Signal to Noise #55 - fall 2009

THE QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF IMPROVISED, EXPERIMENTAL & UNUSUAL MUSIC

marshall allen & the preservation of sun ra's legacy pink mountain mills college issue #55 fall 2009 $4.95 us / $5.95 can

gordon allen pimmon stuart dempster

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SIGNAL TO NOISE

THE JOURNAL OF IMPROVISED, EXPERIMENTAL & UNUSUAL MUSIC ISSUE #55 : FALL 2009 CONTACT 1128 Waverly Street, Houston Texas 77008 operations@signaltonoisemagazine.org 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 ✹ julian cowley ✹ raymond cummings ✹ jonathan dale ✹ christopher delaurenti ✹ tom djll ✹ nate dorward ✹ lawrence english ✹ phil freeman ✹ 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 ✹ adam strohm ✹ john szwed ✹ nathan turk ✹ dan warburton ✹ alan waters ✹ ben watson ✹ seth watter ✹ charlie wilmoth

CONTENTS 55 gordon allen 6 pimmon 8 stuart dempster 10

marshall allen & the sun ra legacy 12 pink mountain 30 mills college 36 live reviews 46 book reviews 50 cd / dvd / lp / dl reviews 52 crossword 89 graphic novella 90 Seminar in Electronic Performance, Mills College, Oakland, July 2009.

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GORDON ALLEN

Herb Greenslade

Busy Montreal-based trumpet player takes on the mantle of community organizer.

By Michael Chamberlain.

The front room of Le Cagibi, a comfortable, funky neighbourhood cafe at the corner of StLaurent and St-Viateur in Montreal’s artistically vibrant Mile End neighbourhood, is populated by students and post-university types huddled over their laptops. The back room is a performance space devoted to improvised music.

On a recent Friday evening, as trumpeter Gordon Allen and the rest of the quartet Stuffy Turkey ran through their Monk repertoire, the side door entrance to the back room remained open, and people gathered on the sidewalk to take a listen before deciding to enter or just to hang around outside with canine companions and neighbourhood acquaintances. Inside, Stuffy Turkey finished the set with “Let’s Cool One,” after which Allen passed his porkpie hat, advising the by now 20-strong in the audience to donate five bucks for the cause, more “if the music is worth more to you than the price of a beer.”

Allen, the well-dressed trumpeter with the porkpie hat and crooked grin, has practically been a one-man scene-maker since arriving in Montreal from Guelph, Ontario in 2005. Since March of 2008, Le Cagibi has been the scene of Mardi Spaghetti, a Tuesday night improvised music series curated by Allen, Josh Zubot, Philippe Lauzier, and Pierre-Yves Martel. Allen is also one of the people behind L’Envers, the performance space (and Allen’s home) a few blocks away from Le Cagibi that’s been running since September 2008, and he’s appeared as a sideman on albums by David Mott, Joe Giardullo, Michel F. Coté, Sam Shalabi, and Jean Derome as well as being a leader or partner in numerous projects, including the groups Stuffy Turkey, Pink Saliva, and All Up in There. He also

teaches trumpet and improvisation and has collaborated on various multimedia projects.

Yeah, he’s busy.

Allen grew up in Toronto, where he went to a high school with a strong arts orientation.

Having always played the trumpet, he studied music just long enough at York University and the University of Toronto to figure out that the academic approach wasn’t for him. Instead, he cites his time at the Banff Centre for Performing Arts and the Vancouver Creative Music Institute as much more important to his artistic development. Bill Dixon, with whom he has taken lessons, is a key figure for Allen, whose playing, with its concern for control of tone and timbre, bears clear traces of the Dixon influence. “What he does aesthetically, the integrity of it over the years, is a real model for me,” Allen explains.

Allen first played in Montreal in 2003 with Steve Lacy, and that was when he met people like Jean Derome, Lori Freedman, Nicholas Caloia, and Rainer Wiens. It was then that he started thinking about moving to Montreal, attracted by the musicians, the infrastructure for improvised music, and the social dynamic of the city.

“People here go out to shows, as a general rule, not just for this scene. People go out at night instead of staying home and watching TV. When I play Cagibi, it is more likely to be for twenty people than for five people, like in Toronto. That makes a big difference,” he states as we sit at the bar of L’Envers.

He’s proud of what Mardi Spaghetti has accomplished. The series brings together musicians, often in whimsical combinations, each one of the four organizers responsible for

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one Tuesday per month. The musicians come from disparate musical worlds—jazz, musique actuelle, rock—but improvisation is the common thread.

“Because Mardi Spaghetti is happening every week, it’s in the back of people’s minds, so it’s now part of the fabric of the neighbourhood and that cafe,” Allen says. “There was already a good level of activity in Montreal for improvised music, but this series has made the music more visible, quite literally. It’s brought a lot of new musicians on the scene, and a lot of new listeners too, I think.”

Allen has been involved in a lot of projects but these days is hoping to focus more on Pink Saliva, his project with Michel F. Coté and Alexandre St-Onge. The trio will release their first full-length CD-R, Bienvenue aux Dames, in the fall. (It and any of his other recordings can be purchased through his MySpace site.)

“It’s been difficult to make things happen with that band. We’ve never played outside of Montreal, and we’ve been turned down for grants to do an album for Ambiances Magnétiques. I think the music is pretty extreme,” he says in trying to explain the situation, “it’s not jazz, but it’s not noise, I don’t know what it is, we just do what we do. That’s what I would like people to know about. I think it’s the best expression of what I do.”

Whatever happens, it’s sure that Allen will continue to work his ass off to make whatever he’s got happening happen. “Nobody who does this music has got what they deserved— not William Parker, not Cecil Taylor. But you keep doing it, and ultimately it’s at least partly up to you to be happy.”✹

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Australian sound artist finds catharsis in sonic experimentation.

By Lawrence English

Marzena Abrahamik

PIMMON While isolation isn’t usually a good thing, it does have one advantage, in that creative undertakings can flourish free from the interference of trends and outside pressures. Perhaps it’s for this reason the Australian sound-artist Paul Gough, better known as Pimmon, was able to develop such an unusual musical language. His recordings since 1997 not only demonstrate his interest in digital signal processing and other transformative pursuits, but also hint at secret passions for ghostly melody and disjointed rhythmic pulses, the result of a musical past littered with pop oddities, prog leanings and abstract electronics.

“It wasn’t until I got a cassette player when I was 10 that I really went nuts,” Gough remarks. “I think listening to shortwave radio had a lot to do with my music.

It was like discovering a magic world for me. My cousins were into ham radio, but I wasn’t interested in that aspect, just listening to the odd noises you’d find.

Eventually I was allowed to play with my mother’s reel-to-reel machine and mucked around making unusual sounds.

I still have some of these recordings and have even sampled them as a part of my work.” Gough’s interest in radio has since become a major part of his life: much of his time is now spent working as a radio presenter (for the exceptional Quiet Space program) and producer for Australia’s national broadcaster.

Radio aside, the roots of Pimmon’s

sonic dawn stretch back to a number of crucial chance encounters that somehow expanded into near mania.

“I think of myself firstly as a consumer,” Gough remarks. “I love listening to new music or musical paths I’ve yet to tread.

I am obsessed about sound! When I discovered ‘different’ music like Nurse With Wound and a lot of the Sydney underground scene at the time, the brashness of youth made me say, ‘I can do that.’ This was the point when I wanted to make my own sounds and have fun.

“These days I can hit the creative zenith if I get an overload of creative listening. That just makes me want to make something, but I’m not drawn to some kind of imitation of what I’ve heard.

Over recent years some obscure prog of the ’70s has done this to me, but I’ve not tried a version of lap-prog…well, not yet anyway!”

What he has tried most recently is documented on the Smudge Another Yesterday LP. On first listening, the album’s emotional qualities are striking: whilst entirely abstract in its arrangements and sound sources, many of the pieces carry with them affecting motifs and hues.

This is matched by the individual way Pimmon’s music explores and exploits the laptop, sending out a beacon of inspired clarity into an ocean of foggy computer soundwaves.

Smudge’s birth, however, was not an easy one. “Basically I hadn’t felt like doing

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anything ‘Pimmon’ for a while,” Gough confesses. “I had this emotional brick wall that had settled largely upon me, and added to this, I was in urgent need of a tech update. I had all sorts of dramas with live performance, so it was like a selfimposed retirement.”

This retirement didn’t last, though, and was broken with a vigorous outpouring that more than makes up for the absence of releases in recent years.

“I had been working on the soundtrack to a friend’s feature film called Left Ear, and it was as I was archiving some unused material that I heard the opening track of Smudge. As soon as I heard it a little window popped open in my head. I relived quite a dark experience in my life and this was the catalyst for this release, and it has been quite a cathartic process.

“There are tracks on Smudge that as I made them I had no idea what was going on, but on listening, they had a profound effect on me. So in some ways I find my work reveals the purpose after the fact.

I’m not sure if that makes sense. I’ve never gone into a work and thought, well this will help me deal with this event or this will be my statement on this thing. It’s not from a prethought place, an academic place or even a ‘sound’ place. It’s about listening to components over and over, finding sounds that either complete or juxtapose what’s happening elsewhere.”✹

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Seattle-based trombonist brings to bear a lifetime of deep listening whether playing classical, jazz or world music.

By Bill Barton

Jean Sherrard

STUART DEMPSTER Trombonist and composer Stuart Dempster likes to say that he is “putting the ‘play’ back into playing music,” and at age 73, he continues to grow and change as a musician. As Shunryu Suzuki Roshi said in the prologue to Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, in the expert’s there are few.” From this perspective, Dempster is still a beginner, which is why his music remains so refreshing—by turns deep, meditative, healing, playful and amusing.

Born in Berkeley, California, Dempster attended El Cerrito High School, where he played in an afterschool band whose repertoire featured swing arrangements in the style of Glenn Miller and Tommy Dorsey. From 1953 to 1954 he led a dixieland band called Dempster’s Ditch Diggers that took part in a contest in San Francisco judged by Kid Ory. “I remember being in awe of the gentleman, and that was before I really knew his background and the significance of his role in the birth of jazz,” he said. “I still treasure that encounter as much as any encounter I have ever had with anyone.”

In the mid 1960’s, Dempster was a classmate of Terry Riley and Pauline Oliveros at San Francisco State, forming associations that continue to this day. He was a founding member of Oliveros’s Deep Listening Band in 1988 and remains a member today. The Deep Listening Band specializes in finding unusual natural or man-made reverberant spaces such as cathedrals and underground cisterns as well as using a method of sophisticated electro-acoustic processing called the Expanded Instrument System (EIS) to change the “fla-

vor, resonance or reverberation” of any performance space. No electronic sound sources are used with EIS, only acoustic instruments and voices.

“Performing with the Deep Listening Band affects me most through listening requirements and multi-tasking,” says Dempster. “In some ways it doesn't affect my other playing at all because I tend to separate out the different genres I perform in, such as jazz, new music, world music and symphonic.”

“My association with Terry Riley goes back a long way, over fifty years,” remarks Dempster, who attended the premiere of Riley's In C in 1964. “Many people, including me, thought I played in that 1964 premiere,” he continues, “but a recent deductive process determined that I played in the nearly identical concert a few months later in 1965.” When Dempster was in residence at SUNY Buffalo (1967-1968) he organized a performance of the piece that led to the famous Carnegie Recital Hall performance and “subsequently the first recording...on the Columbia Records Music of Our Time series. The recording became a hit.” He has organized various performances of In C over the years and recently took part in the 2009 Carnegie Hall celebration of Riley's career and the 45th anniversary performance of the piece organized by the Kronos Quartet.

Yet for all his associations with jazz and the avant-garde, Dempster has made his living as a classical musician. From 1962 to 1966 he was principal trombone in the Oakland Symphony, and his résumé boasts a lengthy list of accomplishments, including an NEA Composer Grant (1978), US/

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UK Fellowship (1979), and Guggenheim Fellowship (1981). Dempster is Professor Emeritus at the University of Washington in Seattle, having joined the faculty in 1968 and recently retired after three decades of teaching.

In 1973 he studied didjeridu in Australia while studying on a Fulbright Scholarship and became one of the first composers and performers to incorporate the ancient aboriginal instrument into western music.

Although he owns several traditional didjeridus, Dempster prefers to use them only in traditional contexts and works with PVC pipe variants in other performances.

A spirit of fun, adventure and discovery is abundantly evident in Dempster’s work with the Seattle jazz-improv group Sunship.

He’s no stranger to that world, having worked with saxophonist Joe McPhee on a number of occasions (Common Threads from 1996 was released on the Deep Listening label). He refers to Sunship as “a forum for reinventing my playing.” Originally a quartet with saxophonist Michael Monhart, guitarist Brian Heaney, bass guitarist Andrew Luthringer and drummer David Revelli, Sunship has expanded their horizons considerably with the addition of Dempster. Their music can move from a deep meditative ambiance to the downright raucous and is strongly influenced

by Sun Ra; Monhart and Dempster first crossed paths in the mid-1990s primarily through a series of large ensemble celebrations of Ra's music. This forum for reinventing his playing is but one facet of Dempster's multi-dimensional esthetic but it is a facet that deserves more attention.

Sunship provides quite a ride. ✹

The Herb Alpert School of Music at

Diverse Musical Forms Flexible Programs Collaborative & Interdisciplinary Projects Personal Attention

2009-2010

Private Lessons Performances Alongside Distinguished Faculty 250 Concerts Annually

Multi-Focus Music Technologies Jazz

State-of-the-Art Technology Variety of Performance Venues Community Arts Partnership (cap) Roy and Edna Disney/ CalArts Theater (redcat)

World Music Musical Arts Experimental Sound Practices Performer/ Composer

California Institute of the Arts

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21st CENTURY MUSIC The legacy of mystic composer and bandleader Sun Ra is being preserved through multiple reissue programs, a traveling gallery exhibit of vintage memorabilia and the ongoing activities of his Arkestra under the direction of alto saxophonist Marshall Allen.

Story by Pete Gershon.

Photos by Dustin Fenstermacher.

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Marshall Allen at home in Philadelphia, July 2009

It’s June 10th, 2009. Spread out across the stage at New York’s Abrons Arts Center are five musicians whose collective history tells the story of the last half-century of creative jazz. There’s bassist William Parker, who came through the ranks of New York’s loft scene in the ’70s and ’80s to become the lynchpin of the contemporary avant-garde jazz scene; Hamid Drake, whose work with Don Cherry and Fred Anderson has made him a soughtafter drummer in a variety of free jazz and world music contexts; saxophonist Edward “Kidd” Jordan, whose instrumental talents have sometimes been overshadowed by his reputation as one of the country’s premier jazz educators and one of the founders of the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival; and Henry Grimes, who after being a first-call bassist for the likes of Cecil Taylor, Albert Ayler and Sonny Rollins in the ’60s, vanished from the scene for thirty-five years, only to resume his career exactly where he left off. But at stage left is the Vision Festival’s guest of honor and the recipient of its annual Lifetime Achievement Award. This star among all-stars is 85-year-old Marshall Allen, who with alto sax, flute, oboe, and a variety of other instruments in hand, has dedicated most of his adult life to playing, supporting and preserving the music of one of the most important yet least understood musicians to have walked the Earth: keyboardist, composer and polymath Sun Ra. On this night, as on all nights when he takes the stage, Allen is a beaming, ebullient presence. Greetings are exchanged, hands are shaken, records are autographed, pictures are snapped. He has time for everyone. After the volcanic all-star set, he sheds his baseball cap and street clothes and re-emerges in the shimmering, sequined vestments that signify his role as the director of the Sun Ra Arkestra.

Tonight he will lead a 19-piece band of musicians who’ve worked with (or been inspired by) Sun Ra through a program of 14 compositions. Much of the music was written by Ra, but several pieces were penned by Allen himself since Ra’s departure from the planet in 1993. Half a decade after the band’s formation, they’re still on a fearless quest for the farthest-out sonic materials, though they’re also rooted in a big band tradition extending back to the days of Fletcher Henderson and Count Basie. Somehow, this mix of eccentric dissonance and majestic big-band harmony is unfailingly resolved into a unified whole.

There’s no show quite like an Arkestra performance. A tight, swinging arrangement of Duke Ellington’s “Black and Tan Fantasy” might bump up against a freeform sound exploration. Group chants and singalongs exhort the audience to “Travel the Spaceways” and the “Space Voice” Art Jenkins warbles through the wide end of a ram’s horn.

53-year-old saxophonist Knoel Scott is likely to make his way to center stage and gyrate through a series of incredible handstands and backflips. And when Allen solos on the alto, one expects the horn to blow apart, a flurry of molten shrieks and squeals leaping from the bell. He jerks the reed violently in his

mouth and claw-handedly strums the keys as if he were playing a guitar. It’s a spectacle. It’s beautiful. And it’s truly a joyful noise.

It’s a ripe time for all things Arkestral. The surviving band keeps up a hectic schedule of international performances, and a new CD on In+Out , Live at the Paradox, presents a September, 2008 festival performance. Classic Sun Ra albums are being reissued, previously unavailable archival recordings are surfacing, and relics from the band’s earliest years are being shown in a traveling exhibition. The keyboardist who famously claimed to be from Saturn, after years of struggle and outright ridicule, has finally been taken seriously as a vital member of the jazz canon.

A month after the Vision Festival, I’ve arrived at the small rowhouse in Philadelphia’s Germantown neighborhood where the Arkestra members have lived communally since 1968. Once the site of rigorous daily rehearsals, the house on Morton Street is a quieter place these days, with Allen and saxophonists Knoel Scott and Yajya Abdul-Majid as its remaining inhabitants. I call upstairs to let Allen know I’m at the door (“Did you ring the bell? Yeah, that thing’s been broken for fifteen years.”) and we ascend the narrow staircase to the third-floor room which serves as his workspace, stuffed with books, photographs, artwork, tools and instruments. Allen manages to keep up a schedule that would exhaust the resources of someone half his age. The band has just returned from gigs in Portugal and France; next week they’ll head back to Europe for appearances in Italy and the UK. In between, “the maestro,” as he is often known, is enjoying visits from family and friends, cleaning the house and repairing his horn.

Born May 24th, 1924 in Louisville, Kentucky, into a family with a brother and five sisters, Allen says of his early years, “There wasn’t much for me in Louisville. We got out when the flood hit in 1937. My father was in Philadelphia, so I came up here. All these bridges around here you see, that bridge across the Delaware, he painted all those. I couldn’t handle that stuff, being up on those wires.

Once, the platform broke and he fell ninety feet, he must’ve been way up top, riveting, painting, that’s the kind of work he did.”

Allen’s mother sang in church and played piano at home. “My brother’s still got her piano after all these years. But I liked the swingin’ stuff, the big bands, that’s what I went after.” He admired the work of Benny Goodman, Duke Ellington and Fletcher Henderson and tried his hand at clarinet and C melody saxophone, but admits he didn’t stick with it at first.

Then Allen left the states in 1944 with the “Buffalo Soldiers” of the army’s 92nd Infantry Division. “I was acting so bad in Philadelphia, there was gangs fighting all the time. I didn’t know nothing about no violence, but [the army] recruited me anyway, got me away from all of that mess.” Allen wound up stationed in Heidelberg, Munich, and eventually outside of Paris, and he joined the 17th Division Special Service Band. He was honorably dis-

charged in 1949 and enrolled at the National Conservatory in Paris where he studied alto saxophone on the GI Bill and played in informal settings at night with expatriate saxmen James Moody and Don Byas.

“It wasn’t no problem meeting people,” says Allen of his years in Paris. “I was a young man then. Everything was an adventure! I got my check each month, paid my rent. I lived off the Champs Elysees at the Rue de Ponthieu.

In fact it was right near the Lido, right across the street from where the Lido girls used to live, now they were some fine ladies!”

Allen drifted home in 1952, and settled in Chicago where his mother was living. There he worked on an assembly line polishing camera lenses and formed his first band, a small group with tenor sax, vibes and drums that played dances and club dates. But then he’d find a record that would change his life forever. “Joe Segel had a store down by the camera factory,” he remembers, “and I used to go in there to buy records. One time I went in and he said, ‘Have I got a record for you!’”

It was Jazz in Transition, a dollar-ninety-eight sampler issued in 1956 by producer Tom Wilson that introduced the roster of talent signed to his fledgling Transition label, including Donald Byrd, Cecil Taylor, and, playing an original composition entitled “Swing a Little Taste,” an eleven-piece combo led by a pianist who’d named himself Sun Ra. “That was some straaaange music,” says Allen. “And Sun Ra was on there swinging!”

The complicated story of Herman Poole Blount and his transformation into the mystic bandleader Sun Ra has been recounted many times elsewhere, perhaps most expertly in John Szwed’s book Space Is the Place: The Life and Times of Sun Ra (Pantheon, 1997).

By way of a brief summary, Blount was born in Birmingham, Alabama in 1914 and displayed great skill at the piano from an early age. He attended concerts by touring big bands whenever possible and developed an uncanny ability to transcribe their charts from memory. Blount was a loner and an honor roll student who began to spend much of his time reading at the Black Masonic Lodge. At 20, he began touring with Ethel Harper, one of his former high school teachers, who’d decided to pursue a singing career. When Harper abandoned the group in the middle of a tour, the group became the Sonny Blount Orchestra, though the young pianist was loath to assume a leadership role. The group eventually returned home and disbanded, but Blount’s career as a professional musician was well underway, and Birmingham’s musical community engendered a sense of black pride in one of the country’s most segregated cities.

After attending Alabama A&M as a music ed major, and continuing his career as a bandleader, Blount was drafted into the army in 1942. He refused to serve, however, declaring himself a conscientious objector on the grounds of both his religious views and the chronic hernia that would plague him throughout his lifetime. His case was rejected,

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This page & Opposite: University Of Chicago Library

The Sun Ra Arkestra, circa 1960: Ricky Murray, John Gilmore, Ronnie Boykins, Sun Ra, Phil Cohran, Billy Mitchell, and Marshall Allen. Below: Le Sony'r Ra.

and after a series of appeals and an eventual arrest for failing to appear at an alternate service camp, he was classified as 4-F and returned to civilian life in Birmingham, angry and distrustful of authority.

In 1945, Blount migrated to Chicago, where he played with blues singers and in Calumet City strip clubs, but also quickly made his first important professional associations, rehearsing and arranging music for one of his idols, bandleader Fletcher Henderson, at the Club DeLisa, and working briefly with saxophonist Coleman Hawkins and violinist Stuff Smith.

By 1951, he was leading the Space Trio with saxophonist Laurdine “Pat” Patrick and drummer Tommy Hunter, performing his own original compositions. Off the bandstand, Blount’s worldview was changing in profound

ways. Chicago was a hotbed of socio-political activism and the scholarly Blount’s studies of Egyptology and Black history and his developing interest in the possibilities of space travel led him to a secret society on Chicago’s South Side. There he crossed paths with a fellow outcast named Alton Abraham, who’d become his business partner for much of the rest of his life.

It was in late 1957 that Allen first encountered Blount, who in October of 1952 had legally changed his name to Le Sony’r Ra and who’d begun to tell stories of an abduction experience that revealed to him that he’d actually come from Saturn. He’d also by then assembled the nucleus of his “Arkestra,” retaining Pat Patrick of the Space Trio, and adding the tenor saxophonist John Gilmore,

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alto saxophonist James Spaulding, bassist Ronnie Boykins, baritone saxophonist Charles Davis and drummers Robert Barry and James Herndon.

“I went looking for him,” remembers Allen, shaking his head as he meticulously disassembles his saxophone, “and when I found him, all he wanted to do was talk. Talk, talk, talk, talk, talk. He talked so much, he talked all night long! I went from talking to Sun Ra to going to work, trying to polish those lenses and I’m falling asleep. Then I went back and Sun Ra would talk some more. We’d go out to the night club, and then it’s four o’clock in the morning again. And I said, ‘when am I gonna play?’ The next day he told me to come to John Gilmore’s place, and to bring my flute. I said, ‘I ain’t got no flute!’ So I borrowed one, and when I showed up for rehearsal it was just me and Sun Ra, and John Gilmore was asleep in bed. I did a lot of them private rehearsals, and I was determined to get into that band.”

But what exactly did Allen find so appealing about Ra’s music? “You’re hearing it now!” he exclaims, cocking his ear to the stereo, which is playing one of a plethora of recent reissues of Ra’s music. “What’s goin’ on? And he had a strange way of explaining his concepts. All that stuff he’s talkin’ about, goin’ to space, all this Buck Rogers shit I’d been reading about in comic books. And all the weird dudes in Chicago, who had all these ideas about designing spaceships, all the dreamers, started hanging around Sun Ra. He had this crew of people, started putting together a whole organization. Same as the Muslims were recruiting young men, the Christians were recruiting, the unions were recruiting, Sun Ra was recruiting too! They had these platforms in Washington Park, the Muslims had a platform, the Christians had a platform, and the space folks had a platform. Everybody’d be passing out these pamphlets. And Sun Ra’s talking about all these double versions of the Bible, turning all that stuff around, everything I’d ever heard, he was saying just the opposite.

Believe it or not, I was still curious about all these things I didn’t understand or didn’t put too much belief in, and later in reality I began to see the things he was talking about turned out to be so true.”

With their Transition debut, Jazz by Sun Ra (later reissued by Delmark Records under the title Sun Song), already out on record store racks in 1956, Ra and Abraham had formed one of the very first musician-run labels, El Saturn Records, to issue a series of 45s and even complete albums, beginning with Super-Sonic Jazz in March 1957 and Jazz in Silhouette in 1959, which were sold directly from the bandstand. Ra began to fortify the live performances of his off-kilter swing tunes with costumes and stagecraft; by 1960, the band had begun to wear space-age tunics, capes and hats. They used a primitive light show, and sometimes released wind-up toy robots into the audience.

A fortuitous set of circumstances has recently opened a window into these seminal days of the Arkestra. In the fall of 2000, Chicago-based writer John Corbett rescued a collection of El Saturn memorabilia from destruction; it’s currently on display in a traveling exhibition, “Pathways to Unknown Worlds: Sun Ra, El Saturn and Chicago’s Afro-Futurist Underground 1954-68.”

“I had the great fortune to be contacted

by Alton Abraham after I’d written an article about Sun Ra for Downbeat,” explains Corbett, “right around the time that Sun Ra had passed away. On our first meeting, he produced this incredible artifact, the name change papers that changed Herman Poole Blount to Le Sony’r Ra. He brought these papers along as a way of demonstrating that he was who he said he was, which I had no question about, but he seemed concerned in some way about proving his identity. Over the course of several interviews, he and I discussed the fact that he had an extensive collection of materials from the Chicago period and a little beyond, very extensive in fact.”

Corbett offered to lend a hand finding an appropriate museum or archival context in which to house the collection, a proposition to which Abraham enthusiastically agreed.

However, finding a suitable and welcoming home for the materials wasn’t as easy as it had initially seemed, and the idea went nowhere.

After Abraham died in 1999, says Corbett, “a salvager was invited to salvage the house, and he brought out a sample of material because he thought a friend of his would be interested in this ‘spacy stuff.’ She saw that it was Sun Ra material and leapt to the assumption that this was Sun Ra’s house being demolished. She circulated an e-mail somehow to enough people that it got forwarded to me.

I immediately knew what was going on, and almost deleted the e-mail, thinking that there were probably going to be a million people clamoring to deal with this. But then I thought, what if there isn’t? What then? This could be a disaster.”

Corbett traced the e-mail back to its source and eventually met with the salvager. “The house had been sold and the contents were in the process of being discarded. Some material was taken by the family, and the rest was in the process if being disposed of, and I think a substantial amount of material had already been thrown out by the time I got there.” Corbett remembers bags of clothing being brought out the curb, and in retrospect, worries that among them might have been some of the band’s original costumes, which Abraham had secured from a defunct opera company. “But overall I think we were successful in making sure that the things that shouldn’t have been discarded, weren’t. I bought all of that material, and then spent the better part of eight years sorting through it with the intention of putting an exhibition together. There were amazing revelations in the process, including the writings, which were more or less unknown previously, although they’d been alluded to in numerous cases, especially by John Gilmore, who was very fond of talking about Ra’s writings and how they had circulated in Chicago.”

In addition to the writings and business papers, the stash included much of the original artwork, color separations and print blocks for the early Saturn LPs, all of which were hand-screened and assembled in Abraham’s basement. Many of these designs were created by a man named Claude Dangerfield, a classmate of several of the band members at Chicago’s DuSable High School. Corbett hasn’t been able to locate him, despite an exhaustive search.

“He wasn’t a musician,” says Corbett, “he was an amateur artist, or a friend of theirs who had artistic leanings, and maybe had a little knowledge of design, I’m surmising this, I

don’t know for sure.”

Displayed on the walls in the gallery of the Institute of Contemporary Arts at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia this summer, Dangerfield’s renderings of spaceage themes and surrealistically-deconstructed instruments (which were eventually used for the LPs When Sun Comes Out, Super-Sonic Jazz and We Travel the Spaceways), bespeak a time of incredible optimism, creativity and fierce self-reliance for the emerging El Saturn Records. Other artwork was created by Abraham’s associate James Bryant, and by Ra himself.

“The thing that I’m continually drawn to is the various ways in which these early record designs manifest,” says Corbett. “You had a bunch of amateur designers doing these things. And they knew enough to be doing overlays, or using onionskin paper, or vellum, but it’s not super high-tech. I’m very fond of Claude Dangerfield’s first sketch, one of the first sketches for the first Saturn LP. When I found it, it was crumpled into a ball, and we had to humidify it to open it up and flatten it, and it was this amazing colored pencil drawing, with this kind of apocalyptic scene.

But what’s funny is, it’s clearly an LP design, but it’s not square, it’s horizontal. Its fascinating to me that here’s a guy who’s been invited to make a record cover design for them, and he’s basically just coming up with some themes, but he’s not even thinking about how this is going to be used for a record. To me, that says a lot about the DIY nature of what they were getting into, that it was very much of a self-invented thing that they were doing. I think the nature of those objects, and then the relationship between the metal print blocks and the record covers, the way that that unveils the process that they were using in Abraham’s basement laboratory is just so unreal, so incredible.”

Still, says Corbett, “I think the most profound objects in the archive were the Sun Ra writings, the fact that we get a glimpse of his philosophical notions, laid out the way they are from that period, where we hadn’t had that before.”

In what way has it changed his understanding of Ra? “First of all, you find there’s very

little about space in them, and a hell of a lot more about the Bible. And this is my interpretation of it, but I think the historical facts bear me out, we see him moving from a relatively isolated enclave that’s almost completely African American, even though they’re playing some white parties and white clubs, primarily he’s preaching to a black audience in Chicago, and in doing so he can talk about the bible in a way that assumed that they’re familiar with it and that that they will understand a lot of the references he’s making. And there’s a tradition of street-corner preaching that he’s tapping into. When he moves away from Chicago and starts to really consider what he’s doing in a more national and then an international scope, he begins to increase the amount of space-talk and space metaphor and reduce the amount of biblical and mystical material. So what you’re seeing in these writings is [work from a time] when the equation was really shifted the other way, and the emphasis was reading the bible as a coded message.”

The show made its debut at Chicago’s Hyde Park Arts Center in 2006 and after its present stop in Philly, will move on to the Durham (NC) Art Guild's CCB Gallery in late August. A full-color catalog is available, as well as an anthology of the rescued Ra writings, both published by Chicago's WhiteWalls Books. Corbett had hoped that the exhibition might lead to a permanent home for the collection, and it has done exactly that.

“Lo and behold, it worked like a charm. The jazz archive at the University of Chicago came forward. That was the optimal place, exactly the place we wanted to do it. We don't own this stuff.” Corbett stresses. “It was more like, we accidentally became stewards of it, and we had to get it into a safe place.”

During his lifetime, Ra released countless records … quite literally. While the Arkestra had brief flirtations with a few well-established labels over the years, including Impulse!, ESP-Disk and A&M, the preponderance of his tangled discography is made up of small LP pressings sold directly from the bandstand.

Some were clad in blank jackets with blank labels, many were hand-decorated by band members in marathon arts and crafts sessions

Left: Claude Dangerfield's design for Super Sonic Jazz, c. 1960.

Right: Sun Ra's cover design for Other Planes of There, 1965 .

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

Detroit: Leni Sinclair | STTA: Danny Clinch / Elecktra Records

Top: the Arkestra at the Detroit Jazz Center, December 1980: from left, Sun Ra, Marshall Allen, Al Evans, Jaribu Shahid, Michael Ray. Bottom: Surrender to the Air at NYC's Electric Lady Studios, spring 1995: top row: John Medeski, Bob Gullotti, Marc Ribot, Trey Anastasio, Oteil Burbridge, Marshall Allen, Damon Choice. bottom row: James Harvey, Kofi Burbridge, Michael Ray, Jon Fishman

at the Arkestra house. Some titles are merely rumored to exist. And in recent years, Ra’s legacy has been enriched and extended by a cottage industry of reissues and archival releases of varying pedigree and legitimacy, with material ranging from the late ’50s through the early ’90s.

“I’m interested in them,” says Corbett, “But I’m not so interested in many, many, many sets and rehearsal outtakes unless there’s something really special about them. And I’m not so interested in tapes that are sort of truncated, or badly recorded, just because they’re there. I’m more interested in them if they’re introducing a composition I’ve never heard before, or something I didn’t already know.

For example, I think the wider availability of the Pharoah Sanders record is a major step.”

Recorded at New York City’s Judson Hall on New Year’s Eve, 1964, the Saturn release of Sun Ra Featuring Pharoah Sanders & Black Harold has been a legendary, much soughtafter title ever since it was pressed in limited quantities in 1976. It’s just been reissued on CD by Brooklyn’s ESP-Disk, with an additional 45 minutes’ worth of material. It’s the only recorded documentation we have of the fiery tenor saxophonist’s term with the band.

“That’s an insanely important record,” says Corbett. “It’s historically important in the context of the development of free jazz, given when and where it was recorded, but it’ s just simply a great record. I’m very interested in the music that came from 1964, ’65, ’66, it was an extremely fertile time, and anything I can find from that period, I’m all over it.”

By the end of the ’50s, Ra had begun to lose touch with some of his key musicians in Chicago, and in July 1961 he took a small group to Montreal for a couple of months’ worth of work. When their visas expired, the band then traveled on to New York City and became stranded there when Ronnie Boykins crashed his father’s car into a taxi. With no money to fix the car, they were stuck. Gigs were scarce for the first few years, but the band felt rejuvenated in New York and threw themselves into rehearsing new music and experimenting with new recording techniques, producing the extremely psychedelic, echo-laden Bad and Beautiful and Art Forms of Dimensions Tomorrow (in Szwed’s book, he called it “low budget musique concrete.”)

The group moved decisively away from their swing band roots and began to delve deeply into avant-garde experimentation.

Moving on to the East Village, the Arkestra fell in with the city’s developing avant-garde jazz scene, living blocks away from Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, Archie Shepp, Albert Ayler, and numerous other pioneers of the new music, including saxophonist Farrell Sanders, who had just moved to New York from Little Rock and was working as a waiter at Gene Harris’s Playhouse where the Arkestra had found a regular gig. It was Ra who tagged him with the name “Pharoah” and he offered him a place to stay at the Arkestra’s house. Eventually Sanders would become a full-fledged member of the band when

John Gilmore took a brief sabbatical from the Arkestra to play with Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers and pianist Andrew Hill.

The assorted avant-gardists of the Lower East Side began to work collectively for the first time in 1964, when trumpeter Bill Dixon formed the short-lived but influential Jazz Composers Guild, a cooperative organization which aimed to improve the lot of emerging creative musicians through collective bargaining when it came to record contracts and live performances. There was also a series of fall concerts entitled the “October Revolution” which featured numerous Guild members, including Ra of course. Bernard Stollman, a young attorney who lived in the neighborhood, happened to drop in, and found most of the talent that he’d soon be recording for his fledgling ESP-Disk record label. The October Revolution was followed up a few months later by “Four Days in December,” culminating with the Arkestra’s New Year’s Eve set heard on Featuring Pharoah Sanders.

Stollman would go on to release three Arkestra records: Heliocentric Worlds, Volumes 1 and 2 (in April and November 1965, respectively) and Nothing Is, a live document from an ESP-sponsored tour of upstate New York colleges in May, 1966.

Stollman remembers one occasion around this time when Ra asked to talk to him in private. “‘Bernard, I’m very troubled,’ he told me. ‘Everywhere I go, I hear people copying my music. I can’t stand it, here I am struggling, and they’re using my music!’ I said, ‘How often do you think these people get musical inspiration? Not very often. And how often do you get ideas? Constantly! You get more ideas in a day than most people have in a year! Isn’t that true? Well, look at it this way, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and they wouldn’t be copying your material if they didn’t admire it.’

I told him eventually he’d get recognition for his ideas, and he seemed mollified by that.”

The man responsible for bringing the Pharoah Sanders material to light is Michael D. Anderson, who spent a decade with the Arkestra as a percussionist and Ra-appointed band archivist. In the years since, he has been a radio personality (known as “The Good Doctor”) on a variety of stations, and since 2004 he has worked closely with ESP-Disk to reissue many of its free jazz classics with supplemental material and interviews.

Anderson came to the Arkestra during the years after their move to Philadelphia in 1968.

Ra once remarked that, “to save the planet, I had to go to the worst spot on Earth, and that was Philadelphia, which was death’s headquarters.” In reality, they were about to be evicted from their residence on New York’s lower east side, and in a gesture that would help get them through the next forty years, Allen’s father had offered the band the use of the property he owned on Morton Street.

“On October 18th of 1977, Sun Ra gave me the position as director of archives,” says Anderson, “because he and Alton at that point had a, we’ll say a disagreement, and

that’s when we started pressing stuff at the house. I used to do transfers of reels for him when I worked at WRTI at Temple University.

Relative to the Pharoah Sanders situation, the whole concert was recorded, two sets, but the remainder of the concert footage is distorted very badly. But from back in the ’70s, I still had the actual mono reel used to press the record, and I did some research with [Abraham associate and El Saturn founding member] James Bryant in the late ’90s. He’d send me tapes to inventory. They were out of their boxes, no information on them, but I have a photographic memory and I was able to listen to the reels and recognize that it was more material from that concert. I sat on that stuff for almost 15 years. But since Sunny’s legacy is starting to be swept under the carpet, I started to pull out some of this material and I’m trying to get things together to release some material that will benefit the band, since Marshall’s having some trouble getting the bills paid.”

Anderson has access to more unheard Ra material than anyone else on the planet. “I’ve been in the shadows for over thirty years, because Sun Ra wanted it that way,” says Anderson, who came to the band as a troubled teenager in the mid-’70s and who immediately impressed Ra by taking the initiative to keep the band’s recorded material in order.

“Sunny was my surrogate father. June [Tyson, Arkestra vocalist] was my surrogate mother.

They took me in. Marshall was like my uncle.

John [Gilmore], all those guys, they adopted me. And I miss ’em all.”

Anderson hopes to issue more material, but is adamant that any such releases must be done properly. “There’s a lot of shit to come out, and we’re trying to get things together legally and financially such that I can go ahead and do what I need to do. If people are willing to work with me, I’ll work with them. If not, I was told to ‘burn it up.’ See, in the ’70s, I was known as ‘the saboteur.’ Because people were stealing tapes from the house, and because of my editing experience, Sunny instructed me to cut up the tapes. I could spread out a session over nine reels. [Later, when] Alton and James Bryant were sending me stuff, I could put it all back together because I had taken them apart in the first place and knew what I did. I hated that job, I was like the damn grim reaper. I’m like, ‘Sunny! I can’t do it!’ but he said, ‘that’s your job, that’s your discipline.’

And what could I say but ‘okay, I’ll do it.’”

Suddenly, our call is interrupted. “Hello?

Are you there?” he says. “Yes? Hello?” It seems I can hear him, but he can’t hear me. I hang up and try to call back … but the line is dead. After a few minutes of confusion, we’re able to reconnect. “That’s Sun Ra,” he says.

“I’m serious. I’m clairvoyant and that was his intervention.” The field of Arkestral scholarship is rife with stories of journalists who went home from interviews with blank and garbled tapes or experienced unusual power outages, so who’s to say?

Anderson’s now in the painstaking process of reassembling the original reels, and is also writing a detailed memoir of his experiences

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with Ra. He has compiled a fifteen-hour documentary, accessible on the ESP website, which contains hours of unheard material, dating back to Ra’s earliest recordings.

“Sunny already had the ‘sound mirror,’ as he called it, in the late ’40s, where he recorded on paper tape,” says Anderson. “I had those paper tapes. Sunny gave me all this stuff to inventory and had me annotate what all the songs were. See, I was the only one who could do it, since I know all of Sunny’s compositions as well as other songs that most people wouldn’t know outside of standards. He does a beautiful version of ‘Yesterdays,’ and I believe it was [trumpeter] Bill Coleman, but in an interview I did with Sunny, he mentioned Jesse Miller as well, so you see, I’m always trying to correct information. There’s also a beautiful recording of ‘Darn That Dream.’ He would just let tapes roll. And most of these recordings are in pristine condition.”

Anderson has also been instrumental in helping to produce a small but very potent series of reissues on the British Art Yard label, whose proprietor Peter Dennett says by e-mail from London, “my job has been over the last five years or so to help tell the story of the visionary Sun Ra, and help future generations reclaim the legacy of Sun Ra’s music. It’s the appropriate time, we are in the twenty-first century and this is twenty-first century music.”

Composer and sound artist Dennett first encountered Ra’s work in the mid-’80s when the homemade, hand-decorated LP pressings began to turn up at the ReR shop in London at £3.99 apiece. “They were fantastic,” he writes. “From that point I was a fan. The music really seemed to transport me into another place/state of mind, it was a very uplifting experience!”

Art Yard had its beginnings in a Sun Ra documentary film project Dennett pitched to the BBC. The film was short-listed, says Dennett, “but eventually ignored by all of the UK TV companies, as too esoteric. Alton was the president of Enterplan[etary Koncepts, Ra’s publishing company] at that time, everyone told me I had to deal with the president.

He asked me to do some work for him— ‘research’. I come from a background in music research and sound restoration, engineering, mostly jazz. That’s been my main gig for some time. [At first] I just wanted to try and

get some of the records back out. I got in touch with Marshall, as I wanted keep things straight with him, make some LPs and set up something that helps everyone involved—try to get it right! It’s important that it’s recognized that the Arkestra organization is a part of this work, not just as performers; they are the original crew that helped create most of these recordings and worked on various levels of the production. Give the credit where credit is due. Copyright law is different in the UK than in the USA. Copyright law has a purpose, to protect the works of the writer and artists, also the record company, the performers and publisher. But there will always be conspiracy theories and disputes when it comes to money and rights.”

Dennett’s label debuted in 2004 with an LP pressing of Disco 3000, Ra’s classic (but previously very hard to find) quartet date, recorded in Milan in 1978. He admits its original Art Yard release, “could have been done a bit better. There were some mistakes, miscommunication. It’s easy to get things wrong when you’re three thousand miles away … all small independents start with a rough cut and improve with time. The important thing is to try to make the records sound better, not worse. I still do most of the design work, so I hope people dig the vibe.”

There’s now an improved CD version of Disco 3000 available, as well as two historically important volumes of long out-of-print and previously unavailable material from the Arkestra’s trip to Egypt in December 1971.

With regards to the label’s future plans, “I have some great unreleased tapes: Sun Ra and His Intergalactic Research Arkestra, Paris 1971, recorded by Radio and Television Nationale France. There was a near riot before the gig [as] the police wanted to close the concert down, but there were too many people so they had to let Sun Ra play. That’s two and a half hours long and it’s a mindblower!!! I want to try and get it released later this year; Knoel Scott is writing [liner notes] about that concert. I do have other unreleased master tapes but it will take some time to collect together the correct photos and words from the people who were there before we make a release. But it will be worth the wait.”

For his part, John Corbett is unabashedly enthusiastic: “Spectacular. Disco 3000? Unbelievable, I cannot say enough good things about that reissue. They’ve done absolutely

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everybody proud. That’s the way it ought to be done.”

In terms of sheer volume, probably nothing can match the release program underway by the Los Angeles-based Transparency label, whose catalog contains 20 Sun Ra releases at the time of this writing, ranging from Untitled Recordings, a single disc containing a 1985 concert at Brooklyn’s Prospect Park bandshell with drummers Milford Graves, Andrew Cyrille and Don Moye plus a couple of mid-70s rehearsal outtakes, to a ten-CD set documenting a complete three-night run at Toronto’s Horseshoe Tavern in 1978. And for over-thetop, Arkestral gluttony, how could anything surpass the 28-CD box set containing the complete recordings of the Sun Ra Arkestra’s residency at the Detroit Jazz Center, taped during the final week of 1980? (The two-anda-quarter-inch-thick, three-ring bound set is opened to disk five on Allen’s shelf when I visit: “I’m trying to make my way through this and not lose my place,” he tells me.)

In fact, Transparency is 53-year-old Michael Sheppard, who in the mid-’80s moved in the same circles as pioneering alt-rockers Mike Watt and Sonic Youth. In fact, his short-lived and fiercely DIY Iridescence Records released Sonic Youth’s split 7” with Lydia Lunch, Death Valley ’69, and Sheppard was later evicted from his apartment after hiring the band to play on the building’s loading dock. He parlayed some modest financial success, and a rolodex full of useful contacts accumulated during several years in underground book and CD publishing, into the launch of Transparency, which has also released music from an eclectic roster of outsider artists including jazz bagpiper Rufus Harley, home-taper R. Stevie Moore, hard-rocking psychedelic guitarist Helios Creed, and Italian classical pianist Alessandra Celletti. Still, Transparency’s mammoth Sun Ra rarities program has probably attracted more attention to the label than anything else.

Sheppard started Transparency after seeing some video footage of Arkestra concerts and quickly released six DVDs’ worth of material (primarily late-’80s sets from New York, California, and Europe) before shifting his focus to audio CDs. It’s a varied collection of offerings, culled from numerous private collections and ranging from the mundane to the amazing.

The three-CD set containing a fairly unremarkable audience recording at Los Angeles’ My-

ron’s Ballroom in April of 1981 may not inspire repeat listening, but I find myself coming back again and again to the soundboard recording from the Warehouse in San Francisco in 1971, which is supplemented by an additional disc containing a lecture delivered by Ra during his tenure on the faculty at UC Berkeley that same year. A 1972 recording of a previously unreleased, extended work entitled “Intergalactic Research” is a valuable addition to the Ra discography, and maybe most interesting of all, Transparency offers a five-CD set documenting almost all of the fall 1983 European tour of the Sun Ra All-Stars, where Ra, Allen and Gilmore were joined by trumpeters Lester Bowie and Don Cherry, saxophonist Archie Shepp, bassist Richard Davis, and drummers Don Moye, Philly Joe Jones, and Cliff Jarvis.

“One of the things I’m really proud of,” says Sheppard with palpable enthusiasm, “my DJ friend Bennett Theissen from Kill Radio, he told me he grew up listening to Sun Ra, and that the stuff we’ve done on Transparency have been such a surprise for him, all the lost reel psychedelic stuff, that it gave him a much wider perspective on Sun Ra than he’d already had. Because one of my specialties has been the really psychedelic stuff from about ’68 into ’72, maybe even ’73 or ’74, where it’s almost like they’ve stopped playing jazz entirely.”

Transparency’s most recent releases include a 6-CD set of recordings from the tail end of the Arkestra’s extended residency at New York City’s infamous Slug’s Saloon, recorded at two gigs in June and August of 1972. The tapes are imperfect, but very listenable, and provide a fascinating glimpse of the band at the peak of it's live performances. (“Slugs!” remembers Allen, “Yeah, right on Thursday, we’d just roll on down Avenue C. Oh man, we used to play from 8 or 9 to four in the morning. You’d be lucky to catch a nap on the bandstand when somebody’d take a solo! Maybe you’d get a break when there’d be a fifteen-minute drum solo so you could run off to the toilet. Yeah, that was really a grinder.”)

Sheppard expresses particular pride in the release of Live in Helsinki 1971: “My absolute favorite. It’s two CDs of a radio broadcast of such high quality that it sounds like a missing studio album. It will include a nine-minute interview DVD from the same time that was only aired once on Finnish TV, all of this licensed from the YLE, the Finnish state radio network.”

But some Ra scholars are put off by the often imprecise sessionography of the Transparency CDs. “I’m dubious about the dates, I’m dubious about everything,” says Corbett.

“About the partial personnel listings. It just seems shoddy to me, and it makes me shy away from them, to be honest. And I don’t doubt there’s great music there.”

Of course, it must be pointed out that even Ra’s own releases of the Arkestra’s music were often low-budget affairs that were rather imprecise with respect to such details, and that as someone who often spoke of hiding his gems in chaos, those aspects of the Transparency program might well have appealed to the intergalactic trickster.

“Those are bootlegs,” Michael Anderson says flatly of the Transparency releases. “I don’t know where those tapes came from.”

Sheppard says he’s spoken with Anderson, and acknowledges that the two clearly didn’t see eye to eye. “With everyone else

I’ve spoken to in and around the Arkestra, it’s been a total love fest,” Sheppard contends.

“It’s this one guy who’s been trying to zap me with negative energy. He seemed really upset that we were releasing these as complete concerts. He wanted to do releases that were more tightly edited, like from a radio programmer’s point of view. He asked me, ‘How would Sun Ra feel about these things you’re putting out?’ and I was like, ‘What? Sun Ra slugged it out for years, to make sure his music would prevail. He would love the idea that people still care about his music and still want to hear every single note of it.’ So I never talked to that guy again.”

Still, one can understand the protectiveness that people within the Arkestral fold feel when it comes to Ra’s recorded legacy. Sheppard, too, speaks with outrage about the countless tapes and reels that vanished mysteriously from the Ra house over the years. Many more recordings were made surreptitiously by fans at concerts or sourced from radio broadcasts and the like, and eventually some of this material has found its way to the market illegitimately. On the other hand, it wasn’t unusual for Ra to arrange the quick sale of the rights to a concert tape in order to find enough ready cash to fly the penniless band home from some far-flung locale. It speaks to the affection Ra fans have for the band that many who’ve later reissued such tapes have made a concerted effort to take care of surviving Arkestra members.

In the liner notes to the 1997 reissue of Cosmo Sun Connection, Chris Cutler of ReR/ Recommended Records recalls, “Back in the late ’70s and early ’80s, [we] imported a great number of Saturn records to Europe … we always paid in full and in advance to cover their pressing costs. Then came an occasion when there was nothing to collect; the Arkestra had urgently needed money and ours had been there—so they had spent it... In the spirit of generous compromise, Sun Ra gave us, in lieu of the unpressed LPs, the Cosmo Sun Connection master tape, which we released in a small edition in 1985 … Money from this CD will be given directly to the Arkestra, whose work it is and who gave it to us.”

Numerous other labels have contributed to the effort to make important Ra material more widely available. Chicago's Atavistic Records has reissued several rare El Saturn titles under John Corbett's direction (including Music from Tomorrow's World, a set of early recordings made during the band's residency at Chicago's Wonder Inn, and Strange Strings, on which the Arkestra members were instructed to play ethnic stringed instruments that were completely unfamiliar to them). And London's Leo Records has released several live Ra CDs, including the previously unavailable 1975 recording Live in Cleveland earlier this year.

And it would be an enormous oversight not to mention the reissue program that started it all, namely the series of 21 Sun Ra CDs released by Jerry Gordon’s Evidence Records between 1991 and 2001, including a “greatest hits” compilation and a 2-CD set of collected 45" singles. Gordon launched Evidence after shuttering his Philadelphia retail store Third Street Music; having stocked Sun Ra’s private pressings for years, he recognized the music’s importance and the Ra reissue program became one of Gordon’s favorite projects. It’s fair to say that his careful reissuing of some of Ra’s most vital music at the dawn WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #55 | 21

of the CD era, including Jazz in Silhouette, Angels and Demons at Play, Atlantis, and The Magic City, helped rescue Ra’s catalog from potential obscurity. Certainly Gordon had rescued the band from financial disaster, according to Anderson: “Jerry Gordon, bless his soul, he was our savior. Many a day we didn’t have any food, we didn’t have anything, and Jerry Gordon took care of us.”

Amidst the reissues, books, films and exhibitions, there’s universal agreement that Marshall Allen is the true keeper of the Arkestral flame. Corbett was on hand to see the current-day band perform at the unveiling of his exhibit at the ICA: “The thing that really struck me is that there’s outrageous energy and spunk,” he says. “There’s great dedication there. I think the band’s not as tight as they used to be, but that’s understandable.

They’re trying to keep something together that’s hard to keep together. And it was Ra that was the great disciplinarian, discipline and precision were his watchwords. Most of all, I was struck by what an spectacularly underrated saxophonist Marshall is. And maybe that’s because, especially in the late ’60s and into the ’70s, he played two roles. He was the section man, playing the charts with everyone else, and then when he was out front, he was taking some completely excruciated solo, so you rarely got a sense of what he would do as a melodic player, the way you did get a sense of that with Gilmore. And when I saw the band in Philly, I heard Marshall warming up, and he sounded fantastic. He can squeal with the best of them, but obviously he comes from a changes background. Marshall sounded amazing in a variety of modes.”

Ra’s departure also seems to have allowed him to step out on his own for the first time.

For years, Allen’s only recorded credits outside the Arkestra were pianist Paul Bley’s 1964 ESP date Barrage and from the same year, African percussionist Babatunde Olatunji’s Drums! Drums! Drums! But since the mid-’90s, Allen’s contributed to a number of albums in collaboration with friends like drummer Lou Grassi, multi-reedist Mark Whitecage, NRBQ pianist Terry Adams, and others, and these small-group efforts give the listener a deeper understanding of Allen’s capabilities. The 1996 recording Surrender to the Air brought Allen and fellow Arkestra members Michael Ray and Damon Choice together with musicians from improvising jam bands Medeski, Martin and Wood, the Aquarium Rescue Unit and Phish, and helped to cultivate a new generation of Sun Ra fans (though some presumably did not get what they bargained for; eBay is still flooded with excess copies at as little as a dollar apiece). When we meet, a trio gig with pianist Matthew Shipp and guitarist Joe Morris at Yoshi’s in San Francisco and a London appearance with drummer Paul Hession and bassist John Edwards are both still fresh in memory; he’s slated to play in Philadelphia with synthesist Charles Cohen and Man Man drummer Chris Powell in late July, with an All Tomorrow’s Parties set joining Canadian laptopper Dan Snaith’s Caribou Vibration Ensemble scheduled for September.

Back at the Arkestra house, I’m querying Allen on the development of his style and technique, one that’s sui generis in the music, but it’s clear that the man would rather just play than dissect and analyze his own approach.

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correct, Sun Ra didn’t want that, it wasn’t what he was after. So I was confused. What does he want? He didn’t want me to play like I was taught, all that training, all that study, he didn’t want none of that! He told me to play what I didn’t know. Just use the spirit, or something!

Use a different technique, a different understanding. I did everything I could possibly do, everything I did that was out of order, now that was good, that’s what he liked! That was the process. You learn how to play eight bars, or sixteen bars, and Sun Ra wants you to play thirteen and a half bars! Or no bars! How do you do that, right?”

It’s doubtful anybody would ever accuse Allen of sounding timid or unsure of himself on the bandstand. Director Robert Mugge was in Philadelphia during my visit for a twilight screening of his documentary Sun Ra: A Joyful Noise on the ICA’s outdoor patio. It contains the best footage of the Arkestra available, much of it shot a few blocks away on the roof of the International House on a steamy afternoon in the summer of 1980 (“It was so hot that day,” recounts Mugge, “that some of the Arkestra members’ rubber flip-flops began to melt into the gravel up on that roof.”) In these clips, one gets the sense of being surrounded by the Arkestra, of being in the very center of the intergalactic action. But just as compelling is the film from a 1978 engagement at Baltimore’s Famous Ballroom. Ra spins like a dervish while soloing on a vintage synthesizer, his forearms, elbows, the backs of his hands cascading across the keys. Later, to his left, Allen stands and takes a vein-popping alto solo, eyes fixed straight ahead in concentration.

The solo comes to an abrupt climax and the audience members at the ICA loudly applaud the projected image of the then middle-aged maestro. Thirty years later, the solo is every bit as compelling as the day it went ricocheting around the Ballroom.

“You just gotta cut out the BS and build something,” says Allen modestly of his loyal dedication to Ra’s music. “You just can’t be ballin’ around all night and then come in and create something all day! You just gotta forget that, you’ve done enough of it already, you know what that is, now do something you don’t know. Create something from scratch, from any idea you come up with. What do you got? Take whatever you got and start

building. If you ain’t got no material to build with, then create some material!”

Allen puts out his cigarette and goes downstairs to greet some visitors, and saxophonist Knoel Scott takes his place. Scott came up as a student of multi-reedist Makanda Ken McIntyre at the State University of New York at Old Westbury, and he tells the story of his Arkestral initiation thusly: “I went to hear Sun Ra at the Beacon theatre in 1976. And that was it. I already felt that Jazz in Silhouette was the greatest jazz record of all time, but this concert ... Sun Ra was up there, looking like an Egyptian god, June Tyson was an Egyptian goddess, and Marshall and [fellow alto man] Danny Davis were like twins up there ... incredible music, incredible spirit, and the symbolism ... [it was] everything I’d ever felt in my heart about who I was. Right then and there it became my life’s dream to be in this band. And within two years, I was.”

Scott speaks glowingly of Allen’s role as a mentor for him as a new initiate. “If you didn’t get your part right, Sun Ra would turn you over to Marshall. He wouldn’t turn you over to John [Gilmore], man, he had eyes that could slice you up with one look. Marshall was a lot more patient. You know, what I really want to see Marshall get, as the premier avant-garde alto saxophone player in the world, and as one of the originators of the avant-garde if you think about it, in light of his contribution of over fifty years and for the work he’s doing at an age where most people are sitting back in their lawn chairs, is the Jazz Masters Fellowship, so he can put those resources into maintaining the Arkestra, and maintaining the house here.”

Built in 1925, the Ra house is showing its age. The roof leaks, the air conditioning is broken, and shoddy repairs after a fire about ten years ago have started to come undone.

Inside, an archive much larger than that of the “Pathways” exhibit is deteriorating, with no concrete plans yet in place to safeguard it for posterity. In a just world, the building itself would be declared a historical landmark and preserved as such.

“He feels an incredible responsibility to Sun Ra’s legacy,” Scott continues. “I mean, he left it with Marshall, his treasures. When a genius that comes along once in 5000 years leaves the planet, and leaves you with their legacy,

yes, it’s a tremendous responsibility, and it’s not something you can easily walk away from, especially after having spent nearly half your life with that person. No, of course, he can’t let Sun Ra down, and he’s not gonna let any of us let him down, especially since he’s waiting for us. You know, we’re all gonna have to face him. All I want to hear is, ‘Well done,’ that’s what we all want to hear from Sunny and John and Pat [Patrick], the only words we want to hear. ‘Well done.’”

Scott departs as Allen returns to the room; the maestro's grandson had dropped by to borrow some money to buy diapers for his new baby. Allen takes the new Art Yard reissue of the Arkestra’s self-released 1979 LP Sleeping Beauty off the shelf and puts the disc into the player. I ask him if he ever receives communication from Ra in any tangible ways.

“Yeah, of course! When I started I couldn’t understand none of this, now I understand much more. He’s talking to us right now!” The title track’s gorgeous, modal keyboard groove builds, and Allen begins to sing along with Ra and Tyson. “Sleeping beauty, sleeping beauty.

Without Price Charming, there’s nothin’ Black Beauty can do. What’s he talkin’ about? All these songs, listen, you know how to get into it, but once you’re into it, you can’t get out of it! You could play this all day long, just take it around and around and around again.”

With Damon Choice’s vibes and Ra’s Rhodes piano filling the room with a thousand twinkling stars, he shakes his head, eyes closed, lost in a reverie. “Every day you got to get the code and the vibrations of today in there. Not the code from yesterday. You got to try better! If you’re sincere about it, you can go anywhere. And if he’s out there with you, it’s good. Sun Ra’s right here, right here with us in this room, you hear it? Sleeping beauty, sleeping beauty, I want to speak of black beauty to you… See, we ain’t got out of it yet.”

On the CD, Allen’s alto takes hold for a brief, ecstatic solo and the maestro’s eyes are still closed, his mind in some far place, many light years in space. ✹ Pete Gershon is the publisher of SIGNAL to NOISE. He wrote about Giuseppe Logan in STN#53

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MARSHALL ALLEN IN PHOTOGRAPHS Photographer Michael Wilderman has followed the Sun Ra Arkestra since the mid-'70s. We are pleased to reproduce the photo exhibit presented in Marshall Allen's honor at the 12th annual Vision Festival in New York City in June.

William Parker, Alan Silva, Marshall Allen and Elson Nascimento with an earlier exhibit of Michael Wilderman's photos in the Vision Festival lobby, June 23, 2000, New York City.

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This page: Marshall Allen and the Arkestra at Coppin State University, Baltimore, MD, October 19, 2003.

Opposite page: Top, celebrating Marshall's 80th birthday, Vision Festival, NYC, May 25, 2004 Center, leading the Sun Ra Arkestra at the June 10, 2009 Vision Festival Performance honoring Marshall's lifetime achievements.

Bottom, the Arkestra marches through the audience at NYC's Vision Festival, May 22, 1999.

The 2009 Vision Festival honoring Marshall Allen provided an opportunity for me to demonstrate my appreciation of the Maestro with an exhibit of my photos focusing on Marshall, including Sun Ra and other musical colleagues. The exhibit is now essentially appearing on these pages of Signal to Noise.

The festival and exhibit were successes, and the set by Marshall with Kidd Jordan, Henry Grimes, William Parker, and Hamid Drake was a festival highlight. The closing set of the Sun Ra Arkestra led by Marshall was especially dynamic and showed well how today the Arkestra continues triumphantly under the energetic guidance of 85 year-old Marshall Allen.

I was born and raised in New York City, and was exposed to the modern sounds through

the excellent jazz radio offerings available at the time. I combined my appreciation of jazz and photography while in California about 40 years ago and then began photo-documenting jazz performances. Since then, I have been contributing to various jazz magazines and have worked cooperatively with musicians, music venues, and concert presenters to help support the music and stimulate creative performances.

My pictures have also been published regularly in newspapers, books, video documentaries; and are seen in exhibits, on jazz T-shirts, numerous CDs, and sites on the world wide web. My own web site is at: www.jazzvisionsphotos.com.

Please check it out.

I have always been attracted to our progressive artists and started listening to Sun Ra in

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the mid ‘60s. I first saw Marshall Allen over 40 years ago with the Sun Ra Arkestra, of course.

My first photographs of Sun Ra were from Berkeley, California in November 1974. Ra’s complete performances of great music, dance, space chants, light shows, etc. offered visual spectacle and unique photo opportunities.

Sun Ra’s backstage soliloquies were a fascinating bonus. Since my early exposures, I have frequently enjoyed and supported the music of Sun Ra and the Arkestra. I greatly appreciate that Marshall Allen has perpetuated the music and has added his own special qualities to our musical cultural scene. Thanks, Marshall – we love you! Michael Wilderman

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This page, top: Marshall Allen, November 1974, One World Center, Berkeley CA above: Sun Ra Arkestra at the Old Post Office Pavilion, Washington DC, October 28, 1984 Opposite page, top: The Avant Garde All-Stars in studio in Stutesbury MA, December 2, 2000. from left, Alan Silva, Kidd Jordan, Hamid Drake, Marshall Allen, William Parker.

Center, a Tribute to Sun Ra at the Chicago Jazz Festival, September 6, 1998. from left, Richard Evans, Marshall Allen, Julian Priester, Art Hoyle, Charles Davis, James Scales, Mwata Bowden.

Bottom: Sun Ra Arkestra at the Bayou, Washington DC, November 3, 1978.

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THEY'RE ONLY IN IT FOR THE MUSIC

A supergroup of West Coast improvisers join forces to make a twisted rock and roll record with “zero hope of mass appeal.”

Story by Tom Djll.

Photos by Jennifer Hale.

San Francisco’s Hemlock Tavern is located in lower Polk Gulch, evocatively named and famed for its picturesque gay hookers. As a tourist shopping guide unironically advises, “Different tastes are accommodated on Polk.”

It’s a busy night, Thursday being the new Friday in 2009’s threadbare economy. This being lower Polk, there are plenty of indigent creatures ready to assist you in emptying your pockets of loose coins. The Hemlock, featuring a giant sport fish on one wall, pool tables and other manly accoutrements, is named for the alley which it adjoins. One whiff and you know half of humanity finds blessed relief in a nearby doorway.

At the back of the Hemlock’s long, doublewinged bar is a room that can be reached via a couple of creaky steps and a curtain of those thick, clear plastic straps such as are found at the doors of walk-in coolers. Here, the chamber beyond is a walk-in hot box, somewhat smaller than a garage, filled with human meat bobbing and weaving to the music of raw, vital, loud bands of all stripes. No colored lights, no fog machines, no giant video screens, barely a stage, just an adequate PA. This is one of the prime indie showcases on the West Coast; possibly, according to some devotees, the best in the world. Tonight, universalist claims have some credence, as the stage rips with the world-class kaleido-melodic caterwauling of Pink Mountain.

At the moment, the band is bouncing every which-a-way to the nervous mechano-synth line of “Pink City” (the keyboardist’s MiniMoog is too ancient to boast anything like an onboard sequencer, excepting possibly the family of mice in the power supply). A second ‘theme’—duhduhduhduhDOMM duhduh-

duhDEE duhduhduhduhDOMM duhduduh-d YAHd-d-DAHd-d-dah—and some choice shredding from the guitarist round it out in about three minutes flat. The assembled admirers, including friends and family, give up the skin-noise. And, BOOM, another number lurches forth, and the hot box becomes a kinetic fun box.

Pink Mountain’s taken the San Francisco stage on the first leg of a tour to hype their new album. The setup sounds purely conventional: all-dude rock band, ear-shredding sound, new album, road trip, tee-shirts and records, pogo-ing fans, smoke, sweat, beer and piss. Take the money and run. Right?

Er, no. More like: Hope for gas money and try to have fun. A cheerful fatalism hovers over Pink Mountain. They’re too old and too smart to wrap themselves in the colors of idealistic warriors in the cause of Rock. Their music’s too out there to sell out. The lyrics don’t moan of teen angst, twenties angst or even thirties angst. They don’t promise they will rock you.

They live in different cities. Three of them are dads.

Kyle Bruckmann, one of the five frontmen for the quintet, is one of the most aggressively self-deprecating guys you could hope to meet. Typical Bruckmann promo: “The State of the Art: whether and why the hell to make a rock record at this late hour. Five grizzled middle-aged men, the sum of whose collaborative creative experiences reads like a veritable STN table of contents (a sampling: Anthony Braxton, John Butcher, CheerAccident, Merce Cunningham Dance Theater, Fred Frith, Nina Hagen, Oxbow, Terry Riley, Elliott Smith, Tom Waits) knocking their heads together to create an impossible, uncategoriz-

able album with zero hope of mass appeal, hype, sexiness, tour support... But doing it anyway, releasing it against all better judgment, lavishly packaged and audiophiliac...”

(Just for the record, there is some tour support for Pink Mountain’s new release. And, as of this writing, you’ve probably already missed it.)

Maybe such self-immolating sentiments should be expected from a highly trained oboe virtuoso. Sure, he’s the best there is on his instrument, and nobody in his preferred field of music gives a rat’s ass. Pick up the oboe and master it? You must really love to hate yourself. “I definitely have a complex relationship with the instrument and the tradition. Oboists are stereotypically a pretty damn neurotic bunch, and I’m not especially happy about the degree to which I fall into that pattern… Did I somehow know I was destined to be myopic and uptight when I was nine years old, or did the instrument make me this way?” Unlike the stereotypical classical musician—well-spoken, polite, neat as a pin and off-gassing formaldehyde—Bruckmann goes about in slacker duds and intones dark and bone-dry gibes under his breath, dissing the straight-up musical world while unmistakably being a well-nurtured (and employed) product of it. Bite the reed that feeds you.

Bruckmann’s the owner of that mossy old MiniMoog; no oboe was in sight for the live show. It does show up on PM’s records; an episode of dire reed distress is overdubbed on the recording of “Pink City,” with Scott Rosenberg joining in on saxophone. (Kyle’s other activities have been documented in these pages by this author: his bands Lozenge, Wrack, and EKG from Chicago

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days; work with Braxton, sfSound and various orchestras around the Bay Area, and numerous improvising groups as well.)

The new Pink Mountain record, out this past April on Sickroom Records, is the band’s second eponymous album. Coming to blows over song titles, they apparently lose all selfcontrol when it comes to consensus on an album name. As it stands, the new rekkid lays out fifteen songs over two LPs in a gorgeous gatefold sleeve with surrealist artwork (kind of like Mati Klarwein’s work for Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew, but unpopulated, and darker in mood). Lavishly packaged and audiophiliac.

The album includes a “free” CD of the music for those who’ve stepped forever beyond the vinyl age; there is no CD-only issue.

How could a band of deadly-sincere-yetallergic-to-sincere-posturing musicians escape the gulag of its own scene? And why even try? Defined by—and therefore constrained by—the clamor of insular fans and something always called “community” but which rarely behaves as such (at least not in any functional sense of the term), your geek-core band has a tendency to form a truly hard core which ossifies when exposed to the sunlight of remote locales. But in the Facetook ’n’ Youboob technoscape, everywhere is local—or seems so, when staring into the computer screen.

Thus, the thousand hardcores of light link to form a network—an online “community” that might support a tour across its carbonbased-lifeform nodes. The tour might support an album, and thus the quixotic urge to procreate in vinyl, to spread the seed of Pink Mountain over the flatland. Which gets us back to Kyle Bruckmann’s comments on the futility of launching another rock band and releasing records, and ensuing discussion in the band van: “Depends on what you mean by futility,” says vocalist Sam Coomes. “Economically?”

Drummer Gino Robair: “Who is this ‘Kyle,’ by the way? Is he around here?”

“We owe the label at least some concerts,” says guitarist and bassist John Shiurba. “We should support the record as much as we can.”

“I just love to play music,” Coomes offers.

Rosenberg: “That being said, we’re only doing four shows, because that’s what we can do. Three of us have kids, everybody has another job, we live in different cities, and we can only take really good gigs.”

Bruckmann: “I guess what I was trying to get at there, is that the futility is an asset, and an aesthetic stance that, uh, tickles me pink.

We’re not young, we’re not pretty, there’s no hype. We can’t tour eight months out of the year—” “Can’t even tour one month,” gripes Shiurba.

“Yeah, and we released the record in this totally obnoxious, gorgeous, fetishist format,” continues Kyle. “Gatefold sleeve, doubleLP—it’s what the music demanded. The more ridiculous and absurd it became, the more beautiful it felt… It just really makes it clear that we’re just doing it for the music.”

Did I really say these guys were too old to be idealistic?

The hot, dry suburban hills east of Berkeley are where Gino Robair has settled down, in a fair-sized ranch house with landscaped lawns (thanks to his wife Laura, a landscape designer) and two kids and a mini-van—the 32 | SIGNAL to NOISE #55 WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM

whole bit. “I always thought I’d fall in love with another musician or an artist, and we’d have this bohemian city lifestyle where we went to lots of openings and parties with other artists and did nothing but avant-garde art and music. But I ended up marrying a nurse and moving out here, and now I have this selfcontained, other part of my life that has nothing to do with any of that stuff.” Still, one wing of this middle-class compound houses Gino’s wonderland/workshop of sculpted noise.

The space is filled with computers, speakers, analog synthesizer modules, gongs, cymbals, drum pieces, sticks, mallets, bows, piles of CDs—and enough styrofoam to propel a symphony of hair-raising squeaks. (The Classic Guide to Styrofoam, Vols. 2 & 3 are upcoming on Rastascan…after his opera, I, Norton.)

There’s lots of drumming in Gino’s background: high school marching band, academy training, graduate studies with percussionist William Winant and gamelan maven Lou Harrison at Mills College. Before earning concurrent masters degrees at Mills in the 1980s, Gino left the drums behind during a year in England, studying and hanging out with AMM’s Eddie Prévost and immersing himself in the London improvised music scene. “It was an education in the DIY, creative-music lifestyle, where you book your own performance series and run your own record label, while striving to grow as a musician and give back to the community.” Since then, he’s been a stout pillar of the Bay Area scene, launching bands (Robair was a founding member of the Splatter Trio, a pioneer hybrid of free jazz, modern classical, and punk) and working with ROVA, Fred Frith, Carla Kihlstedt, the Kronos Quartet, Tom Waits, and John Butcher (and Braxton, too), putting on festivals and releasing dozens of recordings on his own label, Rastascan.

Robair is one of those sound artists who can pick up the nearest object lying around and instantly create an utterly engrossing sound-world with it. One of his annual concert gambits is what he calls “Potluck Percussion,” where audience members are encouraged to bring along a random thingy and present it to the maestro, whereupon Robair strokes, scrapes, whirls, taps, and/or pummels the offering until it surrenders its sweet muse. A big fan of the Fluxus scene, Gino also likes to mix in generous swipes of Dada, so it’s not unheard-of to catch him wailing away on a floppy floor tom with a pair of bananas wrapped in newspapers. What’s wonderful about this action is that he appears to be carrying on in heedless 2-year-old abandon—but no: there’s control and finesse in those absurdist fruit-smacks. Those randy ’nanas sound musical doing exactly what they’re doing.

Oh, and Robair has composed, written and arranged, for various ensembles, the opera I, Norton, based on the pathetic life and grandiose rantings of Bay Area ur-crazyman Emperor Norton, who walked the streets of the Barbary Coast a century and a half ago (probably including Polk Gulch).

Even though he’s been known to don the unholy robes of the “anti-percussionist,” Robair plays loud, righteous DRUMS for Pink Mountain. Goddamn GREAT drumming! in fact. Hear him tick off the lurchy-clock tocks in “Eternal Halflife” and the reprise “Eternal Shelflife,” 4-beat, 5-beat, 4-beat, 5-beat, 4-beat, 3-beat, all set against a steady duple time. Tough stuff. Or sample his damn-the-tor-

From left: Scott Rosenberg, John Shiurba, Sam Coomes, Kyle Bruckman, and Gino Robair in San Francisco, July 2009.

pedoes style underpinning the seven-minute Sisyphean climb of “Foreign Rising.” (Fans of James Tenney, gather round.) Then again, the bedrock he lays down under the horrorshow “Ditch Witch” says all that can be said about Robair’s love of metal bands and their nononsense beats.

Scott Rosenberg might seem to have the most direct connection to the band, via his name (=‘Pink Mountain,’ in German) and the fact that he started it all, but he’s taken perhaps the longest, ramblingest journey to the ruddy alpine environs, from LA to Middletown, CT, New York, Chicago, Paris, LA and NYC a couple more times, and three or four times in the Bay Area. “I arrived at Wesleyan in 1990, the same as Braxton’s first year there.

I pretty much spent college just studying with Braxton and playing the saxophone.” At Mills College in the mid-’90s (disclosure: Scott was a classmate of this writer) Rosenberg studied with Alvin Curran and George Lewis and came out the far end staging orchestral happenings (IE (for large ensemble), on Barely Auditable, and Creative Orchestra Music Chicago 2001, on New World) involving multitudes of musicians and Braxtonian grandiosity. After scoring big with critics for his Owe (Cadence) and El (Spool) avant-jazz albums and being rewarded with little interest from bookers, Rosenberg jumped over to folk-rock with The Full Sun (Howells Transmitter), field-

ing a regiment of 60+ players.

The new album’s “Foreign Rising” is one of Rosenberg’s compositions where simple ideas lead to grinding cosmic complexity. (Q: What is the sound of two galaxies fucking? A: An endless, mounting sonic climax.) It’s also reminiscent of “Hums,” one of the orchestra pieces on IE—a gigantic, uninterrupted glissando, nothing more or less.

Scott’s earthly trip continues with his next geographic leap, to a creative writing program in Laramie, Wyoming. “It won’t matter to the band,” he says, “We all live in different towns anyway.”

John Shiurba’s portfolio: Eskimo, The Molecules, Merce Cunningham, Anthony Braxton, his own 5x5 groups; Limited Sedition label with dozens of DIY releases documenting the Bay Area improv scene; brooding master of skronk. His quiver of string-exciting curiosities includes vibrators, an eggbeater, sticks and Ebows. At the Hemlock, he was seen during the first number stroking the strings tenderly with a serving fork. But, for Shiurba—as he proves with fine riffs on “Pink City,” and ethereal acoustic overdubs on “V”—sometimes a guitar is just a guitar.

The guitarist seems endlessly adaptable and unfazed by any kind of musical challenge thrown at him: rock, noise, improv, country, classical, or the ‘jump or die’ scores of Mr. Braxton. Shiurba’s band-mate in two

outfits—The Molecules and Spezza Rotto—is Thomas Scandura, who also happened to drum alongside Robair in junior high and high school. Speaking of Shiurba’s enlistment in The Molecules, Scandura says simply, “The music seemed to accelerate after John joined.

We were always about playing tight material in a carefree and sometimes ‘wrong’ way. He had no problem fitting in, even though he was playing bass.”

Shiurba lives in a house in the Oakland flats, where his kitchen is the staging ground for myriad band rehearsals, as long as his horsesized dog Bloom isn’t holding the floor. One room is ceiling-to-floor LPs, a dangerous place to linger for any music geek.

Sam Coomes is by default the “star” of Pink Mountain, being a mainstay of the Portland indie-rock scene for well over a decade. Fronting Quasi since 1993, he’s also consorted with Built to Spill, Heatmiser, Sleater-Kinney, and Elliott Smith, among others. Pink Mountain is his first incursion into improvised-and-other music. He’s the most down-to-earth and engaging of the bunch, which may further explain why he’s the guy out in front communicating verbally with the audience. Not for him the game-theory composing strategies, obscure no-wave bands or niche-niche genres. (Although this may be an act on his part: there’s a shot of Sam reading Graham Lock’s Forces in Motion on the inside jacket of

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a Heatmiser record from the mid-’90s. That’s a great book all about—that’s right—Anthony Braxton, a veritable godfather to this band.)

Shiurba: “Sam and I were talking and I said, ‘This is like my classic rock band,’ and he said, ‘Well, this is my “out” band.’”

“What is skronk-rock, anyway? The Contortions or something?” asks Coomes. On being surrounded by composerly types: “These guys start talking about numbers, and scratching on paper with pens, and it could be ancient Chinese or Sanskrit to me.”

“But then Sam will come up with a bass or guitar part that’s more complex than anything Shiurba could ever write out,” adds Gino.

Coomes was key to the formation of the group and to the establishment of its musical identity—the pop icing on the improv cake, if you will—a Quasi-stellar object. Rosenberg sought him out after seeing him in action at an Elliott Smith show: “I came away from the concert with the thought ‘That guy’s the heavy musician of the group.’ My impression of Sam had been as this elder statesman/guru of the Portland scene, but his harmonic language was unique and more colorful than a lot of folks around him, and he clearly used improvisation and drew heavily from the blues, with a kind of energy that is lacking in a lot of rock bands.”

Rosenberg remembers, “Listening intensively to Quasi gave me a sense, from Sam’s music and lyrics, that he’d be really fun to work with, and that he might be open to doing something heavier and weirder than Quasi. As it (fortuitously) turned out, Sam is very much the same in person as he is in his music, which isn’t necessarily true for a lot of people.

“When I saw him play live it was totally clear to me that he was an improviser and had a much broader vocabulary than pop songwriting . . . that his influences included stuff like Cecil Taylor and noise, and I started imagining putting together this dream group of some of my favorite musicians. And that turned into Pink Mountain.”

“I heard one theory that we’re releasing records in the Fibonacci series,” says Robair in a rush, “so we’ll have two records that are number one, the third record is actually two, and the rest will go on from there.” With the corresponding number of years in between each release date? “Hopefully not.”

“We will never break up,” proclaims Shiurba.

“You have to be together first, to break up,” opines Robair.

From ther first album on Frenetic, “Biography of the Sun” sounds like a tortured slice out of Naked City’s Leng Tch’e, at (mercifully) 1/10th of the length. “The Kids Are Insane” sports demented vocals indeed, with Zornsqualling sax and death-metal underpinnings.

“Circling the 7th Planet,” which sounds like a close transcription of a terminal attack of the hiccups, must be the first rock track ever recorded with a contrabass clarinet on it. (The second might be “All Fours,” from the new PM release, although as is true with a lot of their tunes, it’s pretty hard to tell what the fuck is making those sounds.) “Anti-Gravity” sports handclaps and room noise over a silly Mickey Mouse funk bounce.

“The first album… basically, we improvised these chunks of noise with rock drums, and then overlaid keyboards and vocals…. There

was no editing at all,” says Shiurba. “We chose all the parts we liked that were formally the way we liked them.”

“We bring five different writing processes to the thing,” says Rosenberg. “Kyle wrote out some really elaborate stuff for overdubs, and I wrote out some lines, but then in the studio there’d be conduction, or more improvising—” “Sam emailed some parts in,” says Shiurba.

“And I would listen to those and go, ‘Oh, now I have a whole new idea for another part.’”

The new album celebrates the art of cut ’n’ paste noise-rock as undertaken with a chainsaw: violent, raw, and brutally efficient.

Bruckmann is the sonic surgeon of the group, taking raw tracks and making ‘songs’ out of them, although all have a hand in the results. “The kiss of death in this band,” says Rosenberg, “is if someone says something sounds like one of your other bands. Then it’s automatically thrown out.”

“In order to even do the tour, we had to become a Pink Mountain cover band,” states Shiurba. “We had to re-learn all the parts that we’d improvised in the studio.”

“Over the Rainbow, Somewhere”—B major chording in 4/4! This is rock ’n’ roll! “Thee Red Lion” is taken up with a most devastating buildup and hot flashes of distemper, with an interlude of Mellotronic string-section warbles; then it breaks through the clouds as Coomes intones echoplectically over minimalist perc/ bass, whereupon all the disparate elements stack up at the end, crunch. “Ditch Witch” is another “pop song” with a humping beat, amplified metal-string banshees in the near midground fuzzing up your ears quite satisfyingly. After numerous arty traps that plunge into rock-us noise fests, the album calls an official truce with “Underworld,” an exploration of Robair’s lovely prepared-piano vignettes, overlaid with drum guitar plonks ’n’ skronks and ribbons of analog electronics. Things densify with a spastic stalking riff as practiced by a hairy pegleg warthog. All voices exeunt save the prepared piano, whose bell tones and percussive pops evoke a twilight noman’s-land, a distant church overlit by exploding stray ordnance left behind in the retreat, sounding The End, (PONG) The End...

“The reason I got pissed off the first day we were recording,” says Robair, “is that we bring Sam down from Portland, we get in the studio and we start playing and it immediately sounds like every improv record you’ve ever heard… I didn’t come down here for this. We got this guy who’s a songwriter, why don’t we make songs? I thought we were going to play some rock ’n’ roll.” There it is again, that word.

What rock bands would the group count as an influence?

“We’re too old for influences,” says Sam. “That’s the thing,” goes Bruckmann. “The whole fucking point of this band is that we all have completely different aesthetic agendas, but with a lot of overlap. And we work together because of those overlaps, and because of the places where they conflict.”

“Influences are for when you’re trying to learn your instrument and how to write a song,” continues Coomes. “And then you just forget about it. And then you’re influenced by the presidential elections… and the weather…”

“We sound like a fucked-up rock band that’s listened to too many other fucked-up rock bands,” mutters Bruckmann.

“Personally, I’m really into the Rolling Stones,” confesses Rosenberg.

Earlier, in a sequestered space, Bruckmann wasn’t too grown up to unearth an encyclopedia of his musical upbringing, which surely includes some of the “overlaps” mentioned earlier by the other PM’ers: “This Heat is indeed a reference point, but as an influence they’re purely post hoc—people kept saying to me things like, ‘Obviously you’ve been listening to them forever,’ when in fact I’d never really heard them—when I finally (belatedly) checked them out I wished I could say I had been. Same proved true of Henry Cow, James Chance and the Contortions, Devo’s first record (!), and even (to my eternal shame) Beefheart.

“Things that felt more particularly relevant, moving beyond my adolescent hardcore and industrial roots, were Minor Threat, Black Flag, DK, burning rapidly through high school into Einstürzende Neubauten, Test Dept, Skinny Puppy, Big Black, Shellac, Jesus Lizard, Tar, Helmet, Zeni Geva, Foetus, and forefathers like Pussy Galore and Birthday Party. But that stuff all started to feel too cartoonishly MEAN and macho, and bands like The Ex, Dog Faced Hermans, and God Is My Co-Pilot clued me in to the joyful, playful possibilities of propulsive noise. Meanwhile, Boredoms and Ruins led me to Zorn, who in turn served as a gateway drug into ‘improvised music,’ etc. Splatter Trio showed up at an incredibly impressionable moment, believe it or not— Rice University’s campus radio station brought them, plus ROVA, Debris, and Tim Berne with Hank Roberts down to Houston for a concert in 1992. Gino and Myles walked through our living room during the second Lozenge rehearsal EVER and provided some highly inspirational encouragement.

“Once in Chicago (starting in 1996), my ‘scene’ comrades were really primarily the wildly varying neo-nowave bands in the Skin Graft Records orbit—the Flying Luttenbachers, Cheer-Accident, US Maple, Bobby Conn, Lake of Dracula. I veered deeper and deeper into improvised music and all the obvious things. Nowadays, I’m way too old and un-hip, rockwise, but the things that HAVE crossed my radar and which still excite me are bands like Ex-Models, the Locust, Deerhoof, Hella, Orthrelm, Erase Errata, Gorge Trio, Lightning Bolt, Wolf Eyes.”

The sound of a control-freak composer (Rosenberg) being assimilated by a rock ’n’ roll band: “We were having another fight in the studio, and at the end of the night Sam said, ‘God, I really love the push and pull of this band! It’s so much fun!’ And I was miserable…” He peps up, though: “But, I finally get it now. I only have one-fifth of the responsibility and control. I can trust these guys. If I come in with an idea and these four stop me before I can even finish my sentence—they’re right!”

“We’re all fighting for the music,” Coomes adds. “People are brutal, but it’s a noble fight.

Since everybody respects each other, we can hack it.”

Will there be any fisticuffs onstage tonight?

“As long as Rosenberg doesn’t mess up,” cracks Shiurba, to general laughter. ✹ Trumpter Tom Djll lives in the San Francisco Bay Area and also writes for The Wire, MusicWorks and Bagatellen.

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SCHOOL DAYS

Oakland, California's Mills College has trained generations of creative musicians, and under the supervision of Fred Frith, Chris Brown and others, the tradition continues. Story by Jesse Hamlin. Photos by Jennifer Hale.

Professor Chris Brown, far right, and students at his Seminar in Electronic Performance, Mills College, Oakland, July 2009.

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Fred Frith at Mills College, July 2009.

For eight decades, some of the most radically innovative artists in contemporary music have found fertile ground at Mills College, a wooded enclave nestled away beneath a nearby freeway interchange in Oakland, California. John Cage, Darius Milhaud, Lou Harrison, Luciano Berio, Terry Riley, Pauline Oliveros, Anthony Braxton and many other leading composers and improvisers have fueled and been nurtured by Mills’ ongoing tradition of experimentalism. So have such famed former students as jazz pianist and composer Dave Brubeck, Grateful Dead bassist Phil Lesh and performance artist Laurie Anderson. Fred Frith, the far-ranging guitarist and composer who heads the music department, is part of that creative continuum. But he’s focused on what Mills students are doing now.

One night in April, Frith stood onstage in the school’s ornate Spanish Colonial-style concert hall, rehearsing a big ensemble of young improvisers. About two dozen musicians were spread across the stage of the lovely wood-beamed and frescoed Littlefield Concert Hall: five electric guitarists, a tabla player, two accordionists, a theremin player, three vocalists, a trumpeter, a flutist, one alto and one tenor saxophonist, four pianists at two instruments, a traps drummer and two bassists, one playing acoustic, the other electric. Frith, wearing gray jeans and an orange short-sleeve floral-patterned shirt, was guiding them through one of his graphic scores, “Roof.” It’s a photograph of a tiled roof in Marseilles. Each tile triggers short solos— about three seconds in duration—from three musicians playing simultaneously. Before they finish, they signal three other players to jump in, and so on (a second line that begins after the first minute calls on two people to play at a time). Every 10 seconds, Frith conducted a big downbeat—a kind of crossbeam—on which everyone who wasn’t playing hit a sharp accent. The music popped and floated, knotted and stretched. It shifted from skittering piano lines and bowed bass figures to dancing Ornette-like alto riffs, ricocheting tabla rolls, tenor honks and the ethereal hum of the theremin. Breathy shakuhachi-like flute tones gave way to chirping vocal sounds, tapped and scraped guitar strings, ringing harmonics, feedback, and a stream of other sounds punctuated by silence.

“Some of the solos were about three times as long as they should be. They were nice, but you have to keep the material moving,” said Frith, 60, a solid man of medium height with brushy gray hair, thick black eyebrows and a wry sense of humor. Later, after playing “3 Over 2”—an improvisational game developed by guitarist René Lussier and the Montreal school of improvisers, in which players can signal the number of people they want to play at any given time—Frith offered another suggestion: “If you feel you have something to add, do it. If not, maybe you shouldn’t play.

At Mills, nobody tells you what you should play. But listening deeply—being attuned to everything that’s happening around you and

what the music needs at any moment—is a core value at a place that prizes sonic exploration and collaboration.

That night, the Mills Music Improvisation Ensemble, which Frith teaches, was collaborating with the UC Berkeley Jazz and Improvised Music Ensemble, directed by Frith’s friend and collaborator, the adventurous pianist and composer Myra Melford. She and Frith thought it would be interesting to mix things up. They were preparing for a pair of concerts the next week. The repertoire would include three of Frith’s graphic scores and John Zorn’s classic improvising game “Cobra,” which Melford would prompt. She was jazzed about her students working with Frith, whose expansive sense of improvisation and composition has placed him at the nexus of experimental rock and new music for 35 years.

“They can learn more about improvising from Fred, because he brings everything he knows and does it with,” Melford said during a break. “He’s got these structures that work for any number of people. He gets you to focus and gives you rules or parameters, but leaves a lot of room for your own content. And that kind of improvising is really fun.”

Frith seemed to be enjoying himself, bobbing to the music and laughing at the cacophonous climax to his “Dry Stone II.” It’s the sonic expression of a Yorkshire wall being built from the bottom up. As each new solo, or stone, is placed in the wall, the previous soloist loops his or her final phrase over and over.

At one point, a dozen loops crossed and collided in a circling wave of sound. “Ah, I love this piece,” said Frith, a Cambridge-educated Englishman who co-founded the influential British art-rock band Henry Cow, and went on to collaborate with Brian Eno, Bill Laswell, John Zorn and scores of other creative musicians, artists, dancers and filmmakers around the world (he wrote the lovely score to Rivers and Tides, the poetic documentary about sculptor Andy Goldsworthy).

A Mills professor since 1999, Frith is expanding the school’s well-established tradition of improvisation. A number of illustrious avantgarde composer-improvisers have filled the Darius Milhaud Chair in Composition at Mills, among them Harrison, Braxton and Alvin Curran. The three-year position is currently held

by Roscoe Mitchell, the iconoclastic saxophonist and composer who co-founded the Art Ensemble of Chicago and has performed at Mills in various contexts since the 1980s.

A few years ago, Mills began offering an MFA in improvisational performance, which is not tied to any one tradition. The prized graduate program here, which draws students from around the world, also offers an MFA in electronic music and recording media.

Home to the world-renowned Center for Contemporary Music, Mills—a small women’s college that accepts both men and women into its graduate programs—has been in the vanguard of electronic and computer music since the 1960s. The Center evolved from the San Francisco Tape Music Center, a laboratory

for new ideas, methods and performances founded by the trailblazing electronic-music composers Ramon Sender and Morton Subotnick (Sender studied at Mills, and Subotnick studied and taught here). The Tape Center relocated to Mills in 1966, with Pauline Oliveros, the visionary accordionist and composer who conceived the philosophy of Deep Listening, as its first director. Mills remains a magnet for questing musicians looking to find their own voice and direction.

“It’s a haven for people who don’t fit in elsewhere,” said pianist Svetlana Voronina, a key player in the Mills improvisation ensemble.

She’s getting her MFA in performance and improvisation. Voronina, who’s 27 and likes to wear her wavy brown hair in buns, graduated from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in her hometown of Boston, where she changed her focus from music to art. But after seeing Step Across the Border, the 1990 documentary about Frith, she set her mind on Mills.

“Fred talked about sound and music-making and new approaches to being musical. It really inspired me. I applied to the program because of him. He’s an amazing teacher. He tries to understand each individual’s deep motivation for doing what they do, each person’s aesthetic choices. He doesn’t push any of his own dogma on anyone.” There’s freedom at Mills, she added, “but there’s always rigorous attention paid to the quality of the work. It’s not anything goes.” Working in large improvisation groups, Voronina went on, “I try to play distinctive melodies and rhythms. In that type of setting, I’m pretty much hell-bent on adding whatever I can to make the whole thing sound like some sort of coherent musical piece, rather than just noise and improvisation.”

Noise, of course, is as valued as signal at Mills. Wandering the cool white halls of the old-world music building, with its red-tile floors and dark wood doors, you can hear all kinds of static, feedback and tweaked electronic sounds, as well as African and Indian drumming, jazz fiddling and Renaissance madrigals. Unlike some academic music departments that embrace a particular “ism”— serialism or spectralism—“the only ‘ism’ at Mills is pluralism,” said David Bernstein, a 20th-century music scholar who has taught at Mills since 1989. “There isn’t one aesthetic.

Mills goes through cycles where there’s an emphasis or focus on a particular type of creative approach. But it’s always changing. One of them right now is bridging the perceived gap between composition and improvisation. In my mind, it’s a big development in contemporary music around the world.” The challenge for Bernstein and his colleagues is to move the vaunted Mills tradition forward.

“We don’t want to be atavistic, we want to move on. You don’t want to live in the past, you want to use it as a breeding ground for more interesting things.”

An extraordinary range of interesting music filled the beautifully restored Littlefield Concert Hall this past winter and spring. The Mills

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Music Festival 2009 celebrated the reopening of the landmark 1928 theater with six sold-out concerts spanning the past, present and future of contemporary music. Dozens of major artists performed, among them Oliveros, Riley, Maggi Payne, Muhal Richard Abrams, The Arditti Quartet, Nicole Paiement, William Winant, James Fei, Joan Jenrenaud and Frith. The 18-month renovation project used the latest technology to make the acoustics responsive to all kinds of sound, and returned the bold-colored frescoes, murals and geometric ceiling tiles to their original splendor. Designed by the San Francisco firm EHDD Architecture, the restoration, which won the prestigious California Preservation Award and other prizes, set off a new era in Mills music-making.

An hour before its performance in the hall, the combined Mills-Berkeley ensemble, which had played at Berkeley the night before, went over some of the music during the sound check. There was a little tension in the air as Melford, a lively woman with curly strawberryblond hair, rehearsed “Cobra.” The piece uses a set of cue cards that prescribe various parameters and events—cross-fades, cuts, levels of density, looped phrases, the repetition of events triggered by “memory” cues. The players call them up by cueing the prompter with a series of agreed-upon signals: pulling their ears, touching their mouths and noses, holding up palms. The music began with softly plucked strings and whispering woodwinds, the tinkling sound of a distant piano, stretched accordion chords and the ambient swirl of hums and buzzes. But the volume and density quickly increased, and it was hard to hear narrative links in the barrage of sound that poured forth.

“Let’s make sure that when you make cues, it’s for a musical reason, an aesthetic reason,” Melford said. “Think about creating a relationship with one or two people around you.

We’re always creating relationships.” Frith, who’d been listening intently, added: “You really need to be using your ears. You’re playing great, but I’m willing to bet that half of you have no idea what the other half is playing. I couldn’t hear the accordion at all. If you can’t hear the quiet instruments, you’re playing too loud. If everybody’s going along at that nice forte that you enjoy, it’s going to sound like shit, ultimately. So please, listen.”

The players got the message. The performance came off well. The music breathed.

Frith’s “Screen” had some magic moments: the long solo vocal line leading to a mournful alto melody, the sighing Milesian trumpet phrase followed by crunched accordion chords and glissandi. The performance concluded with an alluring improvisation jointly conducted by Melford and Frith. They divided the orchestra down the middle, with Frith leading one side and Melford the other. They played off each other, shaping the music in

Seminar in Electronic Performance, Littlefield Concert Hall, Mills College, July 2009.

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Top: Seth Horvitz, with amplified zither and laptop.

Bottom: accordionist Annie Lewandowski

response to the events unfolding and erupting on the other side of the stage.

Afterwards, bassist Jason Hoopes and guitarist Karl Evangelista, both Mills graduate students, sat in the gold-hued auditorium and reflected on the performance. Evangelista, a soft-spoken man who plays with Hoopes in a jazz-oriented quartet called Host Family, talked about the challenge of trying to communicate in such a big group.

“So much of what happens is psychodrama,” said Evangelista, 23, a graduate student in improvisation with a degree from Berkeley in interdisciplinary studies. “We’re trying to make good music, but we’re also trying to deal with each other as strong musical personalities. There were moments that evinced real listening. Like when Fred and Myra were conducting and exchanging long tones. There was another section where Jason, Vijay [Anderson, the drummer] and Jacob [Zimmerman, the alto player] got into a sort of free-jazz groove. There was communication.” Hoopes, a lanky, dark-haired cat with black-framed glasses, two silver hoops in each ear and a long goatee, chimed in: “It couldn’t have been more than 30 seconds. It sounded good. The energy was there. I felt the graphic scores worked really well. Everybody was listening. I also really liked that moment when the electric bass player from Berkeley [Noah Whitfield] started tapping his strings on the fret board, and Fred started telling guys to mimic him. [Frith held up two fists to signal an ostinato.] That was cool. There was a groove, and there was tonality. A lot of the free improvisation aesthetic is like, itchy, scratchy, textural and noise, and deals with density and color. I love noise, but I also love melody. Sometimes rhythm and time and tonal centers get forgotten. … Improvisation has taught me more about how to live in the world than anything else. You do something and there’s a reaction.

You’re free to do anything, but you’re not free from the consequences of those actions.”

Hoopes, who grew up in northern California and southern Oregon, earned a bachelor’s degree in music at Southern Oregon University in Ashland. He was deep into the experimental music of artists like Cage, Zorn and Frith, and felt the pull of Mills. The school, he said, “had this kind of mystery, this mythical thing about it.” He’d met Frith in Oregon in 2005, and entered the graduate program here the next year. “I felt, ‘Oh, these are my people. This is my environment. I have to be here.’” Now completing his MFA in performance with an emphasis on improvisation, Hoopes works as copyist for Frith and others, teaches bass and plays in a wide spectrum of creative Bay Area bands, often with other Mills students and alumni. They include his “cinematic post-metal” rock band, the Atomic Bomb Audition; the improvisational trio The Brine; the avant-folk group Jack O’ The Clock; and powerdove, which plays the acoustic

songs of accordionist Annie Lewandowski.

She’s a Mills graduate student who played this spring in the improvisation ensemble and in the Electronic Performance Seminar taught

by Chris Brown, who co-founded the seminal computer network music ensemble The Hub in the 1980s and now co-directs the Center for Contemporary Music.

“The cool thing about Mills is that it’s mostly student-driven,” Hoopes said the next afternoon. He was sitting on the stone steps outside the music building, which is set back from a roadway lined with giant sycamore trees. “The instructors are there as resources, to point you in the right direction and turn you on to something that maybe you don’t know about. But we organize the concerts, the sound checks, the rehearsals and do the press. You produce work because you want to. There’s a strong academic element, too, but people come with more of a street attitude, for lack of a better phrase, a punk aesthetic. They understand what it’s like to be experimental, to operate within the potential for failure. That breeds empathy. There’s an incredible amount of generosity in this community.”

Hoopes had just finished conducting a rehearsal of his “Music for Films That Don’t Exist: 25 Dolls,” a harmonically rich, propulsive piece scored for French horn, cello, drums, piano, four voices and alto saxophone. It was his final project for the Contemporary Instrumentation and Orchestration class taught by Mitchell, who sat in the theater with his eyes closed, soaking up the music. Sound artist Seth Horvitz’s mixed-media piece synched the live playing of two amplified cellos and two amplified double basses with the recorded sounds of their instruments; video-screen strobe effects mirrored their shifting tempo and attack.

Horvitz, who improvises all kinds of scraped and plucked sounds on his amplified zither in Brown’s group, also mixed the processed sounds in singer Sally Ann Duke’s piece for two voices and two flutes, “Boy Meets Girl.”

A one-time jazz singer, Duke now digs into more abstract and visceral realms.

“I do a lot of screaming and guttural growling,” Duke said backstage. “It’s what needs to come out of me at this point in my career.

I’m kind of an intense person.” A masters student at Mills, Duke studied jazz at San Francisco State University, where she got a degree in American Studies with an emphasis in fine arts. Feeling the need to go deeper into herself and explore beyond the usual boundaries of song, she came to Mills. “If you’re interested in technology, and you want to explore your improvisational impulses, this is a great program,” said the singer, who has curly blond hair and a shy manner. “Roscoe is great musician. Just being around him is a wonderful influence on me. Just being able to hear him play is worth a lot more than most

schools can offer. And Fred gives great constructive criticism. He reminds me that when I sing with words, I have to take responsibility for what the words are saying.” As a member of an improvising ensemble, she added, “I have to be a good musician, and try to sing whatever the piece needs at that time.”

Mitchell had stepped outside for a smoke.

He’s a wiry man with a trim gray moustache and a direct gaze. One of the great improvisers, he led a composition seminar and taught the instrumentation and orchestra class in the spring. “I feel that one of the most important lessons you can learn is how to learn,” said Mitchell, who tries to provide the resources and guidance to “help students plot out their own paths in music. I’m happy if people are able to tap into their own individuality. And if I’m somehow successful in pointing them in that direction, than I feel I’ve done something for them. You have students here who have gone to schools where the teaching structure is very rigid. And now they’re trying to get out of that.”

In addition to bringing in various musicians to demonstrate the range and techniques of their instruments, Mitchell had his orchestration students analyze various scores, including parts of Mahler’s Symphony No. 2, Crumb’s Black Angels, some of Berio’s Sequenzas and Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring.

“It’s important for improvisers to understand composition,” Mitchell said. “Once they understand how composition works, they can start to think about how they want to shape their improvisations.”

Earlier that morning, Brown was working in the concert hall with the improvisers in his Seminar in Electronic Performance. He was hooking up a wireless computer network that he and other musicians would use to coordinate their performances. A dozen or so grad students were spread around the hall, tapping on laptops and adjusting their homemade electro-acoustic instruments. They were setting up for a run-through of pieces they would perform the following week in a spectacular space at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco. The Yud gallery, designed the museum’s esteemed architect, Daniel Libeskind, is a spirit-lifting, angular space with a 65-foot ceiling and light pouring in through 36 diamond-shaped windows. Lou Reed, Laurie Anderson and Terry Riley were among the musicians who inaugurated the gallery when it opened last year. Brown and his students had cooked up a program of open-ended pieces and improvisations to explore the acoustics of that singular space.

“Think about making a piece that doesn’t need to move too fast,” suggested Brown, a youthful 56-year-old with a full head of white hair and a gentle, thoughtful manner. “It’s really about putting sound into space, and seeing what’s possible. We want to activate

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the room from different angles.”

When the seminar began last winter, Brown had his students build simple electronic instruments from scratch. They started with just a transducer and a speaker, experimenting with the sounds they could draw from them.

Over the semester, the players added more elements, developing their compositions and instruments with software, programming and electronics. Some created banks of sounds, their own vocabulary, on their laptops; others devised interactive systems for signaling other musicians to play and exchange information.

“The idea was to focus on improvising with electronics,” said Brown, a composer, pianist and pioneering electro-acoustic instrument maker who has taught at Mills since 1989.

“It’s a struggle with electronic music to keep it as a performance medium, because there’s a tendency with all the technology to have it be a production, ending up with finished recorded projects. At Mills, there’s always been this interest, when it came to electronic music, in keeping it live.”

For the next hour, an extraordinary range of sounds—sustained celestial hums and crashing metallic noises, zaps, buzzes, whooshes and whistles, rubbery underwater tones, screeches and shimmering gong-like waves—moved through the hall. Matt Hettich’s piece was a simple, beautiful creation, using a feedback loop between each laptop’s built-in microphone and speaker to create a wondrous chant-like drone. Hettich assigned each musician a note in an F-minor 7th chord.

The players slowly walked around the space in a ritual-like manner, changing the volume and timbre and harmony by opening and closing the lids of their laptops.

Dan Good, a sound artist who studied electrical engineering at MIT, was playing an old Fender amplifier with an accelerometerequipped device that he scraped and rubbed against different parts of the speaker cabinet, eliciting a palette of unusual sounds. He was improvising a duet with Horvitz, who runs his modified zither through a couple of cheap little amps to create feedback. Horvitz sometimes plucks the strings—whose tuning he tweaks—or rolls bells across them.

“We both have nice white-noise sounds, more percussive sounds, like knocking or clicking, and rougher, scraping sounds,” said Good, 23, a bearded man with rimless specs.

I’d caught up with him after the rehearsal, as he sat sipping coffee on the terrace of the campus tea shop. The spot affords a splendid view of the great central lawn that slopes down towards the mansard-roofed Victorian mansion that houses the school administration. Maybe it’s the quiet grace of the place, with its towering redwoods and eucalyptus trees, that nurtures crazy ideas.

“When Seth and I improvise, we’re always looking for interesting sounds and different ways to interact,” Good said. “Since both our instruments are homemade, we don’t know exactly what we’re going to get out of them.

Today I hit this harmonic, this drone sound, that I’d never hit before. It was great. I had to close my eyes and try to keep it going as long as I could.”

At Mills, there’s a great tradition of building your own instrument. Brown, who used to make his own electronic circuits with solder

and wire, mentioned the gamelan that Harrison and his partner Bill Colvig built on campus (with help from the great percussionist William Winant, a long-time Mills faculty member).

Students still play it. Showing a visitor around the funky Center for Contemporary Music, which he directs with composer and recording expert Maggi Payne, Brown proudly points to the first Buchla 100, the modular analog synthesizer that engineer Don Buchla built at the San Francisco Tape Music Center in 1964.

It shares a small room with a Moog 3P from 1968. Those vintage instruments, Brown said, “are a great way to teach electronic music.

These days, people have a lot of software, but they don’t get the sense of, ‘Oh, it’s going through this circuit to that circuit.’ Part of the electronic music tradition at Mills is being able to feel you can modify your instrument, or build it from scratch if necessary. That’s a different kind of skill. At Mills, people get their feet wet.”

But it’s not all new music at Mills. One morning in the intimate sky-lit chapel, faculty member Louise Carslake was leading an eight-woman Baroque ensemble through the 1609 John Wilbye madrigal Down in a Valley, and the chorale Jesu bleibet meine Freude from Bach’s Cantata 147. An English born Baroque and Renaissance flutist, Carslake was conducting two cellists, two flutists, two singers, a violist and a violinist, shaping the phrasing and interweaving voices. The early-music courses she teaches are an integral, if little known, part of the Mills musical continuum.

“In a way, there’s a big connection between early music and contemporary music, all the contrapuntal stuff,” said the statuesque Carslake, who teaches a mix of music majors and other students who love to play. “And there are parts of the Renaissance and early Baroque that were were very experimental.”

On a warm evening in early May, as fading blue light poured through the windows of the Jewish Museum’s Yud gallery, a shifting collage of strange and compelling sounds floated through the space and echoed off the high, angled walls. One marveled at the sonic range—electronic drips and whirs, pings and clangs, sounds that momentarily conjured stampeding hoofs, pattering rain, smashed glass, twittering birds, chopper blades, a kalimba. Brown’s computer-network group improvisation, “Ensemble!,” which featured vocalist Zeina Nasr popping plastic-wrap bubbles with her feet, swelled to a stirring racket. Hettich’s “aAnAnd” sent a calming spiritual hum wafting through the space.

For Brown, the performance epitomized the kind of collaborative, chance-taking spirit that defines music at Mills. The most important thing he can teach his students, he said, “is to be open, to value adventure, and to listen. Mills really is an oasis for new music.

It has its own energy and power that isn’t associated with any one person. People come and go. Every class that comes in is different.

There’s an energy that has its own life.”

Terry Riley agrees. The great American composer, whose 1964 piece In C set off the Minimalist movement, was on the Mills faculty for a decade starting in 1973. He taught composition and North Indian classical music.

“It’s amazing, that no matter who is there,

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which faculty, the school always continues to be in the vanguard of new and experimental music,” said Riley, on the phone from his Sri Moonshine Ranch up in California gold country. “It’s definitely part of a larger California and Pacific Rim vision.” Why would it happen there at a girls’ school? “I think a big part of it was Margaret Lyon [the late Renaissance music scholar, who headed the Mills music department from 1955 to 1979]. She was really a visionary person. She brought in Leon Kirchner and Berio. Even though she seemed kind of like a conservatory theory teacher, she was attracted to people with wild ideas.”

A few weeks after school let out, Frith was sitting in his office, where a big white bust of Milhaud—the jazz-loving French-Jewish composer who arrived at Mills in 1940 after fleeing Nazi-occupied Paris—sits on a shelf.

The guitarist was about to head to Europe for a series of concerts, including a London date with Faith No More singer Mike Patton and a performance in Basel with percussion virtuoso Evelyn Glennie. He talked about his way of teaching improvisation.

“I am not the kind of improviser who functions as a kind of guru, where I say, ‘That’s bad, that’s good.’ I’m not interesting in that kind of teaching,” said Frith, who wore a gray sweatshirt with “OAKLAND” emblazoned across it. “That’s how music has traditionally been taught. But in this kind of improvisation, the fundamental prerequisite is that you accept yourself, that you don’t try to be somebody else. You have to accept yourself in order to improvise well. How am I going to come along and say, ‘I don’t accept what you did’? Does that mean I don’t accept you? So you have to be ready to constantly learn from what people are bringing to the table. It may not be what you would’ve done, but then maybe in retrospect you find that it’s something really interesting. So I don’t want to pass those kind of qualitative judgments. The judgments I’m interested in have to do with the fact if we’re here together, trying to have a musical result, there are certain things that have to happen. Obviously deep listening— apologies to Pauline—is one of them. You have to have a kind of telepathic understanding of where we’re going in this situation.”

The most important thing Frith can communicate to improvisers is that there’s no attainable perfect result. “I once had a student tell me that the thing he most appreciated learning from me was that it’s OK to make mistakes,” Frith said. “You don’t learn without mistakes.”

Frith had recently worked with his brother, the British neuroscientist Chris Frith, who told him that the brain learns by looking for what it doesn’t know. It’s constantly sending out impulses to find things it doesn’t know so it can learn them.

“That’s the way it grows,” Fred Frith said. “If that’s the way we function as human beings, I think it’s a very good metaphor for improvised music. We’re constantly challenging ourselves with what we can’t possibly know yet. We don’t know what’s next. We’re in a situation of unpredictability at all times.” ✹ Jesse Hamlin is a staff writer for the San Francisco Chronicle. This is his first feature for Signal to Noise

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

New York Eye and Ear II Various Venues, New York City 7/9-12/2009

Brooklyn might be the beating heart of DIY shows in NYC, but leave it to Todd Pendu, the visionary head of the multifaceted Pendu Organization, to mess up the boundaries and bring the noise back to Manhattan. Pendu has been hard at work redefining DIY aesthetics for a while, and his semi-annual NY Eye and Ear festival is a testament to his vision. Pendu conceived a festival that would bring together the best the local community has to offer and present it in a way that would allow artists total freedom of expression. NY Eye and Ear II, a sprawling showcase of over sixty New York bands and visual artists, took up three venues for a four-day underground extravaganza. Pendu kept the price low and presented a smorgasbord of sounds, such that anyone attempting to pick a genre to define the festival would be at a loss.

NY Eye and Ear is more than the sum of its parts—it is a genuine protest against art falling prey to commercialized patronage.

During the first two days, NY Eye and Ear filled the entire Knitting Factory, with two floors of live stages plus a continuous seven-hour drone marathon in the basement.

The three ongoing levels of action merged into one uninterrupted flow of events, with people shooting up and down the stairs to catch the next act. Appropriately placed underground, the drone room was a hallucinatory experience from start to finish.

Christian Science Minotaur began the

festivities, at first sounding slightly subdued with some miked banjo and electronics.

Then, more spectacularly, they emitted an anguished electric howl, with one of the two members wearing an Optimus Prime mask and feeding it through effects. It was great to see each new drone act setting up and seamlessly blending in with the one already on stage, never allowing any gap between sets, which ranged from high-pitched tape hiss to processed turntable hum. Slasher Risk’s choreographed guitar-and-drums mayhem and Matthew Morandi’s hypnotically rhythmic landscapes stood out from the drone offerings.

One floor above the drone room, Liturgy relentlessly pummeled the audience with their version of stripped-down black metal.

Without the excessive makeup and spiked accessories associated with the genre, and with a minimalist drum set (snare, kickdrum, crash, ride), Liturgy are as close to black garage metal as one can get. Other bands nodding to heavier, more abrasive sounds were Chaw Mank—featuring members of Mouthus and Sightings—with their blizzard of skronky guitar and bass riffage, and George Steeltoe Ensemble with their double-sax free jazz improvisations. Both KF days ended on a psychedelic note: on one day, Nymph regaled us with exotic grooveoriented guitar lines; on the other, Magik Markers destructured spaced-out ballads, unleashing a distinctly potent variety of guitar feedback.

On the third day the action resumed at 92Y Tribeca, whose foyer and lobby were lined with merch tables from close to forty independent record labels and vendors.

From established names such as Matador and revered classics like ESP Disk to small indies like the black noise Esto Perpetua Records, there was an impressive variety of

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records and artifacts that one can rarely, if ever, find under the same roof. The record fair took place at the same time as the screening of “Women of NYCinema,” a collection of films by emerging female filmmakers like Parts and Labor’s recently departed guitar player, Sarah Lipstate.

Even though the bill that evening featured noise mainstay John Wiese, whose smart and engrossingly head-splitting set had many scurrying out of the room, the rest of the night was decidedly poppier.

The Living Days are in possession of a rare frontwoman, Stephonik Youth, who, as Todd Pendu put it, “out-Karen-Os Karen O” with a stage persona that mixes equal parts Bauhaus and Siouxsie. Martial Canterel, the one-man analog synth vehicle of Sean McBride, turned 92Y into a darkwave playground of raw beats and careful on-stage programming of vintage electronics.

The closing night took us across the East River, to Williamsburg’s Death by Audio, where the bands tore through the evening with loud and aggressive sounds. Pygmy Shrews leveled the floor with their coarse punk, while Drunkdriver and Total Abuse left nothing standing with their primal rambunctious energy. The lo-fi synths of spaz pop outfit Team Robespierre concluded a sweat-heavy evening that was a return to the headquarters of present-day NY DIY. By the time the festival was over, Todd Pendu had already started planning the third installment of NY Eye and Ear, scheduled for December. He also plans to release a double-DVD set of performances from the first festival by year’s end. In a city where inspired independent projects must struggle for survival, it is crucial to keep the Pendu Organization going, and its tireless founder afloat. Stefanos Tsigrimanis

Stefanos Tsigrimanis

Christian Science Minotaur at Eye and Ear II

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clockwise: Maria Joao, Jan Garbarek, Nils Petter Molvaer

Bergamo Jazz

Lucio Rosetti / Phocus

Various Venues, Bergamo, Italy 4/23-26/2009

Since its first installment in 1969, when Giorgio Gaslini programmed concerts by himself, Maynard Ferguson and Cannonball Adderley, Bergamo's annual festival of adventurous jazz has presented primarily American and Italian musicians, though aspects of Paolo Fresu’s 2009 program suggest that in coming years he’ll cast his net wider and invite musicians from hitherto less well-represented countries.

Given his age (born 10/22/1929) and his importance to Bergamo Jazz, it seems fitting (though somewhat ironic) that Gaslini should start proceedings with a solo piano concert in

the Auditorium della Casa di Riposo “Santa Maria Ausiliatrice,” a care home for the elderly. But age has not diminished Gaslini. He presents five sequences of “Free Piano”— not so much interpretations of individual compositions as freely orchestrated flights of fancy on factors common, either musically or culturally, to groups of them. He takes a highly idiosyncratic approach to the work of other composers and improvisers, ranging energetically across the keyboard, teasing out sectional riffs and motifs and adding layers of counterpoint, bringing something new to the music at every turn. By eliding Dvorak’s “Humoresque” with Elgar’s “Pomp and Circumstance,” he proves he’s a playful ironist too. The concluding sequence of this stunning concert draws on seven pieces, mostly from the free jazz tradition. Here Gershwin’s “Bidin’ My Time” encounters the surging nobility of

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Ayler’s “Truth Is Marching In,” Sun Ra’s “Out in Space” and the harmolodically exploded bebop of Ornette Coleman’s “Latin Genetics.”

Next up is a concert at the Teatro Donizetti, a lavishly appointed late-18th-century opera house. Topping the bill is the Gonzalo Rubalcaba Trio, but things kick off on a much grander scale with local boy Gianluigi Trovesi and the Filarmonica Mousiké performing their 2008 album Profumo di Violetta. A “journey through Italian opera,” Profumo di Violetta is a suite with dance interludes (variations on the medieval saltarello, mainly). Trovesi is the featured soloist (in the classical rather than the jazz sense, i.e. most of his solos are written rather than improvised) on saxophones and clarinets, but there are key roles for Marco Remondini (cello) and Stefano Bertoli (percussion). Perhaps the most lyrical of Italian reedsmen, Trovesi has long been drawn to

the power of song. Listening to the recording of Profumo di Violetta on a domestic hi-fi is a paltry experience compared to the power of this performance. The Filarmonica Mousiké is a young orchestra with a big sound that conductor Savino Acquaviva controls beautifully.

Whereas the CD included only the orchestra’s wind and percussion sections, here strings have been added, which allows for silkier textures. Trovesi’s initially caressing “Alba” introduces the brassy, fanfare-like “Toccata” from Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo via a hair-raising free-jazz tutti. Trovesi makes musics from different centuries speak eloquently to each other, and his own writing fits in seamlessly. The play of musical history is one of the festival’s two major themes, which Gaslini and Trovesi address successfully, each in his own way.

Gonzalo Rubalcaba has become wellknown for his rhythmic, highly percussive, exuberant style, but although he’s still a powerful and often very busy player, the flashiness has been toned down and a considerable musical personality has emerged. There’s something in his playing of McCoy Tyner’s propulsive left hand and Bud Powell’s fractured invention, tempered by the thoughtful pauses that Ahmad Jamal inserted in his music during the 1950s. But Rubalcaba strikes the keys harder than any of them (as hard as Cecil Taylor, even) and the piano rings like a bell. It’s not that he can’t play softly—often he does, the music has a wide dynamic range—but it’s the punchiness of the sound and the tightness of the trio’s playing that most impress. Drummer Ignaceo Berroa and bass guitarist Armando Gola have plenty of solo space as well as opportunities to show what a powerhouse, mutually supportive team they are. Though the notes produced by Gola’s bass guitar are less characterful than those produced by double bass, they arrive like bullets and have a percussive quality that suits the mainly hi-octane nature of the music. Like a general confident of success, Rubalcaba leads from the front, and his confidence is rewarded.

The other major theme of the festival is Giovani Proposte Europee. The new/young proposals, as suggested by the title, are about developments in European jazz that may indicate the music’s future direction. If so, the set by the Luca Aquino/Raffaele Casarano duo has arrived more than a generation late. Aquino plays trumpet/flugelhorn and Casarano is a saxophonist. Their music has its origins in the jazz-influenced, principally European free improvisation of the 1970s, updated by electronics. Some material is stored on their computers as sound files which they introduce, collage-like, at key intervals. Other material is generated by playing breath tones, isolated notes or short phrases into samplers, which is looped to create riffs and stretched into electronic soundscapes. Some of it sounds not unlike the postmodern tribalism of Byrne and Eno’s My Life in the Bush of Ghosts or one of Bill Laswell’s multi-ethnic dubscape projects. Despite Aquino and Casarano’s efforts to put a personal stamp on the material, their proposal fails to convince.

More stimulating and challenging is the Franco D’Andrea New Quartet, consisting of D’Andrea (piano), Andrea Ayassot (saxophones), Aldo Mella (bass) and Zeno de Rossi (percussion). Unlike the lead-plus-rhythm section of the Rubalcaba trio, D’Andrea’s quartet is a collective, the players working with and occasionally against each other to spark cre-

ativity. The interplay is sensitive but dynamic, the group is tight and the themes (mostly composed by D’Andrea) are knotty. The players drop out occasionally, not to make room for soloists but to thin out the voicings so the music communicates more clearly. Of particular note is de Rossi, whose fills and accents are right on the button while providing a different, more expansive perspective on this quartet’s tightly-honed, quietly dazzling music.

Manu Katché Playground is a typical drummer’s group. Katché plays consistently louder than seems appropriate and he over-drives the music, pushing the soloists along on a wave of sound. The quintet’s other members seem distinctly uncomfortable and during ensembles and while soloing their playing is subdued and occasionally uncertain. The compositions—most, presumably, by Katché—are bland and unmemorable. Towards the end of the set there are occasional flashes of brilliance from saxophonist Tore Brunborg, but Katché’s lengthy drum solo, high on technique, low on creativity, sets the seal on a disappointing performance.

At the heart of Bergamo’s old town lies the Romanesque church of Santa Maria Maggiore, where Jan Garbarek and the Hilliard Ensemble are reprising Officium, a 1993 CD release. While many listeners enjoyed the commentary that Garbarek’s saxophones brought to the closely woven voices of the Hilliards, there were others who thought that embellishing compositions by Perotin, Cristobal de Morales and Pierre de la Rue in this way amounted to sacrilege. But the Hilliards don’t act merely as Garbarek’s backing group—something that’s more apparent in concert than on CD. And although a running order of pieces isn’t provided, it’s apparent that the program differs markedly from the CD version of Officium. Whereas Garbarek stays mostly stage front, on occasion members of the Hilliards move to distant points in the church to voice solo parts, giving an unexpected spatial emphasis to what is mostly close-harmony music. This succeeds, as does the rhythmic emphasis that Garbarek brings to some of the compositions, including a sympathetic reading of “Strella do Dia” from the 12th-century Cantigas de Santa Maria.

Despite my considerable reservations, this is a satisfying and occasionally moving concert.

Nils Petter Molvaer sounds a lonely note in the deconsecrated Chiesa della Maddalena.

The fresco remnants suggest a shattered civilization, and Molvaer’s musical samplings seem just as fragmented, though he tries to make a wholeness out of them. But even when he manages to do so, his bleak, trumpet-driven soundscapes seem largely barren of invention.

Molvaer’s periodic parping and wheezing with his trumpet into a sampler to produce loops and drones result in doldrum moments, a bit like watching a composer rule a few pages of staves prior to making music. The spirit of Jon Hassell’s Fourth World experiments is invoked, but this music sounds brittle and fussy in comparison. Saving the best till last, Molvaer encores with an electronically unembellished and rather lovely reading of “Nature Boy.” With its pyramids of cymbals and crotales, Pierre Favre’s expansive drumkit looks distinctly sculptural, which is appropriate given that his solo concert is taking place in the Galleria D’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea.

Although Favre is a fine jazz drummer, playing solo shows him to best advantage, bringing in

the wider world of percussion and occasional hints of shamanism, Indonesian court music and Japanese gagaku. Each of the pieces he plays has a distinct character and involves different techniques, but they always amount to more than just a display of technique. His crisply articulated work with brushes, accented with tuned percussion, is a particular highlight.

Though fully improvised, all of the pieces have a structural logic. To leave a concert of improvised music thinking that everything worked and could hardly have been better is rare. This is one such occasion.

The Giovani Proposte Europee concert

by Lebanese trumpeter/pianist Ibrahim Maalouf and dancer Fanny Coulm is a rather naive affair, but it’s utterly charming. Maalouf makes his trumpet sound uncannily like a Middle Eastern reed instrument, which he interweaves with the loops and other samples that exist as sound files in his laptop. His use of electronics isn’t radically different from Molvaer, or, earlier in the week, Aquino and Casarano, but somehow he manages to make a personalized and convincing music of it, something they don’t always do. Coulm begins awkwardly, sitting on a chair and extending her legs skyward, one by one, as if in an audition for Cabaret, but the hint of eroticism is one of the few false notes she strikes.

Once attuned to Maalouf’s music, her sinuous movements complement and comment on what he does. Coulm is more reactive than proactive throughout the performance, but her responsiveness is such that dance and music blend convincingly into one.

The chorus of “I Have a Heart Just Like Yours” begins, “You are so unaware of me.”

An unlikely sentiment. Maria João’s natural flamboyance is matched by her dress: a low-cut yellow bodice from which a collapsed parachute of silk billows at knee height, wherefrom a layered gauze of lilac featheriness cascades to the floor. The dress is fabulous, but João manages to best it. Much of the material that she and pianist Mário Laginha present is taken from their 2008 album Chocolate—a silky smooth confection.

Stripped of the album’s session musicians and guests, the music is gutsier and much more improvisational. Laginha is a sensitive accompanist, but it’s during his tumultuous but tightly-structured solos you really hear what he’s capable of. Amidst Latin material and American jazz standards, João takes extended vocal solos that hark back to her free improv days with pianist Aki Takase, including a showstopper based on little more than rhythmic breathing.

The concluding set, by the Nils Petter Molvaer Group, falls far short of João and Laginha’s invention, and it doesn’t help matters that the bottom end of the sound is grossly distorted. Molvaer’s group operates with rock band dynamics—merely loud to extremely loud—and the music either drifts electronically or pounds rhythmically. Subtle it is not. The group presents material from their latest album, Hamada (a geological term for a desert of sharp stones created by physical erosion); their monomaniacal abrasiveness soon becomes wearying, the sound is dreadful, and this is the only occasion in Bergamo where I count off the minutes, hoping they’ll deliver a short set and refuse to do an encore.

No such luck. It’s a pity that such an enterprising and engaging festival should have to end in this way. Brian Marley

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BOOK REVIEWS Turning up the volumes: Looks at books, zines and other printed matters.

It's After the End of the World: Leonard Cohen

Apocalypse Jukebox: The End of the World in Popular Music David Janssen and Edward Whitelock Soft Skull Press CD

Edward Whitelock and David Janssen, a pair of professors at Gordon College in Georgia, have penned what proves to be a strong case of not judging a book by its cover—or even its title, for that matter. Their Apocalypse Jukebox: The End of the World in Popular

Music is a strange amalgam of essays around a thesis not really defined, yet ends up being an eminently readable and entertaining book.

At first blush, it would seem to be a sister volume to Alan Clayson’s enjoyable Death Discs: An Account of Fatality in Popular Song (Sanctuary, 1992), except that where Clayson focuses on discrete deaths, Janssen and Whitelock would seem to be concerned with the death of everything. The world’s end is in their subtitle, after all. But the authors’ vision isn’t as simple as that, nor nearly so clear.

Rather than the sort of exhaustive survey Clayson created, Apocalypse Jukebox takes a case-study approach, exploring at length the work of 10 artists whose they see as “apocalyptic.” And this is exactly where the book’s problem lies—the nomination process

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is far from clear. Apocalypse songs are easy: Prince, Skeeter Davis, Sun Ra and a slew of metal bands. But it’s less clear what Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen, Devo and REM, John Coltrane, Laurie Anderson, Sleater-Kinney and Green Day have in common that makes them all apocalyptic artists. In the end, the authors’ definition is so malleable that the book ends up feeling like it’s not about anything, which is a shame because their takes on the individual musicians are as a whole insightful and well argued.

In the chapters on Cohen, Coltrane and Dylan, the distinction between “apocalyptic” and “devout” is blurred, in the process casting all religious people, at least by extension, as fatalists. The three are certainly artists who reinvented themselves, and with ends

come new beginnings (the other side of the apocalypse coin), but the arguments neither rely on nor inform a common-sense of them as prophets of either ascension or doom. In the cases of Anderson, Devo and REM, the artists’ apocalyptic visions are viewed through a socio-political filter, though in different ways.

Anderson was one of the first artists to attempt to give voice to the complex sentiments evoked by the 9/11 attacks, boldly carrying on with a scheduled tour that brought her back home to New York on September 19 and 20. The authors do a fine job of depicting her struggles about how, even if to, go on with the show, and in that present a compelling case for the function of art in times of anguish. But, like no doubt Anderson and her audiences at the time, they also immerse themselves in the coincidences (in hindsight, rather minor) of such lyrics as “Here come the planes / They’re American planes / Made in America.” There were only two paths open to public personae in those days: clam up or try to help heal. Anderson (like former mayor Rudy Giuliani, in a historic reversal of public image) chose the latter. Its being the only sensible course of action does not reduce the significance of her having taken it.

Devo are fascinatingly cast as not so much “new wave” as “post-hippie.” Band members Jerry Casale and Mark Mothersbaugh were both students at Kent State at the time of the 1970 war-protest killings, and Casale was friends with two of the four victims and witnessed the shootings. “Until then, I might’ve left my hair long and been a hippie,” Casale is quoted as saying (none of the interviews are first-hand, although it’s at such points that the story-telling is at its best). “When you start to see the real way everything works, and the insidious nature of power, corruption, injustice, brute force, you realize it’s all just primate behavior.” This was, he says, a key moment in the development of the “de-evolution” philosophy behind the band.

But these are not clearly apocalyptic perspectives, at least not by any definition offered here. In considering Devo’s “Come Back Jonee” (the band’s continuation of Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode,” in which the hero dies in a car accident), the authors write that the “song operates from a post-apocalyptic perspective because Jonee’s demise is narrated in the time loop; the song literally begins at the end.” Later, in the context of Anderson and the World Trade Center attacks, they write, “In retrospect, of course and unfortunately, September 11, 2001, was not an apocalyptic event, because, despite the anxieties it raised regarding personal and national security, it failed to bring about a new world or, even, a new America.” In these cases, “apocalyptic” seems to mean “bringing about a new beginning,” which is hardly the way the term is commonly used. Given the same latitude they grant themselves, “Pleasant Valley Sunday,” “Anarchy in the UK,” and “Careless Whisper” are also, arguably, apocalyptic anthems.

Which is unfair, because if the conceit of the overarching theme is dismissed, what remains is a set of thoughtful essays on a diverse group of artists. While there’s a fairly wide range of musicians profiled, any reader with a preexisting interest in these artists will find plenty to make the book worth reading. The individual portraits don’t add up to an argument, but that’s hardly the end of the world. Kurt Gottschalk

Elliott Carter: A Centennial Portrait in Letters and Documents Felix Meyer and Anne Shreffler Boydell & Brewer

Edgard Varèse: Composer, Sound Sculptor, Visionary

Felix Meyer and Heidy Zimmerman Paul Sacher Foundation / Boydell Press

Elliott Carter turned 100 on 11 December 2008, bringing to a close a marathon year of festivals, performances, recordings, and publications celebrating his centenary. When asked whether he enjoyed all the fuss, Carter’s stock reply was, “No one likes to be reminded of their age, but I’d be disappointed if it wasn’t happening.” And he worked for his birthday cake; Carter provided several new compositions for the festivities in 2008, including his first choral piece in over six decades, a work for percussion ensemble, and Interventions, for solo piano and orchestra.

It’s probably safe to say that A Centennial Portrait is the first coffee-table book about a modern American concert music composer. A hefty 352 pages, its presentation is exquisite, featuring large, readable score excerpts and sketches, extracts from personal correspondence, handwritten missives, and telling rehearsal notes. There are also a number of engaging letters written to the composer from a who’s who of 20th and 21st century music. Sketches for compositions from throughout Carter’s career—from early works such as Minotaur and the First String Quartet to his recent Boston Concerto, Mosaic, and hot-off-the-presses Mad Regales—offer insights into the genesis and evolution of his working methods and styles. Equally tantalizing are the abandoned projects: a sonata for two pianos from the ’50s; a projected second opera from 2001.

In order to compile the volume, Felix Meyer and Anne Shreffler have done extensive research at the archives of the Paul Sacher Foundation in Basel, Switzerland, where most of Carter’s papers are kept. One might think that such material would yield few surprises, given that Carter’s work has received such intense scrutiny over the years. But the authors have provided fresh material to whet the appetites of Carterians, while simultaneously creating an accessible volume that is an excellent overview of the composer’s first hundred years.

In addition to their Carter holdings, the Sacher Foundation also maintains an extensive collection of the scores, writings, sketches, and correspondence of Edgard Varèse (1883–1965).

Although born in France, Varèse spent much of his career from 1915 onward in the United States. Not a prolific composer—one can listen to his oeuvre in a single (likely mind-blowing!) evening—he is still a key figure in twentiethcentury music.

Edgard Varèse: Composer, Sound Sculptor, Visionary highlights Varèse’s many innovations, both in his approach to traditional musical elements such as pitch and rhythm and in his investigations of electronic music, extended orchestral resources, and sculpted texture. The volume includes analyses of many of his important works, spotlighting Poème électronique, an important early example of tape music; Ionisation, a watershed work for percussion ensemble; and Déserts, for winds, percussion, and tape.

These are supported by beautifully reproduced examples from scores and sketches.

Varèse’s influence on his contemporaries as well as the succeeding generation is also amply documented here. A number of composers pen tributes to his work and legacy. Most affecting is Chou Wen-Chung’s “My sixteen years with Varèse,” relating his time as the elder composer’s student and assistant. Wen-Chung has done a great deal for Varèse studies, editing a number of his works and even completing some from unfinished sketches; his contribution here is essential reading. Another strong contribution is Kyle Gann’s “Magnificent, in a Mysterious Way,” which charts Varèse’s influence on American music.

Because of his celebrity and dedicated advocacy, Frank Zappa probably did more than anyone to bring Varèse to the awareness of the general public. Perhaps it is appropriate, then, that the book closes with Matthias Kassel’s appraisal of the influence of Varèse on Zappa’s rock and concert works.

With these two volumes, Boydell has raised the standard for completeness, annotation, and presentation in retrospective volumes on contemporary composers. Christian Carey

Handmade Electronic Music: The Art of Hardware Hacking Nicolas Collins Routledge

In light of our collapsing economy, the appearance of this book’s second edition is exceedingly timely. Imagine yourself without a job, no prospects of a new one on the horizon, no money to buy more records, and oodles of time on your hands. Some will turn to crime or bathtub gin, but why not become an electronic musician?

You don’t need to buy a synth or sampler or computer; this book will tell you how to hack or make your own instruments using tools you can get for cheap at a hardware store, parts you can find at surplus houses online, and (best of all) stuff that you can get for free by breaking into and repurposing stuff that people have thrown away.

Nicolas Collins is a noted educator and improvising musician whose spontaneity spills over into what he plays with as well as what he plays. Perhaps you have heard of his trombonepropelled electronics, which use the horn to trigger sampler settings? If you want to learn or hear more, he’s got tons of text and most of his discography online at www.nicolascollins.com.

Collins has been making his own instruments with cast-off parts and soldering irons since the ’70s, and at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago he teaches classes on how to do it yourself. But tuition isn’t cheap, and if you have the mechanical acumen to put together a model airplane this book should get you where you need to go. It is a highly practical and downto-earth (or should I say well-grounded?) manual that will walk you through the steps you need to follow to make microphones and oscillators out of cheap chips, cast-off cassette players, and Altoid boxes without electrocuting yourself. While user-friendly, the text inevitably wades into the thicket of circuit diagrams, so to help out Collins has included a DVD with how-to chapters. While it is primarily intended for people who want to get their hands busy making things, Handmade Electronic Music does serve up audio, video, and textual tidbits about Cage and Tudor, Reed Ghazala, and more current practitioners of the hacking arts that might serve as inspiration and example for the beginning instrument inventor.

Bill Meyer

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

Oneida

Oneida Rated O

Lisa Corson

Jagjaguwar CDx3 / LPx3 / download

Last year’s Preteen Weaponry came stickered with this bold announcement: “The first piece of Oneida’s much-anticipated ‘Thank Your Parents’ triptych of releases, which will lay bare the band’s colossal vision of a new age in music.” One assumes that they were joking about the huge impact their music would have.

After all, the Brooklyn art-rock band has been releasing superb records for many years while receiving little of the attention they merit. And sure enough, the riveting Preteen Weaponry went largely unnoticed by most rock critics.

Now that Oneida has released the second part of its trilogy, Rated O, it’s clear that band’s boasts were not completely in jest. No, Oneida is not creating “a new age in music,” but it is certainly making highly ambitious, top-notch experimental rock. Even though Rated O is the middle piece of a three-album triptych, by itself it’s a massive three-CD set—a triptych

within the triptych. Oneida must love things that come in threes. Preteen Weaponry was basically one song divided into three parts, and now Rated O offers 15 songs split into three distinct sections. The first disc emphasizes electronic beats and circular keyboard patterns, sounding more like a dance record than anything Oneida has ever done. Guest vocals by Dad-Ali Ziai give the opening track, “Brownout in Lagos,” an Afro-beat flavor, but heavy reverb makes it sound like Ziai is fighting against crashing waves of electric noise. Claiming they were exploring the boundaries between what music is considered “organic” and what’s considered “synthetic,” Oneida reportedly built these electronic songs by playing most of those notes live, rather than using sequencers or programming. With their virtuosity and sharp sense of timing, Oneida’s members give the music a constant sense of forward motion.

Rated O’s middle disc sounds more like previous Oneida albums, with a vibe evoking Krautrock bands such as Can. On this disc’s six tracks, repetitive organ riffs and propulsive drumming lay the groundwork for searing

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guitar solos, while the band occasionally sings pretty harmonies that might seem more apt for Renaissance monks. Oneida has always excelled at stretching the boundaries of what you’re allowed to do within the confines of a song, and the group does it again on the standout track “Ghost in the Room.” At one moment, most of the band stops, Santanastyle, to allow for a frenzied guitar solo. Then the song locks into one last riff and won’t let go, turning that riff around and around for more than two minutes, repeating with a precision that seems robotic at first but yields more and more intensity—until the band suddenly stops.

The third disc of Rated O feels like a coda, with three instrumental tracks allowing the band to vamp with a probing sense of improvisation, adding sitar and burbling outer-space synths.

Expanding to a five-member lineup and bringing in several guest players allowed Oneida to use more sonic colors across these three CDs. Rated O contains so much music that it’s probably not the best starting place for listeners unfamiliar with Oneida, but it is truly epic.

Robert Loerzel

Acoustic Guitar Trio Vignes

Long Song CD

It’s with both joy and sadness that I’ve been listening to this superb 2003 live date by Rod Poole, Jim McAuley and Nels Cline. Joy because of the long-overdue exposure McAuley has been receiving (at least relatively, in this tiny corner), but sadness because of Poole's senseless murder in 2007. So here is a remembrance: a gorgeous trio of improvisations, a reminder of the beauty in this music of the margins, this strange and lovely sound that remains unheralded, doggedly championed, and lovingly explored. Cline has a Lydia Lunch quote on his website: “The only thing worse than a guitar is a guitarist.”

It’s hard to find convincing guitar improvisers, that’s for damn sure. It’s amazing that three of this rare breed found each other. United not just by a shared love of microtonal music but by a capacious sense of the possibilities of this maligned and overdetermined instrument, these three players create wonders. It’s not about technique, though there’s plenty of that, and it’s not about solos (though there’s abundant expression and even more emotion). The seamless interactions yield bright tapestries, woody thickets, groaning drones, lovely detuned daubs, and flinty shapes at the edges of lonesome arpeggios. Rhythm, texture, line, whatever: it all comes from a shared love for the myriad possibilities of the acoustic guitar. The preparations are used subtly and effectively, not calling attention to anything other than the music. For example, at the end of “Vignes 1” there’s a bracing percussive package where somebody plays what sounds like a Raymond Strid press roll. There are lengthy exhalations and whispers on “Vignes 3.” And there are some lovely passages for bowed guitar, especially in the very electric drones that conclude “Vignes 3.” As bracing as individual moments are—like the chorus of broken kotos on “Vignes 2”—what’s so entrancing about this trio is the way they combine such angularity and improv archness with compelling rhythmic momentum, fragile lyricism, and sweet/ sour melody. Occasionally, in creeps a bent note that conjures up idiomatic references, but it’s always suggestive rather than declamatory. The pieces really breathe, too, and no matter how dense the trio get, they always follow passages of resounding and chiming with a bunch of space, getting small, scrubbing and rustling away as if they’re trying to keep a lonesome fire alight.

This stuff has such audible integrity, such passion, and you can practically hear the listening. Jason Bivins

Rashied Ali Quintet Live in Europe Survival CD

This energetic live document follows up 2006’s excellent two-volume set Judgment Day and employs similar forces.

The music has blossomed; it’s tighter, more adventurous and hard-hitting than before, with the quintet performing in full flight for an enthusiastic audience.

Two of the three selections are James Blood Ulmer compositions over which the band stretches out, straddling the wavy line between freebop and fire music. There are too many moments of fine playing to catalog them all, but

the opening of “Theme for Captain Black” demonstrates what’s to come throughout. The theme itself is beautifully presented in thirds and seconds over Ali’s meterless swing. Trumpeter Josh Evans and saxophonist Laurence Clark harmonize while Greg Murphy’s piano provides crystalline support.

There’s something about the microgestures between the notes that make the tune come to life as bassist Joris Teepe’s ornamented drone ushers in Ali’s first solo. Ali makes the snare sound orchestral, drawing myriad colors and shadings from skin and metal in a way that sets his playing apart from his imitators. When he moves to other drums and cymbals, universes of tone and timbre are created and just as quickly discarded. Ali’s subtle support on Clark’s ballad “Laurana” comprises a masterful display of feathery cymbals and perfectly timed snare and bass drum interjections as the Mingusian head rolls effortlessly into Clark’s motivically driven Coltranesque solo. Ulmer’s “Thing for Joe,” nearly thirty minutes long, is a tour-de-force of telepathic communication. As Evans’ solo heats up, Murphy, Steepe and Ali scale the heights with him, maintaining an up-tempo feel while stretching rhythmic and melodic conceptions at every turn. It’s not all high dynamics, and the group actually brings the volume down while sacrificing none of the energy built throughout Evans’ exhortations. During Clark’s solo, Steepe and Murphy drop out, leaving Ali and Clark to explore Interstellar Space; if only the Ali-Coltrane duets had been recorded this well! It’s a high point, but only one of many on one of the best entries in Ali’s discography.

Marc Medwin

clangs of processed guitar, buffed-metal textures, and a few abrasive touches neatly sidestep the usual ambient clichés; sure, barometric pressures rise and fall, atmospheres respire, but everything seems intentionally placed, without a wasted note.

The trio operating as Skare bring back isolationism with a vengeance.

Like Aquadorsa, they have an knack for defying expectations thanks to a clever use of found sound, dialogue, and glitchy crackle. Solstice City, despite the icy, windswept tundra of its cover, doesn’t attempt to ape the frosty aural palettes of Köner and Biosphere, or the Kubrick-desolate fantasies of the Canadian Cyclic Law crew. The pointillistic sounds twinkle and fall to earth within a foreboding arctic mist, their stark flavors attaining a footing in your consciousness. The 20-minute “Through Wind and Broken Ice” is a snowy landscape of snaps and pops, the bleating of distant fowl, air whipping across the land.

Even better is the half-hour “The Snow Angel Factory”: low-key atmospherics are broken by wails from the horizon, the lone humanoid interrupter piercing the quiet. Loneliness breeds in the cracks of synth fuzz and tone shudder, the results bristling with abject tension.

The melding of corporeal and incorporeal, field recordings and digitized soundscapes, is epic in scope; eventually one becomes uncertain where the studio ends and this landscape’s stark reality begins. Darren Bergstein

Aquadorsa

This is true improvised music: not jazzy, not funky, not chambery, not droney.

The musicians simply start playing and go wherever the music takes them.

The prime impetus is not to play music the way they have played it in the past, but to see what they come up with on this night. The disc was recorded after dinner on December 8, 2008 at an empty Bimhuis in Amsterdam (Kevin Whitehead’s evocative liner notes recreate the mood of the evening for the listener, down to what they had for dinner). The musicians leave lots of space between notes when necessary, as on “Zee-Engel,” or get playfully aggressive when things heat up. What underlies all the interactions is the empathy that informs every move. Mengelberg’s piano is as sparklingly jaunty as ever.

Baars’ tenor sax and clarinet playing has always been distinctive, but there are some especially unusual moments here featuring his shakuhachi. I’m a big fan of Henneman’s compositions but haven’t heard her improvise nearly as much as the other two, so I was pleased to find that she can just as deftly incorporate her lovely viola swoops and rapid-response pluckings into improv situations.

A masterful outing. Andrew Choate

Cloudlands

Glacial Movements CD

Skare

Solstice City

Glacial Movements CD

Italy’s Glacial Movements label has, minimal increment by minimal increment, established itself as one of the world’s most vital headquarters for ambient music. Already the catalog includes heavyweights like Rapoon and Lull; future works are promised by global isolationist Thomas Köner, as well as the mutable Francisco López.

Aquadorsa pairs two of Italy’s finest sound artisans: Oophoi, whose oeuvre has assumed mammoth proportions in both size and outreach, and relative newcomer Enrico Coniglio, whose 2007 release Areavirus on the Irish Psychonavigation label was one of that year’s most neglected outings. At first this doesn’t appear to be the most simpatico partnership: though both artists are adept programmers of synths and samplers, Coniglio’s “classical” approach to sonic mythmaking feels at odds with abstractionist Oophoi. But appearances are deceiving. Cloudlands is an anomaly in this age of the mono(tone)drone and over-arching minimalism, its seven lengthy pieces offering an impeccably layered, detailed impressionism. Avoiding contrived “dark” ambient pursuits or post-Tangerine Dream spaciousness, the duo’s teeming hive of micro activity plays like a millennia-burnished ecosystem of sound. Misty mountain samples, sharp

Ab Baars Ig Henneman Misha Mengelberg Sliptong Wig CD

Laurie Scott Baker Gracility

Music Now CD x 2

Australian-born, London-bred composer/bassist Laurie Scott Baker isn’t well-known in this country, though a look at some of the names on the two-disc retrospective Gracility—Keith Rowe, Derek Bailey, Evan Parker, Jamie

Muir and John Tilbury—might lead one to ask why we’ve not heard more about him. Upon moving to England in 1965 Baker fell in with Cornelius Cardew, also participating in jam sessions at the Little Theatre Club and in the Scratch Orchestra. This set presents four of Baker’s early pieces, ranging from brief lyric-political commentary to psychedelic-tinged raga to charged AMM-like drift. They are windows into the reach of the Cardew-Rowe mode of music-making, scores and situations that court danger in liberating sound from compositional and instrumental controls.

The title piece is a rare meeting between Rowe and Derek Bailey, though it’s far from a study in contrasts between the two players. Rather, the piece requires the performers to avoid amplifier feedback while teetering on its edge. Four amps, two guitars and their natural distortion commingle with feedback whistle, hum and the low ends of bassists Baker and Gavin Bryars.

De-tuned plinks, gong-like harmonic knocks, gentle rubbing and scraping, and the occasional fuzzy chord exist in a hair’s-breadth balance between control and release. It’s not clear whether the goal is to eventually push the limits of that delicate environment to the breaking point, but the quartet eventually shatters any semblance of acoustic order in hot slabs of in-the-red noise, a full-on sonic release reminiscent of the Dead C at their hairiest.

Baker was in attendance at the first English concerts of La Monte Young and Terry Riley in the late 1960s, so it’s not surprising that a Riley influence informs several pieces. On “Pibroch 1926,” Evan Parker’s soprano is augmented by a delayed drone and out-ofphase mirroring; the results evoke both highland bagpipes and Riley’s own electrified straight horn. “Bass Chants & Cues” comes from a 1972 concert at Goldsmiths College, which finds Baker (on VCS3) joined by John Tilbury on organ and drummer Jamie Muir.

It’s an extended foray into Canterburytinged minimalism, a swirl of Persian Surgery pulse and delay that becomes positively unhinged when overlaid with a flailing rhythmic juggernaut. Being in the right place at the right time produced some messy but interesting results. Clifford Allen

Josh Berman Old Idea Delmark CD

Jason Adasiewicz Rolldown 482 Music CD

Klang

Tea Music

Allos Documents CD

Lucky 7s

Pluto Junkyard Clean Feed CD

As ever, Chicago’s talent pool recombines endlessly; vibraphonist Jason Adasiewicz is on all four discs here, cornetist Josh Berman is on three, and a few others are on two. These recordings draw inspiration from ’60s figures like Jimmy Giuffre, Blue Note’s various free-boppers on and the first wave of the AACM, all of whom experimented with abandoning tempo and tonality while still maintaining connection with

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Like nothing else in the avant-jazz world: John Hollenbeck, Matthias Schubert, Scott Fields, Scott Roller.

Scott Fields Drawings Creative Sources CD

Music for the Radio Program “This American Life” Neos CD

Samuel

Stefan Strasser

New World CD

I’ve always admired guitarist Scott Fields for his determined originality as a player and composer—not to mention his immaculately dry sense of humor, which makes his website one of the most fun self-promo sites around.

But admiration isn’t always love, and I’d be the first to admit that his stuff can be tough going, though when it works (as with the grinding rigor of Beckett or the cool minimalism of Christangelfox) it has the effect of immersing you in a sound-world you never knew existed before. He’s not always been prolific, but lately he’s been on a tear, with a good halfdozen releases in the past two years; perhaps his 2003 move from the States to Cologne has opened up new opportunities for realizing his various projects.

The solo record Drawings features Fields the deadpan formalist: 98 tracks in 46 minutes, each using a drawing by the German artist Thomas Hornung as a graphic score. Good luck trying to listen to this in any conventional manner: Fields suggests playing it in shuffle mode, and even within a single track individual sound-events are often sharply discontinuous. Though Fields is happy to draw on jazz and rock idioms, his approach here reminds me of laptop guitar in the Keith Rowe tradition: there’s the same sense of the instrument as a lightning-rod or barometer,

an object crisscrossed by momentary flickers of energy. The disc is a great showcase for Fields’ never-the-same-thing-twice inventiveness, ranging from tiny bouquets of shrapnel to choked, spidery fidgetings and wavery hums; I particularly like the spots of stringtorture involving a metal comb/bow (you can catch a glimpse of it in the video by Arno Oehri included on the CD). In truth, the disc is sheer agony if you try to approach it like a normal listening experience and pay sustained attention; but there’s plenty of substance to these spiky little quiddities, and if you turn on shuffle play the track-by-track jumps offer as much of an aural frisson as the music itself.

Music for the Radio Program “This American Life” was not, as far as I can determine, actually broadcast on the Chicago-based radio show but instead offers an audio parallel to its format and various segments (at least in Fields’ fanciful imagination). If Drawings is bewilderingly atomized, this disc is by contrast almost too leisurely, its five tracks all roughly 15 minutes apiece. Brief, melancholy phrases nudge softly at each other, looping back on themselves over and over again; the pacing is meditative and lingering, taking its pulse from the intertwining lines of the stringed instruments (in addition to Fields’ guitar, there’s cellist Scott Roller and bassist Sebastian Gramss) rather than from drummer João Lobo. The CD requires, again, a certain adjustment of expectation from the listener, a willingness to follow the music’s tenuous, fluctuating emotional arcs across extremely long durations. Sure, there are climaxes—especially on the last two tracks, “That and a dime...” and “Dogs we thought we knew,” which have moments of real violence—but they happen in such extreme slow-motion that they start to feel anything but climactic. Patience definitely required, though the disc’s nocturnal beauty

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draws you in nonetheless.

Samuel is the sequel to one of Fields’ most perverse and musically successful projects, the 2006 Clean Feed release Beckett, and features the same quartet, with Matthias Schubert on tenor sax, Scott Roller on cello, and John Hollenbeck on drums. As before, the compositions are derived from the actual words of Samuel Beckett’s plays: Fields has devised musical systems to convert dialogue and stage directions into parallel musical phrases. The results are surprisingly diverse.

“Not I” is a tour de force for Schubert, who like Billie Whitelaw before him spits out an unflagging purgatorial monologue of memory-fragments and vehement refusals— except that here the play’s austere loneliness becomes a gregarious network of voices and rattly percussion, all chiming together in comic desperation. After that, “Ghost Trio”’s bluesy swing comes as a cool tonic, and incidentally puts the lie to Fields’ demurral in the liner notes about being classified as a jazz guitarist: this is jazz balladry as haunted house, a familiar idiom distended into 20 minutes of mounting paranoia and soft regret. “Eh Joe” fastens on to the listener as inexorably as the voice and camera in Beckett’s TV play, journeying from fluttering unease (marked by a brittle coin-drop motif) to a claustrophobic skein of crisscrossing lines, before plunging into a slowly rocking nightmare. As with Braxton’s music, the relentless procession of wide, odd-angled intervals make you feel like your head is being slowly cracked open; Fields’ scathingly distorted guitar adds to the overall feeling of menace, though it’s actually the brief intrusions of dead silence that really ratchet up the tension. All told, this is extraordinary music that sounds like nothing else in the avant-jazz world—not even, perhaps, the earlier Clean Feed album. Nate Dorward

bop and pre-bop traditions.

Berman’s Old Idea features Adasiewicz, saxophonist Keefe Jackson, bassist Anton Hatwich and drummer Nori Tanaka. Between the instrumentation and stylistic predisposition of this disc, few reviewers have resisted mentioning Out to Lunch. The tunes and solos rarely have specific similarities with Dolphy’s date (though the oblique colors of Adasiewicz’s vibraphone justify a Bobby Hutcherson comparison) but both records strive to reconcile melody and atonality, time and no time. Berman’s vocabulary includes wild phrases and tears, but also the grace notes and bends of pre-free stylists, and there's enough development to keep it from turning into pastiche. Tanaka makes a strong impression, providing turbulent but light accompaniment to some solos while imposing Latin patterns on others. The terse theme “Next Year” ties the disc together, appearing first as a Berman/Jackson duet (showing a talent for improvised counterpoint which also surfaces in “Almost Late”), as a relaxed bop trio for Adasiewicz and rhythm, and finally as a somber quintet finale.

Adasiewicz’s Rolldown features the same instrumentation, but here the players are Berman, saxophonist Aram Shelton, bassist Jason Roebke and drummer Frank Rosaly. As on Berman’s disc, most of Adasiewicz’s pieces feature multi-part themes and non-chordal improv, but he pushes the rhythm section more often towards midtempo swing, while tending towards sound-inspace explorations on the quiet pieces.

(The final track, “Gather,” incorporates both approaches.) Shelton, now based on the West Coast, comes across as a strong improviser in the Ornette motivic-association mold in his only appearance on this set of CDs. Klang’s Tea Music finds clarinetist James Falzone fronting a quartet of Adasiewicz, Roebke and drummer Tim Daisy. Falzone openly cites Giuffre’s influence and uses the phrase “abstract nostalgia” to characterize the group’s music, which is fitting given its sense of traditional jazz as seen through a distorting mirror. Most tracks feature jaunty themes disrupted by a tempo change or solo interjection, leading to improvisations that are more often group outings than strings of solos.

(Falzone, though often the dominant voice, sometimes repeats central motives while others take the improvisational lead.) This open setting provides an especially good chance to hear Adasiewicz’s abstract brand of accompaniment, while Roebke also gets room for a few firm-toned, Haden-esque solo statements. Daisy, like Tanaka, has the role of propelling the ensemble without overpowering, often using brushes or mallets to achieve the task.

If Tea Music is the mellowest of the four discs, then Lucky 7s’ Pluto Junkyard is the rowdiest. A combination of Chicago and New Orleans players, this septet combines Old Idea’s frontline (Berman, Jackson and Adasiewicz) with trombonists Jeb Bishop and Jeff Albert, bassist Matthew Golombisky and drummer Quin Kirchner. Fittingly for a group with a New Orleans element, they mix darkness and extroversion.

Several pieces start on an upbeat note before succumbing to quiet space interludes; conversely, “Ash,” based on “intense emotions” according to Albert’s liner note, is as earnest as one

would expect with that description but nonetheless has a lively cornet/trombone chase. Solemn moods dominate on “Afterwards,” Bishop’s piece on Katrina, closing with a defiant statement of resolve from Jackson. “The Dan Hang,” with guitar overdubbed by Jeb Bishop, echoes the abrasive jazz/rock of Soft Machine circa “Facelift,” while “Sunny’s Bounce” closes the set with a rare AABA 32-bar theme. Pat Buzby

Bobby Bradford

With John Stevens and the Spontaneous Music Ensemble Nessa CD x 2

Midnight Pacific Archives Entropy Stereo CD

Chuck Nessa continues to do us all a service by reissuing more gems from his back catalogue. His latest dip into the archives is a lively 2-disc set documenting some of trumpeter Bobby Bradford’s important encounters with London improvisers in the early 1970s (the Emanem release Love’s Dream is also essential). He's joined by a cracking version of percussionist John Stevens’ Spontaneous Music Ensemble, here including Trevor Watts (alto and soprano), trombonist Bob Norden, Julie Tippetts (vocal and guitar), and bassist Ron Herman. This might seem like fairly conventional instrumentation for this group, but it’s actually a fascinating and mightily enjoyable version of the SME, combining fluid free bop with nonidiomatic playing in both full ensemble pieces and sub-groupings. The skittering, crackling percussion that opens “His Majesty Louis” is part of the piece’s larger fanfare, an Ornette-like celebration of all things improvisatory, with a rousing lyricism at the core (Norden is a really sympathetic player). Tippetts’ bright soprano meshes splendidly with the horns on “Bridget’s Mother,” where Watts plays a boppish line and Bradford bats about some amiable intervallic figures (and at one point sounds like he’s about to start “The Song Is You”).

The churning “Room 408” could pass for a late ’60s Shepp/Rudd piece, and it cedes almost imperceptibly into the slow swagger of “Tolerance/To Bob.” The latter boasts brilliant pulse-track manipulation from Stevens and bassist Ron Herman, and luscious counterpoint from the horns and vocals, including some tasty exchanges between Norden and Tippetts.

The medley that opens the second disc is a reminder not only of how nimble and swinging a player Stevens could be when he wanted, but also of how skillful Watts is as a free-bop player.

I could listen to this kind of thing all day, with bright horns riding an intense pedal-point thrum and hacking away at it. Bradford and Tippetts’ rendition of the theme to Stevens’ “Norway” gives it an affecting, almost hymnal quality (Stevens himself contributes vocals somewhat more raggedly at the end).

The lengthy “Rhythm Piece” begins somewhat tentatively, with Tippetts’ guitar contributions a bit unsteady.

While the piece—a hornless trio—has its moments, it sounds more like a workshop exercise than anything else on the recording.

A radio broadcast from 1977, Midnight Pacific Archives features Bradford’s Extet, where the cornetist is paired with flautist James Newton,

along with bassist Richard Rehwald and drummer John Goldsmith; together they make their way through an hour’s worth of boisterous, post-Ornette music. While Rehwald’s limber playing deserves attention, and the unheralded Goldsmith sounds particularly fine, this date is all about the kinetic playing of Bradford and Newton. They dance in mid-air on the lengthy reading of “Comin’ On” that gets things started.

I confess I am an absolute sucker for Newton, who in contexts like this can do no wrong. The graceful mid-tempo swing of the opener is the perfect vehicle for his dancing, shifting intervals and canny use of overtones. Overall the music breathes quite well despite its general intensity. For example, after an extended Newton intro to “She” there is a hot trio improvisation which Bradford sits out, and Goldsmith’s heavy polyrhythms drive things along in an almost Blackwellian fashion. When Bradford enters, he first takes the piece even deeper into frenzy and then plays with great reserve in a fine drummerless passage. Also enjoyable is a sprightly rundown of “Blue Monk.” But perhaps the best place to hear Bradford and Newton soar is in the swinging “Improvisation #12,” a piece that’s sharp, focused, and a bit melancholy. There’s also a great bonus track: a 2003 duet recording of “She” with Bradford and Vinny Golia on clarinet. Jason Bivins

Gary Burton Pat Metheny Steve Swallow Antonio Sanchez Quartet Live Concord Jazz CD

When jazz writers mention Gary Burton’s ’60s quartet, it’s often in a parenthetical list of “Groups Who Played Jazz-Rock Before Miles.” Similarly, musicians and ECM cognoscenti are the primary fans of his ’70s band, and one of its alumni, Pat Metheny, learned much there before finding fame on his own. Now that it’s become common for groups to approach jazz from a rock-informed perspective, it’s a good time to re-examine the vibrophonist's music, which took the lessons of Bill Evans (regarding interplay and improvisation over placid, although often complex, harmonic structures) and added an awareness of rock melody and guitar styles. Burton and Metheny have reunited for sporadic tours since 2006, along with the former's accompanist of many years, bassist Steve Swallow. With several of Burton’s drummers still active (including no less a figure than Roy Haynes), it may seem odd that Metheny’s primary drummer of this decade, Antonio Sanchez, got the call for these quartet dates, but Sanchez has mastered the light propulsion and interaction that Burton’s book requires. Quartet Live isn’t long on surprises—you’ll go to it if you want more of Swallow’s efficient, self-effacing bass lines and Burton and Metheny’s reliably well-crafted solos (and if you like the loved-and-hated quirks, displayed here in the guitar synth diatribe at the end of “Question and Answer,” that Metheny has picked up in his post-Burton years). Check out older releases such as Country Roads and Other Places or Passengers for this style at its best, but this new CD is still a valuable document of four master

musicians continuing to ply their trade.

Pat Buzby

John Butcher Group somethingtobesaid Weight of Wax CD

A quarter century after the release of his first album Fonetiks, English tenor and soprano saxophonist John Butcher is at the top of his game. Recent duos with Christoph Kurzmann and Eddie Prévost have demonstrated the flexibility and attunement to his partners that make him a top-flight improviser, while the solo albums Resonant Spaces and The Geometry of Sentiment exemplify his immaculate control over his horns, the clarity of his ideas, and the astuteness of his response to various environments.

With somethingtobesaid he asserts his command of two more roles not usually associated with his name, composer and bandleader. Although he brings a strong presence to any ensemble, unseemly displays of dominance are anathema to Butcher’s aesthetic. In both ad hoc and established groups he has worked as a collaborator, and has only brought in prepared ideas when, as in Polwechsel, the group invites that sort of contribution from its members.

But here he is leading a group with his name on it, which he assembled to perform a piece commissioned by the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival. Given Butcher’s commitment to collective improvisation, he approached the project with concern; could his direction provide an outcome that was worth the erosion of the individual members’ freedom of expression?

The recorded results say yes. For a start, the album’s single continuous piece unfolds in gripping fashion, transitioning from one remarkable array of sounds and textures to the next in ways that can’t be predicted, but sound quite right after you’ve heard them. The strong personalities within the group (which includes Chris Burn, piano; Clare Cooper, harp and ghuzeng; dieb13, turntables; John Edwards, bass; Thomas Lehn, synthesizer; Adam Linson, double bass and electronics; Gino Robair, percussion and energized surfaces) make their presence known, sometimes by moving to the foreground and at other times by interjecting a small but telling comment. Butcher’s prepared material includes notated passages, explicit instructions, and recordings of answering machine voices and wine glasses; none distracts from the music’s inexorable progress. The pre-recorded elements complement dieb13’s varispeed vinyl manipulations to both humanize and extend the fabric of the sound, while the play between the unusual and the conventional—especially from old mates Burn and Butcher— enhances the impression that anything could happen, but only the right things will. Bill Meyer

Taylor Ho Bynum

Asphalt Flowers Forking Paths hatOLOGY CD

The Thirteenth Assembly (un)sentimental Important CD

The second disc by trumpeter Taylor Ho Bynum’s sextet—following 2007’s

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Savage Jeffrey Hayden Shurdut withand Michael A nightEnergy: outside the Roxy: 801's Phil Manzanera Brian Ray Eno and Marshall Allen

801

801 Live: Collector's Edition Expression CD x 2

801 Manchester Expression CD

801 @ Hull Expression CD

801 Latino

Davis: Pete Gershon

Expression CD

801 Live wasn’t just one of the great live albums of the 1970s. The 1976 Roxy Music offshoot seemed a talisman of sorts, a window into a different world where the right Brian had stayed in the band and the other Bryan had left. After two brilliant albums of art rock filtered through Roy Lichtenstein and Frank Sinatra, Brian Eno (then simply “Eno”) left Roxy Music in 1973. The tensions that made the band so fascinating began to evaporate as singer Bryan Ferry’s gloss increasingly overshadowed the earlier experimental edge until 1976, when the group split (to reunite two years later).

During the Roxy hiatus, guitarist Phil Manzanera reunited with Eno, alongside bassist Bill MacCormick (who had played with Manzanera in Quiet Sun), drummer Simon Phillips (who would go on to play with Judas Priest and the Who), keyboardist Francis Monkman (Curved Air, Renaissance) and guitarist Lloyd Watson (who had opened for Roxy and David Bowie tours). The album’s enigmatic cover featured a grainy photo of the head of MacCormick’s bass, but everyone knew the album was about Eno and Manzanera.

The group’s name came from a lyric on Eno’s 1974 album Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strat-

egy), and the set list was dominated by Eno songs (“Sombre Reptiles,” “Baby’s on Fire,” “Third Uncle”) and cuts from Manzanera’s 1975 solo album Diamond Head (the title track, “Lagrima,” and the art-rocking “Miss Shapiro,” co-written with Eno), along with brilliantly arranged covers of the Beatles’ “Tomorrow Never Knows” (as “TNK”) and the Kinks’ “You Really Got Me.” The balance of Eno’s oddities, Manzanera’s prog-pop passion and the embrace of classic British rock made for a powerfully eclectic dynamic.

But 801 Live was a phenomenon in another respect as well. Recorded at London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall, it was one of the first live albums to be recorded with direct lines rather than stage mikes. It was, in essence, a live album that sounded as good as studio recordings.

The 1999 reissue added two more Eno songs from the original concert (“Golden Hours” and “Fat Lady of Limbourg”), and now the album springs forth again on Manzanera’s Expression label, with a full second disc of rehearsal tapes. There are no new songs in the studio session (recorded a couple weeks before the London concert), and if anything what’s surprising is how flat the sound is. Granted it wasn’t recorded for release, but it stands as a testament to the shimmering audio of the live disc that their studio recording sounds like the band is in a cardboard box. For the diehard, however, it is interesting to hear the tracks in their rawer state, and with more separation between the instruments it’s easier to pick out what’s coming from where. The album met with enormous critical praise (NME even wrote “who needs Roxy Music now, anyway?”) and the following year a slightly altered version of the band took on a 10-date UK tour. By this time, Eno was in Berlin beginning a fruitful recording relationship with David Bowie. He

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was replaced by Dave Skinner (who would sign on with the revamped Roxy Music the following year) and Phillips was replaced by Roxy drummer Paul Thompson. At least two of those concerts were recorded, but they didn’t see release until much later.

801 Manchester was recorded at Manchester University in 1977 and was first released in 2001. The core quintet for this show was augmented by Roxy saxophonist Andy MacKay, with Kevin Godley and Lol Creme of 10CC both contributing percussion and vocals. The set is a bit more straightforwardly rocking without Eno’s contributions, although “Lady Shapiro” thankfully remains and several new songs are debuted that would appear on the 1977 studio album Listen Now. (Not among the current reissues, Listen Now would bring Eno back for the largest version of 801, including Godley and Creme and Split Enz singer Tim Finn.) With a more traditional keyboardist on stage, it’s Manzanera’s guitar work that tends to grab the ear. He’s a fantastic yet unassuming musician, and his playing particularly leaps out during this set. By the closing “You Really Got Me” he seems more revved than he ever was on 801 Live. 801 @ Hull, from the same tour, features the band pared down to a sextet, affording more room for guitar, but with mediocre sound and much the same set list it is ultimately dispensable.

801 Latino is easily the odd one out of this set. Following a lifelong love for Cuban music and with a few collaborations already undertaken, Manzanera in 1999 organized a Cuban band to play in the UK, with the same working model as the previous 801: organize, record a live album and disband. The resulting set of traditional Cuban songs isn’t the strongest record of Latin music around, but it’s a different setting for a talented and inquisitive guitarist. Kurt Gottschalk

The Middle Picture (Firehouse 12)—has a tidy Russian-doll structure that builds from the leader’s unaccompanied cornet to the full band and then reverses direction. It’s hardly the massive hypertextual labyrinth envisioned in Borges’s “The Garden of Forking Paths,” but it’s still a tricky structure to negotiate. Bynum’s opening a capella fanfare squirms around for a couple of minutes before we head into “Look Down,” which adds guitarist Mary Halvorson and drummer Tomas Fujiwara to the mix. Its repeated-note freebop line surely owes something to Bynum’s long-term involvement with Anthony Braxton’s music, though there’s a cutesy quality to the piece that’s thankfully erased by the tussling interplay that follows. The meat of the album comes next with the 30-minute suite “whYeXpliCitieS,” which introduces the rest of the band (Matt Bauder, tenor sax and bass clarinet; Evan O’Reilly as second guitarist; Jessica Pavone on viola). It’s deliberately episodic—from the opening wall-of-noise guitar to the more delicate, improv-y inner sections, to the calypso that unexpectedly announces part 3 (and which again leads me to wonder if Bynum’s got a case of the cutes)—and even after multiple listens I’m not quite sure where it’s going and why. Bauder’s elegant, grayish tenor sax gradually comes to prominence, and he’s the main focus of the two most sustained sequences, an intense exchange with Fujiwara in part 2 and the wheeling rhythmic pileup at the piece’s end.

Bynum evidently likes open-endedness, though, as the suite trails off from that climax into niggling guitar chording.

The trio performance “Goffstown” provides a coda of sorts—the muted melodic fragments that float distantly over Fujiwara’s rumbling mallet work suggest a slower, sadder after-echo of the preceding suite. But as if that’s too satisfying a resolution, Bynum closes things off with a pooting, inconclusive solo miniature. A rather tasty curate’s egg, on the whole. Nate Dorward Bynum, Halvorson, Pavone, and Fujiwara reunite for (un)sentimental, the democratic debut of The Thirteenth Assembly, a cooperative group in which each member contributes their own compositions. Fujiwara, Bynum, Pavone, and Halverson are all eclectic musicians, so its no surprise that their combined efforts result in an album that moves all over the sonic spectrum: (un) sentimental keeps at least toe in the realm of jazz for much of its duration, but it also dips deeply into the wells of rock, chamber music, and free improvisation. No matter their style, (un) sentimental’s nine tracks are composed and performed with a confident aplomb. Engaged in the funky strut of “Army of Strangers” or “Too Sweet” and its seemingly random streams, only rarely coalescing in unison, The Thirteenth Assembly sound comfortable in whichever skin they’re wearing at a given moment. Halverson’s guitar is perhaps the most volatile of the shape-shifters, going from a clean and unfettered tone to gritty and distorted, sometimes in the course of a single track. Whether swinging, sauntering, or swaying, however, the quartet tends towards a consistency in timbre. There’s sparseness in their cornet/guitar/percussion/viola configuration that can make for a simplistic beauty in “Hate Fields” but sometimes feels to be missing an

ingredient or two. Ultimately, in spite of it's successes, (un)sentimental is a challenging, even frustrating listen; its variety is as much as detriment to the overall experience as it is a boon. Any tricky transitions, for example, seem like a by-product of an attempt to do too much, hardly a capital offense for a gifted young group of composers such as this. (un)sentimental may not be as high profile (or prodigious) as some of the other work these four are making in any number of combinations, but, even amongst the near constant flow of work from each member of the quartet, the album’s is worth notice. Adam Strohm

Jubilee,” “Froggie Went A Courtin’”), a Beach Boys/Violent Femmes medley (“Good Vibrations” and “Kiss Off”), and so forth. Sometimes the performances are likeably sloppy, as if the duo’s making fun of the tunes’ cliché status, other times they’re heartfelt interpretations/ investigations. Their singing has all the subtlety and nuance of a Spike Jones song parody (or a Hee-Haw comedy sketch), but hey, if you wanted subtlety, you probably wouldn’t be listening to a Chadbourne disc. Mark Keresman

fret muscle that doesn’t really suit this band. “It’s about tiiiiiiime,” they drawl on “This Morning,” probably without irony. But, really, at this point, I’m looking forward to the forthcoming Olivia Tremor Control reunion (Hart’s outfit prior to Circulatory System) more than I’m anticipating the follow up to Signal Morning. Raymond Cummings

Circulatory System

The Clean’s history could completely fill this review, and their enormous influence and reputation as the band that kick-started New Zealand’s ’80s indie-pop explosion and inspired rough ’n’ ready ensembles all over the world could likewise overwhelm whatever it is they’re doing now. The trio’s response is to let the back-story take care of itself and get on with making music in the moment. The current Clean may comprise the same line-up as the Clean of yore, but bassist Robert Scott, guitarist David Kilgour, and his drum-beating (all credits are highly incomplete since anyone might pick up someone else’s instrument) older brother Hamish don’t sound much like they used to. Mister Pop is pretty short on incendiary guitarplay and the lyrics make no effort to recreate the giddy exuberance of their youth. Their current mix of rhythmic approaches and layered keyboards sounds more like recent Yo La Tengo first shaken in and then dumped out of Joe Meek’s bag of studio tricks than their old sound, which envisioned a punk-pepped meeting of the Velvet Underground and the Beach Boys through a four-track gauze. Essentially this is timeless psychedelic pop, catchy as your least favorite flu, but a much more pleasant way to feel light in the head. Jangly throwaways jostle with melancholy mullings-over of lives lived outside the conformist lane, and offthe-cuff instrumentals ease the tension ratcheted up whenever they stretch out and Hamish Kilgour once again proves that he’s as great a purveyor of mono-directional beats as Klaus Dinger and Moe Tucker. Like a lot of pop records with legs, this one sneaks up on you; give it a little time and it’ll take up residence in your head, heart and hips.

Bill Meyer

Signal Morning Cloud Recordings CD

Castanets

Texas Rose, The Thaw & The Beasts Asthmatic Kitty CD

The latest by Castanets finds songwriter Ray Raposa and a band of sympathetic compadres sounding very much like something from the state referenced in the title of this, their fifth album. Of course, it's not from the Lone Star state, it was recorded in San Diego, home to bandmate Rafter Roberts who also produced this set . Raposa's songs and vocals bear comparison to those of Vic Chesnutt. Both use guitars played at casual to slow tempos, and sing themselves into their upper registers, where the outer limits of their vocal range makes for evocatively strained passages full of emotion and character. Castanets also embrace the possibilities of the studio. On “Worn From the Fight (With Fireworks)” an electronic percussion track is given center stage, with Raposa singing from the wings. Meanwhile a lightly vibratoed guitar underscores the country soul the fuels the song. This gives way to "No Trouble" with its cracking drums and big piano sound, and the song creeps forward like a slow procession into a dark forest. All in all this is a heady tour, with eleven songs that change shape from broken narratives to poetic sliver. Mystery is ever present, but not overwhelmingly so.

David Greenberger

Eugene Chadbourne Kevin Blechdom

The Chaddom Blechbourne Experience Victo CD

Few things are certain in life—Bruce Willis will make movies in which he smirks and lots of stuff gets blown up, Pat Robertson will decry something in the media that threatens the moral fiber of the entire USA, and Eugene Chadbourne will make albums that are, well, funny. Funny, in this case, means both humorous and satirical, both musical and political, and firmly in the tradition of Daffy Duck, Jay Ward, and Jon Stewart. Chadbourne’s guitar, banjo, appealingly strained hick-accented singing, and rapier-sharp wit act in concert with jazz, rock, bluegrass, and free-improv for predictably skewed, jagged, zany results. The Chaddom Blechbourne Experience is a duo performance with glitch-crafter Kevin Blechdom, a.k.a. Kristen Erickson, captured live at Canada’s Victoriaville Festival and at The Stone in New York City. Both concentrate on playing banjo and singing, plying their talents on a Syd Barrett song (“Astronomy Domine”), trad folk ’n’ bluegrass (“Alabama

During its not-inconsiderable gestation period (eight years, or two presidential terms served back-to-back) Signal Morning’s working title was Blasting Through. This made perfect sense; after all, Circulatory System’s eponymous debut felt definitively like a signsand-portents beginning, chockful of whooshing, drowsy throwback psych about temporal uncertainty principles and elemental imperatives. It wasn’t so much the Beatles or Live/Dead or 13th Floor Elevators as it was a perversion of an Onion headline: “Georgian Stoner Miner Digs All-Incline Tunnel.” An album of lysergic chutes and endless ladders, Circulatory System never actually seemed to lead anywhere, really, which was probably the point. Will Cullen Hart and his pals simply shunted listeners from orchestra-pit scrum to horn-chart giggle to acid-trip whirligigs that insinuated themselves into your subconscious gradually, dropping suggestive clues like bread crumbs along the way: “We’re sending photographs of days to come,” “Yesterday’s world just seems so far away from these days,” and so on. Hart blabbed to rapt alt-weekly writers about how time isn’t really as linear as we’d all like to think it is. Circulatory System were a dauntingyet-sexy proposition, kinda cultish, kinda Druid-esque—and its hour-long debut seemed to zip by in half that time, suggesting that the band had, somehow, found a way to hoodwink time itself.

Onward to the effects-pedal-enabled apocalypse.

Many years and a multiple sclerosis diagnosis later, Hart and company have returned with Signal Morning.

If you’re expecting fireworks, an interdimensional “welcome home” banner, or intergalactic blasting-through, you’ll be disappointed. Morning’s just another Circulatory System album: evasive, mysterious, sometimes hypnotic, longer than it actually sounds, brimming with tape-machine experiments and quickie interludes and the occasional song-proper that don’t fail to add up to something kinda special but don’t quite satisfy after eight long years of waiting for this crew to re-up. The orchestral elements on Morning are laden enough to suggest that they’re taking themselves slightly too seriously—or that they’ve forgotten that psych-rock is supposed to be, like, fun. And yet, there are treasures embedded here: the daydreams-gone-too-far sigh, lull, and whuh? of “Tiny Concerts,” the staticstrewn, quiet-to-loud, jerky, shuffled-edit mindfuckery, vocal-filter ick, and trap-kit rattle of (yep) “Blasting Through,” how “The Spinning Continuous” marries the boomp-bomp bass and skidding shimmer of old with a newfound aggro

The Clean Mister Pop

Merge CD / download

David Daniell and Douglas McCombs Sycamore

Thrill Jockey CD / LP / download

Over the past few years, guitarists David Daniell and Douglas McCombs have played numerous gigs in their hometown of Chicago and developed a strong musical rapport, which shows on their debut record as a duo, Sycamore. Daniell, who has recorded as a solo artist and as a member of San Agustin, specializes in creating shimmering clouds of notes. McCombs is best known for playing bass with Tortoise and Eleventh Dream Day, but he’s also an accomplished guitarist and lap-steel player, and his more abstract work on projects such as Brokeback makes him a good fit with Daniell. In the four performances documented on Sycamore, Daniell and McCombs play off each other’s sounds with patient, probing exploration. The mix of guitars and electronic textures sounds at times

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Evan Parker's Electro-Acoustic Ensemble

Evan Parker's Electro-Acoustic Ensemble The Moment's Energy ECM CD

Per Anders Nilsson Sten Sandell Raymond Strid Beam Stone Psi CD

L. Casserley Adam Linson Integument

Caroline Forbes

Psi CD

After more than a decade, saxophonist Evan Parker’s Electro-Acoustic Ensemble continues to change both personnel and approach. On this 67-minute recording, Parker (here just on soprano) has put together longtime associates to straddle the boundary between European free improvisation as conventionally understood (with all the problematic resonances of that formulation) and AMM-inflected electro-acoustic music.

Parker, of course, has history in both idioms, and he’s joined here by an enthusiastic assortment of players: Peter Evans (trumpet, piccolo trumpet), Ko Ishikawa (sho), Ned Rothenberg (clarinet, bass clarinet, shakuhachi), Philipp Wachsmann (violin, electronics), Agustí Fernández (piano), Barry Guy (bass), Paul Lytton (percussion, electronics), Lawrence Casserley (signal processing), Joel Ryan (sample and signal processing), Walter Prati (computer processing), Richard Barrett (live electronics), Paul Obermayer (live electronics), and Marco Vecchi (sound projection). Where early recordings (featuring a mostly different version of this group) tended to feature much more obvious instances of layering and real-time

sample processing, there’s now much more space in the sound, offering openings for very individual textures (Evans and Ishikawa are essential to the 7-part title suite) and, what’s more important, for provocations. Featuring prerecorded passages and sound environments, part of this suite incorporates live performances from a late 2007 festival performance in Huddersfield, while much of it uses studio recordings from just prior to that date. As always there are features for sub-groupings and soloists, many of which are quite memorable: Evans is rousing in part 3, Fernandez in part 5, there are ace industrial metal contributions from FURT, while Guy and Wachsmann provide nice dynamic variation in part 6, with a lovely passage of creaks and rippling pizz. The lengthy conclusion has the richest use of electronics, with some excellent tweaking of bright brass and plummeting low-end, spilling out in a gorgeous sho/electronics drone that’s like a church organ. The coda “Incandescent Clouds” sounds initially like a laptop malfunctioning, then a metric ton of magnetic tapes spooling backwards at light speed.

The relatively young ensemble Beam Stone represents another fascinating example of the ways in which second (or is it third?) generation European free improvisers are extending their basic idioms by incorporating electronics. Nilsson is credited with computer and synthesizer, while pianist Sandell also uses electronics (and occasionally adds vocals, as he’s been wont to do lately), while the marvelous Strid is as inventive as ever in his approach to percussion (his assemblages of blocky sounds are audibly indebted to Tony Oxley). On a date like this, where you know that the Sandell/Strid axis will be strong and inventive, the key to the overall success is really going to depend largely on how corny or solid Nilsson’s playing is. I’m happy to report that he’s a subtle, thoughtful musician, not afraid of those things which make electronics distinctive, but for the most part striving to enter the sound with some kind of non-idiomatic integrity, something that’s to the benefit of the overall sound. (There’s a minor exception on the bleep-bloop of “Threads,” though in fairness it’s not out of step with the piano tinkle.) While the opening “Grey Zone” is a busy improv raveup,

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the sound of the trio is much more suggestive on pieces like “Refraction,” where Nilsson creates something from the resonance of a cymbal or from rubbed tom heads, eventually constructing a fascinating essay on attack and decay (with some juicy prepared piano too). It’s not all smooth strata, though. They are adept at creating contrast amidst the drones (“Peneplain”), at probing the edges of the sound (the rough squeaks and squawks on “Saltation” or the lowend rumble of “Contact Metamorphism”), and even at subtle uses of glissing and bent notes (“Recrystallization”). A good, resourceful trio.

I was hesitant digging into Integument, a meeting between signal processing wizard Casserley and bass phenom Linson, since I wasn’t knocked out by the latter’s recent solo disc on Psi. But the buzzing intensity this duo creates is just the ticket, making for a disc of mostly rough edges and very little complacency or dawdling.

Indeed, they enjoy opening pieces abruptly and pursuing the consequences of these beginnings: a disorienting whine opens “Stratum spongiosum,” while “Squamous epithelium” announces itself with rough sawing, filled with pauses and with a compelling fragmentary quality. The two players have a provocative relationship too. While it’s often Linson who creates these introductions, Casserley enters as if dropping some chemical compound into the sound, some kind of acid which sets it ablaze, and Linson almost sounds as if he’s trying to escape.

On “Wandering leukocytes,” however, the moaning arco and Casserley’s spectral sounds merge compellingly, as close to mirror images as they’ve gotten to this point. But when Linson’s own processing and sampling rig is opened up on this track, things get more unpredictable: there’s a passage of stark and mournful bass, freed from processing, some vocal shushing from Casserley, and some sonic deep-diving.

It’s all over the map in the best way. While that’s probably the richest track here, many are nearly equal to its pleasures: “Cycloids” is gloriously dizzying, like backwards tapes of car engines starting, and “Chromatophores” sounds like a chorus of singing metallophones, with multiple granulations and details emerging in lengthy explorations. Jason Bivins

like a swelling chord on a church organ.

These instrumental songs combine elements of rock, jazz and ambient music.

A fuzz-tone guitar solo on the opening track, “F# song,” has an ecstatic feel reminiscent of John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme. A few minutes later, the song subsides into a flourish of acoustic guitar that sounds distinctly Spanish.

Three drummers who have played with Daniell and McCombs in concert (Frank Rosaly, John Herndon and Steven Hess) add colorful touches of percussion on various tracks, flitting around the edges of the guitar solos rather than propelling the music forward. These songs began as improvisations, but then the duo edited, arranged and “recomposed” what they’d come up with. The results still sound fresh and spontaneous, but the music has a graceful, elegant flow.

Robert Loerzel

Rhodri Davies Stéphane Rives Ernesto Rodrigues Guilherme Rodrigues Carlos Santos Twrf Neus Ciglau Creative Sources CD

Speak Easy Backchats

Creative Sources CD

Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra gio poetics

Creative Sources CD

Creative Sources is a Lisbon-based label that’s dedicated primarily to European Free Improvisation. Headed by Ernesto Rodrigues, a violist and talented improviser who plays on many of the label’s productions, it’s an ambitious label that has, since 2000, built up a catalogue of over 160 CDs. That’s a significant accomplishment, especially when the CDs are as good as these.

Twrf Neus Ciglau (“I heard the uproar”) comes from a 2008 concert that had harpist Rhodri Davies and soprano saxophonist Stéphane Rives joining Rodrigues, his son Guilherme Rodrigues on cello, and Carlos Santos on electronics, creating a cumulative effect that’s both electronic and orchestral.

It consists of a single 35-minute track, called “1,” that’s difficult to describe beyond referring to an intermittent grinding sound, almost an electronic drone, that’s indistinguishably varied through the early stages of the piece. It exercises a kind of gravitational pull and when it’s finally abandoned the music becomes fully airborne. The music develops largely through subtle gradations in pitch and evolutions in timbre, blurring the lines between strings and electronics to the point that when Rives plays his soprano saxophone with something resembling a conventional timbre, it comes as a surprise.

The group Speak Easy is a quartet consisting of singers Ute Wassermann and Phil Minton, Thomas Lehn on analog synthesizer and Martin Blume on percussion. It’s very rare to hear Minton, the genius of oral sound manipulation, in a context that includes a vocalist of comparable talent, but that’s the case here, with Wassermann producing similar streams of unpredictable vocal transformations, from the Mongolian palate to near-verbal utterances and screams. At times their voices can be

clearly distinguished; at other times, they cross over, becoming unidentifiable. There are passages that sound like a zoo—bird noises and monkey sounds seem to be favored for a resemblance to speech—and others that sound like cartoon voices and sped-up tapes. It’s all a strangely intense delight, the voices somehow giving the sense that the music has been internalized.

With a growing reputation based on recordings with the London Improvisers Orchestra and Evan Parker and performances with George Lewis and Axel Dörner, the Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra is a large ensemble that genuinely improvises. With Ernesto and Guilherme Rodrigues added, the group reaches 20 musicians, not necessarily a number you’d guess at from the frequently introspective, sonically detailed exchanges that the group creates here. The emphasis is generally on strings. While the ensemble includes an electric guitar, a couple of saxophones, two drummers, trombone and trumpet, they’re clearly outnumbered by quieter instruments, mostly strings, including acoustic guitar, bouzouki, flutes and shakuhachi. At times a line will pass continuously through the instruments, one or two notes from each creating a quiet stream of melodic invention.

Often there are quietly intense hives of life, a welter of low-affect sonic activity. While trumpeter Matthew Cairns occasionally stands out in the midst of things, Ernesto and Guilherme Rodrigues manage to blend in perfectly with what is clearly a highly developed group discourse. The most animation occurs on the final “Distributed Talk,” a discretely structured piece that consists of three short improvisations separated by silences. Stuart Broomer

Greg Davis

Mutually Arising Kranky CD

There is something singularly elegant about a single, long-tone composition, especially in this twittering age of instant communication and even lesser levels of concentration. It is unhurried.

It never goes away. Changes in pitch and harmonics are usually incremental, which makes it perfect as background, foreground or even middleground music. Even if you become distracted for a few seconds, it will still be there when your attention returns.

Vermonter Greg Davis has dabbled in folktronica and digital glitchscapes, but here he goes old skool with a pair of analog synth drones. “Cosmic Mudra” is a 28-minute power drone that gradually changes pitch from sub bass to high frequency, building in intensity and density along the way. At the height of the arc, there is a muscular austerity that is at once overwhelming and inviting. It is minimalist incrementalism at its best, reminiscent of La Monte Young and Conrad Schnitzler. While “Cosmic Mudra” is based around a hard organ sound that makes it at times impenetrable, “Hall of Pure Bliss” is the gentler companion, more in the spirit of Tangerine Dream, its bright, warm, gradual waves and layers acting as a perfect sonic balm. Unlike “Cosmic Mudra,” which crescendos around its midpoint, “Hall of Pure Bliss” climaxes early and then begins a long drift into silence. Davis’s reliance on analog synths is refreshing and welcome in this

age of limitless software presets. This is a kosmische delight and a brilliant addition to the Kranky catalogue. May Davis forever travel the spaceways.

Richard Moule

Eastern Boundary Quartet Eastern Boundary BB Production CD

Mihaly Borbely Quartet

Hommage à Kodály BMC CD

Balazs Bagyi Quartet Magyar Zene / Hungarian Music BB Production CD

Hungary’s jazz scene is small but thriving; it has its own history, and in saxophonist Mihaly Borbely and drummer Balazs Bagyi it boasts two adventurous musicians who have their own ideas of what jazz is. They met American pianist Michael Jefry Stevens and bassist Joe Fonda while they were touring Europe and struck up a rapport. The result was the formation of the Eastern Boundary Quartet. Eastern Boundary is a live recording and it shows a band of two parts working together, creating something a little different. Fonda’s “Song for My Mother,” a tune he’s recorded several times, takes on a Coltranish cast with Stevens’ swirling piano and Borbely’s plangent reading of the melody line. Stevens’ “The End Game” appeals to the melodic streak in Borbely’s playing. But it’s with Bagyi’s “Tuszgras” that the sparks really start to fly. A focused group improvisation contains some of the disc’s best playing, and a version of Mongo Santamaria’s “Afro Blue” concludes the set in rousing fashion.

Reed player Borbely pays tribute to one of Hungary’s most illustrious 20th-century composers on Hommage á Kodàly. Borbely calls this “a personal testimony to the timeless beauty of Kodàly’s music, to the timeless beauty of folk music and its lasting power.”

(Kodàly, like Bartok, was a collector of the folk music of Hungary and surrounding areas.) Borbely alternates original pieces based on folk themes with fairly straight readings of Kodàly compositions. It's a remarkably consistent program that wends its way through a variety of moods. Borbely and his quartet (Daniel Szabo, piano; Balazs Horvath, bass; Istvan Balo, drums) understand the complexities and shades of this music. At the apex of the set, cellist Balazs Kantor delivers a spirited reading of the final movement of Kodàly’s cello concerto. This is music that sings and dances as it should, showing how multiple traditions can be coherently blended without descending into academic pretension.

The title of drummer Bagyi’s release, Hungarian Music, seems like a statement of purpose. His quartet includes Daniel Szabo from Borbely’s release, though this time around he’s playing a cimbalom, a Hungarian hammered dulcimer, rather than piano. Czaba Tuzko is on alto and tenor saxophones, Peter Olah on bass and Beata Salomon on violin. The instrumentation gives the music a stronger folk flavor than Borbely’s disc and it’s all that much more original for it. The material is once again divided between jazz-oriented pieces

and traditional music, but sometimes the synthesis occurs in the same piece.

“Legend,” played by the trio of Szabo, Olah and Bagyi, has a baleful theme that turns into a free improvisation. (Free jazz cimbalom? Yes!) It’s also fascinating to hear Szabo comping behind the soloists on “Lover’s Tryst,” a piece that has a loping Coltrane-style groove.

All three discs display a satisfying merger of jazz and Hungarian folk-influenced music and show what can happen when this material is in the hands of open, creative musicians.

Robert Iannapollo

Marc Edwards / Weasel Walter Group Mysteries Beneath the Planet UgEXPLODE CD

Henry Kaiser Damon Smith Weasel Walter Plane Crash UgEXPLODE CD

Les Aus / Sheik Anorak & Weasel Walter Duo

Les Aus / Sheik Anorak & Weasel Walter Duo Gaffer split 10" LP

Weasel Walter

Apocalyptik Paranoia Gaffer CD

Having put the Flying Luttenbachers on long-term hiatus in 2007, percussionist Weasel Walter is now focused on playing improv with a revolving cast of Bay Area musicians. His drumming is as furious as ever, but an audit of recent releases on which Walter appears shows he’s no one-trick pony. He surrounds himself with collaborators whose particular styles aren’t necessarily identical to his own, so although his sticks and skins are a prominent voice on all these releases, the results are varied.

Mysteries Beneath the Planet pairs Walter with Cecil Taylor Unit alum Marc Edwards. Recorded live over two nights in New York City, the disc finds Walter and Edwards working with different collaborators on each night. The percussionists keep up a near-constant clamor throughout both sets, and the addition of third percussionist Andrew Barker on the selections recorded at Lit Lounge makes for a crowded and tumultuous background, though Ras Moshe and Mario Rechtern handle themselves adeptly despite all the thunder. On “The Coral Reef” Moshe switches to flute and the percussionists play at more of an insistent patter than a furious storm. The early morning sunrise soon develops into a far darker scene, but, while it lasts, it’s a nice change of pace.

The line-up on tracks 1 and 3, recorded four months later at the Delancy, is a bit more diverse, featuring Peter Evans (trumpet, melodica), Darius Jones (alto sax), Tom Blancarte (bass) and Paul Flaherty (tenor sax). This sextet punches just as hard as the other group, but the fury feels more tempered; melodic nuggets amongst the shrapnel make for an Aylerish feel at times.

Walter and bassist Damon Smith collide with free guitar legend Henry Kaiser on Plane Crash, which, while not short on the heavy stuff, is equally focused on smaller, acoustic events.

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The more explosive tracks are anchored

by Kaiser’s chunky work on the electric guitar, a dynamic (if sometimes cartoonish) voice. Walter often provides punctuation rather than continuous commentary, which makes it all the more exciting when the trio go all out.

Smith’s bass can be lost in the tornado, but he’s more prominent on the acoustic tracks. The electric fare tends to lurch in irregular bursts, while the acoustic tracks, though still abstract, often hint at a more linear logic. Some of the album’s best material, in fact, comprises Kaiser’s fragmented, tantalizing folk-y acoustic playing, Walter’s sprightly, small-scale clatter, and Smith’s bowed tones.

Where the musical conversation of Mysteries Beneath the Planet is reminiscent of old-school free jazz jams, Plane Crash feels more alien. It’s a truly idiosyncratic effort by three gifted musicians.

The split 10-inch on Gaffer puts Walter and guitarist Sheik Anorak on the other side of three atmospheric guitar/drums improvisations from Spain’s Les Aus (even an appearance from Lydia Lunch can’t quite help the moody Spaniards rebuff the aggressive advances from the platter’s B side).

Anorak’s effects-heavy guitar shrieks in mangled bursts of shearing sound, while Walter goes full-bore behind him.

Three short tracks are all the listener gets here, and that’s just fine, since the excitement never gets a chance to pall.

Apocalyptik Paranoia bears only Walter’s name on its front cover, but the emphasis is on collaborations.

Kaiser and Evans crop up again here, in addition to cellist Fred Lonberg-Holm (who played in one incarnation of the Flying Luttenbachers) and Beantown trumpeters Forbes Graham and Greg Kelley. The disc offers a survey, of sorts, of Walter’s current activities, from “Scintillations,” an acoustic duo with Kaiser, to the burner “Mass Erection.”

“Still Life” features some of Kaiser’s most traditional guitar-playing over whispers of breathy trumpet from Kelley and Walter’s frenetic (though muffled) attack. “Slowest Death” puts an echo on Evans’ trumpet for an oddly noir-ish addition to the Kaiser/Walter duo, and Graham’s electronics set the tone for a heavily digital trio with Walter and Lonberg-Holm that suggests a malfunctioning Nintendo as much as traditional free jazz. Walter’s been busy, and there’s a lot out there to digest. This disc, more than the other three releases, gives a good look at the many outfits in which Weasel’s been plying his abrasive trade.

A track like “Raging War” provides the assault promised by its title, but this disc proves that there are more sides to Weasel Walter, improviser, than some might suspect. Adam Strohm

Eminem Relapse

Shady / Aftermath / Interscope CD

Watch your backs, Hototogisu! Move over, Merzbow! Take cover, Wolf Eyes!

Noise music’s most energizing album thus far in 2009 was laid to tape by a rapper (Eminem) and his eternally-falling-off enabler-cum-producer (Dr. Dre).

That’s right, No Fun Fest performers and attendees: you’ve been sonned and undercut by Marshall fucking Mathers. Even at its hardest and least forgiving, most noise manages to normalize with time, allowing the listener to become accustomed to harsh textures

and monstrous alarms and bloodcurdling screams, to accept extreme face-melt as background music for yard work or paper-pushing or exercise or what-have-you. Relapse, on the other hand, is relentlessly wearying and bullying in a way that doesn’t allow you to relax for even a moment, whiplashing you through a moldy, festering Land of the Lost of outdated celeb referents, stale carnival beats, mawkish fake Jamaican patois, and nasal-voiced shock tactics that suggest a peeved seventh-grader’s diary rants. Even when Em holds forth on addiction—with candor, with pathos—you cringe, because you’re painfully aware that it’s only a matter of time before the juvenile, look-at-me rhythms and boomp-boomp-boom beats will gush back to the fore to remind you that you’d rather be rocking out to, say, Haters (or Skaters). As-is, Em’s 70 Minutes Hate sets a standard for sheer unlistenability that rivals even Sightings’ End Times—which is saying something. Raymond Cummings

Peter Evans

Nature / Culture Psi CD x 2

On stage or on record, trumpeter Peter Evans always impresses with his sturdy chops and well-articulated ideas. But it’s his solo concerts that make me feel the way I imagine people must have felt when they first heard Louis Armstrong in the ’20s; total awe at the spectacle of one man changing what you know about the world using air, spit, creative cognition, and a horn. Sure, there are plenty of antecedents; Evans builds on the radical trumpet lingo coined by the likes of Axel Dörner, Greg Kelley, and Mazen Kerbaj, and his capacity for sustained solitary invention displays the same combination of skill and stamina that Psi’s proprietor Evan Parker has shown during three and a half decades of solo soprano sax performance. Given plenty of avant-garde precedent and the undeniable fact that nothing on Nature/Culture sounds like anything on a Hot Five record, you might ask, why pick Armstrong? First of all, because despite Evans’ use of radical sounds, his unaccompanied work adheres to Armstrong’s mandate that every solo needs to tell a story; at its farthest out, this still feels like jazz. And also because Evans brings a bold extroversion to even his quietest moments; he doesn’t present you with his research or challenge you with his far-out sounds, he reaches out and grabs you and takes you along on his trip. Nature/Culture is Evans’ second document of solo performance, and it tells a bigger story than its predecessor by seizing both the moment and the season; one CD is given over to a concert and the other to a compilation of studio recordings made over several months. The I-Beam show hurtles like a roller coaster, while the studio disc explores various sonic territories in isolated, exacting detail. Both are wild and thrilling glimpses of a talent that promises to take us to some amazing places. Bill Meyer

The Fiery Furnaces I'm Going Away Thrill Jockey CD

2005’s Rehearsing My Choir was a brilliantly odd project, in which Eleanor and Matthew Friedberger—

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the brother-sister team at the core of Brooklyn’s The Fiery Furnaces— collaborated with their grandmother to produce a great piece of audio theater, even if it only held up to a few listens. They then promised their confounded fan base a “return to rock,” which resulted in 2007’s Widow City, a solid album if not quite the box of chocolates some might have expected. The Furnaces are always, always, good for some remarkably catchy songs, and Widow had more than a fair share, but it’s with the new I’m Going Away (their eighth) that the promise of rock has really been redeemed. This is, without a doubt, their catchiest-poppiest-goddamnable-hummablest set of songs to date. There are a dozen of them, only two of which surpass the five-minute mark. Melodies! Refrains! Guitar solos!

For better or worse, the Friedbergers have made a record that works more or less the way records usually do.

Songs! Backing vocals! No confusing mythologies!

The title track is built around a bluesy riff that would have worked nicely during the brief minute they were signed to Fat Possum, but the thread that carries through I’m Going Away is an updated take on soul-inflected rock. As always, the influences are slippery. It might have been Sam Cooke or Chicago or Elton or Bowie, but there’s definitely something going on in tunes like “Drive to Dallas,” “Even in the Rain” and “Lost at Sea.” You can hear elements of the confessional, of the Memphis hook, of the r’n’b melody that lets you know the singer speaks truth. But these are undercurrents. Pop as it is, it’s pure, punch-drunk Furnaces. It’s not quite the Carpenters record they’ve always had in them, but it’s close. Kurt Gottschalk

Satoko Fujii Myra Melford Under the Water Libra CD

The Tao Te Ching says: “Nothing under heaven is softer or weaker than water, / and yet nothing is better / for attacking what is hard and strong, / because of its immutability.” There’s a kindred fluidity and motion to this recent meeting of two ceaselessly creative improvising pianists. “Yadokari” (hermit crab) unfolds gradually, beginning with three minutes of inside-thepiano musings before either musician touches the keyboard; once they let their fingers loose on the keys the kettle really comes to a boil. Graceful and limpid, “The Migration Of Fish” retains an elusive flow even when busy, muscular passages momentarily erupt. “Utsobo” (moray eel) is perhaps the most “dangerous” of these performances, evoking rather brooding, nocturnal imagery. The moray is a shy creature, attacking humans only in selfdefense, but watch out when it does bite! The three duo tracks are separated by solo features. Melford is at her most lyrical on “Be Melting Snow,” a passionate and powerful performance that has a certain inevitability in the way she develops melodic kernels and surging rhythmic structures. Fujii’s “Trace a River” is well-titled: this river has deep-running currents—subtle and gentle one moment, raging the

next. The clarity and lucidity of her playing has never been more evident.

Bill Barton

Peter Garland String Quartets Cold Blue CD

John Luther Adams The Place We Began Cold Blue CD

So, Henry Cowell begat Lou Harrison and Harrison begat Peter Garland, in a manner of speaking. Each of them has been influenced by the culture, and in particular the musics, of the Pacific region, but to differing degrees.

Garland’s inheritance is so rich that he treats it selectively and, like Harrison and Cowell, with respect though not with undue reverence, in that the aim is to make something new of ‘found’ musical material as it’s brought into new cultural contexts. ‘New’ is the key word in the previous sentence. Garland is a restless, nomadic and often (one senses) lonely individual whose work makes reference to the musics of the distant and sometimes not-so-distant lands he’s visited, but his compositions exist entirely on their own terms and without a hint of pastiche or the uncomfortable feeling that cultural plunder is afoot. The highpoint of his career so far, The Days Run Away (Tzadik), a CD of minimalist solo piano compositions, is almost heartbreakingly beautiful without being pretty or sentimental, and the String Quartets runs a close second to it.

Played by members of the celebrated English new music ensemble Apartment House, under the direction of cellist Anton Lukoszevieze, the two quartets, composed in New Mexico (1986) and Japan (1994), are elegantly constructed but with an occasional anxious or querulous edge, as though Garland found the harmonies curdling under his pen.

John Luther Adams writes music that is firmly rooted in place, and in one place in particular: Alaska. Adams’s music often has an elemental quality that reflects the north’s stark landscape and harsh climate. His minimalist, monumental orchestral composition Clouds of Forgetting, Clouds of Unknowing (New World) sums up what’s best about his work—rigorous formal concerns, a bleak grandeur, the often startling musicalization of noise (or music teetering on the brink of noise or gradually slipping into it)—but The Place We Began is a lesser affair. Using fragments of rediscovered reel-to-reel tapes of Fender

Rhodes, resonance feedback and rain, all recorded during the early 1970s, Adams has sculpted four soundscapes.

The source material isn’t of particular interest in itself and the compositions, though well made, sound like much of the ambient music recorded during the past decade or so. To be fair, this kind of thing isn’t Adams’s strong suit; he’s much better represented by Clouds of Forgetting, or his writing for percussion (at which he excels) as heard on The Mathematics of Resonant Bodies (Cantaloupe) and Strange and Sacred Noise (Mode). Anyone who has followed his career with interest will probably want The Place We Began, but new listeners might be better off starting elsewhere.

Brian Marley

General Elektriks

Good City For Dreamers Quannum Projects CD

Good City for Dreamers is the second full-length by General Elektriks, the band name used by Hervé Salters, producer extraordinaire. He plays all the instruments on the album (except for the strings and horns) and what’s amazing is how seamlessly it all fits together: lots of people think of themselves as producers, but rarely do they put together anything this exquisite. The songs are super-catchy; the funk is anvilheavy, but it’s the keyboard sounds— from thick and warm vintage chords to tweaked sizzling sirens—that really make you sit up and pay attention (or shake that ass even more furiously). The vocals also deserve special attention, as Salters perfectly recreates the distinctive timbres associated with some of the best pop groups of all time: ELO, the Beach Boys and the Beatles. What elevates the album beyond just a collection of superb songs is the smooth way it flows from song to song. I don’t mean that the songs crossfade, but that the transitions are expertly crafted—from whispery ballad to Clavinet-inflected groove, for instance. As a blend of soulful, R&B laden pop, General Elektriks excel. Andrew Choate

Vinny Golia Peter Kowald Mythology

Kadima Collective CD

Vinny Golia and the late Peter Kowald seemed destined to connect at some point. Both built their respective careers as inveterate collaborators; always willing to blur or just ignore lines between improvised music’s various camps.

Additionally, both showed a strong connection to their local scenes, acting as mentors, instigators, and organizers in their respective home bases of Los Angeles and Wuppertal. So when Kowald stopped off in LA during his epic cross-US tour in 2000, an ad hoc recording session between Golia and the bass player was arranged. It yielded a series of fourteen improvisations that capture a sense of intimate, collective exploration. Golia switches instruments between each piece, drawing on a huge arsenal of saxes, clarinets and flutes, but he does so with clear intent, shaping the mood and texture with the horns’ different timbral qualities. The recording is further paced by alternating pieces where Kowald played arco with those propelled by his nimble pizzicato. It’s clear that these two players connected instantly: listen to Kowald’s groaning bowing against Golia’s growling contra alto clarinet; his spritely plucked lines against breathy Chinese flute; or his briskly sawed harmonics against strident looping sopranino. The session was followed the next evening by a concert performance and then Kowald left to finish his tour. The two never met up again before his untimely death, so it’s our good luck that there is this document of their fortuitous meeting. Michael Rosenstein

Vyacheslav Guyvoronsky

Interventions Into Bach and Mozart Leo CD

The title says it all; Russian trumpeter and composer Vyacheslav Guyveronsky has composed over, around and through works by Bach and Mozart.

The bizarre wit and shere audacity of this project usually suffice to carry it off, even if the overall result brings a measure of disappointment. This disc brings to fruition an idea conceived some thirty years ago, when Guyvoronsky dreamt that Mozart told him (after they drank wine and discussed music) to add some instrumental parts to the famous C-Major piano sonata. On this recording, we are given what amounts to a piano trio treatment of the sonata’s three movements. The Bach pieces, including a recomposition of his so-called French partita and a contrapunctus from Art of the Fugue, followed suit; they are scored for a less conventional but just as viscerally interesting group of musicians, including a prominent accordion in the partita, which was written for solo harpsichord.

The soloists, including Oilina Fradkina (piano), Vladislav Pesin (violin), Ariadna Koryagina (voice), Vladimir Guyryushov (cello) and Evelyn Petrova (accordion) handle every pause, twist and turn with graceful conviction. These top-drawer musicians are, however, at the mercy of a slightly myopic artistic vision. This sort of recomposing is nothing new, and I’m reminded of much more adventurous efforts, such as Berio’s Symphonia or his reconstruction of Schubert’s tenth symphony, where Berio and Schubert are represented in much starker temporal and tonal contrast. However, it would be folly to draw too deep a comparison between Berio's approach and Guyvoronsky’s. The latter pursues an angle of good humor and fun, and the Bach reinterpretations succeed on those terms. He integrates the original piece very subtly, maintaining loyalty to overarching rhythmic feel and counterpoint while introducing elements that accent and enhance rhythmic and harmonic movement; this would explain his jazzinflected trumpet in the Bach Overture and the soaring and jabbing vocal cadenzas throughout. It does not, however, explain the brief snippets of text, delivered in short, surreal bursts of French. There are many other amusing surprises, such as the playful skewing of rhythms in later movements. The Art of Fugue treatment is the most radical here, the familiar B.A.C.H. motive forming the brew of an energetic and wildly Protean fantasy for violin and trumpet whose gradual descent into rumbling chaos is breathtaking. The Mozart sounds as if Max Reger or Alban Berg had superimposed a violin and cello part over Mozart’s original. I longed for the substance of the music to spur Guyvoronsky to new creative heights, allowing his voice to be heard as it was in his Art of Fugue rendering. To these ears, this is where the project fails. I hear a lot of Mozart and Bach, but Voronsky’s contribution to the history he obviously reveres remains fascinatingly obscure.

Marc Medwin

Alfred Harth

Just Music Trios, Groups, Ensembles Laubhuette CD-R x 3

EMT Vol. 1 & Vol. 2 Laubhuette CD-R x 2

When people think of the halcyon days of German improvised music, what usually comes to mind is the WuppertalBerlin FMP axis, which produced such figures as reedman Peter Brötzmann, pianist-composer Alexander von Schlip-

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penbach and bassist Peter Kowald. But German free music has had a far greater reach than the Total Music Meeting would indicate, a significant portion of which is centered on the FrankfurtDarmstadt-Wiesbaden area. One of the central figures in the Frankfurt scene was reedman-composer Alfred Harth (now based in Seoul), who early on instituted Frankfurt’s Centrum Freie Kunst, a center for avant-garde music, performance art, and multi-media creativity active in the mid-1960s. Though Harth’s discography is extensive and includes progressive rock, electronics, theater music and unclassifiable multimedia suites, his early free-jazz recordings have remained woefully out of print. These include recordings of such ensembles as the cooperative Just Music (JuMu) and EMT (Energy Music Totale). Harth has now reissued five discs of archival recordings with both groups on his own Laubhuette Productions, filling in the gaps of his discography and giving a fuller picture of the German improvisation community into the bargain.

Just Music recorded one privately released self-titled LP (later reissued

by ECM) and contributed to the Born Free compilation (Scout, 1970), though the group was a key presence on the Frankfurt improvisation scene (which also included Modern Jazz Quintett Karlsruhe, Free Jazz Group Wiesbaden and the Jazzworkers). The three discs of JuMu material focus on ensembles, duos and trios spanning the years 1968-1971; as it was a cooperative, not all performances feature Harth. As a saxophonist, his approach doesn’t put him among the paint-peeling crowd; it has a concentrated softness even during otherwise harsh blowing, a cottony delicacy that Brötzmann dubbed “wind in the pillow.”

“Dom Suite 1 & 2” on the first disc features a somewhat different lineup than was customary. Usual suspects Harth, bassist Peter Stock and drummer Thomas Cremer are joined by clarinetist Witold Teplitz and altoist Hans Schwindt, and the result is like being thrust into an Ayler group improvisation.

Frantic waves of percussion and arco bass support Harth’s blistering tenor before a Dixieland-like singsong theme emerges. The quintet began, after all, as a New Orleans-style jazz band in the mid-1960s, and while scorching saxophone solos are part of the proceedings, there’s a buoyant lilt that recalls JuMu’s early influences. Teplitz’s false-fingered clarinet squall seems jovial yet hungry for the new. The most consistent JuMu lineup featured trombonist Dieter Hermann, guitarist Johannes Krämer and cellist Franz Volhard in addition to Harth, Stock and Cremer, and is represented by three tracks; eight more boil JuMu down to a nutty trio of Krämer, Stock and Volhard.

Collectively, they’re strong evidence that Krämer was a hell of a guitarist, spinning single-note lines and quirky comping in defiance of the billowing reeds and seasick bowed strings. There are few traces of a Derek Bailey influence; instead, his twisted folksiness and riti-like picking foreshadow the work of Joe Morris and Kurt Newman.

Harth formed EMT in 1972 with his girlfriend, Belgian pianist Nicole Van Den Plas; her brother, bassist Jean Van Den Plas; and the itinerant Swedish drummer Sven-Åke Johansson. The group sometimes brought in guests, in-

cluding Kowald, Brötzmann, trumpeters Michael Sell and Helmuth Neumann, and trombonist Liliane Vertessen. EMT recorded a single LP for the SAJ label, Canadian Cup of Coffee (1972), before parting ways. In fact, some of the last JuMu collaborations represented here involved Nicole and Jean Van Den Plas; piano-reeds duos make up a few of the tracks on JuMu Groups & Duos in what was a transition period between that group and EMT. Whereas JuMu played mostly “free,” EMT incorporated elements of musical theatre and European concert music into their improvised suites, Johansson singing nonsense lieder in tandem with Harth’s clarinet trills and dives. “Music Is Happening Is All” exemplifies the EMT take on traditional free jazz structures, as Johansson’s “Dynamische Schwingungen” propel the band through all-over phase-echo as horsehairs swirl, while Michael Sell’s bugle calls and Harth’s woody glossolalia skirt the edge of the whirlpool. Apparently at one point during this live performance someone actually started sawing at the stage.

Nicole Van Den Plas’s piano-playing is scarce here, but she’s well-represented on organ. Volcanic and dense, her playing is transcendently spiritual, recalling the tonal ragas of American minimalism. “Hymne Heilbronn” creates extreme tension by pitting her and Harth’s repetitive lyric against percussive thrash, though at bottom it’s rather simple and downright pretty. Neither EMT nor JuMu placed much importance on commercial recordings—this was music of a moment in time. We can be thankful some of it has been preserved.

Clifford Allen

Jim Haynes

that features Mama Bär and infant son having a bike ride. The vocals here are clean and practically Hildegard von Bingenesque, but the jostling ups and downs of the road are also audible.

A pastoral feel still reigns as the voice retreats into the middle distance and quiet countrysides peddle past with only the occasional car or motorcycle interrupting. Conceptual pieces fill out the disc, like a piece that documents the results of “running with a red shirt into a herd of cows.” All of these tracks were originally released in limited editions as acetates or CD-Rs featuring handmade art, so it’s a real treasure to finally have some of this singular work more widely available.

I greatly prefer Lionel Marchetti’s live improvisatory work with microphones and electronics (in his work with Jerome Noetinger or Quintet Avant for example) to his tape collages and musique concrète pieces. Knud un nom de serpent (Le Cercle des entrailles) is one of the latter, originally done in 1993-95, released in 2001, and now reissued. It opens with a chant that you’d find on a Folkways ethnomusicology record; high-pitched electronic tones are gradually woven into this percussive singing, along with Marchetti’s mic fumbling and bits gathered from French radio. Every other track is a short silence. Even as an example of editing dexterity from a variety of sources it is only marginally engaging, especially considering the ease with which these types of compositions can be created given the software currently available. There’s a lot of spoken French on the disc also; the meaning of the words often disengages the dramas and tensions that the collages generate.

Andrew Choate

Intransitive CD

Erdem Helvacioglu

Kommissar Hjuler & Mama Bär

Aucourant CD

Sever

Asylum Lunaticum Intransitive CD

Lionel Marchetti

Knud un nom de serpent (Le cercle des entrailles) Intransitive CD

It’s a testament to the distinctiveness of the Intransitive label that their three most recent releases sound nothing like each other. Jim Haynes's record is four tracks of slowly morphing ambient crinkle. No instrumentation or other info is supplied, but it’s clearly a microphone and computer project. It’s subversive in a relaxed way: instead of cramming musical ideas down your throat, layers of shimmery sound add up and eventually completely engross the listener.

Just don’t look for active development of musical ideas when you put it on; it’s more about creating environments of sonic intrigue.

Asylum Lunaticum, however, demands direct listener engagement.

“HJCVGrimmelshausen” is a bunch of cut-up phonemes, with equal emphasis given to the phonemes and the sound of the cutting. Arrigo Lora-Totino’s work from the mid-1960s (check out “l’esperienza” on UbuWeb) is either a clear influence or an unknown but kindred forebear. Voice experimentation, with Danish as the ground zero language, is the focus of many tracks here. “Ehrfurcht” is a 25+-minute track

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Wounded Breath

Istanbul-based electro-acoustic artist Erdem Helvacioğlu constructs harshly beautiful soundscapes by processing sound samples and forming them into narrative structures that address fundamental questions of human existence.

“Below the Cold Ocean” explores man’s struggle against the elements, evoking our futile attempts to transcend the challenges posed by nature: you can hear the water, the ice, the cold, collisions of hard surfaces, sonar beacons.

“Dance of Fire” has a powerful rhythmic forward motion, as if to suggest the stillness lurking behind the violence and brutality in the struggles of daily life—or is it violence behind the insistent yearning of the human heart? In “Lead Crystal Marbles” Helvacioğlu leaves aside the existential for the playful and sensuous in a 17-minute roll in the hay with the possibilities of sound. “Blank Mirror” and “Wounded Breath” close out this bleak but radiant recording, the former inducing dread at the ineffability (and futility?) of life, the latter a bleak reminder that no one gets out of here alive, whatever business one may have left undone. Michael Chamberlain

Jonathan Kane Jet Ear Party

Table of the Elements LP / CD / download

Jonathan Kane’s debut February elevated him from the footnotes, a place he’d earned on account of his associations

with La Monte Young, Rhys Chatham and the Swans, to a chapter of his own in the book on downtown NYC hybridism. He’s made a couple of strong EPs since its 2005 release, but Jet Ear Party is only his second long-player. If you’re already hip to Kane’s concept, you know what to expect—unswerving, minimalist-inspired dynamics meet electric blues tonalities in a deep muddy groove. This album successfully delivers more of what’s made him semi-famous; the unbending “Super T-Bone,” for example, is as inexorably hypnotic as a cobra swaying before your eyes, and the slowly sidling opener “Smear It” as menacing as that snake in a bad mood.

But Kane achieves mixed results adapting his approach to more diverse material. “Thank You Falletinme Be Mice Elf Agin” translates well enough into an uptempo boogie, and whoever had the idea to climax it with David Watson’s bagpipe freak-out deserves a high-five.

But the addition of vocals on “Up in Flames” saps tension without adding much soul. If you’ve never heard Kane before, don’t wait until the icicles drip to pick up February; if it melts your head and heart, you’ll want to hear Jet Ear Party, flaws and all. Bill Meyer

Steve Kuhn Trio with Joe Lovano Mostly Coltrane ECM CD

Denis Lavant Sylvain Kassap Ramon Lopez Claude Tchamitchian Frank Médioni Ascension, Tombeau de John Coltrane Rogue Art CD

These two homages to John Coltrane stand out from the legion that have emerged since the iconic saxophonist’s death in 1967. These discs present repertoire that veers refreshingly from the beaten track, affording a reappraisal of Coltrane’s neglected later works and a piercing glance at some of the metaphysical issues addressed in his oeuvre.

Pianist Steve Kuhn was a member of Coltrane’s first quartet, which had a legendary run at New York’s Jazz Gallery in early 1960. Kuhn would go on to have an impressive solo career, a significant portion of it documented by ECM and often featuring the present trio, comprising drummer Joey Baron and bassist David Finck. Here, Kuhn revisits tunes that he played with Coltrane and confronts a few from Trane’s contro-

versial 1965-1967 period, bringing his uniquely sensitive approach to every composition. The trio’s introspective take on “I Want to Talk About You” finds Kuhn beginning the track with a beautifully voiced reference to the saxophone multiphonics Coltrane used to conclude his studio version. Even enigmatic later works such as “Jimmy’s Mode” and “Configuration” are treated with grace and refinement; the latter, about as fiery as the disc gets, is a stunning vehicle for Joey Baron, while the former allows Finck to stretch out in tenderly meterless modality. Guest saxophonist Joe Lovano’s contributions are equally fine, especially his sumptuous presentation of “Spiritual” on taragato. These veteran improvisers capture the music’s spirit without being enslaved by it, their individual voices combining with the typically spacious and detailed ECM recording to make this an immensely satisfying tribute.

From Rogue Art, we have a “Tombeau” piece in the tradition of Ravel and Messiaen, but its roots are in 1960s free improvisation and poetry. Unlike Kuhn’s album, these are not reinterpretations as much as mood pieces, conjuring shades of Coltrane by evoking the drone, intensity and rapt introspection of his final works. Taken on those terms, the disc succeeds quite nicely, due in large part to Denis Lavant’s harrowing delivery of Franck Médioni’s poetry. The texts treat Coltrane’s album titles as idées fixes, the words “ascension,” “meditations” and “expression” bubbling repeatedly to the music’s surface. Lopez, Kassap and Tchamitchian bring European sensibilities to the mix without forsaking the raw power of 1960s fire music; listen to Lopez’s crackling percussion on “Quelle Rive?”, the album’s closer, accompanied by Kassap’s delicate clarinet swirls and Tchamitchian’s microtonally inflected bass motives. Music and poetry mirror each other in their arch-like rise and fall, their power and beauty making this disc a worthy tribute to its dedicatee.

Marc Medwin

Margaret Lancaster Io: Music for flute by Beyer, Vierk, Polansky, La Barbara, and Tenney New World CD

On Io, flutist Margaret Lancaster performs a program that spans nearly three quarters of a century, but concentrates on the 1930s Ultramodernist tradition in American music as a point of reference.

Johanna Beyer’s “Have Faith” (1936)

is a brief, angular piece that presents the nightingale’s song in a fetching, somewhat spiky, costume; it is sung with pure tone and detailed care by Beth Griffith. This segues directly into the title piece, by Lois V. Vierk. Lancaster is joined here by Larry Polansky (electric guitar) and Matthew Gold (marimba).

The material makes use of the slides and inflections of gagaku, a subject of extensive research by the composer.

Lancaster brings an Eastern flair to the score’s subtleties, while Polansky and Gold articulate vibrant ostinati and pulsating drones. The piece supplies an East-meets-West amalgam that is simultaneously distinctive and appealing.

The most recent work on the CD is Joan La Barbara’s Atmos (2008). Although written for multiple instruments and “sonic atmosphere” as a theatre piece, it still shows off Lancaster’s dramatic flair in this audio-only version.

La Barbara revels in the sounds of breath, manipulating live performer and recordings to create a wide range of “wind shadings.” Other effects include percussive attacks, key clicks, and all manner of vocalizations. La Barbara’s piece may be more directly influenced

by Cage than Cowell or Seeger, but it’s a welcome inclusion nonetheless, offering Lancaster a stunning showcase.

Another echo of the Ultramodernist school is James Tenney’s Seegersong #2 (1999). Tenney (1934-2006) used Ruth Crawford Seeger’s Piano Study in Mixed Accents as a basis for the piece, extending her ideas about tempo flexibility to encompass some of the investigations into large-scale rhythmic design that engaged him during his late career.

While all of this technical detail may be fascinating to insiders, the aural result is widely appealing: an artfully shaped solo flute piece. Lancaster handles its tricky rhythmic shifts with precision, while maintaining a sumptuous tone.

The CD closes with Piker, Larry Polansky’s five-movement work for solo piccolo, its title alluding to a 1935 letter from Marion Bauer to Ruth Crawford Seeger (“You’re no piker! But please drop me a card from somewhere!”).

Generally, one might think that five movements of solo piccolo is four too many, but Polansky’s inventiveness holds the listener’s interest throughout, including microtonal passages, devilishly difficult polymetric twists and turns, distressed Shaker tunes, and percussive foot stomps. Lancaster is also joined by Polansky and Gold on the final movement, so it’s not strictly a solo work.

Even so, it takes an artist of Lancaster’s caliber to make piccolo diverting for

twenty minutes—a task she accomplishes handily here. Christian Carey

Joëlle Léandre WIlliam Parker Live at Dunois Leo CD

Joëlle Léandre George Lewis

Transatlantic Visions RogueArt CD

Joëlle Léandre Quentin Sirjacq Out of Nowhere

Ambiances Magnétiques CD

Les Diaboliques Jubilee Concert Intakt DVD

The canon of duet double-bass recordings is not huge by any means, but hearing Malachi Favors and Tatsu Aoki’s 2 x 4 years ago has dispelled in this reviewer the preconceptions of them as novelties. Live at Dunois, a crisp and color-rich document of Francophone bassist Joëlle Léandre’s stage meeting with Bronx four-stringer William Parker at this past winter’s Sons D’Hiver Festival in France, is just as good. Conversations rich in rhapsodic yarns unfold over shifting layers of plucked blues, bowed moans, percussive string-slaps and occasionally an operatic climax (dig Léandre’s commanding wordless vocals about thirteen minutes in). Track increments mark the natural breaks in this all-improvised set, rather than starts of songs per se. But for instant kicks jumping to tracks 2, wherein a mystical funeral oratory seems underway, or track 6, with its Dadaist randomness and Leandre’s unison string-and-voice drones, are sure bets.

Trombonist George Lewis is indelibly individual, whether forging paths as a professor, music software designer or writer. But in his performance last year with Léandre at Vision Festival XIII, which is beautifully offered here for posterity by Rogue Art in the latest of its austerely packaged live releases, he did a heck of a job of swapping the self for the better symbiotic good.

The way his squawks, honks, bleats, wheezes and plunger-muted filigrees link up with Léandre’s toolbox worth of double-bass sounds almost unfailingly suggests a singular voice, sort of like the sound mosaic of a busy bus station.

That’s not to say that the proceedings aren’t tuneful, as the first and sixth tracks (titled simply as respective chapters in

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the seven-part “Transatlantic Visions”) come as close to melody as improvised minimalism can get. But generally the proceedings are ruled by old-fashioned juxtapositions of textures, with which Lewis and Léandre read each other like conjoined twins.

Perhaps because Léandre, 57, has logged serious hours as an educator (including, recently, a visiting-professor position at Oakland’s Mills College), she embraces new sounds and challenges with all the hunger of one at the opposite end the podium. Adding to her dossier of myriad endeavors, from solo bass albums to an octet inspired

by Eric Satie (Satiemental Journeys, which played alongside the Globe Unity Orchestra at this year’s Harlem Jazz Festival), is Out of Nowhere, a duet album with pianist Quentin Sirjacq. A protégé of Léandre’s from Mills, her young countryman brings a decidedly classical flavor to the eleven tracks, but without the stuffiness. Quite to the contrary, his low-to-high swoops, volume shifts, pulsing keys and chord shimmers reflect the genre at its most cathartic.

And while on rare occasions it seems as if Léandre wants to sturm und drang while Sirjacq wants to go pastorale, the results are respectable, and not unlike the post-classical work of Rachel’s.

Ever since encountering the likes of John Cage and Morton Feldman while a student in Buffalo in the mid-’70s, Léandre has managed to keep a foot in the sort of vocal performance art those men mastered. Les Diaboliques, which teams Léandre (on bass and voice) with pianist Irene Schweizer and vocalist Maggie Nicols, were filmed live in March 2006 at the Zurich club Moods, in what the Jubilee Concert DVD shows was fine form. Nicols acrobatically vocalizes, usually wordlessly, but sometimes with comedic narrative from, say, the perspective of Eve: “I must not go near the apple, I am a nice heterosexual girl…,” she sings, as Léandre lures her with pouty come-ons. The concert is part absurdist theatre and part musical improvisation, with Schweizer (who concentrates for the show’s entire hour or so on her piano) jumping from blocky Cecil Taylor chords to blues vamps to moody ambience. Léandre plucks, bows and manhandles her bass like so much pliable clay, and Nicols, whose voice alternately invokes Irene Aebi, Jeanne Lee and Patty Waters, provides all the charisma a front woman should. Interesting stuff, and a nice toast to Intakt’s 20th year in business.

Nathan Turk

Urs Leimgruber Thomas Lehn Lausanne For4ears CD

Reed player Urs Leimgruber and analog synth player Thomas Lehn are consummate collaborators. Though both have released solo outings, having another voice to play off of seems to bring out their best. This recording captures a concert the two played in Switzerland during a short tour, and one can hear their partnership develop over the course of these five compact improvisations. Lehn is a gestural player, his rapidfire sine-wave scribbles and echoing looped textures responding to Leimgruber as he works through percussive pops and sputters, harsh vocalizations and forceful overtones. Lehn 64 | SIGNAL to NOISE #55 WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM

started out as a pianist and that comes through here as well, as he blocks out masses of sound and texture. The reed player tosses spitfire flurries back at him; Lehn retorts with a series of calligraphic flourishes. The two can lock in on pulse-based momentum or spin off into pure textural exploration. It is all about the process, and they sometimes grapple with false starts and dead-ends.

But with players like these, the process is well worth following to see where it leads. Michael Rosenstein

Daniel Levin Ingebrigt Håker Flaten Gerald Cleaver Fuhuffah Clean Feed CD

Steve Swell Rob Brown Daniel Levin Planet Dream Clean Feed CD

Daniel Levin Quartet Live at Roulette Clean Feed CD

While you could call Daniel Levin one of the most vital cellists on the free improv scene these days, that would be selling him short. These three releases provide ample proof that he’s one of the most vital up-and-coming players, period.

First up is a trio with bassist Ingebrigt Håker Flaten and drummer Gerald Cleaver. Not too many cello-bassdrums trios come readily to mind, but these three quickly dig in to put aside any notion of mere novelty. Levin’s bowing darts and saws against Håker Flaten’s tumbling lines and Cleaver’s supple sense of time. The cellist’s compositions provide useful springboards for the trio’s improvisations, whether the soaring lines of “Wiggle,” the coursing groove of “Shape,” or the stirring free lyricism of “Woods.” “Metaphor” is constructed out of phased, looping lines, the parts floating in and out of synch while never losing a sense of staggering momentum. There’s also an arrangement of the folk song “Hangman,” where the bassist’s dark rumble sets off the leader’s tawny melodic inventions.

Levin is also part trombonist Steve Swell’s trio on Planet Dream, along with saxophonist Rob Brown. The compositions are by Swell and Brown, but as with Levin’s trio, they are mostly frameworks for group improvisation.

Working without a drummer, the three sustain an elastic sense of implied pulse, making good use of the timbral contrast between their instruments.

Swell’s pieces lope along with infectious free grooves; their anthemic themes fracture into hocketed lines that get tossed around in various sub-groupings.

Brown’s pieces tend to be more open, and the trio develops them into bracing three-way conversations.

Last up is the newest release by Levin’s quartet. Levin has been exploring this chamber-like instrumentation— cello, trumpet, vibes, and bass—since 2001. Matt Moran was a charter member and Nate Wooley replaced original member Dave Ballou in 2005. For this session, recorded live at Roulette in NYC in the spring of 2008, bassist Peter Bitenc sits in for long-time member Joe Morris. Levin’s compositions are sparser here than on the quartet’s

previous three releases, providing directional strategies rather than thematic structures. Titles like “Conversation I,” “Delicate,” “Lightspeed Particles I,” and “Scratchy” are one indication of how the leader has laid out just the barest of outlines for the group. Wooley is a master in this type of setting, showing a fine grasp of color and texture and a responsiveness to everything going on around him. Moran’s shimmering vibes playing is percussive and resonant. Bass and cello round things out with rich arco and quavering harmonics.

Individually each of these releases is a strong statement. Together, they’re a powerful case for Levin as one of the more interesting players around.

Michael Rosenstein

Lokai

Transition

Thrill Jockey LP / CD / download

Ominous creaks are the first sounds heard on Transition, the second album

by Lokai, an Austrian duo comprising Florian Kmet and Stefan Nemeth (who’s also in the band Radian). It’s as if Lokai had recorded this piece inside an antiquated factory with rickety machines controlled by ropes and pulleys. At least, that’s the scene that played out in the mind of this listener. Others may picture something altogether different, of course, but Lokai makes the sort of spare, moody music that sparks the imagination. Moments of buzzing tension surface from time to time, but Lokai’s combination of tick-tocking percussion, airy synth and elegant flourishes of acoustic guitar is mostly soothing. Transition is quieter than their 2005 debut, 7 Million, which featured

overwhelming waves of electronic noise on some tracks. The waves are more like gentle trickles here, though the record returns to those foreboding creaks on the final track. It’s anybody’s guess where this latest “transition” in Lokai’s soundworld is headed: we’ll just have to wait for album number three to find out. Robert Loerzel

Chris McGregor Trio Our Prayer Fledg'ling CD

Louis Moholo-Moholo Marilyn Crispell Sibanye (We Are One) Intakt CD

In three decades as a bandleader, South African pianist Chris McGregor left only a spotty history of recording sessions. Reissues have been sporadic since his death in 1990, but lately his music has become more available than ever. Cuneiform has issued several previously-unreleased performances by McGregor’s monumental Brotherhood of Breath, and Fledg’ling has unleashed three important London sessions produced by Joe Boyd in the period immediately preceding the formation of the Brotherhood. Because the focus soon turned toward McGregor’s big band, Our Prayer, and the septet date Up to Earth, both from 1969, never were released at the time. For McGregor and his fellow Blue Notes, who had all emigrated from South Africa in mid-decade, the late ’60s was a fertile and frustrating interval as they sought out new possibilities after the group disbanded. Our Prayer, with Blue Notes drummer Louis Moholo (he

adopted the double family name many years later) and American bassist Barre Phillips, was McGregor’s only piano trio session. Here the bass is often cast into a front-line role, as in the opening “Church Mouse” where it trades back and forth with the piano to maintain a muscular vamp that recalls the churchinspired melodies that grounded so many Brotherhood tunes. On “Moonlight Aloe,” McGregor begins by sketching out voicings that might well be filled out by a horn section, only to give way to a free extended solo. Increasingly, the musicians move towards collective free interplay, culminating in the title piece, which comprises more than half the record. Here, Moholo’s perpetually alert, nuanced drumming guide the others through every unexpected turn of events.

Sibanye, Moholo-Moholo’s duet with pianist Marilyn Crispell, was recorded in Baltimore nearly forty years after Our Prayer. Is there any way to summarize the changes in his playing over such a time span? Not easily. But it does seem as if he has gained a greater precision in his attack, a greater command of color, a more fluid capacity for polyrhythms.

This serves him well on this first meeting with Crispell, since she too has shown remarkable development in recent years, from the energy playing of her earlier work to the tenderness of her ECM releases. This concert swings between those two poles. The musicians start off the encounter with the appropriately boldly titled “Improvise, Don’t Compromise,” but particularly in the elegiac “Journey” and “Phendula (Reply)” they also achieve an evocative lyrical power. Most often the two modes of exchange alternate, but

in “Sibanye” Moholo and Crispell synthesize free improv vocabulary and lyricism, sketching out melodic gestures like so many quick bursts of flame.

Jason Weiss

Joe McPhee

Angels, Devils and Haints CJR CD

I've always been intrigued by “For John Coltrane,” the opening cut on Albert Ayler in Greenwich Village, which featured a string trio of bassists Alan Silva and Bill Folwell and cellist Joel Freedman backing the leader, sans drums.

Ayler’s alto approach here is rather straight, absent his more characteristic tortured multiphonics and jubilant wail.

Though Belgian violinist Michel Sampson’s dervish-like playing was a significant part of Ayler’s mid-period work, and he always used duetting bassists to interesting effect, the string ensemble’s prominence on this particular dirge was an opening of possibilities that the saxophonist never again realized.

Joe McPhee, saxophonist, trumpeter and torchbearer of the Ayler legacy, employs a similar, expansive format on Angels, Devils & Haints, a two-disc homage recorded nearly a decade ago in Le Mans and Nantes, France, and only now seeing release.

McPhee has recorded several duets with Dominic Duval, the bassist in Trio X, so he’s no stranger to stretching out the bass and saxophone format. Here, Duval is joined by Michael Bisio, Paul Rogers and Claude Tchamitian in a veritable canvas of bass interplay, full of tumultuous crackling, shoving, bustling and thwacking. Fifteen minutes into the nearly hour-long title piece, the

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basses scrabble and motor in alternating squeaks and low harmonics—the effect is resoundingly physical. When McPhee enters again, he toys with similar extremes in volleying declamations and glossolalia before entering into a declamatory call of the sort one finds at the Ayler brothers’ fingertips.

A different character emerges with the leader’s pocket trumpet; gulps and contorted, flute-like sounds spiral out of the horn, erupting into screams across the bassists’ quadruple pizzicato. In contrast, the opening of the Nantes disc is “Ol’ Man River,” an unaccompanied tenor rendition that rises from plaintive delicacy to bristling storms of activity—it’s a reverential performance that shows just how imbued with (the) spirit McPhee truly is. Angels, Devils & Haints is one of his most colorful sets, its force and beauty still as fresh as it was when it was recorded a decade ago.

Clifford Allen

R Millis 120

Etude CD

KMB JAZZ IN 2009 JOE MORRIS ATMOSPHERE

The final issue of the KMB Jazz CD-R series, Atmosphere is a powerfully intimate piece of music showcasing Morris' rarely-heard modes of banjo playing. Limited to 250.

MATT LAVELLE + MORCILLA THE MANIFESTATION DRAMA

Co-released with Lavelle, this quartet with Francois Grillot, Chris Forbes + Andre Martinez interweaves the leaders experiments in Harmlodics® with his Latin Heritage.

IDEAL BREAD THE IDEAL BREAD

Named runner-up as "best debut" in the 2008 Village Voice Critics' poll, Josh Sinton's group of Kirk Knuffke, Reuben Radding and Tomas Fujiwara plays the music of Steve Lacy.

ORDER DIRECT: KMBJAZZ.COM FUTURE: Josh Sinton plays Steve Lacy's Book of H Evil Eye (Pride/Moritz/Wooley/Filiano)

Robert Millis is one half of the redoubtable Climax Golden Twins. Long considered the little brothers of the Sun City Girls, due to a shared interest in ethnic art forms and old audio formats, I’ve always found the Twins to be the more interesting and consistent group, as they’ve all the humour of Sun City Girls with none of the smart-arse conceptual joking. The CGTs are slightly arch, but generally sincere, without being earnest. This approach informs 120, a collage piece from Millis’s archives which cuts field recordings and music sourced from old 78s with some of the most gorgeously otherworldly drones heard since Andrew Chalk or Loren Chasse.

120 progresses slowly like an abstract travelogue, from the opening section, which plays out one side of a phone conversation between a record dealer and a prospective customer, through to passages which juxtapose the audio of nature with beautiful stretches of shimmer and shudder, comedic episodes on man’s evolution, looping pianos and clattering Asian orchestras from the turn of the century, and tight edits that jolt the listener between sections as though you’re being jostled to and fro on a trans-continental train ride. It closes with “(Charcoal Twins)”, a threnody for parched guitars and levitating drones.

As with everything Millis touches, 120 combines the enthusiastic eyes and ears of a master researcher with an equivalent, highly advanced grasp of sonority. The result is poetic without pretension, and exceptionally rich and engaging. Jon Dale

Nicole Mitchell's Black Earth Strings Renegades Delmark CD

Flute and strings? If you’re thinking this is a set of polite chamber jazz stylings or what used to be called Easy Listening, you’re not even close. AACM flautist (and occasional vocalist) Nicole Mitchell takes her muse to another level on this new recording. The other players are Renee Baker on violin and viola, Tomeka Reid on cello, Josh Abrams on double bass and gimbre (a lute of ancient design with a wooden body and a skin resonator, still played in

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Morocco) and Shirazette Tinnin on drums and percussion. Mitchell has a very vocalized sound on flute and isn’t afraid to let loose with explosions that threaten to fry your system’s tweeters.

She is also a profoundly lyrical player and a significant composer, whose work recalls Julius Hemphill, Abdul Wadud, Leroy Jenkins and her illustrious predecessors in the AACM. The group is aptly named. It’s certainly earthy and deals with Great Black Music—Ancient to the Future in a very personal and committed fashion. There are moments of deep melancholia alongside joy and celebration. Mitchell’s “Wade”—an adaptation of the spiritual “Wade in the Water”—is a perfect example. From Mitchell’s liner notes: “I was thinking what it may have been like running for your life on the underground railroad.

The fear, the struggles, the sadness of leaving loved ones, the joy of making it to freedom, then the realization that it’s not heaven on the other side.”

Bill Barton

Joe Morris Petr Cancura Luther Gray Wildlife

Aum Fidelity CD

Joe Morris Simon H. Fell Alex Ward

The Necessary and the Possible Victo CD

Over the last three decades, Joe Morris has established himself as a strong leader and composer. But along the way, he’s also searched out collective settings for free improvisation. These two releases, quite different in nature, are examples of this side of his music.

Wildlife is a collective that Morris formed with alto and tenor player Petr Cancura and long-time collaborator Luther Gray on drums. Cancura’s throaty, garrulous tenor playing and acidic alto are informed by free jazz tradition without coming off as beholden to any one player. Morris (playing bass) drives things with looping, polyrhythmic undercurrents or pushes the momentum with thrumming, angular swing, playing off Cancura’s animated flurries and Gray’s caterwauling momentum. Gray’s simmering free swing is a particular pleasure, more evidence that he’s one of those players who deserves far more recognition than he has received. In his liner notes, Morris states that the group’s goal is to “make the music soar, bounce and swing, to sing, wail and lament, to search and discover.”

Over the course of four pieces, they do just that, unfolding spirited flights of melody and demonstrating a mercurial approach to pulse and groove. This is a compelling statement from the trio and marks Cancura in particular as someone to keep an eye out for.

In May 2008 (two months after recording Wildlife), Morris (this time on guitar), bassist Simon Fell, and clarinetist Alex Ward did a short tour of North America, culminating with a set at the 25th edition of the Victoriaville festival.

Right from the start of The Necessary and the Possible it is evident that this is collective communication of a kind that can only be developed after years of playing, the trio’s lines emerging, crisscrossing, and arcing off with

telepathic fluidity. There are times when the listener is diverted into following a particular line; but in short order, the three voices have coalesced with such mazelike intricacy that singling out just one is impossible. It’s hard to believe that music of this stature was created after just three performances together.

Let’s hope this is not the last to be heard from this trio; in the meanwhile, this disc is essential. Michael Rosenstein

of the six recordings. There are no other edits, no attempts at smoothing transitions. Baron’s shredded alto and Blairon’s percussive string slaps and delicate plucked patterns come through, lending the piece cohesiveness despite the chance element in its construction. This disc’s not an easy listen, but its rewards are in the way it makes the listener think about the process of its construction. Michael Rosenstein

Narthex

The New Dawn

Potlatch CD

Jackpot CD

Formnction To say that Narthex is a duo consisting of alto player Marc Baron and bassist Loic Blairon is a bit off the mark. While alto and bass are the sound sources, the two pieces on this CD are conceptual distillations. The two recorded six improvisations of exactly 30 minutes each in locations around France. For the first piece, they took one of the improvisations and digitally replaced the sound of the saxophone and bass with two sine waves at 1000 and 500 Hz. The background was then totally removed with digital noise cancellation.

What is left is totally bereft of gesture, timbre, inflection, or dynamics, leaving only duration. This is truly binary music; over the course of the 30-minute piece, each tone is either on or off.

The structure emerges solely from the balance between sound, silence, and the overlap of the two frequencies—the long upper register tones and choppier low tones. The second piece is no less beguiling. Here, the first 5 minutes of the first improvisation are followed by the second 5 minutes of the second improvisation, and so on through each

There's a New Dawn Recorded in 1970, There’s A New Dawn touches down in similar ground to any number of late ‘60s/early ‘70s period piece private press albums – light psychedelic touches festooning decent pop/rock songs with lyrics of questionable poetry. It’s the lyrical content that usually gets my teeth grating when listening to these records, being as they are an index of vaguely heavy concerns (‘the world is dying, you left me and I’m sad, I’m outside of society, the class system is a drag’) expressed with what feels like either a) touching concern and naivety or b) baffling unawareness of one’s textual incompetence. But The New Dawn, formed

by Dan Bazzy in the Pacific-Northwest USA and extant for several years before recording their one and only album as their career wound down, still punch above their weight. There are a bunch of nice, witchy touches here – the silvery organ and recorder that curls through the beautifully muted production on “Life Goes On”; the hilariously righton recordings of the sea that open “(There’s A) New Dawn”; indeed, much

of There’s A New Dawn transcends the homogeneity that turn-of-the-‘70s private press culture is often mired in.

Which is part of its charm for some – this breed of record collector would happily spend its life huddled next to a stack of mythical Holyground originals in someone’s dusty cupboard. But you should cheat The New Dawn out of this obscurity – questionable ’71 ‘heavier’ demos and ’08 live reunion notwithstanding. Jon Dale

Nudge

As Good as Gone Kranky CD

To Kill a Petty Bourgeoisie Marlone Kranky CD

Nudge, the trio of multi-instrumentalists Brian Foote, Paul Dickow (Strategy) and Honey Owens (Valet), return with a collection of dub-inflected psych-blues and ambient songs. Nudge is the perfect moniker for this threesome, who move between guitar, bass, programming and small percussion; they love to unfurl slow-burn tunes that drift and linger unhurriedly, alternating between beatific calm and searing misery and loathing. At the heart, though, of these disorienting songs is a sense of haunted fragility. Imagine There’s a Riot Going On crossed with Dr. John’s Gris-Gris, as interpreted by Mark Hollis. Foote and Owens’ vocals are flanged, phased, distorted and drowned in reverb. In fact, the metaphor of drowning seems appropriate for this record: at times—as on the dirge “Burns Blue”—it’s as if it’s struggling to keep from being swal-

lowed in a sea of effects. But elsewhere it keeps its head above the water, as on the dry, diffusive funk of “Two Hands” (with its tight wah-wah guitar figures) or the Tropicalista arrangements of “Tito.”

Despite a certain sonic consistency throughout the album—tremolo, chiming guitar atmospherics and 4AD-style production—it’s also capable of textural surprises, such as the delayed thumb piano and layers of wheezing harmonica on “Harmo” or the raw jazzy drums of “Aurolac.” The disc closes with “Dawn of Light,” where guitars and vocals crescendo into ecstatic distortion and feedback: an explosion that feels liberating after the cloistered quality of the rest of the album.

If As Good as Gone is an internalized struggle, Marlone is expansive and outward-looking. To Kill a Petty Bourgeoisie is the Minneapolis couple of Jehna Wilhelm (guitar and vocals) and Mark McGee (electronics and sound manipulation) plus assorted friends. Marlone builds on the combustible frisson of noise, melodies and processing that made their 2007 concept album The Patron so grand. If you’re going to give yourself an agit-prop name, then you better be able to back it up with some suitably abrasive sonic snarls. TKAPB do that with flair, especially on the industrial grinds of “Villain” and “Turritopsis” that recall early ’80s dark wave acts.

But they also draw on the lyrical guitar drones of Windy and Carl and Seefeel, swelling and sighing with a bewitching languor. And despite Wilhelm’s wistful voice, TKAPB also rage and roar with a ferocity that matches Godspeed! You Black Emperor. This makes for exciting and dynamic arrangements, especially when McGee overloads songs with

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abrupt noise bursts. Still, as “In People’s Homes” shows, this group isn’t above fashioning a good old fashion pop song à la Lush, either. But then that’s TKAPB, a group that seems to know no boundaries. Richard Moule

Offonoff

Slap and Tickle

Smalltown Superjazzz CD / download

Peter Brotzmann Toshinori Kondo Massimo Pupillo Paal Nilssen-Love Hairy Bones Okka Disk CD

The Thing Bag It!

Smalltown Superjazzz CD / LP / download

It’s fair to say that first time around the intersection of jazz and rock turned into a cul de sac, knocked off course by the failure of most practitioners to distinguish flash from content and, even worse, their total failure to rock. James Blood Ulmer and Last Exit pointed the way back to the highway by bringing the noise and viscera, and since the ’90s it has fallen to a younger generation— who approach rock and jazz without the distorting filter of hierarchical thinking—to set things right. By dint of extraordinary skill and relentless travel (these three records were recorded on two continents and feature ten musicians from seven countries), Norwegian drummer Paal Nilssen-Love has acquired MVP status in this most welcome second coming; he’s the guy who ties these albums together, but he’s certainly not the only reason to listen to them.

Offonoff is a trio comprising NilssenLove, electric bassist Massimo Pupillo (of Zu), and electric guitarist Terrie Ex (of The Ex). Since the latter two men have deep roots in punk, Slap and Tickle is the closest of the three records to rock music. Terrie’s vocabulary of jagged chords, metallic scrapes, and flying chunks of broken noise is the antidote to TMN (Too Many Notes) syndrome, and Pupillo rises to the challenge by churning out gut-compacting blasts of bludgeoning low-end sound. NilssenLove subdivides and restructures the action from moment to moment, balancing primitive brutality with exacting rhythmic invention.

Pupillo and Nilssen-Love encounter two grizzled veterans of free jazz on Hairy Bones. Peter Brötzmann and Toshinori Kondo wedded good oldfashioned fire music to Miles Davis’s post-Hendrixian electric trumpetplaying with Die Like A Dog; despite the gray in their manes, they are by no means old hounds waiting to be perked up by young pups here. There’s an element of “let us show you how it’s done” on the first track, with first Brötzmann’s sandpaper sax howls and then Kondo’s striated trumpet cries testing Pupillo’s resolve, stamina, and ideas to the limit. Nilssen-Love, who has previously worked with Brötzmann, knows the drill and wisely lays back a bit, restricting himself to frequency ranges that the horns don’t occupy and playing with less force than he does in Offonoff.

After the opening sprint he starts feinting and sparring with Brötzmann with the nimbleness of Muhammad Ali, and the going gets really good. Covering the ranges from hushed to haranguing, 68 | SIGNAL to NOISE #55 WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM

from naturally articulated to technologically fucked, the quartet make total music for the mind, body, and spirit.

The Thing has been combining free jazz and rock and roll since the turn of the century, but now they’ve got something else to put in their bag. Bag It! was recorded by Steve Albini, so you know that Nilssen-Love, saxophonist Mats Gustafsson, and bassist Ingebrigt Håker-Flaten’s renditions of rock songs by the Ex and 54 Nude Honeys have the requisite granite physicality. Mats confirms his free jazz bonafides with a heartrendingly haunted solo introduction to Albert Ayler’s “Angels.” You already know he can do this stuff; he simply does it extremely well here.

The change-up is Gustafsson and Håker-Flaten’s use of live electronics.

Gustafsson’s website confirms that he’s turned into an analog filter fan, and the occasions where set-to-stun oscillators overtake the trio’s heavy acoustic stomp and douse it in a radioactive acid bath make this a must-get even if you already have a rack full of their records.

Bill Meyer

Pauline Oliveros and Ione

IO and Her and the Trouble with Him: A Dance-Opera in Primeval Time Deep Listening DVD

“There is tremendous expansion in the so-called new music scene. What used to be a village is now a metropolis.”

Those words to an interviewer from Pauline Oliveros—one of the founding mothers of said village-cum-metropolis—work equally well when applied to her own neighborhood. Everything she does at this point brings to the table a rich mix of traditions and communities.

In this DVD, that moveable feast also comes from a few fellow chefs. It presents a live performance of a multimedia piece of theater in the ancient Greek sense of that word: theo-, a spectacle of gods afoot amid the cosmos, the earth, and their mortal foils. Dancers, singers, solo and in groups; live musicians improvising, taped electronic and electro-acoustic music improvised and composed; filmed images projected through the three-dimensional sculptural installation serving as the stage, to fall on their way to the backdrop across heavy rocks hung from steel cables, and a giant latticework web of taut rope, and metal hoop-swings that rise and fall, on all of which bodies perform— they work together like something Sun Ra, Homer, Mr. and Mrs. Coltrane, Isadora Duncan, Sappho, Katherine Dunham, John Cage, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, and Cheikh Anta Diop might have joined forces to cook up.

Oliveros’s “music and sound design” comprise recorded material dating from 1966 to the present, some added by collaborators in this project (the fruit of a year-long residency at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Music).

The live orchestra foregrounds post-jazz saxophonics and violinics along with various Maltese woodwinds. But there are many other strands here: we also encounter the most vital and least insular forms of experimental music from high concert tradition and academia; of “women’s music” and “world music”; and of improvised music (Oliveros is one of its handful of contemporary roots, along with Cecil Taylor and Or-

nette Coleman in their other traditions).

The hour here feels like the four-decade utterance it is.

That music is the water in the pot of a tale told by the equally schooled and well-seasoned Ione, whose script and direction of its enactment add some deep blues to Oliveros’s signature deep listening. With Joanna Haigood’s (aerial, as well as grounded) choreography, they voice and embody the more afrocentric sides mentioned above. Ione re-tells the ancient Greek myth of Io, the woman Zeus seduced then turned into a calf to hide her from his jealous wife Hera. Here, the male god’s selfish lust and deceit are less the way of the world and more a temporary distraction to work through and defeat; Hera is more the goad to help that process along than her husband’s enabling tormentor of his victims. Io winds her way through the lethal wiles of the one and the almost-too-strong medicine of the other to find her own immortality, reborn from Argos in Egypt as the goddess Isis.

One noteworthy part of the production is the intermittent stream of filmed images. They look to have been a powerful part of the spectacle, live: a crazed man-face for Zeus, his saintly counterpart on the other side of his turmoil, a serpent, a slow pan suggesting the Sea of Argos’s rocky sound, the thousand-eyed monster. On DVD, the effect is more that of a classic silent movie’s special effects—more prosaic, but as evocative.

Describing her myth as taking place in a “primeval, cyclical time” as everpresent as it is archaic, Ione imagines the emergence of semantic language itself in the addition of vowels to the

percussive, textural palette of a consonant speech predating such sense.

In fine mythical tradition, she conflates cosmic and geological creation and destruction with the powers of culture, society, and politics both “then” and “now.” Her material comes from the historical template of our own world’s founding myths in the birth and rise of literacy—in Mesopotamia, Egypt (with its early vowel-less writing systems), then Greece—which unfolded through several spikes in that now parochial region’s warfare and natural catastrophes, as well as in the arts and energies that would mitigate and survive them.

Pauline Oliveros’s long and thoughtful cultivation of the balance of yin and yang in both improvisation and composition seems just the vessel to carry such prime complexes, and Ione’s just the mind and voice to match it.

Mike Heffley

Tara Jane O'Neil A Ways Away K CD / LP

Tara Jane O’Neil records usually take a few weeks to sneak up on the listener; an extrovert she is not. A Ways Away is no different; indeed, its production, which is muted, hazy, and quietly psychedelic, predisposes you to taking a good long time to truly absorb O’Neil’s songs. But when you do, it becomes clear that she’s almost alone in her ability to gesture toward emotional complexity while keeping her cool.

You may also find that her songs, given their folksiness, their use of windswept slide guitar, softly bupping and trickling guitars, and gently propulsive percussion (there is some inexplicably lovely

tambourine and bells on here) come close to singer-songwriter ‘personal exposure’. Don’t be fooled. If you buried these songs under both a further haze of ‘70s non-production and a back story detailing a loner/loser who absented from reality, collector types would be bidding a storm on eBay for an original LP copy. But even when O’Neil moves closest toward traditional folk (as on the simple, see-sawing melody of “Beast, Go Along”), there’s something in her delivery—not quite coldness, perhaps a certain introversion and slight tartness to her tone—that sets Tara Jane O’Neil apart from the stool-sitting, earnestlyemoting emo-folk divas (both male and female) that currently clog upwardly mobile beer barns everywhere. If anything, it reminds of the slight remove/ distance that was particular to the songs of Rebecca Gates of The Spinanes.

Which is high praise from this quarter.

And while A Ways Away is not as potent as Spinanes’ Strand, that does not mean its loveliness should elude your audition. It is both an emotionally exhausting and formally rich slab of deep matter. Jon Dale

Evan Parker John Wiese

game these days. What is surprising about this set of four improvisations is how well the two carve out a common ground from divergent sensibilities without either one backing off. Parker’s immediately identifiable labyrinthine soprano and sagacious tenor snake against Wiese’s scabrous electronic grit and jump-cut digital processing. Wiese dives right in with rambunctious slabs of noise, but he’s savvy enough to open things up and not scrawl over the top of Parker’s intricate lines. Things get volatile as the two push into decidedly unsettled areas and then work their way out. While certainly a sideline for both players, it’s a serendipitous success.

As might be expected from a No Fun release, Wiese’s solo outing is a rawer affair. There’s a restless energy at play as he deploys fractured slivers of activity, spumes of feedback and blasts of static across tumultuous layers of noise. The CD is also released in a limited edition with a book of Wiese’s sketches, and in a way, these four pieces come across as the sonic equivalent of sketches, the lines and textures placed with a sure ear for balance and tension. Taken together, these two releases show complementary sides of Wiese’s playing.

Michael Rosenstein

Second Layer CD

People Band

John Wiese

Emanem CDx2

C-Section

Circle Snare No Fun CD

California noiseician John Wiese is not the most obvious collaborator for a guy like Evan Parker. But then again, considering matchups like Anthony Braxton and Wolf Eyes, anything is fair

69/70

In October 1968 the People Band assembled at Olympic Studios in London and recorded music for an album produced by Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts and issued two years later by the small, folk-oriented Transatlantic label. Until its CD reissue by Martin

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Davidson’s invaluable Emanem imprint in 2004, the recording languished in deepest obscurity. In a sense that was appropriate: People Band music, free jazz opening into a still less defined practice of improvisation, bared its backside to the world of commerce and commodities. It was essentially an involving event, a here-and-now occasion—part music circus, part orgiastic celebration, part communion. Yet the 2004 reissue makes it abundantly clear that even when heard as archival material People Band music remains a stirring and uplifting experience.

Now Emanem has retrieved more from the People Band vaults—music from a slightly later studio session, some taped at the home of pianist Mel Davis, a live blast from the Paradiso club in Amsterdam, and extraordinary documentation of a 16-strong gathering sounding out woodland on the outskirts of London. There has never been a fixed People Band line-up, and within that volatile identity participating musicians might decide to play each other’s instruments or to invite audience members to join them. Still there was from the start a dedicated nucleus, and although individually they have followed diverse routes across the intervening years, that core remains and sporadically gets together to play today, four decades on. Mel Davis is commonly acknowledged as the prime mover of this band, although being leaderless has been a political as well as musical fundamental of the People Band’s existence. There has been no definitive sound either, idioms collide and morph—although the marvellous combined reeds of George Khan, Davey Payne and Paul Jolly, tussling and bickering or soaring together, add a distinctive flavor. Other key ingredients are Mike Figgis’s trumpet and fluegelhorn, Charlie Hart’s robust double bass, Tony Edwards’ percussion and the idiosyncratic accents of Terry Day’s potent kit work. Individual virtuosity is never an end in itself although it may feature in the detail, amongst the convoluted patterns that form and dissolve within the music’s turbulent and sometimes chaotic flow.

For their quintet set at the Paradiso, Hart, Day, Jolly and Payne were joined

by American clarinettist Albert Kovitz.

This is People Band music observing free jazz protocol, but as a launching pad rather than a guiding light. It’s a joy to hear Day’s combination of drive and sensitivity figuring like a dancing daemon at the music’s heart. The jam in the woods, preserved with surprising clarity and depth that extends to the jet planes intermittently roaring overhead, has the feel of some arcane communal rite, a minor miracle of lawless coherence. At a time when freely improvised music has become self-conscious about its own history, this is an important addition to awareness of that past. More importantly, there’s real freshness and vitality to this anarchic music, bound by no formula and hugely enjoyable.

Julian Cowley

Perlonex and Charlemagne Palestine It Ain't Necessarily So Zarek CDx2

The second double-disc collaboration CD between Charlemagne Palestine and the three Berlin micro-improvisers 70 | SIGNAL to NOISE #55 WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM

in Perlonex is another live recording, this time from Vienna’s esteemed Porgy and Bess club in late 2006. Perlonex is Ignaz Schick (tube sine wave generator, looper, objects, turntable), Jörg Maria Zeger (various guitars and stomp boxes) and Burkhard Beins (selected percussion and objects, small electrics); Palestine plays grand piano, voice and cognac glass. The recording is excellent and intimate: you feel like you are there.

After the first set’s applause dies down, even the CD audience is treated to Palestine’s banter regarding the fact that they are playing in a jazz club, so, like a jazz band, they will play two sets (and even an encore!). The music, however, is anything but jazzy. The feel that the four improvisers bring to their art cannot be overemphasized: there’s a lot of minimalist improvising following in the footsteps of AMM, but the pacing and sound of this group truly embody another leap for this style. The developments are slow, but molten, not glacial.

And the addition of Palestine riffing on Gershwin’s lyrics buoys the engrossing tumult with rare humanity, humor and anger. This recording could become a touchstone for future improv that seeks to intermesh intensity with personality.

Andrew Choate

Polwechsel & John Tilbury Field

hatOLOGY CD

Phosphor Phosphor II Potlatch CD

Polwechsel’s personnel has shifted over the last 15 years, and their sound has accordingly moved on from the resolute austerity of their self-titled debut.

First came the addition of John Butcher, whose reed playing added a warmth to the timbral palette of Werner Dafeldecker’s bass and Michael Moser’s cello.

The addition of percussionists Burkhard Beins and Martin Brandlmayr on Archives of the North (and the departure of guitarist Burkhard Stangl) marked another significant change. This time out, the group’s sound is expanded with the addition of AMM’s pianist John Tilbury.

Moser’s composition “Place/Replace/ Represent” places Tilbury’s bell-like notes and hanging chords alongside a prerecorded piano track, which is played back into a second piano to create ghostly resonances. Over the piece’s deliberately paced 22 minutes the pianist interacts with the ensemble’s groaning string drones, breathy reeds, shimmering metallic scrims and soft abrasions. Dafeldecker’s “Field” uses contrasting dynamics and densities as compositional building blocks—buzzing static and hiss build up, for instance, only to be displaced by dark growling string abrasions. Polwechsel has now moved on again—Butcher has since left the group, leaving just two string players and two percussionists—and it will be intriguing to see where they go next.

Phosphor II is a follow-up to the group’s eponymous 2001 debut.

Burkhard Beins, Axel Dörner, Robin Hayward, Annette Krebs, Andrea Neumann, Michael Renkel, and Ignaz Schick have played together in a variety of contexts over the last decade, refining a language of meticulous, textural group interaction. But those expecting a study in reductionist reserve here will be in for

a surprise. The seven musicians have orchestrated a collective language out of the fricative sputters, plosive grit, and sibilant hisses of extended technique, nimbly interweaving string overtones, tuned percussion, and pinched and overblown brass with rustling static and piercing sine waves. The members of this septet are keen listeners and they develop pieces full of inner drama through an animated balance of density and dynamics. As good as their initial release was, this one shows a clear progression. Michael Rosenstein

crawl of “Request For Masseuse”. That they follow it with the hyperactive punk scrawl of “Human Upskirt” suggests they’re keen on playing with their listeners, not to mention flagging their continuing obsession with jokey song titles, which nicely undercuts some of their formal advances. King Of Jeans is an unpretentious rock record which is aware enough of its historical context to know exactly what to do, but not too reverent to be stuck in the past.

Jon Dale

Pissed Jeans

Opus de Life

King of Jeans Sub Pop CD / LP

People often say ‘what goes around, comes around’. What they don’t tell you is that what ‘comes around’ often sets niche markets off into paroxysms of absolute delight that their moment in the sun has returned with a blinding flash (or, just as often, smoking embers and ash). So to the Amphetamine Reptile school of scuzz-rock or pig-fuck or whatever you want(ed) to call it. Pissed Jeans often get caught up in this wave of reminiscence, but there’re smarter things going on in their records that are sometimes overlooked—the riffs snap with an energy that often reminds me of The Kinks inventing heavy metal, the noise moves around with a concision that’s sorely lacking in some of Pissed Jeans’ peers, and perhaps most importantly, King Of Jeans is loaded with great songs, which has often not been the purview of this field. There’s also something in the riff-movement here that’s more satisfying than a hundred Clockcleaner records—witness the slow

Profound Sound Trio Porter CD

This is the kind of set free improvisers and their fans always hope for and rarely get. One expects music full of energy, subtlety, and exploration from saxophonist Paul Dunmall, bassist Henry Grimes, and drummer Andrew Cyrille, the players who make up the Profound Sound Trio; it’s the kind of music they routinely make. But something happened on this stifling hot night at last year’s Vision Festival that lifted all three of these men at the same time to the peak of their capabilities. This hour’s worth of music simply overflows with life and passion, bursts explosively open into one sonically amazing area after another, but never loses its focus along its twisting pathways. In its effortless grace, musicality, wit, boundless ideas, and swing, Cyrille’s performance is extraordinary in every way. His snare and bass drum manage to sound like both a talking drum and Kenny Clarke; his conversational approach to rhythms (swinging but not necessarily anchored to a stated beat) and nuanced cymbal

work are always perfectly attuned to what’s going on in the music. Grimes sounds totally alert and engaged on both bass and violin. He plucks out his lowest notes to form a troubled bed for the music, with an urgency that keeps the music moving without pushing it aggressively. His bowed work is celestial, yearning, beautiful, and also fueled by a forward momentum that keeps Cyrille and Dunmall at a boil.

This is one of his best post-comeback recordings. And Dunmall is a tenor gladiator, strong, cathartic, and detailed in his improvising. His phrases build up ridiculous momentum and tension, and then disintegrate into wails and rasps.

He spirals upward into his altissimo register in response to Grimes’ violin and lodges himself deep in Cyrille’s rhythmic abstractions. It’s a performance in which they just keep challenging one another, and the challenge is met every time. Ed Hazell

Respect Sextet Sirius Respect Mode CD

The Respect Sextet has a playful way with the material they cover, but their name isn’t entirely ironic. The transformations they work on the compositions of Stockhausen and Sun Ra on their latest release bespeak a genuine respect for the creative spirit. The mere fact that they would search for connections between those two preeminent mystics from two very different musical traditions indicates a willingness to look beneath stylistic surfaces for deeper truths.

Sometimes their arrangements slowly stalk the tune, creeping up then springing on it in a rush of recognition. Other

times they plunge in, recasting the melodies in different instrumental colors or displacing accents to give them different shapes. If there’s a precedent for their re-imaginings of compositions, it might be Misha Mengelberg (an admitted inspiration) and his recasting of Monk and Herbie Nichols for the ICP Orchestra. The album sometimes brings Stockhausen and Ra into musical alignment. For instance, Stockhausen’s “Leo” sounds a lot like a Sun Ra processional, and Ra’s “Saturn” is bonded to the German composer’s “Capricorn” in a concluding medley. Individually, the group—trumpeter Eli Asher, trombonist James Hirschfeld, saxophonist Josh Rutner, keyboardist Red Wierenga, bassist Malcolm Kirby, and drummer Ted Poor—are all excellent soloists.

They take what is essentially a Jazz Messengers instrumentation and orchestrate the arrangements and soloing for maximum variety. The boldness and individuality of this unlikely pairing of composers marks the Respect Sextet as one of the best and most ambitious new ensembles in jazz. Ed Hazell

Christopher Roberts Trios for Deep Voices Cold Blue CD

All too often, the double bass is an instrument that is, in the words of our previous president, “misunderestimated.” While it is frequently used to secure the low end of an orchestra, playing sustained tones and ostinati, the bass also has extensive capacities as a solo instrument. It has a much wider range than is frequently employed in ensemble contexts. Effects too are underutilized in mainstream concert

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music; harmonics, in particular, can sound quite evocative on bass. An object lesson in this regard is Christopher Roberts’ new recording Trios for Deep Voices, which includes not one but three bassists: Roberts, Mark Morton, and James Bergman. Trios is inspired in part by Roberts’ 1981 trip to New Guinea. The sound of the country’s wildlife and memories of music-making with natives in the Star Mountains subtly infiltrate the proceedings; percussive effects and birdcall imitations can be heard throughout the CD. Roberts is also influenced by minimalism, creating great swaths of overlapping repetitions and drones: the results can be thrilling, such as the big, thick chords sounded by the three bassists on the album’s opener, “Hornbills.” Most important, though, is the haunting lyricism evident throughout the disc: it’s particularly effective in the final movement, “Mesto,” where frequent dynamic swells give an extra lift to soaring solo melodies and supple pantonal harmonies.

Christian Carey

Henning Sieverts Symmetry Blackbird Pirouet CD

The mark of any creative instrumentalist is the development of a signature voice, and with it the ability to shape any performance in which you’re a participant.

Percussionist John Hollenbeck has long since reached that plateau, lending his light-yet-powerful propulsion and unique palette of colors to every recording he’s on. This diverse program by bassist Henning Sieverts’ quintet is a prime example. Whether maintaining a balance with a swaggering frontline of Chris Speed’s tenor sax and Johannes Bauer’s trombone on “Wingswing,” providing swift movement behind the chamber ensemble interplay of “Dribs and Drabs,” or churning and clanking underneath the bustling theme of “Gale in Night, Nightingale,” Hollenbeck commands attention without detracting from the group esthetic.

Sieverts doesn’t lack for interesting ideas, either, recasting Charlie Parker’s “Blues for Alice” as a gentle ballad with a wandering tempo and combining Paul McCartney’s title song with a traditional refrain in minimalist clothing.

Speed’s clarinet work provides strong contrast for Bauer’s burly trombone, and Sieverts turns in some expressive playing on the solo “Low Owl” and the pretty closer, “O.M.’s Birdsday.”

James Hale

Simak Dialog Demi Masa Moonjune CD

What does Indonesian fusion sound like? On Simak Dialog’s fifth release, keyboardist Riza Arshad has a gritty Rhodes setup that evokes Chick Corea or Jan Hammer circa 1973 and a similar vocabulary, and although guitarist Tohpati’s distant, wiry sound sets him apart from the demigods of that era, he can navigate the fretboard with equal ability.

However, instead of a bombastic jazzrock drummer, the percussion duties are handled by two Sundanese kendang percussionists. At first, it's a welcome change, but the bed of gentle hand drumming, combined with the mildmannered bass of Adhithya Pratama, 72 | SIGNAL to NOISE #55 WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM

makes it difficult for the music on this CD to gather intensity; most cuts get off to an energetic start but then settle into cruise control, with Arshad in particular having a tendency to solo at great length. This group certainly achieves a distinctive ethnic, chilled-out brand of fusion without sacrificing rock drive, and Demi Masa offers compositional value as well as chops: Arshad’s themes have both a knottiness and a melodic charm. However, one gets the sense that this rambling 70-minute CD could effectively been boiled down to a tight forty-five minutes. Pat Buzby

Six Organs of Admittance Luminous Night Drag City CD / LP

Ben Chasny, the sole constant soul in Six Organs of Admittance, has a knack for making a turn that looks like it’ll take him in one direction and ending up somewhere totally different. Remember the time he signed up free-improvising wild man Chris Corsano and made a delicate, mostly acoustic troubador record? He’s done something like that again. Luminous Night’s producer Randall Dunn is mainly known for his work with leviathans like Earth and Sunn O))), and Chasny’s been known to kick up quite a racket on occasion. But while this record does sound big and it makes no bones about confronting the cosmos, it’s not particularly heavy.

Hans Tueber’s flute and Eyvind Kang’s viola make as much of a mark as Chasny’s guitar, which never comes out stomping; there’s nary a power chord to be found. It’s been a long time since Six Organs issued an album on Holy Mountain Records, but there’s something especially Jodorowsky-esque about this effort. The spacious arrangements sound seriously windblown, and Chasny sings like a man who is deeply aware of his struggle with his place in the scheme of things. But the way his voice is placed high in the mix hews closer to pop convention than is usual for Six Organs. It’s telling that there’s a song here called “The Ballad of Charley Harper,” after the late minimal realist painter; as in Harper’s painting, each detail takes up a lot of space, and none are superfluous. Bill Meyer

The Slits

Trapped Animal Narnack CD

Thirty years after the release of their first record, Cut, it’s hard to imagine what a new disc by The Slits “should” be.

The group cut one of the most radical figures in the British punk explosion with jagged songs about shoplifting and stereotypes and their provocatively undermining use of fashion and femininity. They quickly embraced the reggae subculture that lurked below the punk scene and reinvented themselves as earth mamas with a series of dub sides. And then they were gone.

Singer and motivating force Ari Up (the only original Slit to continue recording and performing) reunited with bassist Tessa Pollitt in 2006 and with a new generation of women (including Sex Pistols drummer Paul Cook’s daughter Hollie) hit the road and released a three-song, 10-minute EP. The 14-track Trapped Animal is the band’s chance to prove they weren’t just one of the

most exciting English groups of the ’70s uprising but (unlike, say, the Pistols) also remain viable in the 21st century. The disc doesn’t threaten to displace Cut as the finest record in their short catalog.

But it does show a band that’s existing in the present. It wavers between some fun if tossable punk-pop numbers and some better (and others worse) Rasta grooves. The confusing get-over-yourchild-abuse anthem “Issue” is just too mad to make sense of, and “Peer Pressure” is fun even if it raises the question of where the band’s ’tween voice springs from. But when they hit, as with the hyper-infectious title track or the laid-back groove of “Cry Baby” (sung

by Cook), they come off as a band that went out and learned what they could do the old-fashioned way, whatever the history behind their name. The closer, “Had a Day,” sounds unlike anything they’ve ever done, an unusual piece of ethereal anger. Ari often boasts (or, rather, toasts) of The Slits as the “original punky reggae party,” something they’ve never quite distilled on record.

Trapped Animal sums that up, without looking backward. Kurt Gottschalk

Wadada Leo Smith Jack DeJohnette America Tzadik CD

Wadada Leo Smith has always had a strong connection to percussionists, from his early encounters with Steve McCall to his work with Bobby Naughton and Pheeroan akLaff on his own Kabell label. A collaboration with Gunter “Baby” Sommer as part of a trio with Peter Kowald proved particularly fruitful—an association renewed three years ago when they performed a duet in tribute to the late bassist. This duo with Jack DeJohnette has been in the makings for a while now: the drummer was part of the original line-up of Smith’s Golden Quartet and the two have been discussing recording a duo together for a decade. Tzadik has come through for Smith again, providing studio time for them to work through a suite that the trumpeter has been developing over the last few years. The spare pairing of trumpet and drums underscores the free blues inflections of Smith’s playing. His warm, burnished

tone dances across the drummer’s lithe pulse, moving from clarion anthems to plaintive lyricism. DeJohnette is indelibly associated with Miles Davis’s ’70s sessions. But he was also part of the Creative Music Studio in Woodstock, where he crossed paths with several AACM luminaries. This meeting accentuates that side of his playing and pushes him to some of his strongest music of late. One of the pieces is titled “Ed Blackwell, the Blue Mountain Sun Drummer,” and DeJohnette’s musicality and supple approach to time pay fitting tribute. The intimate recording captures the duo perfectly. Michael Rosenstein

Warren Smith Composers Workshop Old News Borrowed Blues Engine CD

There should be a special place of honor for people like percussionistcomposer Warren Smith, who has spent his entire life working within the jazz community and deepening his art without much regard for the superficial trappings of fame. Nor has he paid much heed to stylistic boundaries, either: he’s worked with Janis Joplin (he was her musical director) and Max Roach (M’Boom), Julius Hemphill (Flat Out Jump Suite) and Van Morrison (Astral Weeks). For more than two decades he also ran a loft, Studio WIS, where, among other things, he regularly convened the Composers Workshop Ensemble to play his original big band charts. This is their first album in about 25 years, which is to be lamented, given the spirit of freedom, intergenerational esprit de corps, and attractive compositions in evidence throughout this disc.

The pieces, many of them musical portraits or tone poems in the Ellington tradition, cover a lot of territory, from the opening reggae lope of “Rivers State Suite” to the hard-swinging swagger of “One More Lick for Harold Vick.”

“Hungarian Gypsy Song” is a lyrical jazz-rock ballad, its orchestration closely voiced; a glaze of vibraphone gives it a beautiful shimmer. (Smith was with Gil Evans, too, and the experience sometimes shows in his harmonies and use of low brass.) “Free Forms 1–4” are frameworks for free improvisation.

There are no less than four percussion-

ists, along with bassist Jaribu Shahid and guitarist Yoham “Chiqui” Ortiz, and together they easily handle the pieces’ rhythmic variety. Saxophonist Andrew Lamb does a star turn on “Rivers State Suite,” modulating from songlike improvisation to a joyfully roaring climax.

Other outstanding soloists include altoist Douglas Yates, baritonist Claire Daly, euphonium player Joe Daley, and long-time Ensemble member Jack Jeffers on bass trombone. This is one of the great unsung rehearsal bands, and Old News Borrowed Blues is a lovely reminder of what it sounds like when people get together just to make music for the sheer love of it. Ed Hazell

Günter “Baby” Sommer Live in Jerusalem Kadima Collective CD

The six tracks here, recorded during German drummer Günter “Baby” Sommer’s visit to Jerusalem in July 2008, feature him in a variety of settings: solo, duo, two different trios and two different quartets. The solo piece “Sommertime” will be a familiar routine to his fans. While my favorite version is still the one from his Victo record with Peter Kowald and Connie Bauer (3 Wheels, 4 Directions), his dapper touch is infectious and it’s always interesting to hear the different choices he makes from version to version. The best collaboration on this disc is “Yo Yo Yo,” a quartet with bass clarinetist Yoni Silver, tenor saxophonist Yonatan Kretzmer and guitarist Yonatan Albalak. Albalak’s freewheeling, slightly psychedelic playing pushes Sommer in a direction I’ve never heard before, and the interplay between the lower registers of the sax and bass clarinet makes for a truly heavy sound.

The trio with bassist JC Jones and baritone saxophonist Steve Horenstein on “Bojoh” produces special moments, too: Sommer even sings, and on drums he gets off some explosive eruptions in reaction to Jones’s big bass.

Andrew Choate

The Sperm Shh!

De Stijl LP

Finnish composer Pekka Airaksinen is

one of his country’s most prolific composers, though much of his work has remained outside the limelight. Where other Scandinavian composers looked to the Darmstadt school, Airaksinen instead turned to psychedelia, free improvisation and ragas, and in the late 1960s he became one of the founding members of the guerilla-art collective The Sperm. The Sperm’s only properly issued record, 1970’s Shh!, was issued on Airaksinen’s O Records and reissued on CD-R in 1998. This De Stijl LP is its first authorized reissue anywhere outside of Finland, giving this curious entry on the Nurse with Wound list a bit more currency with contemporary listeners.

To a degree, “Heinäskirat I” recalls the music of Swedes Folke Rabe and Bo Anders Persson: pulsing chords in decaying repetition, fleshed out with low electric rumble echoing from somewhere deep in the earth. Though hewing close to the middle and lower frequencies, there’s an icy thinness to the sounds that saps some of the potential for room-filling environment, providing instead a tense, burbling soundtrack for micro-movement and decay. The piece closes with rhythms built on sampled insect sounds and metallic whirr, and there’s a purely tonal (and very orchestral) sense of uplift before it dies out in fading feedback. “Korvapoliklinikka Hesperia” begins with gloopy church organ drift and billowy grunge, overlaid with sampled phone conversations.

Soon, words and sound masses play off one another contrapuntally. The opening of side two captures the collective music of The Sperm with “Jazz Jazz,” a piece for saxophones, trumpet, organ and background plodding that recalls the distant and pseudo-naive music of early AMM. Initially spacious and tense, the trio of horns builds into low blasts and multiphonic squall before dying out. Shh! teeters precipitously between some form of humanity and sheer electronic alienation, never settling into either mode for too long. Clifford Allen

Splinters

Split the Difference Reel Recordings CD

The British old guard finds common ground with the British new guard (circa 1972) in two long free improvisa-

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tions on this delightful album. The ad hoc ensemble convened for this session includes saxophonist Trevor Watts, drummer John Stevens, trumpeter Kenny Wheeler, and bassist Jeff Clyne along with three open-minded stalwarts of the London bebop scene, tenor saxophonist Tubby Hayes, drummer Phil Seamen, and pianist Stan Tracey. Together they make music that isn’t at all tentative, but patient, openhearted, and mutually supportive.

It also swings like the dickens. The formal outline is a familiar one in free improvisation: collective ensembles with soloists breaking out as inspiration strikes, others entering in with commentary, riffs, and parallel improvisations when appropriate. Instruments drop in and out of the ensemble to keep the textures and density varied.

It’s all quite relaxed and everyone is clearly having a ball. It’s always a joy to hear Stevens play in tempo, and he and Seamen bubble along merrily together from the start, without ever losing clarity or overwhelming the horns. Wheeler is in especially good form, placing special emphasis on his lyrical-free side and his flashing, quicksilver control of timbre. Watts foregoes the kind of fragmented discourse he pursued with Stevens in the Spontaneous Music Ensemble, and emphasizes linear continuity and melody when he solos. Hayes proves to be a deft free improviser, repurposing the bop vocabulary of wails and gruff tones for this unstructured context and weaving intricately contoured lines above the steaming rhythm section. The only disappointment is Tracey, who is inexplicably reticent and only steps forward towards the end of the first improvisation, “One in One Hundred” (he’s not on the second). Sometimes adding new voices to a group of regulars provides just enough of a twist to keep everyone fresh and alert.

Ed Hazell

Talibam!

Boogie in the Breeze Blocks ESP-Disk' CD

Over the last six years, New York noise doof electro improv meisters Talibam! have appeared on a couple dozen CDs, handmade CD-Rs, cassettes, compilations and even a spilt 10”.

They’ve hammered away relentlessly, respectably, at clubs, spots and squats around town, and have taken their mayhem on the road. But landing their new CD Boogie in the Breeze Blocks on ESP is the most hilariously appropriate move they could have made. At the core of the band is the Sun Ra / Keith Moon duo of Matt Mottel (Cooper-Moore, Shadowmaps) on keyboards and Kevin Shea (Storm & Stress, Coptic Light, People, Mostly Other People Do The Killing) on drums. The pair is cloaked in broad musical knowledge, juvenile humor and a lot of friends (Michael Evans, Chris Forsythe, Mike Pride and the rest of MOPDTK, among others, all contribute to the new album), adding up to a swirlwind of Zappa, Boredoms, Sabbath, Dragnet and more on Breeze Blocks. It’s total fun, and they manage to jam out manic ideas long enough, at times, to develop surprising grooves. ESP-Disk has been doing some great work recently; the venerable label seems to be back on its feet, 74 | SIGNAL to NOISE #55 WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM

(re-)reissuing not just the familiar classic titles by Ra and Ayler, Pearls Before Swine and the like, but also bringing out some crazy trippy ’60s artifacts (check out Cromagnon’s Cave Rock).

The label that once actively backed Esperanto is the perfect match for the band, and Mottel—a scenester since before he could get into the clubs legally—knows it. Ridiculous perfections are at work. Kurt Gottschalk

Tiptons Sax Quartet Laws of Motion Zipa! / Spoot CD

Formerly known as the Billy Tipton Memorial Saxophone Quartet, the Tiptons in this incarnation feature Amy Denio (alto sax, clarinet and voice), Jessica Lurie (alto and tenor saxes, voice), Sue Orfield (tenor sax and voice), Tina Richerson (baritone sax and voice) and Chris Stromquist (drums). Laws of Motion is a potently swinging brew of jazz improvisation, Gypsy music, klezmer, hints of Italian banda, a healthy dose of funk (particularly in the drumming), a smidgeon of rock, and oblique nods to a wide assortment of experimental and world music traditions, perhaps most notably the off-kilter rhythms and complex structures of Balkan music. Denio and Lurie are impressively soulful and expressive vocalists, singing in Italian and Taiwanese as well as wordless languages of their own spontaneous invention; Denio’s mastery of extended techniques is a real ear-opener. They are both remarkably inventive composers too. This music never comes off as a mish-mash of influences but instead as an organic blend with a flavor all its own. Denio’s arrangements of Gabriella Schiavone’s “Sind” and the traditional Taiwanese “Mi Yo Mei” are fetching indeed.

There is some absolutely volcanic solo work from all four reed players and Richerson provides a powerful fulcrum for the richly voiced ensembles. It’s fun, it moves and it keeps your attention through a variety of moods, both earthly and otherworldly. Bill Barton

Tres Gone Sextet with Perry Robinson Robo-Robinson MMA CD-R

Rozanne Levine & Chakra Tuning Only Moment Acoustics CD

Clarinetist Perry Robinson’s activities have covered a vast area of contemporary improvisation over the past four decades; having made his name in “fire music,” playing with Archie Shepp, Henry Grimes, and Roswell Rudd, he’s since become involved in a number of cross-disciplinary outfits.

Two new discs feature him in the very different company of Portland’s Tres Gone Sextet and clarinetist Rozanne Levine’s Chakra Tuning ensemble.

Mike Mahaffay’s Tres Gone Sextet takes a multi-ethnic and multi-disciplinary approach. Robo-Robinson brings the reedman aboard for thirteen improvisations on an instrumental canvas including theremin, vibra-band (a large, blown rubber band) and a plethora of sampling devices. While the group is unabashedly free-form in its explorations, emphasizing passages

of otherworldly textural detail and indeterminate white noise from electronics, guitars, and percussion, a defiant sense of swing remains. That’s mostly due to Robinson’s clarinet, which stitches together chamuleau digs, upper-register trills, and fragments of singsong melody. On “Killer Bees” his piercing shouts and squirrely growls cut through the grungy, synthesized stew, propelled by Mahaffay’s free-time march; the guitars and Stan Wood’s vibra-band (which mimics trumpet, tenor or baritone saxophones from bar to bar) occasionally add their own accents.

Rozanne Levine’s Chakra Tuning, on the other hand, is a ritualistic exploration of space, timbre and communication. Levine, Robinson, and Mark Whitecage play a range of clarinets, whistles, wooden flutes and percussion, augmented by violinist and vocalist Rosi Hertlein. The tracks range from the leader’s unaccompanied woody lullabies and duets with Whitecage to the quartet’s more diverse palette.

Flute, shakers, thunder sheet, chants and violin signal the entry of “Thunder Talks,” developing into an excited four-way burble: insistent shakes and claps, staccato yelps, sinewy violin and twittering ocarina. Low clarinet blats and the tug of Hertlein’s violin signal “Lying in Bed, Moving Through Space”; here, the musicians’ long unison tones blend and fall in and out of phase with one another, punctuated by occasional scrabble. Unlike RoboRobinson, this disc subsumes the clarinetist’s delicate weavings of breath, line, voice and gesture into the group’s fabric. Even when the foursome surge and pirouette, Only Moment retains

an extraordinarily meditative, almost therapeutic quality. Clifford Allen

Trio 3 with Irene Schweizer Berne Concert Intakt CD

Trio 3—alto saxophonist Oliver Lake, bassist Reggie Workman, and drummer Andrew Cyrille—has established itself over the last two decades as one of the most rigorous and exploratory improvising groups. On this release they are joined by protean pianist Irene Schweizer in concert at the Taktlos Festival in Berne, Switzerland in 2007. Schweizer’s uncanny ability to merge delicacy with explosiveness fits perfectly with the trio's churning, restless ambience. A number of the composition titles from this performance epitomize what the music is all about: “Timbral Interplay,” “Phrases,” “Flow” and “WSLC”—the players’ initials indicating spontaneous group authorship. Cyrille’s “Aubade” is an outstanding track, its bouncy, angular head articulated by Lake’s sax and Cyrille’s melodic drumming (which shows him squarely in the tradition of Roach and Blackwell). The piece then shifts into an arrhythmic dreamscape of darting sound fragments, changing textures, mysterious noises and splinters of melody, until the head returns—succinct and playful, as in the beginning. This 12-minute piece encapsulates all the strength and subtlety that this trio-plus-one displays throughout the concert. The recording as a whole shows that, while the group has total mastery over the history of jazz, their ears are turned toward an

infinity of future sounds. And this in turn explains why there is something inscrutable about the music these four masters perform here, as if we listeners are receiving messages sent back into the present from that boundless future.

Alan Waters

Various Artists

Gamelan of Central Java X: Sindhen Trio

“Wilujeng,” a traditional piece used to mark the passing of a musician, features great string playing balanced with watery bells and a swinging rhythm.

The sounds of the Balinese gamelan have been available to Western ears for a long time; this series is doing great work to expand the world’s understanding of how gamelans play all over Indonesia. Andrew Choate

Felmay CD

Various Artists

Felmay CD

Sub Rosa CD

Gamelan of Central Java XI: Remembrance The latest releases in this great series showcase some gorgeous vocal work.

The Sindhen Trio disc has two long vocal pieces and a 14-minute instrumental. “Budheng-Budheng” is 30 minutes long, a performance of a composition dating from the 18th or 19th century.

(Detailed, informative booklets accompany each release.) Three female vocalists are the core of the ensemble, while more than a dozen instrumentalists fill out the sound. The vocal lines change abruptly, like Eric Dolphy runs that jump octaves unexpectedly, and the result is engrossing and mysterious at the same time. The interplay between the female soloists and the rumbling male chorus reaches ecstatic heights during the rousing fireworks-like finale.

The liners to Music of Remembrance state that music used to commemorate the dead in the West is usually somber, while in Java memorial music avoids mournful tones since this would attract malevolent spirits. Consequently, the music here balances the somber and the celebratory; the vocals are accepting and peaceful rather than mournful.

Institute of Sonology 1959-1969 This CD documents early electronic music created at the Institute of Sonology in Utrecht, Holland. The roots of the movement were Pierre Schaeffer’s initial work in musique concrète and the establishment of the first electronic music studios in Paris and Cologne.

The immediate inspiration, though, was likely Edgar Varèse’s Poème électronique, presented at the Philips Pavilion of the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair. Initially called STEM (for “Studio voor Elektronische Muziek”), the organization changed its name to the Institute of Sonology in 1967, giving rise to the counter-organization STIEM that continues to this day. The music on this CD largely dates from before the fracture and gives a good sense of what was going on in the first decade of Dutch electronic music. It’s always striking to hear what was accomplished with fundamental components: oscillators, filters, tape, a ring modulator, and a few other devices. The pieces included here represent divergent approaches to the construction of music by electronic means, though there’s a shared vision

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of fresh sonic possibilities. The ones that communicate most immediately are the ones that retain a link to traditional instrumental sounds and phrasing. Dick Raaijmakers’ opening “Piano-Forte” from 1959 is a kinetic explosion of sounds, initially tied very closely to the source piano’s sound and articulation.

Similarly, Ton Bruynel’s “Reflexen” is built on a single sound from a Burmese drum, but it magnifies that source into an extraordinarily diverse yet insistently percussive work. Konrad Boehmer’s “Aspekt” is a profound study of microtonal relationships. As the CD proceeds chronologically the pieces become much more ambitious in scale and also much more complex in terms of their form and their ability to transmute their sources. The concluding “Chants de Maldoror” by Rainer Riehn is a clear demonstration of the growth in the genre, a 26-minute piece conceived, realized and realized again over a fouryear period. It’s a dense, involving and still challenging work. Stuart Broomer

Various Artists

It Ain't Over!: 55 Years of Blues Delmark CD / DVD

Among a steady flow of blues compilations from the folks at Delmark Records comes It Ain’t Over, a title inspired, no doubt, by the pioneering Chicago label’s 55-years-and-counting run. Featuring most of its local blues roster, the CD and accompanying DVD documents one hell of a party at Buddy Guy’s Legends on March 7, 2008. Mayor Richard M. Daley was present, as were buckets of whupass from all participants, not least of all from a couple of octogenarians. Boogie pianist Aaron Moore and guitarist Jimmy Johnson, both well into their 80s, channel wizened insight from decades of uneasy living into “Why You So Mean to Me” and “Wading in Deep Water,” respectively. While most of the performers are scene veterans, few have as many recordings to their credit as you’d expect. Shirley Johnson, whose “As the Years Go Passing By” is arguably the concert’s peak, issued just a few hard-to-find releases prior to signing to Delmark.

Such big breaks and second chances have been label owner Bob Koester’s legacy, alongside claims to fame like his stewardship of the Jazz Record Mart and a couple of hands-down classic releases (Junior Wells’ Hoodoo Man Blues is still his all-time best seller).

But he’s also had to say goodbye: this utterly jubilant concert sadly marks the last time Little Arthur Duncan was recorded live. This protégé of Little Walter struts his sparse, ghost-train licks over a swamp-rock shuffle in “Pretty Girls Everywhere.”

The DVD version of the concert, at which Daley proclaimed the evening Delmark Records Day (“Wow, that’s somethin’ else,” the small, whitehaired Koester replied humbly), offers five additional cuts. The best is “Reconsider Baby,” by Lurrie Bell, which showcases the guitarist’s slow-burning licks and tasteful vamps; it’s a deserved turn in the spotlight for Bell, who was also part of the house band that night, alongside Otis Rush’s old keyboardist Marty Binder. The gratitude on folks’ faces, for Koester’s efforts or maybe just for the sweet musical backing, 76 | SIGNAL to NOISE #55 WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM

is evident. “We hope that Mr. Bob Koester be in the record business another 55 years,” Jimmy Johnson opines during his fiery rendition of Fenton Robinson’s “You Don’t Know What Love Is.” The crowd’s applause signals their agreement, and, frankly, who wouldn’t? Nathan Turk

Various Artists Legends of Benin

Analog Africa CD / LPx2 / download

Analog Africa’s campaign to lift the curtain of international ignorance about vintage West African groove music is on roll, and I sure hope the label doesn’t hit a speed bump anytime soon.

Legends of Benin continues the good work done by last year’s African Scream Contest. Like that set, it’s a multi-leveled immersive experience that is accessible enough to play to mixed company at your next backyard barbecue and deep enough to suck a seasoned music collector into the comforting embrace of fresh sounds and culturally specific music-geek lore. I can’t comment on the vinyl and the less said about the inferior download format the better, but the CD’s presentation is fantastic.

The fat 44-page booklet is full of striking color photos of the performers and their milieu. The accompanying liner notes don’t say a lot about any particular track, but focus instead on artist bios and compiler Samy Ben Redjeb’s firsthand recollections of his adventures and travails on the track of the ’70s-era platters that comprise this collection.

And the music? Taken in tandem with the recent Orchestre Poly-Rythmo de Cotonou collections on Analog Africa and Soundway and Scream Contest, Legends establishes the diminutive Benin as a musical powerhouse on a level with Ghana and Nigeria. The four legends surveyed here are singers Gnonnas Pedro, El Rego, Antoine Dougbé, and Honoré Avolonto, backed by top ensembles like l’Orchestre Black Santiago and l’Orchestre Poly-Rythmo.

Each leader shows versatility. El Rego’s “Feeling You Got” is swell ersatz James Brown, while “El Nam Mian Nuku” sways to a simmering rhumba groove. Dougbé, who reportedly kept his bands on their toes with threats of supernatural intervention, obtains a cantering, organ-dappled variant on funk from l’Orchestre Poly-Rythmo, but veers closer to reggae on “Nou Akuenon Hwlin Me Sin Koussio.” Afrobeat fans will find a lot to like in Avolonto’s driving, agile “Tin Lin Non,” and Pedro’s jubilant yelps move through a sublime weave of rubbery bass, dancing hand-drum patterns and bright, singing guitar accents. The disc’s sound is splendid, full and bassy throughout, belying the likely sourcing of some of this material from records or tapes that have spent decades stored under less than optimal conditions. Bill Meyer

Various Artists

Open Strings: 1920s Middle Eastern Recordings and New Responses Honest Jon's CDx2 / LPx4

This two-CD (or four-LP) set is drawn from EMI’s archive of 78s recorded across Iran, Iraq, Turkey and Egypt back in the 1920s. The first disc presents 20 tracks of virtuoso string playing by musicians now virtually lost to history—

Nechat Bey, Oudi Yorgho, Abdul Hussein Khan Shahnazi, Kementchedi Alecco, Sami Chawa, Haigo and numerous others. Most of the selections are solo instrumental pieces for oud or santour, while a few capture the eerie, forlorn cries of the spike fiddle. And most of these selections utilize a traditional song form known as the “taxim” which follows an improvisational themeand-variation pattern that allows for stunning technical displays on the part of the instrumentalist. What is striking in these performances is the densely evocative atmosphere of an older time and place that is created just through the sparse sounds of a lone instrument.

This anthology departs from a strictly archival format by including a second disc of contemporary recordings influenced or inspired by the older Middle Eastern drone styles on disc one. The artists here include Micah Blue, Paul Metzger, Charlie Parr, Sir Richard Bishop of Sun City Girls renown, UK folk guitarist Rick Tomlinson aka Voice of the Seven Woods, and the psychedelic folk duo MV and EE. This recent material, while interesting and inventive, does not have the same resonance and mood as the powerful historical recordings—now almost a century old—on the first disc.

Stringed instrument players and adventuresome world music listeners will revel in these recordings, which give a whole new perspective on what it means to rock the casbah. Alan Waters

Penitentiary 511 Jazz Ensemble plays the fun groove “Psych City”—music of the people, indeed.) There’s also plenty of emotional intensity here, improvising of deep conviction either undergirded by or seeking spiritual resonances to the music. Most of the time this results in pretty affecting music, as with James Tatum’s rousing trio work, the joyful “Ja Mil” by the Hastings Street Experience (with a great tenor solo from who knows who?), and the Lightmen’s urgent “All Praises to Allah,” with burning flute from an unknown contributor. It doesn’t work quite so well on “Nomusa” by Ndikho Xaba & the Natives—a fairly unimaginative jam on a pedal point—or on “Bada Que Bash” by the P.E. Hewitt Jazz Ensemble (I couldn’t get past the overwrought vocals from Sonia Valledeparas and Nina Scheller). But this resonance is extremely powerful on the lengthy Ronnie Boykins piece “The Will Come, Is Now,” from his 1974 ESP date. And for more direct thematic material, there are some stirring vocals here. One of the most intense moments comes with Ade Olatunji’s quite poetic recitation (heavily Afrocentric) on Positive Force’s “The Afrikan in Winter,” an affecting meditation on alienation. Leon Gardner’s proto-rap “Being There” isn’t quite as effective, but has an earnestness that can’t be ignored. Taken as a whole, this is an important collection and an enjoyable one to boot. Jason Bivins

Peacedrums’ songs often consist of nothing more than Mariam Wallentin singing while her husband, Andreas Werliin, pounds away or ticks off a beat on his drum kit. On The Snake, their second album, the duo occasionally uses other instruments, including steel drum, piano, xylophone, marimba and Rhodes, but those instruments feel secondary to the dynamic combination of drums and human voice. Wallentin calls out her words in a forceful, brassy tone like a blues diva, but she sometimes displays a more delicate side. On “So Soft So Pink,” she sings softly in a chanteuse style not too distant from the work of Feist, although she allows her voice to sink into stranger, throatier depths at the end as she declares, “There is nothing to say about history.” The only clunker here is “Chain of Steel,” with its inane chorus: “She’s got a hold on me / not in a tasty way / she’s got a hold on me / in a nasty way.” Otherwise, The Snake is a solid collection of catchy tunes that stand a chance of breaking through to the mainstream. Some of these songs, such as “My Heart,” would sound great on a movie or TV soundtrack. And yet, there’s also a peculiar streak running through the whole record. Songs that might have been standard pop ballads in the hands of another band break out into clattering drum solos and vocal outbursts that are almost alarming in their intensity. Robert Loerzel

Various Artists

Wavves Wavves

Alan Wilkinson John Edwards Steve Noble

Spiritual Jazz

Jazzman / Now Again CD

Subtitled “Esoteric, Modal + Deep Jazz from the Underground 1968-77,” this rich and rewarding collection is sort of equivalent to finding a vintage local punk comp in the ad section of Maximum Rock ’n Roll. Even for the kind of improv freaks who read this magazine, we’re talking about very obscure players here. I’m not always exactly sure why “modal,” “deep,” and “esoteric” are understood to be coterminous, but it seems intuitively right to me. Certainly there was some kind of interface between specific post-Coltrane musical impulses and religious experimentation (or cultivation) during this time period. And I actually don’t think it’s possible to talk about the vast majority of jazz history in the United States without considering religions somewhat rigorously (but that’s another story for another time). A common theme running through the pieces is “exotica,” in terms of instrumentation or formal exploration (certainly a common enough interest during this period of American religion, that’s for sure).

Lloyd Miller plays compelling santur in the Press Keys Quartet, and one of the best pieces here is the riotous, joyous “Neveen” by Salah Ragab & the Cairo Jazz Band, a fusion in the best sense.

Tracks like this also serve as reminders that improvisation in this idiom was social music, among its other qualities.

Sometimes this is expressed in frankly populist ways, with healthy doses of preachified funk: check out the nicely orchestrated Mor Thiam tune “Ayo Ayo Nene,” with its great Afro-Pop chorus and superb Lester Bowie solo; or dig into the outrageously hip-shaking “No Jive,” a 1974 jam by Frank Derrick’s Total Experience. (For a more literal expression of populism, the Ohio

Fat Possum CD

‘One man bedroom trick’ is both porn talk and record reviewer shorthand; Wavves makes good on the latter with this full length. Some call it ‘beach punk’, which begs a question about appropriateness of any combination of punks and the beach, but to these ears it’s closer to an extension of the Guided

By Voices aesthetic of the mid 1990s, before they suckled at the Matador teat and lost their charm and character.

There are certain songs (such as the extended intro to “Beach Goth”) which lean closer to the Animal Collective’s world, which suggests Wavves has to stop reading Pitchfork and internalise a little more; when most of your record feels like a borderline sociopath moaning in a darkened So Cal bedroom, singing for your supper is not a good vibe. Great chunks of Wavvves make up for these small oversights, though: the combination of Spector-DIY overload, Mary Chain blowout, surfer girl melodies and weedy, whiny falsetto harmonies really holds up as an extrapolation of everything that’s potent about hiding in your room and dealing only with a fetishised, fantasised notion of pop culture reality (as fed through the blue glow of the TV and the red dB levels of the stereo). There’s every chance his thing will get real tired real quick, but for the next year or so he’s onto something that plenty have done, but few have done with such disenfranchised élan.

Jon Dale

Wildbirds & Peacedrums The Snake

Control Group CD / download

Vocals and percussion are the two sounds at the core of this duo from Gothenburg, Sweden. Wildbirds &

Live at Cafe Oto Bo'Weavil CD

Bassist John Edwards and drummer Steve Noble have lately been piling up a diverse but consistently worthwhile run of trio discs on the Bo’Weavil label.

On The Early Years they proved the perfect rhythm section for Lol Coxhill’s freebop caterwaul; on Deadeye Tricksters, in the company of guitarist Alex Ward, they turned into a scorching free-rock power trio. Live at Cafe Oto explores different territory again: it’s classic energy music, spread over one sprawling half-hour track and a shorter coda. This time their companion is saxophonist Alan Wilkinson, former member of the bluntly named Hession/Wilkinson/ Fell, a trio that made memorable noise throughout the 1980s and 1990s; more recently he’s helmed the similarly incendiary Free Base, of which Noble is also a member (plus bassist Marcio Mattos).

The disc starts with Wilkinson on baritone, the most formidable instrument in his arsenal: his huge, screaming sound is comparable to Peter Brötzmann or Mats Gustafsson, though there’s a giddy champagne-bubble fizz to his playing that mitigates the head-intobrick-wall factor. Every so often he takes the horn out of his mouth and yammers away with unadorned voice, and that labile, vocalized quality carries over to the sax work. Most importantly, he’s got plenty of ideas, rather than just relying on brute force: like his compatriot Tony Bevan he cultivates a sense of melody so sped-up, batted-around and fragmented it’s whiplash-inducing, and he has a knack for turning bellows and cries into expressively smeared patches of sound. Edwards and Noble are beautifully various and pell-mell in their responses, veering into bastardized sorta-grooves that have recklessly

accelerated pulses. I especially love the swishy kinda-Latin frenzy that kicks in once Wilkinson switches to alto, which finds Noble slashing away with Errol Flynn abandon (I’ve long been a fan of his superbly vicious cymbal work, like a supercharged Sunny Murray). And they swing, too!—just listen to the hilarious riff on every “cool walking bass” cliché you’ve ever heard that they perpetrate just after the 20-minute mark. Together, these three musicians make state-ofthe-art fire music, marked by all of those things—great ears, imaginative reach, a care for sound rather than just volume— that separate a great blow from a merely decent one. Nate Dorward

Yo La Tengo

Popular Songs

Matador CD / LPx2 / download

Comfort is a welcome thing in trying times. Yo La Tengo’s responses to the zeitgeist have generally been through deeds, not songs; rather than pen a little protest tune, they’ve shared the stage with comedians who make the political points for them and made charity gigs an integral part of their itinerary.

But while the twelve little to fairly-long numbers that make up Popular Songs do not depart from the usual Yo La Tengo categories (songs about people they might know, songs about people they might be, songs about stuff they like, and instrumentals), they make it clear from the get-go that Ira Kaplan, Georgia Hubley, and James McNew (everybody sings, everybody plays everything) are not only aware of what’s going on in the world, they know what they want to do about it. Certain songs give voice to the dread that’s as natural as breathing these days; nonetheless, this is an unusually comforting Yo La Tengo album. Consider the opening triptych. With its soured sonar keyboards, fuzz bass, and slinky blaxploitation strings (a YLT first), opener “Here to Fall” gets as close as the trio is likely to get to sounding like Curtis Mayfield.

And like Mayfield at his best, Kaplan lays it all out in a lyric that acknowledges the omnipresent anxiety, admits he can’t do much about it, but says he’s here to go through it with you. Then they show us how they’ll help with a double serving of musical comfort food.

“Avalon or Someone Very Similar” counters its lyrical acknowledgement that “times have changed” with a lovely guitar solo so timeless it could have flown in from a Byrds or Clean record, and wreathes its sentiments in falsetto harmonies as sweet as your childhood memories of falling asleep in the back seat while the Association drifted out of the radio. Eerie synths circle around “By Two’s” creeping melody and faintly dubby (another YLT first) bass line, but Hubley quells the terror with a lullaby-like delivery of the words “hush little baby, don’t you cry.” Of course, there’s more. The record is considerately sequenced, so you can hear all the nice, short songs first, then decide if you want to stick around for the lengthy exercises in drift and freaking out. The last three tracks take up nearly half the total playing time, and there’s comfort of another sort when, after an album consisting mostly of softer pop sounds and sturdy grooves, Yo La Tengo lock into a remorseless churn and finally go loudly nuts on guitar. Thanks—I needed that. Bill Meyer

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SOUNDWATCH

Kurt Gottschalk turns on and tunes in for the season’s blockbuster video releases.

Bill Frisell

It’s surprising at this point in time, when everything old is digitized again, to find rarely seen footage from the couple of years when punk was vital, but the DVD releases of Wolfgang Büld’s 1977 Punk in London and 1978 Punk in England (both released

by MVDvisual) are filled with footage of those remembered as rebel heroes as well as those long since forgotten. The German director combines a fly-on-the-wall approach appropriate to his subjects’ nothing’s-important credo with an outsider’s perspective. He’s not concerned with being cool or making conclusions, and he allows bands and fans to talk about the importance of their revolution (or, alternately, moon the camera) as they see fit. The first film is immediately post-Pistols, with a respectable amount of live footage of The Clash, The Jam, The Adverts, X-Ray Spex, The Boomtown Rats and others. A year later, punk had (for practical purposes) fizzled, but the walls it blasted were still down. The Clash and The Jam were experimenting with new sounds, and such groups as The Specials, Ian Dury, Madness and The Pretenders were taking advantage of the new freedom. While there are good docs around on individual bands, few films capture the diversity of the scene so roundly.

Punk may have started as music, but it spread like a virus across the arts, mutating its name as it went along. Llik Your Idols (MVDvisual) is a film about filmmakers, but they were the rebel rockers of the movie world. Taking its name from the punk/no wave slogan (and then the 2007 S.A. Crary music doc of the same name, which went from Swans to Yeah Yeah Yeahs), Angelique Bosio’s 2007 film is about the New York circle that included Richard Kern, Nick Zedd and Joe Coleman, but it doesn’t ignore the fact that Lydia Lunch and Sonic Youth were also peers.

It’s an interesting look at art made of ugliness, and includes two full Zedd shorts as well.

The Blue Cheer / Ramones nexus fell in on itself in Japan in a particularly well-oiled way, where Haino

Keiji, Makoto Kawabata and Asahito Nanjo have, since the ’80s, crafted a particularly heavy psychedelia. The label PSF has been a primary outlet for those masters of overdrive on audio, and was also behind a mythic video of Haino’s Fushitsusha filmed in an almost dark room and initially released on VHS. Two new live videos from the label do little to bring it into the digital age, for better or worse. Nanjo’s High Rise is featured on the 20-minute Psychedelic Speed Freaks Live 1986 (citing the term that gave the label its acronym name). The clear videotape lines and burns somehow add to the charm of the short, heavy set from the M.I.A. Nanjo, and it’s great after a decade or so to hear their blues drenched brutality again. It’s a short set, but another 20 minutes wouldn’t really have added much.

The power trio Kousokuya is one of the less noticed (at least on Western shores) and longestlived of the PSF rock bands, and their Live at Shinjuku JAM, 2006 shows them to be still going strong. The ethereal vocals of bassist Mick and heavy guitar of Kaneko Jutok give them a similar feel to Fushitsusha, although drummer Takahashi Ikuro keeps them in a more 4/4 format. But while the mystery of Haino makes the darkroom video seem apt, and the raw VHS feels right for Nanjo (whose audio releases often seemed like bootlegs anyway), two hours of iffy video makes the Kousokuya wear thin.

Drummer Jerry Granelli seems consistently to come up with interesting ways to package his guitar band V16. Their last release, 2007’s The Sonic Temple, was a double live CD with each disc following the same set list. For Vancouver ’08 (Songlines), Granelli has paired a new studio recording with a live DVD fimed the night before the studio session.

It’s a strong group, with him and bassist J. Anthony Granelli, backing the twin guitars of David Tronzo and Christian Kögel. Together they comprise a kind of leftfield jam band, easy-going and building to moments of excitement. Tronzo is, of course, a great player, but

the lesser known Kögel matches him every step of the way. Both are adept at slide, and each can shift easily into quiet noise or delicate finger-picking, and the father/son rhythm section push with a wide range of dynamic. Directed by Colin McKenzie, who was also behind the 2002 documentary Jerry Granelli: In the Moment, the hourlong film intersperses footage from the small stage of Vancouver’s Ironworks with informal backstage interview footage.

New releases from William Hooker and Bill Frisell show very different ways to approaching the documenting of the pairing of live music and silent film. Free Jazz from the Sanctuary (Media Sanctuary) presents Hooker’s bold solo drum soundtrack to Oscar Micheaux’s 1920 race film The Symbol of the Unconquered. Hooker is best known for his intense kit attacks (there’s a reason he works so well with Sonic Youth’s Lee Ranaldo), but is on occasion capable of greater subtlety. With dramatic mallet rolls and cymbal washes, he makes a moving soundtrack for the 60-minute film, which depicts a black community’s struggles against local Ku Klux Klan forces.

Filmed before an audience in Troy, NY, the video wavers between the film and wider shots of Hooker and audience with the screen above them. While one wants to see Hooker play, however, it makes for a distracting way to try to watch the film. An option to watch either the movie or the room would have been welcome.

Films of Buster Keaton, Music by Bill Frisell (Songline / Tone Field) takes the opposite tack, focusing all visual attention on the three silent comedies: Go West, One Week and High Sign. The project has been around for a while, premiering at St. Ann’s in Brooklyn in 1992 and seeing CD release in 1995.

So while there’s nothing new here, it’s surprising how long it took for a proper package to come together.

With drummer Joey Baron and bassist Kermit Driscoll (the since-disbanded trio remains his strongest working group), Frisell’s sense of humor and storytelling make for a perfect accompaniment to Keaton’s slapstick pathos. The production works in every respect. There’s not the chance to watch Frisell play, however, which is made up for with the release of Solos (Songline / Tone Field), an intimate soundstage recording (without an audience) filmed at the Berkley Church in Toronto in 2004. Frisell’s own compositions are interspersed with his love for American music (a couple traditional tunes, plus some Dylan, Gershwin and Hank Williams) in a wonderful set that, if perhaps a little overproduced, is still beautifully produced.

The Sun Ra Arkestra documentary Points on a Space Age (MVDvisual) doesn’t focus on the past, but it doesn't ignore it either. It opens with John F. Kennedy delivering an address on the "space age," then cuts to home movies of Ra and his Arkestra in Egypt. But the hour-long documentary is set in the present, telling without voiceover the story of the men and women keeping the faith 16 years after Ra's death. It might be a little heavy on the cross fades and split screens, and full performances would have been welcome at least as extras, but the subject is worthy. The existence of the Arkestra puts the bandleader on the level of Basie and Ellington, at least inasmuch as being worthy of a repertory band carrying on after him. And in a roundabout way, it's the story of saxophonist Marshall Allen as well. The Arkestra's third skipper isn't interviewed, but his presence is felt. The Arkestra continues on as jazz missionaries, and it’s nice to see the futurist pilgrims not treated as something from the past. ✹

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THE WEIGHT OF THE WORLD Jason Bivins digs metal, doom and heavy music in all its permutations.

Let’s start out with some basic ingredients this time.

The reissues of Nifelheim’s first two records induce a real sense of nostalgia. Something formerly confrontational, maybe even a bit unsettling, now just sounds like a relic. Their eponymous 1994 debut (reissued on Regain) is just over half an hour of O.G. Scandinavian black metal: corpsepaint, gauntlets, blast beats, funny names, the lot. But nostalgia aside, the music holds up fairly well. In fact, as mannered as it is in a certain sense, there’s a rough intensity to tracks like “Black Curse” that seems pretty authentic, even today. Unlike the efforts of contemporary dabblers in the style, the gritty thrash of “Possessed by Evil” and the movie-music lyricism of “Storm of Satan’s Fire” come across pretty convincingly. And for those who can’t get enough early Venom, you’ll be delighted by “Witchfuck” and “Die in Fire.” Their 1997 follow-up Devil’s Force (Regained) is emphatically in the same mold, another nine blasts of proudly atheistic din, this time with a bit more technique. Opener “Deathstrike from Hell” and “Satanic Mass” have some changes and rhythmic flourishes that anticipate later refinements by groups like Nile. And the dissonant solos throughout (especially on “Hellish Blasphemy”) are quite Kerry King-ish.

Of course, most readers of this mag tend to prefer their black metal served up moody drone style, a textural frosting on some baked amalgam of doom and metalgaze. One of the key exponents of this sub-sub-genre is Aidan Baker, who’s been unusually active (even for him) of late. He brings his full arsenal of guitar and effects to the trio Whisper Room, where he’s joined by Neil Wiernik on bass and laptop, and Jakob Thiesen on drums and electronics. There’s a frosty, almost processed swirl to the music on Birch White (Elevation 08). They do a really nice job of blending acoustic sounds—scraped metal and a very bouncy snare—with a heavy minimalism and electroswirl that recall mid-period Isis, a fine thing. But they’re not limited to this template. On the fifth track (all are untitled), they play music (with handclaps, improbably) that could almost pass for Belew-era Crimson, while the urgency of the repeating guitar figures on track 7 summon Neu!, heavy not in volume but in effect.

If ever there was an argument to be made about the glories of vinyl, Baker’s gorgeous double LP Gathering Blue (Equation) would be fine evidence.

Impressed on lovely cerulean vinyl that looks like a giant eye, these tracks find Baker at his most expansive and meditative. “Bond of Blood” gets things started and provides a template: lengthy shimmering haze, which at length offers up muffled vocals à la Broadrick without the churning everlasting riff. It drifts laconically, filled with narcotic dreams. Baker gets even deeper into this territory on the enchantingly gloomy title track.

He plays fuzzy, faint chiming guitar, the kind of thing that goes well with a summer flu (as does the splendid performance of Joy Division’s “24 Hours” here). Side 3 features a long medley of tunes stitched together by some burbling glitch-trance stuff (a modestly used drum machine) that eventually settles into a steady tick-tocking over a glacial drone. By the time Baker’s ghostly lyrics waft through “The Taste” and “When You Scream,” it’s sounding a bit too same-y and lacks the impact of earlier sides. But this is perhaps the point, to delve deep into an unrelentingly blue mood.

The latest from Nadja, Baker’s well regarded duo with Leah Buckareff, is a covers album of all things.

When I See the Sun Always Shines on TV (The End) is a love letter to some formative influences, opening with a Broadrickian take on My Bloody Valentine’s

“Only Shallow.” When you hear the thick gauzy distortion, the muffled melancholy of the vocals, on Codeine’s “The Pea,” it all makes sense how kids raised on shoegaze and post-No Wave noise (Swans get a nod here too, with “No Cure for the Lonely”) would get into heavy drone music as they wander deeper into adulthood. In fact it all sounds kind of like Jesu, and the basic personality of Nadja—even though they transform themselves enough to problematize this notion—isn’t always audible. But then again, it’s still a great record, so that’s anything but a deal-breaker.

The most surprising track is Slayer’s “Dead Skin Mask.”

(I confess to being unfamiliar with A-Ha’s “The Sun Always Shines on TV” or Kids in the Hall’s “Long Dark Twenties,” so I can’t reasonably comment on how they’ve been altered here, but both sound righteously sludge-adelic.) Elliott Smith’s “Needle in the Sky” brims with an unexpected promise, but that’s quickly burnt away in the glorious, grinding version of The Cure’s “Faith” that concludes the disc.

The Seattle duo Blue Sabbath Black Cheer don’t dish out the bongwater riffs their name suggests, but rather trade in black metal atmospherics delivered by noiseniks. Just shy of tongue in cheek, they might conjure up the opening moments of Sabbath’s first, that cryptkeeper vibe. But on their 10" split with Dried Up Corpse (Gnarled Forest) they create some genuinely creepy ambiance, with moans, crackle, and cavernous noises. There’s a distant drone, an occasional sound like shoving ballast overboard (boom!), creaking wood, and a general feel of being lost at nighttime at sea.

The DUC stuff is in the same general idiom, like the noise frosting knifed off the cake of Sunn O)))’s Black One, but a bit more rickety rackety.

BSBC is on another split LP (Drug-front Productions), which pairs them with another black/noise duo, Bleak Village. Each side is filled with quirky, abstracted Sabbath homages. BSBC’s “Paranoid” winds up with a moaning, crackling din before fluttering out in helicopter blades and bowed metal. The second piece, “Elektrisches Begrabnis,” eventually lets loose with some Wrest-like mewling, crawling out from a burning, squealing stratum of sound. It’s very subtle for all the affectation in the presentation, and fans of noise and experimental black metal alike will want to check this out. Bleak Village’s side is a suite—“Penetration Camp—Mob Rules—45rpm—666 Seconds”— created entirely out of found sounds and manipulated recordings, a massive machine slowly warming up to its own malevolence.

The mysterious group Grief No Absolution take this general sound to a more complicated space on Eurostopodus Argus/Crypsis (Flingco Sound). Opening with a sort of piano/cello etude shrouded by fuzz, noise, and shrieks, the four brief tracks that make up the Crypsis EP constitute a kind of assault on musical decency. Imagine Sonic Youth’s “Providence” gone far more bleak and misanthropic. There are moments when this sounds a bit trite, but it’s actually unclear where the polarity lies: is this a “shocking” intrusion on poise and lyricism or, much more interestingly, a commentary on the dynamics of so much “avant” metal, rooted as it is in anti-clerical chest-thumping? As the music shades into the lengthier tracks of Eurostopodus Argus, the atmosphere thickens, with guitars and rending feedback eventually overwhelming almost everything else (though a faint droning cello seems still to be there). By the time we reach the long concluding track “A Corpse of Intent” it is starting to sound seriously creepy, an unsettling wind to accompany

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your deepest abjection. A pile of sound eventually amasses, like an amplifier’s reverb coil after you kick it, but stretched out to distorted infinity.

If there’s one band whose name has haunted this column since its inception, it’s Oregon’s YOB. The psychedelic stoner doom trio led by guitarist/vocalist Mike Scheidt disbanded several years ago, after just a handful of recordings. Scheidt went on to pursue the short-lived Middian before, thankfully, resuscitating a new version of YOB last year. On The Great Cessation (Profound Lore), they play the same kind of long-form, very slow, incantatory music that sets them apart from mere chuggers (although chug they certainly can, a sheer leviathan stomp that will get any head nodding).

Scheidt’s got a far greater interest in harmony and chord progressions than the usual suspects, and his writing has always had a ritualistic quality (even as you can imagine it being on the soundtrack to some Conan movie) along with the intense melancholy that for me is its most memorable quality. On this release, there are even some tunes (“The Lie That Is Sin”) where they explore the lyricism that’s always been latent in their work. While “Breathing from the Shallows” falls slightly short of the mark after the powerful trio of songs that open the disc, it’s just a noisy palate-cleanser before the lovely melancholy of the closing title track, where the band follows that same downward drift that’s pulled them under so beautifully for so long.

I’m so glad this band is back.

Soon after former Iceburn member Gentry Densley was featured in Ascend (with Sunn O)))’s Greg Anderson), he’s back in Eagle Twin, along with Tyler Smith. The SLC duo deliver The Unkindness of Crows (Southern Lord). Combining some of the heavy exoticism of recent High on Fire with the thunder sludge of old-school Melvins, this record is pretty great. Despite the sonic references, Eagle Twin is quite different from the other heavy duos with whom they’re likely to be compared. Their primary difference from, say, Om or Big Business is that these guys are actually interested in improvisation. Not just for a few bars, before returning to the riffs. Smith actually plays pretty freely, as Densley’s baritone guitar smears warm fuzz tones endlessly across the plastic rhythms. And with Densley also combining monastic chant with spitting growls on tunes like “Murder of ...,” well, we’ve got a pretty good thing going on. For those in need, they do settle into rumbling ritualism on “Storytelling of Ravens,” but they’re most at home on tunes like the lengthy “Carry On, King of Carrion,” with extended guitar frippery and tension all over the place.

Battlefields’ Thresholds of Imbalance (Translation Loss) has similar range and ambitions, but the basic ingredients are a bit different. While hundreds of bands now work at the post-Neurosis intersection of doom, shoegaze, psych, and crust, few young bands do it as artfully as this quartet from the upper Midwest.

With a genuine emotionalism at the music’s core, their ringing guitars and electronic textures convey something more frosty than the average Isis knockoff. The album as a whole works together as if it were some kind of suite, with an ominous feel throughout but not at the expense of certain crucial ornamentations, if you will. I’m thinking in particular of the beaming lyricism of tunes like “Imbalance,” but they also occasionally show their hardcore roots (“Quake and Flood”) or their fluidity with time (ironically on “Stasis”). Good stuff.

On the proggier side of things is Gutbucket’s splendid A Modest Proposal (Cuneiform), a swaggering, reeling, riffing monster of a record. The New York

SMOKING THAT ROCK Ray Cummings gets down with messed-up modern rock.

Let’s kick off this issue’s edition with a few corrections. If you’ll remember, I spent a good bit of ink last time around introducing you to one Emmy Collins of Landers, Calif. We were under the impression that Collins was a woman; we were wrong. We misidentified Brutal Poodle’s 2xCD set; the actual title is Music to Crash Your Car To. We also screwed up the title of Acidic Jews’ cassette release: it’s Clean Rigs, not Clean Rites. Smoking That Rock regrets the errors, and notes that if you’d like to buy or learn more about Collins or the kajillion projects he’s had a hand in, drop him a line at frugalfilms@hotmail.com.

And now, a known quantity. Deerhunter have built a rep as purveyors of sweeping, swooning songs that celebrate despair, depression, and decay. The songcraft of frontman Bradford Cox—whose solo Atlas Sound project hits similar sweet’n’sour notes—and his fellow Christopher Walken fans becomes more airtight and surefooted with each successive outing, so it’s no shock that Rainwater Cassette Exchange (Kranky) finds these Georgians at their peak. Here Deerhunter plumbs its stock-in-trade subjects, but there’s a decided spring in its collective step and a touch of the louche; at times, they tend tropical or ’50s sci-fi fly, at others they seem to be aping The Strokes. In any event, the band’s palette is expanding by leaps and bounds.

On I Feel So Strong. I Feel I Could Punch a Hole in a Fucking Wall (Bug Incision), guitarist Christopher Riggs casts fleeting aspersions from the cool, dry solace of primordial silence. Scuffed tones, huffing scree, wavelength scratching and scribbling, abrupt amp-cable thumps, and other aural oddities emerge from the void only occasionally and briefly, each hint of sound punctuating swathes of unbearable stillness.

I have no idea how Riggs went about wrestling these effects from his electric axe, but Strong more than lives up to its title, and makes you wonder what goes

down when he’s not holding back, when he goes all out with compositional pyrotechnics.

Ah, the debut EP! That first shot across the bow, that introductory statement. Oklahoma’s The Lava Children have titled theirs—wait for it—The Lava Children (Graveface), and it’s certainly an intriguing how-ya-doin’—all nearly-indecipherable indie-rock mash-note weirdness, slide-guitar creepy-crawlyness, smeared girly intimations, and so on. They sound kind of like The Breeders’ Pod, left out to bake in the Arizona sun for a few hours. Which isn’t necessarily a minus. It’ll be interesting to see what this duo has up its sleeve for the eventual full-length.

Since leaving Wolf Eyes earlier this decade, Aaron Dilloway has established himself as a one-man noise hurricane, turning out solo and collaborative slabs with a frequency that puts many of his peers to shame. Many of these are great on a visceral, frightening level—I’m especially partial to Rotting Nepal, the Live at the No Fun Fest 2007 split with Carlos Giffoni, and False Speech with C. Spencer Yeh—but Chain Shot (Hanson) is the first Dilloway product to really sink its teeth into me. The back of the digipak curtly identifies the tools of its creation—“tape loops, metal, horns”—but that does no justice to the impact of the actual sounds. The chugging title track dabbles in industrial snuffle-shuffle, spent-machine cycle loops spiced with clanks, whirrs, and irregular metallic taps that suggest a snapped belt slapping iron, awaiting a repair or replacement that will never arrive. “Execution Dock” leans heavier on horns that Dilloway loops and desecrates into sickly, end-times exclamation points that perpetually mutate. Bonus track “Medusa”—left off the initial, vinyl-only pressing of Chain Shot—is a half-hour-long suite of malevolent fuzz, like the popcorn static that results when a television station cuts out, gradually swelling in volume and thickening in texture: a scaled, jagged underbelly

reveals itself then begins to slash the atmosphere to bloody shreds before transitioning to a muffled space-shuttle launch roar, then the unholy-in-thissetting sound of water gushing and pouring. To say that “Medusa” becomes “slightly more unsettling” from there would be a massive understatement.

How best to absorb a Starving Weirdos album?

This California duo—bulked up to a quartet for Into an Energy (Bo’Weavil)—routinely pile samples upon guitar drones atop violin codas upon the kitchen sink, and listening too closely, at too high a volume, will likely do one’s head in unless one is zooming through the cosmos on formidable drugs. (I’d imagine so, anyway.) Headphones or killer speakers, I recommend not placing Energy at the dead centre of your attentions—its musique-concrète swirl and roil seems most powerful and effective at the vanishing point between attention and inattention, where the self is given over to concentrating on some important task at hand and, say, the tapped-bongo foghorn dread of “Everything Glass” overwhelms every other source of ambient input: a whimpering dog, a dripping faucet, the distant grind of a lawnmower. Listen too close and Starving Weirdos enjoyment is reduced to, well, work: the conscious brain struggles to compartmentalize all those interwoven instruments and voices and textures. Something gets lost, and the experience becomes much more arduous.

And now, I’ll take my leave of you; as it happens, this is my final Smoking That Rock column. It’s been a wonderful experience and loads of fun, but due to a mounting workload, varying commitments, and an online publication I’m launching in the fall, it’s time to call it a day. You’ll still see my bylines in Signal to Noise, though, so all is hardly lost. Take care of yourselves, and each other, and remember to support your local cassette-only noise/out miscreants. They need your love! ✹

quartet is included in this column because—for all their influences, ranging from the Lounge Lizards to Zappa to klezmer and Crimson—the music is pretty damn heavy. This effect isn’t achieved in a one-dimensional or stereotypical way, but simply through the group’s sheer love of the riff, an eternal return at the heart of this wonderful collection of tunes. Ty Citerman’s no-wave-y guitar puts the lie to simplistic understandings of prog rock, bringing with it a sensibility equally shaped by noise and skronk as by the “whoa!” chops moments that flash throughout (especially on the intense “Side Effects May Include”). Ken Thompson’s reeds (and keyboards, a double-duty he shares with bassist Eric Rockwin) provide just the right foil, a boisterous, jittery presence that digs into these complex forms with real proficiency but which has more fun turning them inside out.

The debut EP from Stats (nee Stay Fucked) is heavy in just my way: post-Bastro, post-Craw, post-Botch.

Let’s just say that it’s got coiling rhythms from drummer Hank Shteamer, taught wiry bass from Tony Gedrich, and contrapuntal, texturally varied guitar from Joe Petrucelli. They refer to their music as “prog-punk,” and I think it fits. It’s not just because the songs wend their way continually without reverting to hooks and repeating riffs, but also because there’s actually an intense amount of sonic and—wait for it—harmonic variety in these three tunes as well. At times, the lines pile up and the music erupts in noisy crescendos, but

never for long, as there’s always a buzzing hornet guitar or road-grading bass to carry things forward, and Shteamer plays with a contrapuntal ease that reminds me of Wetnurse’s Curran Reynolds.

After 10 years, Kansas’s Coalesce returns—improbably, given all their acrimonious breakups—with Ox (Relapse). Throughout the 1990s, along with Botch and the Dillinger Escape Plan, this quartet played a brand of extremely complex mathcore, equal parts precision (Jes Steineger’s whipcrack guitar) and fury (Sean Ingram’s oft-imitated howl). For all the bludgeoning heaviness, the noisy abandon of this band, they’ve always been very attuned to textural variety. That’s even more true of this latest release. Throughout, especially on tracks like “Dead Is Dead,” they seem to have come down with the same Morricone flu that’s recently infected Earth. It makes for even further range, with the result being a compact 36-minute album which might even be their best.

A couple columns back, drummer Rich Hoak’s Total Fucking Destruction made an appearance. At that time, it was rumored that Hoak’s more famous combo, Brutal Truth, might be returning after a long hiatus.

It turned out to be true, and after a decade or so, the grind conceptualists are back with one of their most ambitious (and unrelenting) yet, Evolution Through Revolution (Relapse). The velocity, the technical rigor, the quick changes and resistance to formula, all the things that have been the band’s hallmark since Need

to Control, they’re all here. But this band is so playful with rhythm and genre, it’s almost impossible to know what’s hitting you in this 20-song, 40-minute release.

Hoak and bassist Dan Lilker swing mightily for a music that sounds mechanical if you listen only at the surface.

But one listen to a tune like “Daydreamer,” and you really have to be tuned out not to hear. “On the Hunt” is the kind of thing that they were doing back in the day, with almost a Mahavishnu level of density and complexity (with some howling lyrics and sheer noise guitar). And while they occasionally do look back to “back in the day”—as on the nearly-punk “Bob Dylan Wrote Propaganda Songs” (hmm, maybe we should think of BT as the Minutemen of grind) and the breakdown-heavy “Get a Therapist, Spare the World”—this is mostly state of the art. Fucked noise winds through the nasty dystopian visions of “Global Good Guy” and “War Is Good.” They show their agility with absolutely face-ripping, polyrhythmic madness on “Detached,” and then head into a different hemisphere altogether with the spaced-out, noisy psych swirl of “Semi-Automatic Carnation” or the weird, almost Southern rock riff of “Afterworld.” And when the buzzing bees of “Powder Burn” swarm your ears, it sounds like they’ve stuffed all the other tracks together. The disc closes with the unwavering riff of “Grind Fidelity” (though it does pause at the end before a thirty-second overdriven Fantomas-like squall). An absolutely crazed disc, and a triumph for a long-missed band. ✹

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CONTINENTAL RIFFS Peter Margasak travels the world in search of subversive sounds.

Few artists embody the music of Zimbabwe like Thomas Mapfumo, and on two superb reissues from Water Records we get to hear his earliest work as a leader. On 1977’s Hokoyo! with the Acid Band he hasn’t quite nailed down his sound, nor his opposition politics. The album opens with a lovely American-style R&B groover, but then it quickly reveals the sound he’s spent the last three decades perfecting. Back then his nimble electric guitarists began mimicking the signature sound of the Shona—the thumb piano known as the mbira—with bubbly, liquid lines cascading over the skittery groove. Three years later, on Gwindingwi Rine Shumba with the newly christened Blacks Unlimited, his stance as a political force has been established—many of the songs praise then newly installed leader Robert Mugabe, who would later be excoriated in Mapfumo’s songs—and the band’s early clunkiness vanished, replaced by a dazzling, propulsive fluidity.

We can relive the early days of Congolese rumba on The World Is Shaking: Cubanismo from the Congo, 1954-55 (Honest Jon’s), a wonderful collection of tunes that offers a glimpse into the new marriage of Cuban son with native melodies, instruments, and tropes. The liner notes by Gary Stewart—author of the indispensable Rumba on the River: A History of the Popular Music of the Two Congos—do a great job explaining how imported records allowed locals to reimagine rhythms originally birthed in their land as vibrant urban party music. The clave—both the instrument and the rhythmic unit—is inescapable here, and on “Moni, Moni Non Dey” Adikwa baldly rewrote the Afro-Cuban classic “El Manicero” with new words. In the coming years Congolese musicians would put a distinctly African stamp on these grooves, but these early experiments are both fascinating and musically compelling.

Although Introducing Mamane Barka (Introducing) is a new recording, the titular Niger musician is playing a very old, practically extinct instrument; the five-stringed biram is a large, boat-shaped sacred instrument of the Boudouma, nomadic fishermen along Lake Chad.

Mamane Barka didn’t play the instrument until he was in his early 30s, learning from old master Boukar Tar, who desired to pass on his knowledge to a worthy successor. According the album’s liner notes, with the death of Tar several years later, Barka is now the only remaining biram player in the world. The album combines the ancient repertoire he learned from Tar, along with new pieces he wrote himself. Spindly, driving licks are accompanied by the kaleidoscopic percussion of Oumarou Adamou (on douma, kalangou, and calabash), and Barka sings on half of the eleven spellbinding tracks, a nice, rootsy variant on West African blues.

The production—with synthesizers and drum machines—on Ililta! New Ethiopian Dance Music (Terp) may be contemporary, but the stunning rhythms and melodic modes go back many decades. This superb collection, released by Terrie Ex of the Amsterdam post-punk legends the Ex, offers a antidote to the tedious, cheaply produced pop that replaced the classic live-band sound of the country’s ’70s era. The selections aren’t the slightest bit retro, but the singers embrace a familiar, melismatic brand of soul over the gurage, wollo, gondar, and oromo grooves—all stuttering beats, consonant cries, and wildly sashaying melodies.

Most of the tracks were cut in 2005-2007, with the oldest, from 1999, coming from the late Mohammed Jimmy Mohammed, who recorded a killer, strippeddown solo record for Terp. While nothing here matches the peaks of Mahmoud Ahmed or Tilahoun Gessesse, it proves that Ethiopian music is still alive and well.

India’s Raghunath Manet is equally talented as a musician and dancer, trained in the classical art of Bharathanatyam, a fire dance that dates back several centuries. It’s typically accompanied by Carnatic music, the style of Southern India, and that’s what Manet plays on the veena, a large, plucked string instrument. On Veena Dreams (Iris) he veers in and out of tradition with his arrangements, but his flowing, richly melodic improvisations maintain old school values. Rather than tackling a long-form raga, he serves up a variety of shorter pieces, including “Siddha,” which finds him soloing over some treacly electronic washes, and the title track, which features some stultifying programmed beats; there are also percussive vocal improvisations throughout the album. Luckily, most of the music is acoustic, allowing his glorious tone to shine through.

The music on Konkani Songs: Music from Goa Made in Bombay (Trikont) offers an intriguing glimpse at an analog to vintage Bollywood sounds. Goa, one of India’s smallest states, was colonized by Portugal beginning in the early 16th century, and the influence still persists in some areas, among them music. While nothing on this compilation, which includes material cut between 1963 and 1976, sounds remotely Portuguese, the sounds are rife with international influences. Many musicians from Goa were lured to Bombay by the film industry, but these songs, some of them performed

by Bollywood heavies like Mohammed Rafi and Amit Kumar—son of Kishore—explore a distinctly Goan tradition known as “Tiatr,” a kind of regional opera/stage show. The music has a certain charm, but without the jump-cut aesthetic of the best Bollywood the material ultimately comes off as a bizarre imitation of European pop and Afro-Caribbean sounds.

Over the last couple of years the Brazilian thrush Céu has been involved in a number of compelling side projects including Sonantes and 3 Na Massa, and the same crew of São Paulo musicians who’ve worked on those and other efforts surround her on her wonderful second album Vagarosa (Six Degrees). The album is steeped in a heavy reggae vibe, but her sultry Portuguese singing is pure Brazilian, sashaying through the deep but spacious grooves with sexy sibilance and sensual curlicues. She doesn’t have a conventionally strong voice, but she knows how to use it, insinuating and whispering rather than exclaiming and shouting.

The band includes members of Nação Zumbi and Orquestra Imperial; multi-instrumentalist Beto Villares, who produced her debut, and the remarkable guitarist Fernando Catatau are also on hand, crafting immaculate, dynamic grooves for her voice to get lost within.

Rio samba specialist Marcos Sacramento has usually tweaked readings of classic and newer material with innovative flourishes, and on his latest Na Cabeça (Biscoito Fino) he’s assembled three guitarists to provide all of the rhythm and harmony. Luiz Flávio Alcofra, Rogério Caetano, and Zé Paulo Becker create a rich setting for the singer—you’ll hardly notice the lack of percussion instruments—capturing all of the rhythmic sophistication of the samba within a matrix of crisscrossing, harmonically dazzling strings. Sacramento is a terrific vocalist, caressing the lovely melodies, most of them composed by his collaborators here—there are also time-tested gems by Cartola, Noel Rosa, and Chico Buarque—with a sanguine fervor that eschews both the sentimental and the frothy.

Although Rios’ Lucas Santtana has always shown a deep feel for samba and bossa nova, his recordings have always messed with the formulas, coloring the music with funk or dub. On his latest and best album

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Sem Nostalgia (YB Music) he’s at it again, limiting himself to only voice and guitar sounds, but manipulating the conceit to produce a rich sound. “Super Violão Mashup” opens the album with an instrumental barrage of samples from prominent Brazilian guitarists—Dorival Caymmi, Tom Ze, and Jorge Ben among them—with surprisingly funky results. On “Cira, Regina e Nana” guest musician Curumin manipulates the body of an acoustic guitar to make beats. But the record works because Santtana’s songwriting isn’t overwhelmed by such techniques; the gentle melodies are gorgeous, with delicate singing that teases out sweet harmonies, and the bizarre sonic effects only heighten the tunes. A number are sung in English, a first for Santtana, but regardless, he’s masterfully extending and revitalizing beloved Brazilian traditions.

There are few sounds as haunting as the Hardangar fiddle, a Norwegian violin with an extra four or five strings running beneath the fingerboard to provide spooky, deeply atmospheric overtones. Nils Økland has long been one of the country’s unquestioned masters, but while he has a total command of folk traditions, his own recordings break with them. He writes his own music, and though it sometimes draws upon native folk idioms, his work is equally informed by classical music and free improvisation. He’s made stunning records for Rune Grammofon and worked with vanguard figures like Christian Wallumrød and Frode Haltli, but on the stunning Monograph (ECM) he goes it solo. Økland also plays violin and viola d’amore on the recording, frequently adopting different tuning systems to give his compositions an even greater tonal variety. His elaborate melodies are sketched with exacting precision, his razor-sharp lines standing in wonderful contrast to the alternately glowing and ringing resonant tones produced by the sympathetic strings.

On its second knockout overview of vintage Panamanian music, Panama! 2: Latin Sounds, Cumbia Tropical & Calypso Funk on the Isthmus 1967-77, Soundway Records delves into another facet of the Central American nation’s rich heritage. “La Murga de Panama,” for example, a Puerto Rican bomba by the great Willie Colon, is transformed by Papi Brandao y Su Conjunto Aires Tableños into a driving piece of música típica, a homegrown variant on Colombian cumbia and vallenato. What’s so great about many of these twenty slamming tracks is how local rhythms put a distinctive stamp on whatever style the various groups have waded into. While a track like “Descarga Superior” doesn’t have any particular Panamanian flavor, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t slay with its squealing saxophone solo, guitar-driven groove, and some percussion breakdowns halfway between Santana and Tito Puente. Too often Panama’s musical history begins and ends with Ruben Blades—a genius, granted—but these Soundway collections are providing a desperately needed alternate history.

On its second album Radio Romanista (Asphalt Tango), Belgrade Romani rock band Kal puts its faith in the music of leader Dragan Ristic rather than the classic material on its debut. The furious grooves pumped out by its lean rhythm section are fattened by the slashing violin of Vladan Petrovic and the woozy, twin accordion licks of Jovica Maric and Radovan Petrovic, with Ristic navigating high-octane melodies both rooted in tradition and open to modern elements; the band seems equally informed by punk rock aggression and electronica agility. Despite the manic energy, Kal’s music is deceptively sophisticated, with rigorous arrangements and delirious harmony. ✹

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BURNERS AND BACK FLIPS

Joel Calahan samples the season’s finest underground hip-hop releases.

The career of Awol One, time after time, chalunder the radar remains problematic for others lenges the criteria by which we judge a musical in the scene. Micro-movement aficionados artist. According to few principles of evalualike these are the addressees of Busdriver’s tion does this Los Angelino and Shapeshifterz opening salvo on Jhelli Beam: “Conscious rap crew member pass muster as a great MC: has failed us.” To which Busdriver’s reaction his voice is deep and muted, his aesthetic an is, no doubt, full embracing of stream-ofever-changing journey through various producconsciousness rap: he runs roughshod over ers, his flow a litany of homespun clichés and the selective diction of the conscious rapper dumbfounding expressions of personal sentiwith a natty and nasty logorrhea running from ment and self-evident truths: “Some people the political polemic to the surrealist sketch don’t know how to be happy”; “If we don’t to cutting-edge technological jargon, with change our direction soon / we’re going to the only apparent organizing principle being end up exactly where we’re headed”; if you’ve strict polysyllabic rhyme. A premier example heard a single song of his, you don’t need of virtuoso tricksterism is the absurd “Memore examples. Over a dozen or so albums, Time (With the Pulmonary Palimpsest),” which Awol One has carved out an unflappable and features Busdriver’s thrilling verbal derringdo idiosyncratic personality, and it might be that over an uncut backing track of Mozart’s famous the best one can say is that one likes him as sonata movement, “Rondo Alla Turca.” Try the an entertainer, rather than that one likes his salty meat: “Dane Cook’s table reeks / with music. There is something utterly compelling a yang butch’s anal beads”; or “I’m a hack at about the confidence Awol exudes in declaring deer shootin’ / no Vladimir Putin / while I wear these simplistic platitudes on his new album this pantsuit thing.” The pure delight of Jhelli Owl Hours, on dance-floor jams like “Stand Beam is that Busdriver in the end is continuing Up” and self-reflective ballads like “Destinaa long tradition of social critique based on the tion” (with the unbelievably obvious chorus power of words to make men look foolish: this hook, “It’s not the destination / it’s the journey is classic vituperium in the Roman tradition, the you should love”). This is rap that doesn’t quite poet potshooting odious political figures and brag, because its obvious flaws undercut the rivals with giggle-inducing insults that cut to force of simple boastful jibes like “I’m sorry I’m the quick. Political cartoonists still skewer like invincible” or “When I’m angry I do a million this, but a well-placed metaphor in the hands pushups.” Owl Hours, like all of Awol One’s of a skillful poet can’t be matched. work, sits in that wide swath of rap where Over two decades of producing on some of charisma is everything—yet no one has dared hip-hop’s greatest collaborations, DJ Pretread on Awol One’s idiot-savant persona, nor mier has made the short loop the preferred will they likely. Who could? method for matching skills with MCs known for Abstract Rude moves in the incestuous lyricism, such as Biggie Smalls, Nas, AZ, Jeru Project Blowed circle, and so it’s often hard to the Damaja, and, of course, Guru, of his own pin down exactly what he’s releasing. Rejuvenagroup, Gang Starr. Living the life of a kingpin tion is like a solo debut in the sense that it’s now, Preemo has avoided responsibilities for his first release in years in which he holds the a full record for most of this century (save for main mic responsibilities solo; it’s also the most most of Big Shug’s 2005 Who’s Hard?). This coherently-produced record AR has enjoyed in aversion has been a shame, since the LP format a lengthy career. New Rhymesayers labelmate is the best way to enjoy Preemo’s restrained Vitamin D goes all soul all the time to great efproduction style, the creative ways he finds to fect: “The Conch” and “Tomorry,” for example, diversify within the strictest of constraints. don’t have the pithy chorus hook required of Blaq Poet has run with the Queensbridge a great single, but they both feature a smoov crowd for years, and cashes in on the connecblend of deep vocals and nodding breakdown tion for his latest record Blaqprint, which offers loops to create a feel-cool atmosphere. When record geeks a full slate of Preemo producthe occasional brass sample pierces through tions. And no surprise, this is vintage stuff—the the mix, the glistening contrast peaks but never track “What’s the Deal?” alone provides a loses its steady flow. study in contrasts with the legion of producOut of all the tracks on their latest record ers now making records with the Group Home Leviathan, Scienz of Life should be best instrumentals etched in their brains. In these remembered for “Touch Screen Queen,” a love wilds, a steady hand on the scratches is a knife ballad to a woman made of digital electronblade in the rucksack. Sure, Blaq Poet is caics who becomes accepted by the narrator’s pable on the mic, but his raw style recedes and family because they want to exploit her highreally makes little difference, for good or ill—it’s definition television capabilities. It’s the kind of Premier who saves the billing. simple, original narrative that this Jersey trio The tolerance that the hip-hop community has been recording for nearly a decade now, has for Minneapolis hacks Eyedea & Abilities and it anchors a prodigious full-length from the is blinding. But now that DJ Abilities has emgroup—their only recent release has been a braced DJ Ant’s live-rock production style on singles and rarities that popped up five years By the Throat, it won’t be long before people ago. Production by ID-4 Windz has roots in the finally get that this duo was never hip-hop nor Native Tongues movement, but his cool jazz was it enlightening in the least. Nay, By the is emulsified with electronic buzz, the colder, Throat consistently displays a contempt for post-9/11 version of neighborhood politics. subject matter that is astounding. “Time Flies Yet the fact that Scienz of Life, despite a worWhen You Have a Gun” and “Hay Fever” decry thy album of cuts, will likely continue to pass gun ownership and advocate euthanasia with a 84 | SIGNAL to NOISE #55 WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM

casual indifference made more angering by the cock-rock guitar riffs and preacherly condescension in Eyedea’s voice. With no sophistication or tact, Eyedea sounds like he’s reveling in these human tragedies. The lead single “Burn Fetish” reeks of sophomoric wisdom: “Empathy is the poor man’s cocaine / and love is just a chemical by any other name / I like the way your pheromones make me sleepy / this far away I still smell you inside me.” Ego-blasting and narcissism are what rap is all about, but one gets the distinct sense this is real narcissism—and that doesn’t play well over beats or wailing guitars.

Despite his prestigious pedigree as a former member of two Southern California college rap darlings, Jurassic 5 and reggae/salsa activist ensemble Ozomatli, Chali 2na has until now given us no distinction as a solo performer. A nearly full career, then, is riding on his debut, Fish Outta Water. The problem is, on solo tracks the 2na can’t uphold the energy and dynamism of the full band posses of his past.

“Comin’ Thru” is a standout as the album’s obvious single, and Chali enunciates deliberately over juicy beats, reviving an old-school flow in places that satisfies. The production chops, however, leave us stuck in recycled R&B melodies, and can’t match the strong narrative work on tracks like “Love’s Gonna Getcha.”

Experimentation remains one of the defining characteristics of a studio production-based art like hip-hop, and so it seems misleading that only the fringe rap producers—either renowned for their art or reviled for their unlistenability—are granted the label “experimental.” Yet when you listen to Anti-Pop Consortium, one of this decade’s prize cult hip-hop acts labeled “experimental,” you begin to understand how truly revolutionary hip-hop has the possibility to be. Their new offering, Fluorescent Black, should be a highly anticipated album, coming out on Big Dada Recordings a full seven years after their last release on Warp, Arrhythmia. Its length is prodigious, a seventeen-track masterwerke coming apart at the seams with musical ideas and compelling arrangements. The whole is much more than an amalgam of genre-source ideas, though they do incorporate a range of electronic maneuvers pioneered by the likes of Autechre, as well as the turntablism of Bill Laswell and DJ Spooky, and the avant-jazz sounds ground in the mills of post-loft NYC. Indeed, Fluorescent Black may be one of the first releases to codify many of the experiments performed in these vital musical scenes, all in one place. Nothing intrinsically superior to the postmodern art of grafting method and style to collage: but when it loads in the chamber with verbal gusto in tracks like “Volcano” and “Shine” (a cool Russian art heist narrative) we’ve passed the threshold of experimentation and crossed into a defining moment for the art. ✹

WORD MUSIC

Fred Cisterna reviews recent spoken word recordings.

In 1951, John Cage composed Imaginary Landscape No. 4, a radical work that embraced chance but utilized precise instructions. The work is scored for musicians who manipulate 12 radio receivers, and the basic material— whatever radio stations are broadcasting at the time of the performance—is unpredictable and varies with every performance. Almost 30 years later, the Canadian filmmaker, musician, and artist Michael Snow created two audio pieces by turning a short-wave radio’s dials, but these works were improvised. The result, 2 Radio Solos, was eventually released on cassette tape in 1988 and is now available on a CD from Blackwood Gallery at the University of Toronto in Mississauga, Ontario.

Snow’s subtle performances—“tuning in and out and between stations, changing bands, bass, treble, and volume”—result here in exquisite audio collages. Of course, all kinds of sounds come into play, and a variety of spoken languages make up a significant part of the rich panoply. In the first piece, “Short Wavelength,” much of the material is sped-up, not because of post-production tinkering—there was none—but because the batteries lost power in the course of the recording. The effect abstracts the source material, pushing it further into the realm of pure sound. The second track, the 43-minute “The Papaya Plantations,” starts off with what sounds like a broadcast of Moroccan music. Later, bad reception, slivers of music, and overlapping signals create sonic magic. At another point, a Spanish-language broadcast is enriched with various types of looping interference. Sometimes voices are buried so deep in the mesh of radio waves that they become just another texture in the mix.

Light years away from Snow’s approach

are the brash recitations of the musician and performance poet Copernicus. Born Joseph Smalkowski, he’s been releasing albums since the 1980s. His philosophical, rant-like performances focus on a handful of themes, particularly the idea of nothingness. On 2009’s disappearance (Nevermore, Inc/Moonjune), his backing musicians include two longtime associates, guitarist Larry Kirwin and musical director and keyboardist Pierce Turner.

On “12 Subatomic Particles,” the deepvoiced Copernicus intones, “After 2,000 years of scientific discovery, all of creation can be explained by 12 subatomic particles.” As the band whips up a psychedelic stew, Copernicus commands, “Bow your head to the top quark! ... Bow your head to the electron!” It’s impossible to know how much of his act is a put-on and how much is a sincere expression of a wiggy perspective. But worrying about such distinctions is probably missing the point.

Copernicus’s world is a place where bravado, philosophical rumination, and rock jams are all equally at home.

Ha’Orot (Tzadik) by Greg Wall’s Later Prophets involves three rabbis—not too many jazz albums can claim that. First there’s saxophonist and clarinetist Rabbi Greg Wall, who was ordained in 2006. Then there’s Rabbi Itzchak Marmorstein, who intones the album’s texts, which are by Rabbi Avraham Itzchak HaCohen Kook (1865_1935), a poet and mystic also known as Rav Kook. At times, Marmorstein sticks to the poems’ original Hebrew, while at others, he recites his English translations. Wall (a former student of Archie Shepp) and his band—pianist Shai Bachar, bassist Dave Richards, and drummer Aaron Alexander—provide fine backing: modal grooves, free jazz, impres-

sionistic pianism, Jewish melodies, and other elements come together nicely. “Nigun Ha’rav #1” and “Nigun Ha’rav #2” show another side of Rav Kook’s creativity. For these two instrumentals, the band has created excellent arrangements for melodies composed by the revered rabbi. The first track displays a lovely lyricism, while the latter is a jaunty piece with elements of 1960s soul-jazz.

The legendary ESP-Disk’ recently put out a CD of the late Timothy Leary’s Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out, which the label originally released as an LP in 1966. It’s a key spoken-word document of the psychologist and psychedelic researcher’s ideas. A lot of us walk around with reductive, cartoon-like notions about Leary, and it’s good to hear the doctor make his own case.

Leary discusses, in measured tones, a number of ideas surrounding what he sees as a new step in the development of man. Assisted by the use of certain drugs—LSD and marijuana— people, especially young people, will have the opportunity to live fuller, more sensual, and more sensitive lives. (Leary’s speech rhythms are hypnotic, but it must be noted that engineer David Hancock edited out what the liner notes describe as “the long intervals between words.”)

Leary’s cultural critique is nuanced at times, and it’s fascinating to hear him talk about the generation gap in neurological terms, complete with references to an “imprinted symbol system” that traps older adults. Leary’s ideas have been superficially absorbed by American society, but they are still radical. The last track, “One Final Word,” touchingly asks the young to be kind to their parents and to turn them on—not to drugs—but to sensory awareness.✹

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REISSUE REDUX

Bill Meyer surveys the season’s key reissues.

F-stop Fitzgerald / courtesy Cuneiform

Birdongs of the Mesozoic

The news that the Feelies’ first two albums are coming back into print after years lost in the wilderness is welcome around these parts, but it’s complicated by the news that the bonus tracks included on earlier versions will be left off the physical product and the new bonus tracks will be relegated to downloads. Here at Redux HQ we don’t review records we haven’t seen so evaluation of Bar/None’s treatment of Crazy Rhythms and The Good Earth will have to wait until next issue. But the issue’s been raised; how much enhancement is desirable, and when is it not?

Drag City’s treatment of Bert Jansch’s previously undigitized mid-70s sojourn with Charisma records is a good example of enhancement done right. This isn’t the easiest phase of the English singer-guitarist’s career to approach. Newly freed from the group Pentangle and old label entanglements, he was up for something different; Charisma’s owner wanted to make him a star singer-songwriter. L.A. Turnaround got things off on a good foot. Recorded at the boss’s mansion with former Monkee Mike Nesmith producing, it crystallizes everything that could go right with such an arrangement. Jansch showed up ready to play with a strong selection of songs; the hired American hands, especially steel guitarist Red Rhodes, cast them in a flattering country-rock light without ever tripping them up. Bonus tracks, illustrative notes, and a rough little making-of film round out a great record that deserves not to be forgotten. Its successor is another matter. Jansch made Santa Barbara Honeymoon over three months with drummer and aspiring producer Danny Lane behind the board, and it’s a classic fish out of water disaster. Jansch sounds game but totally lost when confronted with a production approach that stripped out his folk roots and surrounded him with totally inappropriate horns, female choruses, and

studio “enhancements.” Annotator Mick Houghton tries to make a case for reassessing the record, but the bonus demos and unaccompanied live tracks recorded at Montreux say otherwise. This one’s only for Jansch completists and fans of overdone 70s studio bakery. On A Rare Conundrum, extravagance and experimentation are replaced by retrenchment and cautious commercial moves. Most of the record finds Jansch back on familiar ground, playing stark and acoustic; the few songs with a band sound calculated to appeal to broaden the fan base to casual folk-rock listeners without scaring anyone off. While it’s an eminently listenable album, it didn’t grab the attention of anyone beyond the faithful, and it faded out quickly.

Collector’s Choice has taken a slightly more measured approach to Little Richard’s early 70s sojourn on Reprise, Jansch’s former label. They’re still sticking their name on the front cover — please stop! — but otherwise the designers have faithfully reworked the original sleeve art into a jewel boxfriendly format. The track order also adheres to the original, with nothing added and nothing removed.

New liner notes by Gene Sculatti provide more context than anything anyone thought to put on a Little Richard sleeve back in the day. And the music? The Rill Thing is a pretty solid selection of contemporary r&b, heavy on the blues, with tastefully punchy backing by the Muscle Shoals crew. The Second Coming is much odder and messier, with some throwbacks to his earliest wild man stylings jostling for space with hard-edged funk, proto-rap, and needlessly extended instrumental rock jams.

Concord is also issuing classic Ray Charles sides with a similarly simple approach. A Message From The People (Concord) which was ostensibly Ray’s civil rights statement, has no extras at all, and the mushy mastering feels very 1990. Still, if you’ve

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never heard his partially French-ified goof on “What Have They Done To My Song, Ma,” you owe it to yourself. Really. As you probably surmised from the title, Modern Sounds in Country & Western Music, Volumes 1 and 2 (Concord) pulls together two LPs of big band treatments of the Nashville songbook on one CD. Greater minds than this one have weighed in on this music for decades, so I’ll just mention that it’s all in one spot and easy to find now.

Big Star may never have earned the sales that Ray Charles did, but the Memphian combo helmed

by Alex Chilton and (at first) Chris Bell has been accorded so many accolades that it’s similarly hard to know what more to say about them. Suffice to say that if you like anything that’s ever been called power pop and you haven’t heard their first two albums, you are doing you a very serious disservice. And like Brother Ray, they’ve had those twin pinnacles combined on a single CD. Originally released in 1992, the shifting of the Stax catalog to Concord has occasioned a minor retooling of #1 Record/Radio City. The eye-punishingly crammed design hasn’t been changed at all and the mastering job is only marginally better than the first CD’s strong showing, but for this edition the CD has been bulked up with single edits of “In The Street,” which you might know from an inferior cover version that serves as the theme music for That ‘70s Show, and “O My Soul.”

Originally conceived in the mid-80s by the members of XTC as a pseudonymous side project calculated to cancel out business-instigated burnout, the Dukes of Stratosphear baffled everyone by doing better than the parent band. Now that their two records have passed into the hands of their original creators, bandleader Andy Partridge has reissued them on his Ape imprint in lavish editions that could give excess a good name. Originally both records were wedged onto one CD; now each is packaged in a hardbound booklet with bright, glossy color pages, reminiscing liner notes, and oodles of bonus tracks. The debut, 25 O’Clock, still holds up. The MO is pretty straightforward — pick your favorite Beatles or Electric Prunes acid burst, write a song like it, and garb it in period piece production — but it’s immaculately done. Since the original record was an EP, Partridge has pumped it up with nine demos and outtakes that show how much skilled, hard work it took get from the original songs to the final freak-outs, and how wise they were to make it the size it originally was. Psonic Psunspot is lighter and longer, and shows how unlikely it is that lightning will strike twice. Truth be told, they weren’t even trying to hide who they were or the fact that the record was being made in 1987. That said, it’s more diverse listen than 25 O’Clock; the Beach Boys, Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, and Burt Bacharach rear their heads as influences, and tuneful enough to make this a second-from-top drawer XTC album.

Belfast, Maine’s Time-Lag label specializes in deluxe vinyl-only revivals of totally unknown psych treasures, but they apparently believed enough in the potential of Lula Cortes’ Rosa De Sangue to do a CD version. This one takes fidelity to an extreme; the sleeve is an exact miniature replica of the LP, and since it wasn’t a gatefold the first time around you’d better remember where you file the thing! The range of genres at Cortes’ command is

pretty impressive; faux-opium den folk noodling, appropriated Indian devotional singing, Portuguese Dylan approximations, acid guitar freak-outs and a bit of disco that might have still sounded mighty suave when the record was made in 1980—each take their turn.

Hugo Filho’s Paraibo (Shadoks) doesn’t get quite the same level of love; it’s packaged in a serviceable jewel box, and it sounds like it was mastered from a cassette, although that might just be the original recording quality. But the music is well worth hearing if you’re already on a mellow Brazilian psyche tip.

The splay of wah-wah guitar across Filho’s amalgam of indigenous acoustic pop and international rock sounds must have sounded out of time even when he first released in a micro-pressing of 500 in 1978, and now it sounds like a time capsule from a coffee house scene that probably never was.

The Middle European head music scene has its own friend in Lion Productions, which is located in distant suburb of Chicago. They’ve recently brought Guru Guru’s 1970 meisterwerk UFO. This trio of commune-dwelling acidheads included former free jazz drummer Mani Neumeier amongst their number and their music was certainly birthed from spontaneous creation, but not of a particularly jazz-oriented sort. Neumeier’s avant acumen can be heard in the field recordings and ametrical scraping of the final track “Der LSD-Marsch,” but mostly this is heavy rock with wings. If you like Bardo Pond’s side projects, come hear where it all started.

The music on Sergius Golowin’s Lord Krishna Von Goloka is just as sprawling, but instead of getting down and wild, this record’s goals are beyond. Golowin, a Czech-born Swiss resident and associated of Timothy Leary who passed away in 2006, was mainly a scholar of esoteric folklore.

In 1972 the Kosmiche Musik label, fresh off an inaugural released by Leary and Ash Ra Tempel, issued Golowin’s sweeping celebration of mysticism.

While he and his musicians, which included synth scion Klaus Schulze, definitely sought to evoke the ether, they did so with a rush of strummed acoustic guitars, winding mellotron passages, and insistent drumming over which Golowin chanted invocations to the titular spiritual entity. Dukes Of Stratosphear might have sung about taking a bike ride to the moon with giggles on their lips, but his man sincerely wanted to tune humanity into the cosmos.

Still, there’s nothing wrong with a bit of low humor, and that’s exactly what you get from Rastakraut Pasta (Water). This 1979 collaboration between Dieter Moebius and Conny Plank is all about the low end. Inspired by reggae but situated in a Cologne studio, the two men crafted robotic rhythms, deepened at crucial points by Holger Czukay’s bass guitar, and then laid all manner of electronic tomfoolery over the top. The result is much more overtly goofy than Moebius’s work with Cluster, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing unless you really hate smiling. This may be Water’s last release from the old Sky records catalog. Reportedly the German Bureau B label has already taken over the catalog and plans up to 40 releases from it. Here’s hoping that an affordable edition of Cluster’s Zuckerzeit is among them.

It’s hard to know if Cluster directly influenced Claudio Rocchi when he was making Suoni De Frontera (Die Schachtel), but he sure was tuned into a similar wavelength. Rocchi was originally part of the fairly successful prog combo Stormy Six, but by 1975 he’d retreated to his home studio and swapped epic songs for elliptical electronic miniatures. What makes this record so enduring is the way Rocchi refused to ditch his pop gifts for melody and groove just because he had fallen in love with oscillators and filters. The duo-fold digipak is simple and gorgeous and the liner notes by Rocchi and a charmingly fannish Oren Ambarchi impart some foundational orientation for a totally obscure but highly worthy unearthing. Records like this are what this column is all about — get it now before it disappears.

Speaking of Oren Ambarchi, the Melbournebased sound sculptor has started his own label, Black Truffle, to return some of his early works to print. Stacte 3 and Persona both date from the turn

of the century, when Ambarchi first happened upon the electronically enhanced approach to guitar that he’s carried on to the present in his solo work and in disparate collaborations with the likes of Keith Rowe and Sunn 0))). Both records are remarkable for how un-guitarlike they sound; an unprepared listener might think he made them with a Rhodes piano, a sampler, and a few months of studio time rather than a guitar, some pedals, and an afternoon a side.

And each has been MIA since shortly after being released in a stingy vinyl pressing. Stacte 3 is much heavier, Persona quite airy, but both benefit from a bit of revisionism; Ambarchi’s mastering acumen has far surpassed the slapdash work of the originals, opening up the music’s layers so a hint of light shows through.

Birdsongs of the Mesozoic have been through a few changes in their own. Originally founded by Mission Of Burma’s Roger Miller in 1980 as an outlet for his non-rock keyboard work, the group has been squired by another Bostonian ivory-tickler, Erik Lindgren, through a myriad of line-ups and styles since Miller left in 1987. During Miller’s tenure the group sought to combine harsh rock textures, Enoesque tunefulness, irreverent humor, and an amplified equivalent of orchestral density. The two-CD Dawn of the Cycads (Cuneiform) replaces an earlier single-disc collection on Rykodisc with Birdsongs’ earliest recordings, all three of their Miller-era twelve inches, and a 1987 live set. One wishes that they would have included the original covers somewhere in the package, not to mention the combo’s cover off Eno’s “Somber Reptiles,” but otherwise it’s a pretty swell set.

While all is not as quiet on the jazz reissue front as this small closing entry suggests, we’ve tried to keep the focus on the very best. The reappearance of Gerry Hemingway Quintet’s Demon Chaser (hatOLOGY) once more confirms the depth and richness of the Hat Hut archive; one wishes that they could find a way around cycling records in and out of print in limited editions. This second version is substantially the same as the first; new mastering, new sleeve, but the excellent music is the same.

With the mostly Amsterdam-based combo of Michael Moore, Ernst Reijseger, Wolter Wierbos, and Mark Dresser at his disposal, Hemingway was able to articulate an inclusive music as simultaneously rooted and forward-looking as Dizzy Gillespie’s or Eric Dolphy’s was in their day. But don’t listen to this because it’s good for you; check it because it’s a blast.

The same can be said for Seven Compositions (Trio) 1989 (hatOLOGY), an especially approachable Anthony Braxton effort realized with the dynamic collaborators Tony Oxley (percussion) and Adelhard Roidinger (bass). There is an uncommonly emphatic forward motion to these pieces that belies the collage methodology that combines the titular seven compositions into just three tracks. And, perhaps inspired by the visceral excitement of his fellow musicians, Braxton plays with exceptional soul and expressiveness throughout.

Now that Nessa’s 1967/68 5 CD box has gone out of print, the label is bringing out the individual Art Ensemble records that it originally issued in the late 60s and which were at the box’s core.

Congliptious, a 1968 session led by Roscoe Mitchell at Chess studios, not only establishes the template that Mitchell, Lester Bowie, Malachi Favors, and later Jospeh Jarman would explore when they became the Art Ensemble of Chicago; it stands up to anything else they did. One side of solo performances and one side-long tapestry demonstrate the broad historical vision and sonic imagination, rigorous strategies, and rude humor that made the Art Ensemble one of a kind. The bonus tracks — three takes of “Carefree” and one of “TatasMatos” — are simultaneously a joy to hear and kind of inappropriate. Compressed and much closer to song form than the Congliptious material, they’re well worth hearing but might have been better served by a separate CD that includes some of the other archival material that was on the box. Don’t take that as a complaint, because the music is great; take it as a plea for more, sir. ✹ WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #55 | 87

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CROSSWORD

By puzzlemaster Ben Tausig. This issue's theme: "Pump Up The Volume"

Across

1. Not neg.

4. Request-for-proposals words 9. Foot dectet 13. Big name in camping equipment 14. Record label for Man or Astro-man? and other surf rock groups 16. Neil Peart's band 17. Strange 18. Inactive, but still there 19. Handmade goods website 20. Garagy brother-sister duo 23. Ice Cube holders, perhaps?

24. Niger's continent: Abbr.

25. Mouse's predator 28. Post-Galaxie 500 project for Dean Wareham 29. California avant-garde folk songstress on Drag City 33. Suffix with "legal" 34. ___-Ozn (early 80s dance music producers with "AEIOU, Sometimes Y") 35. Reduced in volume, with "out" 36. Guitarist who's collaborated with John Zorn 40. Tragic character in a 1989 Aerosmith single 43. The pill alternative 44. Future PhD's hurdle 47. "Sun Giant" band 50. Romantic piece of writing, often 51. Kit-___ 52. Thinking machines: Abbr.

53. Competition that admits many different skill levels, for short 54. Iconic tagger called out in Blondie's "Rapture" 59. Survey 61. Paul Oakenfold's genre 62. 1,000 grand, casually 63. Positive descriptor for a metal band, generally 64. A good many Indians 65. "Telephone Line" group 66. ___ Music (glam icons) 67. Hunts for 68. Manhattan sch. attended by Talib Kweli, Milton Babbitt, and Antony Hegarty

Down

1. Bio 2. Mother-lover of myth 3. Album half 4. Fleur ___ (royal symbol) 5. High-flying military branch: Abbr.

6. Rebuke from Caesar 7. ___ Rabbit 8. Southern Chinese province 9. Elm or peach, e.g.

10. Was higher on SoundScan 11. Snaky shape 12. Unlikely to engage strangers in conversation 15. Place for notes 21. Pkgd. food suggestion 22. Build from scratch 26. Tiny 27. Trip agent?

29. Hourly rate 30. Almost finished, in grad school 31. Return to a broken state 32. Word of disapproval 36. Word of disapproval 37. Move over again, as text 38. Have regrets about 39. Works the door, in a way 40. LGA alternative 41. In the manner of 42. Sender of scores of red envelopes

44. "A Few ___" 45. With ease 46. Harris who recorded with Gram Parsons 48. Interval that, historically, is forbidden from being used consecutively 49. Egyptian god of the underworld 50. Palm phone 53. Freedom of the ___ 55. Partner 56. Weather instrument 57. Das ___ (words at the conclusion of a German film) 58. Dirty-sounding clothier 59. Each 60. Lacto-___ vegetarian

for answers, see: signaltonoisemagazine.blogspot.com

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