blue Notes were a mixed-race hard bop outfit when they escaped the tightening restraints of South African apartheid to play the Antibes festival in the summer of 1964. After coming into contact with the most adventurous players in the new music, they transformed themselves into an avant-garde unit, infused with their own distinctive energy and drive. After stints in Zurich, Geneva, and Copenhagen, they eventually settled for in London, where they had a lasting impact on a generation of improvising musicians. And yet, though the Blue Notes were known mostly as a quintet—Dudu Pukwana, Chris McGregor, Louis Moholo, Mongezi Feza, Johnny Dyani—they never appeared as such on record.

Their full force is felt throughout The Ogun Collection, the long-awaited fiveCD set that reissues all but the earliest documents of the band, augmented with unreleased material that restores the complete sessions. Though the band had effectively broken up as a working ensemble by the late ’60s, it occasionally reunited, with results that demonstrated their continued closeness—like a family whose bonds have been strengthened in exile. And like a family, their number dwindled through the quarter-century spanned by these recordings.

On Legacy: Live in South Afrika 1964, the Blue Notes are heard in their original sextet formation with the

authoritative tenor saxophonist Nick Moyake (who made the journey to Europe but returned home the next year).

A few months before, on the studio session Township Bop, they had been relatively contained, but in these extended performances, from a concert in Durban shortly before their departure, you can already hear them reaching toward open terrain. Pukwana really lets it rip on his own “Two for Sandi”; Feza, in turn, offers a glimpse of his nimble grace on McGregor’s “Vortex Special.”

They’re still firmly anchored to the jazz tradition here, but the seeds of future developments are clearly audible.

There’s a substantial leap in time and personal history to the next disc: the band was back in the studio at the end of 1975, barely a week after Feza’s untimely death. A double-disc marathon, Blue Notes for Mongezi sets out wailing and very free, moving in and out of themes drawn from each member’s individual projects, and builds, mournful and reflective, to an indomitably spirited celebration. It’s a totally spontaneous performance, in which the musicians just played, often singing or chanting, letting entire lifetimes of music and emotion wash through them. Their tunes—fiercely melodic, even a little raw—here take on the aspect of praise songs. Above all, no matter the physical distance between them (McGregor was by then based in France, Dyani in Scandinavia), the Blue Notes’ intuitive cohesion remains strong.

Blue Notes in Concert reconfirms their sympatico at London's 100 Club in the spring of 1977, and makes evident the worlds traversed since their initial live recording. Paradoxically, as may happen in the crucible of exile, they sound more South African than when they lived there: through these years, memory and imagination conspired to translate the sounds they grew up with—from church hymns to folk songs to popular music—into wild, new forms, full of lyrical uplift and rousing rhythms.

The final set in the box marks a further loss. Blue Notes for Johnny, recorded in 1987 the year after Dyani’s death, features a trio (that even masquerades as a quartet once, through studio magic—Pukwana plays both alto and soprano on “Funk Dem Dudu”).

The repertoire is mostly given over to Dyani’s own impassioned melodies, and again the performance renders celebration from sorrow. Such was the miracle of the Blue Notes that every occasion for making music turned into a revelation of joy. Jason Weiss

John Cage 3

Two / Inlets / Two4 OgreOgress DVD

One7 [From One13] / One8 OgreOgress CD

Three / Twenty-Eight / Twenty-Six with TwentyEight / Twenty-Eight with Twenty-Nine OgreOgress DVD

In the final years of his creative life, John Cage devoted much of his time and energy to the so-called number pieces.

The plain text in the title of each piece refers to the number of performers; the superscript indicates which version of the piece is being played. In certain cases, two or more of the compositions may be played simultaneously.

Texture was always of considerable

WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #53 | 47

Savage Jeffrey Hayden Shurdut with Michael Ray and Marshall Allen LudwigEnergy: van Beethoven

Ludwig van Beethoven / András Schiff

Complete Piano Sonatas, Volumes 1-8

Davis: Pete Gershon

ECM New Series CD x 8

The legendary Hungarian pianist András Schiff has now completed his traversal of the Beethoven piano sonatas. It’s a challenge accepted by generations of pianists ever since Artur Schnabel threw down the gauntlet, recording the cycle for Angel in the mid-1930s.

The succeeding decades have witnessed a variety of approaches, on both modern pianos and period instruments, but none has yielded the insights afforded by the complete picture captured in Schiff’s survey.

The cycle was recorded between 2004 and 2006, largely in concert performances in Zurich, Switzerland, and subsequently released in eight separate volumes in chronological order.

Schiff chose the recording location for its ample acoustics, aiding and abetting ECM’s magnificent production. Each sonority blooms generously, no matter what its dynamic level. The most minute nuances loom large, making this one of the most detailed cycles now available.

Obviously, such an approach necessitates a firm hand at the tiller, and Schiff does not disappoint. The 32 sonatas were written over the entire course of Beethoven’s career, and Schiff’s interpretations take account of the chronological disparity. There is a lightness, a disarming joie de vivre, in the early pieces, written when Beethoven was in his mid-twenties. More than this, there is an entirely appropriate sense of classical architecture balancing the youthful vigor. The final movement of Opus 2 No. 1 moves along briskly under Schiff’s hands, but all of Beethoven’s shifting accents are observed.

The first three movements function along similar lines, Schiff never pushing the already brisk tempi beyond credulity and maintaining a sense of each movement’s architecture.

This is the crowning achievement of Schiff’s cycle: he travels with Beethoven from classically inflected youth to the visionary wisdom of early romanticism, but he never loses sight of the myriad structural elements that made each piece revolutionary. Beethoven’s music is replete with rapid-fire dynamic shifts, pregnant pauses and sudden harmonic juxtapositions that bespeak and transcend his roots in the rhetoric of Mozart and Haydn, and Schiff exposes every detail. The expansive opening arpeggio of the Tempest sonata is placed in stark contrast to the sonata proper, where interpreters such as Wilhelm Kempff and Richard Goode smooth out the transition. Alfred Brendel comes closer in his digital cycle, but even he eschews the violence latent in much of Beethoven’s music in favor of detailed gentility. Schiff will have none of it, all dynamic extremes informing his highly charged readings.

I do not mean to imply that Schiff is all about the Apollonian aspects of this music; his sense of drama, of unbridled emotion, is just as convincing. His reading of Opus 106’s slow movement is as reflective and as heartbreaking as, for example, Sviatoslav Richter’s 1975 concert recording, and his epic final fugue from the same sonata is equally triumphant.

The dialectical totality of Schiff’s approach, encompassing emotion and intellectual rigor, places his cycle squarely in the 21st century, and his renderings of the last three sonatas drive the point home. In a revelatory series of lectures on the Beethoven sonatas available on the Guardian website, Schiff demonstrates that in the first movement of Opus 109, Beethoven is actually quoting one of his earlier sonatas. Similarly, in Opus 110, he alludes to the Credo section of his gargantuan Missa Solemnus. Schiff renders

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

these allusions clearly in his performance, bringing out the relevant passages just enough to highlight them. Again though, it is the enigmatic and abstract world of these last three sonatas that sets them apart, and nowhere is Schiff more compelling than in the final sonata. The first movement seethes with controlled energy, fury and humor vying for prominence in the service of consummate virtuosity and of a structure still somewhat indebted to classicism. Its wildly innovative theme and variations movement is well-proportioned in Schiff’s hands, but he imbues the work’s radical harmonic language with the right levels of mystery and stillness. In Schiff’s vision, we hear Beethoven leaping the centuries, prefiguring our own post-impressionist abstractions as far back as 1822. Though it’s the one disc recorded without an audience, all three sonatas are infused with the energy and commitment of a live performance, so devoted is Schiff to these supreme compositional achievements.

Schiff decided that he would wait to record the Beethoven sonatas until he was in his fifties, having only then gained the wisdom necessary to undertake the task. It was a fortuitous decision. No cycle that I’ve heard brings Beethoven’s compositional universe into such complete focus, and none places these masterpieces in such a broad historical context. Preceding interpretations tend to speak more to a singular vision, such as the geniality of Kempff’s 1951–56 readings, or the muscular virtuosity of Wilhelm Backhaus’s 1960s recordings, but no one plays these works with such historical and emotive breadth. Even Steven Kovacevich’s virtuosic cycle for EMI seems glacially distant compared to the warmth and nuance of the ECM recordings. From the first notes of Opus 2 to the final hushed chord of Opus 111, Schiff presents the cycle as a unified whole replete with diversity.

Simply put, the set is one of Schiff’s crowning discographical achievements and yet another triumph for ECM. Marc Medwin

importance to Cage, melody hardly at all, and harmonic considerations were immaterial, hence his frequent use of non-tempered and sometimes hard to control or totally unpredictable instruments, such as the water-filled conch shell on the first disc under review.

At 121 minutes, “Two3,” for sho (a Japanese mouth organ made from bamboo) and conch, verges on the monumental, though only in terms of duration, and OgreOgress's Christina Fong and Glenn Freeman have wisely chosen to issue it on DVD Audio where it can be heard in an unbroken sitting.

There’s no formal beginning or end to the music, no development, no contrived tension and release, just a series of often brief, discrete events during which sounds replace silence (or vice versa: no hierarchy is implied).

The piece consists mainly of dissonant, quavering sho chords in which occasional single notes stand proud—a consummation of breath into sound, occupying a narrow register. The conch provides gurgles and register-breaking low gloops at infrequent intervals. Solo conch features on “Inlets” (1977), which predates the other compositions on these discs by more than a decade and which encompasses indeterminate elements (as anyone who has tried to play one will know, a water-laden conch shell is a completely unpredictable instrument). “Two4,” for sho and violin, with its overlapping solo movements, involves chance elements to determine the placement of sounds. If you have the stamina, these compositions play remarkably well as a continuous 158minute program.

On “One7 [from One13]” and “One8” the instrument of choice is cello. Sound and silence, in time, are the fundamentals of the piece. As “One13” was incomplete at the time of Cage’s death in August 1992, its material, involving single pitches at various amplitudes, has been organized according to the time brackets established, using chance operations, for the earlier composition “One7.” Rob Haskins’s sleeve notes for all three releases explain issues such as this remarkably well and between them provide an excellent introduction to Cage’s number pieces. “One8” involves the use of a Bach bow, a curved bow allowing the cellist, whoever he or she may be on this recording, to play several strings simultaneously. The peppery/chocolaty chords and eerie whistling harmonics, beautifully captured, are thrilling.

The final disc contains compositions predominantly for wind instruments.

“Three” features a family of recorders, overdubbed by Susanna Borsch. If your preconceptions of consort recorder music are of shrill discordance, cast them aside; the single, long-held notes, muted chords and deep bass tones, again admirably recorded, are wonderfully fine-grained and presented with unwavering pitch, very pleasing to the ear. “Twenty-Eight,” as played by the ensemble Prague Winds, appears here in three versions: by itself, with Christina Fong on violin (“Twenty-Six with TwentyEight”), and as “Twenty-Eight with Twenty-Nine,” which adds Fong, Freeman (percussion, bowed piano), Karen Krummel (cello) and Michael Crawford (double bass). The last of these is a particularly satisfying experience with its throbbing pulsations and thick, constantly fluctuating textural palette. In

other hands the number pieces can feel austere and rather deliberate, but these compositions remain open to creative interpretation. Fong, Freeman and their collaborators take full advantage of the possibilities they afford. Brian Marley

California E.A.R. Unit Morton Feldman: For Christian Wolff Bridge 9279A/C CD x 3

Composed in 1986, just one year before his death, For Christian Wolff is one of Morton Feldman’s late, long masterworks. While briefer than For Philip Guston and String Quartet II, which can take upwards of five hours to perform, For Christian Wolff still clocks in at well over three hours without interruption, daunting for performers and audience members alike. But on California E.A.R. Unit’s triple-disc recording, time seems to stop; one is entranced by the otherworldly sounds Feldman has wrought. Christian Wolff (b. 1934) was the youngest member of the “New York School.” In the 1950s, along with Feldman, John Cage, and Earle Brown, he helped break new musical ground, exploring the use of aleatory structures, noise, silences, and graphic notation. Feldman’s homage to Wolff doesn’t make explicit references to the latter’s music. Instead, he captures the slowly evolving, methodical aspects of Wolff’s hermetic life as a New England academic and transcribes them into an enigmatic score. Piano, celesta (both played by a single keyboard player), and flute play slowly and softly for the piece’s entire duration, repeating just a few notes at a time, over and over again, forming intervals whose curious, spiky dissonances never resolve conventionally. Despite the piece’s atonality, the prevailing pianissimo dynamic and lack of overt gesture removes any sense of confrontation or drama. Keyboardist Vicki Ray and the much-missed flutist Dorothy Stone (who passed away just last year) have recorded a focused, moving performance of this important and provocative work. Christian Carey

Ca$h $lave Clique White Prop$

Panic Research Audio CD

Rape Ape

Hello My Name Is Rape Ape Panic Research Audio CD

Hearasay in Paradox Lust A Lusty Lay

Panic Research Audio CD

Safe Safe

Panic Research Audio CD

Lung Mountain

Sunset on Lung Mountain Panic Research Audio CD

Tone Ghosting

Aktion in the Reins Panic Research Audio CD

Matt Weston + Tone Ghosting

Live at Sonic Circuits EP Panic Research Audio CD

Festering mere miles from the legislative arena where our great nation’s

politicians pocket bribes, sip expensive cocktails, and leave gobs of slime on brass handrails, Panic Audio Research is one of the Virginia/Baltimore/D.C. area’s least celebrated imprints. Judging by their latest crop of releases, label head Jeff Bagato leans toward the more experimental end of underground rock in his preferences, but one can hardly paint every CDR with the same brush.

White Prop$ finds Ca$h $lave Clique mining a vein somewhere between the rhythmic noise of studio-based Yellow Swans and the psychedelic pyrotechnics of live Yellow Swans: go-go drumbeats rattling at the bottom of the mix, cruise-liner turbine whorls of guitar feedback, sped-up chipmunk vocalisms, blubbering, desperate-forDramamine keyboards, and Clique only knows what else. At certain moments— particularly when the backbeat up and vanishes—the experience of listening to this record is comparable to being trapped on a spinning psychic tilt-awhirl, caught in some sort of demonic vortex, or being hopelessly drunk and randomly criss-crossing city streets during rush hour, angry motorists mashing horns and leaving rubber on the asphalt as they swerve to avoid you.

John Simler is the Clique’s singing/ keyb-jamming half, but for solo jawns he prefers the sobriquet Rape Ape. A nasty string of improvisations—generated using “clip mic, thunder tube, and effects”—Hello My Name Is Rape Ape offers a smorgasbord of out aesthetics: atonal high-frequency whistles slicing through afterburner wrath, post-Oh Astro wavelength bounce, oil-set-to-boil simulations, squeaky-hinge meditations descending into topsy-turvy, antimatter nightmares.

Safe are a far more sedentary proposition. Siren-like sound-flickers, autoharp brushes, and granular stretches of synth simmer in a velvety, pregnant silence that recalls the considered circuit-bending alchemy of GOD. Slightly less antiseptic is Bagato’s Tone Ghosting solo project, an improvbased melange consisting of, according to the liners, “hacksaw, vinyl, FX, voice, mic.” This is—happily—vague to the point where it can mean anything in theory; on Aktion in the Ruins that equates to vast swathes of burrowingweevil doom, glitchy noise-bursts, vocal perversions, and sonic Tourette’s jerks interspersed with vacuum.

But the Live at Sonic Circuits EP, Bagato’s collabo with percussionist/ electronics wrangler Matt Weston, is a different animal altogether. It’s as though the pair were piloting golf carts through some vast warehouse space full of instruments, elephants, school chairs, and other random objects—in complete darkness. So sometimes there’s nothing to hear, but at other moments the squeak of metal on linoleum rings out, or a cymbal or metal file cabinet tips over, or a beaded curtain is brushed aside; their velocity is deliciously random, becoming mouthwatering when one or the other or both collide with a cluster of things, dominoeffect-style. How much more delectable might this project have been, I wonder, had Bagato and Weston crashed headon more often?

Hearasay in Paradox Lust and Lung Mountain come off as the odd men out in this equation: the former turning in chopped-up collages of chamber music, Ren Faire performances, and fairy-

tale readings, a themed concept that wears out its Middle Ages welcome with a swiftness that’s almost breathtaking; the latter indulging in longwinded New Weird Americana/sub-Sonic Youth chicanery involving theremins, guitars, and—honest-to-blog—a pot-lid gong tree, which Lung player Sal Amoniac ought to exploit in some solo form, like, post-haste. Raymond Cummings

Arnold Cheatham Thing

Porter 1507 CD

Loft jazz was less well-documented in Boston than New York, yet several notable groups involving artists like bassist John Jamyll Jones, drummer Hüseyin Ertunç, trumpeter Mark Harvey, and reedman Arnold Cheatham emerged to wax crucial (albeit rare) documents.

Cheatham’s interests leaned towards a homegrown electrified jazz along the lines of post-Bitches Brew Miles or Odyssey of Iska-era Wayne Shorter.

Cheatham, who plays alto and soprano saxophones as well as flute, is joined on Thing’s eight original compositions (four to each side-long suite) by trumpeter Wil Letman, electric pianist Vagn Leick, drummer Kiah Nowlen, bassist David Saltman, and conguero Dorian McGee. Originally released in 1972, Thing offers strikingly raw music, beginning with the minute-long snippet that introduces “Sketch” before it abruptly cuts out and is replaced by an entirely different, funkier theme. Letman, though mostly sounding as though he were in the other room, is crackling with back-tothe-crowd bursts as Cheatham simultaneously blows soprano and alto over a throbbing ostinato. The leader’s straight horn recalls the pinched, dervish-like phrases of Wayne Shorter, but upon switching to alto he digs in his heels, low grit vaulting to split-tone squeals à la Noah Howard. The third “Sketch” is positively rough in its flute-oscillator textures, buried guitar shards (courtesy Bob O’Connell), and choppy metallic clangs. “Road Through the Wall” is considerably less of a juggernaut than the first side, but even this more consonant stew still has its tough bits. Thing is a fine display of electrified improvisation, and one can hope there is more work from this side of the underground waiting to emerge on disc. Clifford Allen

Chicago Sound Map

Performs Compositions by Olivia Block and Ernst Karel Kuro Neko KN03 CD

Too often creative music gets thoughtlessly characterized as “abstract,” which seems really to mean “hard to hum.”

This set is the antidote; it's titles and methods are highly concrete. Chicago Sound Map is a project involving members of TV Pow and like-minded improvisers such as Boris Hauf, which explores music that sits astride the fault line between composition and improvisation. And what is a score, if not a map for sound? Although the two pieces on this CD, recorded April 8, 2008 at the Chicago Cultural Center, were realized by a fairly conventional collection of instruments (piano, strings, reeds, percussion, and electronics), they come from composers deeply involved with environmental sound.

The inspiration of Olivia Block’s “Stop the Sound of the Big Bell” is open to

WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #53 | 49

Joe Morris (third from left) with Luther Gray, Taylor Ho Bynum and Allan Chase

Joe Morris Bass Quartet High Definition hatOLOGY 670 CD

Joe Morris Barre Phillips Elm City Duets Clean Feed CF130 CD

Joe Morris John Voigt Tom Plsek

MVP LSD: The Graphic Scores of Lowell Skinner Davidson Riti 10 CD

Joe Morris has always been something of a ronin, never aligned for very long with any one scene or school of playing, or any one city or band—or, since he took up the bass and banjo, any one instrument. This non-dogmatic approach has stood him in good stead, giving a bracing sense of freedom and determined individuality to his playing. You approach every new recording with a sense of anticipation, expecting to be surprised in some way. These three new releases are true to form, with Morris on bass piloting a quartet; engaged in deep musical conversation with bassist Barre Phillips; and performing the graphic scores of the late Lowell Davidson in a trio of Boston-based improvisers.

Morris, of course, first established himself as guitarist in the 1980s, then took up the bass in 2000. He doesn’t play guitar lines on the bass, however, any more than Anthony Braxton plays sopranino saxophone lines on the contrabass clarinet. There are characteristic gestures we can

recognize as Morris’s alone—favorite intervals that define his melodies, a way of crowding notes together then spacing them widely apart to create tension and release, for instance—because personality and style are inescapable no matter what the instrument. But Morris honors the nature of the instrument in his hands; it’s another way of looking at his music, translated into new terms.

High Definition, featuring a stellar quartet with saxophonist Allan Chase, trumpeter Taylor Ho Bynum, and drummer Luther Gray, is perhaps the best showcase for his bass playing to date. Each composition calls for a different approach to the instrument, from the smooth drive of “Skeleton” to the complex rhythmic dispersal of “Morning Group” to the variety of propulsive figures on “Land Mass.” His solo on “All-in-One” indicates just how “bassey” his bass playing is—he revels in the deep sonority and weight of the notes. He and Gray make a sympathetic team: Morris conceives of the bass as a tuned drum, and Gray plays the drums as percussive melody, so they knit themselves seamlessly into the fabric of the ensemble. This is one of Morris’s most joyful albums. Bynum plays on “Skeleton” as if he can’t believe how much fun he’s having, and rifles through an encyclopedia of colors and textures on “Bearing.” Chase brings passion, order, and a richly textured tone to his soloing. His blistering solo on “Topics” is a model of swinging coherence, and he traces elegant and surprising lines across “Skeleton.”

Elm City Duets joins the front ranks of Morris’s previous duet albums with William Parker, Mat Maneri, Matthew Shipp, and Anthony Braxton.

This entirely improvised album, with Morris on guitar, is by turns elusive, enigmatic, concrete, tactile, and ethereal. “Ninth Square” is a vibrant sound-color improvisation, crackling with sighs and rattles, wooden textures and metal scraps; you can hear echoes of Africa and Asia in the snap of strings, the sudden welling up of silences, and the springy rhythms. “Recite”

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

is patiently linear: Phillips crafts each note to telling effect, and Morris never comes to rest as he pushes his inquiring lines forward. The lively “Normal Stuff” is a exploration of spontaneous extensions, variations on variations of variations.

The piece opens with bristling string snaps and instrument-body taps that fizz and pop like champagne bubbles; when the tempo slows down, the intensity doesn’t abate—the musicians just take more time working through the music’s implications. These duets are extraordinarily empathetic, each man functioning independently while contributing to a common purpose. That’s the methodology of the best free improvisation, constantly redrawing the line between multiplicity and unity and redefining its form as it evolves.

Lowell Davidson’s graphic scores offer yet another way of ordering improvisation. Written on 3 x 5 note cards, the compositions, left untitled

by Davidson, are little treasure maps marking the spots where the richest balances of chance and design, intention and coincidence lie buried.

To a greater or lesser degree, the scores dictate interactions between players, the development of the piece, the shape of line and tempo. Morris (on guitar), bassist John Voigt, and trombonist Tom Plsek—who all spent many years performing with Davidson—defer to the scores on MVP LSD, and the result is neither freely improvised nor through-composed, but some ideal marriage of the two approaches. “Particles” is a glittering sound field, like a stochastic composition by Xenakis, in which different patterns grow and die away. The score of “Separate Blue X’s” prompts gestures of different sizes and proportions, occurring in diverse registers and tempos. “Gold Drop #2” elicits round, plopping notes from Plsek and Voigt, plus liquid ripples from Morris. The trio places their trust in these signposts left by Davidson’s quirky imagination as it made its mad, intuitive journey through life; and their trust is entirely merited. This is a lovely and long overdue tribute to one of free jazz’s unheralded geniuses. Ed Hazell

question, but its sound brings to mind a video she first showed a couple years ago that consisted mostly of wind and trees. Reeds hiss and hush, strings squeak and sigh, sounds accumulate and recede. A single piano note rings out and is captured and elongated by the electronics; at later points, a single drumbeat provides a similar effect. Perhaps these events represent the bell?

The instrumentalists seem to split between those who support these reports and those who dissent, first by ignoring the continuous sound, then clamoring against it. Block’s score includes space for improvisation, but is designed so you won’t know where one leaves off and the other begins. This map seems to take us to a place where continuity and discontinuity struggle for dominance, and in the process create a greater whole that encompasses both.

Ernst Karel’s original recording “Heard Laboratories” serves as part of the score for “Heard Laboratories, performed.”

Karel’s version, which is due out on and/OAR sometime in 2009, is a sonic ethnography of edited (but otherwise unprocessed) recordings taken from research labs. To perform it, the musicians are guided by his recording and by a graphic score that is very specific about what instruments and what frequencies should appear from second to second, but pretty open as to how the players should meet those requirements.

Rumbling piano reproduces the hum of electric motors, buzzing sax expands upon the timbres of electronic measuring instruments. The players manage both to represent Karel’s original sounds quite faithfully and use them to instigate specifically bounded and scrupulously investigated explorations of given audio sectors; the investment and intense curiosity with which they carry out their efforts turns what could have been a dry exercise into a rich sound exploration.

Bill Meyer

Chopteeth

Afrofunk Big Band Grigri 001 CD

The first words you hear on this debut record are: “Fela was right.” The twelve musicians in this band from Washington, D.C. are not the only ones expressing that sentiment lately.

Twelve years after his death, Nigerian bandleader Fela Kuti seems to be more famous than ever. Two of his sons, Femi Kuti and Seun Kuti, are making records he would be proud of.

The father of the Afrobeat genre was even the subject of an Off-Broadway musical last fall called (what else?) Fela!

And several bands, including Antibalas and Nomo, are jamming to the kind of funky grooves that used to drive Fela’s music, even as they expand the Afrobeat formula in new directions.

Like Antibalas and Nomo, Chopteeth is an American band with musicians of various ethnic backgrounds. You don’t have to be African to make African music, but the presence of Kenyan singer Anna Mwalagho and Ghanaian percussionist Atta Addo does give Chopteeth a feeling of authenticity. Primary songwriter Michael Shereikis has been playing guitar in various African styles since he was a Peace Corps volunteer in the Central African Republic.

He also studied ethnomusicology and spent time playing with bands in the Ivory Coast, and his broad musical

knowledge shows in Chopteeth’s arrangements. Most of the tracks on this debut sound like something Fela might have recorded, but there are also dashes of music from other parts of the continent: a little bit of Soweto, a little bit of Senegal. It all blends together seamlessly, with the horns punching out strong melodies above constantly revolving guitar riffs and syncopated percussion patterns. The dance party barely takes a pause over the course of this album, and along the way, Chopteeth’s members get a chance to show off their chops with lively solos. Chopteeth does its share of the chanting vocals often heard in Afrobeat, but Mwalagho can also sing with more melodic flair. And when rapper Head-Roc joins in on the final track, “No Condition Is Permanent,” the mix of Fela-isms and hip-hop sounds as urgent as Chopteeth’s call for political change. Robert Loerzel

Loren Connors & Jim O'Rourke

Two Nice Catholic Boys Family Vineyard FV59 CD

Loren Connors

The Curse of Midnight Mary Family Vineyard FV64 CD / LP

Lately the massive wave of Loren Connors releases on countless micro-labels has thinned to a steady trickle from one, Family Vineyard. While his recent efforts bear excellent testimony to his restless creativity, sometimes I've been left wanting just a bit more. That’s where these two very different historical releases come in, and most likely you’ve never heard either. Connors recorded The Curse of Midnight Mary in 1981, released it in an edition of ten cassettes, and then forgot all about it until the music turned up by chance 27 years later.

Two Nice Catholic Boys, on the other hand, is previously unreleased material, but it’s never been totally off the burner either. It is drawn from the same 1997 European tour as In Bern, which came out on the short-lived hatNOIR imprint at the height of the Connors glut.

Turns out Jim O’Rourke, Connors’ duet partner, taped the rest of the tour, and there is plenty more to their partnership than In Bern reveals. Two Nice Catholic Boys is drawn from three performances, each rather elusively sourced; the song titles are “Maybe Paris,” “Or Possibly Köln,” and “Most Definitely Not Köln.” In Bern dips in and out of various genres, but it’s really about a mood best summed up by annotator Thierry Jousse—“serenity.”

Two Nice Catholic Boys is much more unsettled, and better for it. The music ranges from crunchy rock riffing to lyric fantasias to eerie pure-sound exploration, and feels much more like a meeting of equals than its predecessor, where O’Rourke seemed to maintain a steady framework within which Connors could do his thing. They brandish distorted chords like radioactive swords on “Or Possibly Köln,” slashing at each other and the ill-lit space around them with steely purpose. “Most Definitely Not Köln” descends into a dark passage of terror and discontent, spooky as a trip through the catacombs with a dying flashlight and a disturbingly bony guy in a hood leading the way. This album will stand as one of Connors’

great collaborative ventures.

Midnight Mary faces off with that same be-hooded character, but it’s a different man on the guitar. In 1981 Connors was still working through his influences as well as a series of pseudonyms (Guitar Roberts, Loren Mattei, Loren MazzaCane). His self-consciousness about his own artistry—Connors had already decided to put more energy into playing than painting because he knew he had something unique when he put fingers to strings—pushed him toward a certain extremity in pursuit of indelible expression, but it’s much more raw, less controlled. Playing acoustic and singing over his picking and slide work in a wordless falsetto moan, Connors uses country blues sounds and forms as his vehicle to get to the place of blues myth. That place is the crossroads where you meet the devil, but since Connors was at heart a good Catholic boy, he didn’t necessarily want to sell his soul. This record documents what he played when he went into a supposedly haunted graveyard one night with guitar and tape recorder in hand and played some stuff that might keep the evil one away. Connors draws on haunted religious themes like “Amazing Grace” and “Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground,” and wails them like he’s none too sure they’ll keep the demons at bay. The effect is somewhat overwrought, and definitely more for the Connors completist than Two Nice Catholic Boys. Bill Meyer

Valero Cosi

Collected Works Porter 4008 CD

Valero Cosi Enzo Franchini

Conference of the Aquarians Last Visible Dog LVD 127 CD

Two limited-edition CDRs by the prolific Italian multi-instrumentalist Valerio Cosi are here reissued by Porter and Last Visible Dog, which will hopefully earn Cosi’s trans-genre musings the wider audience they deserve. Collected Works culls Cosi’s best tracks from the last three years or so, and demonstrates his ability to make something fresh out of sharp, witty jazz-laced psychedelia: witness the raw power and hypnotic groove of “I Wanna Be Free,” on which guttural shrieks enhance Cosi’s “new thing” saxophone exhortations.

The track is drenched in vibrato and blues, notes bent every which way around static rhythms that multiply then explode into waves of controlled resonance. The jungle vibe is also present on “Hoboland,” as a vocal mantra supports nostalgic keyboard interjections. Much of the disc inhabits this no-man’s land, veering between loosely structured improv à la late Trane and lo-fi sound experiments. Most of the tracks on Collected Works are soaked in a haze of flange or heavy chorus; not so on Aquarians, originally a 2006 release with percussionist Enzo Franchini. Jazz comes to the fore even more strongly here, as can be heard in Franchini’s remarkable drum work. At times, he really does invoke the vitality of mid-’60s New York or Chicago, so heartfelt and committed is his homage. Yet, right in the middle of it all, we are confronted by “Interference,” a brief but jarring mass of filtered static that manages to exude its own sort of beauty. Effects are

tastefully used, and therefore welcome, except for the overly distorted “Part 7.”

“Conclusion” is a gorgeous closer, its delicacy and crystalline orchestration a fine example of this duo’s ability to absorb and synthesize. Marc Medwin

George Crumb

Complete Crumb Edition, Volume 12 Bridge 9261 CD

Volume 13

Bridge 9275 A/B CD

As George Crumb’s 80th birthday draws near, Bridge has accelerated the release schedule of its complete Crumb edition. Taken together, volumes 12 and 13 offer a transgenerational portrait in the development of this pioneer’s compositional language.

Volume 12 contains several of Crumb's pivotal works. The earliest are the Five Pieces for solo piano of 1962, originally written for Joseph Burge. The pianist commented, much later, that he had never seen anything like them in the literature, and as the liner notes attest, the miniatures also impressed Karlheinz Stockhausen. Here, Crumb begins exploring the piano’s innards in a way that would become a hallmark of his mature style, especially in the third piece, where strings buzz and rattle in near-silence. Jacob Greenberg brings out the post-Webernian pointillisms in these works while also convincingly demonstrating their innovations. The piano miniatures anticipate similarly ghostly moments in the provocative Eleven Echoes of Autumn (dated 1965, but actually completed in 1966), employs a chamber ensemble, the alto flute and clarinet in particular becoming fodder for Crumb’s timbral explorations.

Perhaps the best-known item is 1971’s Vox Balaenae, a harrowing, beautiful trip through evolution inspired by whale song and arranged for amplified alto flute, piano and clarinet. The performers hum, whistle and otherwise emote every sonority of this landmark exploration of sound and time with conviction.

While the International Contemporary Ensemble’s playing is stunning throughout, flutist Claire Chase is absolutely riveting, her voice and flute blending so completely as to be indistinguishable at key moments. Volume 12 also contains a fine new recording of “The Sleeper,” written for the late Jan DeGaetani.

Volume 13 is a two-disc set presenting volumes 2 and 4 of Crumb’s epic American Songbook series, “A Journey Beyond Time” (African-American songs) and “Winds of Destiny” (Civil War songs). Both cycles are scored for percussion quartet, piano and voice, but the percussionists of Orchestra 2001 play hundreds of instruments, rendering exact timbre recognition impossible. As with earlier contributions to the series, Crumb leaves the melodies intact while completely reimagining the accompaniments. The African-American cycle opens with “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” which is imbued with expectant stillness, as Barbara Ann Martin’s rich voice floats over the glassy textures. By contrast, Jericho’s walls come down with a vengeance as two tambourines and forceful low piano tones bolster the vigorous rendering. The Civil War settings are similarly theatrical, Martin’s offstage “Battle Hymn of the Republic” coming off quite effectively. Yet it is “Oh

WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #53 | 51

Jon Fishman and Mike Gordon at the Clifford Ball, August 1996

Phish

At the Roxy Jemp 1041 CDx6

The Clifford Ball

DannyClinch Clinch Danny

Jemp 1041DVD x7

By the time I attended this run of concerts at Atlanta's Roxy Theatre in early 1993, I was already starting to listen to John Coltrane and Anthony Braxton. But I was still as deeply into Phish as I would ever be, and had been anticipating these shows for months. The run has gained a reputation one of the band’s best, mostly on the weight of the second set of the 2/20/93 show, the date on which I celebrated my 17th birthday, surrounded by music and friends I loved. It’s been more than a dozen years since I’ve listened regularly to Phish’s music, so it’s not surprising that hearing these recordings overwhelmed me with nostalgia and reminded me of all the childlike fun this band had onstage: their fairy-tale stories, a capella goofs, silly non sequiturs, and the “secret language” of musical cues they used to communicated with their audience.

They were a consummate live band that fulfilled Zappa’s recipe for successful live performance: deliver something the audience knows, and something they would never expect.

The 2/19/93 show starts with a cover of the Rolling Stones’ “Loving Cup,” and the band sounds rambunctious, like they know they’re gonna party all night and aren’t about to take it slow. Sparks really start to fly during “Maze,” and during the “Colonel Forbin’s Ascent”/“Fly Famous Mockingbird” sequence you can hear how focused the band is as guitarist and de-facto leader Trey Anastasio begins a fantasy narration incorporating floods, clouds, steam and the circumstances of their last botched gig in Atlanta. The set eventually ends with a frenzied “David Bowie” that segues in and out of Zeppelin’s “Moby Dick” as a way to celebrate drummer Jon Fishman’s 28th birthday.

I’ve always preferred Phish’s long tunes to their ballads or their more traditionally structured songs, and this track is a good example why: the tone veers from foreboding to country twang back to leaning-overthe-abyss potential calamity before striking down all at once into the joyful hard-reggae groove of “David Bowie.” The band is irresistibly mischievous, and when they succeed, the music can be addictive. They have more in common with the attitude and virtuosity of improvisers like Han Bennink and Misha Mengelberg

than you might suspect.

The crux of this three-night stand is undoubtedly the second set of the second concert. The haunting, throbbing austerity of “Wilson” is the perfect set-opener, and it segues into a super-spirited “Reba” that finds the band so perky they almost jump over the notes. Every song drifts into the next in the kind of continuous, organic flow that jam bands are more renowned for playing in than actually excelling at, but Phish weave so many tight changes and tangential ideas into their improvisations throughout this set that even the most serious jazz fan could be impressed by the soloing and interaction on display. The set continues on the sixth disc of this collection and gets into an uproarious cover of “Hold Your Head Up,” before the band finally caps things with an extended “Harry Hood,” a film noir tune with McConnell working the organ and piano and Gordon’s electric bass billowing in like a damsel’s distressed cigarette smoke.

The band is in pretty good shape for the third night, but the preceding two nights do seem to have taken a toll on their overall energy level. The first set starts with the crowd-pleasing “Suzy Greenberg,” and you can hear the audience singing along to the simple, catchy chorus. They finish the set with a smoking “Run Like an Antelope,” embellished with Anastasio’s typically manic soloing. Second set highlights include a rollicking “Bathtub Gin” and a great sequence of encores that begins with an a capella “Sweet Adeline” and finishes with the traditional “Pig in a Pen” accompanied by the great Atlanta banjo-player Jeff Mosier. While this set is nostalgic for me, and required listening for Phishheads, the music contained herein speaks for itself, and in many languages: rock, jazz, country, improv, slapstick, funk. Andrew Choate

Three years later, Vermont's Phinest arrived home at the end of a successful tour of the same outdoor concert sheds once populated by the Grateful Dead and beginning to evolve into one of the country's most commercially successful live acts. This new seven-DVD set presents in its entirety The Clifford Ball, the two day festival which took place August 16th and 17th of 1996 at a decommissioned air force base in Plattsburgh, NY, just across Lake Champlain from their Burlington headquarters. The band's management expected this wholly self-produced event to draw 30,000 phans, but ultimately 70,000 arrived, becoming the largest music concert in North America that year (this writer purchased general admission ticket No. 1).

The Clifford Ball combined six sets of music with a 52 | SIGNAL to NOISE #53 WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM

town square comprised of fanciful storefronts, biplanes trailing banners emblazoned with jocular messages (“running low on fuel ... no joke”), an on-site radio station, and an enormous overnight camping area, and established the template for such new-millenial über-festivals as Bonnaroo and Coachella.

The up-close-and-personal video format, primarily close-up shots that somehow seem more immediate (if less sweepingly cinematic) than prior DVD sets from Las Vegas and Brooklyn, highlight the band's appeal as quirky, offbeat personalities who happen to play quirky, offbeat music. Anastasio, especially, looks absolutely ecstatic surveying a crowd that extends back almost as far as the eye can see.

The first day's high points include masterful renderings of several of their signature transportational epics: the majesterial and mostly instrumental “The Divided Sky,” the set-anchoring jam-vehicle “Mike's Song” and the by-then rarely performed “Esther,” a demented saga concerning an innocent young girl whose world is turned upside down by the acquisition of an enchanted puppet. But by 1996 Anastasio had already written the last of his suite-like mind-blowers, and the “mini-set” of short semi-acoustic numbers at the mid-point of Saturday's concert signaled a growing tendency toward simpler song forms. Night has fallen by the second set and technician Chris Kuroda's eye-popping light show is almost like a fifth band member (in fact, the men of Phish look somewhat naked without it in the daytime portion). The show-closing “Harry Hood” ends in a hail of fireworks as the band leaves the stage.

Sunday brought another three sets, with a guest vocal by Ben & Jerry (who had just launched their Phish Food flavor months earlier), covers of Edgar Winter's “Frankenstein” and the Beatles' “Day In The Life,” a “Tweezer” complete with snowboarders hot-dogging on trampolines, and a “Harpua” finale that wouldn't be completed until the following year's summer festival, The Great Went, in northern Maine.

A bonus disc contains interviews with the band and associates, a short documentary on the event, the Friday night soundcheck, and an ambient 4 AM set where the group played on the back of a flatbed truck as it rolled slowly through the campgrounds.

The Clifford Ball was the culmination of a crucial phase in the band's development that began around the time of the Roxy shows. With the band reuniting in March for its first concerts in almost five years, it's a great time to revisit some of their career milestones.

Pete Gershon

Shenandoah, I Long to Hear You,” with its high-pitched melodic pre-echoes, that lingers longest in the memory.

These song cycles find Crumb’s originality undimmed, and they sum up all that he has achieved in fifty years of composing. The Crumb edition moves from strength to strength, and the fact that the composer supervises every recording renders them definitive.

Mark Medwin

Lowell Davidson Trio

ESP-Disk 1012 CD

Gunter Hampel Music from Europe ESP-Disk 1042 CD

Karel Velebny SHQ

ESP-Disk 1080 CD

Among the latest reissues by ESP from its original catalogue, these three releases illustrate the label's remarkable prescience in producing music that still challenges listeners forty years later.

Pianist Lowell Davidson was a Harvard graduate student in biochemistry when he was recommended to ESP

by Ornette Coleman in 1965; though he remained active for a while in New York and Boston, and died in 1990, Trio was his only record. Tightly propelled by bassist Gary Peacock and drummer Milford Graves, his playing recalls the mercurial abstract power of Cecil Taylor, the lyrical delicacy of Paul Bley, while sounding all his own. His fluid sculpting of densities and space suggests a deep thinker whose scientific acumen posed a unique set of cues for developing the new music; it would be fascinating to hear where he carried his ideas.

Music from Europe was the label’s first venture abroad, when Hampel’s quartet, including saxophonist Willem Breuker, recorded the session at the end of 1966 in Holland. The first album presenting entirely his own compositions, it placed Hampel among the international vanguard of free improvisors and led directly to the lively transatlantic bands on his own Birth Records. Here as later, he helped bring the vibes into a new era, building dramatic openended structures to accommodate the full palette of tone colors he draws on, notable in the wide contrasts employed by the two soloists as well as in the combustible bass clarinet duos heard on this date. Passages like the closing section have sonorities reminiscent of early European music, with their close raw harmonies and a rhythmic suspension that predates the blues.

Label founder Bernard Stollman first heard of Karel Velebny from the Czech contingent at the MIDEM conference in early 1968, so he continued on to Prague and invited the tenor saxophonist to record later that year while on tour with his quintet in Germany. Though Velebny was well-known in his home country up until his death twenty years ago, SHQ is now his only available recording. Doubling on vibes and bass clarinet, he is joined by Jiri Stivin on alto sax and flute, and a primed rhythm section that never slackens. Joyous, intense, tightly spun, their playing lights the way through a dark night. While rooted somewhat in the bop tradition, the band does indeed take the music out and beyond. Jason Weiss

Michael Dessen

Between Shadow and Space Clean Feed 1061 CD

It's nice to see West Coast trombonist Michael Dessen getting a little higher profile lately, what with this new trio effort on the insanely prolific Clean Feed label and a new release on Cuneiform

by Cosmologic, the crack freebop quartet of which he’s a member (reviewed in STN#51). Between Shadow and Space represents a different facet of his work from Cosmologic or his excellent debut Lineal (Circumvention, 2007), since Dessen makes substantial use of laptop electronics throughout. The results are fantastically subtle, imaginative extensions of his trombone’s sound—feathery rufflings, pixelized halos, teasing curlicues and rasps—and he mercifully avoids the bleep-bloop clichés that sink a lot of similar projects.

The title track is one of the CD’s few purely acoustic pieces, and it’s a killer: a funky elongated groove sliced-through with silences and repetitions, the effect being a kind of mournful stillnessin-movement. “Restless Years” and “Anthesis” similarly touch on the kind of metrical intricacy that Vijay Iyer and Rudresh Mahanthappa have made their own in recent years, and the presence of their frequent companion Tyshawn Sorey on drums cements the connection. Dessen’s music, though, has a more ambiguous flavor, the players drawing back from the groove as often as they seize on it, even if both tracks end with triumphant intensity. Another side of Dessen’s aesthetic is represented by the enigmatic multisectioned pieces “Chocolate Geometry” and “Granulorum,” whose dreamy structures are full of irrational climaxes and moments of secretive self-communion. The disc is completed by a stealthy Dessen/Sorey free improv and a memorial for Alice Coltrane, whose drizzling, swarming electronics suggest light streaming out of a stained-glass window. Aside from the fine work by Sorey and the leader, bassist Christopher Tordini brings fine rhythmic flair and emotional undertow to the music—listen, in particular, to the way “Anthesis” unfurls note by note out of his rich double-stopped introduction.

Nate Dorward

Taylor Deupree and Kenneth Kirschner May

Room40 RM418 CD

On May, Taylor Deupree revisits his collaboration with fellow New Yorker Kenneth Kirschner, with whom the 12k boss released a pair of Post_Piano albums earlier this decade. Recorded live in May 2008, this disc features them in a piano/laptop duet in which each musician simultaneously plays the piano and uses a laptop for live processing and manipulation. May isn’t an attempt to render the piano unrecognizable under a bevy of digital deconstruction; instead, Deupree and Kirschner re-envision the instrument within the digital context, marrying its antique sound with modern tools. Amidst a slow ambient swirl of electronics, Kirschner plays the piano’s keyboard while Deupree manipulates its innards. The piece, stretching over 36 minutes, swims by at a languid pace, the piano often solitary at the forefront of the music, tinkling quietly or voicing melodic fragments

before a gentle, ethereal drift. The music’s dreamlike haze is effectively atmospheric, but between some of the fuller drones and the upfront plinking of the piano keys, there exists a middle ground of the smallest sounds that is sometimes obscured. The live performance isn’t without its hiccups and interruptions, but the overall murky mood wins out. The piano, while front and center, isn’t purposeful enough to drive the music, and May ends up feeling like a half-remembered dream, its general mood lingering even as few details stay in the memory. Adam Strohm

Arrington de Dionyso

I See Beyond the Black Sun K KLP200 CD / LP

One-time Old Time Relijun leader Arrington de Dionyso’s recent recordings, particularly 2006’s Breath of Fire, found him exploring realms of the intensely personal—fragments, improvisations, and naked brush-strokes, etched in realtime and bumped to definitive format in such a way as to preserve the raw immediacy of each moment. On I See Beyond the Black Sun Dionyso goes for endurance instead, with “AION” carefully yet colorfully teasing nuances out of the interaction of pedal-point drone and gruff, at times strangulated bass clarinet improvisations. There’s something oddly bluish and bruised about the playing here, particularly when Dionyso leaps between chestrattling clarinet drones and tracings across scales, or charms time-warp gobs of notes into the air. It’s good, and unlike a lot of music of this variety— indie folks “discovering” abstraction and improvisation—it’s not particularly forced, beyond the conscious decision to use something this monolithic as the album’s “statement of intent.” But part of me prefers the snippets of thoughts documented on earlier albums, which had a from-out-of-nowhere feel that communicated on a more human scale.

Tracks like “Ten Thousand Year Vision” are closer to his earlier form, and the asceticism of their presentation—one bass clarinet slowly circling notes into spiral formations, no background, no flash—is more appealing. Jon Dale

Drumbo

City of Refuge Proper 024 CD

Some sounds are digestible and become assimilated into the musical vernacular; others are irreducible and anyone who uses them bears the brand of the original. So it is with Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band, who combined raw electric blues, surreal lyrical imagery, and free jazz–inspired reed mayhem with hitherto unheard broken rhythms and a pan-tonal guitar vocabulary. You play that way, and people will always think of Beefheart. Still, no one has more right to that sound than the Magic Band’s members. They may not have conceived the Cap’s mad blend, but they bore tremendous responsibility for working it out and realizing it. No one can lay greater claim to such accolades than Drumbo, a.k.a. John French, the drummer who first broke the band’s music away from the tyranny of steady beats, the band’s music director for the landmark Trout Mask Replica double LP (he was left out of the credits for his trouble), and a recurrent Magic Band

member until their penultimate album Doc at the Radar Station. His reward?

If he plays those fantastic, unstable rhythms, people will say it sounds like Beefheart. His revenge? On City of Refuge, he sings just like the Captain.

Mind you, French would probably dispute any attribution of ill intent; the Beefheart sound is his sound, too. And it’s not like Beefheart created his vocal style out of whole cloth; he owed an awful lot to Howlin’ Wolf, for one. But certainly he took gritty blues growling to places it hadn’t been before, and he had certain tics that differentiate a Beefhearty utterance from an idiomatically bluesy one. Drumbo’s adopted the Captain's back-of-the-throat roar, tonsil-knotting interval leaps, and sotto voce spoken asides, and even started playing untutored-sounding soprano saxophone, which was Beefheart’s old horn. He’s marshaled a quartet of Magic Band veterans to play the sort of licks they used to play, and made it all hop to his inimitable drumbeats. If you’ve been longing for someone to make this sort of music again, you’ve got your wish. And yet, I’m ambivalent.

French didn’t always sing that way; with French-Frith-Kaiser-Thompson and Crazy Backwards Alphabet, his delivery was powerful and bluesy, but not at all Beefhearty. It’s disturbing to hear him submerge his vocal identity and take on another’s. He lets a certain fussiness creep into the arrangements on certain tracks, particularly the piano intro to the title tune and the noodly bass figures on the John Peel tribute “To the Loft of Ravenscroft.” A cartoonish hard rock aspect mars a couple others. And yet, I’m glad this sound is still around.

Bill Meyer

Ethos Percussion Group Building

Bribie BR084 CD

Building is the fourth release from the unique Ethos Percussion Group, an allpercussion chamber quartet of sound experimentalists founded in 1989. Its members—Eric Phinney, Yousif Sheronick, David Shively and Tres Files—come from diverse backgrounds in classical and world music, and together they pursue a minimalist aesthetic in these four pieces. “Break It Down” takes the components of the standard drumset and a standard Ghanaian drum choir and parcels them out among the four different players. The result is an intercultural weave, a kind of pointillist dialogue between the elements of these two drum sets which originate on opposite sides of the Atlantic—floor tom addressing ride cymbal, gankoqui bell chattering with bass drum, snare drum responding to shaker, and hi-hat juxtaposed to the deep-toned klobotodzi drum. “These Trees That Speak” is a Susie Ibarra composition on which the composer makes a guest appearance manipulating tapes. This work is built around the recorded, amplified, insistent pulse of a human heart, and moves through a series of highly atmospheric trance-scapes created with log drums, slit drums and singing bowls.

“The Guiros Talk” features the interaction of four guiros, scraped, scratched and struck in an elaborate four-part tap-dance which could serve any music teacher as a perfect illustration of the meaning of timbre. It also illustrates how

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

minimalism is always about achieving a maximum effect within some set of restrictions, making more from less. The instrumental credits for the final track, called “Ziggurat (Interior),” epitomize where the Ethos Group is coming from: the ensemble plays toy glockenspiels, boom whackers, cappuccino frothers and snare drums! Building is an intriguing, satisfying statement; Ethos should be lauded both for the synthesis of global instruments and world sounds that they create, and for the boundaries they break in the process. Alan Waters

Fennesz Black Sea Touch 076 CD

I think it’s fair to say that Fennesz’s most interesting work occurs in collaborative situations; examples range from his work with Keith Rowe to his CDs with David Sylvian. A darling of both critics and audiences, Fennesz has made it ever clearer in recent years that the gauzy sentimentalism he unveiled on Endless Summer wasn’t simply a device to be played with and cannily undermined; rather, it is the heart of his airy music. No matter how often the earth rumbles, no matter the abrasiveness of the static deployed, Fennesz seems always to return to a kind of folksy arpeggiating on his guitar, a cool, mentholated space that is like mood music for hipsters. He gets there no later than three minutes into this record. Now, when I say that his solo recordings, where he indulges in his now well-worn devices, are not his most interesting, I don’t mean that they’re somehow displeasing. While there is actually a disturbing variation within the Fenneszian drone here—during specific passages in “The Colour of Three,” the oscillations recall Peter Frampton’s voice box—most of the record envelops you gently. The muffles and warping bells on “Perfume for Winter,” the steam release of “Grey Scale” and “Glide,” the gentle intervallic ripples throughout— they’re all delightful, known pleasures to which fans will gravitate quickly, that kind of beauty in ruin which he captures so well. Jason Bivins

Luc Ferrari

Tuchan-Chantal

Room40 DRM404 download

I guess this digital distribution thing is the way of the future, but recalcitrant that I am, I can’t get my head around the dematerialization of format, particularly when it comes to characters like Luc Ferrari, whose compositions often deal with physicality, society, specific spaces in the world. Tuchan-Chantal is a case in point: one of the outcomes of Luc and Brunhild Ferrari’s time in the small French village of Tuchan, it contrasts extended interviews with Chantal, the daughter of one of the Tuchan families the Ferraris befriended, with small passages of acoustic guitar, and rare recordings of Tuchan’s ambience—street scenes in passing.

Disseminating such a grounded composition in an intangible digital format seems somehow cognitively dissonant. If you’re not down with the French language, the interview sections in Tuchan-Chantal pass by more as discrete audio events than narrative or discussion; since I have limited facility with French, my experience of

this 40-minute piece engages more with structure and sonority. The fades between the acoustic guitar sections (composed of tart, fragile, cyclical phrases) and the interview with Chantal recall the organization of radio reports, and indeed one thing that communicates beyond any putative language barrier is the honesty in Ferrari’s reportage—the relative nakedness of the interview segments suggest little post-production. From Presque Rien onward this has been characteristic of Ferrari’s work. But Tuchan-Chantal feels particularly voyeuristic and exposed, even as its structure gives it a quizzical, almost detached air at times. Jon Dale

Paul Flaherty Aria Nativa

Family Vineyard FV57 LP

For over three decades, reed player Paul Flaherty has carved out a personal take on free jazz from an outsider’s stance. Based in Connecticut, he’s resisted the pull of New York City, choosing instead to form strong working relationships with other outsiders and dive deep into a take on the tradition that combines unbridled intensity and emotional vigor. While some of his strongest recent work has been with drummer Chris Corsano, he’s also ventured into recording solo sets, something he hadn’t done before his 2001 session Voices. This LP features two live sets from the winter of 2007, one at ISSUE Project Room in Brooklyn and the other at the Community Theatre in Peterborough, NH. Flaherty’s solo music has an incantatory feel: he plunges in and heads off with dark, soulful zeal, bluesy growls, and vocalized bellows; lines loop, phrases get repeated and then spun off into exhortational flights.

But this is not simply a cathartic blast.

Flaherty knows how to pace things— how to drop back, introduce melodic threads, let things cool down, and then at just the right moment crank up the heat. Michael Rosenstein

Robert Fripp Brian Eno

No Pussyfooting

Discipline Global Mobile DGM 5007 CD

Evening Star

Discipline Global Mobile DGM 5016 CD

In 2005 Robert Fripp and Brian Eno released their first collaborative effort in thirty years, the haunting Equatorial Stars. The disc’s finely chiseled sonics and brittle but full soundscapes brought to mind the two albums they made between 1973 and 1975, which have now received an upgrade from their 1990 CD incarnations. The importance of these early ambient masterpieces is not in question. What is striking after so many years is just how adventurous some of this music still sounds today.

The side-long composition “An Index of Metals,” from Evening Star, is a case in point, veering dangerously close to noise, but in an unpretentious way that demonstrates a love of sound for its own sake. Then there's the exquisite title track, a minimal web of increasingly thick orchestration that remains transparent as Eno’s spare keyboards are filtered through the haze of Fripp’s sustained and icily distorted tones, prefiguring years of soundscapes to come.

Evening Star’s predecessor, No Pussyfooting, was slightly more improvisatory,

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

relying heavily on the layered loops that typified early Frippertronics. Overtones abound, introducing what was then newly atmospheric territory, as can be heard in the opening moments of “The Heavenly Music Corporation.”

“Swastika Girls” presents huge guitar swells jumping in and out of focus over an increasingly prominent background of pastoral arpeggiations, almost the antithesis of “Corporation”’s stark angularity. This reissue expands the album to two discs, with bonus versions of the pieces at half-speed and reversed in an attempt to reproduce a BBC session in which John Peel played the album that way. These are fascinating but basically superfluous exercises; the album stands well enough on its own. The longer tracks on both albums are heavily indexed, useful when you’re searching for a favorite section of “Index of Metals,” for example. These reissues expose a lot of detail, and really, that’s what this music is about. Each sonority blooms in context, bringing new pleasures with each listen. Marc Medwin

Satoko Fujii New York Orchestra Summer Suite Libra 215-023 CD

Satoko Fujii Nagoya Orchestra Sanrei

Bakamo 007 CD

Satoko Fujii Natsuki Tamura Chun

Libra 102-022 CD

With a brass section ready to deal mercilessly with any chart and a refreshing attention to space and nuance, Satoko Fujii’s New York Orchestra spends the majority of Summer Suite lovingly realizing her ambitious 40-minute title-track.

Filled with long impressionist passages, crisp grooves, block chords, and abundant polytonality, it’s got a compositional range that doesn’t hamstring the superb improvisers here (including Ellery Eskelin, Tony Malaby and Steven Bernstein). It’s a bizarre, overstuffed, and very fun piece, filled with the riotous, uncontainable energies of the season for which it’s named. There are some sweet passages where the ensemble as a whole plays the drum part. There are long droning sections and sudden horn fanfares. And while it’s rare that the full ensemble actually plays for very long, it’s heavy when they do. A couple more standout moments before the verdict.

There’s a splendid few minutes about two-thirds of the way in for topnotch tromboneliness (I’d have appreciated solo credits throughout, though).

And the piece ends with a nod to the Ellington-Evans continuum, though one of the saxophonists brutalizes it with a lengthy, flatulent flat note. Awesome.

The other pieces aren’t as memorable, though they’re good. “Sanrei” is a thunderous stomp with excited brass, with low pendulous chords anchored

by Stomu Takeishi’s elastic lines. The tempo slowly rises, cued first by a spunky trumpet solo, then a blistering alto (Briggan Krauss, I think) in 11/8.

And there’s a bright circle dance with vivid sectional contrast on the closing “In the Town You Don’t See on the Map.” It's one of Fujii’s best largeensemble releases.

By contract, the Nagoya Orchestra disappoints. Fujii only conducts here (well, she ululates too) and her piano is sorely missed. Not only does the orchestra itself seem limited by the elephantine rocking—not that rock riffs are inherently problematic, but these aren’t so good, many of them significantly not written by Fujii—but they seem clunky, tentative, underrehearsed. This is frankly bizarre for a Fujii date, and not at all what this group has previously delivered. Simple riffs are used as platforms, building dynamics and density vertically, but there’s something one-dimensional about these pieces. Out of the miasma that opens “Sankaku,” for example, comes a simple repeating 5/4 figure, but it’s not really developed (the best parts are the unaccompanied solos) and it gets a bit noodly. The dense harmonies and polyphony have their moments, and several pieces are rearrangements of previously recorded faves, but it’s not enough. The closing “Sanrei” has some great sax solos riding atop its ponderous central figures, for example, but it’s marred by ridiculous no-wave guitar.

The heavy brass and reeds sound much better on Fujii’s jittery “Blueprint”—but its Mingusy opening descends into something messy and self-indulgent, neither adjective one I would ever have applied to a Fujii project before. With so many excellent Fujii recordings out there, this one’s disposable.

I’ve always been partial to the Fujii/ Tamura duo, and Chun finds the pair on what is effectively a date in New York.

In his hilarious liners, Tamura admits to being frustrated at the way his wife’s charts are increasingly complex, forcing him to practice more than he’d like.

Despite his confessions, he sounds great soaring atop complicated—but never labored or mannered—pieces like the jittery “Tokyo Rush Hour,” the skirling and circuitous “Spiral Staircase,” or the spidery title track. There's still plenty of freewheeling impressionism: Tamura freaks out in the upper register on “Nudibranch,” reacting to Fujii’s stalking low end; the pair have a good time mucking with shifting tempi on the swinging “Curt Response”; and they dredge up some deep farty muffles and woody clatter on “Ultraviolet.” But in terms of their combination of extroversion and soft texture, the best example is the lengthy title track, where Fujii gets bell-like sounds from prepared piano.

They move from there through moods that are by turns somber, romantic (Tamura is almost channeling Sketches of Spain at times), and boisterous (Fujii’s

solo is intense). Jason Bivins

Carlos Giffoni Adult Life

No Fun Productions NFP 40 CD

Having traded in his laptop for analog synths, Carlos Giffoni has moved beyond the sonic buzz-bomb shards of his early work. That’s not to say that he has backed off any. Instead, hyperactive laptop grit has been traded for relentlessly coursing pulses and drones that build in thundering waves of density.

Giffoni describes Adult Life as his most musical work to date. While the pieces still involve surging, enveloping walls of noise, the density is shot through with texture: the deep-bass jackhammer roar is countered by shreds of static, sputtering waves of synth bluster, and spatters of stuttering glitch. The five pieces pitch and roar along, but it's a queasy ride, hardly anything to kick back and surf along to. There is a dark intensity and physicality to the music, defined by the power of the pulse and roar rather than any real harmonic detail. While Giffoni is still probably better heard alongside other players from the noise pantheon, his solo work is well worth hearing.

Michael Rosenstein

Lafayette Gilchrist Soul Progressin' Hyena HYN 9371 CD

If you appreciate both Les McCann and Andrew Hill, there’s a good chance that pianist Lafayette Gilchrist’s new CD with his working band, an octet called The New Volcanoes, will click for you.

Like Robert Glasper, Gilchrist grew up with hip-hop and funk and isn’t afraid to mix it up. He can be both heady and down-home. Gilchrist has stated that the first jazz album he bought was Duke Ellington’s singular meeting with Charles Mingus and Max Roach, Money Jungle. His style could be considered a branch of the tree that began with Duke’s solo work, moving through Monk, and continuing with Hill, Mal Waldron, et al. On the funky-butt titletrack Gilchrist is a self-effacing leader... in fact, maybe too self-effacing. The horn players get most of the solo space and Gilchrist doesn’t really make a strong impression in his brief statement. Soul power is the thing here though, with the testifying horn charts the real “stars” rather than the soloists. “Between Us” has delightfully off-center harmonies and dashes of dissonance layered on top of the groove. Sun Ra’s Lanquidity could be a reference point here, though

modern hip-hop bass/drums patterns underpin the funk. The other ensemble pieces have similar groove-oriented foundations, but offer plenty of variety in melodic content and harmonies.

“Uncrowned (On the passing of Andrew Hill)” is a solo piano performance that showcases Gilchrist’s more contemplative side. It’s a dark, moody and beautifully nuanced piece that may well be the disc’s highlight. On his fourth CD as a leader, Gilchrist already has a distinctive voice, and it will be interesting to hear how his music develops in the future. Bill Barton

Henry Grimes Solo

ILK 151 CD x 2

The story of Henry Grimes’ amazing return to the New York jazz scene after decades of obscurity is already hoary after only five years, but I can’t still can’t get over the gestalt of Grimes—most of all, his huge, thick sound. Now comes the motherlode—two and a half hours of solo live improv. The performance centers on Grimes’ magisterial bass musings, alternating with briefer turns on the violin, the instrument he played first in school and returned to at age 70.

I’s a jungle of thickly layered gestures, with few sustained tones, even when Grimes picks up the bow. Somehow, the music is high-energy but not nervous, reckless yet wise. Maybe the paradox dovetails with his freakish hybrid persona as fresh kid on the block and ten-ton legend. Despite the unquenchable restlessness of his melodic and harmonic statements, the overwhelming mood is of a great beast at rest—only with transparent skin, so the pulsing of corpuscles, firing of nerves, and growth of new tissue are open to view. Often, there is an overall feeling of slippage, of descent, perhaps into entropy, perhaps into memory. But Grimes doesn’t go down without a furious scrap. There’s a deep pulse in this music—not an explicit rhythm, but a beating heart and brain. Listening to so much solo bass at one sitting can lead to aural mirages, and more than once I heard timbres recalling everything from ore-boat horns on Lake Superior to a dinosaur slowly twisting a Volvo. Often, I sensed the undertow of a Russian male chorus.

There’s a deep-seated vocal quality to Grimes’ music. The bass is his voice, not his weapon. When he plays violin, overtones of Irish tenors and Scottish pipes float in and fade away. But all this is beside the point. The music is original, generous, self-renewing and

distinctive, almost completely stripped of obsessive patterns or recognizable jazz fragments. Lawrence Cosentino

Hair Police

Certainty of Swarms No Fun NFP 39 CD

Hair Police are positioned at the nexus of metal and rock ritual, industrial anxiety and noise aesthetic, which has become a fairly well-attended field— particularly after the cultural and critical acceptance of Mike Connelly’s other group, Wolf Eyes. What’s unique about Certainty of Swarms is that it’s the first time I’d feel absolutely comfortable in attributing an elegance of form to Hair Police. If before they’d seemed lacking in focus or structural consideration, Certainty of Swarms is eloquent in its development. What’s most gripping about the album is the way it jolts your expectations, particularly as tracks like “Intrinsic to the Execution” move through discrete phases, offering up bolts of grimy-gray noise and heat to puncture silence. And if something like “Mangled Earth” is rather more prosaic—offering a combination of diseased, distorted vocals, rudimentary drums and obsessive-compulsive guitar shredding that is of a piece with other work at the rock-noise nexus—well, so be it. Where other groups would simply dump such a track anywhere it fits, on this CD, Hair Police are conscious of flow, mindful of mood—I’ve not heard too many records lately that maintain their atmosphere so doggedly. If you thought there wasn’t much mileage left in this cabal of artists—a fair enough presumption, given it’s been a while since we heard something truly groundbreaking from their circle—Certainty of Swarms suggests there’s quite a way to go yet. Jon Dale

A Handful of Dust

Now Gods, Stand Up for Bastards / The Philosophick Mercury No Fun NFP-34 CD x 2

Omit

Interceptor

The Helen Scarsdale Agency HMS012 CD x 2

Bruce Russell swiped the name of his duo with Alastair Galbraith from a line in T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land: “I will show you fear in a handful of dust.” In the early ’90s, the shredded scree that these two coaxed from hyper-amplified, feedback-drenched guitar, violin, and electronics had a certain shock value.

WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #53 | 55

Fifteen years on, this stuff fits in perfectly with the raw noise squall that finds its way onto innumerable cassettes, CDRs, and lathe-cut 7" releases. So it is no wonder that No Fun’s Carlos Giffoni has rescued these two limited-run releases, which originally came out in on Russell’s Corpus Hermeticum label. Recorded in 1995, Now Gods, Stand Up for Bastards delivers five short, blustering diatribes of roiling sonic debris (one also featuring drummer Peter Stapleton) before it launches into the 22-minute closer, “The Dark Lantern of Reason.”

Russell and Galbraith are in it for the process, not the form. Pieces don’t really start as much as they seem to emerge from an abyss, and don’t end as much as they fade into the murk.

They let things reel out slowly, riding the slow waves stirred up from buzzing overload. The more extended flow of the final piece starts with a churning blast and rides along from there with pummeled drones and shuddering spume. The Philosophick Mercury was recorded two years earlier, and its two long cuts have a rawer, more direct attack. “Fama fraternitatis” plies the elemental components of static, buzz, crackles, and feedback against a much starker sonic plane. Halfway, Russell’s distorted and broken vocals break in, sounding like shortwave bursts from space. Stapleton’s drums are added on “God’s love to His people Israel.” Things start out with a nervous chatter, but after a slow build-up, they crescendo to a thundering cacophony that ebbs and flows between storming density and more open pulse, only to explode into a final sprint into mayhem.

This set isn't essential, but it provides a handy summary of Galbraith and Russell’s noise-prov blasts.

Omit's Interceptor owes little to A Handful of Dust’s sonic bluster, even though it comes from the same New Zealand free noise scene. For this one, the reclusive Clinton Williams packed up a “damaged cassette deck” and two suitcases of drum machines, effects, and analog synths and traveled to Wanganui, a small urban area on New Zealand's west coast. Over five months, Williams recorded these low-key fragments of loops, drones, and fuzzed and blurred textures. Some flow by in a few minutes, while others hum along for close to ten. What they all share is a subtle, organic sense of pace and texture. It is as if he is taking a stethoscope to catch and amplify the breaths and palpitations of an alien world. Or maybe they’re the sonic realization of the electromagnetic waves emanating from a distant quasar. And while the shifting layers and fluttering rhythms have a sense of understated brooding, they never fade into mere ambient groove.

Williams is far too keyed in to the subtle shadings and colors for that. There’s a hermetic feel to the music: the sound of a focused aesthetic filtering and refining the music down to a core essence.

Maybe this will inspire someone to reissue some of Williams' earlier work, including his three-CD magnum opus, Quad. Michael Rosenstein

Harry Pussy

You'll Never Play This Town Again Load 121 CD / download

The 19-minute-long set Harry Pussy played as part of a Siltbreeze package

tour in 1996 was one of the most wildly thrilling sets of rock and roll that I heard all decade. At its end singer-drummer Adris Hoyos looked like she’d run a marathon and barely survived. This 42-track CD, which gathers together all of the out-of-print vinyl from their postSiltbreeze days in all their distorted, dropout-strewn glory, is almost exactly four times as long as that concert, and if you play it all the way through you’re liable to feel as tuckered out as Hoyos was that night. But start it anywhere at random and let it run about fifteen minutes: after a good dose of the primal blurt of Hoyos’s screaming and drumming blasting through the guitarists’ trash-compacted, Beefhearty chordclash, you’ll more likely feel purged of anything that ails you and glad to be alive. HP’s secret? They made good on punk rock’s promise of rejuvenating abandon without giving in to its twin pitfalls of utter idiocy and suffocating conservatism. Bill Meyer

Humi Dune

MoonJune 019 CD

Like the hybrid word they’ve created as their project's name, this duo of Hugh Hopper and Yumi Hara Cawkwell are like conjoined musical syllables.

The results vary significantly over the course of these primarily improvised pieces. On the eight-minute “Shiranui” Cawkwell’s voice and Hopper’s bass and electronics leave plenty of room for silence, intensifying the simplest of movements. Conversely, the closing track, “Futa” has passages with so much punctuation that it sounds like a thought that can’t find its proper shape.

The most stirring aspect about these ten pieces is the confident resonance of each of the player’s instrumental tones.

Hopper is certainly the better known of the two (though Cawkwell has been a presence on the London experimental music scene since the beginning of this century), and it’s always a treat to hear his signature sound find new areas to explore. David Greenberger

Jackie-O Mutherfucker Freedom Land

Very Friiendly VF045 CD

Jackie-O Motherfucker’s output over the last few years has been uneven: a lot of people went crazy for their Flags of the Sacred Harp, but to these ears it was tentative and patchy, and last year’s Valley of Fire was disappointing.

They’ve seemed compassless for a while now, their few recent recorded peaks almost happenstance occurrences, less the result of group mind and more just dumb luck. They strike me as a live unit that doesn’t translate terribly well to studio/structure; in that respect, they’re the underground’s Grateful Dead—something Freedom Land, compiled from live recordings from their 2005–06 US tour, bears out.

The continued presence of Eva Salens drives the performances here, her vocals roaming across JOMF’s improvised hinterlands, calling down miracles with feverish glee. But the group’s playing doesn’t often match the intensity of Salens’s delivery, so she tends to drift from the host outfit’s orbit—you’d be better off listening to her solo albums as Inca Ore. But with “Pull My Daisy” JOMF start to connect, moving through

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

phases of freedom and relative structure with breezy ease, Danny Saraki’s drums being particularly illuminating in their mapping of that divide. JOMF are still plugging away at their vision of free Americana, equal parts improvisation, folk, rock and blues, but they’ve lost some of their focus and drive, meaning that Freedom Land comes across as slightly messy. Jon Dale

Seth Josel

The Stroke That Kills New World 80661-2 CD

Although the American-born, Berlinbased guitarist Seth Josel possesses such facility that he could operate in a number of spheres, he’s devoted himself to the domain of composition and recital where his instrument, which has been king for a generation or two everywhere else in the world, is a stepchild. On this record, he’s also a curator, selecting pieces from the expanded classical realm designed for or adaptable to his electric guitar. Several of them draw on rock music from the ’60s to the ’80s, from Pete Townsend’s discovery of the instrument’s sonic potential to Sonic Youth’s elevation of that potential to a position equivalent with the song. Others, however, don’t even acknowledge that rock music exists.

What these six compositions share is specificity; each isolates a phenomenon and exposes it at length. Some are much more successful than others as actual listening experiences. Eve Beglarian’s “Until It Blazes” opens the CD quite attractively with an examination of sharp attack and soft, delay-enhanced decay. Essentially it is a ten minute-long crescendo, its liquid reverberant figures rising gradually to a sandblasted climax.

Michael Fiday’s “Slapback” uses similar means—a limited number of phrases and a delay pedal—to achieve different ends. Unabashedly rocking, its chords slam hard right and left across the stereo spectrum, turning what is structurally a canon into music that blasts like a cannon. Gustavo Matamaros’s “Stoned Guitar/TIG Welder” takes its title from a cheap joke that doubles as a statement of methodology. Woozy as you might feel listening to Josel’s vertiginous glisses, which are gradually overtaken by an electrical hum, this guitar isn’t stoned the way you might think. Think about it, man; guitars don’t take drugs, har har. Josel literally plays his with a stone, which Matamaros has instructed him to apply to the strings from bridge to nut while the titular welder supplies a contrasting sound-stream. This piece feels more engaged with the past quarter-century of electric guitar practice in the world at large, and it succeeds spectacularly as a psychedelic listening experience. On the other hand, the way compositions by Tom Johnson, David Dramm, and Alvin Curran isolate a given compositional issue yields less satisfying results. Johnson uses six guitars and a canon form to multiply a limited number of pitches until you hear them all at once. It’s testament to Josel’s ear and fingers that he can pull it off so exactly, but even though at five minutes it’s half the length of anything else on the record, it’s likely to tire the listening ear with its compulsive retracings. This is minimalism minus the fun. The other two composers take a single mundane gesture—the strum—and break it down, test it, see what it’s made of. Your

willingness to go there with them will depend largely on your curiosity about structure. Bill Meyer

Zbigniew Karkowski & Tetsuo Furudate Zeitkratzer World as Will III Sub Rosa SR282 CD

Zbigniew Karkowski & Damion Romero 9 Before 9

Blossoming Noise BN035 CD

Zbigniew Karkowski & Lin Zhiying Switch

emd.pl 007 CD

World as Will III is the final part of a trilogy that has taken Polish-Swedish composer Zbigniew Karkowski and Japanese noise artist Tetsuo Furudate a decade to complete. Drawing from Schopenhauer’s philosophy of “world as will”—in essence, the idea that the will primarily creates the world and history—the final installment also features German ensemble Zeitkratzer, who commissioned the closing “Mix White.”

It's the pinnacle of this release, particularly the strained, knotted strings at its opening. I waver a bit on Karkowski’s work, but this is a good set, particularly for “Mergence,” the only truly collaborative composition on the disc.

After opening with around ten minutes of low, unyielding drone and hiss, which morphs and buckles around a solid, rattling sub, two heady minutes of slowly ascending, intricately tweaked noise build into a false crescendo—its sudden halt reveals a throbbing bass drone as

the fundamental of the composition.

Tonally, “Mergence” hovers closer to the dreaded “gothic/dark ambient” continuum than I’d like, but this element of industrial music damage is doggedly prevalent in modern noise/electronics.

Furudate’s “Below the Demarcation” is similarly moody, though its combination of heavy breaths and wild, rattling interference is all-encompassing and oppressive at high volume.

Karkowski’s collaboration with American noisician Damion Romero focuses on low-frequency explorations: the warning on the inside cover about stress to your playback systems pretty much defines what’s going on here. It’s more conceptual gambit than listening experience, though Karkowski and Romero know their way around both sonics and subsonics—the “audible” part of 9 Before 9 rumbles with authority, even as it develops little from its opening anti-flourish of charcoal-black growl and groan, and the subs are sculpted with almost erotic precision.

But it’s still closer to a stereo system test than something you’ll actively return to, so your interest will depend on your fondness for concept over content.

Switch, which teams Karkowski with young Chinese artist Lin Zhiying, is the flipside—the opening “Redirecting” is obstreperously busy, leaping between tart sections of roaring noise with jump-cut logic, while arpeggio stutters of distortion regularly infect the host’s body. “Exclusion Zone” lets up a little, particularly at its beginning, where it explores the possibilities of high-pitched whine and scurry. Out of these three collaborations, it’s the one you’ll return to most often, and while I’m still not entirely convinced Karkowski

is at the head of the pack, Switch is evidence that he’s worth checking in on occasionally. Jon Dale

Kasai Allstars

In the 7th Moon, the Chief Turned Into a Swimming Fish and Ate the Head of His Enemy by Magic Crammed CRAW44 CD

Devoted fans of Congolese music have been complaining since the 1990s that the popular bandleaders and singers in this music-rich country have veered off course in the direction of a slick, clichéd, shallow, overproduced kind of pabulum that has lost touch with the real roots of rumba. One of the trends that has emerged to set the balance right is the electro-traditional movement called “tradimoderne,” which draws directly on ethnic music from various regions of the Congo, combining a raw, noisy, urban Kinshasa sensibility with traditional rhythms and instruments. The Kasai Allstars are a virtual supergroup of singers, players and dancers in this style. Their personnel—nineteen in all are credited in the liner notes—are drawn from different bands working in this vein, including Masanka Sankayi, Tandjolo and Lusombe Madimba.

The group’s members also represent five distinct ethnic groups from Kasai province in Central Congo (a region the size of France), and the material they’ve put together is a blend of those cultural influences. The main instruments used here include slit drum, African xylophone, electric thumb piano, tam tam drum, several electric guitars, and lots of singing and percussion, with distortion woven throughout for good measure.

Each of the songs on this recording is tied to a traditional dance—Mutuashi, Londola, Musango, Koyi Le—and so the Kasai Allstars in action are as much a spectacular dance display as they are an explosive musical act, making this recording a perfect illustration of the intimate connection between music and dance that is typical throughout much of Africa. Kasai province has never fully recovered from the exploitation unleashed there by the colonial mining industry earlier in the twentieth century, and the steady movement of people from there to Kinshasa over decades has brought a lot of the rural music into the context of urban life. The tradimoderne musicians in the city capitalize on this by concocting a wild mixture of sounds that belong as much to the future as to the past. Kasai Allstars were included on Crammed Discs’ earlier compilation of the new Kinshasa bands, Congotronics 2: Buzz and Rumble from the Urb’n’Jungle, and now we have a whole disc from this exploratory and inventive group who keep one foot in the bush and the other in the 21st century. Alan Waters

Achim Kaufmann Mark Dresser Harris Eisenstadt Starmelodics Nuscope 1021 CD

Harris Eisenstadt Guewel

Clean Feed CF123 CD

Harris Eisenstadt is a model of intelligent versatility; whether he’s leading the band or contributing to the collective, the NYC-based drummer brings

WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #53 | 57

discernment and discipline to the proceedings. Perhaps it’s his schooling in African drum traditions that informs his sensitivity, or maybe it’s his experiences with improvising musicians as diverse as Sam Rivers and Jeff Parker, but his playing always seems keyed into exactly what the music needs.

Starmelodics is a collaborative trio with virtuoso bassist Mark Dresser and German pianist Achim Kaufmann. As piano combo methodologies go, this one sticks more to tone float than nonstop swing or cluster crash. Kaufmann’s touch is light and melodic; Dresser contributes counterpoint and color with his adroitly placed harmonics and singing bowed lines. Eisenstadt’s work here is mostly about careful shading and subtle momentum; even on his own compositions, his commentary always flows back into what the other players have to say rather than standing out for the sake of standing out.

Guewel is the Wolof word for griot, and this record reflects Eisenstadt’s deep involvement with African music without lapsing to obvious multi-kulti fusioneering. The material is drawn from Sengalese pop groups like Orchestra Baobab, but the horn-heavy, bassless line-up—besides Eisenstadt there’s Josh Sinton on baritone sax, Mark Taylor on French horn, and the spectacular one-two trumpet punch of Taylor Ho Bynum and Nate Wooley—scotches any notions of a groove-oriented jam session. Instead Eisenstadt pulls the tunes apart, letting the horn players improvise muttering conversations between outbreaks of uplifting melody. The results are truer to the group’s improv roots than to the sounds of Dakar’s top 40, and even after a half-dozen spins the record keeps the listener off-balance with its sudden shifts of tone. Bill Meyer

Khate 13

Khate CD-R

Phi

Khate CD-R

Detritivore

Just Not Normal dowload

A sense of willful mystery lies at the heart of Khate Gausmann’s music. How she acquires sound sources isn’t quite known; it’s more like a known unknown, if you’ll permit me to be Rumsfeldian for a moment. What’s known is that this Virginia-based circuit-bender tinkers with sound-making or -altering devices like guitar pedals, keyboards, and children’s toys. Then she tests their new capabilities, eventually sculpting finished tracks threaded with unrecognizable pop music samples, field recordings, and what have you into a sort of subterranean phantom ooze. What’s unknown is exactly what combination of bastardized elements is at work in any given song.

13 follows the gently coursing path set by predecessor Field Reports—see the waxing, waning limbo of “Grey,” the soft downy bubble’n’scrape of “Kitty Hospital,” or how “DX” weaves wind-chime tinkle into tearing, rotating rupture—but comes through with a few pleasantly abrasive moments. Namely: “Boxing Day,” where an ever-increasing series of shock-treatment crackles lay waste to a crumbling vocal sample. Phi, by contrast, is subdermal almost to the point of invisibility; its first trio of bite-size 58 | SIGNAL to NOISE #53 WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM

compositions fugue by on an undertow of surging, staticky foam, gray pulses throbbing weakly yet insistently—until “Trichotomic” arrives, unleashing sticky, darting stutter-steps and appropriated, anonymous bro-harmonies that resurface as soon as “Quinate [For Bela]” begins. That song quickly takes an Aphex Twin turn, with pluckings of downtuned guitar strings trudging through digital Pavlovian pings and pangs. Endcap “Eight Volt House” burrows a wheedling tunnel of smudged vocal, rippling wavelength tone, and flickering distortion straight to purgatory.

Released by free-download label Just Not Normal, Detritivore is the most engaging of Khate’s recent creations.

There’s a sense of daring and unrest that makes for a listening experience that’s more active and involving than her last few quietly turbulent recordings.

“Basic” opens with two disparate loops that sound great together—an insistent, boomeranging throb that resembles an irritable synth and robotic Conet Project intoning—then morphs into something even more complex, with effects that seem to slash into, gnaw at, and pummel the helicoptering mix.

There’s queasy “Diesel,” where generator pulses simulate a benign form of seasickness, while ”Isabel” pits blustery, locomotive chugga-chugga against the goosebump-inducing squeak-squeal of unoiled gears and the clatter of raining debris. Raymond Cummings

Land of the Kush Against the Day

Constellation CST058-2 CD

Montreal musician Sam Shalabi has never shied away from big ideas or big music. His 2003 disc Osama (Shalabi’s full first name) was “protest music about Arabophobia,” and on the literary front, he has been inspired by the sprawling works of Walter Benjamin.

The compositions of this experimental guitarist/oudist have shown similarly epic ambition; his albums with his group The Shalabi Effect have been dense, psychedelic odysseys through the Fourth World. So in writing for his 30-piece Land of Kush ensemble, modeled after the Nasser-era Egyptian classical orchestras, it’s hardly surprising that Shalabi would find a literary subject that equals the scale of his orchestra. If you’re going to go big, there is none bigger than Thomas Pynchon, the author of the American answer to Joyce’s Ulysses, Gravity’s Rainbow. It’s probably wise that Shalabi hasn’t chosen Gravity’s Rainbow as his inspiration, instead drawing on Pynchon’s most recent novel, Against the Day. Although he has divided the music into five sections, one for each of the book’s chapters, he allowed his three vocalists (Jason Grimmer, Molly Sweeney and Radwan Moumneh) to devise their own lyrics.

Conceptual albums can be painfully unwieldy, but despite the potential pitfalls, Shalabi and his orchestra pull this project off masterfully, fusing the Arabic pop of his 2008 album Eid with the North African grooves and sonic collages of The Shalabi Effect. It’s whirling, mesmerizing music, which ebbs and flows between the swooning tranquility of “Iceland Spar” and “Bilocations” and the soaring title track, which suggests a cross between Sonic Youth and Gnawa drumming. The stark, mournful strings and horns of “Rue Du Depart” provide

the perfect denouement. Shalabi may have simply intended Against the Day as a homage to Pynchon, but he’s created a dazzling crosscultural marriage of music and words that is monumental, complex, and beautiful in its own regard. Richard Moule

Steve Lantner Quartet Given: Live in Munster hatOLOGY 663 CD

Word is getting out about Bostonbased pianist Steve Lantner, based on his three strong trio CDs with Joe Morris on bass and either Luther Gray or Laurence Cook on drums. Two of the disks showed Lantner’s strengths in freely improvised settings, while What You Can Throw showcased his compositional skills alongside pieces

by Braxton and Ornette. On Given, Lantner, Morris, and Gray are joined by reed player Allan Chase for a kaleidoscopic live set. Lantner has a particular fascination with intervallic structures, and the single, continuous flow of “Given” is based around a four-note series (in set theory, it’s notated 0146: for example, C, D-flat, E, and F#). If that sounds like an intellectual conceit, these four musicians have internalized the structure to balance formalism with collective invention. Over the course of the 47-minute suite, the four ride the edges of lyricism, freedom, simmering pulse, and an elastic sense of time.

Morris and Gray synch perfectly with Lantner’s mercurial sense of phrasing and Chase’s probing, angular post-bop freedom. What makes this session particularly engaging, though, is the way the quartet fits together so inextricably, moving between full-ensemble sections

and trios, duos, and solos, interweaving lines that morph from fiery angularity to skittering free swing to quiet, open musings. Michael Rosenstein

Thomas Lehn & Gerry Hemingway Kinetics

first place, and that’s where the refined attunement that comes from working together, pushing forward, and having the chops and chemistry to get where you need to go comes in. Bill Meyer

timbral control. This is another stellar release from Another Timbre and yet another reason to check out Seymour Wright. Michael Rosenstein

Sebastian Lexer Seymour Wright

Point Conception

Blasen

Auricle AUR-8 CD

Kinetics makes a persuasive case for the virtues of good recording, thoughtful post-production, and musical maturation. Which isn’t to say that Tom & Gerry’s previous efforts for Erstwhile and Umbrella were bad records; in particular, their self-titled debut presented a thrilling exchange of electronic and acoustic sounds in real time. But this one, on Hemingway’s own label, is even better. One reason is the audio quality, which fully realizes the tactile sensation of Lehn’s analog synthesizer-playing and satisfyingly recreates the vibrations of air molecules around Hemingway’s cymbal strokes. You’ll lose some of the music if you run Kinetics via itty-bitty wires into tiny speakers; this baby demands to be played on a decent stereo system with speakers of a certain size. The same care that got the most out of the self-recorded live performances also, I suspect, went into picking the right ones; there’s not a wasted second on this CD. Hemingway and Lehn sustain enormous and unwavering control throughout, even in long moments near the silence threshold. This is the duo’s quietest album; they dole out the fireworks as sparingly as a fire marshal in woodworking class. If the double-disc Tom & Gerry gave us a bit too much, this one gives us only the right stuff. Of course that stuff had to be there in the

Another Timbre AT13 CD

Last year, British reed-player Seymour Wright attracted some well-deserved attention with his self-produced solo release Seymour Wright of Derby, as well as a duo recording with Keith Rowe. This collaboration with pianist Sebastian Lexer is another don’t-miss proposition. Wright and Lexer are part of a nexus of musicians who have been participating in Eddie Prévost’s regular Friday workshops in London since the late ’90s. Wright is one of a handful of reed players who have managed to define a truly personal vocabulary out of extended reed technique, integrating every breath, reed vibration, keypad flutter, and hissed microtone into a unique improvisational language.

Likewise, Lexer has delved into the strings, sounding board, and mechanical action of the piano to develop a nuanced approach to the instrument; he also adds subtle real-time electronic processing to this session. Every sound is placed precisely in these two expansive improvisations: there is a careful balance between attack and decay, resonance and sympathetic overtones, the metallic reverberation of strings and the sax’s percussive key-snaps and pinched cries. Lexer’s electronics shade almost imperceptibly into the musicians’ exquisite demonstrations of

Daniel Lentz Cold Blue CB 0028 CD

Composer Daniel Lentz is from Pennsylvania, but he’s been based out west for decades. He’s recorded albums for various labels, including Cold Blue, the Los Angeles imprint that has released minimalist and post-minimalist works by West Coast-associated artists such as James Tenney and Harold Budd. Critic and composer Kyle Gann has called the composer’s pieces “pretty,” but goes on to say that Lentz creates work in “many shades of pretty: comfy pretty, orgasmic pretty, weird pretty, disturbing pretty, aggressive pretty, chaotic pretty.”

This disc receives its title from Lentz’s “Point Conception (for nine pianos)”.

Originally released on vinyl in 1984, it might be thought of as an example of maximalist minimalism; an intoxicating construction built out of layer upon layer of lines awash in octaves. The piece might not feature the insistent plinking associated with minimalism, but the repetition, accretion, and subtle shifting that are emblematic of the style are strongly in evidence. On this recording, Arlene Dunlap is the sole pianist: she’s been overdubbed again and again to create a dramatic tower of sound.

The album’s other track, the previously unrecorded “Nightbreaker (for four pianos),” is performed by pianist Bryan Pezzone. When I played the piece in the store where I work, a customer asked if the music was by Scriabin. Fair

WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #53 | 59

enough, it has some of the wild and wooly quality of the Russian composer’s pianistic flights. Here it’s clear that Lentz has moved beyond minimalism as he reworks the great 19th-century piano tradition in unusual ways. Fred Cisterna

Evgeny Masloboev Anastasia Masloboeva Russian Folksongs in the Key of Rhythmm Leo LR 517 CD

Vyacheslav Guyveronsky Andrey Kondakov Vladimir Volkov Christmas Concert Leo LR 520 CD

Russian expatriate Leo Feigin has done as much as anyone to offer an alternative impression of the music of his native country of over 140 million people. The roster of Leo Records is stocked with innovative musicians like the Ganelin Trio, Sergey Kuryokhin (whose massive eightCD boxed set was just released), and Simon Nabatov. Two new CDs feature different instrumentation and musical approaches but still bear witness to the creativity of the Russian music scene.

Evgeny Masloboev and Anastasia Masloboeva are a father-daughter musical team from Eastern Siberia. At the time of this 2002 recording, the father, who plays percussion ranging from drums and marimba to pandeiro and “industrial junk,” was 38 and his daughter 15. The title is straightforward enough: the pair reimagine Russian folk music within the spare setting of two voices and percussion. Folk music in Russia has always had a subversive bent, usually in the lyrics, but the Masloboevs add an avant-garde element to the mix. Anastasia is an ethereal singer, and there is something very beautiful yet disquieting about her presence. The vocals are often layered, and the effect is akin to Native American chant or medieval church music.

The St. Petersburg trio of Vyacheslav Guyvoronsky (trumpet, voice, woodpipe), Andrey Kondakov (piano, percussion, woodpipe) and Vladimir Volkov (bass, woodpipe) works in a mode more familiar to aficionados of Leo’s avant-garde jazz output. The five pieces (plus a short bass interlude) on Christmas Concert were recorded at a live performance in the group’s home town. Though Vladimir Putin might object to Russia being considered part of Europe, the music here is certainly within that continent’s progressive music tradition, with classical flourishes battling lustily with cacophonous fecundity.

Elsewhere, these musicians work in very different musical areas (Kondakov plays with Igor Butman; Guyvoronsky writes chamber music; Volkov is a peripatetic free musician), but when they’re together they create music that is cohesive yet spontaneous. Andrey Henkin

Tony Malaby Cello Trio Warblepeck

Songlines SGL SA1574-2 SACD

Sean Conly Re: Action

Clean Feed CF124 CD

Casting is key on these two efforts, which share inside-outside aspirations and the presence of soprano/tenor saxophonist Tony Malaby. Malaby 60 | SIGNAL to NOISE #53 WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM

gained notice working with Paul Motian and Charlie Haden, leaders who might like to open the door just a little bit, but aren’t going to step out and get wet; on his own, he’s been more willing take the music out a ways, and he’s paid close attention to the way the right player affects the music; a trio with William Parker and Nasheet Waits will take you somewhere different than one with Motian and Drew Gress. Here he’s made unlikely bedfellows of frequent partner John Hollenbeck (drums, percussion) and new collaborator Fred Lonberg-Holm (cello, electronics). It’s hard to say how Hollenbeck, who hews toward tunes and careful arranging with his own large band and the Claudia Quintet, and Lonberg-Holm, whose list of collaborators ranges from Peter Brötzmann to Simon Joyner, would fare in a long-term relationship, but they’re startlingly complementary in this brief fling. Hollenbeck reinforces Malaby’s melodic bent, but the cellist draws on his acumen as an accompanist to give special consideration to those same contours. Together they entice Malaby into exploring more exotic territory, including birdcalls and walkie-talkie-like twitters. The effect is a bit like seeing your old buddy who always wears a nice oxford button-down turn up in sharply tailored tropical wear.

Journeyman bassist Sean Conly has worked for over a decade in New York City for such disparate employers as Lew Tabackin and Andrew Hill.

He’s stacked the deck on his first solo effort with a strong band that includes Malaby, alto/baritone saxophonist Michael Attias, and veteran drummer Pheeroan akLaff. Conly is a good player, but he puts the spotlight more on what his band can do with his compositions than on his own quite solid soloing. It’s a wise decision; the best moments come when the other players strike sparks off each other, such as Malaby and akLaff’s smoking duel during “Daily Mutation,” or when they linger at length over one of the melodies, as Attias does on the ballad “Intone.” A cover of Dolphy’s “Gazzelloni” testifies to Conly’s taste for strong structures, and the anomalous musique concrète snippet “Concrete Garden” suggests that he might profitably pursue other directions. But Re:Action satisfies most by giving his sidemen strong material that they can shape as they will. Bill Meyer

Jim McAuley

The Ultimate Frog Drip Audio DA00406 CDx2

Guitarist Jim McAuley’s career began in the late 1960s with the folk-rock group Mouse. They signed a contract with Capitol Records, moved to Los Angeles and promptly disbanded without even managing to record their debut album.

After McAuley subsequently worked as a session guitarist on albums by Frank Sinatra, Perry Como and other popular entertainers, a later contract (1976) with John Fahey’s Takoma Records was scuppered when the company was bought by Chrysalis. He's capable of playing in a wide variety of modes, but his personal style is hard to pin down. His releases to date consist of the Acoustic Guitar Trio’s self-titled debut (Incus, 2002), and a solo album, Gongfarmer 18, issued on Nine Winds in 2005. McAuley is an extremely resourceful, cliché-free improviser on

all his instruments (classical guitar, steelstring guitar, 12-string guitar, dobro, prepared Marquette parlor guitar and marxophone, the last of these being a kind of hammered dulcimer), and he’s not averse to playing an occasional tune, if it’s a good one. This beautifully presented two-CD set consists of duos: with the late Leroy Jenkins (violin), Ken Filiano (double bass), and the Cline brothers, Alex (percussion) and Nels (various guitars). The duos with Alex Cline are, in the main, spacious and delicate affairs. When using tuned percussion—bells and gongs—rather than the drumkit, Cline creates soundscapes that give McAuley considerable latitude in his placement of notes. Their interplay is more closely responsive than McAuley’s duos with Nels Cline, in which the guitarists run a parallel course, engaging glancingly, somewhat as players respond to each other during uptempo free-jazz blowouts, though free jazz this most certainly is not. As two-thirds of the Acoustic Guitar Trio, Cline and McAuley know each other’s work well. It shows in the way that, although they seem in their improvisations to be working independently, everything they do fits neatly together.

True empathy, in other words. As for the duos with Filiano, each of them is different in nature, as though areas of exploration had been prearranged. If that’s the case, it doesn't hamper their creativity one whit. In the freewheeling, sometimes scrabbling duos with Jenkins, sparks fly, especially when he and McAuley are struggling to find common ground. The set concludes with a solo threnody for friend and fellow Acoustic Guitar Trio member Rod Poole, who was murdered in 2007.

Brian Marley

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 slightly more prosaic—it’s Merzbow in timehonored style, replete with 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 psychedelic 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 could almost function as a Merzbow primer. Keio Line, where Akita teams up with French guitarist Richard Pinhas (leader of prog outfit Heldon), 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 nearly all in-the-red, on Keio Line Akita progresses with great subtlety. He’s more interested in pulse here 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

Merzbow

Peggy Lee Group

Important IMPREC 205 CD

Drip Audio DA00318 CD

Dolphin Sonar Zophorous

Blossoming Noise BN024 CD

Richard Pinhas and Merzbow Keio Line

Cuneiform RUNE 278/279 CD x 2

It’s taken some work to quell my suspicions of 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 analog 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 about the artist. This is the case with his latest stretch of music, of which Dolphin Sonar may be the most impressive effort.

Recorded to protest annual dolphin slaughter in Taiji, Wakayama Prefecture, 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

Lisa Miller Octet Sleep Furiously Green Ideas 291107 CD

New Code

Western Canada’s creative music scene continues to flourish, offering remarkable jazz and improvised music by a cadre of spirits such as violinist Jesse Zubot, cellist Peggy Lee, percussionist Dylan van der Schyff, trumpeter Brad Turner, guitarist Tony Wilson and pianist Lisa Miller. Miller’s Sleep Furiously presents the pianist at the helm of an octet combining a guitar/piano/bass/drums jazz ensemble with a string quartet. Miller places the strings on equal footing with the rest of the ensemble, as when Zubot and Lee’s thistle-sharp creaks enter into dialogue with guitarist Ron Samworth’s overdriven eruptions on the eerily foreboding opener, “I Cry.” At the music’s core is van der Schyff, who acts as a colorist, shadowing the strings or kicking things into high gear, an approach that works well on “Singing,” a folksy, epic crescendo of contrasting quartets. The glorious drama-filled ostinato on “Sleep Furiously” highlights Miller’s meticulous execution, and the record’s finale, “Green Ideas,” sums up her conception with a string reverie that meets a brief no-nonsense groove.

Miller has crafted a personal synthesis of chamber music, experimentalism and jazz that demands attention.

On New Code, the Peggy Lee Band expands from a sextet to an octet thanks to the addition of Samworth and tenor saxophonist Jon Bentley. These twelve pieces may surprise those who only know

Lee as an improviser. The record’s program of originals is bookended by a jubilant country waltz take on Bob Dylan’s “All I Really Want to Do” and a reading of Kurt Weill’s “Lost in the Stars” that highlights Lee’s gorgeous horn arrangements. In between is a multi-layered outing that boasts fire, raw emotion and plaintiveness while touching base with jazz, chamber music and collective improvisation.

The moody “Preparations” unfolds as a group conversation, particularly at its somber conclusion, while the guitar pyrotechnics of “Not a Wake Up Call” sit harmoniously alongside the forceful skittishness of “Scribble Town” and the fluid propulsion of “Tug” and “Shifting Tide.” While Lee mostly plays a supporting role, three “Offshoots” place her in improvisatory settings with Turner, Bentley and trombonist Jeremy Berkman. Her robust compositions make a compelling showcase for Vancouver’s finest talents. Jay Collins

Moscow Composers Orchestra featuring Sainkho Portrait of an Idealist Leo LR 527 CD

This project was originally intended to be a tribute to the Russian writer Daniil Kharms, a casualty of Stalinist persecution who died in the psych ward of a Leningrad prison in 1942. He started his career as an avant-gardist in the spirit of Dadaist and later, Fluxus movements, which put him at odds with the cultural policy of “social realism.” Three of the tracks here set his poems to music.

During the recording process, one of Kharms' kindred idealists died. “Nikolay Dmitriev,” writes Leo Feigin in the liner notes, “managed to put together The Moscow Composers Orchestra at a very troubled time in the history of Russia—the years following perestroika.”

He also ran the Dom Cultural Center, Moscow’s showcase venue for creative music. Tuvan singer Sainkho Namchylak helped make the project an homage to Dmitriev as well, penning the title track and opening cut in dedication to his memory. She declaims her elegiac lines in an expressive Russian that translates speech into music easily. Pianist Vladimir Miller, bassist Vladimir Volkov, and drummer Vladimir Tarasov confirm that translation near her recital’s end with their chimes of musical comments.

Those segue seamlessly to Sainkho’s lovely ballad “One Lilac Evening.”

The eight MCO players lay down an opening redolent of early New Orleans, later East Berlin—Slavic soul blues, speaking its several tongues. Sainkho sings her words in a clear, soft lilt; the song evolves into something more modern, modal, open; she switches to her higher, scratchier voice, matching well the MCO nuclear family of strings (violin, cello, bass, bowed) in both ringing and resin-scratchy timbres; then to her middle-voice shout, reaching with them all in group improvs that seem to gallop like stallions through high wind. High points of the other tracks include Vladimir Miller’s composing, Sergey Letov’s multi-reeds, Alexander Alexandrov’s plyings of the bassoon voice in this context—and the brilliant balance between wild and tender, raw and refined, literary and musical that all pull off together. This CD is a perfect example of the wide yet integrated

range particular to this Eurasian scene.

It is rich with Sainkho’s several-voices-inone, and her usual comfort and power in moving between the now and the archaic, especially her own Tuvan vocabulary that speaks the free-jazz lingo so fluently. Her prowess as a composer is a singular revelation here. Even so, she does come across as more of a guest than a star, rightly enough: it's the MCO that more personally extends the vision of the man who managed and presented them to the world, as well as the re-visioned history of Kharms. The same riches of integrated range— command of jazz styles from the whole of the music’s history throughout the world, of its idiomatic intimacy with Western art music and with other art forms and cultures, of the most artful improvisations flying beyond the constraints of idiom by soaring in their spirits—define the MCO, eightfold.

Sainkho embodies them in her person, but they put the same freedom-in-fate on full display as a group, functioning as one. Virtuosi all, down and dirty, childlike and older than old, in and out of time. Mike Heffley

Musica Elettronica Viva MEV 40

New World 80675-2 CDx4

Among the most provocative, undefinable, and utopian of ensembles, Musica Elettronica Viva has endured due to its near-clandestine existence and a shared outlook. Its core members—Alvin Curran, Richard Teitelbaum, Frederic Rzewski—practice a radical democracy and an essential playfulness with sound materials. Educated at elite American music schools in the early 1960s, each went off to Italy for further study; with other expatriates in Rome, they founded MEV in 1966. Ever variable in size, the collective sought to challenge reigning orthodoxies and pose alternatives for organizing sound; its music was strongly influenced by Cage and Feldman, as well as the Fluxus movement and the free jazz scene. After all these years, the group continues to challenge listeners: “Mass. Pike,” the final piece on the four-CD retrospective MEV 40, was recorded at the Tanglewood contemporary music festival in 2007, and it left much of its audience perplexed by its wayward references, its collage aesthetic, its intuitive form.

From the start, MEV pioneered the use of live electronics alongside traditional instruments and assorted contraptions. The work was completely a matter of performance, freely improvised with no predetermined plan.

Their first big piece, “Spacecraft,” was produced throughout Western Europe in the fall of 1967, and the Berlin version heard here differs markedly from the Cologne performance on the Alga Marghen release—shorter, more intense. It’s perhaps their most abstract piece: even known instruments (tenor sax, voice, trumpet) are made strange, and with Rzewski’s amplified glass plate, Curran’s contact mikes, and Teitelbaum’s early Moog synthesizer triggered partly by brain waves, the musical experience was more like a happening.

The late ’60s was MEV’s most active period, since they were all living in Rome—including another frequent member, soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy, who is heard on over half the mu-

WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #53 | 61

sic in this box. The ensemble continued briefly in New York during the early ’70s, when trombonist Garrett List became a regular member, but after Curran returned to Rome and Rzewski moved to Belgium, MEV regrouped only as opportunities arose. As these seven concerts attest, each served as a fleeting laboratory for current ideas, themes, acquisitions, and topical commentary.

This is a music of friendly anarchy, whose imaginative space expanded through the decades. The textures and delicate juxtapositions became more complex, in part due to the increased sophistication of synthesizers and samplers. Sometimes when Lacy was present the group would coalesce as a jazz band around his knotty tunes, as in the second set of the 1982 Amsterdam concert. Likewise, the 2002 Ferrara performance (a sextet with George Lewis) includes an intermittent Lacy medley—it was to be his last appearance with MEV. Even more remarkable is a sequence where List’s fractured vocal delivery of “You Are My Sunshine” leads into a moving duet between Curran (on the shofar) and Lacy, before they all launch into Lacy’s “Deadline.”

I’ll never forget MEV’s concert at New Jersey’s Montclair State University in 2005: there, on the big stage, the three core members sat, bent over their consoles and keyboards—three mystic rabbis rattling the keys, conjuring their magic gardens, their clouds of gnosis and unknowingness. Jason Weiss

Mendi and Keith Obadike Crosstalk

Bridge 9285 CD

Multimedia duo Mendi and Keith Obadike have created a number of works together, including the internet opera Sour Thunder, a sound installation at Northwestern University entitled Big House/Disclosure, and a book of poetry; they are currently at work on an opera, Four Electric Ghosts, slated for premiere at the Kitchen in 2009. Their latest CD, Crosstalk, features recordings and compositions by various hands that feature spoken word; the results are an hour-long exploration of American grammars, both spoken and musical.

Some of the participants—Daniel Bernard Roumain, DJ Spooky, and Guillermo Brown—have recorded for Thirsty Ear’s Blue Series, which combines electronics, jazz, and hip hop influences; others, such as Paul Lansky and John Link, are from the world of contemporary concert music. Lansky, whose work has also been used by Radiohead, contributes the CD’s lengthiest and most fascinating piece: “The Chatter of Pins,” a confluence of English folksong, ’80s rap styles, subtle percussion punctuations and delicate electroacoustic shadings. DJ Spooky’s “Being Black (featuring Ursula Rucker)” is an all-too fleeting exploration of sonorous spoken word accompanied by trip-hop beats, dissonant ambient halos, and a splash of scratching. Link’s “Life Studies, Movement 1” features digital synthesis and a recording of Shakespearean scholar Helen Vendler reading Sonnet #65. The result is an engaging combination of regular pulsations, percussive attacks, layered washes of speech snippets, and fragmentary pitch gestures. Drummer Guillermo Brown places big beats front and center on “Electroprayer 5.0.”

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

George Lewis’s “Morning Blues for Yvan” is a real-time laptop improvisation that incorporates fragments of the composer’s trombone playing. Bernard Roumain, on the other hand, employs portions of interviews of friends and family from Harlem, discussing ideas of loss and mourning. The accompanying soundtrack is appropriately mournful, ostinato-laden electronica. “The Pink of Stealth,” by Mendi and Keith, interweaves snatches of speech with a vibrant collection of sounds deriving from processed thumb pianos and a fox hunt. Though the project’s participants take different approaches to the challenge of incorporating speech into music, Crosstalk is unified by the high quality of their contributions.

Christian Carey

DJ Olive Triage

Room40 RM429 CD

Likes its two predecessors, Buoy (2004) and Sleep (2006), DJ Olive’s third “sleeping pill” comes with a humble entreaty to the listener to “please listen quietly.” Following this simple instruction, with the lights dimmed low and bed sheets pulled about my chin, I have yet to make it through this album’s near 60 minutes. While this proves that the former exponent of Brooklyn’s illbient scene may have hit upon a cure for insomnia, it also points to an unresolved paradox within the series; namely, that some of this dreamlike music is never meant to be heard. The gently shifting electronic waves, buried whimpers and chiming percussion that begin Triage lap in constant tidal rhythm against the senses, potent enough to lull the mind into pleasant slumber. But beyond this point lay other, potentially undetected delights: carefully deployed passages of woozy turntablism that recall the dusty vinyl collages of Philip Jeck, David Watson’s drowsy reports on bagpipes, the faintest phantom of an oscillating drone and the decaying voice of a steel-stringed guitar. But by this stage, any drowsy listener will have long since drifted into fairyland. Spencer Grady

Charlie Parker

Bird in Time: 1940-1947 ESP-Disk 3000 CD x 4

It’s difficult to say whether producer Michael Anderson’s compilation of Charlie Parker airchecks, studio recordings, rarities, and musician interviews is a terrific collection of obscurities for aficionados or a somewhat awkward multimedia jazz history lesson. The selection of music is first-rate, although not necessarily essential listening for anyone but Bird fanatics, and it offers a fascinating portrait of the development and early flowering of Parker’s music. However, navigating between the two booklets of biography and recording session details on the one hand, and the four discs of music and interview excerpts on the other, can be a trial.

The music ranges from the revelatory to the mundane, and all of it has been previously available on various bootleg labels. The set starts out strong with several airchecks by Jay McShann’s big band in which an apprentice Parker sounds perfectly at home. The sessions reveal how deeply Parker’s later music was grounded in Kansas City swing, and they feature solos in which one

hears the seeds from which his mature style grew. It’s also great music. Bird’s late-'30s demo (some date it 1940) and a 1942 studio recording with guitarist Efferge Ware are also revealing peeks at a young journeyman altoist testing ideas and building a style. Other dates are interesting only to those with a hardcore Parker jones. The Bob Redcross sessions, recorded in a Chicago hotel room, are laidback musicians-only jam sessions that don’t add much to the canon. Ten tracks by trumpeter Cootie Williams’ Orchestra are included, but only “Floogie Boo” includes a Parker solo, and an astonishing one at that.

The remaining nine tunes don’t tell us enough about Bird to justify their inclusion, as enjoyable as they are.

However, the three Barry Ulanov Jazz All-Stars broadcasts with Dizzy Gillespie, Fats Navarro, Lennie Tristano, and John LaPorta, among others, are blazing, worth adding to any Parker collection.

The same is true of a lovely three-alto aircheck with Bird, Willie Smith, Benny Carter and the King Cole Trio “backing up in the background.” A couple smalllabel rarities are nice to have, but anyone seriously interested in Bird is better off getting the Dial label collection rather than the few Dial tracks included here. The interview material puts the music in a more personal context. You hear the pride that men like Max Roach, and Howard McGhee take in what they accomplished and their indignation at the way Parker’s life has been misrepresented and his achievements belittled by wider American culture.

The booklets present a biographical outline of Parker’s life, with quotes from Anderson’s own interviews with Roach and Roy Porter, as well as

interviews conducted by others, such as Leonard Feather. But the layout makes information about important sessions not included in the set look exactly like information about sessions that are in the box, and there’s no separate listing of the set’s contents. Finding out what you’re listening to requires some searching, which can be a drag. And personnel listings are not as complete as they could be. McShann’s excellent trumpet players, Buddy Anderson and Orville Minor, deserve props, for instance. But if you have the patience and the CD remote, it’s rewarding to read, listen to the music in the context of Bird’s life, pause and read some more. Ed Hazell

and repeatedly overdubbing tracks.

The work’s density is nearly stifling, transforming the piano from a melodic instrument into a source of hammering cacophony and sound-bursts. It’d be difficult to recreate this work in a live setting, but that makes this recording all the more intriguing as an artifact. By contrast, “176” is a relaxed affair—open and spacious, with a sense of mischief.

Working entirely with techniques that don’t involve fingers touching the keys, the pair resort to elbows, knuckles and god knows what else. It’s rich and fluid music, which offers a welcome change of pace and space from “Tectonic.”

Lawrence English

Anthony Pateras Chris Abrahams

The Teen-Pop-Noise Virus

Tectonic/176

anthonypateras.com download

Chris Abrahams has been questioning the character of the piano for over two decades now. His work with The Necks has allowed him to explore a wide range of compositional forms and performance styles, something that has carried over into his solo outings.

Anthony Pateras, a comparative newcomer, has forged ahead in recent years with his prepared piano excursions and developed an increasingly personal approach through successive European tours. Here these two Australian pianists unite for a pair of long-form conceptual compositions, mixed in both surround and stereo formats. “Tectonic” is the most instantly captivating work. It’s an oppressive yet enveloping storm of notes; the pair created it by working in octaves, close-miking the piano

Poptastic Seeland 530 CD

Kanye West

808s and Heartbreak Roc-a-Fella 1791341 CD

Vocal distortion technology is inherently contradictory; its use can either suggest that whatever ideas or feelings the performer seeks to impart are so extraordinary that filtering effects are essential to get the point across, or merely that the performer is making sport of those who subscribe to the first notion. Of course, Autotune and its bastard(izing) kin can also serve as masks for talentlessness, laziness, or creative bankruptcy. But for the purposes of this review, let’s play devil’s advocate and give Poptastic and Kanye West the benefit of the doubt: let’s posit that they opted to shred, puree, and otherwise distress their voices for legitimate artistic reasons.

The Teen-Pop-Noise Virus is what its title (and the grayscale paintings of young adults and tacky, lovelorn portraits in the liners) suggest that it is: a cut-out rack pop R&B album. The twist? Its co-ed coterie of makers and performers—experimental producers Chris Fitzpatrick and Thomas Dimuzio among them—aren’t teenagers, and their would-be hit singles are sonically shocked and waterboarded within an inch of their precious bitrates. It’s an interesting idea in theory, isn’t it: flipping the vapidity of adolescent-emotion-asimagined-by-studio-execs into noise art, funneling fluffy tripe like “I can’t escape the memory of yesterday when I held you in my arms” and “Somehow, someday I will bring you my love / It was sent from above for you, and for me” through an aural meat grinder for 50 minutes, the cavalcade of overtreated voices wrapped around the saccharine hooks, dripping with acidic digital static. Poptastic tip their hand too far in terms of harshness, turning Virus into a brutal slog: the album’s too catchy to work as noise yet too ugly to work as actual pop. But even that would be forgivable if the record didn’t suffer from a nasty case of vertigo that makes it impossible to get a solid handle on either aesthetic, let alone sit through it all without reaching for a Merzbow disc for some palate-cleansing. As a concept Poptastic is worth expanding upon—the liners alone are worth the price of admission—but only if the wizards behind the curtain don’t urge the listener to puke up her lunch.

Kanye West’s engrossing 808s and Heartbreak is equally tough to stomach, for different reasons.

Somehow, over the course of four or

WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #53 | 63

five years, rap’s Great Polo-shirted Hope has gone from hotshot hip-hop producer to ballin’ with a backpack to self-obsessed and vexing to a whiny diva-dude willing to devote an entire record—where he sings, for Christ’s sake—to castigating an ex for a breakup for which he himself was largely responsible. There’s no denying that the guy’s an out-and-out asshole, and his plaints about throttling a lover and claims that female adultery is worse than male adultery aren’t going to endear him further to Oprah viewers. But—and this is a big “but”—if you make it past that roadblock, there’s a lot to savor here. Vocal filters blur his unstudied croon into a tragic narrative sneer where cocksucker bravado disguises an undercurrent of self-disgust, and the bleary, titular synths melt together into a regal, downcast rue: “Robocop” cracking wise about living in the shadow of female suspicion over mechanized whirs, “Amazing” attempting to steamroller sorrow with outsized self-aggrandizement, doleful pianos, and Young Jeezy, and on, deeper into a den of Austin Powers references and abject misery. One suspects that for West, this Heartbreak is less about a defunct relationship than about the death of his mother; some emotional experiences are impossible to process, let alone, convey in song, and it’s very possible that his ex acts here as a surrogate punching bag for outrage at one of the few things he can’t control: mortality. Raymond Cummings

Enrico Rava New York Days ECM 2523 CD

As the leading proponent of Miles Davis’s less-is-more approach to the trumpet, Enrico Rava does some of his best writing for the spaces between the notes. Who better, then, for him to team up with than fellow masters of minimalism, saxophonist Mark Turner and drummer Paul Motian? Filled out

by Rava’s longtime pianist Stefano Bollani and bassist Larry Grenadier, this is a quintet that relishes sibilant cymbals and textured vertical tenor slashes, and can go for long stretches without pulse or melodic development. When a motivic gesture actually signals forward motion—such as Motian’s crisp ridecymbal pattern on “Improvisation I” or Grenadier’s onrushing introduction to “Outsider”—it cuts through like a beacon, but it’s no surprise when gauzier statements quickly supplant it. These New York days are more likely spent in a mist-covered Central Park than in cross-town traffic, although the occasional breathy rip from Rava or cascading burble from Turner remind you there’s life in the city. Three pieces that sit in the middle of the disc have more flesh on their bones, but something is askew in each. The first, “Thank You, Come Again,” begins with a jaunty piano figure and proceeds conventionally, but Motian’s cymbal strokes are drawn out just enough to create some drag. The second, “Count Dracula,” begins as a pretty ballad, but the tempo begins to melt like wax midway through. “Luna Urbana,” an off-kilter tango, rounds out this small grouping. Following a two-part improvisation in which Rava and Turner exchange roles at the halfway point, 64 | SIGNAL to NOISE #53 WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM

the trumpeter concludes with a pair of gorgeous ballads featuring melodies that are more fully formed. Even here, though, much of the beauty is in what’s left unsaid. James Hale

Revolutionary Ensemble

Beyond the Boundary of Time Mutable 17532-2 CD

This unit, formed in 1970 by violinist Leroy Jenkins, bassist Sirone, and drummer Jerome Cooper, was one of the truly unique trios in new music. Jenkins brought improvisational advances that he’d pioneered as part of Chicago’s AACM, while Sirone supplied the energy of free jazz, accrued during gigs with Albert Ayler, Marion Brown, and Pharoah Sanders; Cooper, meanwhile, contributed a singular approach to rhythm and timbre. In the early ’70s they released a handful of records, most of which are now out of print.

Their reunion at the 2004 Vision Festival was met with a mix of excitement and apprehension. Their Vision set and the subsequent studio recording (and now... on Pi) proved that they were still a potent combination. Unfortunately, the trio played very few gigs due to Jenkins’ flagging health, and this release captures their final live performance in May 2005 in Warsaw, Poland. Featuring one piece by each member and two collective improvisations, the concert provides an opportunity to hear the unique sensibilities each musician brought to the group. There’s the balance of Sirone’s muscular, fat sound; Jenkins’ keening, abstract sense of form rooted in deep-seated extensions of blues and jazz tradition; and Cooper’s structural sense of time and floating swing feeling. From Sirone’s opening solo statement on his piece “Configuration,” the trio makes it clear that they had lost little of the spirit that imbued their sound a quarter century before. Jenkins’ “Usami” is particularly strong, the formal structure serving as a framework for textural contrasts complemented by an achingly beautiful melodic thread.

Cooper’s “Le-Si-Jer” has a suite-like structure, with features for each of the musicians based on a repeated melodic kernel; there are some powerful spots, though it is marred by a meandering section for Cooper on chiramia and Yamaha PSR 1500. The two closing collective improvisations are the true highlights, elegantly structured and fired by stellar playing by all three. This may not be their strongest recording, but with Jenkins now gone, it’s a valuable reminder of what a revolutionary group this really was. Michael Rosenstein

Arthur Rhames & Charles Telerant Two in NY

Ayler AYL-DL108 download

Arthur Rhames was a prodigious, flamboyantly gifted musician. He wasn’t just good, he was virtuosic on every instrument he played, and he played a ridiculously wide range of them, including guitar, piano, and tenor and soprano saxophones. Music poured out of him, like a painful necessity, like a need to get high, as if he could push himself to higher and higher levels of ecstasy if he could play enough notes fast enough for long enough. This

duet with drummer Charles Telerant, the bulk of which was recorded at Soundscape in March, 1982, features Rhames on his four primary instruments, with all the knobs set at eleven from the opening notes. Following two short pieces recorded guerrilla-style on New York streetcorners, the solo piano opener, “Rachmaninoff on Giant Steps,” is exactly as billed, Rhames weaving an extravagant swingingclassical fantasia of baroque lines and advanced harmonies that morphs into Coltrane’s classic tune, played even faster than the original. When he turns to the guitar, he cranks out gritty rock riffs and plays call and response. He’s no slouch on standard jazz material, either. He chews through the changes of “I Got Rhythm” like a school of piranha devouring a wounded tapir.

Coltrane was clearly a Rhames fixation, but though he doesn’t escape his shadow, there are clear indications that he was working through Trane toward something of his own. At times on “Let My People Go” and “Mr. PC” his lines veer off in an unexpected direction or explode into growls and multiphonics when you’re least expecting it. It’s like a grenade going off in your hand. Telerant is a perfectly fine free-jazz drummer, but he’s clearly hanging on for dear life, hoping he won’t get thrown from the careening train of Rhames’s music. Frustratingly, Rhames never quite took control of his talent before he died in 1989 at age 32. Unlike, say, Sam Rivers, another improvising polymath, he never found a satisfying context for all the music in him, a way to assemble everything into a coherent whole. The reasons for this are undoubtedly many and complex, but considering the trying conditions under which he worked, he sure made some inspiring music during the time he had on Earth. Ed Hazell

Joe Rigby Praise

Homeboy Music CD-R

Arthur Doyle Trio Nature Boy

Homeboy Music CD-R

Often it’s the work of the passionate few that ensures that neglected artists receive their due. Those musicians

whose recorded legacy from the time they were “on the scene” is scant or microscopic have a friend in Roy Morris and the Homeboy label, which he created in the 1990s to document the music of trumpeter Norman Howard— sessions later reissued by ESP-Disk.

After laying dormant for a number of years, Homeboy is back with two releases of music by loft-jazz veterans Joe Rigby and Arthur Doyle.

Rigby had never recorded as a leader before this 2007 session, recorded in Brooklyn and now issued as Praise. It is a rehearsal tape, warts and all, on which Rigby’s tenor and soprano are joined by bassist Ken Filiano, drummer Lou Grassi, and fellow loft-era veteran, trumpeter Ted Daniel. The quartet runs through an untitled blowing vehicle, Coltrane’s “India” and the brief ballad “Earth Flower.” “Blowing vehicle” should be clarified—Praise is a free-bop record, and on this track the quartet’s blowing rolls along like an updated modal version of a 1950s Prestige date. Rigby is clear about his Coltrane influence in an interview available on the Homeboy website (www.homeboymusic.com), and it’s rare to hear a contemporary saxophonist come from Trane with such conviction. The set begins with the pinched dives of Rigby’s straight horn in conference with Filiano’s flamenco sketches. Though Rigby and Filiano are energizing enough as a duo, at four minutes in Grassi enters with an intense near-tango underneath the saxophonist’s Berber whorls. Daniel is on excellent form too, his sound recalling post-Brownie trumpeters like Charles Tolliver and Woody Shaw, yet delivered with the projection of a strong tenor player. It’s a bit of a surprise to encounter such egalitarian, traditionallyminded music from a former Milford Graves sideman, but that’s part of what makes Praise such a welcome addition to Rigby’s small recorded canon.

Arthur Doyle’s place in the current improvisation world is more like an outsider/art-brut anomaly; he still occasionally picks up his horn, but generally concentrates on singing repetitive, childlike songs with the accompaniment of electronic musicians. In the 1970s, though, he was a tenor player whose overblowing didn’t just peel paint, it scraped away at the building’s very structure. This

1972 trio performance from Studio Rivbea with drummer Rashid Sinan and Sun Ra trombonist Charles Stephens (both later contributed to Doyle’s 1977 classic Alabama Feeling) is completely over-the-top. “Nature Boy” is only an oblique reference at best, for Sinan sets up an impossibly fast, minimalist drum choir underneath slick brass soliloquy and Doyle’s bowels-of-hell screams.

The feral intensity of his saxophone playing is matched by Stephens’ adept postbop chortle, and provides continual fascination over the half hour of hurricane-force free playing. The CD contains just the one cut, but there’s no need for anything more. Clifford Allen

Keith Rowe Keith Rowe Erstlive 007 CD

Keith Rowe Taku Unami

Keith Rowe / Taku Unami Erstlive 006 CD

Keith Rowe's solo music is always a journey for listeners, because his own journey as an instrumentalist—with all of its frustrations, constraints, and possibilities—is such a compelling one.

His playing has what you could call an extreme furtiveness, in the sense that Rowe wishes to erase his “thumbprint,” not just to overcome predictability but to get outside of the paradigm of musical identity (death of the author, indeed!), without succumbing to reticence or hesitancy. Clearly, it's a love of process over product. And Rowe’s own development over the last decade has involved a steady reduction of his guitar, or at least his reliance on his instrument.

It’s still there on the table, not so much buried amidst wires, implements, and effects as integrated into a larger soundsource apparatus which includes Rowe’s increasingly prominent laptop. His solo documents are not snapshots capturing a moment in his overall development, but highly considered performances that reflect the processes leading up to them and those that might follow from them. So here, on this 36-minute performance from Tokyo, the first time Rowe has performed solo in that city, we have another impossible-to-predict piece of music. It may not be such an obvious reinvention as his previous solo

recordings, but it's an extremely powerful and quite emotional piece.

Hanging over a lot of criticism of “eai” music is its relation to other improvising traditions, specifically to European free improvisation and, thereby indirectly, to jazz. I have no interest in those arguments whatsoever, but considering the “anxiety of influence” seems central to any understanding of Rowe’s work.

Are genres ever dead, spent, absent forevermore? Or does their sound exist eternally, like the background radiation from the Big Bang? Such questions seem to hover over this work. A long, string-scraping section opens the improvisation, but there’s a curious and very provocative lack of deliberateness about it. It’s filled with hesitancies, unsure of whether it wants to follow a safe path, to engage in something so, well, Rowe-like. After a few moments, you start to realize that there’s an oboe in the background, playing an etude. You think it’s your neighbor’s stereo but it’s there deliberately. Could this be some kind of conceptual frame, the ultimate contrast, where Rowe writes himself into or out of a larger musical history, or is it simply a provocation? Then there’s a slow crackle, flames eating the unspooling tape, and that echo from past is devoured by muffled noises that burble up then disappear, leaving gaps and silences. And then comes another conceptual return, this time in the form of a dark chorus, intoning an unknown loss.

And then a little bebop starts cranking away manically in the background, its vitality a reminder of some sort, or even a judgment of its absence in the present.

Ardent Rowe followers know that these musics have been formative influences on him, and a sense emerges that this may be a conceptual self-inventory. But the piece just isn’t complacent enough for anything like that to settle in. A string flutters, some metal whoops like blades, and then CLANG. The music winds unpredictably up and down, with slices of identifiable genres rising and sinking, though any fixed gesture is quickly unsettled. This musical statement is never quite recognizably coherent, avoiding patterns, yet at the same time evincing direction; ultimately it ends with a mighty bleat, a perverse anticlimax rather than a resolution.

The 37-minute duo with Taku Unami features the fascinating timbral addi-

WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #53 | 65

tions of mandolin and contraguitar.

It's not outlandish to suggest that the bubble-popping notes that emerge occasionally from these instruments—a rustle here, a burble there—suggest a Tilbury element, but really the faintly audible string pluck, the occasional emphatic thwack, the winding computer clatter, suggest an aesthetic that is Unami’s own, enigmatic and resistant to codification. If there’s any similarity with Rowe's solo disc, it’s in the intersection between implements and revenants, moaning and grinding into half-life—as in a brief passage combining string thrum with the sound of a cassette being mangled in an old tape deck. There is much skitter and click to this music, but without the proto-industrial, insistently repetitive texture of, say, Voice Crack; rather, the effect here suggests a chorus of insects, a shower of nails.

Just past the piece’s midpoint, things get deeply unsettling, conjuring forth images of metal objects being liquefied. The last few minutes are haunting, as the musicians unleash cavernous rattles and scrapes, now distant, now shrieking in your face. But these are only moments, brief episodes that emerge tantalizingly from a performance that is often inscrutable in its development.

It resists being understood too quickly, carefully avoiding a generic arc dynamic or any similar convention. Jason Bivins

DJ/Rupture Andy Moore Patches

Unsuitable CD

The DJ as improviser is a complicated notion, fraught with issues pertaining to ownership and the value attached to sound selection over sound creation.

Many have staked a claim by defining their own personal style—Marina Rosenfeld’s acetates, for example, or DJ Olive’s Vinyl Scores project. By contrast, DJ/ Rupture (a.k.a. Jace Clayton) appears to be aiming for a balance between sound curation and combination, and on Patches he locates himself firmly in this area of debate. Edited from a series of improvised concerts with The Ex’s Andy Moor, this record sees Rupture’s sound collages meshing with Moor’s guitar work. Rupture works the turntables as he might on a solo set—selecting a range of records that create a firm rhythmic backbone for Moor’s ingenious responses. Rupture is a master of sound selection: his mind is attuned to the possibility of sound combination, and his wide-ranging knowledge of music allows him to make unexpected, expressive combinations. His exchanges with Moor often sound much fuller than a duet—at times you’d be forgiven for imagining that you’re listening to a quartet in full swing. Lawrence English

Alexander von Schlippenbach Friulian Sketches Psi 08.07 CD

Aki Takase Alexander von Schlippenbach

Iron Wedding: Piano Duets Intakt 160 CD

Like many European free improvisers of his generation, pianist Alexander von Schlippenbach has lately been 66 | SIGNAL to NOISE #53 WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM

revisiting foundational influences. His playing in this context sounds especially fresh, and the chamber music settings play to his strengths. He’s joined here by clarinetist Daniel D’Agaro and cellist Tristan Honsinger, both well-suited partners, for a set of performances that appropriate directional motifs from classical music as a way of shaping the trio’s open improvisations. The result is forward-thinking, spontaneous music that pays attention to form without being shackled by it. The pianist is at his most spacious, focused less on density than on creating leaping intervals and unpredictable lines that intertwine with Honsinger’s cranky cello and D’Agaro’s spare playing (which to my ears recalls Ben Goldberg on his fine Lacy tribute). I suppose you could look at these performances as “sketches,” but they’re rendered with care and concentration, and far more development than you might think: there’s certainly nothing sloppily impressionistic about the dark ruminations of “Notturno” or the sprinting “Fase.” Those who know Schlippenbach through his trio with Evan Parker and Paul Lovens might be surprised by the Webernian piano on “Elegia,” the ponderous chords of “Romanza,” or the beautifully woven counterpoint of “Rapsodia” and “Recital.”

The piano duets between Schlippenbach and his wife, Aki Takase, are similarly lean. Both players show great relish for the idiomatic properties of their instruments, rather than trying to grind them down into a non-idiomatic mess (always an uphill battle unless you spend the majority of your time under the lid). The results are compelling, ranging from gracefully melodic pieces (the slow, Feldman-like “Early Light” and the thoughtful “Passacaglia”) to ones packed with coiled-up energy ready to burst forth (the intense bustle of “Iron Wedding” and the dense, jabbing “Steinblock”). Even on boisterous pieces the pianists don’t get in each other’s way; when they bring on the thunder, they do so to create points of emphasis in music that is otherwise mostly reflective. Jason Bivins

7K Oaks

7000 Oaks

Die Schactel 08 CD

Alfred 23 Harth Hans-Joachim Irmler Günter Müller Taste Tribes For4Ears 1970 CD

When German reedman Alfred Harth first recorded in 1969, he was already at the center of a diverse music and art scene in Frankfurt. The ensemble, with a varied cast of personnel from free improvisation and classical backgrounds, was called Just Music and made two scarce records (one on ECM and another privately released) before dissolving.

Just Music was so named because of Harth’s synaesthetic approach to music and the arts, born from his conviction that different and occasionally competing traditions could be blended to create something unique and valuable, whether or not it “swings.”

The five extraordinarily dense improvisations on 7000 Oaks were recorded in Rome in late 2007 with Zu bassist Massimo Pupillo and two members of the Italian improvisation group Ossatura, drummer Fabrizio Spera

and pianist/sonic artist Luca Venitucci.

Harth’s sound was once characterized, half-jokingly but aptly, by sometime collaborator Peter Brötzmann as “wind in a pillow.” Indeed, Harth’s tenor sound is broad and breathy, his language unhurried in its exploration of nuance and detail. On “Strategy of Tension,” mouthpiece squeak, feedback and accordion coalesce in long-toned chamber explorations before being overtaken by slashing, overdriven gestures. Often these swaths are large enough to create a space for lingering meditation, and Harth’s evenly-paced influence makes itself felt.

Taste Tribes is an electro-acoustic beast of another sort, joining Harth with laptop artist Günter Müller and former Faust organist Hans-Joachim Irmler.

Rather than being real-time trio improvisations, four of the five pieces here are constructed from duet performances augmented with overdubbing; fragments of Conrad Schnitzler’s Eruption and Makoto Kawabata’s guitar are also incorporated into the music. Initially “Genuine Imitation” approximates moments of MEV, with indeterminate but decidedly organic rustles and knocks, footfalls, and reed-slaps. Only after a few minutes do digital glitches creep in, balanced by organ drone; samples of birdsong mate with Harth’s clarinet in a bath of electro-acoustic psychedelia before being subsumed in white noise.

Psychedelic it is—as Harth puts it, a meeting of current improvisational tools with sounds that transcend any given period. And transcendence is what synaesthesia aims for. Clifford Allen

Brad Shepik

Human Activity Suite Songlines SGL SA1576-2 SACD

Brad Shepik seemed ubiquitous in the 1990s; since then his appearances on record have been less frequent but always worth checking out. His new Songlines release, Human Activity Suite, is a Chamber Music America commission, a meditation on the effects of human activity on this planet; it’s Shepik’s attempt to “connect my musical expression to how I felt about the earth and the environment we are creating for ourselves as a result of how we live.” His regular working trio of Gary Versace (organ, accordion and piano) and drummer Tom Rainey is augmented here by trumpeter Ralph Alessi and bassist Drew Gress. Several pieces are named after the world’s continents, which Shepik evokes with a broad palette of timbral colors thanks to his multicultural array of instruments (in addition to guitar, he plays tambura and electric saz) and Versace’s keys (his accordion work is particularly stunning).

Alessi again proves that he is among the most imaginative and technically accomplished trumpeters currently active. Despite its formal ambitions and overarching theme, Human Activity Suite remains grounded in jazz-based improvisation: it swings and pulses with tremendous fervor. To listen, feel and think globally seems to be the message. Bill Barton

Matthew Shipp Trio Harmonic Disorder Thirsty Ear 357187 CD

Matthew Shipp’s ability to contrast a jaggedly bouncing melody line with

thunderous bass chords, urgency with laconic unpredictability, gives him one of the most identifiable voices in contemporary piano. Indeed, few of his peers have left hands as dominant and powerful as Shipp’s, a fact that he demonstrates time after time on Harmonic Disorder. Joined by Joe Morris on bass and Whit Dickey on drums, Shipp performs 14 pieces that range from singletheme exclamations (“Mel Chi 1”) to Monkish constructions with interlocking parts and rhythmic surprises (“Roe”).

Like many of Shipp’s best recordings, this one conveys a laid-back athleticism that makes him seem like a limber basketball forward who has the reflexes to wait for opportunities to present themselves on the floor. Even when thematic patterns are predetermined, Shipp always sounds like he’s weighing his options, swinging his hands down at the last possible moment; and often it sounds like his left hand is pouncing from a great height. As usual, Dickey is a nimble responder, dodging Shipp’s rhythmic gestures as much as engaging with them. While Morris has yet to develop an individual voice on bass—perhaps that’s too much to ask, considering his unique approach to the guitar—he has a compelling arco tone that is a great match for Shipp’s resonant bottom end and occasional bass-note bombs. James Hale

MoonJune MJR023 CD

closer, “Picking Bland.” Anyone with an interest in Soft Machine, particularly the brief, overlooked era propelled by Howard’s engine-room intensity, should grab Drop.

Formed in 1972, guitarist Gary Boyle’s Isotope is a largely overlooked quartet that represents some of Britain’s best second-wave fusion. After the group’s debut, personnel changes led to the formation of the 1974 edition, which featured drummer Nigel Morris, keyboardist Laurence Scott and Hugh Hopper, who had by now left Soft Machine. Lasting only two years, this edition of the group released one record (Illusion) and toured extensively; three live performances are compiled on Golden Section for the first time. The best material is from a smokin’ May 28, 1975 date where the group is joined by percussionist Aureo de Souza. The six tracks make the most of Boyle’s raw, liquid arpeggios, Scott’s surging Rhodes, Hopper’s funky, fuzzed-out pulse and Morris’s nimble accentuations.

Highlights include Boyle’s blistering lines on the Weather Reportish “Attila,” the spacey spirituality of “Spanish Sun,” and the funky “Crunch Cake.” Two cuts from New York (in less-than-optimal sound, alas) and five tracks from a 1974 London appearance offer further glimpses into the group’s dynamics.

The London show is particularly fascinating for Hopper’s deep groove on “Lily Kay” and the alternative version of “Spanish Sun.” Fusioneers will want this one, too. Jay Collins

Isotope

Terakraft

Cuneiform Rune 273 CD

World Village CD / download

Soft Machine Drop

Golden Section

Akh Issudar

Whether you call it jazz-rock, fusion, or something else, the electric jazz of the ’70s and ’80s gets a bad rap. True, there was plenty of vapid riffery and smoothed-out funk-lite, but there were (and still are) some excellent groups making original and sometimes breathtaking music. Britain’s Soft Machine was one of the best; despite myriad personnel changes, they remained true to the spirit of experimental creativity.

After the arrival of saxophonist/keyboardist Elton Dean and the departure of original skinsman Robert Wyatt in 1971, a quartet lineup featuring Mike Ratledge on organ and electric piano, bassist Hugh Hopper and the flamboyantly ferocious drummer Phil Howard emerged as one of the loosest editions of the band, and lasted only five months. Drop is sourced from a 1971 performance which has languished in the Radio Bremen Archives. Except for one side of Fifth, it seems to be the group’s only recorded performance.

The ten compositions, six by Ratledge, unfold as one long-form, 62-minute suite. As a composer he favors modal grooves, witness “All White” or the coruscating “Slightly All the Time,” which featuring Dean’s glorious saxello; while his “Out-Bloody-Rageous” is a showcase for Dean’s high-flying alto lines, dual Rhodes drones, Hopper’s busy bass and Howard’s over-the-top dance. The tension between the two factions of the group—the free-thinking Dean and Howard versus the more conservative Ratledge and Hopper—is palpable on the Dean's thunderous “Neo Caliban Grides” and the brief improv “Intropigling,” but the group’s engines fire in sync on the rich-hued

Terakaft’s Akh Issudar and Tinariwen’s Aman Iman are very much a matched set. The Tuareg (or Tamashek, as the Saharan nomads call themselves) quartet includes two early members of Tinariwen and shares their essential sound of ragged, bluesy singing and intertwined, barbed-wire guitar lines; two songs on this record, their second, were written by Tinariwen mates, and each album’s title is half of a desert proverb: “Water is life; milk is survival.” The music certainly has the feeling of getting down to the basics: the tunes stay with you like a heavy stew cooked over a fire, and most of the beats come from handclaps or heavy strums on an acoustic guitar. But not too basic—compared to the raw desert blues records that have come out lately on Sublime Frequencies, this stuff is big-budget classic rock.

The disc was recorded in France with producer Jean-Paul Romann of the group Lo’Jo, and it sounds like the band blew half their advance on amps and guitars, and the rest on getting the arrangements right. If they did, it was money well spent, since the richness and variety of their string tones and the just-rightness with which the sounds are placed contribute to the album’s success. Some guitars ring out clarion-bright, others scrub and thump like a laundry-day drum corps, and still others thicken and vary the textures behind the vocals, which also benefit from some sweetening. The layered, swirling chants on the title tune are positively psychedelic. The singing is all in the musicians’ native tongue, and it is delivered with a defiant air that befits the overriding lyrical concern

of cultural survival. Given that health challenges have forced Tinariwen to tour the U.S. twice without their leader Ibrahim Ag Alhabib, it’s nice to know that they’re not alone in serving up solid desert rock. Bill Meyer

Trio Sowari Shortcut

Potlatch P208 CD

Trio Sowari’s first release, Three Dances, was one of the musical highlights of 2005. Happily, their follow-up, Shortcut, is every bit as good. Tenor saxophonist Bertrand Denzler’s astute deployment of the mostly unorthodox sounds he draws from his instrument is particularly impressive. In some quarters it has been argued that saxophones are anathema to EAI, that they sit uncomfortably in the music.

Denzler proves otherwise. His blasts of tuned air and percussive pad-tapping blend superbly with Burkhard Beins’s largely textural rather than percussive approach to his kit, especially when Beins makes swishing sounds by gently rubbing the drumskin with a block of polystyrene. Beins also plays “small electrics,” which merge with Phil Durrant’s software samplers and treatments. Particularly good examples of the trio’s textural interplay can be heard on “Corridor” and the pointillistic track that immediately follows it, “Dots #1.”

Running to almost ten minutes, the latter track is one of the lengthiest on the aptly titled Shortcut; most are half that length or less, and the five parts of “Piercing,” with which the CD begins, total less than four minutes. But even when the trio is working in Webernian miniature there’s nothing insubstantial about the music: it’s robust and emphatic, merely stripped of inessentials.

Though ideas are sometimes teased out at length, as on “Trespassing,” the turnover of events is often surprisingly swift—or perhaps it just seems like that because the music is consistently engaging. Brian Marley

Ulaan Khol II

Soft Abuse SAB 032 CD

How often is the second segment of a trilogy your favorite part? The beginning draws you in and sets the stage and the ending delivers the payoff, but the middle has the hardest job; it has to keep you engaged with no promise of resolution. And so it is with II, the latest installment of an instrumental suite called Ceremony that Stephen R. Smith has recorded under the alias Ulaan Khol. The motivations behind Ceremony are situational and reactive.

The Los Angeles-based multi-instrumentalist, who is also a member of the Jewelled Antler outfit Thuja, has spent a lot of time since 2002 recording ersatz Eastern European folk music under another alias, Hala Strana. Two years ago he also became a father.

Can you blame the guy for wanting to crank it up and cut loose, especially when he puts that impulse to such good ends? Shorn of the need to play a part and share space with acoustic stringed things, Smith’s electric guitar sounds pretty marvelous. He has a tone that’s one part bagpipe to two parts Television (the band, of course) filtered through an analog tape haze.

Layered atop organ chords shrouded

WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #53 | 67

in Saturnian echo and punctuated with brief bursts of emphatic drumming, Smith’s swooping melodies impart a sense of gripping import. As with Hala Strana, Ulaan Khol’s music feels like a keyhole view into another world, and as with most of Smith’s releases, the muted yet compelling cover art amplifies the mood. So what’s the problem? No matter how good the record’s eight tracks are, and they’re damned good, you still feel like you’re in the middle of something. So you’re left hanging, just like when you walked out of The Two Towers and knew you had a year to wait for the story to end.

Bill Meyer

4 Corners

Alive in Lisbon

Clean Feed CF134 PAL DVD

Ken Vandermark Collected Fiction

Okka Disk OD 12075 CD x 2

It’s a shame that 4 Corners—the quartet of Ken Vandermark (reeds), Magnus Broo (trumpet), Adam Lane (bass), and Paal Nilssen-Love (drums)—hasn’t played outside the Iberian Peninsula. This ensemble plays to the strengths of everyone involved: Vandermark and Lane are complementary composers, Broo a sublime soloist, and Nilssen-Love’s skills as both colorist and stoker are on display. But until they get their noses out of the port and take their sound to the rest of the world, this DVD is a more than adequate substitute. It’s well shot and recorded, with plenty of close-ups that offer perspectives that even the guy at the front table will never get. This actually cuts both ways; it’s a thrill to see Nilssen-Love’s gong technique and the way Vandermark’s facial musculature influences what comes out of his bass clarinet, but not so swell to be confronted with the bassist and drummer’s facial contortions as they go about their business. Four of the five tunes here are reprised from the band’s debut CD, but they’re more fluid, less prone to heaviosity; sounds like 4 Corners is forging an identity distinct from the sum of its constituent parts.

Collected Fiction pairs Vandermark with four bassists—Kent Kessler, Ingebrigt Håker-Flaten, Nate McBride, and Wilbert De Joode—all of whom have worked intensively with him at some point. Vandermark sticks mostly to his clarinets here. Since the individual tracks mostly last three or four minutes, there’s plenty of room for variety within each encounter, which makes generalizations about each player meaningless. What’s consistent throughout is the thoughtfulness with which the players develop the music.

Although it was recorded in one session lasting two days, it’s the sort of record that is best approached a bit at a time; savor, don’t slurp. Bill Meyer

Various Artists

Give Me Love: Songs of the Brokenhearted—Baghdad, 1925-1929 Honest Jon's HJR35 CD / LP

In the 1920s Gramophone (later to become EMI) sent teams of recordists across Iraq to capture any and every type of music they could find. The 22 tracks on Give Me Love have been culled from that material and brought together under the theme of brokenhearted love. The main instruments used in these songs include flutes, ouds, violins, the darbukkah drum (dumbek), and voice. And while it’s a cliché to say that such-and-such “foreign” music transports the listener to another time and place, in the case of these historical recordings from old Baghdad it’s true! There is an irresistible and highly evocative atmosphere throughout these selections which comes from the lovesick emotions conveyed in the songs, as well as from the rich cultural mix which this music grew out of. Folk singers from the countryside collaborating with Jewish musicians playing urban styles of Arabic music; extended violin solos in the open-ended, improvisatory Taqsim genre; a Hebrew hymn that opens with the cry “Allah”; nightclub performances by female singers whose primary job was prostitution; musical influences from Kurdistan, Bahrain and Kuwait—it’s all melded together in these tracks. The pained and urgent vocals of Sayed Abbood and Said El

Kurdi are particularly powerful, as is the violin work of Khedayer Bin Kessab, Saleh Ibrahim and Kemani Noubar. But there’s another important point that has to be made about this intriguing and wonderful musical document. Namely, it’s well known that the countless Americans who have enthusiastically backed the current US invasion and occupation of Iraq are nearly totally ignorant of Iraqi culture and history, and this CD release gives us a perfect example of precisely what they are ignorant of. It is impossible to hear the sad, distressed and mournful sounds on Give Me Love without thinking of the sad, distressed and mournful condition of contemporary Baghdad in crisis. This should be required listening for every American— public official or private individual—who has ever endorsed this catastrophic and inhuman policy. Alan Waters

Christian Wolff Early Piano Pieces hat[now]ART 141 CD

Christian Wolff was only sixteen when he began studying composition with John Cage at the dawn of the 1950s; this album includes six solo piano works dating from that decade. Like his mentor’s music, chance, innovative performance parameters, and performer choice loom large. Steffen Schleiermacher, a German pianist who specializes in 20th-century music, displays a sense of nuance and precision throughout. The earliest piece, 1951’s “For Prepared Piano,” draws the listener’s attention to the occurrence of each individual sound as it carves out its own space amidst the silence—the tones end up having an event-like weight. “For Piano I” (1952) displays a more restless sound-world, where notes flow or awkwardly bump up against each other. Wolff works with a restricted number of pitches in those two works, but employs all 88 notes of the keyboard for 1953’s “For Piano II.” Prepared piano is reintroduced in the second and third sections of 1954’s “Suite (I),” enriching and even de-pianoizing the instrument. On 1957’s “For Piano with Preparations,” Wolff continues to expand the instrument’s sonic possibilities. Wolff uses 17 preparations here

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

as opposed to the ten he employs in “Suite (1),” and the first movement of “For Piano with Preparations” winds up in wild territory. The final composition, “For Pianist” (1959), is a garden of forking paths: what the performer does next is partially determined by the result of his previous choice. In other words, the pianist must take cues from his own playing. This sound-matrix fascinates: silences abound, clanging timbres burst forth, quiet tones slowly dissolve.

Fred Cisterna

Zu

Carboniferous Ipecac PIC-110 CD

Carboniferous is a terrific introduction to the Italian post-prog-punk-prov trio Zu. The live albums have all been great, but they work best as reminders of your own experiences being bombarded by Zu in concert. They have had some great studio albums too, but the best have been collaborations with others (Gustafsson, Takemura) that don’t show the core trio off as well. This album changes that. The full range of their sound is captured, and with enough detail that you can discern all the small things they do that add up to such richness. Luca Mai’s baritone sax even shows a softer, sultry side on a couple of tracks, echoing the horn riff from Soft Machine’s “Facelift” for a bit during “Axion.” But make no mistake: his sax usually blasts. On “Carbon” he sounds huge, like an airdrill unplugging holes in a steel tank, and the sharp polyrhythms here would make the most nerdy prog-rock band jealous. The band does bring in some collaborators on a few tracks, most prominently King Buzzo and Mike Patton, but unlike past Zu partnerships, these additional folks amplify and intensify Zu’s pre-existing sound, rather than embellishing or bouncing off of it. Each track offers something unique, and none is more attention-grabbing than the opener “Ostia.” I still can’t figure out what instrument was responsible for the carnivalesque syncopated distorted bagpipe whirl that pops up in the final ninety seconds: keyboard? guitar? sax? Ultimately it doesn’t matter: it blisters good. Andrew Choate

SOUNDWATCH

Kurt Gottschalk turns on and tunes in for the season's key DVD releases.

Rachel Shearer’s Fakerie (Family Vineyard) deals with the question of what to show by showing almost nothing. The repeated swells and decays of bright electric guitar are matched with seven points of light, growing and fading in intensity with the sparse chords. The production is as simple as it is beautifully effective, with a fragmented story in the enclosed booklet explaining a bit of the mood if not the approach. The DVD is only 22 minutes long, but runs on a loop and easily sustains several rounds of viewing. The visuals in LoVid’s self-released 486 are equally perplexing, made all the more so by the fact that there is no audio track. The DVD contains 486 circuit bending experiments, created by capturing the image of a computer screen while messing with the machine’s innards.

The effect is oddly appealing, looking something like a jumpy technicolor quilt, but with an anxious undercurrent (especially if its watched on a computer) by displaying pixellating patterns that suggest something has gone wrong with the wiring.

Roscoe Mitchell is caught in performance with the excellent French flutist Jerome Bourdellon and vocalists Thomas Buckner and Dalila Khatir, with an equally important contribution being made by the reverberating galleries at the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris, the sculptures of Alain Kirili (who organized the event) and Claude Monet’s Water Lilies, all of which are seen and attempts to broaden the base; Soldier got stronheard in the CD/DVD set Kirili et les Nymphéas ger results teaching compositional strategies to (Mutable Music). It’s a great piece of documenchildren from polyglot Brooklyn with his Tangertation, with all the musicians moving through ine Awkestra than he does with the kids of the the museum and the handheld cameras almost secluded Central American mountain town. voyeuristically keeping pace, capturing the feelMaking a documentary about a musician as ing of discovery the small audience no doubt multi-faceted as Elliott Sharp presents a chalfelt as their senses dined. lenge, one smartly met by director Bert Shapiro Athens, GA, guitarist Dan Nettles boldly by making three short documentaries, all of put music to a 1928 Buster Keaton feature and which are included on the DVD Elliott Sharp: made the soundtrack available both as a CD Doing the Don’t (Pheasants Eye). The titular and on the DVD on Steamboat Bill Jr. (Nowt short focuses on Sharp the composer, a bit of Records). It’s bold not just because the movie a valentine with family and contemporaries is so iconic, but because Nettles’ compositions singing the praises of the nice guy beneath the have a similar feel to Bill Frisell’s, who has also downtown exterior. Better are the two which set scores to Keaton films. However, the music use Sharp himself as the primary source. Slabs, played by Nettles and his tentet Kenosha Kid Pantars, Violinoids features him playing and follows the action more closely than Frisell’s discussing the various stringed instruments he’s scores, mimicking car horns and train engines designed, and Sharp on Sharp is a sometimes as needed and in some sequences they play surprising conversation about the music industry. passages designed to emulate Keaton’s day.

Together the three films, along with perforUltimately, it’s as enjoyable as it is ambitious. mance footage covering more than 20 years, As a producer, soundtrack composer, jazz make for an excellent overview of an important pianist and death rocker, Jamie Saft keeps busy. artist.

His trio Angel Ov Death, with Andrew d’Angelo Arguments about how to appropriately and Mike Pride, falls in the latter, metal-tinged film dance have been going on for as long as improv camp, and the filming by Torsten Meyer dance has been filmed, and for the self-released at their June, 2007, set at The Stone captures DVD-R Art Union Humanscape cinematogratheir energy with manic camerawork. A different pher Chi Jang Yin and editor Rebecca Reynolds sort of out rock is heard (and seen) on the CD/ chose a somewhat dizzying strategy to docuDVD set Ween at the Cat’s Cradle, 1992 (MVD). ment Ayako Kato’s performance with bassist The CD is a full set from Chapel Hill, NC, but Jason Roebke and percussionist Tim Barnes. In the DVD—culled from concerts in Trenton, NJ, fairness, there’s a lot to try to capture here—the Columbus, OH, and The Netherlands, are the extended playing of the musicians is almost as better way to experience pre-“Push th' Little interesting to watch as the dance itself. While Daisies” Ween as a rough and ridiculous duo. the slow pans can be frustrating—a single Their doofiness is all the more charming with audience view would have worked better—the the vintage VHS recording. It’s unlikely to win two long, gradually-unfolding pieces makes the new fans, but it’s a little bit of brown treasure for video well worth the while. believers. ✹ WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #53 | 69

Andy Guhl and Norbert Moslang of Voice Crack

Abstract sound and nonlinear storytelling rarely come together as beautifully as in the 1989 film Kick That Habit (Drag City), a portrait of Switzerland that shows both the natural beauty of the country and the industrial landscape that has been built atop it. It was only all too fitting that director Peter Liechti chose Norbert Möslang and Andy Guhl, the duo of sound artists then known as Voice Crack, to be both the soundtrack musicians and the vehicle for the film. The sounds they coax from household electronics provide a perfect parallel for the juxtaposed imagery. The band is shown performing and in incidental moments, but the 45-minute film comes off as less about them than the culture they grew out of.

Another urban landscape is explored in Leimart Park, a documentary about jazz, poetry and visual arts in the Watts section of Los Angeles. Art is seen as a part of survival in the disadvantaged neighborhood, and cafes and galleries become important meeting places.

Pianist Horace Tapscott, who is seen performing and in archival interviews, is also an important part of the scene, regaled as someone who has hung on for decades when he might have found greater fame by leaving.

Dave Soldier’s 30-minute Yol K’u (Mulatta Records) takes the Mayan Guatemalan village of San Mateo Ixtatan as its setting and gives writing and directing duties to a group of young people, most high-school aged. The story they come up with is a rather tepid romance with a soundtrack provided by the children under Soldier’s direction. Short scenes at the end, showing the young musicians at work, make for the most interesting moments, but the music itself (also on the included soundtrack CD) comes off as fairly traditional, despite Soldier’s apparent

THE WEIGHT OF THE WORLD Jason Bivins digs metal, doom and heavy music in all its permutations.

J.R. Fritsch

Darsombra

Let’s start this column off with more from the fine fresh FSS imprint. On Re-ups (FSS 003), we get an altogether different kind of heaviness from Cristal, who favor a blend of dirty noise, EHG malevolence, and a bit of gore atmospherics. With former members of Labradford and Breadwinner, these Richmond laptop sound artists boil down the permafrost, taking the spiked wristbands and demon mewls out of black metal and leaving just the void. They often invoke atmospheric noises: a creaking door, a slight iron rattle, long escaping winds. But elsewhere, as at the end of “Stars Hide Your Fire,” the sound of turntable cartridge and flames recall what you might hear on a mid-tier eai record. Just when you think you’ve figured them out, though, they smash your face with a sudden and unexpected blast of overdriven, digital noise on “Left of Swept” and close out with “Avici,” which recalls the Drumm/Marhaug collab from a few years back.

Flingco Sound has also seen fit to reissue Gore’s 1987 Mean Man’s Dream (FSS 002). The Dutch proto-industrial band were, along with Godflesh and Young Gods and a very few others, one of the first instrumental bands to explore the intersection of noise rock, downtuned sludge, and sheer hypnotic Amp Rep-etition. Twenty-two years on, it doesn’t sound a bit dated. In fact, it’s hard to resist the pummel of tracks like “Search,” “Chainsaw,” and “The Bank.”

The Medium (FSS 005) is a bewitching DVD from Chicago trio Haptic. It’s filled with slowly transforming grainy black-and-white imagery—swirling stars, a Madame Blavatsky type conjuring with her hands, a bemused child—while on the audio track these drone masters take the sounds of amplifier hum, snare, and electronics and lather them into a lovely sound bath, along with some contributions from Tony Buck, Boris Hauf, and Olivia Block. Intervals float in and out, as if from rubbed glass, and distant organ

chords undergird the whole. Wonderful music in which to lose yourself, like sinking through something thick and oily.

Pussygutt is going to invite all kinds of comparisons to Nadja, mostly because they’re a male/female duo (bassist Brittany McConnell and drummer Blake Green) and because, on She Hid Behind Her Veil (20 Buck Spin), they play long-form doom. But if they earn the comparison, it’s because they’re really good, nothing more. Playing outside of Boise, they’ve perfected the same kind of lonesome prairie doom that, at least in mood, compares favorably with Samothrace. But in execution, the blistering distorted chords that seep across this single 47-minute track are more claustrophobic. I dig the drummer’s use of cymbal swells exclusively for the first third of the piece. And there are a lot of layers, combined from supplementary sources that aren’t always immediately identifiable—some bass multi-tracking using distortion and ebow sits alongside birdcall noises from the keyboards, bells, and big bad speakerrattling resonance. A weird string section crops up halfway through, and the piece starts sounding like seriously moody movie music influenced by Sunn 0)))’s Black One. With each release, Geisha becomes more adept at integrating the varied elements they once wore a bit too obviously on their collective sleeve. This noise rock quartet’s latest, Die Verbrechen der Liebe (Crucial Blast), has the expansive sonic palette of vintage My Bloody Valentine, the noisy experimentalism of late Swans (“Stop Talking, Let’s F***,” which also has moments of Big Black), and the sheer doomy stomp of mid-1990s Melvins (“Cocktown & the G Boys”).

It frays at the edges, resonates, vapor-trails into the distance, and holds you down by the shoulders, usually all in the course of a single passage. Things get blisteringly noisy on “Sportsfister,” but that’s the least

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

complex track here. The most interesting is the halfhour “Theme from Diana,” filled with manipulated voice recordings and fascinating textures, many of them courtesy of reworked materials from a years-old “metal percussion” performance the band gave.

It positively erupts in the final five minutes and as a whole is very strong, very effective.

Following up on the fine Eternal Jewel, Darsombra (Brian Daniloski) has produced an interesting conceptual record in Nymphaea (Public Guilt), where the fuzz-shrouded title track—stomp, dirge, fantasy soundtrack, and drone all in one—is the leadoff, and is thereafter reinterpreted by a dozen different artists all similarly inclined to heavy, trance-inducing music. Many of the interpreters focus in on the crying high-end figures in the base piece, extrapolating these materials to generate lyricism and depth, looped and layered. The results are decidedly mixed. Least impressive are the renditions by Max Bondi (whose lyrics are pretty inconsequential, just a gloss on the basics) and Pulsop (with an uninspiring electro reimagining). But elsewhere things are quite satisfying. The creepy muffled chorus on Ala Muerte’s oscillating version is really effective. The same goes for the super-drone whipped up by Perfect Teeth, and the frosty bare essentials by Magicicada and the Destructo Swarmbots. In its methodology, this is something a bit more radical than your basic remix record, and parts of it are definitely worth your time.

If expansive psychedoomia is your thing, Jersey’s Maegashira are ready to drag you into the morass with them on The Stark Arctic (Spare Change). The basic sound combines fuzzed-out stoner blues with Nordic blizzards and Neurosis melancholy. On tunes like “Caribou Crossing,” they’re definitely closer to the Kyuss/Fu Manchu end of the spectrum. Things are slightly more misanthropic on “Ammonia for Sweat,” where the band gets in touch with Electric Wizard and Eyehategod. At times it’s good and compelling. But while Maegashira are competent when playing molasses doom or Southern sludge, they don’t truly excel at either. It can be effective when it comes together, as on the nasty “Hi from Jersey.”

But there are also times, as on the trippy 21-minute closer, where their reach exceeds their grasp.

One of the experts in this style is Scott “Wino” Weinrich. It’s hard to believe that Wino hasn’t released a proper solo recording prior to Punctured Equilibrium (Southern Lord). As well-traveled and well-known as the singer/guitarist is—St. Vitus, The Obsessed, Spirit Caravan, and The Hidden Hand—it seems overdue. In some ways it’s the album you’d expect at this point in Wino’s career, the logical extension of the stoner groove and space rock he began exploring with Spirit Caravan and which had morphed into a kind of swamp boogie

by The Hidden Hand’s last record, The Resurrection of Whiskey Foote. That same sound, with one foot in 1970s FM and the other in contemporary metal of the sort played by Clutch, persists here. Even on the up-tempo semi-thrash of the title track—where it’s Wino pissed at the world—the music seems set up mostly for twinned guitars first to riff then to solo.

Some tracks (like “The Woman in the Orange Pants”) are vehicles for squealing noise and processed guitar.

But overall, nothing here compels and some of it is downright awful. The hooks are forgettable at best and, on tracks like “Smilin’ Road,” uncomfortably recall Peter Frampton. And too many tunes (like “Wild Blue Yonder”) come across like inconsequential jams.

The feedback-drenched “God, Frauds, Neo-Cons and Demagogues” is a platform for a classic Wino rant, cueing up the angry closer “Silver Lining,” the album’s best track. But it’s still a disappointment.

Southern Lord has released a pretty entertaining DVD, a companion to Lair of the Minotaur’s War Metal Battle Master, featuring the uncensored video for that record’s title track (“Banned in 31 Countries” the cover proudly proclaims) as well a vast amount of live performances, a “making of” featurette, and the requisite behind-the-scenes and interview stuff. The video itself is a cross between the movie 300, early 1970s Italian zombie cinema, and standard metal video (dudes jamming in the desert). The uncensored variant features more revealing shots of the female zombies and more detail in the gore upon which they feast (as well as half a dozen beheadings).

The behind-the-scenes stuff is pretty dull—swordfight training, makeup sessions, etc.—so the value in this one comes in the 45 minutes or so of live footage, which is low-quality but high-energy (and the band itself is really good, working the death/thrash intersection exuberantly).

Velvet Cacoon’s Genevieve (Southern Lord) is another head-scratcher. It comes across initially as typical blackened thrash, with big walls of guitar and whispered “spooky” lyrics barely audible within the general pummel. There are occasional interruptions from acoustic guitar and so forth, leaving impressions of the “pagan” black metal that is popular in the Pacific Northwest (e.g., Agalloch). And there are other passages where the walls tumble down, leaving some pretty vapid synth musings. It makes for a perplexing sound, and not necessarily perplexing in a good way. The latter part of the record is far better, riding on repeated arpeggios and long textural passages, even if the ambient passages aren’t overly innovative.

This seems to have been an especially fertile time for bands working the intersection of noise, prog, and metal. Heavy experimental music from Louisville didn’t die out in the mid-’90s. Akimbo is a power trio in every sense: scope, intensity, and sheer weight, ranging between the hesher stomp of High on Fire, the expansiveness of Isis, and the dirty grooves of Kylesa. It’s cool that Jersey Shores (Neurot) is inspired by shark attacks in the early 20th century, but you don’t need to know that to appreciate the hooks, the chopped-up textures and noisy guitar mangling, or the long decaying chords and feedback (massively effective at the end of “Rogue”). They’ve got something of the manic mood-shifts and dynamic range heard in Squirrel Bait, Bastro, and Slint, for sure, if you want to look to influences from the Bluegrass State.

But when you hear how their fantastic frippery creates tension on “Lester Stillwell,” it’s closer to Botch than Slint. Keeper.

Interloper is a new label to me, but if their release

by Harpoon (vocalist Toney Vast-Binder and Dean Costello on guitar, bass, and drum programming) is any indication, they’re a contender. I’m a sucker for nasty grindcore, with its rhythmic intensity, hyperchange arrangements, and economy of expression. And of course there’s a long tradition of drum machines (ANb for example) in this idiom, which has little time for dragons and fantasy: it’s all about intensely technical expression like “Lefty” and an abundance of anger. To be honest, Double Gnarly/ Triple Suicide isn’t going to make me forget my early Napalm Death or Pig Destroyer, but damn this one surprised me with how good it is.

Rabid Rabbit’s self-titled LP (also on Interloper, and available as a download) isn’t quite as impressive.

It’s basically noise rock with some improvisational ambitions, served up by big rumbling bass (two of ’em), stomping drums, and heavily processed psychfreakout guitar. The mid-tempo jam “Spider,” with its Zep-like guitar scales, is pretty infectious, as is the fuzzed-out “Ephedrine” and the juicy vibrato-heavy “September.” They do lock in to the same devices for a bit too long to my ears. Still, on “First Blood” and “Morse Code”—with guitars like flying noise, and some insistent mumbled vocals—they get close to a Stinking Lizaveta vibe that’s hard to resist.

Ghostlimb’s Bearing & Distance (Level Plane) is a 19-minute barrage of old-school D-beat madness of the sort Disfear still waves the flag for, crossed with

a bit of early Dag Nasty and some of the most fun breakdowns I’ve heard in a while. Headed by Justin Smith of Graf Orlock (whose new release is eagerly awaited), this stuff is free of insider humor, movie references, and really any hint of irony. Too sincere?

Too “emo” in the old-school sense? Maybe. But it works, with particular ferocity on “Saltaye” (there’s a nautical theme running through, perhaps a tip of the hat to Mastodon?).

Somewhat more elaborate stylistically is Landmine Marathon, whose Rusted Eyes Awake (Level Plane) occupies a somewhat familiar patch of metal terrain, where extremely complex death metal proficiency butts heads with noise and grind. It’s amazing how fertile the American metal scene is right now, and these Arizonans—led by the amazing vocals of Grace Perry—are a punishing lot (check “Xenocide” in particular). One of the most satisfying releases in this batch of discs.

Taking off in a different direction is Millions, whose Gather Scatter (Seventh Rule) is as complex and technically adroit as Landmine Marathon, but whose sound is equal parts Jesus Lizard noise, Botch/ Dillinger precision, and sheer Converge hardcore onslaught. The opening “Lest the Professor Catches Fire” is a fine example of their ground-up amalgam, with polyphony throughout and phrases that lengthen and shorten continually, all stacked atop changing meters. It’s nasty, heavy stuff for closet Rush and Mahavishnu freaks. But tracks like “Getting the Last Word” and “View from a Sinking Ship” are visceral reminders that this band doesn’t skimp on the emphatic power of their heavy roots.

Brutal Truth was one of the most important grind bands of the 1990s, and drummer/vocalist Rich Hoak has not only kept that group’s flame alive but has pursued his heavily politicized Total Fucking Destruction project as well. On Peace, Love, and Total Fucking Destruction (Enucleation), Hoak’s precision drumming drives 23 tracks (in just under 26 minutes) of blasting, heavy grind that’s shot through with a satirical streak that sucks up and spits out pop culture references—melodies, Beastie Boy wailing, derisive quotes of ’60s hippie classics, and Rush on crack (“Grindcore Salesman”)—and tosses a musical grenade at the lot. Whether channeling his punk youth (“Fuck the internet”), endorsing meditative distance (“Non-existence of the self”), predicting bioterror, or even delving into scene politics (“Seth Putnam is wrong about a lot of things, but Seth Putnam is right about you”), it’s a neck-cracking experience.

Speaking of which, the neck gets fully cracked on Noism’s + (Crucial Blast), a dizzying assault of electronics and grind. With programmed blast beats, feedback and white noise garlanding the hyper-drive riffing (think Agoraphobic Nosebleed crossbred with Genghis Tron), this is truly mean music from the Japanese duo. With twelve tracks in 21 minutes, there’s little time to figure things out and distinguish one track from another, since guitarist Yoshiro Hamazaki and programmer Tomoyuki Akiyama make few concessions to conventional (even for grind) gestures. Mild exceptions are heard on “Zaporojets,” the mini-breakdown on “I’m Not in a Band,” and the possibly punning “Death-Meta-Logic.” It’s painful, a complete barrage.

Finally, the unpredictable Black Elk is back with Always a Six, Never a Nine (Crucial Blast), another volley of heavy, anti-social Amp Rep noise. For all their aggression, this band always manages to dial into some striking harmonic complexity, even on the heavy-riffing “Pig Crazy.” Beneath the howling, distorted lyrics (some Yow, some Eugene Robinson, some McTighe) that recall Today is the Day, Black Elk loves to dig into tempo changes and heavy Craw/ Botch riffs that fuse noise/texture with proggy ambitions of the sort heard on the most recent Dillinger record. A lot of bands strive for this kind of fusion but these folks really pull it off. For proof, check out “Winter Formal,” where resounding pig-squeal guitars morph into Meddle-era Floyd spaceships, or the gentle guitar arpeggios that belie the title “The Brazen Bull III.” Even as the music chugs along in muscular fashion, there’s a fragility, even a confessionalism at its heart that makes it weird and unpredictable. Sonically diverse, and heavy as hell in places (“Brine”), this one is killer.. ✹ WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #53 | 71

SERENE VELOCITY

Jon Dale and Bernardo Rondeau monitor electronic music's vital signs.

René Passet

Move D.

Mike Shannon’s new album, Memory Tree (Plus 8), is one of the better techno/minimal records circulating, and in a field suffering from a surfeit of release action, this is no small claim. Memory Tree’s power lies in its consistency of mood, which nonetheless is neither homogenous nor repetitious; rather, Shannon’s productions offer a multiplicity of takes on a seemingly similar thing. His best tracks are carefully sculpted and pared back while maintaining an almost springloaded quality—the rhythms here, particularly on cuts like “Dr X” and “Uno Para El Sol,” are full of bounce, knitting together tiny snatches of chords and jittery, jumping-bean arpeggios, while pendulous, rolling bass lines coast the kick. Shannon also keeps it parochial, with fellow Canadian Mathew Jonson adding some fuzz and grit to the synth programming on Memory Tree’s highlight, the livid, flaring “Wolf Module.”

Unknown Exception (Modern Love) compiles singles released between 2004 and 2008 by British producer Andy Stott. Like other recent releases on Modern Love, it’s deeply in debt to Detroit techno, while taking its coloration from the radiant grays of the Basic Channel and Chain Reaction axis. So, dub techno as praxis, then: but Stott’s ear is both clear and sure, and his tracks always carry themselves well—there’s real poise in this music. And if certain moments leap out and shock your ears—the hailstorms of shrill cymbals and handclaps in “Credit,” for example, or the juddering bass that propels “Made Your Point”—Unknown Exception ultimately works so well because everything’s of a piece, even down to the bluish metallics of the artwork.

German label Mobilee have quietly but determinedly released a clutch of singles and albums that vary from the slightly underwhelming (that recent Sebo K 12" was a bit of a snooze)

to the essential, a designation for which their new full-lengther from Poland’s Marcin Czubala, Chronicles of Never, qualifies. Though it takes a few tracks to really start moving, Czubala’s modus operandi is pretty well mapped out from the get-go—lovely, extended explorations of rhythm’n’texture, in some cases quite delicately moving, such as the dewy-eyed cross-threaded melodies that tinkle through “Spectacles for Humans” like droplets of condensation collecting on your sun visor. And the attention to microsonics reminds me a little of Ricardo Villalobos: while Czubala is nowhere near as psychedelically recalibrating as a listening experience, he does understand the power of building microscopic patterns of percussion (see the tiny details that glimmer through “Dazed and Confused”), though he’s not as intricate and/or distracted as Villalobos.

The most breathtaking record from this field from the last half year or so, though, must be Move D & Benjamin Brunn’s second collaborative full-length, Songs from the Beehive (Smallville). Move D (a.k.a. David Moufang) has been on a roll recently, what with the 2006 reissue of Kunststoff, and here he ups the ante again, with a duo set that takes its sweet time to go to some rather beautiful places. Tracks here typically take a few minutes to get moving— the kick will appear eventually, but you’ve got to give them time—and the result is electronic music that feels truly organic, as though you’re watching the birthing of new galaxies, or the blossom of cross-pollinated, hybrid flora. There are too many highlights to pinpoint, though the album’s bookended by its two best cuts, the hypnotic, sub rosa movements of “Love the One You’re With” and the slow, deep exhalation of “Radar.” The sound is not unlike the “upful

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

melancholy” of Global Communication’s 76’14, albeit updated for the post-minimal and postIDM era. JD Dial records co-founder Peter M. Kersten may be familiar to most for his Lawrence releases, but he’s chosen to go with his lesser-known Sten handle on The Essence (Dial). Not quite as brooding as the label’s usual output, this second Sten album is a dimly-lit cavern percolating with tense activity. With a steady hand and sharp focus, Kersten gently drops elements onto shifting panes of ice, allowing motifs and timbres to slowly morph as they glide along ribbons of metallic rhythm. Gelatinous bass wiggles under sheets of frosted synth pocked by Kersten’s throbbing diodes. The beats smoothly slink-skip amid the glare of mirror-polished hi-hats, gaseous spurts and the automated chimera of human presence: faint rattling tambourines and looping bongo thwacks. Like Dial fixtures Efdemin and Pantha Du Prince, he also garlands his tracks with shimmering strands of trickling glass or, for much of The Essence, an almost Radiophonic chime.

These swirls of melody limn the monochromatic cloud-cover like veiled sunshine.

For a bit more brawn and sweat, check out Shed’s remarkable debut. As its cover seems to illustrate, with its photograph of a tree that crops out much of its branched top for an ample view of its gnarled base, nothing grows without roots.

In fact, a fuzzy voice-over halfway through directly lays out the project at hand: to recapture the vitality of classic techno and rave music without resorting to pastiche. Throughout Shedding the Past (Ostgut) he certainly excels in this task. No puritan, Shed mounts behemoths of rhythm and color that are as lithe as they are muscular. His tracks wobble in asymmetrical cycles, loaded with gooey arpeggios, bulging chrome tendons, jittery beats, electric jolts, dubby reverberations and modulator plasma. If Autechre hadn’t slipped through a wormhole to the furthest coordinates of cyberspace (not a diss), maybe Shed’s mighty mutant dance music wouldn’t startle.

A similar ultravivid palette and futuristic energy course through Stereo Image on their snippety first album S/T (Frog Man Jake). After leaving Junior Boys and releasing solo tracks bustling with pent-up panic, Johnny Dark has found a frontman to match their spliced ’n’ diced exuberance. Instead of Jeremy Greenspan’s sweet hush, we get San Serac’s mercurial charisma. His delivery is Bowiesque, sure, but it’s hardly karaoke. A fully committed spazz, he croons, moans, spits and cries his way through command-line communiqués like “New Year’s day / on the crest of the undertow.” With the album’s eight songs running an average of two to three minutes in length, Stereo Image maximizes crispness and carbonation. We get 2007’s spectacular singles—the blithely heartbreaking “Red Nights,” and the fluttery freak-out of “Dark Chapter”—but also the kling klang splendor of “Strange Life” and whiplash stutters of “Exposure.” Chopping synthpop tones and whinnies into chrome-plated glints, Stereo Image preserves a bit of the 1980s’ uncanny robotics and neon immediacy. But they also subtract much of its kitsch. Sparkling, fortified digitalia with thrills to spare, S/T is great.. BR ✹

SMOKING THAT ROCK Ray Cummings gets down with messed-up modern rock.

Not long ago, Liars—a band whose reviews tend to make its music seem much more interesting than it actually is—deigned to film three videos for every song on one of their albums. Obviously, the costs involved in producing and hawking DVDs could be prohibitive for underground musicians but that's no excuse: borrow a video camera from a neighbor, film some low-grade footage yourself, and post it on your MySpace page. It may endear you to restless, link-surfing strangers who've never heard (or heard of) your band. For instance, Ovo might benefit from some crude visuals. They're an Italian noise-metal duo whose sound is raw and guttural, and their latest, Croce Via (Load) comes across as slightly less unrelenting but more brutal (not to mention more nastily punk) than 2006's snarling Miastenia. Singer/guitarist/zither player Stefania Pedretti's skin-crawling yammer-mewl and Bruno Dorella's no-nonsense drum pound ask no quarter and give none, and as Via lunges dead-eyed through all those sustained-feedback hills, skin-battered valleys, and blistered-larynx ululations, I imagine them committing to a video treatment wherein they're piloting a dog sled through some Godforsaken black-and-white tundra. The dogs and musicians are drooling blood, which a film technician has enhanced to appear as black-red onscreen; Dorella is seated, concentrating, cracking the whips in time with the drums (somehow), while Pedretti stands behind him, wild-eyed, screaming, clawing at a guitar coated in sequins. The director would cut between closeups of her face and wide-angle shots of riders and dogs racing through the snow.

Black Vase was my earliest full-bore Prurient experience, not to mention my first exposure to the often daunting world of power electronics. It sounded harsh and uneven, like the work of an extremely unhappy man attempting to sandblast himself out of existence.

Since then, Dominck Fernow's extensive catalogue of full-lengths, EPs, collaborations, and singles have addressed a mindset of eternal torment via crushing synth/feedback torrents even as he's toyed with various approaches and intensity levels. The Black Post Society (Cold Spring) is the final large piece in the string of jagged alabaster shrapnel shards Fernow issued as Prurient in 2008—see the sluiced-alarm tones of Arrowhead, mind-fucking compilation Cocaine Death, and career-peak And Still, Wanting, among many other shitstorms. But what of Post? If I were asked to transform this into a film, I'd go borrow from a screen-saver concept: a pitch-black blackdrop littered with silver jacks that would jump, scatter, and shift in concert with the coarse vocals and tonal turbulence.

In general, Post isn't far removed from Prurient's other recent work, appending additional, gore-appointed panic rooms to the royal Transylvania mansion of his recorded mystery: “Specter Of A Chile” a study of eternal torments, a simulacrum of some meth-crazed junkie scratching madly at bloodthirsty hallucinogenic bugs in Xasthur's haunted black-metal mausoleum, “Egyptian Bondage” bombarding the ear with diabolical trachea-box mutterings and rampaging psychnoise, the cryptic rack-tightening and curdled synth clockwork of “Months Lengthening Into Years,” and so on. In a way, “Rose Comet” presents a new paradigm, at least for this listener: prior to this, I'd never knowingly heard someone abuse paper in the context of a noise recording. Fernow seems to be rifling through piles of it on this song, which suggests a historical researcher recoiling in the wake of some sort of world-shattering discovery. There are distressed, liquid-y sounds—as

if a full bottle were being shaken, at hyper-speed— followed by grave, sinister vocals drenched in reverb: “The die is cast/1962.” There's talk of wooden weapons, of demises, of burned out things; there's a static-shedding worm coming into ever-clearer focus, a skein of distortion coating everything, pages being brushed and turned and torn in disbelief, a slow ascent that never really peaks—it sucks you into its panicked orbit, to the extent that the experience of somebody innocently tapping you on the shoulder during a headphone session with this song would probably result in injury for one or both parties.

The debut full-length from Zomes (Holy Mountain) demands a more considered concept. So many referents spring to mind: the instrumental that closes Ocean's Eleven, Mike Schank's ponderous American Movie score, ambient drift, quickie-mart checkout-line mediation cassettes, church organist riff runoff. These 16 brief affirmations—all written and performed by guitarist/organist Asa Osborne, formerly of Lungfish —spool by slowly like grainy Super 8 film reels of fluttering jellyfish, none lasting long enough to overstay its welcome. The pervading sense of peace and tranquility is undercut by a layer of foreshadowing, like the gradual interlude between gobbling down mushrooms under one's tongue and awaiting the transformation of the everyday into something wonderously, subtly alien: witness the repeating rhythmic contortions of “Crowning Orbs,” how two floating-in-space melodies comprising “Near Unison” quiver almost imperceptibly, like Jello moments before an earthquake, the stark three-note refrain that brands “Chordal Forms” into memory. Don't laugh, okay?

Zomes needs 16 videos; each must be animated

by Aeon Flux creator Peter Chang and feature blank-faced aborigines in native garb playing various instruments in seasonal humors. That's it. No funny costumes, no limbs akimbo, nothing crazy. Seriously.

Asa, call me: let's do this.

For Canaris (Capitan Records), the new album from Massachusetts-based musician Chris Brokaw, the best presentation might be a single long shot of the former Come member playing his guitar in an empty room. His fret style—precise yet loose, direct yet layered, restive yet fully in control—calls a great deal of attention to itself, particularly on recordings like this one, where he isn't singing or collaborating with others. Surely, group work is fulfilling—see his stints with Come, Pullman, the New Year, and Codeine—and it pays the bills, but I really wish he'd lock himself up in a tower if that meant we'd get more po'faced, thumbs-hitched-in-belt-loops blues pieces like “Watching the Clouds.” Or maybe wrenching, palate-cleansers like the 18-minute title track, where Brokaw demonstrates the full breadth of his range and plays in the more experimental end of the solo sandbox: wrathful, scowling drones beget noisy grit and wrought-iron dissonance. “Exemptive” is a plaintive thing of light-refracting fretwork, a calm, upstairs-downstairs chase, while “Sanguinary” feels a bit more contemplative—more reserved, more winter solstice wistful—even as it comes across a bejeweled, gossamer web of an exercise.

You have to wonder: what do those who slave away in support of Robert Pollard's hoary runaway muse get out of the bargain? Sure, there's prestige, a spot of cash, and the satisfaction of job well done, but is that really enough? For now, let's turn our attention to The Crawling Distance (Guided By Voices Inc)—the first of a buncha 2009 Fading Captain releases—where Pol-

lard wrote and sang the songs and longtime partnerin-crime/instrumentalist Todd Tobias fleshed 'em out.

Reviewing these discs gets to be a grind even if you're a huge GBV fan because they're hit-or-miss in terms of quality and because there are so many bloody many of them. So it's a pleasure to report that Distance is one of the guy's better recent efforts. Production's range-y, performance's threshed, no gloss, no undue hiss or static. On the face of things, there's nothing exceptional happening here—except that Bob brought the melodic ruckus to the studio. Not having to strain to find hooks makes all the difference: the rudimentary riff-stomp of “Cave Zone” is as immediate as it is satisfying, the surprising “Too Much Fun” bringing leather-strut, hard-rawk 'tude to bear only to pause for sensitive piano interludes, gauzy, gently rousing “The Butler Stands for All of Us” standing toe-to-toe with oldies like “Tractor Rape Chain,” “Soul Train College Policeman,” and “Everywhere With Helicopter.” As with most of Pollard's projects, video treatments feel superfluous; given the intense fandom the man enjoys and the impressionism inherent in the sentiments he expresses in his midwestern brogue, a pastiche of fan-created YouTube clips spliced into a single DVD document would sum things up nicely. .

Pollard's old drinking buddies the Strokes have been on break for a good little while now, haven't they? Three years: First Impressions of Earth came out in January 2006. Meanwhile—in addition, one presumes, to dressing and slouching like Entourage extras —the boys have kept busy. Singer/songwriter Julian Casablancas cut an abortion of a single with blended-genre pop star Santogold and Neptunes producer/wannabe rapper Pharrell Williams for a Converse advert, while guitarist Albert Hammond Jr. is presently pursuing a moderately successful solo career, bassist Nikolai Fraiture just struck out on his own as Nickel Eye, and guitarist Nick Valensi is more or less incognito as a hipster session musician.

Thus far, drummer Fabrizio Moretti's extracurricular is proving the most satisfying. Little Joy—a trio that finds Moretti working with multi-instrumentalist Binky Shapiro and Los Hermanos singer/guitarist Rodrigo Amarante—issued its self-titled debut (Rough Trade) the day before the United States of America chose its 44th president. When I call Little Joy the smoothest, mellowest Strokes album never recorded, no disrespect or slight is meant—it's just that Amarante's bemused, heavy-lidded croon reminds me a great deal of Casablancas', and there's a sneaky simplicity to the loose song arrangements: they win your favor right off the bat, even if they're not as machine-like as those of Moretti's other band. Another difference: Shapiro's conversational, leaf-weight vocals chiming in or taking lead now and again, varying the mood and feel of the slow-tempo, tropically-inclined—one might say “pleasingly anemic”—music somewhat.

In a lot of ways, it’s tough to even think of Little Joy as a band in the traditional sense: they're more like a couple of friends drinking past closing time in a Hawaiian-themed dive bar in Vegas who, sloshed and a bit heartbroken, endeavor to play a few tunes on borrowed instruments, but then it turns out they've got songs and words figured out already and are able to crystallize the moment a bit too perfectly.

They should make a movie where this happens; it'd only need to be as long as the album itself—30 minutes or so—and it'd lay claim to your affections even as it called forth many more melancholy memories and sore regrets than you'd really care to relive. ✹

WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #53 | 73

BURNERS AND BACK FLIPS Joel Calahan samples the season's finest underground hip-hop releases

Black Milk

“I'm goin back to the basics / back to the basement” boasts Black Milk, a Detroit native and Slum Village associate who is the poster child for a new generation of underground producers (Damu the Fudgemunk and Kno also come to mind) who diversify their sounds beyond soul and jazz samples to prog rock, show tunes and folk. Tronic is Black Milk's second full-length after 2006's Popular Demand, and, like its title suggests, strips down production to a set of electrobacked beats heavy on technology twists. However, the development from his debut and freelance producer work to this album is jawdropping. Popular Demand was reworked soul grooves that flashed virtuoso talent on the wheels but a dull ear to flow from sample to sample. The simplicity of Tronic production proves a maturity in songwriting: much of the album is live studio recording, emphasizing arpeggiated chords and simple scales on piano, Korg R2 synth, and a bone-rattling drum kit. True to his roots, Milk does lace in a few two-bar chops for good measure on tracks like “Overdose” and “Try.” But the machine glow and nasty percussion fills on “Bounce” and “The Matrix” (the latter with guest scratches by DJ Premier) is like a phone call from the future—pick it up, son.

Devin the Dude is one of pop music's great raconteurs. “In My Draws,” the opening to his latest bowl session soundtrack, Landing Gear, narrates a night in the life of Devin's boxer shorts from a sexual encounter to a strip search for weed. There's no pretension that sing-songy lyrics delivering obscene and anatomically correct similes are more than a trick, but the design makes the effect no less amusing. His subject matter of blunts, bitches and bucks is of course familiar, but there's a casual elegance to his frankness, like a Sinatra of the drrty souf jetset: you hear it in the crooned chorus of “I Don't Chase 'Em” (“I don't chase bitches, bitches chase me / I don't chase hos / Nooooo-oo”) and some truly eye-opening turns of phrase

("I was giving you the beef while you were sleeping on some bacon”; “Girl this dick is so clean / you can boil it in some collard greens”). Sure, Landing Gear is just another Devin the Dude joint, but for many, that will be plenty.

Noah23 slings a backpack like fellow Canadians Josh Martinez and Moka Only, but he's the literati representative of the group. Take the title of his 2001 debut, “Neotype Phenotype,” an example of his fondness for scientific jargon, rife as it is with the polysyllables that are the bread and butter of Noah23's lyrics. Like most hip-hop that pushes one stylistic gesture to the limit, Noah23 records can be monotonous, and in that, Rock Paper Scissors is no distinction from previous discs; it's the work of a journeyman who will poach a few fans as an opening act but won't ever marry a catchy song to his estimable stream-of-consciousness.

Over nearly two decades, Michael Troy as Myka Nine, has, along with fellow Freestyle Fellowship MCs, offered not just a West Coast alternative to Brooklyn social consciousness, but an entire ethos. His latest record, 1969, stands and delivers ten solid songs—like all of his stuff, Myka treats vocal delivery as melodically as rhythmically. “Elevated” and “To the Sky” are darker meditations with a G-funk era feel, and things get crazy when Busdriver cajoles him to let loose on “Chopper.”

There are two paths producers typically follow on solo albums. One is to get out all the energy you have to restrain when backing an MC. This is what comes from San Diego's own Exile in Radio, where he shows off a messy concatenation of soundbytes impossible to pair with vocals. “It's Coming Down” and “The Sound is God” are low-key and just kiss the edge of restless fidgeting that characterizes the experiments here; “Mega Mix” is emblematic of the downfall of getting too cute and embracing attention deficit. The “Nutcracker Suite” sample on “Population Control”

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

will bore a hole in your brain and lay dormant until you start putting up the Christmas lights—caveat emptor.

The other path is to keep the restraint in hand, and risk making half an album. DJ Signify of the Anticon/Lex oikos (best known for a few near-legendary breakbeat mixes in the mid-90s) makes good on the promise of his first beatmaking affair, 2004's Sleep No More.

Dark fuzz grooves blend into one another, with a handful of vocal spots to keep things interesting. “Sink or Swim” with Aesop Rock matches the best of their respective talents: the steady death march of drums with dissonant piano riff plays counterpoint to Aesop Rock's crooney whine. Chicago native Radius matches Signify in beats with a beautifully-conceived periplum of songs that trace the Second City grid in Neighborhood Suicide. Radius has a thing for drum patterns, and not just strong kicks, but a careful timing with cymbal and stick taps too. “Bucktown (Fuckwork)” shows off the best of his skills, but “LoganSquare (Rent'sDue)” and “Hydepark (Imissyou)” are firmly rewarding destinations.

Mush Records is known for glitch-pop and hip-hop that tastes of it, from Clue to Kalo and Her Space Holiday to cLOUDDEAD and Octavius. K-the-I??? has a husky build and a voice to match, booming carefully-enunciated chorus hooks over labelmate Thavius Beck's shifty IDM beats. Beck last offered his hand to Saul Williams on Niggy Stardust (with Trent Reznor!) and it's easy to hear the crossover into gothic industrial. K-the-I??? has verse lyrics that are hard to catch, but there's a real pleasure in the articulation of the vamp in “Decisions” and “Marathon Man.” The Def Jux crowd are kindred spirits to this world pushing production intensity and sound over sense in rhymes.

French duo Mister Modo and Ugly Mac Beer play the beats and the scratches, respectively, and prove it takes two to emulate the DJ Premier style. The Modonut EP features only three song-length tracks, but they're potent potables. “Can't Wait” features El Da Sensei reciting to ringing hi-hat touches and vocal yawps—his jagged catch on the stop-and-go beat track is compelling. The real find, though, is jazz vocalist Jessica Fitousi appearing on “Not Afraid” and “Cigarello.” Modo and Mac weave vintage soul through her improvised vocal lines, a masterful play of old and new.

A friend recently described the main problem with Count Bass D: a chronic inability to self-promote.

More's the pity, as D counters the perception of post-millenium Dirty South with warm electro-R'n'B served alongside some seriously enticing beatfucking. “Neon Soul,” “Can We Hang Out Tonight?” and “What I Do” are deliberate and groovy, but the Count isn't satisfied with just a good feeling. He pounces into the mudpit on “Back Pay (Parts 1 and 2)” and “Y.B.A. Square” among others, luxuriating in making a mess of the gentlest vocal line, the simplest drum bap. The verses are even greater, full of delicious non sequiturs just to bug you out.

Brooklyn rock has come a way off from breakbeat battles or Biggie hustling the corner store. Take 21-year-old braggart Charles Hamilton as a hip-hop wunderkind, but you shouldn't take him too seriously.

The hype of his upcoming major-label LP has been building from last September, since which time he's released 8 mixtapes in anticipation. The preppy, backpacker bounce to lead single “Brooklyn Girl”—full of high-end headphone adulation and chicky boasts— will be lent to a CW-network soundtrack, but plunging knee-deep into the mixtapes makes you realize there's

more at work to the infant terrible than just age-appropriate palaver. It's Charles Hamilton is the one to take in first: one screwy warbling chop by DJ Skee leads to the next, but Hamilton never falters, on and on, over the Isley Brothers on “Conversations with God,” Hoobastank on “Mr. Perfect” and the culminating Labi Siffre chop on “I'm Good (Bret Hart).” Smart enough to put on the spoiled rich kid act for the masses, but his intelligence quotient is real. If this kid doesn't make it I'll eat my hat.

Ugly Duckling put a slick shine on soul breakbeats, crafting fountains of brass and wiggling basslines into foot-moving pop songs. The Native Tongues did a version of this in Brooklyn in the early 90s; but the Long Beach trio of Dizzy Dustin, Andy Cooper and DJ Einstein are tamer in the humor and seem content to rehash old tricks rather than push new ones into production. The beats have always been the vital core of the trio, evident in past hits like “Little Samba”: here the high water marks come at the top of the album in “I Won't Let It Die” and “The Takedown,” with a nice solo DJ set of gorgeous old-school scratching and vocal interpolations, “Einstein Do It (Night on Scratch Mountain)."

Dälek begins Gutter Tactics, their seventh fulllength, with a provocation: “Blessed are They Who Bash Your Children's Heads Against A Rock” sets an excerpt of the infamous “America's chickens coming home to roost” sermon by Reverend Jeremiah Wright to producer Oktopus's signature plodding, ominous groove. This gesture, on the eve of Obama's ascendence to America's highest office, initiates an album of political commitment that embraces commemoration as well as polemic. On “Los Macheteros/Spear of a Nation,” MC Dälek recounts as line items the history of the guerrilla military groups Umkhonto we Sizwe (or “Spear of the Nation") and the Boricua Popular Army (aka “Los Macheteros"), following a poetic tradition from Pindar to Yeats of memorialization through language. Yet, the drive forward from here is urgent and direct in polemical pleas. The epic track “Who Medgar Evers Was...,” arguably Dälek's finest yet, again memoralizes the bloody history of civil rights before pointedly accusing its inheritors of missing its call to arms: “Tell the truth, you never knew who Medgar Evers was....” Celebration would be unbecoming in these halls; for Dälek, Obama's moment just means more work to be done.

The official presidential campaign song for Barack Obama is a mere footnote in history (Ben Harper's “Better Way", anyone?); the real pre-election smash hit was Will.i.am's viral sensation “Yes We Can.” Folk music—definition: made by the folks—has a way of recording history all its own, and our folk music, hip-hop, like folk music of previous generations, has proven its elasticity in cataloguing the reactions of black (and white) America to Obama's election. The tones vary widely, as is to be expected, from the declamatory (Brother Ali's “Mr. President (You're the Man)”) to the sentimental (Jay-Z's “History") to the metahistorical (Saul Williams's “A Letter to History”).

In “Q-Tip for President,” Q-Tip and J.Period do a campaign analysis over the vintage backing of “Eric B. for President” and Obama soundbytes. J.Kwest ("I Am (Obama)") sees the Prez writ small in his own potential; Kidz in the Hall roll up their sleeves to make change on “Work to Do"; Spider Loc, Uncle Murda, Philly Blunts and Freeway pay tributes and hecatombs on “Mr. President”; and Crooked I released a pair of paeans to O-beezy with the Block Obama mixtapes. Even Freddie Foxx puts down the Bumpy Knuckles gloves and shakes the hand on “Yes You Can.” Common waxes philosophical (duh) on “Changes”; then 6th Sense samples Common on “Ignite the People (for Obama).” For Young Jeezy, the fact means life stays pretty much the same: “My president is black, my Lambo's blue...my money's light green and my Jordans light grey”. One of the most surprising assays is Simeon and Black Spade with “Change the World,” a improvised jazz fusion production with vibes and a quick-shifting beat. And yes, not as quick on the trigger, Will.i.am eventually delivered a followup to his hit, the more mundane “It's a New Day” built on a forgettable chorus over a bouncy funk strut—I guess it pays to do it when no one else is. On November 4, the people spoke, and the MCs wrote the history. ✹ WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #53 | 75

THE GLOBAL BEAT

Peter Margasak travels the world in search of subversive sounds.

Ivo Papasov

It's still rather mind-boggling that the brilliant her ubiquitous spirit. Yet while the instrumental clarinetist Ivo Papasov once did hard time for arrangements hew to decades-old models, the playing instrumental music that conflicted with singers do assert their own personalities in their the nationalist agenda of Bulgaria’s communist improvisations and phrasing. regime, but time has been his vindicator. While Thanks to its trade route location Zanzibar has leading the group Trakiya in the 70s he began long experienced a steady of influx of far-flung using wedding celebrations as his primary avenue cultures, but the one that stuck in its local music of expression because they were less likely to be was Arabic. Over a century old, taraab music busted by the authorities—hence the genre coinoffers a majestic blend of Arabic structures mixed age Buglarian Wedding Music, which is actually with gently swaying local rhythms and Swahilia rigorous hybrid of various regional traditions language singing. Culture Musical Club is one with Turkish and Balkan Romani styles dominatof the few enduring musical societies from the ising. On his latest album Dance of the Falcon land, where locals would congregate regularly for (World Village) Papasov doesn’t achieve the communal performances. These days the group same blistering velocity he did on late 80s clasis the premiere exponent of ages-old styles from sics like Orpheus Ascending, but he remains an the region. Shime! (World Village) is the latest in improvisational dynamo, navigating the dizzying a winning series of albums produced by Werner meters—a little 7/16 here, some 9/8 there—like Graebner, and here the group seamlessly tackles a stroll in the park. Most of the tunes are originals more propulsive styles and dances like kidumbak or revamped traditional pieces, but even a jazzy and ngoma. The recording was made in the romp through Henry Mancini’s “Pink Panther” group’s Stone Town headquarters, in open air, theme is transformed by Papasov’s virtuosity. and you can practically feel the breeze drifting Some tacky electronic keyboards mar a few through these elegant arrangements--some tracks, but this is music as both a life force and an instrumental, some with avuncular singing, but aural bulldozer. all featuring the infectious combination of stately The Egyptian singer Oum Kalsoum will probharmonium lines, spry qanun patterns, percolatably always tower as the queen of classical Arabic ing percussion, and a full complement of strings. song and on the wonderful A Tribute to Oum KalOn her fourth album Tchamantche (Nonesuch) soum (Institut du Monde Arabe), recorded live at the intoxicating Malian singer and songwriter a 2001 music festival in France, you can hear the Rokia Traore continues to tease out her own standard she set in every note. An excellent oruses for the traditional sounds of her native land chestra, using the classic Egyptian mix of western with a beautifully introspective pop sensibility. strings and Arabic instruments like oud, nay, and Her songs still tap into the circular groves on qanun, supports three fine contemporary female Mande music, but here she ditches the calabash singers—Riham Abdelhakim, Karima Skalli, and in favor of standard drum kit and electric bass.

Abir Nasraoui—covering Kalsoum standards.

A gentle lattice of electric guitars sketch out the Since Kalsoum’s performances and recordings delicate shapes of her tender compositions, virtually wrote the book on this repertoire, it’s embroidered on most pieces by the brittle twang impossible for these women not to summon of Mamah Diabate’s n’goni. Despite the record’s 76 | SIGNAL to NOISE #53 WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM

shift toward western instrumentation—which also includes some subtle human beatboxing from Sly Johnson, the guy who helped French singer Camille on her latest album—Traore hasn’t significantly changed her sound. Her lovely vocal melodies (and overdubbed harmonies) still have the call-and-response hypnotism of the best Malian music, and there’s an irresistible intensity lurking beneath the hushed performances.

The superb Tuareg group Tinariwen have inspired an ever-increasing burst of co-called desert blues from in and around the Sahara, but the Sublime Frequencies label seems to have a monopoly on finding the best and grittiest practitioners. Group Bombino is the second discovery the label’s Hisham Mayet has made in the city of Agadez in Niger, and while the music on the lp Guitars From Agadez, Vol. 2 isn’t as loud and raw as earlier Saharan releases by Group Doueh and Group Inerane, it’s no less powerful. The group is led by the young guitarist and singer Oumara AlMoctar (aka Bombino). Side one is taken from the group’s archives, and the songs deliver a deeply soulful, all acoustic attack—just guitar, handclaps, and some hand percussion--where the spare singing conveys a deeply focused intensity.

The second side was recorded live by Mayet is considerably more raw, with Bombino plugged in and unleashing tightly-coiled lines that stab and prod over the imperturbable groove.

One of the most arresting sounds in traditional Norwegian music is made by the Hardanger fiddle, a violin outfitted with an extra four or five strings that run beneath the fingerboard and provide gorgeous, haunting overtones to the sound produced with the main strings. On her latest album Stille (NORCD) Åse Teigland gives a beautifully recorded solo recital on the instrument, where centuries old folk melodies ripple with life; her precise readings reveal a nonchalant energy and verve, but every time I’ve listened I end up in thrall of those resonant overtones. The harmonies are thick and viscous, ringing and droning beneath the fleet lines Teigland bows with rhythmic snap None of the original figures from Brazil’s influential Tropicalia movement have remained as devoted to envelope-pushing like Tom Ze. While his relentless creativity hobbled his career for decades at home, his David Byrne-endorsed revival in the early 90s has found him making up for lost time; he’s made almost as many albums in the last decade as he did in the previous four. His new Estudando a Bossa Nordeste Plaza (Biscoito Fino) is the third in a series of recordings that find him essaying specific Brazilian genres and movements (preceded by samba and pagode); this time bossa nova is his subject. As usual, he masterfully subverts the genre with his wacko singing, bizarre harmonic effects, heavy verbal punning, and a warped historical perspective. Most of the tunes feature vocal cameos from some of Brazil’s best and most important contemporary female singers—Monica Salmaso, Fernanda Takai, Tita Lima, Mariana Aydar, and current Os Mutantes singer Zelia Duncan, among them (David Byrne is the sole male guest). Each singer audibly engages Ze for a genuinely interactive vibe, but the star ultimately needs no help. Ze is 76, but I can’t think of too many artists of any age that match his ongoing vigor and adventurousness. ✹

ALL THAT JAZZ

Larry Cosentino examines modern-day manifestations of bop and beyond.

The weirdness of spring—the unaccustomed mix of warm and chill air, the sweet suck of mud, the loneliness of the first bee—agrees well with the elusive lightness of vocalist Judi Silvano. Cleome: Live Takes (JSL 007) is a diverse collection of live performances, ranging in mood from the giddy dance of the title track to the bullish, Monkish “Noscarob” to dreamy atonal drifting. Silvano is a virtuoso, but her wordless syllables are naïve as daffodils, as fetchingly skinned and soiled as a tomboy’s knee. The open, garage-y ambience of some of the tracks only enhances the informal sense of discovery. When Silvano sings lyrics, she savors them slowly, especially in a limpid reading of Sun Ra’s “Love in Outer Space” that will be hard for any singer to surpass. Her rapport with the band, especially drummer Gerry Hemingway, is the perfect mix of comfort and curiosity. Depending on the demands of the tune, Hemingway and Silvano drift, twitter, keen and groove as one; it’s pure joy when they digress into mutual fidgets on the Sun Ra track, like bugs who forgot to work on flowers for a minute.

Seattle’s Jessica Lurie is a polystylistic, multi-talented vocalist-instrumentalist, but she doesn’t parade her skills, rather setting them out like a spicy meal in a high-tech tent. For such a dense bolus of jazz-funkworld-folk, Shop of Wild Dreams (Zipa!Music) goes down very easy, owing largely to the music’s lissome languor, quick humor, and slight happy-gas pop buzz.

Lurie always has her feet on the ground, whether she’s drifting on a lyric or carving out a solo, or presiding via aura alone. She plays creditable alto and flute on the sinuous “Grinch,” one of several tunes with a Middle Eastern flavor. A slow kaleidoscope of colors from electronics, banjo and ukulele and baritone sax mirror Lurie’s varied moods. The band is always thinking of new ways to support her, and it’s not a predictable trip. They mix it up so well, it’s a nice surprise when Erik Deutsch’s piano pares the music down to pure jazz. On “Pinjur,” she rips off a hypnotic, high-energy tenor solo as the band drives her on, led by Seabrook, who hacks away at his banjo like a rail-splitter. Just when you begin to wonder how they’ll avoid a cliché wrap-up, Seabrook and Deutsch pop into a squeaky freakout-ina-thimble that disperses and focuses the energy at the same time. If this is a formula, it’s well scrambled and nicely spiced.

The possessive in Mike Reed’s People, Places and Things (482 Music 1060) summons up a man-onthe-street program from the ’50s, and, in a way, that’s what this is. Drummer Reed dedicated the disc to the Chicago jazz scene from 1954–1960, mixing standards with originals. His quartet—with Jason Roebke on bass and the scrappy front-line duo of Greg Ward on alto sax and Tim Haldeman on tenor—knocks down a series of straight-whiskey toasts to everyone from Sun Ra to lesser-known lights like drummer Wilbur Campbell and the hard bop band MJT+3. The brawny, bruised and brotherly Chicago feeling permeates all the tracks, from a lyrical stumble around Sun Ra’s “Planet Earth” to the strip-joint shimmy of Oscar Brown, Jr.’s “Sleepy.”

Reed returns with his aptly named Loose Assembly for a more exploratory outing, The Speed of Change (482 Music 1062). Ward is back too, floating this time on an elusive haze conjured by Jason Adasiewicz on vibraphone and Tomeka Reid on cello, with Reed shimmering and bubbling on the traps.

Nicole Mitchell pops in to deliver a vocal on Max Roach’s “Garvey’s Ghost” (much sweeter than Abbey Lincoln’s spooky original), and she also doubles on

flute on the final track. Imagine Out to Lunch slightly sedated, fuller in texture, with a cello thrown in. It’s sanded finer than Eric Dolphy’s masterpiece, but still a finely wrought, intriguing set.

Rent Romus, a longtime Bay Area composerreedman-impresario, is justly proud of Thundershine (Edgetone 4017), his third jazz album. This robust, big-toned collaboration with saxophone veteran Chico Freeman was released in 1994 as In the Moment, but “due to unforeseen circumstances it was never properly made available to the public,” as Romus cryptically puts it in his sleeve notes. Whatever the reason for the wait, it belongs in print. The music pulsates confidently, leavened by a tough lyricism and perforated unexpectedly with compelling trapdoor excursions into free-form. In the first two tracks, “Cameltrot” and “Dali Lawnd,” the band takes you for a pounding motorboat joyride, only to push you off into the water to drift, until they deign to zoom back and swoop you up.

The classic two-horn attack pattern is also alive and kicking in a powerful CD by Baltimore saxophonist David Bond, another longtime free-bop warrior little-known outside his local fiefdom. His quintet gives no quarter in The Early Show (CIMP 5004), a soaring, banging live set recorded at Twins Jazz in Baltimore.

The group (which pairs Bond with fellow saxophonist Andrew White) stretches out on five originals here; its avant-fatback agenda owes a lot to the big-toned, bluesy universe of Archie Shepp, though there are also generous shimmers of sunrise Coltrane ecstasy. The two longest tunes, “Coltrane” and “Sun Ra Swing,” pay respectful but not overly imitative homage.

It’s rare to experience music that seems to strive toward complete immobility. Jeff Johnson’s Tall Stranger (Origin 82518) has a staggering, strung-out pace that may drive some people crazy, but will surely delight others who resist our world’s accelerating rate of input. All three legs of this trio (Johnson on bass, plus reedman Hans Teuber and drummer Billy Mintz) have tireless storytelling chops. Johnson drawls out his solos like a grizzled medicine-show man after a dozen redeyes, and when Teuber switches from noodling tenor to bass clarinet, the colloquy among the three opens up profound depths by lowering the buzz of activity close to absolute zero. It’s not a lazy crew. The illusion of space is carefully etched by three hypersensitive bandmates who seem to agree that the overt gesture is a symptom of the failure of imagination.

I’m writing this column on Inauguration Day, which doesn’t seem to be quite the right time to dive into a set of grim, reflective tone poems on 9-11 and its subsequent horrors, foreign and domestic. Fair enough. When the time comes, in two weeks or two decades, American Agonistes—an extraordinary pair of big-band suites by the Aardvark Jazz Orchestra (Leo 508)—will be on the shelf and waiting. The first suite, “Blood on the Sun/New Moon Rising,” was premiered eight days after Sept. 11, which makes its mesmerizing mix of raw nerves and deep reflection all the more remarkable. The forces are fairly large (25 musicians), but the economy of timbres and tone colors and the intimacy of the writing make most trios sound like jostling mobs. Composer, leader and pianist Mark Harvey moves the narrative forward with the simplest effects—a stately brass chorale overlaid with stinging sprays of hi-hat, or a tenor sax solo buoyed by trombone swells. As an experiment, I listened all the way through without reading the notes, then studied the underlying program, and was shocked

at its specificity. (The second suite, “Fallen Truth,” has movements entitled “Big Oil Tango,” “The Prevaricator” and “Theocracy in America.”) You can listen for the sheer adventure, or study it with the dotted lines on the overlay, as you please.

It’s almost cruel to juxtapose the sober Aardvark opus to another idiosyncratic large-ensemble CD, Carla Bley’s Appearing Nightly at the Black Orchid (ECM 11815). The first two tracks, full of Tin Pan Alley and bebop quotes, is suffused with a thin haze of nostalgia that reminded me of cheap Edward Hopper mall prints at first. Only with the half-hour title track, an episodic montage of moods and music from ’50s New York clubs, did the aesthetic jell in my mind. It’s a bouquet to the music Bley heard in her youth, but it’s not campy or retro. There are a lot of quotes—Bley’s piano intro stampedes through a dozen old standards in less than a minute—but after a while they start to make you smile, like paperboys yelling headlines in a film noir street scene. Indeed, Bley’s string of kaleidoscopic episodes unfolds as if in black and white on a silver screen. There’s plenty of blowing room for stalwarts like trumpeter Lew Soloff and saxophonist Andy Sheppard, and it’s often rather like all of them are doing their bit on a revolving Busby Berkeley set. Sure, it’s post-ironic razzle-dazzle, down to a high-kicking conclusion and built-in curtain call I wouldn’t play for my hipper friends, but Bley makes it engaging with change-ups in tempo, harmonic oddities and overall momentum.

I cannot resist hopping one last car on the big band train: yes, Joe Lovano’s Symphonica (Blue Note 26225) is old news, having made it to a lot of Top 10 lists for 2008. Yes, this is a quarterly magazine, so we’re getting to it late. But I can’t leave it alone. It’s sweet and soothing, and doesn’t give us Lovano at his pugnacious best, but if there has ever been a night where soloists and big band—and full orchestra—played so integrally and beautifully together, I don’t know of it.

This is Lovano’s equivalent of Monk at Town Hall, only with a bigger band and more generous arrangements, and deserves a deep bow.

How about a drifting floe of uncategorizable music for a coda? The Bad Plus are back—you know, the fellows who were going to “make jazz relevant again,” per Esquire—and they are up to just enough of their old tricks to make For All I Care (Heads Up 3148) worth a listen. The conceit of this disc is that Nirvana, Heart and Pink Floyd can be chalked onto the same coffeeshop drink menu with the likes of Milton Babbitt.

Well...no, but it’s a happy spank in the cochlea to hear pianist Ethan Iverson’s incisive take on fare like Babbitt’s “Semi-Simple Variations,” Ligeti’s “Fem (Etude No. 8)” and Stravinsky’s “Variation d’Apollon.” The trio has to drag an ice cube and chain through the rest of the disc: the euthanized monotone of alt-rock chanteuse Wendy Lewis, sounding like a woman beyond the consolation of suicide. That makes her perfect for the angst-ridden trilogy of Nirvana’s “Lithium,” Floyd’s “Comfortably Numb” and the Flaming Lips’ “Feeling Yourself Disintegrate.” There are consolations.

Drummer David King’s Beatlesesque thwacks trot through the angst, and Iverson gets his magnificent licks in where he can. He emits beautiful bloody clouds of notes on “Barracuda” and mad arpeggios in “Numb,” but pares it down to the honest ring of a carpenter’s hammer to play Stravinsky. If a new round of “is this jazz?” blather breaks out, don’t ask me to comment. I’ll be outside in the mud looking for the first bee. ✹

WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #53 | 77

WORD MUSIC

Fred Cisterna reviews recent spoken word recordings

Pete Wyer

The “Spoken Word” category is a good catch-all for intriguing, where-do-you-file-it? recordings. This column will focus on conventional spoken word, concrete poetry (which sometimes has no conventional words at all), composers who create text-heavy work (Robert Ashley is a good example), and other sound arts that emphasizes language, vocal sounds, etc.

This installment looks at some very different examples of the genre: a storyteller backed by a crack band; an ambitious piece that skillfully utilizes spoken word, music, and sound design to paint an audio portrait of a time and place; an unusual introduction by a conductor before a live performance; and a poetry website that features both reading and engaged analysis.

Iceberg Slim aka Robert Beck—the notorious pimp-turned-writer—was born Robert Lee Maupin in 1918. His vision of mean streets populated by hustlers,

whores, and con men found expression in books such as Pimp, Trick Baby, and Airtight Willie & Me, and his writing has had a significant influence on hip hop.

Reflections, recorded in 1976, finds Beck intoning four rhymed narratives as he’s backed by a bluesy jazz group, the excellent Red Holloway Quartet. There’s no shortage of humor or theatrical flair; the music is effectively atmospheric and, at times, as sly as the narrator.

Beck’s recitation can be sing-songy, but he’s a gripping performer and his stories take turns that leave you stunned. Reflections is a hoot in some ways—you can be sure that many listeners view these wild, back-in the-day stories from a campy perspective—but when Beck spits out words like “bitch” and “faggot,” the listener is reminded that the guy had a highly developed dark side. But he can just as easily crack you up, keeping you on your toes until the very end. Reflections

wraps with “Mama Debt,” the surreal, heartbreaking tale of Beck’s last visit with his dying mother.

Composer/guitarist/spoken word artist Pete Wyer’s Stories from the City at Night (Thirsty Ear) is not without its own sense of urban grit, but this atmospheric album paints a much dreamier portrait of life in the big city (in Wyer’s case, New York) than Beck’s grim tales. “Rain at Night,” the album’s longest cut at nearly twenty minutes, presents a vivid collage of urban sounds fleshed out by dramatic cellos, guitar, and saxophones, as Wally Burr performs the meditative, sometimes multi-tracked, text. This is work that should be listened to closely—think of it as a film without images except for the ones playing on your mind’s own screen. Other highlights include “Somebody,” where vocalist Carol Lipnik sings with a sense of longing and loss that evokes Brecht/Weill, and “Dina’s All Night Diner,” a humorous, late-night look back at a romantic relationship. On the latter cut, reader Caryn Havlik is abetted by accompanists including pianist Matthew Shipp.

The pianist Glenn Gould is well known for his idiosyncratic approach to key works in the Western classical canon. Leonard Bernstein, the New York Philharmonic, and Gould performed the Brahms Piano Concerto No. 1 in April of 1962, but the pianist and the conductor had different ideas of how to approach the work. Gould prevailed, and Bernstein made an unusual statement to the audience before the concert, remarking that he respected Gould’s vision and felt compelled to honor the pianist’s conception of the piece despite their contrasting views. The recording of the concert is bookended by Bernstein’s fascinating disclaimer and an excerpt from a radio interview with Gould.

Moving on to the internet's glut of spoken word offerings, I wanted to spotlight Poem Talk. This excellent podcast series (sponsored by the Poetry Foundation, the Kelly Writers House at the University of Pennsylvania, and Pennsound), presents the school's audio archive, with each show featuring a vintage recording of a poet reading a single poem, and host Al Filreis and three guest poets discussing the poem in depth. (Ted Berrigan’s “3 Pages,” a Jaap Blonk sound poem, and Ezra Pound’s “Cantico del Sole” have all been showcased.) The conversation is intelligent, multifaceted, and illuminating. Filreis and his guests never try to pin down a single meaning; the poem is left breathing at the end, its mysteries and possibilities intact. Fred Cisterna

Pogus proudly announces the reissue of the Source Records 1-6 as a 3 CD set Source: Music of the Avant Garde 1968-1971 Featuring recordings by: Robert Ashley - David Behrman Larry Austin - Allan Bryant Alvin Lucier - Arthur Woodbury Mark Riener - Stanley Lunetta Lowell Cross - Arrigo Lora-Tolino Alvin Curran - Annea Lockwood www.pogus.com 78 | SIGNAL to NOISE #53 WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM

REISSUE REDUX

Bill Meyer surveys the season's key reissues.

What happens when you put jazz together with cowboys? Western Swing! Sometime during Franklin Roosevelt’s first term, bands of hat-wearing musicians started charming Western dancehall audiences with a dazzling amalgam of fiddle tunes and swing rhythms that sound today like rock and roll’s prototype. Bob Wills was their king and despite their name, his Texas Playboys first made it big in Oklahoma. During WWII they hit their peak of popularity playing for displaced Okies working in California defense plants. In an effort to capitalize on their new-found marketability, Wills put together a series of pre-packaged record shows (aka transcriptions) for a company called Tiffany Music with the intention of shopping them to stations around the nation. The Western Swing gospel stalled at the Mississippi, and not all of the shows were distributed, which was a shame since the material the Playboys recorded for them was the loosest, liveliest and most ingratiating music of their career.

Ten volumes of The Tiffany Transcriptions finally made it to vinyl in the early 80s and CD about a decade later, but they’ve been out of print for quite a while. Collector’s Choice has put the whole batch out again in a boxed set. The packaging is swell; each album comes in a little gatefold, which is swankier than the original LPs. The annotation tends more toward glad-handing and sentimental remembrance than in-depth discussion, but if you’re looking for music that makes you glad you’re alive, you won’t necessarily want to read as much as you’ll want to hop around the room anyway. The only real complaint I have is that there are still dozens of tunes in the vaults; would it have killed anyone to add a few of them to each LP-erasized disc? Regardless, this music got thousands of Americans through some pretty dire times; it might do the same for you now that they’re back.

A little over twenty years later, Creedence Clearwater Revival rose to the top of the charts with their updated version of populist roots rock. The late 60s weren’t such a happy time, so Creedence Clearwater Revival, Bayou Country, Green River, Willy And The Poor Boys, Cosmo’s Factory, and Pendulum balance their party anthems with blue-collar laments and commentary on the war from the point of view of guys who lacked the resources to dodge the draft. In honor of the band’s 40th birthday and facilitated by bandleader John Fogerty’s rapprochement with the label that he once excoriated in song, Fantasy has put out new digipak-wrapped, more spaciously mastered versions of the band’s catalog. Each comes with bonus tracks, many live performances taken from the band’s swan-song tour as a three-piece tour.

One wonders why they’d include, say, a second long march version of “Suzie Q” on the same CD while leaving off the concise 7” edit, but a couple of collaborations with Booker T and the MGs transcend murky recorded-on-TV sound.

If Creedence were essentially popular music types who courted heads by stretching out the guitar solos, California session guitarist Jerry Cole did the same whilst performing under the producerinvented moniker The Animated Egg by ladling on the effects on the psychedelic cash-in Guitar Freakout. But as you’d expect from a guy who shuttled easily between sessions for Sinatra, Elvis, and straight-to-the-supermarket cheapo sessions, scratch off the fuzz and you’ve got competently

professional country-rock and R&B instrumentals.

The hot licks and a brazenly groovy cover have turned what was once a $1.98 bin-stuffer into prime eBay bait, thus this CD reissue. Since such albums only ran 25 minutes back in the day, Sundazed has added a dozen tracks from some go-go dancethemed LPs that Cole recorded under other aliases that are every bit as trippy.

Scarcity, 60s stylings, and South American origins are a volatile mix on the collector’s market; I imagine that someone, somewhere opened a home equity line to score one of the very rare copies of Sacros’ self-titled LP. But you won’t have to; Shadoks has turned out a CD version of the only release by Chile’s answer to the Byrds, which disappeared shortly after its 1973 release when Augusto Pinochet crushed the country’s music industry like a bug. With its twelve-string jangle, accomplished harmonies, and graceful melodies, they actually summoned the Byrds’ sound better than the McGuinn, Crosby, and company could by that point. Despite lasting only half an hour, his one’s well worth picking up.

Given the drab rock and drabber ballads that have become R.E.M.’s stock in trade since Bill Clinton first accepted the Democratic nomination for president, it falls to people who just attended their 25th high school reunion to remember that the band used to get compared to the Byrds, too.

Around the time of their first album Murmur (IRS/ UMG), they made it ok for college kids repulsed

by New Romantic synth-pop to like guitars again with a kinetic blend of discrete Americana, crisp bleached grooves, and a melodic sensibility equally indebted to the Velvet Underground and the Byrds. Quarter-century anniversaries are always a good time to get people to buy the same record again, but packaging this one with a second disc containing a whole concert from 1983 sweetens the pot. A few of those old fans might remember how R.E.M.’s guitarist and tastemaker Pete Buck used guest spots and year-end top ten lists to urge people to check out the likes of Camper Van Beethoven and Robyn Hitchcock. Not many people followed him as far as Charlie Pickett, whom he both toasted and produced. Nowadays Pickett is a Miami lawyer who plays Howlin’ Wolf, Flamin’ Groovies, and Velvet Underground tunes in bars on the weekend, but back in the 80s he headed up a posse of Johnny Thunders wannabes who toured and drugged themselves half (or closer) to death flogging those same Velvets and Groovies covers alongside some startlingly strong originals about their favorite scoring corners and least favorite girlfriends. Most of his records never made it to CD, so the recently released best-of Bar Band Americanus (Bloodshot) is about as close as you’ll get if you don’t live south of the Florida Panhandle.

Volcano Suns were the irreverent, chaotic sequel to Mission of Burma. Helmed through all their incarnations by Burma’s drummer Peter Prescott, the band didn’t so much steer a middle course between noisy punk and catchy pop as drive a punk beater all over the pop road with tire chains that tore up the tarmac. Understandably, they were loved by only a few at the time, and I’m not sure that anyone under the age of 40 is waiting for them to come back. But Merge, the same label that resurrected Big Dipper’s catalog a year back, has given the Suns’ first two albums an absurdly deluxe

treatment. Both Bright Orange Years and All-Night Lotus Party, which have never been on CD before, have been loaded up with bonus tracks that range from the ridiculous — a “dub” that is nothing but shouted vocals — to the delirious — anyone up for a power trio hammering of Prince’s “1999”?

Speaking of dub, Pressure Sounds has unearthed a commendable if totally obscure gem in Dub I (Pressure Sounds) by Jimmy Radway & The Fe Me Time All Stars. Radway was an aspiring producer-performer whose slender legacy — a few singles and this album of dubs — were barely noticed in the 70s on account of poor promotion.

A jazz fan, Radway was more tuned into the emotive qualities of horns than most of his contemporaries, and it’s the echoing brass as much as the tough bass that makes this one well worth hearing.

Coxsone Dodd garnered much more fame and fortune than Radway; when he died a few years ago, the head of Studio One had two separate labels labeling his old tracks and the entire Jamaican music business writing new tracks over his old grooves. And it’s the grooves that are kind on Dub (Heartbeat), a collection of transformed rhythms he put out under the name Dub Specialist. Dodd was hardly a dub virtuoso like King Tubby, but he knew what he had and how to draw attention to it. So every reverb-laden keyboard lick or guitar dropout serves to focus you back on the bass and drums.

The Numero Group, best known for its Eccentric Soul compilations that focus on extinct urban labels with strange back-stories, has taken the single-artist plunge with two 70s-vintage albums by Indianabased singer Caroline Peyton. Intuition and Mock Up both present the Indiana-based singer dealing with writer-producer Mark Bingham’s eccentric spin on essentially mainstream material. The first album sounds like a mash-up of Joni Mitchell, Leon Russell, and Yoko Ono; the latter is far slicker, with creditable stabs at the Eagles, Chic, and anonymous gospel-rock filtered through singer-songwriter sensibilities that are undone by Peyton’s gratuitous technical displays, yet occasionally redeemed by intriguing textural adornments from her versatile pipes.

The Paul Bley Quintet’s Barrage (ESP) affords a rare occasion to hear Sun Ra’s ace alto saxophonist Marshall Allen in a non-Arkestral setting. It’s a rather remarkable occasion of music in flux; Allen and percussionist Milford Graves seem determined to overturn the Ornette Coleman-inspired lyricism and forward propulsion proposed by the leader and bassist Eddie Gomez, while trumpeter just wants to blaze. One wonders if the tapes have deteriorated; the CD sounds rather more distant than many other recent ESP reissues, as though they felt they couldn’t release it without an extra dose of noise reduction processing, but the music still cuts through.

The high end is much more intact on Lowell Davidson’s Trio (ESP), the better to hear Graves’ light touch on the cymbals and Davidson’s own nimble right hand, which gets the most out of a rather rickety-sounding upright piano. Bassist Gary Peacock still seems rather lost in the background on this recording, which represents the only commercial release by a man who once played piano with Ornette and later exerted a profound influence upon a young Joe Morris. ✹

WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #53 | 79

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

CROSSWORD

By puzzlemaster Ben Tausig. This issue's theme: "Men of Letters."

Across

1. Summer month, in Paris 5. MP3 data holders 9. Big name in bulk foods 14. Response from one feeling totally chill?

15. Label for Chromeo and the Black Lips 16. Longed 17. "Nothin' But a Good Time" guitar soloist 19. With all due haste 20. Three-sheets-to-the-wind 21. Part of FEMA: Abbr.

23. Chick-___-A (fast food chain) 24. Switch options 26. Prolific Tokyo experimental musician 28. Early Def Jam Records star 31. Doctrine 32. Old Testament song 33. ___ Mills (portrait photography company) 36. Rock band with "Beautiful Freak" 40. The ___ Band (Charlie Wilson's group) 41. Guitarists tend to have to replace them 44. Juuust fine 45. ___ Heart (aka SeĂąor Coconut, aka Geeez 'N' Gosh, aka Flanger) 47. Worked the door, in a way 48. Late, in Rome 50. Hightail it 52. Shock rocker born Jesus Christ 54. Bluesman with a nightclub chain 57. Restaurant seating option 58. Charles or Davies 59. Mani-___ (multitasking beauty treatment) 61. Chaotic ordeal 65. How sardines may be packed 67. One of MTV's original VJs 69. Giant Armadillo 70. Suffix with gas 71. "I'm ___ mood for this!"

72. As a companion 73. Siouxsie & the Banshees' "Cities in ___" 74. Txts, say

Down

1. Basics, so to speak 2. Shamu, e.g.

3. Pakistani tongue 4. Green Day drummer born Frank Edwin Wright III 5. Serial heartthrob?

6. Be down with something 7. Staff symbol 8. Appear 9. "No. 1 in Heaven" band 10. Make like a puppy 11. R-rated acronym 12. Free Jazz pioneer Taylor 13. Nancy of "Access Hollywood" 18. Snake poisons 22. Scratching (out)

25. Norwegian inlet 27. Melody Maker alternative 28. Lorena Ochoa's org.

29. Would-be J.D.'s exam 30. Guitar key changer 34. Say you're on the guest list when you're actually just broke, e.g.

35. Words after stop or touch 37. Swing pianist Hines 38. 1969 CCR tune 39. Onion covering 42. Hint of color 43. ___ Major (guest rapper on Lil Wayne's "Lollipop" who died before the song was released) 46. Hosp. scanner 49. Former Iraqi Governing Council President Abdul Aziz

51. Turn off the amp 53. Speed 54. Water purifying brand 55. Everyday 56. City referenced in Eno's "Burning Airlines Give You So Much More" 57. Musician/model Phillips 60. Spun, so to speak 62. Credit application figs.

63. Viet ___ 64. Yoko and family 66. Charged particle 68. Prime rib au ___ for answers, see: signaltonoisemagazine.blogspot.com

WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #53 | 81

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

WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #53 | 83

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

SIGNAL TO NOISE #53 WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #53 | 85