Signal to Noise #64 - winter 2013

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

shaking ray levis generator records record-hunting in jakarta jozef van wissem matthew shaw issue #64 fall 2012 $4.95 us / $5.95 can

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

#64 : FALL 2012 matthew shaw 6 jozef van wissem 8 shaking ray levis 10 generator 18 on location: jakarta 25 live reviews 34 book reviews 40 cd / dvd / lp / dl reviews 42 graphic novella 66 PUBLISHER pete gershon COPY EDITOR nate dorward BLOG MASTER christian carey CONTRIBUTORS clifford allen ✹ caroline bell ✹ jason bivins ✹ marcus boon ✹ stuart broomer ✹ pat buzby ✹ joel calahan ✹ christian carey ✹ john chacona ✹ mike chamberlain ✹ andrew choate ✹ fred cisterna ✹ jay collins ✹ larry cosentino ✹ david cotner ✹ ethan covey ✹ julian cowley ✹ raymond cummings ✹ jonathan dale ✹ christopher delaurenti ✹ tom djll ✹ nate dorward ✹ lawrence english ✹ phil freeman ✹ andrew gaerig ✹ michael galinsky ✹ david greenberger ✹ kurt gottschalk ✹ spencer grady ✹ jason gross ✹ kory grow ✹ james hale ✹ jennifer hale ✹ carl hanni ✹ ed hazell ✹ mike heffley ✹ andrey henkin ✹ jesse jarnow ✹ mark keresman ✹ robert loerzel ✹ howard mandel ✹ peter margasak ✹ brian marley ✹ marc masters ✹ libby mclinn ✹ marc medwin ✹ bill meyer ✹ richard moule ✹ larry nai ✹ kyle oddson ✹ natasha li pickowicz ✹ plastic crimewave ✹ grant purdum ✹ chad radford ✹ alexander richter ✹ michael rosenstein ✹ elise ryerson ✹ ron schepper ✹ steve smith ✹ thomas stanley ✹ adam strohm ✹ john szwed ✹ nathan turk ✹ dan warburton ✹ alan waters ✹ ben watson ✹ seth watter ✹ charlie wilmoth ADVERTISING e-mail for rates & info: operations@signaltonoisemagazine.org DISTRIBUTION

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Record store in Jalan Surabaya, Jakarta

by William Gibson, summer, 2011 cover photo of Shaking Ray Levis in Chattanooga by Robert Wright, July 2012

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MATTHEW SHAW

Laurence Labat

Brit's affecting folk-drone music reaches a new level.

By Jon Dale

Matthew Shaw’s music has always had an ecclesiastical edge, but in recent years he’s really brought that to the fore in long-form compositions like his recent, self-released Lanreath, extending field recordings and long tones out into fog banks of reverb, so that the audio shudders around your sensorium. Look up at the peak of these pieces and you might just expect to see light glinting through stained-glass windows, casting shadows on the white voids of space that stretch internal architectures into infinities.

But if anything, Shaw’s religion is that of the natural world; his pieces are embedded in the Earth, feet deep in the clay, with moss and lichen collecting around the instruments as they echo across the British landscape. It has taken Shaw a while to get to this place, though the search for something ‘other’ is a constant thread in his music.

“My earliest influence was my Dad’s singing,” British musician and songwriter Matthew Shaw reflects as he winds through the stations of his early epiphanies. “He was and still is a member of the Crewe male voice choir, and also did a lot of heavy religious pieces through St. Mary’s church in Sandbach. He was the eldest of five boys and his Dad was the choir master, so they all sang and it was a big part of their lives.

Religion was much less a priority in my home life, but the singing continued. The power and volume of hearing a large group with all that natural reverb was amazing to me as a young child.”

After those early days at home, Shaw took guitar and drum lessons, eventually finding himself in the early ’90s world of shoegaze, catching My Bloody Valentine and Boo Radleys shows. Stints in riot grrrl and hardcore punk groups marked out his early twenties, before he passed through that time-honored rite of passage of so many music fanatics—working in a record shop—and encountered the fringe dwellers of English towns like Stoke-on-Trent, catch-

ing gigs by groups like Sculptress and Ashtray Navigations, making loose connections with the A Band free music constellation, tape trading, and working up the courage to record his own material as texlahoma. texlahoma released a clutch of fascinating sides which documented Shaw’s early development, from simple songwriter—“My goal was very clearly to write what I considered to be the most honest songs I possibly could and to experiment with sound,” he recalls, “nothing more than that to begin with”—to a more complex engagement with electronics and sonic texture. He seemed to be striving to peel his music back to its core, zooming in on the key expressive faculties of sound. But while Shaw would end up writing songs that didn’t rely on production or stylistic trickery to get their point across, he admits that the rigmarole of the traditional band structure was exhausting: “[G]rowing into a full band touring again, I pretty much felt like I’d had enough of it all. I was just tired of the songs, tired of the vans, tired of having no money.”

But it was Shaw’s move to solo work that flagged a significant shift in his concerns.

In the past few years he has released a number of albums—on his own label, Apollolaan; Susan Matthews’ Siren Wire Editions; and collaborator Brian Lavelle’s Dust, Unsettled imprint—which have Shaw stringing simple synth tones, glistening guitars and rich field recordings out on the event horizon, which slowly accumulate power through the accretive heaviness of the drone. Sometimes, as on his collection of highly personal piano reflections, In the Morning Sun, he’ll work in miniature, with just one instrument—in this case, the piano—to essay deeply affecting tributes to those around him. His pieces come close to memorialization of both place and emotion, trying to capture an intangible, Proustian essence of memory work.

It all came beautifully together on the

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recent Lanreath, by some measure the most moving and gorgeous piece Shaw has yet recorded. Thinking through his recent approach to making music, he explains, “I started to think back to those choral pieces my Dad would sing, and also felt much more interested in the texture of sounds, the resonances and also the sound of places, than I was in pouring out emotions into song form. Some of these early long form pieces dictated their length to me: they had to be long to capture in sound how I felt about the place at that time and for me to paint as clear a picture of that feeling that I got by being there. I like to record a place, I like to do some field recording and more recently also to play anything that will end up on the album in that specific place, to photograph the place and make notes in a journal so that when I come to sculpt and produce the finished pieces I have everything to hand to make it as close as possible to what I believe the piece should be and reflect.”

This is one side to Shaw—the modern cartographer of the ear, “getting wholly absorbed into a landscape, its surrounding villages and towns, and special features, especially those from pre-history, the ancient through to modern psychogeography of the place, its folklore, accents, smells, flora and fauna.” He also sometimes uses small constellations of melodies or phrases to set incident in action, something you can also find in his recent collaborations with peers Brian Lavelle (as Fougou) and Andrew Paine (as The Blue Tree). With a new CD-R just out on Blackest Rainbow, There Was Never a Time When Your Life Was Not Now, Nor Will There Ever Be, Shaw’s current run of deeply affecting drone and folk passes seems to be reaching a new level. This selfconfessed “megalithomaniac” is slowly, beautifully, capturing the essence of the land that surrounds him.✹

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Dutch lutenist stands outside of society to bring his instrument into the present.

By Bill Meyer

JOZEF VANWISSEM “The lute has a very bad problem with its image, which I’m trying to do away with,” remarks Jozef van Wissem. Half a millennium ago the lute was immensely popular across Europe, but it went out of fashion by the end of the eighteenth century. In the twentieth century it enjoyed a modest comeback, but mainly as an antique favored by men in tights at Renaissance fairs. “On the one hand it has this Hollywood style image, and then it has this really serious image: that it is this museum instrument that’s kept in the museum by specialists of early music, who have come up with this set of rules about how it should be played and how it should be presented. I have a political goal to bring it out of there, to change this rule and share with people the beauty of this instrument.”

Van Wissem isn’t just interested in redeeming the lute. The Dutchman, who currently maintains residences in Brooklyn and Ghent, Belgium, is very conscious of his role as an artist, and the lies of modern living are also in his sights. “I think that in general it is a political thing for me, to play this instrument. It’s anti-computer age, antistuff you don’t need, anti-everything that’s wrong with this society nowadays.” The man is not a Luddite; he held his end of this conversation on a cell phone, and he sustains a vigorous Facebook presence. But he finds plenty to oppose in the contemporary valuation of novelty and endless acquisition; art is his vehicle for protest. His music and the way he presents it assert the worth of things, ideas, and traditions that have been around for hundreds of years; old instruments like the lute, old ways of living like that of the wandering gypsies, and a line of anti-establishment mysticism and philosophy that stretches from the Free Spirit heretics of the fifteenth century through Emanuel Swedenborg to Gilles Deleuze.

“My life is kind of like the life of a gypsy.

Like I travel all the time, that’s how I make a living. That also has down sides, but gypsies are the only people that never went to war

as a people. So there you go, it’s already a statement in itself.” Van Wissem’s itinerant lifestyle involves frequent touring punctuated by occasional congresses with like-minded musicians involved in disparate genres. He’s played duets with guitarists Tetuzi Akiyama, James Blackshaw, Loren Connors, and Jim Jarmusch; provided source material for electronic sound transformers Maurizio Bianchi and Gregg Kowalsky; recorded collaborations with the bands Smegma and United Bible Studies; contributed incidental music to the video game The Sims Medieval (Electronic Arts); and toured as part of The Heresy of the Free Spirit with ancient instrument improvisers Che Chen and Robbie Lee. He’s also organized a traveling festival that has appeared in New York and Europe called New Music for Old Instruments.

“I had Keiji Haino sing in the trio with Robbie Lee and Che Chen. He did Japanese singing and we improvised with strings, and there were other people like Stefan Mathieu doing his own pieces for virginal.” Other performers have included banjoist Paul Metzger and steel guitarists Susan Alcorn and R. Keenan Lawler; this fall Van Wissem’s Incunabulum label will release a compilation with those and other participants. “It’s kind of a movement for people to update early music instruments, but also sometimes instruments that suffer from cliché.”

Born in 1964, Van Wissem first played classical guitar, whose repertoire is full of repurposed compositions for lute. After years of serious study and an appearance with the Limburg Symphony Orchestra, in 1980 he was bitten by the punk rock bug and joined a band called Mort Subite. He spent the next 14 years playing electric guitar and running a punk bar. “At some point I got sick of it.

It was too much rock and roll lifestyle,” he explains. He sold his bar and his guitars, then “moved to New York and started to study the lute. I lived alone for a year; I was completely isolated. I wanted to get some introspection and with that came the lute.”

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While the lute looks a bit like a guitar, it is played differently. The strings, which are strung in pairs called courses, are plucked, not picked, so that the attack is more staccato and the decay of each note quicker than a guitar’s. As Van Wissem became immersed in the instrument’s technique and lore, he was attracted to a form popular in Renaissance-era lute music—the palindrome. His obsessive expressions of symmetry bring that centuries-old compositional device into dialogue with the rigor of 20th-century minimalism. More recently he’s layered his melodies so that statements of the same phrase, played in slightly variant tunings, radiate with microtonal clashes, and added poetic recitations by filmmaker Jim Jarmusch, artist Jean Madic, and actress Tilda Swinton that bring direct attention to the spiritual dilemmas and epiphanies expressed by his song titles.

The association with Jarmusch, whose guitar feedback weaves and coils around the lute’s intricate steps, has been especially productive. They will release two albums at the end of 2012. Apokastasis (Incunabulum) is a vinyl-only offering, with one side devoted to some of Van Wissem’s most lyrical solo performances and the other to more duo expressions of desolation and apocalypse. The Mystery of Heaven (Sacred Bones) is an allformats release that includes some of their noisiest playing; Van Wissem even returns to the electric guitar on the reverb-laden “The More She Burns, the More Beautifully She Glows.” He is also contributing music and lute know-how to Jarmusch’s next movie, Only Lovers Left Alive, a century-spanning vampire love story.

Video games, movies, festivals—things have undeniably improved since Van Wissem started out, when “everybody thought I was the village fool, and it was really difficult to convince people of the beauty of this instrument.” But, he says, there’s still plenty of work to be done to rehabilitate the lute. “It’s still marginal. It’s not like it’s in Billboard.”✹

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PARADISE GARDENS A secret history of folk art and the ol’ timey avant-garde with Chattanooga's Shaking Ray Levis.

Story by Chad Radford.

Photos by Robert Wright.

“Oftentimes, folks like to reckon that the Shaking Ray Levis are a duo, but that ain’t exactly the completed picture,” Dennis Palmer remarks with a cool nod. His barreling but warm Tennessee drawl projects an inviting personality that’s equal parts ornery jokester and accommodating Southern gentleman. But there’s something deeper lurking behind his words—something sassy, irreverent, and intellectual, although he rolls his eyes at being called the latter. Yet these characteristics seem at odds with the wild-eyed and deranged legacy of what he likes to call “ol’ timey avant-garde” music, which he’s spent the better part of his life cultivating.

On stage, Palmer is the wild-eyed “vocal-teller” who plays synthesizer, makes noises, tells stories, and is generally the more gregarious half of the duo’s founding members. As 2012 unfolds, Palmer and percussionist and cohort Bob Stagner have been celebrating the Shaking Ray Levis’ 25th anniversary with a series of concerts in their hometown of Chattanooga, Tennessee. Actually, it’s been 26 years since the group got started, but never mind that; this is the Deep South and things tend to move at a slower pace here.

The chemistry that Palmer and Stagner share is palpable, both on-stage and off, and when they’re together it’s difficult to shake the feeling that they’re just about to

pull the wool over your eyes. But that’s only because these life-long friends understand, even anticipate each other’s thoughts and reactions. “I’ve known Bob since we were in the first grade, and we’ve always played music together,” Palmer says. Together, they adopted the name The Shaking Ray Levis in the summer of 1986 as a nod to a bit of lore about a local “haint.”

According to legend, Ray Levi was a stranger who arrived unannounced in Chattanooga sometime around 1835. He was a foreigner, thought to be of ancient Melungeon descent, and he showed up wearing a golden smock and headgear decorated with dancing turquoise poodles, red copperhead snakes, and emerald clovers. He brought with him a trove of mystical and spiritually uplifting music that he’d been carrying around from town to town, “shaking them up like a Coke,” Palmer told Atlanta, GA’s weekly newspaper Creative Loafing in 1995.

Levi was a musical Johnny Appleseed, and to this day, some say that his ghost can still be heard shambling along Frazier Ave., in East Chattanooga, eager to share music with whoever crosses his path. In many ways, the story illustrates the Shaking Ray Levis’ working methods, as the music they create is intended to challenge both their audience and themselves while catering to a higher cause. This drive manifests

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Dennis Palmer and Bob Stagner in Chattanooga, July 2012

itself throughout the group’s releases: a 1992 10” picture disc they recorded as a quintet with New York noise provocateurs Borbetomagus, titled Coelacanth; their 1993 debut CD False Prophets or Dang Good Guessers; their 1997 CD Boss Witch; or their 2007 collaboration with Killick Erik Hinds, A.S.A.P. Wings. Through it all, percolating beats and bug-eyed blasts of short, sharp rhythms crowd around lyrics that aren’t necessarily sung but spoken in tongues, all to the tune of dissonant noises firing like stray bullets. In “The Popcorn Gomer,” the opening number from False Prophets, Stagner asks, “What kind of music are we are going to play?” and Palmer replies, “I don’t know, Bobby, but I think we’re going to be famous!”

There’s a sense of humor at work here that’s informal and absurd, flavored by a certain Southern regionalism, and opposed to the hubris of many 20th-century classical and modern jazz composers. But they nonetheless take the music very seriously.

For Palmer and Stagner the long-term goal is to one day see their dedication to improvisational modes of communication—musicians working together in the moment and forgoing the crutches of repetition, musical structures, and grooves—influencing the larger world of music.

“We want to make music that people can be entertained by,” Palmer insists. “Entertainment can be scary, and we want to make music that can scare people, but we don’t want it to linger there. It’s more about the trust that everybody in the room has with each other—a baby can start crying, a cell phone can go off, and these things can be unexpected, but you have to look at it like this: ‘A, B and C are going to happen.

However, something is going to happen between A and C as well but it ain’t gonna be B.’ We don’t know when we’re gonna be born and we don’t know when we’re going to die, but the closer we get within those time values and work with every possibility that we have as listeners and as players, we realize that the acts of listening and performing are equally as creative as each other.”

It’s a radical way to couch the simple act of entertaining people, but it is precisely this kind of participatory approach that builds strong communities around music.

“When you get down to it, improvisation is folk music, and thank goodness that academia hasn’t been able to do much with free improvisation, because it’s constantly evolving,” Palmer says. “I hope it will always be that way.”

Despite their dedication to improvised music, the Shaking Ray Levis have never been particularly opposed to more structured musical approaches. Their 2003 CD Mayor of the Tennessee River with spoken word artist and Duplex Planet zine editor David Greenberger saw the group channeling its musical mania into pop song lengths, providing the soundtrack to Greenberger’s quirky monologues. Nearly every song on the disc has been played on NPR at one point or another, which is about as mainstream as a group like the Shaking Ray Levis is going to get.

But beyond that, Palmer and Stagner have tapped into a deeper musical dialogue by pursuing a lifetime of collaborations with likeminded artists. They aren’t looking to partner up with any old soul who’s out looking for a jam session.

Their aim is to work with musicians who are equally committed to furthering the cause of improvised music in a larger cultural context.

Over the last quarter of a century Palmer and Stagner, along with the Shaking Ray Levi Society—a 501C3 non-profit organization they founded in 1986 to promote freeimprovised music throughout the region— have become anchors to a family of artists that extends far beyond the borders of their home state. The Society has been responsible for bringing a steady supply of world-class talent to Chattanooga. “Had we not been playing outside Chattanooga and provided an educational exponent to what we’re about, we wouldn’t have caught the attention of the local, state, and national funding agencies, especially the local,” Palmer says. “Gratefully, we had a good bit of favorable press from critics in London, New York, Chicago, and Atlanta to provide a big city endorsement for those that needed that sort of perspective.”

But perhaps avant-garde jazz luminary Anthony Braxton said it best in a 1993 video from a SRLS-sponsored show at Chattanooga’s Hunter Museum: “And so, the work of the Shaking Ray Levi Society, in my opinion, is very important because they are seeking to provide an alternative to the marketplace dynamics.” And as one can imagine, that isn’t exactly an easy task.

Regardless, over the years dozens of likeminded artists, including John Zorn, Eugene Chadbourne, Borbetomagus, Fred Frith, LaDonna Smith, Shelley Hirsch, Amy Denio, Davey Williams, Frank Pahl, Gino Robair, Min Tanaka, Jack Wright, Alan Licht, and the late British improv guitar pioneer Derek Bailey, have all shared the stage

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with the Shaking Ray Levis. With each new pairing, the group delves into a world of instinctive performance as communication, facilitating abstract narratives that are ridiculous, hilarious, horrifying, even a little crazy. But the music always strikes a familiar chord on a subconscious level.

“The tangible and motivating challenge that we take to heart is that improvisation asks us as listeners and as performers to participate in and celebrate risk, diversity, and oftentimes, unorthodox practices of communication,” Palmer says. “We’ve found that an open sensibility or modality, like improvisation, lends itself to working with diverse populations, and by that I mean people that ain’t been schooled as listeners or even as musical players.”

The roots of such a communal musical approach run deep within Palmer’s family tree, particularly on his father’s side, which was heavily involved in gospel music and singing in churches throughout the region.

His father, Clinton Edward Palmer, was a vocalist in a Chattanooga gospel quartet, and he and his sisters sang for churches throughout North Georgia. His uncle James was chairman of the Music Department at Tennessee Temple University, and served as Music Director for several churches throughout the South. His grandfather taught shape-note singing, better known as “Sacred Harp” singing.

Palmer’s father had a knack for eefing—a distinctly Southern style of singing best described as hillbilly beat boxing. No words are sung or even uttered—just wheezing, humming, and hiccupping rhythms—and it’s accompanied by handclapping and chest-slapping for a percussive effect— also called “hamboning.” Palmer has fond memories of being a child in the early ’60s and hearing his father make these noises around the house. This was long before entertainers such as Jimmie Riddle and Jackie Phelps introduced the world outside of the South to eefing with their musical interludes on the TV show Hee Haw in 1969. “My dad would do it all the time just to get me and my brothers going,” Palmer says. “He’d go into these little made-up numbers to get us out of bed for school in the morning, or to get us into the car when we had to go somewhere. I loved it!”

Sound in general has always set Palmer’s mind in motion. When he was a child, the spooky sound-effects records that his family would buy for the haunted house they’d create in the basement each year at Halloween were among his favorite things.

So were the squirrel calls and duck calls

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he’d order from the back pages of his dad’s hunting magazines. All of these things, coupled with a reel-to-reel tape recorder that was, as he puts it, “chock full of howling wind and haintly hollers,” became the fundamental sonic palette for the Shaking Ray Levis. To this day Palmer still plays the game calls pretty much every time the Shaking Rays play a show.

By the time he was a teenager, his tastes had gravitated toward the more esoteric side of the popular music of the times. His older brother Clinton later exposed him to art rock (Yes, King Crimson, et al.), but he was always a huge fan of Jimi Hendrix’s guitar playing. When asked if he had a favorite Hendrix album, without hesitation he starts repeating the fake interview between Hendrix and Mitch Mitchell at the start of Axis: Bold as Love. “If you will excuse me, I must be on my way…”: his words trail off while imitating the track’s swoosh of feedback and guitar noise.

Anyone playing a synthesizer also caught his attention. “Back then it was commonly thought that a synthesizer could, in theory, recreate the sound of any instrument known to humans, space aliens, a Bigfoot, or Winged Garuda,” Palmer says.

“I used to go to the record store and buy any record if it had someone playing synth on it. I bought some really awful records doing that; it was real hit or miss. But back then it really was a new thing. I remember going to the record store one day in 1970 and these guys were like, ‘you have to hear this thing called a Moog on the new Earl Scruggs record, people are saying it’s gonna replace fiddle playing!’ But I wanted the synths to make weird sounds.”

There were other records that caught his ear: the Monkees’ break from Don Kirshner’s rule to release Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn, & Jones Ltd. was a favorite. But he was more interested in immersing himself in Keith Emerson’s Moog solo in “Lucky Man” by Emerson, Lake, and Palmer. “I was a 13-year-old kid the first time I heard that and I thought ‘Whoah… What was that thing?’ It was really cool.”

A few years later, Palmer’s aunt Anita

Jo, who worked for an RCA distributor/ warehouse in Chattanooga, bought him an 8-track cartridge stereo recorder, and he soon figured out how to take the cartridges apart to make tape loops of distorted recordings of a Magnus Chord Organ, AM/ FM radio frequencies, and found sounds.

“We would take these tape loops to parties and tell people that it was the latest Pink Floyd record,” he laughs. “Back then, people wouldn’t have tolerated listening to something homemade by someone from Chattanooga, they just weren’t interested.”

It wasn’t until 1979 that Palmer acquired a Moog of his own. When his father passed away at the age of 42, Palmer inherited one of his hunting rifles, which he traded in for a late ’70s Moog Prodigy. “The rifle wasn’t valuable enough for me to get a Minimoog, so I settled for the Prodigy, which ended up being perfect for me at that time.” These days he plays a Moog LP 2 analog synthesizer with MoogerFoogers CP-251 and a MF102 ring modulator. He also sports a bent-circuit Casio sk1, which he had custom “Frankensteined” by a company out of Tallahassee, FL called Diabolical Devices.

Bob Stagner remembers the tenacity with which Palmer devoted himself to learning how to play the new Moog. It was such new technology that no one was offering lessons on how to use one, and there were no instructional videos for the novice to learn his way around its knobs and buttons. “He taught himself how to play that thing from top to bottom, and to this day it really shows,” Stagner says. “No one in this country plays like Dennis Palmer.”

Stagner’s earliest musical memories are more rooted in country and rock and roll than Palmer’s, but it wasn’t long before his experimental tendencies revealed themselves. When he was a kid, Stagner became aware of just how profoundly music affected him while listening to Johnny Cash, Herb Alpert, Pete Fountain, Wilson Pickett, and James Brown emanating from his next-door neighbor’s turntable. There was plenty of music coming from his own living room as well. “My mother, rest her

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soul, used to have traditional country music blasting so hard that the screen doors on our house pumped like a speaker,” Stagner says. “Back then I was really kind of ashamed of it, but later, I discovered just what beautiful music it really is.”

In the summer of 1967, Stagner’s family bought him a guitar. He was only 10 when he started to experiment: tipping his guitar over onto its side, detuning it, and bouncing household objects off of the strings.

“My sister was dating a drummer at the time and when he saw what I was doing he said, ‘You need to be playing drums!’” Six months later he switched to the drum kit, and he hasn’t looked back since. Stagner also has vivid memories of being taken to see a concert by Nashville star Chet Atkins later that same year. Forty-five years later, he still recalls Atkins’ presence that night.

“I wanted to play drums just the same way that he played guitar. Chet was a hard-ass, and for the right reasons. He did not suffer fools, and seeing him play in a bubble of sound ‘hip-no-tized me.’”

When not appearing in the Shaking Ray Levis, Stagner divides his time between part-time musical gigs with other professional musicians. When asked, he rattles off a laundry list of favorite moments: playing jazz alongside singer-pianist Bob Dorough, sitting in with June Carter Cash and her daughter Rosie, and playing with British percussionists Roger Turner and Tony Oxley. He’s also been working with longtime friend and collaborator, bassist Marc Trovillion (better known as Buddy T), one of the founding members of Nashville’s alt-country staple Lambchop, though the version they recorded of the song “2B2” make the final cut for Lambchop’s latest album, Mr. M. “I can’t go into too much detail about it without sounding crabby,” he laughs.

Stagner also teaches drums and percussion to “folks age 4-104,” as he puts it, and works with a program called TRAP in which he teaches music to children and adults with autism and Down syndrome.

One of the Shaking Ray Levis’ most unusual, and important, collaborators has

been the Rev. Howard Finster. Finster was a folk artist and Baptist minister in Summerville, GA, who claimed to that God had instructed him to spread the gospel by decorating the land surrounding his house, which came to be known as Paradise Gardens. Over the years Finster crafted nearly 50,000 pieces of artwork for the Gardens, gaining a modest amount of mainstream attention after appearing on the Tonight Show in 1983. The appearance led to R.E.M. and Talking Heads famously using Finster’s art on their album covers.

Palmer’s uncle Neil ran a store down the road from Paradise Gardens at that time.

“My aunts and uncles used to talk about this unusual artist and preacher, Rev. Finster, especially after he appeared on Johnny Carson,” Palmer says. “I just went over to Howard’s studio one day and introduced myself.” They forged a lasting friendship, and soon were playing shows together.

Once, the Shaking Ray Levis even traveled with Finster to Birmingham, Alabama to perform for a revival on the back of a flatbed trailer. Later, they brought Finster to Chattanooga for an artist talk and performance at the University of Tennessee. The Shaking Ray Levis opened the show using an arsenal of homemade instruments and found objects. Palmer recalls in vivid detail the neon-blue double-knit suit he wore that night, and hearing him walking around behind them, “whooping and hollering” while they played.

That evening, Finster referred to their music as folk art, adding, “It’s wonderful to have professional artists and folk artists.

These boys are folk art because they didn’t go to no university to get this rig going.

There might be a few universities that would like to have the credit for rigging this up for them, and that’s the reason it’s folk art, because it’s not a national taught thing.

It’s their own thing.”

Finster’s influence on the Shaking Ray Levis, and on Palmer’s visual art as well—a staccato drawing style that appears on most of the group’s album covers—is plain to see. Folk art is the merger of utilitarian and decorative aesthetics; typical value judgments and rules that bind most other artistic disciplines do not apply. It’s the language of outsiders, and it’s clear why the Shaking Ray Levis and Finster saw eye-toeye: they drew strength from their willful divergence from popular culture, remaining dedicated to their crafts.

Palmer continues, “Howard was a clairvoyant. He could see that which is withheld from the more highly educated mind, and traveled to other worlds: one planet he visited was covered in grass that moved like a beautiful woman’s hair under water.

The people that lived on this planet didn’t walk on the ground, they floated above this grass, and eating just a spoonful of white pollen that the grass produced provided them nourishment for nearly a year. He traveled in what he called his celestial body, and could travel through the Earth and see all the veins of water. One time he traveled to the Hell planet and saw Hitler wearing jackboots. He shoved Hitler and yelled at him to ‘get out of the way!’”

Palmer says that Finster “truly knew how to play and to entertain folks by improvising. He enjoyed making up names on the

spot like ‘Orantneeki’ or ‘Barsonahnola,’ and creating animal calls and dinosaur hollers. One method he used to improvise was to shut off certain ‘brain cells’—referring to brain cells as if they were like a jail cell with a door. He would say, ‘you close off the cells to 1970, 1913, or 1983; close off all yer brain cells that hold yer past and open up a brand new cell and let the moment of the here and now flow in...’”

Borbetomagus’s saxophonist Jim Sauter recalls inviting Palmer and Stagner in 1986 to play New Directions, a festival he organized in Piermont, NY with his Borbeto counterpart, Don Dietrich. Other acts that year included the David Hykes Harmonic Choir, Rudolph Grey, and Andy Guhl and Norbert Moslang, who were presented that night for the first time under the name Voice Crack. But it was the Shaking Rays’ fiery performance and especially Palmer’s otherworldly ranting that left a mark. “[It was like] a combination of tobacco auctioneer and television evangelist,” Sauter says.

“It totally floored me, just great.”

Dietrich recalls that same performance with equal reverence. “Without a doubt, that was the most memorable Shaking Rays gig I’ve ever seen,” he says. “It was so inspired: Dennis was doing this auctioneer barking thing, and just speaking in tongues—more like shrieking in tongues— like a man possessed, and the sound was just so intense. And Bob was just going apeshit on the drums. When it was done my heart was pounding, and I thought ‘this was just insane,’ which is the highest compliment that I can give to a performer.

It was just nasty, and it built and built and I thought my head was going to explode, like in the movie Scanners or something, and then, in a split second they just stopped! The moment was really pastoral, like you had just stepped off of a cliff. To this day it’s one of my fondest memories of the New Directions experience.”

Over the years Borbetomagus had occasionally received grants from Meet the Composer to set up shows. Some time later, they set up a gig with Palmer and Stagner at the Valley Cottage Library, a show that was equally memorable, both for their version of King Crimson’s “21st Century Schizoid Man,” and because “It was the last time we received support from ‘Uncle Meet,’” according to Sauter. “The auditor that attended the show saw to that.”

While they were in New York, however, Borbeto and the Shaking Rays booked time at Water Works Studio, a small, 8-track studio in the meat-packing district to record what would become the Coelacanth 10” picture disc. “I don’t think any of us went in with a clear idea what would or could come out of it, but we were all up for giving it a shot. Sure glad we did too,” Sauter says.

“It’s always a challenge to play live with anyone. With Bob and Dennis there is a comfort level because I know them and like them both personally, and they’re good.

But in a live situation you never really know what’s going to happen. That’s challenging and what still makes it fun. Always trying to make the music go someplace new.”

In 1986 and 1987, Palmer and Stagner booked two day-long music festivals at Finster’s Paradise Gardens, and it was

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Stagner and Palmer with Derek Bailey in 1993

while putting together the second one, the “Fah-Sah-Lah-Cah Lo” Festival (a name that Finster uttered while speaking in tongues), that Derek Bailey sent them a letter to ask if he could perform. Soon after, Bailey and the Shaking Rays became close friends, and the result was the Shaking Ray Levis’ CD debut, False Prophets or Dang Good Guessers, released on Incus Records in 1993. “The simple fact that Mr. Bailey thought enough of us to invite us to be [the] first US group on the label still holds its own, plus it was a real task making that record—it always takes longer in the American South to create great works,” he adds, citing long hours spent recording the album, usually between midnight and 6 a.m., in sessions divided between a cramped studio space and Palmer’s house.

In 1994, Incus released Short in the UK, which featured Palmer, Stagner, Steve Beresford and Roger Turner.

They continued to perform with Bailey from time to time, yielding a handful of other recordings, including a 1999 live performance at Lamar’s Restaurant in Chattanooga. There’s also The Gospel Record, which features Bailey, Palmer, and Amy Denio, performing twisted takes on traditional Southern Gospel numbers. A 2003 set that Bailey played with the SRLs at Tonic in New York—Bailey’s final U.S. performance—will be available later in 2012.

Howard Finster died in October 2001, and Derek Bailey died in December 2005, but both artists left an indelible mark on the Shaking Ray Levis. They could be ornery when it was appropriate, but the one thing the Shaking Ray Levis learned from both of them was the importance of being resolute.

Palmer sums it up eloquently: “Sing like a bird. Sing in the face of difficulty, and sing with little or no indication of praise.”

Ultimately, this is the same drive that has kept the Shaking Ray Levis pressing forward for so many years. And while over time their fiery nature may have simmered down to a more considered pace, the spark is still there. “Pacing to me, in this context, means being thoughtful and practicing empathy and on beyond empathy within a sonic basis,” Palmer explains. “We enjoy playing at a fast pace and being noisy, but we tend to use more silence in our music these days. And I’m not necessarily speaking of Cage silence, maybe it’s more like Pooty-Tang’s use of silence—mixing everyone’s esthetic and empathy all up into a sonic soufflé with hot sauce.” In a later email he adds, “I once heard, that if yer old ye can’t git into the kingdom of heaven.

NO MATTER HOW OLD YOU ARE. So, it is important to become childlike in yer old age—not immature, to become childlike.”

This year, in addition to the show with Derek Bailey at Tonic, there are a few other Shaking Ray Levis albums in the works, including a 2010 collaboration with vocalist Shelley Hirsch. Atlanta two-piece Duet for Theremin and Lapsteel recently released Collaborations, which features five tracks recorded with Palmer and Stagner. Palmer is also finishing up a solo record, called White Wuf, which features contributions from Stagner, Col. Bruce Hampton, Frank Pahl, and Jessica Lurie.

There’s also a new David Greenberger/ Shaking Ray Levis disc in the works, Tramps That Go Think in the Night. Recording began in May 2011, nearly a decade after Greenberger’s first collaboration with the Shaking Ray Levis, Mayor of the Tennessee River. Tramps follows the same basic design, in that Greenberger generally begins by reading a text in his typically conversational tone. But whereas Mayor

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of the Tennessee River was born out of Greenberger’s experience and conversations with Chattanooga’s elderly, and created with performance in mind, this time around the material is not tied specifically to Chattanooga. Some of the stories are sweet, some are sad, funny, oblique, but they’ve been scaled back without much improvisation going on at all. “What’s really great about working with the Shaking Rays in this context is that they listen really well and can respond,” Greenberger says.

“That part of the process is brought to bear in the initial phases of creating, but when we’re recording the stuff we’ve worked out the arrangements. It keeps the character of them as players, but for what I do, I really need to have the fixed architecture of a composition in place, no matter how spare it may be. For the conversational voice to be believable, the music becomes the house that the character lives in.”

While on the surface the project may sound like a departure for the Shaking Ray Levis, in the end it’s consistent with Palmer and Stagner’s desire to draw on everything that they know as both listeners and performers. Improvised or not, the sounds they’re channeling are the accumulation of a quarter-century’s worth of deep musical exploration, experience, knowledge, and a freedom that many musicians will never know. It’s the result of their commitment to their craft and to their art—folk art to the end. They listen, they perform, and they communicate like no one else on the planet.✹ Chad Radford lives in Atlanta, GA where he writes for Creative Loafing and other publications. He wrote about Loren Connors in STN#63

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TAPES FROM THE UNDERGROUND At the close of the 1980s, Generator provided a haven for DIY cassette culture on New York's Lower East Side.

Story by Adam Krause.

The “cassette culture” of the 1980s, which arose in the years following the appearance of affordable devices for home recording and cassette duplication, was perhaps the first truly autonomous musical movement to appear after the invention of recorded music. The often home-recorded, hand-packaged, self-distributed cassettes that this movement created were usually circulated through a nebulous network created through personal contact lists and fanzines. Tapes were traded more often they were sold. It was an underground consisting of obscure artists making music for the sheer joy of it.

This network of largely unknown artists was a wonderfully confusing mess, which, however wonderful it was, remained a confusing mess. Perfect musical matches remained perfect strangers because they moved in different circles. And in order to enter any of these circles, one would need

to know that there even were circles to enter in the first place. Cassette culture was unknown to all but the initiated few. This may have added to its mystique, but at the same time, countless potential cassette artists never made a single cassette because they didn’t even know there was such a thing as a “cassette artist.”

In June 1989, one young entrepreneur made a particularly interesting attempt to add structure to this nebulousness—and to make cassette culture more widely known and available—when Gen Ken Montgomery opened Generator Sound Art Gallery as a space where the cassette artists he had connected with through mail, fanzines, and travel could perform and sell their work. With Generator, Montgomery established a centralized location where at least one small segment of the cassette underground could congregate. At the same time, by opening a space for this

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purpose in his own neighborhood, he was able to use the works of international artists to engage with and strengthen his own local scene.

Montgomery thought of Generator “as turning [his] apartment inside out.” All the things he had previously done at home would be moved to a storefront where

anyone could walk in off the street and see what was happening. He listened to music, kept up correspondence, and basically continued to partake in the cassette underground. The only difference was that he was doing these things in an open storefront rather than his apartment.

But beyond that basic first step, he

Gen Ken Montgomwey, left, and Conrad Schnitzler, below, at Generator circa 1989

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remained open to its evolution and development. “It was kind of beyond me,” he claims. “That’s why I can’t take credit for Generator’s success. What happened at Generator was an accumulation of many generous people who sent me their music, ideas, and support. There was an openness to create a space for something to happen.

And in that space, lots of things happened that I couldn’t have predicted.”

It all began with a chance encounter with a text by John Cage. At 17, Montgomery took a job shelving books at the local community college library. One day, in the stillness of the stacks, he noticed the word Silence printed along the spine of a book.

It was John Cage’s first collection of essays, originally published in 1961. Montgomery pulled it out, started reading it, had his mind blown, and has yet to return it. Reading Cage’s essays, in particular the “Lecture on Nothing,” Montgomery became conscious of listening to the sounds of everyday life as if they were music.

By the time he found Silence, Montgomery had already been listening to, “and liking, the most far out music [he] could find.”

But, he states, “Silence got me to listen even more.” In fact, Cage’s book got him to listen to everything as music. “The effect that had on me was profound,” he says.

“That’s something I carried with me for the rest of my life.” When he moved to New York City from San Francisco in 1978, he was able to appreciate the various sounds of the city that many find obnoxious. The screech of the subway, the constant traffic and car horns, were all sounds ripe for enjoyment, not nuisances best ignored.

Montgomery enrolled in film school, but his obsession with sound tended to dominate his projects. Though ostensibly working on films, he “would completely obsess with the soundtrack.” Around this time, Montgomery met the electronic musician Charles Cohen. Cohen suggested that Montgomery forget about films entirely and simply compose music. As Montgomery recalls, “I was like, ‘Yeah, but I don’t know music.’ He just smiled and said, ‘You don’t need to.’” Thus encouraged, Montgomery started experimenting and recording. In the early 1980s, he also attempted to join a few post-punk bands. But it turned out that Montgomery’s intuitive approach to sound and noise-making clashed with the expectations of more conventional musicians.

Or, as he says, “They couldn’t understand that I didn’t know the notes.” So, bereft of bandmates, he recorded a solo cassette called Gen Ken and the Equipment with just himself and, as the title implies, his equipment.

That recording, Montgomery says, was his entry into the cassette underground.

“Once I made Gen Ken and the Equipment, I started mailing it to people,” he says.

“These relationships became the most important relationships in my life.” One noteworthy connection was his friendship with the Berlin artist Conrad Schnitzler. A former student of Joseph Beuys, Schnitzler had initially been a sculptor, but abandoned visual art in order to devote himself entirely to sound. And he quite literally abandoned visual art, leaving all his sculptures in a field one day. An early member of Tangerine

and evolved throughout its existence. One of Montgomery’s earliest statements on Generator claims: “Generator is a public experiment begun on June 1, 1989 to expose a world of international sound art to new audiences who wouldn’t have otherwise known that this underground network existed, and to provide a meeting point for the people already attracted to this international network that has previously remained accessible only by post. … It’s about everything small and everything New York is not. Small editions by unfamous artists. … Come hear the modern folk artists.”

Generator, like any experiment worthy of the name, did not have a predetermined goal, but rather, sought to discover something new and unforeseen.

John Cage visits Generator in 1991

Dream and a founding member of Kluster, Schnitzler was also a prolific solo artist. He had printed his address on the back of one of his records, and Montgomery sent him a cassette. In turn, Schnitzler invited Montgomery to send a track to be included on a compilation LP called International Friendship. Schnitzler and Montgomery, along with David Prescott from Boston, soon started a record/cassette label focusing on the various artists they had come into contact with through the post. The label, Generations Unlimited, further expanded Montgomery’s contacts and relationships.

Their first LP bore the rather appropriate title of No Borders.

The relationships kindled by Generations Unlimited combined with the availability of $99 flights on PEOPLExpress to Brussels to provide Montgomery with the opportunity to spend time in Europe. It was there that Montgomery envisioned a space in New York City for the music he was involved in. “There were,” he recalls, “scenes I was connecting with in Europe

that I found missing in New York.” He was impressed by record stores carrying artist-produced records and cassettes in Amsterdam like Staalplaat and Zensor Records, and Gelbe Musik and Scheissladen in Berlin. His time with Schnitzler in Berlin, “who constantly threw out a million ideas every time we sat down at the table,” also contributed to the formation of the idea to create a place where their friends’ music could be heard and bought.

The exact details of this proposed place were still undetermined even after Montgomery had returned to New York and begun work on it. As he states, “I was still coming up with the name for Generator after I had signed the lease.” In many ways, however, the exact nature of Generator is still undetermined, or at least, very hard to pin down. It was a record store where many of the records were not for sale, an art gallery devoted to sound, and an infoshop for the cassette underground. It was each of these things, but not reducible to any of them. Moreover, its nature changed

The first incarnation of Generator, located at 200 East 3rd Street, lasted from June 1989 until June 1990. As Montgomery describes it: “I had cassettes hung by Velcro all over the walls, a small bin filled with records, fanzines and fliers, and small cassette players attached to the walls so people could come in and preview cassettes. There was also a cassette recorder on the front door and one in the toilet for people to record anonymous sounds. I had a small but powerful PA for concerts.

People would crowd in or stand outside in the street to listen because of how small the space was.”

The musicians associated with Generator aesthetically bridge the divide between the modern classical tradition represented by Cage, Stockhausen, Feldman, and their ilk, and the world of DIY punk rock, industrial music, and straight-up noise. As Montgomery summarizes: “A lot of the music coming through the cassette network was made with primitive toys from Radio Shack, selfmade instruments, or modified instruments, the Casio VL Tone, synthesizers, cheap drum boxes and anything they could find that made noise—even amplified household appliances. It was very much using what you’ve got. You didn’t have to buy expensive equipment or go to a recording studio to record your ideas. You were in total control of your own sound. You could be spontaneous by sending cassettes in the mail to fanzines and other artists. You could reach your audience immediately and directly. It was a world of folk-noise. …

You wanted to share it with anybody who might appreciate it.”

This folk element to the cassette underground was very important to Montgomery.

As he states, “I was much more excited about someone sending me a cassette from a small town in Texas who didn’t care about a recording contract with a record

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label, who was obviously doing it because he loved doing it.”

By creating a space for such artists in New York City, Montgomery was able to meet many people in his area involved in cassette culture that he had not previously known. Before Generator, he had created musical contacts all over the world, but few in his own community. “There weren’t many coming from New York. They were all over the place: Spain, Holland, Japan, France, and Russia, to name a few. So I kind of had this vague feeling that I was missing out on something in my own town. Part of the idea of why I called it an experiment was I wanted to find out whether or not there were more people like me interested in my kind of underground music in New York City. …

I thought if maybe there was a place to go, I’d meet like-minded people.”

Although the majority of his contacts still came from out of town, Generator certainly did manage to become a social hub where Montgomery was able to meet like-minded locals. Al Margolis, who ran the cassette label Sound of Pig, Carl Howard of Audiophile Tapes, and Geoff Dugen, who now runs GD Stereo, were among the New Yorkers who strolled in through the door.

He also met a number of DJs from the legendary free-form radio station WFMU and local sound and noise musicians, like Donald Miller of Borbetomagus, and Paul Lemos from Controlled Bleeding, who made Montgomery’s acquaintance at Generator. The store was also able to create interest from curious newcomers who (often quite literally) just walked in off the street with no idea what they were stepping into.

As Montgomery states, “As well as people who were already making noise and music, there were people who just got into the spirit and started doing their own thing because Generator was also a resource of information.”

“Generator was the place to be early every Saturday evening during its existence,” says Margolis. “There was always a really interesting live performance/sound event.

Just as a small example: Con Schnitzler, Hausswolff/Karkowski, Tom Hamilton, Thomas Dimuzio, Adam Bohman... So that if at all possible one had to go. Cassette folks, noisemakers, et cetera, what in those days was a relatively small community of sound/noise/experimental music makers and listeners could actually hear what they were interested in and actually just meet up week in and week out.”

Montgomery spent the entire year that Generator was on the Lower East Side working at a busy photo lab in midtown from early in the morning until two in the afternoon, then stopping at the post office before going to Generator from three until midnight. But Margolis’s observation that Montgomery’s “completely economically suicidal way of not carrying anything commercial, which in its strict hardcoreness, was a breath of fresh air,” also recognizes that the very things that made Generator special also made it economically unviable. Eventually, and perhaps inevitably, the monetary burden became too much, and rather than turn the space into a more financially promising, but personally unpalatable entity that might support itself, Montgomery decided to abandon 22 | SIGNAL to NOISE #64 WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM

the project. He still had numerous contacts looking to set up performances, so for a year or so, he organized concerts at other venues, in particular, every Sunday night at a performance space called Webo, where he presented “Generator at Webo.”

Soon, however, some friends urged him to revive Generator and offered him an affordable loft space on Chelsea’s West Side. This incarnation, located at 547 West 20th Street, existed from June 1991 until June 1992, and was different from the first incarnation in several respects. It was in a third-floor loft in a neighborhood with almost no foot traffic. There was a women’s prison across the street and an after-hours S&M bar on the corner. Everything else was industrial. People would have to know about it and make a special trip. There were no more curious strangers stumbling into Generator. The hours were limited, and while the archive of cassettes and other recordings was housed there, selling things was hardly the focus. This second incarnation of Generator was primarily an exhibition space that focused on sound installations and periodic performances.

This focus on installations arose, in part, out of the experiment that was the first Generator. As Montgomery recalls, “When I first opened the storefront in the East Village, there weren’t really any sound installations. … Three or four months later I had the first sound installation by Chop Shop, aka Scott Konzlemann, who then lived in Boston but first heard about Generator when in Madrid. In the tiny, decrepit basement, Konzlemann installed Furnace Plate, a 200-pound piece of rusted metal with a 16-inch speaker welded into it. Its sound was a physical experience like sitting next to a jet engine. Upstairs he had five or six other speaker constructions all running simultaneously throughout Generator’s open hours.” This installation helped make Montgomery more interested in immersive sonic environments, leading to the much more installation-focused second incarnation of Generator.

Margolis remarks that “the original Generator, more so than the second one, still resonates,” but the Generator in Chelsea still had its charms, and GX Jupitter-Larsen of the Haters remembers it as a wonderful performance space. “Every time I performed at the Generator in Chelsea, I used the freight elevator as a stage. I like elevators, and Generator’s was a classic. Made for a handsome performance space. It was also the Generator in Chelsea where I did my first performance using amplified handheld hole-punches. The clici-clic as I called it. Soundwise, it’s still my favorite New York show of mine.”

It was also at the Generator in Chelsea that Montgomery received an unexpected phone call from John Cage. Montgomery had lent out the copy of Silence he had stolen from the library (but eventually paid for), and had completely forgotten about it. He ran into an acquaintance on the street, who mentioned that she had a book of his that she needed to return. Montgomery claims that “When I got the book back, it was like a long lost child returning.” It was just a few days later when the phone at Generator rang with the unmistakable voice of John

Cage on the other end. Someone had told him about Generator and he wanted to check it out. He paid a visit, and then invited Montgomery over to his house, where Cage introduced him to his friends by saying something to the effect of, ‘This young man has made an art gallery just for sound. Isn’t that amazing?’

With both versions of Generator, Montgomery sought to provide a place for artists who slip through the cracks: musicians too experimental for the music business, but too noisy and rough for the art world. The cassette-based artists who fell through the cracks and landed at Generator prove that it is possible to forge a free space beyond the marketplace and the museum, a space where interesting things can happen that don’t need to fall within the confines of any given parameters.

By the time the second Generator location closed, Montgomery was burned out on music. He spent some time in Europe, and eventually moved to rural Pennsylvania, where he entirely stopped listening to and producing music. But another chance encounter brought him back to the world of sound. He found a box of 8-tracks and an old player at a yard sale. He bought the whole lot. It was mostly 70s rock, but it was nice to listen without any vested interests.

Then he popped in Led Zeppelin IV. The 8-track had been dropped in the mud and otherwise maltreated throughout its life, so instead of kicking off with the familiar strains of “Black Dog,” it began playing all warped and wobbly, sounding more like a sound experiment than a rock record. He put in a cassette and recorded what was

happening. Soon, he returned to New York, and along with Scott Konzlemann (of the speaker constructions discussed above), started a small record label called Generator. Montgomery’s mangled recording of Led Zeppelin IV was released as 8-Track Magic.

Generator continues to exist as a label, and in recent years, Montgomery has steadily increased his musical activities. Besides the ongoing existence of the Ministry of Lamination, in which Montgomery amplifies and records the sounds of everything from bread to bubble wrap being run through a laminator, Pogus Records has recently released Birds and Machines, a compilation of Montgomery’s early cassette works from the 1980s. There is also a relatively recent recording of duets with the late, great Conrad Schnitzler on GD Stereo called GenCon Duets, and a one-sided LP called Pink Noise Montgomery made while teaching sound art in Cincinnati, released

by Anarchy Moon. There is also a forthcoming LP on Vinyl-On-Demand in Germany, among many other recent and forthcoming releases.

Montgomery and I were both recently among the artists who contributed tracks to a CD that accompanied a Lemon o Books zine called Our Moon, and in early 2012, he and I joined Andrea Beeman and Marielle Allschwang for a collaborative performance at the Stone in New York City, located on the Lower East Side, just blocks from the site of the original Generator. The music we performed was based on each of our moon-themed contributions to Our Moon, as well as recordings from Mont-

gomery’s recent trip to India. Using tape loops, various electronics, guitar, violin, and Montgomery’s newly acquired sarangi, we played a piece that sounded like a cross between field recordings of the Apollo Missions and a slightly deranged and experimental raga. Montgomery, Allschwang and I performed in the dark, while Beeman, the Enchantress of Bioluminosity, danced throughout the space wearing and carrying various lights.

After our performance at the Stone, we walked to an Ethiopian restaurant that had formerly housed a tire shop. Looking past the highly-recommended vegetarian platter and out the front window, I remarked that we seemed to be directly across the street from the location of the original Generator. Montgomery turned around, took a look, and seemingly somewhat surprised to notice exactly where he was, confirmed that, yes, we were indeed directly across the street from the old storefront. Generator has not existed as a space for two decades, but Montgomery’s folk-noise, DIY, person-to-person approach to art and music continues unabated. He persists in bringing people together to make things happen without the permission or blessing of the culture industry. He continues to connect with, and collaborate with, unfamous artists making small editions, freely lending his time, resources, and talents to create interesting events and artifacts. ✹ Milwaukee's Adam Krause is a musician and the author of Art as Politics (New Compass). This is his first feature for Signal to Noise

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IMPROBABLE ECSTACIES

William Gibson goes record shopping in Jakarta and opens a window into Indonesia’s musical history.

Near the center of the heaving chaos of modern Jakarta, around the corner from the Embassy of the State of Palestine, in the tony neighborhood of Menteng where Barack Obama attended grade school amidst the honking rattle of three-wheeled bajajs and the wooden pushcarts of street vendors selling bubur ayam (a chicken porridge that serves as breakfast for most Jakartans), is the street of junk vendors known as Jalan Surabaya.

For the past forty years, a narrow strip of land between a mephitic canal and the thrumming traffic of Jalan Surabaya has served as a daily flea market selling antiques both authentic and fake. As part of the dizzying incongruity of Jakarta, the series of concrete stalls with roll-down doors, most no larger than an American suburban closet, melds perfectly into this leafy enclave of quiet mansions hidden behind bamboo and high walls.

These days, most of the shops sell knockoff brand-name luggage, and the quality of the existing junk seems to be slipping precipitously, though one ware on the street is still going strong: vinyl records. These sell for anywhere from 50,000 to 500,000 rupiah (or between 6 and 60 US dollars), and the street has long been a haven for vinyl collectors and audio explorers who seek out sonic relics from the pre-digital world. They come from Japan and Korea, from Europe and North America, to sit on hard plastic stools on the steaming street under a brutal sun, to flip through stack after stack of old platters with filthy covers. To most observers, such as the disappointed tourists slowly broiling as they wander the “Street of Antiques” described in guidebooks, and perhaps even to many of the record sellers themselves, these people are clearly insane. To the initiated, Jalan Surabaya offers a garden of endless delights.

To them the bazaar has become a sort of Southeast Asian El Dorado, whispered about in record stores in Singapore and Bangkok in the reverent tones usually reserved for the holiest of places.

I first visited this emporium of improbable ecstasies several years ago with Alan Bishop, an American musician of Lebanese descent currently based in the Pacific Northwest.

Together with his brother Richard and their friend Charles Gocher, Alan formed part of the fabled Sun City Girls, one of whose signature styles was an energetic re-assembling of the exotic pop sounds the brothers discovered on their tours of India and Southeast

Asia. The band even went so far as to tour Burmese villages to share the stage with local musicians in order to pick up the authentic rhythms they couldn’t hear back home.

Gocher’s death from cancer in 2007 caused the Bishop brothers’ various side projects to become their main focus, and for Alan, one outcome of that shift in musical emphasis entailed collecting as much Indonesian pop as humanly possible.

Shaven-headed with a slightly manic countenance and dressed all in black, including a sweat-inducing black blazer, Bishop at times resembles F.W. Murnau’s vision of Nosferatu, while his personality invokes the slightly off-kilter uncle who makes family gatherings interesting (fully aware of this, one of Bishop’s musical personae is the cranky sooth-sayer “Uncle Jim”). He is also a long-standing collector on Jalan Surabaya and has established serious relationships with many of the top sellers on the street, many of whom know him as “Crazy Alan.” Although he first visited the street two decades ago, it is only in the last six years that Bishop has become serious about collecting. By his own estimates, he’s bought many thousands of records from their stalls.

How does one get involved in such an endeavor? Bishop later explained in an email: “My first time in Indonesia was 1989.

Before then I had been listening primarily to traditional Indonesian music and had no idea what kind of a popular music legacy was present in the country. Collecting Indonesian vinyl to learn about the nation’s musical legacy has become one of my main obsessions.” Bishop’s approach to the study of Indonesian pop is that of a working musician, not an academic musicologist. He not only collects the music, but knows the history of the bands and the musical influences both Western and local, as well as the recording and distribution histories of individual albums. Want to ride in the Fiat that Titiek Sandhora leans across on the cover of her self-titled album on Mutiara Records? Bishop knows the man who owns it.

The marketplace of Jalan Surabaya has itself played no small part in Bishop’s study of Indonesian pop. He elaborates, “Jalan Surabaya provides a meeting place and functions as an informal workshop and classroom for those interested in the musical history of the country. I have witnessed many young Indonesians meeting and discussing the music with sellers and other curious customers on a daily basis.” The individual sellers are

the lecturers in this outdoor classroom, and Bishop knows the value of their friendship: “I have a personal relationship with each seller and the relationships grow stronger every year, and I learn from them all the time. I ask many questions and they are eager to share their knowledge. I can feel their pride when discussing the rich history of their music.”

This pride is something that Bishop takes on his own shoulders as well.

Beyond buying used vinyl, Bishop tracks down surviving musicians for interviews for the extensive liner notes of the compilation albums that he releases through Sublime Frequencies, the label he co-founded with Hisham Mayet in 2003 in order to expose listeners to “obscure sights and sounds from modern and traditional urban and rural frontiers via film and video, field recordings, radio and short-wave transmissions, international folk and pop music, sound anomalies, and other forms of human and natural expression not documented sufficiently through all channels of academic research, the modern recording industry, media, or corporate foundations.” Sublime Frequencies has enjoyed a rapid ascent, its releases eagerly sought out by collectors of so-called “world music” as well as urban hipsters and scholars of folk culture.

Early releases focused on Southeast Asian pop, with albums that carried titles such as Night Recordings from Bali (captured on a hi-fidelity hand-held cassette recorder) and the alluring Princess Nicotine: Folk and Pop Music of Myanmar (compiled from cassettes bought on location). In 2009, Sublime Frequencies released the album Singapore A-Go-Go, which was culled from my own collection of Straits Chinese pop records from the 1960s and 1970s. Due to Bishop’s efforts, some of Indonesia’s dazzling post1960s pop music—and the history behind it—is now deservedly available to a wide audience.

With “Crazy Alan” as a guide, I was able to enter the thicket of unfamiliar names and faces and sounds on the sellers’ stacks. There are about a dozen serious record sellers on the street. Some of the junk shops keep records on their shelves, but they are not part of the larger coterie of sellers who attract the collectors. There is friendly competition between the serious record vendors, though they also help each other out if a big time collector like Bishop is looking for a particular album. Amazingly, they all seem to know the contents not only of their own stalls but of

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Top: Mr. Shahdinar in his stall on Jalan Surabaya, summer 2011

their competitors’ as well, and if one album is desired, a runner will be dispatched to another owner’s stall to procure it (all of the merchants on the street pay jointly for shared nightly security patrols, too).

Although I am only a modest collector, I’ve done my fair share of vinyl hunting in some far-flung places, and have encountered everything from the urbane (I once lived in the building opposite an Aladdin’s cave known as the Jazz Record Center in Manhattan) to the atavistic, like being chased out of an open-air flea market by beer-soaked bums in Edinburgh, but I’ve never really come across anything quite like the stacks on Jalan Surabaya. The sheer volume is awe-inspiring.

I asked one seller, a thin, well-dressed fellow named Inal, how many records he had in his shop. Without a moment’s hesitation, he proudly replied: “one million.” Although something must have been lost in translation, there is truth to be found in the abstract expression: does it matter if he only has 10,000 records? At some sublime point, the size of the mass ceases to signify in exact terms.

Adding to the perplexity of being faced with a hypothetical one million records, sellers don’t categorize their stacks. There is no convenient taxonomic grouping by artist or genre, or era, or country, or quality, or really anything at all. What one encounters is a riotous assortment of albums from every conceivable era in every conceivable genre from all over the world stuffed into boxes or merely stacked on shelves. Like the tangled fecundity of jungle that so disconcerted early European explorers of the tropics, the stacks of recorded music on Jalan Surabaya can swiftly overwhelm and swallow would-be collectors.

Finally of course there are the relatively mundane problems of language barriers and cultural differences: this is, after all, Jakarta and not Cambridge. Overcoming these barriers entails being not merely friendly and courteous but outright deferential to the men (and they are all men) who act as the sentinels and sellers of the grooved magic you are there to acquire. A sure way to win their confidence is to speak some polite words in Bahasa as well as to know the names of local labels and musicians. After several visits they will remember you, and that’s when deeper issues of mutual respect come into play.

The music I was after on my most recent expedition to Jalan Surabaya is known as kroncong (also variously spelled krontjong, from the Dutch, and keronchong in Bahasa, though pronounced something like “krongchong” in English). Kroncong is believed to be descended from Portuguese music that European colonizers first brought to the region in the sixteenth century. However, these “Portuguese” were just as often Ceylonese or African or of mixed race ancestry as they were “pure blood” European, so that the styles of delivery and performance of kroncong were as much influenced by the

strong traditions of Africa and India as they were by Iberia. Because of this origin, for a long time kroncong was considered to be louche street music of these “black Portuguese,” or Mardijkers (“free persons,” or former slaves), as they were known in Batavia (Jakarta).

It wasn’t until the early twentieth century, when recorded sound began to have an impact on the music industry, that kroncong became respectable: the dashing playboy image that the street performers projected fit well with the star-system required to sell albums. As the century progressed, the professionalization of the industry had a profound impact on the way the music was performed. It became the popular music of Java and remained so until a different genre known as dangdut, based on Middle-Eastern traditions, took hold in the 1960s. No matter the stylistic differences, all modern kroncong music is distinguished by the use of two instruments that play an interlocking pattern of on- and off-beat sounds, known as cakcuk, behind the melodic line. This intricate pattern of sound is partly what makes Indonesian music sound so exotic to Western ears—even when played on instruments like an electric guitar.

The first stop on my kroncong adventure was the stall of Uje, close to the bottom of the street near the intersection with Jalan Diponegoro. Like many Indonesians, Uje (pronounced “oo-gee”) uses only one name. Considered to be a new kid on the block, Uje has been selling records on Jalan Surabaya for ten years. He has a modest stall, crammed with records, tapes, and CDs as well as record players, speakers, receivers, and even reel-to-reel tape players. After a desultory shuffle through the stacks nearest to the entrance, I ask him for records on a specific label I’m keen to explore, and with a grin he deftly flips through about four boxes before returning with half-a-dozen albums.

With obvious pride, he claims that not only does he know each and every record he owns but also the exact location of each album. In the ever-shifting contents of his shop, this is quite a feat of library science.

After I have chosen the albums I wanted and negotiated a price (having met me before, Uje simply gives me a flat rate: “Everything in shop, 100,000 rupiah”), he then pulls similar albums, safely packaged in shrink-wrapped plastic, from a locked metal cabinet. Though some are nearly half-a-century old, these albums are in mint condition, their sleeves pristine, and their vinyl surfaces flawless.

This is the choice stuff, the records that draw collectors from across the world: Uje’s private reserve. He gingerly hands them to me, watching attentively to ensure that a slip of my fingers doesn’t mean a smashed treasure. The temptation to buy is great, but these gems are priced far beyond the 100,000 rupiah flat rate, and I’ve other stalls to explore. Back into Uje’s vault they go.

Further along the street, at the corner of one of the small bridges that cross the canal,

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is the stall of Harris, an affable man who speaks good English and has one of the largest collections of albums on Jalan Surabaya.

The eclectic mix of his collection is astounding. On one shelf, a record of traditional folk songs from the People’s Republic of China rubs shoulders with the Berlin Civic Opera’s performance of Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice, which sits above a recording of the Philippine Constabulary Marching Band which shares space with Johnny Tillotson’s 1963 album Talk Back Trembling. And as with Uje, Harris knows the location of every record in his collection even if it’s in a language he doesn’t speak. He claims to have 20,000 albums in his collection, which is believable (he owns another stall down the road, which acts simply as a storage shed), but his own tastes run to light jazz and Indonesian dangdut, the vibrant dance music that has supplanted kroncong as Indonesia’s most popular homegrown sound. He also has one of the best collections of Indonesian pop on the street, which means that Harris can usually offer several copies of the same album in varying conditions.

For long-standing customers, Harris offers sweetened iced tea accompanied by conversation. We perch on low plastic stools and shift continually to keep in the meager shade provided by a tarp stretched from his stall.

Harris tells me that he thinks that more than 100,000 records have passed through his hands in the fifteen years he’s been active on the street. Does he ever wonder why people would travel all the way here to buy music recorded using old-fashioned techniques? He purses his lips and ponders before answering, “Because it makes them happy to do so.” And what of himself, why does he sell records to these people—people like me?

This answer requires no thoughtful pause: “Because making other people happy brings happiness to me.” Perhaps it is this attitude plus the size of his offering that makes Harris’s stall such a popular destination for collectors. It is an attitude that Harris learned from his father, Shahdinar.

Harris’s father has been selling records on the street for more than forty years. A thin, spry man with a quick smile and swift fingers, Shahdinar doesn’t speak a word of English.

But he really doesn’t have to. He communicates with customers by watching what they buy then offering them similar, often harder to find, material. When you consider that he’s been selling records since the 1960s, when many of the albums in his stacks were new, it’s easier to appreciate how he’s become so adept at sensing which music will appeal to individual buyers.

On this visit, though, he’s in a hurry to depart so I only have a few moments to exchange greetings. He notices the albums I’ve stacked up and wordlessly turns to find something more. After rooting around in a box, a smiling Shahdinar places into my hands an album with the title Popular Songs from Parahiangan (West Java), in Krontjong Beat. It’s pressed in translucent ruby-red

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vinyl and in impeccable condition, so I can’t resist buying it, though the staged cover art which strains to create a folksy atmosphere, and the fact that the liner notes are written in English, suggest that I can expect either rancid schmaltz or endearing kitsch. Happily, the music would prove to be the latter.

The record appeared on the Evergreen label, with the proud notification that the music had been “arranged and directed by Brigadier General R. Pirngadie.” As I would learn, this label was active in the 1960s and was the love child of General Rudi Pirngadie, who had a hand in producing each of the releases. Each album on Evergreen followed the patriotic theme of arranging popular music from across Indonesia for an orchestra comprising both Western and indigenous instruments as well as a full chorus, and backed by a kroncong beat. A few Evergreen titles will serve for illustration: Songs of the Moluccas, in Krontjong Beat; Songs from Minang, in Krontjong Beat; even Reveries of the Independence War, in Krontjong Beat, and the politically provocative Songs of the Peninsula, in Krontjong Beat.

The Evergreen releases were ostensibly meant to share the folk music of Indonesia with the world, though the political undertow of the general’s project is evident in the liner notes: “Krontjong Beat music reflects the motto on the Indonesian Coat of Arms: Unity in Diversity.” According to ethnomusicologist Craig Lockard, Pirngadie eventually became known simply as “General Kroncong.” If the music on the Evergreen release I bought on Jalan Surabaya is anything to go by, the orchestral kroncong that the general believed would unite the nation was to be beautifully recorded in sparkling stereo and simultaneously evocative of both the space-age and a tiki-torch lounge: Les Baxter, eat your heart out. Unfortunately, Pirngadie’s “Krontjong Beat” project was ultimately derailed not so much by Indonesia’s political upheaval but because the music on the albums was too Western for the local audience and too exotic for the foreign audience. Fortunately for collectors, this bizarre episode in Indonesian pop and the unintentionally camp music it produced is preserved and for sale at Harris’s shop.

Flush with successful kroncong collecting, with the heat and dust and pollution of high noon beginning to drag—and my big bag of vinyl starting to weigh me down—I decided to bid Harris adieu. But he had one more surprise for me that day.

The album was an original pressing of kroncong music on Lokananta Records featuring the legendary singer Waldjinah Budi. The vinyl plate was thick, its surface nearly flawless, and though it revolved at 33-1/3 rpm, it was only ten inches across, which made it all the more unusual. The few minutes of music I heard over the din of the street were absolutely entrancing, so I bought the album and slipped it in with the rest of my loot before heading back my hotel. I didn’t think much more of it at the time, though for the rest of my trip I couldn’t get Waldjinah’s voice out of my head.

The nacreous beauty of the music was fully revealed a few days later after I dropped the needle on the vinyl in the air-conditioned silence of my home in Singapore. Some

would call the music soul-stirring; others might use the words “mesmerizing” or even “other-worldly.” The music attempts what in the gamelan tradition is known as rasa, or the communication or transmission or even shared manifestation of a particular emotion.

The concept of rasa originates in the Hindu traditions that preceded Islam’s arrival in Java, but it also includes local animist traditions that give Javanese rasa a style distinct from that of India. It was a type of rasa that I was encountering, or undergoing, or experiencing (or all three) when I played the record repeatedly in the climate-controlled concrete box I call home.

On the record, Waldjinah’s plangent voice is backed by the instruments of the “Orkes Krontjong Bintang” and a male chorus, or gerong, whose names appear only as Budi, Walujo, and Soewardi. The song “Kembang Kacang” takes one side of the album, and is performed in the languid langgam jawa style of kroncong, which was centered in Waldjinah’s hometown of Solo (or Surakarta) and which Lokananta Records would later play a key role in promoting as an innovation in Indonesian national music. Langgam means “popular song,” which in Java can mean “popular song in the gamelan repertoire.”

Langgam jawa tries to bridge the two traditions by melding elements of gamelan with kroncong and Javanese folk singing.

A musicologist once described the langgam jawa style as “hearing gamelan music transferred to Western instruments” because the orchestra usually consists of flute, guitar, violin, mandolins, and plucked cello or occasionally bass. Some langgam jawa songs use a bawa, or solo vocal introduction, from the gamelan tradition, and indeed it was Waldjinah’s haunting bawa that Harris had played for me on Jalan Surabaya.

Combined, the kroncong orchestra, the male gerong, and Waldjinah’s voice create an iridescent latticework of sound. Later I would learn that her elegant tonal delivery employs a technique known as cengkok, which gives a shimmering quality to her voice. Waldjinah’s cengkok is also an essential element in transferring the rasa expected in traditional gamelan music to the langgam jawa sound.

Cengkok creates an individual style expressing the musician’s own feelings by embellishing the original composition while simultaneously expressing the emotion that the song is trying to deliver. As one musicologist put it, cengkok “is that which gives soul and sense” to the song.

The album was now part of my collection, but what was it that I was listening to in the luxury of my private study? Could I even experience rasa if I didn’t understand the language or the tradition? What was it that I had encountered on Jalan Surabaya?

The first time I heard Indonesian music, it wasn’t even Indonesian. Frenchman Maurice Jarré’s soundtrack to The Year of Living Dangerously, Australian Peter Weir’s 1982 film adaption of his compatriot Christopher Koch’s 1978 novel set in Jakarta, offers a delightful simulacrum of Javanese music.

Jarré’s soundtrack uses pentatonic scales and traditional rhythmic structures played on authentic gongs and drums to preserve the essential elements of the gamelan sound to enhance the visual spectacle on the screen without distracting from it: as audio exoticism, it is superb. Yet at that time and place,

in the late 1980s in the wholesome outer suburb of Los Angeles that was my teenage home, it might have been the only introduction to Indonesian music available.

Finding authentic gamelan music at the local strip mall music stores proved difficult, though at some point I picked up something called Magic Bali, Le Ramayana. The music is first rate, if too brief. The distinctive CD cover features a young native woman gazing heavenward wearing a dancer’s crown, one of her plump breasts bursting from her sarong. It was produced in France for the Playasound label, which frequently designed album jackets that featured Gauguinesque peepshows of exotic lovelies. Until I moved to Southeast Asia more than fifteen years after first seeing Weir’s film, Jarré’s soundtrack and the bounteous beauty of Magic Bali were all the Indonesian music I owned, though I was aware of gamelan as a cultural totem.

Gamelan is a familiar music to many people in the West. It has such a distinctive sound that once it is heard, it is instantly recognizable. Unfortunately, gamelan can sound very much the same to the untrained ear, which makes it easy to enjoy without delving too deeply into the aesthetic (which partly explains Playasound placing plump exotic breasts on the covers of their albums).

This situation is nothing new for Western listeners. In 1817, Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles, perhaps best remembered today as the founder of modern Singapore, published a two-volume History of Java in which he noted: But it is the harmony and pleasing sound of all the instruments united, which gives the music of Java its peculiar character among Asiatics. The sounds produced on several of the instruments are peculiarly rich, and when heard at a distance have been frequently compared to those produced on the harmonic glasses. The airs, however simple and monotonous they may appear of themselves, when played on the gambang kayu [a percussion instrument similar to a xylophone], or accompanied by the other instruments, never tire on the ear, and it is not unusual for the gamelan to play for many days and nights in succession.

Modernize the diction and Raffles’ proclamations would be as true for most Western listeners today as they were two centuries ago. Peculiar yet pleasing, simple without being tiresome, exotically Asiatic, the music of Java is paradoxically both fascinating and forgettable, a type of audio wallpaper for the Western ear. It comes as no surprise then to learn that the composer Erik Satie was inspired by a live gamelan orchestra he heard at the 1889 Paris Exposition Universelle (Debussy heard it there as well). Satie’s hypnotic Gnossiennes for piano, a continuation and exploration of the sonic possibilities of the repetitive modal structures he explored previously in the famous Trois Gymnopédies, was one result of that encounter. There is a direct ancestral line from Satie’s gamelan-inspired piano compositions to the electronic music pioneered by Brian Eno and Philip Glass in the late 1970s. Raffles’ description addresses the peculiarly enduring appeal of this type of music, whether it is ancient Javanese, fin de siècle, or modishly ambient.

Satie was lucky in that he was able to

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hear gamelan music played by a Javanese band in France, truly a rare occurrence prior to the invention of recorded sound. Before this time, the only way to “broadcast” (to use the word anachronistically) music was the printed page, and indeed the business model for distributing music either as sheets or spinning discs remained little changed until recently. Music in the nineteenth century was sold much like books or engravings— the only other print mediums available for distributing knowledge—and often the distinction between the three mediums was blurred. In addition to engraved illustrations of gamelan instruments, Raffles included transcriptions of three gamelan melodies in Western notation as illustrative plates to his History of Java as this was one of the only ways he could distribute Javanese music.

For a lucky few with access, however, Raffles arranged a special treat. On a brief return visit to England in 1816-17, he brought with him not only the instruments for two separate gamelan orchestras (still housed in the British Museum and Claydon House) but a Javanese protégé named Raden Rana Dipura, who, Raffles relates in the History of Java, performed “several national melodies” on the gambang kayu before an “eminent composer” (Dr William Crotch), who found that they bore “a strong resemblance to the oldest music of Scotland.” Many musicologists believe that Raden’s might very well have been the first performance by a Javanese musician, on a Javanese instrument, in Europe. At the very least, it can be said that the gamelan instruments that Raffles brought to London have been identified as the first in England, though without trained musicians they would remain silent museum pieces.

Born at sea in 1781 to impecunious parents, Raffles began at age fourteen to clerk for the East India Company in London. He arrived in Penang in 1805, and thirty summers after he first saw the light of the ocean, Raffles became Lieutenant Governor of Java in 1811. He immediately began amassing a collection that would eventually form not only the database for his History of Java but also the nucleus of natural history collections and museums from Singapore to London, including the forerunner of the London Zoo. When he left Java five years later, according to one source, his collection of manuscripts, textiles, folk art, specimens of live and dead flora and fauna—and gamelan instruments— weighed in excess of thirty tons and required more than two hundred cases.

In many ways, the book he published acts as a taxonomy of his collection of Javanese artifacts: it was his way of sharing his collection with the literate public. He was an autodidact, so it is no accident that his collecting efforts served to disseminate knowledge and direct experience from Java to the world; indeed, throughout his life, Raffles was keenly interested in creating centers of education.

To give two pertinent examples, in 1812 he revived the Batavian Society of the Arts and Sciences, which had initially opened in 1778 but had fallen into neglect (in 1815 he would give a lecture on Javanese music, in which he declared it to be “peculiarly harmonious”). His original plans for the new colony of Singapore, which he founded only two years after publishing his History of Java, included grounds for an institute that would house a library and natural history collection

as well as function as a language school for Malay and Chinese. Although this was not completed during his time in the East, Raffles laid the cornerstone in 1823.

Fast forward two hundred years and the impact of Raffles’ endeavors are still being felt in both Jakarta and Singapore, where elements of his original collection still remain in public view. Books from his collection as well as the History of Java and books about him can be found in Singapore’s Lee Chian Kong Reference Library, a sleek building located not far from the very ground which Raffles had originally intended for his institute.

The two-story-high windows on the eleventh floor of the reference library on Victoria Street, the jewel in the crown of Singapore’s National Library Board, offer a panoramic view looking south toward the equatorial line fewer than one hundred miles away.

Foregrounded by the white balustrades and red-tiled roof of the iconic hotel that bears Raffles’ name and framed by the glistening towers of the modern city-state, in the middle distance are the myriad cargo ships anchored in the crowded “roads” of the narrow Straits of Singapore that, by some accounts, on a daily basis funnel fully half of all global trade and one third of all oil transported by ship between the islands of Batam and Singapura (at their narrowest point, the Straits are only about six miles wide).

Batam Island, which comprises the horizon line of the library’s panoramic view, belongs to Indonesia, so while I sit in the air-conditioned silence of the reading room, I can make a visual connection to the country that produced the music that I am here to attempt to understand. During moments like these, during the cool study of solitary research that follows the heat of exploration and discovery, in the intricacy of the geographical and historical nexus in which I find myself enmeshed as I gaze out of the library windows, I sometimes feel the penetration of the intangible T.S. Eliot identified in “The Dry Salvages” as “the moment in and out of time,” which he describes as “music heard so deeply / That it is not heard at all, but you are the music / While the music lasts,” a definition that could equally be applied to the concept of rasa that I was here to understand.

I had to wait nine days to get what I came here for. Far from the panoramic windows, in a warehouse near the airport it calls its Used Book Repository, the library keeps a book with the title Lokananta: A Discography of the National Recording Company of Indonesia, 1957-1985, by Philip Yampolsky, who is currently the Director of the Robert E. Brown Center for World Music at the University of Illinois School of Music. In the late 1980s, Yampolsky was given unprecedented access to the recording logs of Lokananta Records.

The result is an extraordinary taxonomy that not only gives detailed information about the recording session of each Lokananta album created over three decades but also creates patterns that offer insights into the history behind the promotion of genres and musicians, including langgam jawa and Waldjinah.

In addition to this textual contribution, Yampolsky spent most of the 1990s recording, editing, and annotating a series of twenty CDs, published in America by

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Smithsonian Folkways Recordings and in Indonesia by Masyarakat Seni Pertunjukan Indonesia. Titled simply Music of Indonesia, the series attempts to preserve and disseminate specimens of the varied folk music traditions of the entire archipelago that the original Lokananta pressings often missed.

Yampolsky wrote to me that Lokananta “was too timid: it published only Central Javanese gamelan music, a tiny bit of West Javanese music, even less of Balinese music (recorded in Yogyakarta, not Bali), and the rest was popular music.” Because of technological constraints, often only truncated versions of songs were preserved. “Lokananta’s Javanese gamelan recordings were made by the terrific RRI musicians, but there were time-pressures imposed by the LP medium, so gendhing [gamelan compositions] that would normally take thirty minutes to play had to be squeezed down to ten or twelve minutes.” The second volume in the series, Indonesian Popular Music: Kroncong, Dangdut, and Langgam Jawa, offers listeners a solid, if brief, introduction to these musical forms.

Yampolsky’s impetus to create such a vast archive of the music of Indonesia is one Raffles would recognize: “Indonesia is astonishingly rich in musical variety, and my concern is to make it possible for people to appreciate that variety. Javanese and Balinese gamelan music are well-known, but few people know about the ensemble music of the Toba Batak, for example, and even fewer know about the wealth of singing styles and string music in eastern Indonesia or about the old-style Sundanese-Chinese music of gambang kromong. There are so many wonderful styles and traditions that are ignored by the mass media!”

As for collecting on Jalan Surabaya, Yampolsky says: “In the past yes, though I don’t do much there anymore, especially since my focus now is mostly on the music of rural communities in eastern Indonesia.

That music never made it onto record.”

However, Jalan Surabaya, he tells me, was where he bought his copy of Lokananta ARI123, which bears the title of Waldjinah Ratu Kembang Katjang, though he is unsure if he bought the record from Harris or not.

The album title refers to Waldjinah herself, who is credited as leading the orchestra. In 1958, when she was only twelve years old, Waldjinah won top place in a prestigious singing competition known as the Kembang Katjang, and thereafter was known as the Ratu Kembang Katjang (literally, “bean flower queen”), which is also the title of the song on Lokananta ARI-123.

Established either in 1955 or 1956, Loka nanta (which is the name of the mythical first gamelan drum created by the god Bathara Guru) was intended as the transcription service for Radio Republik Indonesia, but soon began to sell albums to compete with the private companies then coming into existence in Indonesia, companies that often sold Western-influenced crooner music that eschewed local styles. Lokananta was officially opened as a for-profit business in 1961 with a three-fold mandate to 1) encourage, establish, and disseminate national musical arts; 2) produce income for the state; and 3) cooperate with other government agencies in programs involving sound recording.

The series number ARI-123 can be partially

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translated: “A” denotes “regional music,” “I” is for “Indonesia,” but the “R” remains an enigma. The number “123” indicates the order of release. In total, 4,933 copies of ARI123 were made, a large number by Lokananta standards. The ARI series, which featured almost all of the label’s langgam jawa output, was begun in 1959 and discontinued in 1973, though most of this music would be rereleased later on cassette. (Recorded music was not big business in Indonesia until the introduction of cassette tapes in the 1980s since record players were expensive, electricity was intermittent even in the big cities, and the tropical climate is extremely deleterious to vinyl.) Langgam jawa itself accounts for fully five percent of the vinyl output of the label (468 minutes in total) while kroncong more generally accounts for ten percent of vinyl output. ARI-123 was recorded on April 24, 1967: forty-four years, one month, and two weeks to the day before I first heard it.

But what of the song “Kembang Katjang”? I learned that the modern spelling, since a nationwide spelling reform in 1973 when the tj became a c, is “Kembang Kacang.” Diligent search provided numerous sources in both English and Malay that refer to it as a “traditional Javanese folk song” (the earliest reference dates to 1924), often identified as a precursor to the langgam jawa genre. Yet these references offered no discussion of the cultural context or the meaning of the song, if there was one.

In the library, I discovered that Javanese song lyrics were sung poetry and that the distinctions between traditional dance, the famous wayang puppet shows, literature, and music were completely fluid, with genres and traditions freely incorporating and adapting styles, stories, and characters from each other. Yet these traditions are so deep, come from so many sources, and overlap so frequently that the original meanings are often lost or transmuted into impressions, so that traditional song lyrics tend to be more evocative than substantive.

I also learned that the Javanese language has three registers that range from high to low depending on cultural context. Waldjinah sings this song in ngoko and madya, or low and middle Javanese.

The title of the song is a play on words that invokes elements of both a garden and pastoral foodstuffs. “Kembang Kacang” literally means peanut or bean flower, but the word for such a thing in Javanese is besengut, which also means “to frown.” The song is about a woman who is in love with a man who lives far away, though the subtext is about struggling to be patient while waiting for love. The word play is typical of vocal gamelan music and creates intricate sung poetry that matches the intricacy of the instrumentation.

In langgam jawa, as in gamelan, singers choose the lyrics based on meters that fit the melody. Unlike in Western pop music, the music does not exist to support the vocalist, but rather the two components must work in harmony to create a whole melody, or lagu.

And unlike in most Western art music, the melodies in gamelan do not express emotion by shifting mood or tone, which requires interpreting the intention of the composer.

In gamelan, as in most Middle Eastern and South and East Asian music, the melody is constructed by the players from a shared

repertoire of lyrics and musical meters that obviates the need to interpret a composer’s intentions—indeed, obviates the personality of the composer altogether. The musicians may embellish the notes within a designated scale (as described in cengkok above), but this personal expression must not deviate too much from the accepted frame. To the post-Romantic Western tradition of music, such a method of creating emotion sounds incredibly restrictive, but it allows Javanese music to try to express a universal emotion which music that privileges the emotions of a single individual (whether pop singer or composer or lyricist or soloist) necessarily shuns.

If the Javanese band is successful in their attempt, then rasa—Eliot’s “moment in and out time”—is formed. In langgam jawa, as in gamelan, the meters and lyrics that are used to create a lagu are known as macapats.

As musicologist Benjamin Brinner explains, a macapat meter is determined by the number of lines in a stanza as well as the number of syllables in each stanza and the ending vowel sound of each line. Since the length of a stanza is determined by its meter, any melody that fits one verse in a given meter will fit another meter. Often the macapats used in langgam jawa come from what are known as tembang macapats, which are sung in simple Javanese. Many musicologists believe that the lyrics to some of the tembang macapats are quite ancient and predate Hindu influence, although most macapats date from the late eighteenth century. The lyrics of the version of “Kembang Kacang” on the album come from three sources: two macapats and lines from the folk song (or sekar) with the title “Kembang Kacang,” though as a folk song it probably exists in many different versions.

The bawa, or vocal solo, that Waldjinah chose to introduce this song is in the asmaradana macapat, which is often associated with intense love. The word “asmaradana” is a compound of the words asmara or “love” and dahana or “fire.” The lyrics of the bawa can be translated as: “Don’t sleep in the afternoon, men. / There is a god roaming about the world / Carrying his golden bowl. / It contains a prayer against evil / And provides clothing and food / Dedicated to / People who open their eyes and accept their fates.”

Waldjina then signals the change from the bawa to the folk song by singing a section known as an andhegan, or full stop: “This will be followed by the song entitled Peanut Flowers, which speaks of patience and acceptance.”

Next come the song lyrics from “Kembang Kacang” (printed all in caps on the back of the record sleeve). In the kroncong tradition, the lyrics are known as pantun, and make use of a two contrasting halves. The first half, known as sampiran, is often a description of a natural object or element, while the second half, or isi, expresses an emotion. Frequently the relation between the two halves is expressed in a paradox based on the incongruity of the element and the emotion, and often it involves Javanese word play. Translated literally, they sound like nonsense lyrics: “turmeric sweet potato leaves cannot hold water / when we meet I wish to hold him for seven days. / fish paste, the essence of a decorative mirror / don’t say... father... father. / tamarind leaves, the son of Durna, / still

young trying to find noble knowledge. / red porridge with sugar and fennel and spice, / not satisfied yet to entertain you. / stone, mud, a river fish wearing a scarf / forgive me if I made a mistake.”

The mention of Durna’s son ties the lyrics to the tradition of courtly gamelan. Durna’s son is Aswatama, who in the Hindu story of the Mahabarata is jealous that his semi-divine father passed sacred knowledge about warfare to his purest disciple Arjuna and not to himself. Aswatama pressed his father to reveal the knowledge to him as well, and Durna unwillingly obliged, then immediately regretted his decision, saying, “Oh Aswatama, I fear that you will not tread the path of virtue.” Hearing this, the son becomes dejected and wanders the earth in grief. The disappointment Durna feels connotes the complex of emotions expressed in the lyrics of “Kembang Kacang.” The song connects romantic love with both nature and a divine power in which patience is a high virtue. But being patient is not always easy.

On this recording, interleaved with “Kembang Kacang” is a brief interlude from another macapat known as Midjil, which is usually associated with themes of birth and emergence. These lines are less oblique and create tension with the allusions to the Aswatama story: “Forget, I cannot forget / The more I try to forget, the more I see. / My memory / Is like a big tree / It can be pruned, but it never dies. / It grows vigorously / And my love flourishes. / To fail to recognize the face / But still remember the voice. / Latticework for a vine / Dead or live I follow.”

In one ten-minute song, Waldjinah invokes ancient stories to form a lagu that she sings employing a cengkok that embellishes the melody over the male gerong chorus and kroncong instruments to create a melodic interpretation of the near divine patience required to survive the pangs of unrequited love. She sings it such a way as to create a rasa with her audience so that they both feel her emotions empathetically and experience the same emotions themselves. The song is performed in an acculturated style that was considered innovative because it adapted classic Javanese gamelan melodies and tuning to Western instruments, and was recorded on a state-owned record label specifically created to encourage local arts.

Astonishingly, Waldjinah accomplished this feat when she was less then twenty-five years old.

But all of this I learned later, and in the end, it is merely show and tell.

Amidst the heat and dust and noise of Jalan Surabaya, Harris simply said “listen,” and played the record. Hovering over the clanking growl of the rampageous traffic and the crepitating surface noise of the half-century-old vinyl was a voice so silken and pure that it seemed to momentarily suspend time and still the air.

I enquired: “How much?” I remember Harris smiling at me while making a gesture with his arm to take in both myself and the street, sweeping his hand upward toward heaven, saying: “You are a friend of Crazy Alan. Only 50,000 rupiah!” And then he grinned. ✹ William L. Gibson wrote about the Nonesuch Explorer Music Series in STN#63

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

Festival International de Musique Actuelle de Victoriaville

Martin Morrisette

Victoriaville, QC 5.17–20.2012

On the weekend of the 2012 edition of FIMAV, all talk in Quebec was focused on the ongoing demonstrations by students protesting tuition hikes set by the government of Jean Charest, a government beset by allegations of corruption in the construction industry.

The student demonstrations and boycott of classes had begun in February. Demonstrations and marches were met with a heavy police presence and little inclination for dialogue from Charest and co., resulting in physical confrontations between students and police. Predictably, the mainstream media focused on the spectacle of violence, and hysterically blamed the “entitled” students for all of it. Public opinion was solidly behind the Charest government. A week earlier, a group of student boycotters had disrupted classes at UQAM. Things had gone too far.

Something needed to be done to stop this sort of behavior.

So it came to pass that on that Thursday, the provincial legislature was debating a special law to deal with the protestors. The law would place restrictions on assembly and demonstrations. The law was sure to provoke a response, one that might wake up even those who did not share the students’ views or approve of their actions. Quebec was on the edge of a precipice.

As we made our long and torturous way to Victoriaville (a two-hour trip that took four due to construction delays), I wondered what the general take on the situation would be there. My question was answered when Levasseur strode onto the stage to introduce the opening performance by Phil Minton.

Levasseur was wearing a red felt patch, the symbol adopted by the students, and in his comments he noted that this was a sad day for Quebec, in reference to the new law.

The larger context was the attitude of indifference, if not outright hostility, to artistic endeavor exhibited by Stephen Harper’s federal government. FIMAV relies on govern-

ment support, and with Harper’s Conservative Party slated to remain in power with a majority for the next three years, who knows what the future might hold for arts funding in Canada? Will the demands of the market alone shape government policy? Can arts presenters demonstrate the “relevance” of marginal and experimental art forms to the satisfaction of the skeptics?

Minton and 31 local singers, dubbed the Feral Choir, approached the stage from their seats in the Cinema Laurier and then took it over for an hour of joyous vocalizing, answering my last question very much in the affirmative. The second piece, a composition of Minton’s titled “Grunwick,” was inspired by a key moment in British labor history—a major defeat for the British labor movement that helped consolidate Margaret Thatcher’s hold on power. It was beautiful to see a group of amateurs deliver such a moving performance under the direction of a master, and it neatly linked the avant-garde with the local quotidian.

Several other performances dealt, implicitly or explicitly, with themes of resistance and positive social change, among them saxophonist Matana Roberts’ Coin Coin: Gens de couleur libres, the first part of a larger piece inspired by her family history of slavery, performed by Roberts with a ten-piece group of musicians from Montreal, where she has maintained a sometime home over the past few years. The piece documented the voyage on a slave ship to a slave auction. The piece is sprawling (and this was a shorter version than I have seen in the past few years!) but very powerful.

Likewise Wadada Leo Smith’s presentation of excerpts from his new four-disc set Ten Freedom Summers, each piece evoking key moments in the fight for African-American civil rights from 1954 (Brown vs Board of Education) to 1964 (Civil Rights Act).

Smith’s band—pianist Anthony Davis, bassist John Lindberg, and drummers Susie Ibarra and Pheroan akLaff—was accompanied by period video images, and their performance was by turns meditative, angry, resigned, and hopeful, with beautiful balance among the voices and soaring trumpet from Smith.

Both Montreal and Chicago’s AACM were represented at the festival, Roberts’ use of Montreal musicians providing an obvious link. Performances by Montreal violinist Jean René and l’Ensemble Supermusique neatly linked the past and present of Quebec’s musique actuelle scene. While l’Ensemble, a

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large group made up of longtime Montreal luminaries such as Jean Derome, Joane Hétu, Diane Labrosse, and Martin Tétreault attested to the ongoing creative vitality of a 30-year-old collective, it was René’s set of original compositions and renditions of pieces by Derome, Tetreault, and René Lussier that particularly moved me, with subtle interplay between René, violinist Josh Zubot, drummer Pierre Tanguay, and bassist Nicolas Caloia. The performance both paid homage to musique actuelle’s past and pointed to its future.

The performance by the Miles Perkins Quartet stood out in terms of conception and sheer beauty of musicianship. Perkins is a Manitoba bassist/composer who divides his time between Montreal and Berlin, and his group comprises Belgian pianist Benoît Delbecq, British trumpeter Tom Arthurs, and Montreal percussionist Thom Gossage. Their Saturday afternoon concert at the Cinema Laurier, performing music from their album Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear, was close to perfect. The music seemed to float in the air, the musicians filling the spaces with colors and shades, surprising but apt shifts in dynamics and tone, in a delicate balance between composition and improvisation.

It is fortunate if one such concert takes place during a festival; at Victo, there were two, the second being the closing concert by The Trio. Roscoe Mitchell commenced with long tones on soprano sax; George Lewis offered punctuation on trombone, the tension building until Muhal Richard Abrams came in with a single dramatically placed note on the piano that both released the tension and upped the ante. All three took extended solos, and Lewis processed the soundscape with his laptop in a performance that was challenging, beautiful, and completely satisfying. These are wise, wily veterans with an intuitive understanding of one another, and it was a privilege to enter their musical world for an hour or so.

Both sets could be seen as reflections on time and space as well as the need for beauty, daring—neither one felt at all “safe” musically—and the spirit of discovery. They were optimistic but offered no final answers other than the notion that spiritual clarity is of the utmost importance. This seemed fitting for the political context in which the festival found itself this year, and indeed I think that Victo found itself again this year.

Mike Chamberlain

Top: Phil Minton and Feral Choir Bottom: Matana Roberts' Coin Coin

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Suoni per il Popolo

Parker: Thien V. | Lethe: Deanna Radford

Montreal, QC 6.6-6.23.2011

The 12th annual Suoni per il Popolo’s eclectic spirit included not only the customary free jazz, pop and experimental electronics, but surprised even seasoned listeners with vibrations emanating from dry ice, giant record needles and a high wire act of motorized Meccano. With multiple simultaneous events each night one could catch only a fraction of the action, but below is a sampling.

A three-day bash celebrating the AUM Fidelity label’s 15th anniversary commenced with bassist William Parker’s Essence of Ellington 13-piece orchestra. Parker has always been reluctant to play other people’s music, but his lifelong love for Ellington prevailed when an Italian promoter arranged a European tour, and an overflowing Sala Rossa greeted the North American premiere. The Duke was present as much in spirit as in song.

Fragments of classics and archetypal trumpet flourishes were updated New York avant style, as much Little Huey as it was Ducal.

There were two introductions, the first verbal, as Parker traversed the bandstand giving humorous anecdotes about each member, and the second musical, everyone soloing in turn through a lengthy piece simply titled “Montreal.” Fragments of “C Jam Blues” and “Jump for Joy” were recognizable, alongside Rob Brown’s incendiary take on “Take the ‘A’ Train.” The second set was characterized by duos and strong ensemble sections, “Prelude to a Kiss” hitting a high point led by vocalist Fay Victor and piano legend Dave Burrell.

Parker’s Quartet and Raining on the Moon Sextet set a sympathetic tone, dedicating pieces to Jackie McLean, Abbey Lincoln and Whitney Houston, the latter “because she is a human being too.” Leena Conquest danced and sang, radiating healing vibrations to all.

The AUM festivities concluded with saxophonist Darius Jones. His quartet featured mid-tempo ballads steeped in the restless close-voiced comping of Matt Mitchell on Fender Rhodes and the rattling rhythms of Chas Smith. Dizzyingly fierce opening and closing sections sandwiched Trevor Dunn’s slow and melodic bass solo on “Ugly Beautiful,” the contrasts embodying the title.

Other jazz included Ellery Eskelin’s Organ Trio, whose “I Don’t Stand a Ghost of a Chance” nostalgically echoed the smooth standards once played by Eskelin’s organist mother. Gary Versace spun spidery lines on the pipes against drummer Gerald Cleaver’s light simmering touch. Oliver Lake’s Trio 3 with bassist Reggie Workman and Andrew Cyrille stood out with “Boo,” a polyrhythmic and polytextural tribute to Art Blakey reminiscent of an orchestra of African talking drums. Freer still was Subtle Lip Can, a trio of Bernard Falaise on guitar, Josh Zubot on violin and Isaiah Ceccarelli on percussion. Detecting which sound floated from which instrument was a challenge, as cymbals were bowed, guitar ebowed and violin tapped along the wood or scraped past the bridge. Instant electroacoustic composition with a human core.

A touching version of Gavin Bryars’ The Sinking of the Titanic by Isak Goldschneider's

15-member Innovarumori included strings, woodwinds, keyboards, tuba, brass, percussion and electronics. The latter were especially effective, manned by Vergil Sharkya, a former student of Philip Jeck who recorded a previous version of the work. The “Autumn” hymn, reportedly played by the band as the ship sank, recurred regularly with sublime re-arrangements over the work’s 40-minute duration.

Arriving early to an evening of installations and video, one is confronted by four towering wooden sculptures connected by ropes, a cross between clotheslines and telephone poles. Homemade electronic motors, clothespins and paper clips hung from the lines, all wired to three paper cones, each stuck in a barstool and acting as resonators. Catherine Béchard and Sabin Hudon manipulated the structure, sliding the clothespins to define stopping and starting points for the travelling motors, creating overlapping cycles of zips and buzzes. Points for best concept went to Douglas Moffat, who concocted a fourfoot-tall, all-terrain record needle, physically tracing out a spiral path as if the island of Montreal were a giant LP and recording the “grooves.” What does the city sound like?

Not unexpectedly, like a stylus dredged along earth and gravel. Steve Rodin took cues from Shaeffer and Cage, his laptop piece opening with a series of looped door squeaks matched by video of same. Clothes hangers colliding in a closet, a dragged concrete block and freezer hums followed, ambient room sounds filling in the silences.

Japanese sound artist Lethe’s set was part science demo, part performance art. Sixteen slabs of dry ice were sequentially placed on three glass tabletops supported by metal legs. Candles were lit ritualistically and placed underneath each table to heat the glass. The ice was then held against each surface, the abrupt changes in temperature and friction inducing bellowing shrieks. Varying contact points and pressure summoned different resonant frequencies, like Ellen Fullman’s droning strings backing a blackboard chalk solo. Even though nothing was mic’d, dense noise filled the cavernous Darling Foundry.

While Godspeed and Arcade Fire put Montreal rock on the map, a cellar-full of other underground bands await their 15 minutes.

Drainolith’s Alex Moskas finger-picked exquisitely incoherent bluesy notes on guitar behind echo-drenched vocals, Creedence run through a trashed Fender amp, tremolo on 10. Brave Radar evoked a vaguely Velvets vibe, their female drummer heavy on the floor tom driving a loping groove. Skip Jensen’s trio exudes post-nuclear energy, Jensen’s warpspeed Ron Ashton guitar frantics propelled by nimble bass lines from Shawn Cotton, tightly locked into the blurred sticks of drummer Johann Schlager in an astigmatic vision of sludge rock. The Sexareenos’ Farfisa psychedelia sustained the frenzied party atmosphere, a cover of the Velvets’ “White Light/White Heat” ending a manic evening.

Versatile guitarist Marc Ribot closed the festival. His first improvisation quoted various standards, including a recurring “Dancing in Your Head” theme. This was followed by ragtime, classical, Chuck Berry and raga flavoured workouts, snipped up and whipped out with precise finger work and a smidgen of Derek Bailey. The theme from “Some-

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where Over the Rainbow” emerged from a blues, the perfect ending. Lawrence Joseph

Contact!

New York City, NY 6.8.2012 The end of the third season of Contact!, the New York Philharmonic’s contemporary music series at the Metropolitan Museum and Symphony Space, was led by guest conductor David Robertson, a staunch advocate for new music and specialist in modernist-leaning repertoire. The program, for chamber orchestra, featured the premieres of two of the Phil’s recemt commissions: NACHLESE Vb: Liederzyklus by the Swiss composer Michael Jarrell and Two Controversies and a Conversation by the 103-year-old American composer Elliott Carter. It also included ...explosante-fixe..., a watershed work for multiple flute soloists, electronics, and ensemble by French composer Pierre Boulez.

Jarrell’s piece had soprano Charlotte Dobbs singing several translations of a poem by the seventeenth-century Spanish poet Luis de Góngora. Its unifying concept: the idea of how texts are reflected and even changed when translated. Not only does the vocal part require polyglot flexibility; it features a wide vocal and dynamic range, demanding exquisite control. But the piece’s musical language, while colorfully orchestrated, didn’t transform nearly as much as the texts it treated: Jarrell’s penchant for disjunct leaps and pervasive dissonance could have accommodated a bit more variation.

Carter’s post-centenarian works have been aphoristic, but bursting with creativity.

Conductor Oliver Knussen heard an earlier version of this work, Conversations, and asked the composer to expand it. The resulting lightly orchestrated concertino for piano, percussion showcased soloists Eric Huebner and Colin Currie, performing separately and in dialogue with each other. A particularly brilliant passage saw Currie playing ascending arpeggios on a marimba and xylophone placed at right angles, moving seamlessly from one mallet instrument to another. If Controversies/Conversations will likely be seen as a diminutive companion piece to Dialogues, Asko Concerto, and even the Double Concerto, this interplay of sharply delineated characters is a welcome continuation of a distinctive compositional approach.

Robert Langevin, Alexandra Sopp, and Mindy Kaufmann were the flute soloists for the Boulez work (Langevin’s instrument outfitted with MIDI). The piece displays the fruits of Boulez’s labors in the early 1980s at the electronic music studio at IRCAM in Paris.

Like the Carter work, it deals with instrumental interplay, but in a more coloristic fashion.

Shimmering slabs of orchestral harmonies, clouds of overlaid flute, and ricocheting gestures are haloed by interactive electronics, which refract musical excerpts into a swirling kaleidoscope that envelops the listener. ...explosante-fixe... is important, even canonic, in that it suggests a way forward in which orchestras and electronics don’t just coexist onstage, but interact in organic fashion. The ensuing thirty years have found countless composers extending this idea, but few of them have created works as memorable as this. Christian Carey

Top: Lethe Bottom: William Parker in Essence to Ellington.

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Lucie Vitkova and audience in Frantiŝek Chaloupka's Eva a Lilith

Opera Days

Ostrava, Czech Republic 6.24-6.26.2012 Over the last 12 years, the biennial Ostrava Days festival in the Czech Republic has built a reputation as a showcase for contemporary orchestral music in Europe.

Under the guidance of founder, director and chief conductor Petr Kotik, the Ostravské centrum nové hudby (Ostrava Center for New Music)—the organizing body behind the fest—has grown to include a renowned summer institute which attracts composers from around the world to teach and to present at the festival.

This year, the programming expanded to include another alternating-summer festival. Working in association with the National Moravian-Silesian Theatre, the Center for New Music presented three nights of contemporary opera at the end of June. Though it was less than a third the length of the Ostrava Days fest, and presented far fewer pieces, the programming and performance did its sister festival proud.

The festival opened June 24 with John Cage’s 1991 work Europera, among the composer’s final efforts and the oldest piece in the program. The hour-long piece is scored for two singers, a pianist and a Victrola player, each following a sequence of selections from pre-existing operas of their own choosing. It was staged in an ornate and compact gold-leaf opera house in the Ostrava Center. The Victrola opened the concert playing faintly from the rear of the stage. It was the only activity for two minutes before mezzo-soprano Katalin Károlyi rose from her seat to sing as the other singer—the Brazilian soprano Martha Herr—exited to sing from offstage. Herr returned after some minutes and took position at the front of stage, donning a partial

rat costume. At the nine-minute mark, the piano made its first entrance. In this round of chance gestures, even the lights were subject to random assignment, leaving the house lights on as much as (if not more than) the stage lighting, a startling move even in 2012. The pianist played at times without depressing keys. The singers drew from Bizet, Handel, Mozart, Rossini, Tchaikovsky and others. The Victrola seemed to pull the audience backwards and forwards through time. Ultimately, it didn’t feel like an opera so much as a visit from the ghosts of operas, and a striking way to announce the contemporary.

The second night opened with a piece by the 30-year-old Czech composer František Chaloupka, a former student of the Ostrava institute. Eva a Lilith was exciting as a work of music, theater and voyeurism. As the audience was let into the large Jirí Myron Theatre, they were guided by ushers not to their seats but onto the stage where a plywood structure some 20 feet tall with a 300 square foot base awaited. Eight open doorways allowed the audience to try to gain vantage.

Inside, the Brno-based Dunami Ensemble (with the composer on electric guitar, complemented by electric bass, reeds, percussion and vibraphone) played a slow and tense soundtrack. The score followed simple repeating themes with passages seemingly left for improvisation. The two principals—Eva (Lucie Páchová) and Lilith (Lucie Vítková)—played pianos, saxophone, accordion and percussion, singing and at times screaming. Occasionally one performer would step outside the structure (being banished from Eden, perhaps) to peer at the other and move slowly about the stage. On one of her sojourns, Vítková delivered a piercing, wordless aria. She is a young and fierce performer who animated last year’s Ostrava Days festival not just with her own composition but with her accordion playing and after-hours folk danc-

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ing, and she proved to be a key presence in Opera Days as well.

The second half of the night, and in fact the second half of the festival, was given over to the brilliant Italian composer Salvatore Sciarrino. His haunting 1998 work Infinito Nero was the highlight of last year’s Ostrava Days festival and Katalin Károlyi returned this year to sing it again. The piece—for a single vocalist with chamber ensemble—floats without momentum, a frighteningly quiet work employing as a libretto the trance-induced ravings of the 17th-century mystic Maria Maddalena de’Pazzi (who seems to be lost between good and evil in a sea of blood). The audience was seated on the stage around the ensemble, which slowly rotated on a turning platform, with Károlyi at the center like an animated corpse. Syncopated pops and flutters and reeds built into a slow terror kept pace by parade bass drum.

Sciarrino’s La porta della legge (2008), based on an excerpt from Kafka’s The Trial, closed the festival with an impressive synthesis of stage and video design, three singers and a full orchestra. Like the previous night’s pieces it progressed slowly, built on gradually evolving repetitions: “motifs” would be too strong a word for the piano chords and cello slides that slowly shaped into a fine rhythmic net.

The movement onstage was slow as well, fitting for a story after all that takes place over the course of some fraction of eternity (even if the running time was a mere 75 minutes). The fact that it was composed as a dialogue made certain that there was some action on stage—at least as opposed to Infinito Nero where most of the movement was due to a motor under the stage—but even so, the simple moving of a chair seemed an extreme gesture. The actors at times even froze in a running stance, as if motion were merely a concept, not an act. Likewise the music, even with its shifting undercurrents, seemed un-

troubled by alterations in key and tempo.

The stage set was effective and brilliantly simple. Projected images of the characters moved over a large screen at one point; at another, curtains from the sides, top and bottom of the stage closed to shrink the tableau claustrophobically to the size of a television set, just big enough for the heads of the two main characters to face each other. The copper and black curtains opened onto a white scrim with white lights to allow for a view into the story’s infinite. But being able to see it didn’t answer the primary question in Kafka’s story and thus in the opera, which is: What is the infinite, both literally and metaphorically?

Is this bureaucratic nightmare of a wait the process of getting into heaven? This wasn’t the first time Sciarrino used waiting as subject matter. He has described his 1981 Introcuzione all’oscuro as an introduction with nothing following it, meant to evoke “an anguish in which the [musical] bridges seem to have spanned infinity.” But here in this Kafka waiting room, what was our protagonist anticipating? Was the wait about seeing justice served? Or was it simply to get an identification card renewed? It was clearly ghastly, whatever he was there for.

A waiting room might seem an unlikely setting for an opera, but it was a fitting scene for Kafka living in Prague between the wars, and it’s just as familiar a scene today. It might not be the grand tragedy of Verdi, but contemporary opera reflects contemporary times. And in an Eastern corner of the Czech Republic it has a new stage. Kurt Gottschalk

Robert Ashley Brooklyn, NY 4.25-28.2012

The old man sits alone on stage at the Roulette performance space in Brooklyn, drifting through time and space in his mind, things he remembers and things he imagines bumping into each other in a stream-of-consciousness, eternal now.

There’s a voice, little more than a whisper, that begins somewhere inside him and

may not even have the force to become fully audible. It’s the voice of Robert Ashley performing his latest opera, The Old Man Lives in Concrete.

It’s both a new and familiar work. An expansion of his piece Concrete, shown at La Mama in 2008 and recorded on Lovely Music, with additional material amounting to eight completely new sections that Ashley calls “songs,” but which can fairly be called arias, it’s also a prime example of Ashley’s concept and style: series of spoken word sections (there are occasional bits of sprechstimme that may come as much from the singer’s interpretive notions as the composer’s instructions) heard within a bed of flowing, mostly ambient electronic sound.

It’s also his finest work yet. Ashley is as much a writer as a composer, and he has slowly been working away from clear, identifiable musical content and into a unique kind of theater. He calls his works operas, and they are, because they are about characters dramatically compelled to express their internal lives through music. They always have extraordinary librettos, even as the musical performers are asked to make less and less obvious music. His ability to write intensely personal interior dialogues is unparalleled. But that has not been able to save most of his works from a shifting point of view that weakens the dramatic and thematic point. In pieces like Dust and Perfect Lives, he is observing characters from the outside, and writing what he imagines is going on inside their heads, a method that works in novels but is difficult to consistently pull off on stage, where we are supposed to find our way inside a living person, and connect the music and sound to their thoughts. It’s engrossing to see one of his operas, but the distance between the audience and the characters, mediated by words that are themselves at some distance from the characters, is often an obstacle to a moving and human dramatic experience.

This new opera has a subtle but profound difference. Rather than writing first person dialogue from a third person perspective, Ashley has written a completely interior, first person piece, with the Old Man, Ashley himself, expressed in multiple

voices. Ashley sat on a high platform, downstage right. His lines set the scene as being inside his head, the main performers seated at a row of desks upstage—Thomas Buckner, Joan La Barbera, Jacqueline Humbert and Sam Ashley—had their own distinctive timbres and styles (Humbert was especially musical and fascinating), but were all different aspects of that one voice. They told stories, perhaps things that actually happened, perhaps things that only happened in dreams, that were all one man’s stories.

This single perspective meant every moment added to a complex and enigmatic picture of a man whose sense of time had become entirely separated from the rest of the world. All the songs, even the most elusive, were elements of the complex portrait. The spaces between seconds on the clock became chasms in which the Old Man told stories to himself—“Stream of consciousness, sure. It’s not a stream, it’s a sorting,” he says—some brief, some lengthy and seemingly endlessly discursive, all telling us something about what mattered to him so that it stuck in his memory. The Old Man is so well made that the four-hour duration seems to suspend time and is so involving that it feels like a stimulating, refreshing pause.

Ashley is an American artist, kin to Philip K. Dick and Joe Frank, and his avant-garde means are deeply embedded in American culture. When the songs refer to baseball, Otis Redding and Johnny Carson, it feels like things Ashley loves, without Laurie Anderson’s easy mockery. He’s a humanist, not a social critic, his characters experiences life like we all do. One long song is about the old man trying to explain why it took him forty years to get a joke, and he never quite explains it but the story is strange and fascinating and ends with the enigmatic question, “know what I mean?”

As the songs accumulate, the sense of poignancy grows, each detail adding up to a lifetime of puzzling over the mysteries of other people and oneself. His memory reaches for the past, which ultimately seems just out of reach. The final thought: “You can’t get the toothpaste out of the tube, because the hole is too small.”

George Grella

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

Arkestra members Cecil Brooks and Dave Davis

Picture Infinity: Marshall Allen & The Sun Ra Arkestra Sibylle Zerr

Sibylle Zerr

Sibylle Zerr

For decades, the evolving Afro-cosmology of space traveling Sun Ra and his Arkestra has been irresistable to scholars and researchers compiling discographies, collecting tapes, and publishing interviews that shed light on the past and present activities of one of creative music's most important and enduring groups.

Throughout the '90s and early 2000s, Peter Hinds' Sun Ra Research, a semi-regular periodical that rolled off of his own Omni Press, offered more than 30 volumes of raw transcriptions of tapes of his backstage chats with Ra and other Arkestra members.

Self-publishing sure has come a long way

since then, to the point where an individual can produce a slick, full color, hardbound photo book that challenges the production values of any major publishing house.

With Picture Infinity, German photographer, writer, and cultural anthropologist Sibylle Zerr has done exactly that.

Picture Infinity presents a selection of more than eighty photos, many in color, taken over the period of eight years of various sequinned Arkestra members in performance, backstage, and on the street.

Interspersed are Zerr’s own essays, briefly detailing the histories, the music, and the day-to-day trials and tribulations of the band members, who live a kind of bifurcated existence in which they travel the globe as revered cultural dignitaries, only to return home to unpaid phone bills and faulty plumbing in their communal enclave on Morton Street in Philadelphia.

Charles Davis, Knoel Scott, Michael Ray, Fred Adams, Cecil Brooks, and of course, the band's present-day leader, the maestro Marshall Allen, are the most prominent

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You Look Good for 100: John Cage

among the shimmering tone scientists’s grizzled, road-worn visages. Indeed, between the photos and the essays, Zerr cumulatively presents a touching portrait of the Arkestra in it’s end-game, noting with sadness the passings of two mainstays, trombonist Tyrone Hill and drummer Luqman Ali, in 2007.

It's a gorgeous package that devout followers of the Arkestra will certainly need for their collections, but even Zerr admits there are inevitable limitations to the approach.

“Sometimes all the collecting of contemporary documents, all the keeping of debris and relics from Sun Ra’s original hand, are like the hopeless attempt to get hold of a spirit that cannot be fathomed,” she writes.

“The essence of the Sun Ra Arkestra cannot be written on a sheet of music, and can never be documented in any library, soundor photo-archive in the world. It goes beyond description. One has to experience it.” Pete Gershon

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

Wadada Leo Smith and Southwest Chamber Music

Wadada Leo Smith Ten Freedom Summers Cuneiform CD x 4

Let’s get this out of the way up front: this is a masterpiece. That’s a term I’m not sure I’ve ever used in a review before, unless perhaps it was to refer to a reissue of “classic” material or something of the sort. But here we have, from one of the true masters in the long history of “jazz,” a distillation not only of some of his most powerful musical ideas using a variety of ensembles, but a reckoning with African-American history as affecting as any since John Carter’s—hell, as any, period.

It’s worth noting, at the outset, that frequent Smith collaborator Vijay Iyer has warned of jazz that purports to be a history lesson. But as Smith himself has said of this long-gestating work, “I’ve always thought about the meaning of my music, how I would like for it to find its meaning in society. So, when I began my research for Ten Freedom Summers and began to write the music, I experienced a deep sense of how much I personally had been touched by these people and events—they had shaped my life as a young man growing up in Mississippi. Knowing that their stories were also my story, it was easier to carry that cultural element into my composing.” So this music is neither didactic nor merely narrative but something that aspires to capture, distill, and edify all at once.

After the music’s premiere in the fall of 2011, Smith took the musicians into the studio more or less right away and emerged with this four-disc whopper. Ten Freedom Summers contains over five hours of intense, exploratory, ambitious, and challenging music. Many pieces are played by one of the two primary ensembles here: Smith’s Golden Quartet/Quintet (where the trumpeter is joined by pianist Anthony Davis, bassist John Lindberg, and drummers Pheeroan akLaff and Susie Ibarra—the quartet numbers feature just one drummer) and Southwest Chamber Music (Jeff von der Schmidt conducts a compact nonet that has the range of Intercontemporain).

As an aggregate the music consists of dedications to or remembrances of towering individuals, many of them sadly sacrificial in this history. In the opening “Dred Scott, 1857,” there is a potent churn of melismatic arco bass followed by a dissonant crash, almost like the sound of befuddlement and disorientation. Spiky piano and crying, sputtering trumpet usher in a massive droning section with shape-shifting piano, now hushed in fear, now defiantly optimistic. The Golden Quintet is just so intensely good, consistently burning and creative but with a propensity for deep reflections and jaw-dropping interpolations of multiple American

musics. Often in these portraits they return to deep funk, lonely fire, the outpouring of dissonance, and chamber-music constructions whose sober deliberation contains a deep passion. It’s with this combination of approaches that they delineate “Malik Al Shabazz and the People of the Shahada” (a subject of which pianist Anthony Davis has a deep understanding). Southwest Chamber Music makes its first appearance on “Emmett Till, Defiant, Fearless,” a stirring piece in which Smith’s held tones create their own context before the ensemble arrives with its sumptuous, spacious but harmonically full sound, as if they are making explicit what Smith leaves implied in his own improvisations. Smith’s writing for the ensemble throughout uses pedals and drones in a way that reminds me of Gavin Bryars or John Luther Adams, marked by dark billowing shapes and powerful repetitions along with a superb use of overtones and an instinct for drama and contrast.

And on this piece particularly, different strands coil together and coalesce, the chaos and disbelief of Till’s demise emerging amid intense polyphony and focused intervals that dart in and out of the miasma of strings.

But what a changeup on the rousing “Thurgood Marshall and Brown vs. Board of Education: A Dream of Equal Education, 1954,” whose deep funk jabs recall Smith’s writing for his South Central LA Kulture pieces. The music moves into a burnished bronze reflective space, dare we say a deliberative section with the faintest ghost notes from Lindberg’s bass cautiously engaging Davis and Smith, goading them into possibility. It’s this fascinating exchange of musical ideas, historic landmarks, and epic composition that makes this release frankly jaw-dropping. It’s quite simply a music as multiple and manifold as you’re likely to hear any time soon. I’ll admit that you don’t have to know the history very well to respond to the music. But what’s the point of not engaging the music on the multiple levels Smith intends? Listen to how he uses timpani and strings in “JFK’s New Frontier and the Space Age”—shades of Copland! And elsewhere, on “Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott” or “America, Parts 1, 2 & 3,” Smith signifies on In a Silent Way, these lambent moments reminding me vividly of “Shhh/Peaceful” in their rapturous possibility. These portraits continue: things are stark, almost lost sounding on “Medgar Evers: A Love-Voice of a Thousand Years’ Journey,” with timpani, strings, flute, and harp straddling this world and another (throughout, some of these spare chamber ensemble moments recalled Smith’s vision for his New Delta Ahkri); the full group of musicians punches it out on “The Little Rock Nine: A Force for Desegregation in Education, 1957,” with no echoes of Mingus except for a brief bluesy ostinato; and “Fannie Lou Hamer and the Mississippi Freedom

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Democratic Party, 1964” instead focuses on spare, admiring reflections.

Smith also deals with signal moments in freedom’s coming. On “The Black Church” and “Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society and the Civil Rights Act of 1964,” both groups play with such probing, generative character that the music seems to reach beyond itself, indelibly partaking of Smith’s particular vision yet capturing long traditions of American musical experimentalism too. Smith is particularly gifted in his writing for strings, alternating lighter moments (where woodwinds and strings gather in billowing clouds) with thickets of Ivesian polyphony or pounding, ominous sections whose rhythmic density is equal parts Steve Reich and Anthony Davis. And unlike some “jazz” composers who have tried their hand at such scale, Smith isn’t seduced by treacly, excessive harmonization nor by the rabbit-hole of endless complexity: there is always line, narrative momentum, and absolutely top-notch improvising (a special tip of the hat, by the way, to the superb playing of akLaff and Ibarra throughout). Notice how, in “Freedom Summer: Voter Registration, Acts of Compassion and Empowerment, 1964” and “The Freedom Riders Ride,” the moments of bluesy radiance are chastened by disappointment or a dour sense of purpose—and knitting together each of these moments is Smith’s always compelling, purposeful playing. Through dizzying spirals and swirling strings (including some terrific Lindberg solos) that seem overwhelmed by the multitudes of those gatherings in American cities, to the solemn processional feel of “The D.C. Wall: A War Memorial For All Times,” to the sizzling urgency of “Buzzsaw: The Myth of a Free Press,” the music seems to be uncontainable, inexorable, bright and overflowing with energies yet always tethered to an overarching sense of purpose, knowing it inhabits that universe bending towards justice.

Following “September 11th, 2001: A Memorial,” which is both stirring and harrowing, and “Democracy” (which barrels forward, hesitant to commit to one direction, but also appropriately offers a model in its group improvisation, as multiple voices coexist in a piece of moments rather than finalized coherence) the epic concludes with the haunting, chastened “Martin Luther King, Jr.: Memphis, the Prophecy.” Smith, who has witnessed and participated in this history, is playing to us our better and lesser angels, and defiantly refuses to pin a smiley-face on the story. And the story, like Smith’s music, is ongoing and pointed to betterment.

Can you imagine somebody more suited to write the soundtrack to this history? I can’t. And if we’re lucky this may be the soundtrack and template for freedom summers to come. Jason Bivins

John Luther Adams Four Thousand Holes Cold Blue CD

Songbirdsongs Mode CD

Alaskan (by way of New York) composer John Luther Adams was long known as the “other John Adams” of contemporary concert music, overshadowed by Californian (by way of Massachusetts) John Coolidge Adams, composer of Nixon in China, Dr. Atomic and the Pulitzer Prize-winning On the Transmigration of Souls. The balance of recognition seems to be shifting, as the Alaskan Adams has created several large-scale works that have raised his profile, such as the spatial percussion piece Inuksuit and the museum installation The Place Where You Go to Listen. Adams frequently speaks of “creating ecologies of music.” Both those pieces are based on aspects of Alaska: the former draws on the traditional music of the region, and the latter responds to local weather patterns and tectonics (implicitly reflecting the impact of climate change).

Pianist Stephen Drury and his Callithumpian Consort are staunch advocates of Adams’ music. Two recent recordings present different aspects of his work. On the title-track of Four Thousand Holes, the tintinnabulation of Scott Deal’s vibraphone and chimes, Drury’s piano, and a haloing electronic aura suggest the crags and shifting light of the Alaskan wilderness. Adams never allows this limited palette to grow stale, continually refreshing and varying the sound world. Its companion piece “…And Bells Remembered…” takes the tintinnabulation still further.

Alongside Drury, five percussionists use mallets and bows to craft a tolling and chiming soundscape.

Is this a memento mori or a secular ritual? There’s no clue in the booklet’s aphoristic notes, but the incandescent sonic shimmering conjures up a sweeping vista in the mind’s eye.

Many composers have incorporated birdsong into their music, most famously Olivier Messiaen, who was an amateur ornithologist and travelled the world to collect birdsongs; they appear in most of his compositions. Even Messiaen’s transcriptions of these arias of the animal world are limited by Western ideas of notation: they occur at a precise moment in the piece and are studiously notated in conventional (if complicated) rhythms. Adams has taken the incorporation of birdsong materials further. Rather than prescribing when they are to occur, he gives the musicians phrases (transcribed in the field) and detailed indications of the habits and movement patterns of the species which sing them. Thus the musicians are tasked with making their playing approximate the birds’ behavior; not the other way around.

Thus, creating an ecology of music involves much more than what’s printed on the page: it requires empathy, study, and imagination. songbirdsongs dispenses, insofar as is possible, with human expectations of formal trajectory and “pretty Polly” mimicry, replacing it with something wild, unfettered, often enthralling. Christian Carey

Rodrigo Amado Motion Trio & Jeb Bishop

for Bonnie Prince Billy, lay down nearly five years for this record to find witchy beats for Spires That In The a label because no one knew what to Sunset Rise, zero in on a trance call it; I say don’t worry what to name groove with DRMWPN, match it, because it’s gonna call you out.

Burning Live at Jazz Ao scrapes with Mazen Kerbaj, and Bill Meyer Centro fuel a free jazz blow-out with Peter JACC Records CD Ran Blake Brötzmann, and not once sound Christine Correa When I first met Rodrigo Amado out of place. A childhood spent Down Here Below in the mid-90s, he talked of how hearing Middle Eastern music and Red Piano CD isolated Lisbon was from the rest of Louis Armstrong in the house and improvised music world. Things sure all that Chicago had to offer outside The excellent vocalist Christine Correa have changed, to the point where a of it shaped his musical concephas been recording lately with pianist Portuguese label, Clean Feed, seems tion, and a teen-aged epiphany at a Frank Carlberg, but here she teams to be carrying the burden of survival Rahsaan Roland Kirk concert made up with the outrageously good and for the music on both sides of the Athim mindful of the responsibility that always unpredictable Ran Blake for a lantic. Amado co-founded the label, comes with improvisation. He may first volume of tributes to the sorely although he divested himself of his be determined to tell the truth in missed Abbey Lincoln (and not for stake years ago. His affiliations reflect every musical situation, but he’s also nothing, but if you haven’t heard both the impulse to reach outside the as willing to ratchet up the tension as Blake’s duets with Dominique Eade, country for renewal—he’s recorded he is to provide support; he’s a good remedy that quickly). Two versions of frequently with musicians from other man to have around if you want to Lincoln’s “Down Here Below” bookcountries, especially Americans— make things happen. These records end the concise record, which also and maintaining standing groups represent an incomplete survey of his contains a pair of “Freedom Day” and with willing locals. This album brings activities over the past year, but each “Christmas Cheer” renditions, a gloriboth methods together. The Motion is well worth your time. ously ragged “Brother, Can You Spare Trio, which has been around a while, Sugar Maple is a rambunctious a Dime?” and an outrageously good, includes Amado on tenor saxophone, free jazz excursion named after the spindle-crashing “Little Niles.” There Miguel Mira on cello, and Gabriel FerMilwaukee tavern that hosted the enis quizzical, brilliantine piano from randini on drums; guest Jeb Bishop is counter. Gjerstad’s alto sax and clariBlake everywhere, never expected a long-time member of the Chicago nets defy gravity and safety, slinging (that sudden crash, the cannily-timed jazz community who moved to North lines skyward under a steady fire from dropout) but always apposite to the Carolina in 2012, one year after this Fred Lonberg-Holm’s electronically piece and the moment alike. And this concert was recorded in Portugal. enhanced cello—there are moments is audible from note one of the openBishop is the kind of player who can where he sounds like Hendrix playing ing “Down Here Below,” with lengthy, make his way in many contexts, and a walky-talky, and how cool is that? ruminative passages for piano alone, he jumps right in here, putting his Zerang is all restless motion here; if Blake wistful and fragile but then shoulder into the music and giving you’re up for a collision of Midwestern announcing his intentions with an it a good strong push. The Trio grit and Mittel European angst, this’ll assertive close-grouped bundle of pushes right back, but also yields, in do ya fine. notes. Correa’s feel for dynamics is what sounds like a well-established Ibsen’s Ghost was recorded in great, especially as she perambulates dynamic. Although Mira’s attraction Oslo, but it’s even more steeped in All in the lower register and deftly layers to his instrument’s low end makes American free jazz soul. The quartet in a nasal inflection on an acid lyric him sound remarkably like a bassist, breaks out at a sprinting pace, with (“it’s not so easy”). And “Brother, Can this isn’t a horn + rhythm section outtenor saxophonist Joe McPhee and You Spare a Dime?” is just so hot ing. Each player is an equal partner, trombonist Jeb Bishop holding forth when she belts, not without a hint of introducing melodic and decorative like a couple of street corner ranters disbelief at her circumstances, “I was ideas sparked by robust but accesusing their positions at either end the kid with the drum!” The record sible free jazz—think Archie Shepp, of the block to save the maximum retreats to a spare, almost disoriented Sonny Rollins at his most unfettered, number of souls. Zerang fuels the “Bird Alone” and begins to regain or Ken Vandermark when he’s hangbreakout with a cymbal-heavy wash its swagger during a gorgeous ing around bad-ass Scandinavians. that balances pure sound with unaccompanied vocal on “African Their momentum naturally gravitates swinging pulse, but he sounds most Lady,” Correa varying her phrasing, to that point where swing speeds up in his element during the meterless, timbre, and articulation subtly and to a blur, and their sense of interaction hieroglyphic gestures that follow. impressively throughout. The second seems founded more on a commitThe other two records place “Freedom Day” is more rhythmiment to generating complementary Zerang with a woodwind player and cally halting, with an almost tentative energy levels than a more convenpianist/synthesist Jim Baker, but they lyrical delivery at first, but then opens tional sense of counterpoint. Bishop couldn’t be more different. Erb/Baker/ up—with the words “can’t believe rides their velocity like a skilled surfer, Zerang was made during Swiss tenor it”—into a confident stride. And the and they let him into their flow as saxophonist/bass clarinetist Christoph concluding version of the title track is willingly as the sea accepts all divers.

Erb’s 2011 residence in Chicago, spare and defiant, making me eager Bill Meyer an enterprise funded by his home for the next volume. Jason Bivins town of Lucerne. Erb still seems to Jim Baker be developing his own personality Nathan Bowles Kyle Bruckmann from disparate influences; he seems A Bottle, A Buckeye Michael Zerang equally at home with post-Paul DesSoft Abuse CD / LP / DL Psychotic Redaction mond fluidity and John Butcher-like Multikulti Projekt CD Nathan Bowles has played the extended techniques. Zerang makes spoons and other percussion with The no effort to engage his jazzy side, Christoph Erb Black Twig Pickers, Pigeons, and Spiinstead matching Baker’s pointillistic Jim Baker ral Joy Band; more recently he’s also playing with gouging scrapes and Michael Zerang played banjo with the Twigs. A Bottle, quick, tiny gestures. It’d be fair to call Erb / Baker / Zerang A Buckeye is his first solo long player, this idiomatically correct non-idiomatVeto CD and since it is named in part for his ic improvisation. Psychotic Redaction, preferred banjo manufacturer, you Frode Gjerstad on the other hand, takes genres that probably won’t be surprised to learn Fred Lonberg-Holm have no business being in the same that it’s an all-banjo affair. You might, Michael Zerang room and slams them together with however, be pleasantly surprised by Sugar Maple atom-splitting force and no small FMR CD what he does with the instrument. measure of mischievous glee—this Away from the Twigs, he maintains his trio has billed itself on occasion as Joe McPhee connection with old timey music by Disney & the Muslims. Zerang plays Jeb Bishop playing his banjo clawhammer-style Ingebrigt Håker Flaten Middle Eastern beats with a dubwise and covering tunes like “Alabama sense of sonic transformation; Baker’s Michael Zerang Gals” and “Elk River Blues.” But the pinging synth and Kyle Bruckmann’s Ibsen's Ghost presence of another tune, Jack Rose’s brutally nasal double reeds are frankly Not Two CD “Lick Mountain Ramble,” clues you combative, doing their best to shoot in to where Bowles is going. Like each other off the range but never Percussionist Michael Zerang’s the Rose, who often played with the upsetting Zerang’s beats. It took kind of guy who can play rock drums WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #64 | 43

ASavage Trio featuring Kerbaj Energy:Mazen Jeffrey Hayden Shurdut with Michael Ray and Marshall Allen

“A” Trio

Music To Our Ears Al Maslakh CD

Spill

Stockholm Syndrome Al Maslakh CD

Mike Cooper Radio Paradise Johnny Kafta's Kids Menu CD

Scrambled Eggs and “A” Trio

Beach Party at Mirna el Chalouhi Johnny Kafta's Kids Menu CD

Scrambled Eggs and Friends Scrambled Eggs and Friends Johnny Kafta's Kids Menu CD

Over the last decade, the Beirut improv scene has established itself as an equal to that of Chicago, London or Berlin. Key musicians include Raed Yassin, Christine and Sharif Sehnaoui, Bechir Saadé, Charbel Haber, and especially the trumpeter, poet and visual artist Mazen Kerbaj.

The CD label Al Maslakh has documented the scene, and since 2000 the annual Irtijal festival has served as an important showcase. Three of these new releases appear on Johnny Kafta’s Kids Menu, a collaborative project administered

by Haber, Kerbaj and Sharif Sehnaoui. They describe it, tongue-in-cheek, as “a sub-label [of Al Maslakh] to accommodate its younger customers.

A specially crafted ‘Kids Menu’, designed to soften its image and prepare future generations for its ‘publishing the un-publishable’ doctrine.” It’s slightly more accessible music, perhaps, but for the most part, Johnny Kafta’s Kids Menu is really just a fun way of packaging excellent recordings of improvised music. The CDs come in bubble envelopes featuring lovingly ink-printed images

and, if you order through the mail, your own address on the reverse as well as “whatever other delights that the international postal services may indulge us with.”

Scrambled Eggs and Friends offers seven tracks by experimental rock trio Scrambled Eggs (Haber on electric guitar and electronics, Tony Elieh on electric bass and Malek Rizkillah on drums) with various local improvisers. There are awesome combinations of rock exuberance and textural flourishes that only musicians truly comfortable with both realms could produce.

“SE + AK & JG” adds Joseph Ghosn on laptop and synthesizers and Abdallah Ko on electric guitar and electronics, and the result sounds like Faust’s “It’s a Rainy Day Sunshine Girl” without the vocals but with the addition of a forcefield of electronic whirrs and feedback. French saxophonist Stéphane Rives, a recent transplant to Beirut, joins Scrambled Eggs and Mazen Kerbaj on “SE + MK & SR” in the most stripped-down improv on this disc: background washes of electronics crest and subside as analog beeps jostle with flutter-tongued reeds, percussive pitter-patter and squeaks.

Beach Party at Mirna el Chalouhi is a more straightforward collaboration pairing Scrambled Eggs with the “A” Trio, which is Kerbaj, Sharif Sehnaoui (acoustic guitar) and Raed Yassin (double bass). Two half-hour improvs bookend a short middle track, “Koji Kabuto (Ya Akruto),” which is close to punk rock, with a filthy lipsnarling guitar line and Kerbaj and Yassin chiming in on vocals—chanting, squealing and growling.

Layers of extended techniques pile on the fistwaving, head-nodding pulse. It’s heavy. And light at the same time. The truly improvised stuff that makes up the rest of the disc is less rock-oriented than the other Scrambled Eggs collaboration, and gives the listener a chance to hear just how far out those guys can go while still playing instruments that sound like rock instruments. It’s great improv and great rock, separately and together.

You can hear the “A” Trio on their own on Music to Our Ears: four improvisations recorded in September 2010. What makes Beirut improvisers unique is their willingness to engage with many kinds of improv: gestural, laminal, insect, drone, etc. Even rhythm is welcomed! On “Three Portraits in No Color” Sehnaoui’s rhythmic strumming of his prepared acoustic guitar creates a bed of gentle insistence that tenderly frames Kerbaj’s puckering whines. The group’s aesthetic cohesion is not just the result of playing together a lot. A friend of mine visited these guys and sat in on some practice sessions, and told me that after each improv they would talk animatedly

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about what they liked and didn’t like about the performance. That kind of detailed dialogue and critique is not as common as one would think among musicians, and this recording attests to its value.

These labels don’t focus solely on Beirut musicians, but also support other kindred spirits. Spill is the Berlin duo of Magda Mayas on piano and Tony Buck on drums, and Stockholm Syndrome features two long tracks recorded in concert in Helsinki and Oslo in 2010. While we’ve all heard pianos played percussively, it’s rarer to hear someone play the drums with as much attention to melody as Buck. High-pitched bowed cymbals form harmonic sequences with brushed straw, wood-on-wood pops and bass thumps. The friction this duo generates is the result of being so seamlessly intertwined that conflagrations of star-burning intensity naturally appear at every twist. Mayas has a gifted ear for timing, giving Buck the freedom to create unusual combinations of melody and rhythm. These two have such personal approaches to their instruments that it’s astonishing how well it comes together.

British ex-pat lap steel guitarist Mike Cooper’s music touches on so many different genres that it’s no surprise the Beirut folks would be drawn to his absolutely singular voice. Field recordings, electronics, blues, improv and roots music all coalesce in Cooper’s soundworld. For those familiar with his solo releases on his own Hipshot records, Radio Paradise is a tighter studio collection that still amply covers the breadth of his interests. Without overdubbing, he builds layer after layer of sound—some big, some small - so that all of the subtle parts add up to a dizzying yet cohesive whole in his hands: belted blues vocals, backwards looped guitar lines, hand-clapping, etc. His level of commitment makes a deep impression because it is such a genuinely strange concoction. In a song that blends “Migrant Song” with “Heartbreak Hotel,” Cooper sings the line “soul-snatched or maybe just left behind” and gets caught on it, returning to it over and over while riffing on a sequence of dusty chords.

I didn’t recognize the line so I Googled it and found this from Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow: “Is that who you are, that vaguely criminal face on your ID card, its soul snatched by the government camera as the guillotine shutter fell—or maybe just left behind with your heart.” Cooper’s aesthetic is one which draws together so many elements that it’s as if the listener’s own experience and discoveries are just another part of the mix. Andrew Choate

Twigs, Bowles taps into the complex historical and emotional stew of rustic Americana without denying his involvement with other types of music. His skills as an improvising percussionist and his immersion in long tone music are evident in the serene bowed intro and savagely scraped endgame of “Beans.” But it’s the ruminating air in the song’s middle that brings those events into focus. Bowles has a clear vision of what makes music speak to others. His banjo technique foregrounds singing melodies, which loom out of the ringing, rhythmic patterns like a tall fir tree emerging from the forest and the fog. Each piece is musically complete, yet open; you can imagine a voice singing it, but without words, there’s room for the listener to create their own story. Put another way, this guy is playing music to make you feel, not licks to make you cheer. Bill Meyer

Kyle Bruckmann

On Procedural Grounds New World CD

This is a marvelous release placing a well-deserved spotlight on doublereedist Kyle Bruckmann’s seriously ambitious recent compositional work. The four pieces here each feature different instrumentation, giving some well-deserved exposure to a range of performers from the vibrant Bay Area scene.

Bruckmann pairs his oboe with Matt Ingalls’ clarinet on the opening “Cell Structure,” a terrific study for overtones and dirty electronics. As sub-guttural quicksand gathers at their feet, the reedists plot a course of squiggly unisons, insistent breath and grain, and woody flora running wild, before the closing lambent bath. The title track is a fascinating, sprawling half hour in length, opening with quizzical birdsong before proceeding to lay out gorgeous lines over a compelling pulse track.

This one features Bruckmann’s excellent group Wrack (with violist Jen Clare Paulson, bass clarinetist Jason Stein, bassist Anton Hatwich, and percussionist Tim Daisy) along with ROVA and live electronics aces Gino Robair and Tim Perkis. The piece is filled with superb moments: an absolutely churning solo from Larry Ochs, while Daisy stokes the coals; a gorgeous, vaguely Korean-sounding strings passage, slowly morphing from spaciousness into a Hatwich bells fantasy; and then a honker from Raskin over a slow groove, electronics pulling the whole apart from behind the curtain. The intense solo piece “Orgone Accelerator” features Bruckmann on oboe and English horn, which prowl alongside menacing, claustrophobic electronics while seeming also poised to evade them. Perhaps best of all is the dark melancholy and polyphony of sfSound (Bruckmann, Ingalls, altoist John Ingle, Robair on prepared piano, violinist Benjamin Kreith, violist Tara Flandreau, cellist Monica Scott, and percussionist Kjell Nordeson) on “Tarpit”: strings and oboe floating gorgeously through this oscillating tapestry, as dark clouds grow steadily, buzzing and shrieking as electronics take out the bottom again and again.

I’ve been returning to this disc with

European players who move within the orbit of Norwegian multi-reedist Frode Gjerstad. Four of these recordings feature projects which Gjerstad has been leading for years—his trio, John Butcher his group Calling Signals, and his Gino Robair unique and astonishing large ensemApophenia Rastascan CD ble, Circulasione Totale Orchestra— and nearly all of the musicians who Toshimaru Nakamura appear on these recordings have John Butcher worked with Gjerstad in numerous Radio Paradise contexts.

Monotype CD Back in the 1980s Gjerstad founded his Circulasione Totale When improvisers keep playing Orchestra to showcase this musical together over a span of years, the network of rotating personnel. In an music they make becomes part of interview he once explained that he an evolving dialogue. One chalwanted all the musicians he knew lenge they face is to keep the music to “mix with each other as much as fresh and unpredictable without possible, make new combinations jettisoning the benefits of knowing in every possible way.” The name of one another’s ways: to know, yet not the project was intended as a “made know, and make the music known up name that belonged to no real anew. language, but it was understandable With London-based saxophonfor most people.” ist John Butcher and Bay Area The instrumentation of the percussionist Gino Robair, the Circulasione group on PhilaOslo is changes in their dialogue also amazing: three drum-sets, electric reflect each man’s ongoing effort bass, acoustic bass, electric guitar, to keep moving on his instrument. tuba, sax, clarinet, cornet, vibes, and Robair spends much of this session electronic effects! Each of the two agitating surfaces with motorized discs contains a single continudevices (toys, vibrators) and bows ous live performance of just over rather than drumsticks, and Butcher seventy minutes, one recorded in does something similar by applying Philadelphia in January, 2010, and motorized gadgets to the bell of his the other in Oslo in March of 2011. horn. Thus two essentially acoustic Each piece is a kind of epic journey, instruments turn into amplifiers of winding mysteriously through phases mechanized chaos. The chaos slips and moods defined by unrecaway when Butcher sets to blowing, ognizable sounds and surprising his darting, fluttering figures and combinations—tuba, electric bass just-so bent tones bracketing the and clarinet for instance—and then bent buzzes that issue from Robair’s gradually, or suddenly, the orchestra skins. This album, taken from a 2009 as a whole will unload an a-rhythmic performance for radio broadcast, is avalanche of impenetrable noise as white-knuckled and uncomprowhich quickly, or slowly, morphs into mising as anything the duo has ever a rambunctious, disheveled groove, done; no mean feat, that. which is soon turned inside out as it Dusted Machinery feels like the dissolves into an estranged, distant realization of implications first sugpurring from Bobby Bradford’s corgested on Cavern with Nightlife, net, or into tiny, scratchy noodlings which includes their first show from Anders Hana’s electric guitar. together. Then and now, Nakamura There are intermittent sections when doesn’t even try to match the saxothe triple drum-set barrage of Louis phonist’s athletic flexibility with his Moholo-Moholo, Morton J. Olsen no-input mixing board, which he and Paal Nilsson-Love reaches a plays by jacking the device’s output dense and ferocious roar, only to into the in jack, then shaping the then be topped off by the electronics resulting feedback. Instead he runs of Lasse Marhaug. The music is indeone or more continuous streams scribable, inscrutable, unclassifiable, of abrasive sound, which Butcher utterly uncompromising and beautiequals with some very unsaxfully unbearable. It is challenging on Circulasione Totale like ribbons of coarse, pulsating all fronts—for the players, for listenOrchestra sound. This is a much tougher affair ers, for producers and engineers, for PhilaOslo than their initial encounter, more Circulasione Totale CDx2 anyone who comes into contact with abrasive and determined, but no it or even just near it. less thoughtful in its development.

Frode Gjerstad Trio Gjerstad’s trio release East of Bill Meyer East of West West finds the leader playing Circulasione Totale CD clarinet as well as alto sax. Right Lucio Capece from the beginning of the first piece, Calling Signals 07 Zero Plus Zero “Summersault,” bassist Jon Rune From Cafe Sting Potlatch CD Strøm and Nilssen-Love generLoose Torque CD ate a muscular and dizzying kind Clarinetist Lucio Capece has been Calling Signals 08 of turbulence which they return to a key contributor to a number of reA Winter's Tour repeatedly throughout the rest of the cords over the last decade, a strong Loose Torque CD recording. The title track is perhaps but spare voice in the area of music the most impressive performance Fred Lonberg-Holm once called “reductionist” or “eai.” on this session. It is short, sparse, Nick Stephens Zero Plus Zero is a simply fantastic and ruminative, with Nilssen-Love’s Attic Antics solo recording, which to my ears is cymbal work and Gjerstad’s clarinet Loose Torque CD similar in spirit and methodology to lines delicately ricocheting off each Marc Baron’s triumphant Une Fois, other in slow motion. In a few places Jon Corbett’s Chaque Fois. Like Mark Wastell, the trio even seems to be gesturing Dangerous Musics Rhodri Davies, Burkhard Beins, and toward the musical worlds of, say, Kongens Gade others in a roughly similar area of Ives or Messiaen.

Leo CD music, Capece now uses multiple Gjerstad’s Calling Signals quartet sound generators to realize his This cluster of releases encompasses is another project built around the vision. After the opening “Some an interconnected set of mostly idea of a shifting line-up. From WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #64 | 45

great eagerness since it arrived and I’m sure it’ll end up on my best of 2012 list. Jason Bivins

move upward uncertainly” (where he uses a Sruti box to generate a huge stack of tones midway between Charlemagne Palestine and Pauline Oliveros), the title track finds him expertly controlling breath and multiphonics, layering differently articulated tones at long intervals (some very close-miked to the point where feedback seems likely, others nearly disappearing, others deep wet gurgles inside the soprano) and doing so with “applied objects used as preparations,” like a wobbly top on a metal table or a marble rolling inside an inverted cymbal. With “Inside the Outside I” Capece returns to the Sruti box. But on this piece things get even thicker and more resonant (other instruments used for this effect include double plugged equalizer, ring modulator, bass clarinet neck, cassette and Minidisc walkmans) as a way of thickening the drone and expanding it, with a plunging low end and chiming bowed metal everywhere. But on all of these pieces there is considerable space and regular drop-offs, never simply suffocating sound. As an example, Capece uses one of these rests to dig into some mouthpiece glissing, peeking out from the low rumble like a coil of energy through the top of your skull, skirling up and down through mouthpiece, ring modulator, warp and woof and wood and whine. Capece takes us even further into the abyss on “Inside the Outside II” where he pairs the equalizers with “tuned backyard (recorded through cardboard tubes of differing dimensions),” ending with a quizzical section for what sounds like party chatter and hollow wood. “Spectrum of One” is all sine waves (though it could easily pass for Capece’s clarinet, that’s how good he is), performed on the anniversary of the first photos taken from space. And “Inside the Outside III” is for bass clarinet “with and without cardboard tubes.” Its obsessive, minimalist worrying of an interval sounded at times to me like a solo version of Consume Red. As the piece fades with lonesome maritime bleats issuing from nowhere, my first thought is that I want to hear it all again. Jason Bivins

Patrick Farmer and Sarah Hughes

John Cage

cians documented by Another Timbre, his use of stochastic strategies within formal structures is equally of note. Ryoanji offers an ideal example of Ryoanji this approach. The piece was inspired by a small hat[Now]art CD Kyoto rock garden that Cage visited in the ’60s.

The spare groupings of fifteen stones placed on carefully raked white gravel left an indelible impression. Cage worked on a set of drawings Caisson which became the basis for a series of pieces for Another Timbre CD solo instruments and percussion. In these pieces, a precisely notated percussion score is paired with a graphic score for the other instruments, where lines indicate glissandi of intersecting trajectories. The striking reading of the piece on the Hat[now]art disc moves with stately grace, Eberhard Blum’s haunting flute paired with Jan Williams’ tolling percussion. One third of the way through, growling trombone enters, followed No Islands by wordless voice, oboe, and bass. One quickly Another Timbre CD loses any notion of foreground or background, each element hanging separately in space like a brushstroke.

On the surface, the live improvisation by Tierce captured on Caisson has little to do with Cage, who was outspoken about the differences between his approach and improvisation. But Jez riley French, Ivan Palacky, and Daniel Jones chart a Droplets distinctive trajectory in their music. First off, there Another Timbre CD is the instrumentation, which mixes zither, contact mikes, electronics, field recordings, turntable, and an amplified Dopleta 180 knitting machine. The results is a mercurial sonic field, against which the A Pauper’s Guide to three musicians carefully place individual sounds: resonant clangs; pops and crackles; amplified John Cage Another Timbre CD-R buzz and whir; and the sounds of birds, bells, and footsteps. In an interview on the Another Timbre site, French calls the piece a “meeting between intuitive composition, sound & improvisation” divisions that could be using “time, space, stillness, quietude—even in the midst of a detailed audible field.” autonomous but that No Islands, featuring Patrick Farmer on turncomprise the whole tables and electronics, Kostis Kilymis on electronAnother Timbre CD ics, Sarah Hughes on chorded zither, and Stephen Cornford on amplified piano, includes two collective improvisations along with a reading of This year marks John Cage’s centenary, an Cage’s “Four6.” The improvisations move with a event that has yielded concert series, academic measured sensibility, the individual contributions colloquia, and publications across the globe. Occarefully layered in a way that suggests sonic tober 2011 was just as auspicious an anniversary, calligraphy. For the Cage piece, the musicians marking the 50th anniversary of the publication are instructed to choose twelve different sounds of Cage’s seminal book Silence. Recordings each and play within flexible time brackets. The celebrating both events have started to appear. piece starts out with the sound of birds and the HatArt, a long-time supporter of Cage’s work, outdoors (it’s unclear if this was sound coming in continues their commitment with reissues from from outside or from field recordings). Over the their deep back-catalog. Another Timbre, course of the 30-minute performance, the limited meanwhile, has put out five CDs under the rubric sonic palette creates a hyper-focus on shifts in “Silence and After 2—cutting edges,” focusing density, texture and dynamics. The success of a on “the increasingly fertile exchange between the performance like this depends on the musicians’ traditions of post-Cageian composition and postability to adhere to Cage’s instructions while reductionist improvisation.” collectively fine-tuning the results, and the results While Cage’s elemental focus on sound and here are captivating. silence has had an enormous impact on the musiThe trio of Farmer, Hughes and bassist Domi46 | SIGNAL to NOISE #64 WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM

Tierce

Stephen Cornford Patrick Farmer Sarah Hughes Kostis Kilymis Dominic Lash Patrick Farmer Sarah Hughes Anett Németh

Signe Maehler

James Saunders

nic Lash was formed to perform works by the Wandelweiser collective and related experimental music. Droplets includes two realizations of “For Maaike Schoorel” by Taylan Susam, where hushed gestures are placed against a ground of inky silence. The instrumentation is unlisted, and particularly on the first reading, the sounds’ restrained attack and muted sustain are disembodied from any recognizable sound source, forcing the listener to concentrate on positive and negative space. A 21-minute collective improvisation for double bass, percussion, and zither is placed between the two readings: while it eschews gestural arcs, there is a keen ear to dynamics and density as spatters, crackles, daubs of overtones, creaking long textures, and engulfing low-end drones are assembled into spontaneous form.

The real stand-out though, is Eva-Maria Houben’s “Nachtsück” for solo bass. Recorded in a small wood in a village in Derbyshire, Lash was caught in a downpour; rather than abandon the performance, he persevered. The sound of the bass, rain, wind, insects, birds, sheep, and the distant hum of an airplane equally inhabit the musical plane in a way that the use of field recordings can only approximate.

The title composition of Anett Németh’s A Pauper’s Guide to John Cage is a knowing nod to Cage, layering clarinet, electronically treated household objects, and field recordings over a spare piano part according to chance-derived time brackets. The clean attack and ringing sustain of the piano provides an effective field for abraded sound sources, which move around the sonic plane through careful controlled dynamics and densities. “Early Morning Melancholia” utilizes field recordings and “domestic electronics” to create a more cinematic piece as overtly identifiable segments wash against shimmering scrims of electronics.

James Saunders’ new CD is a particular favorite from this batch, and it gives insight into how younger composers are absorbing Cage’s tenets. The six compositions are constructed from a series of single-page scores that specify brief, self-contained sound events. The processes that govern each of the pieces are intriguing and often amusing—such as a piece where ten players drag disposable coffee cups across fifty different surfaces—and in the hands of these performers, the structures provide the foundation for music of absorbing detail. Standouts include Philip Thomas’s careful deployment of the overlapping timbres of piano decay, melodica and harmonica, and radio static; Rhodri Davies’ compact reading of a piece for prepared harp, which uses the materials on a list of traditional gifts for the first ten wedding anniversaries; and the final piece, where Angharad Davies, Tim Parkinson, and Saunders create a beguiling structure out of violin harmonics, bowed metal, and the scrape of a coffee cup on a brick. Michael Rosenstein

Café Sting, while anchored in the bass-drums team of Nick Stephens and Moholo-Moholo, includes Eivin One Pederson on accordion; and A Winter’s Tour has Stephens and Nilssen-Love, with Jon Corbett on trumpet and valve trombone. The opening composition on Café Sting is a 35-minute piece in four sections that evokes the dramatic boat ride through the Bonkafjorden that was necessary in order to travel to the gig in Stavanger. Pedersen’s crisp yet understated accordion playing blends perfectly into the atmosphere and flow of the group’s musical ideas. A Winter’s Tour was recorded in front of a small audience at the Arts Center in Colchester, England in December, 2009. Corbett’s rapid, crystalline phrases slice and dart across the musical terrain established by the other players, as if announcing urgent messages. On A Winter’s Tour Gjerstad’s alto sax is sometimes the lead voice, but in many places he seems to be commenting on or responding to what others are saying rather than steering the music. Bandleader as catalyst appears to sum up Gjerstad’s vision of his role within the various ensembles he maintains.

Gjerstad does not play on Attic Antics, which brings together Stephens and cellist Fred LonbergHolm, nor on Kongens Gade, which includes Corbett, Stephens, and Moholo-Moholo, but these collaborators are certainly within the ‘circulasione totale’ that Gjerstad has set in motion. Attic Antics is an intriguing dialogue of pure sound exploration, the two instruments moving back and forth between complete entanglement and distant separation.

The disc presents three pieces, playfully titled “Attic Antics,” “Antique Addicts” and “Tantric Ants,” and playfulness is plenty noticeable in the players’ interaction, as if a cello and a contrabass could become a pair of kittens or pups pawing skittishly at each other one moment and then quickly bounding away from each other in an instant, all while having fun on the living room rug.

Kongens Gade, recorded in May of 2009 at Premises Studio in London’s East End, captures these three veteran players as they expertly fuse their musical personalities while retaining their distinctive, instrumental voices. While Moholo-Moholo is always dramatic and inventive whenever he plays, on this session the great South African master-drummer seems especially articulate and nuanced. He’s developed a technique for playing both loudly and softly at the same time, as if simultaneously whispering and shouting through the drum-set, and on this session Stephens’ bass work is precisely cued to this quality of Moholo-Moholo’s drumming. At several points Corbett adds shards and brittle bursts from his pocket trumpet, generating a delicate, three-way conversation within the group, while alluding almost inevitably to the musical legacy of Don Cherry. Kongens Gade is both a satisfying group undertaking and a nearly perfect example of MoholoMoholo’s drum-set artistry.

As Gjerstad and his extended family of musical colleagues explore density and fragmentation, cultivat-

ing spontaneous group identity while resolutely asserting limitless selfexpression, they create music that points to a faraway place beyond sound. Gjerstad has found the right metaphor for this striving, as well as for the ambitious efforts of the whole constellation of players he works with: total circulation, on all levels, in all directions, without closure, passionately and relentlessly pursued.

Alan Waters

performance that night comes through beautifully. The historical value of these tapes will be immediately apparent to anyone devoted to the cutting edge of jazz in Britain at that time, and for anyone new to British free jazz, there could hardly be a better place to start than a table down front while the Ninesense band cuts loose. Alan Waters

Elton Dean’s Ninesense

Because She Hoped

The 100 Club Concert 1979 Reel Recordings CD x 2

Benoît Delbecq François Houle Songlines CD

François Houle Genera

The London jazz scene of the 1970s was full of turbulence and experimentation. The impact of the American avant-garde was everywhere, British prog-rock and psychedelic rock were flourishing, strands of what would come to be recognized as world music had become woven into the fabric of folk and pop idioms, and small, independent record labels were popping up on the continent and in England to document the new and unclassifiable type of jazz that was emerging at that time. This was the milieu in which saxophonist Elton Dean founded his small bigband Ninesense in 1975, bringing together players from Keith Tippett’s groups, from Chris McGregor’s Brotherhood of Breath, and from the wider London improv community. It was a breakout time for experimental and creative music in the UK. Toward the end of the decade 21-year-old Riccardo Bergerone—then a jazz and avant garde aficionado from Turin—first met Dean when he dropped into Ogun Records’ office in London while on a summer road trip. In spite of having no prior experience with music management, Bergerone soon found himself organizing and promoting a series of concerts back in Italy for Dean’s quartet with Keith Tippett, Harry Miller and Louis Moholo. Thus a friendship began between Dean and Bergerone, which lead Dean to invite the ardent supporter to London for a performance by his Ninesense band at the legendary 100 Club in March of 1979. Bergerone hung out with the group, snapped photos of them in rehearsal, and then that night perched his portable Sony TC-D5M cassette recorder on a front row table at the club. Over thirty years later those tapes have resurfaced, and this release gives us access to that amazing night of music. The Ninesense line-up at that time was Alan Skidmore (saxes), Mark Charig (cornet), Harry Beckett (flugelhorn, trumpet), Nick Evans (trombone), Radu Malfatti (trombone), Tippett (piano), Miller (bass), Moholo (drums), and Dean (alto sax and saxello). Bergerone captured both sets that night, with Jim Dvorak joining the group on trumpet in the second half. The tracks (eight in all) move in and out of composed and improvised sections, exploring a wide palette of textures and moods in a seemingly effortless and organic flow of communication among the players. While the recording does not have the pristine digital quality we’ve become accustomed to, the energy and excitement of the band’s

Songlines CD

Tyson Naylor Trio Kosmonauten Songlines CD

Duo recordings have always been tightrope acts. When the pair have only each other to respond to, the dialogue tends to be more probing and intimate than when other participants are involved. Because She Hoped, is the third recording by two old friends—Vancouver clarinetist François Houle and Parisbased pianist Benoît Delbecq—and there’s a natural telepathy between them. Although each has amassed an arsenal of extended techniques (piano preparation in Delbecq’s case, circular breathing and playing without a mouthpiece in Houle’s), the two employ these approaches with great sensitivity. Dry, spacious, and moderately paced, their exchanges are largely meditative ballads, though they turn up the heat on the off-kilter rhythms of “Pour Pee Wee,” while on Steve Lacy’s “Cliches” their restraint generates an enormous amount of tension.

Genera features Houle’s current touring band, with flugelhornist/cornetist Taylor Ho Bynum, trombonist Samuel Blaser, bassist Michael Bates and drummer Harris Eisenstadt. The “+1” is Delbecq again, on piano and electronics. Genera kicks off on the same contemplative note as Because She Hoped, but then moves into the swinging “Essay#7,” propelled by Eisenstadt’s deft drumming. Houle’s Gil Evans influences can easily be felt in the ensemble writing, making this sextet sound like an even larger group. Genera is a challenging and bracing listen, which always stays on this side of tonality and lyricism even in the freer moments.

Tyson Naylor has a growing reputation as the go-to pianist on the Vancouver scene. Naylor (who is also a member of Canadian folk artist Dan Mangan’s band) has an impish sense of humour that shows an affinity for the merrymakers of the ICP Orchestra. You can hear Misha Mengelberg’s spare, subtle intervals and dry-martini wit in his playing, though it’s Mengelberg filtered through Brad Mehldau. The rollicking opening of “Paolo Conte” descends into stops/starts, waiting four minutes to introduce its theme.

The rest of the tracks are just as spritely and vivacious. While the disc is Naylor’s chance to show off as a leader, the chemistry between himself and his rhythm section—bassist Russell Sholberg and drummer Skye

Brooks—deserves a mention, and Houle also fits in beautifully in his two guest appearances.

Richard Moule

Mark Fosson

Digging in the Dust: Home Recordings 1976 Tompkins Square LP / CD / DL

In late 1976, Mark Fosson thought he was one of the luckiest guys around. After a few years of woodshedding and writing tunes, the 12-string guitarist from Kentucky had mailed a demo to his favorite label, John Fahey’s Takoma. Fahey declared his tape the best thing to show up in the mailbox since Leo Kottke‘s and promptly signed him, and Fosson moved to LA to make a record. From there things fell apart.

Fahey sold the label, Fosson never found another one, and those tapes sat for three decades before a relative passed them to Drag City, who released The Lost Takoma Sessions in 2006. That’s the end of a nice story, right? Not quite. While Takoma Sessions is a swell record, we still hadn’t heard the tape that knocked Fahey out in the first place. Digging in the Dust rights that wrong.

Fosson’s fleet fingerpicking expresses movement and a sense of undiluted joy quite at odds with Fahey’s penchant for black humor and emotionally complex rumination. I dare you to play “Frozen Fingers” whilst driving down a two-lane highway; you’ll be smiling and speeding in no time. Although the material on this record overlaps significantly with Takoma Sessions, there are differences significant enough to make this record worth your while. It comes down to feel; these performances feel fresher, more joyous. They may have been recorded as demos, but they don’t feel unfinished or hesitant, and Fosson’s technique is just as strong. And for all the cowboy movie fans out there, there’s a cover of “Back in the Saddle Again” taken at a pace that’ll make you want to let fly a whoop and a holler out the open window of that speeding car.

Bill Meyer

Foxes Fox

Live at the Vortex Psi CD

Evan Parker & Le GGRIL Vivaces

Tour de Bras CD

Of all the various ensembles Evan Parker has appeared with in the last couple of decades, Foxes Fox may be the most poorly documented.

In the company of pianist Steve Beresford, bassist John Edwards, and percussionist Louis MoholoMoholo, Parker is challenged in different ways than some of his more active groups. And from the opening of this three-part live date from February 2007, there’s a rambunctious, crashing feeling to things. Parker’s efflorescent tenor, Beresford’s spiky, fiery irruptions, Edwards’ incredible string manipulation (and especially that twang as he hauls the strings around the edge of the neck), and Moholo-Moholo’s

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fierce snare and tom patterns make for an irresistible mix to these ears.

Vortex, indeed. The opening piece is quite blistering, but filled nonetheless with space and buoyancy, especially in a marvelous section for burbling bass, serrated inside-piano, and drums. The quartet’s music is crashing, slashing, and alive with fast-moving details. But for an even greater treat, Kenny Wheeler joins the band for the second set, which opens with a graceful and spacious melancholy feature for the master trumpeter/flugelhornist. Things do get off and racing, though, but always centered around that indelible, undeniable sound. Wheeler works at the extreme registers, with a sharp instinct for note placement, space, shapes, and drama. And then late in the lengthy improvisation, he and Parker dive deep into some motivic late Trane material. A pungent, tense 10-minute closer brings an end to a simply terrific set.

Le GGRIL is a rather shambolic large group, and Vivaces opens with a muffled wheeze and galumph from twinned (!) accordions and tuba, and a capacious drone made up of massed winds and guitars.

Similar to the sort of thing that the Micro-East Collective and other large ensembles have explored, the music is rooted in timbral swirl and morass.

But it has shape to it, a gathering and dispersion of sound, realized by players who know when not to play and how to coax fascinating details from their instruments. As that implies, the music is not consistently dense. In the middle of “Semis,” for example, a vast space opens up for delicate arco overtones and quizzical clarinet, followed by ace trombone counterlines from Scott Thompson and shifting, furtive low-end tenor from Parker. The ominous, crawling “Bouturage”—where Parker directs the ensemble but does not play—is a marvelous textural study, with the accordions creating a metallic buzz that snakes through brass and strings and rubbed/bowed percussion. The piece gets a bit craggy, with dark dissonant shapes closing in, but there’s again an opening for a fine bass and muted trombone duet and finally a vigorous froth of twittering detail, the whole ensemble spinning and generating sparks. The third and final piece, “Marcottage,” is directed by violinist Raphael Arsenault and it’s the most percussive performance here, sending Parker into a fine tenor excursion. The recording is cloudy, obscuring some detail, but this is fine large ensemble stuff overall, well worth exploring for the entire group and not just their esteemed guest.

Jason Bivins

Tomas Fujiwara and the Hookup The Air is Different 482 Music CD

Pictures of Tomas Fujiwara’s grandparents, elegantly dressed, their countenances warm yet reserved, grace the artwork of The Air Is Different. This is the second recording of the drummer/composer’s Hookup group, which includes guitarist Mary Halvorson, bassist Trevor Dunn, tenor saxophonist Brian Settles, and trumpeter Jonathan Finlayson. The

Air Is Different blends contemporary chamber jazz with fleeting references to traditional jazz and twentieth-century neoclassicism. Thus, it embodies both reflection on the past and the resolve to forge new pathways; Fujiwara’s inclusion of family photos is no mere dedicatory happenstance.

“Lineage” and “For Ours” present tight structures and twining melodies that reference their progenitors in homage, not parody. Finlayson’s plummy tone and Fujiwara’s supple, dynamically nuanced drumming prove particularly distinctive in these pieces. “Double Lake, Defined” features an urgent polymetric groove and shredding solos from Halvorson and Settles, while “Cosmopolitan, Rediscovery” combines free play with a raucous rhythmic underpinning and bracing dissonance.

The CD’s final two selections— “Smoke-Breathing Lights” and “Postcards”—are more extended, allowing the quintet to explore several different roles and textures.

It’s in these variegated landscapes that Fujiwara and the Hookup shine most brightly, responding presciently to the shifts in one another’s playing.

You can hear the familiarity with each other’s moves that’s born of countless gigs on a variety of Brooklyn bandstands. Standing on the shoulders of avant jazz giants, and not afraid to occasionally look over their own for inspiration, Fujiwara and company make exciting music together. Christian Carey

Jean-Luc Guionnet Seijiro Murayama Window Dressing Potlatch CD

Seijiro Murayama Stéphane Rives

Axiom for the Duration Potlatch CD

Percussionist Seijiro Murayama has traveled a diverse musical path, from sonic onslaughts with Keiji Haino and K.K. Null to his recent spare sonic explorations with Michel Doneda and Lionel Marchetti. These two recent duo releases with like-minded reed-players provide a salient view of the areas he is now exploring.

French saxophonist Jean-Luc Guionnet needs little introduction, given his work with Hubbub and Ames Room and collaborations with Toshi Nakamura, Eric La Casa, and Dan Warburton. Window Dressing is a study in micro-controlled gestures and timbres: reed pops, sputtered overtones, and pinched harmonics parry with scraped drum heads, hissing brushes, muted snare sizzle, and surgically precise taps and choked rolls. The two use space and silence, building tension and then breaking things with pregnant pauses. Over the course of a 30-minute piece and three shorter pieces, what could sound stultifying in lesser hands instead develops an enormous sense of purposefulness. The two synch together so closely that the improvisations sound at times almost composed.

Muryama’s duo with Stéphane Rives is more narrowly focused, as Rives’ stream of skirling overtones quavers against the buzzing drone of bowed percussion. Rives is simply

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astonishing in his ability to create uninterrupted torrents of resonance and crashing harmonics, weaving breath into eddies of undulating sound. Muryama’s bowed percussion is completely interwoven into Rives’ playing and it’s often impossible to separate the two. While there are elements of drone here, the listener’s attention is constantly drawn to the glints off of the duo’s surging breakers. Halfway through, when a pure tone emerges from Rives’ horn, the effect is mesmerizing, as it rises, extends into an almost mechanical cycling with Muryama’s cymbal scrapes, and then transforms into piercing tintinnabulations broken by metallic creaks and crashes.

The final section unfolds with long streamers of percussion overtones, shot through with swelling currents of soprano that mount and shudder toward a dazzling resolution.

Michael Rosenstein

Coleman Hawkins

Classic Coleman Hawkins Sessions: 1922-1947 Mosaic CD x 8

Coleman Hawkins was nothing if not prolific throughout his 47 years of recording, so even this marvelous eight-disc retrospective is necessarily selective. However, with the exception of Bean’s 1930s European dates, owned by EMI, every facet of his development is explored, from his very first solos with Mamie Smith’s Jazz Hounds to his work with Nat King Cole and the Metronome All-Stars to his groundbreaking unaccompanied solo “Picasso.” Of course, Bean’s iconic take on 1939 “Body and Soul” is included, but one listen through the set demonstrates that it is the tip of a huge iceberg.

There is no good way to describe Hawkins’ playing in a soundbite. His transformation from the slap-tongue style of the 1920s to the stunning harmonic precision of the 1930s and beyond is all here, but what imbues every solo is a limitless inventiveness.

While set producer Scott Wenzel states that the 1920s material is a springboard for the rest, I found it to be the most revelatory, even though the presentation of these sessions is selective. Even the samples of Hawk’s work with Fletcher Henderson from the period show rapid development, as Hawkins leaps chromatically all over the horn, prefiguring Dolphy in the process. His 1924 solo on “He’s the Hottest Man in Town” is in such a high register as to be misheard as an alto.

Much of the credit for the set’s success must go to liner note writer Loren Schoenberg. It is one thing to present an artist’s history and analyze the music track by track, but it is quite another to have the historical grasp to place Hawkins’ accomplishments in proper context.

Schoenberg is a master of detail and manages to interweave the many star musicians’ stories in his narrative.

He also pulls no punches, expressing frustration with the 1941 Metronome All-Stars date that included such luminaries as Benny Goodman, Charlie Christian and Count Basie but where solo time was at a premium.

My only complaint about the set concerns Andreas Meyer’s

restoration. I prefer the airier (and admittedly noisier) transfers of Doug Pomeroy or Steven Lasker, but this is a minor quibble where such excellent music and documentation is concerned. We are unlikely to see another Hawkins set like this for some time, if ever, so grab it now.

Marc Medwin

Paul Hession Alan Wilkinson Simon H. Fell

Two Falls & A Submission Bo Weavil CD

Alan Wilkinson Practice Bo Weavil CD

Simon H. Fell

Frank & Max (bass solos 2001-2011) Bo Weavil CD

In the late ’80s, bassist Simon Fell launched his label Bruce’s Fingers to capture the music he and a group of like-minded free improvisers were working on in Cambridge, Leeds, and areas around London. At first a cassette-only label, Bruce’s Fingers captured explosive free ensembles, thought-provoking solos, and the early iterations of Fell’s series of compositional forms for ensemble improvisation. This trio of releases on the Bo Weavil label harken back to those early cassette releases, offering a glimpse of what Fell and crew have been up to recently.

Fell’s recordings with alto and baritone player Alan Wilkinson and drummer Paul Hession were probably the first to garner notice in the international press. Here was music that exploded, picking up on the precedents of American and European fire music and hurtling them forward. A recording from 1991 came out on cassette and a handful of others followed over the years.

Two Falls & A Submission captures the group during a 20th anniversary tour, and they burst out of the gate with Wilkinson braying full-bore over Fell’s churning rumbles and Hession’s thundering salvos. While there’s no shortage of bluster and muscle, there’s also a structural sense that begins to reveal itself as Wilkinson blasts forth phrases which get looped, inverted, and shredded over his partners’ momentum. Fell and Hession function as far more than just a rhythm section: one can hear Fell pick up the reed player’s ideas and thread them into his roiling flurry, and Hession responds with crashing cymbals and volatile thwacks. The three improvisations aren’t quite unrelieved in their fury, balancing molten force with passages of open, textural interaction. This set is full evidence of a power trio still on top of their game and this is their bestrecorded document yet, revealing the full range of their sound.

Wilkinson’s solo disc Practice is from two sessions, one marking the closing of a practice space he had used for years and the second from a newly built rehearsal studio he’s used since. His sound is extraordinarily powerful, particularly on bari where he cuts through with blasts, honks, false-fingerings and overblown harmonics. But his measured sense

of phrasing is also in evidence, whether on a 3-minute miniature or a 20-minute extended improvisation.

He moves from sputtering stomps to slowly evolving timbral explorations, throwing in a poignant reading of Ornette’s “Lonely Woman” and a piece titled “You Don’t Know What Love Is” which strips away all vestiges of the standard. The set sprawls, sagging at times under the weight of too many ideas, but the lengthy “Dalston No 1” is proof that Wilkinson has the deliberation and discipline necessary to pull off a solo recital.

The real standout of the batch, though, is Frank & Max, a solo outing by Fell. The bassist last released a solo album in 1991, so this is longoverdue. These eight improvisations, recorded over the course of the last decade, are studies teeming with musical invention. Drawing on a full palette of plucked, bowed, scrubbed, scraped, and beaten strings, Fell creates a set of dedications to bass greats like John Edwards, Barre Phillips, Barry Guy, Harry Miller, and Charles Mingus, along with his wife and instrument maker Jo Fell, his bass technician Patrick Charton, and his first (and only) bass teacher Peter Leah. There is an inspired musicality to how Fell threads his ideas together, and each piece stands as a fully realized statement.

He also performs Bill Evans’ “Turn Out the Stars,” delivering a free interpretation that hums and buzzes with spontaneous lyrical refinement.

Highlights abound, but the nuanced arco on “For John Edwards,” the darkly resonant “For Harry Miller,” and the oscillating timbres of “For Charles Mingus” are all worth mention. The recording quality is stellar throughout, picking up every detail.

Michael Rosenstein

Fred Ho & the Saxophone Liberation Front Snake-Eaters Mutable CD

One needn’t know Fred Ho’s long musical/political/personal public saga to enjoy and appreciate this CD, but it sure does help. Billed as the “debut of Fred Ho’s Saxophone Liberation Front,” its disciplined/ riotous sound suggests that he’s not only still going after a long bout with cancer (detailed on his blog and published as Diary of a Radical Cancer Warrior [Skyhorse Publishing, 2011]), but is still going strong. The spate of recordings released during the most recent stage of that battle certainly support that claim, presenting new work and reviving/reprising earlier work in new contexts. As ever, this music is enlisted against Ho’s foes: the biological disease itself, yes (the liner notes refer to “The New Fred Ho, b. August 5, 2006,” the date of his diagnosis), but even more so the wider range of cultural and political ills involved in that illness and in society at large. Knowing all that helps you hear the life-or-death stakes that inform these tracks.

“Snake Eaters” refers to a military’s elite group of assassins trained specifically to take out (eat) their enemy’s special-op counterparts. “Beyond

Columbus and Capitalism” names that general enemy; it is a suite commissioned in 1992 by ROVA in solidarity with an international campaign to oppose the Columbus quincentennial. The titles of its four tracks critique post-Columbian history for its four horsemen of gold-lust, syphilitic sex-lust, excessive lust for red meat, and the capitalist system enabling them all.

It helps to know the history of Ho’s instrument, for its resonance with his work’s militant aspects. Herr Adolphe Sax’s 1846 invention brought the formerly soft-spoken woodwind family into the martial groups of brass and drums that led to American jazz. Those roots morphed into the mellower sound of the big-band sax section also informing Ho’s work, especially here in pieces such as “Jeet Kune Do: The Way of the Intercepting Fist” (for Bruce Lee; think Lalo Schifrin), two different arrangements of Thelonious Monk’s “Reflections,” and Erroll Garner’s “Misty.”

The most current incarnation of that saxophone tradition, of course, is the one contemporary with Ho’s own post-1960s history. After the ROVA commission, Ho founded his own Brooklyn Saxophone Quartet, with David Bindman, Sam Furnace, and Chris Jonas. All, like this one, are associated with the post-Black Power aesthetic that affirmed the instrument’s individual and collective sound in the 20th century and beyond as preeminently and victoriously African-American.

That said, Ho’s place in that history is more specifically Afro-Asian, itself a movement and aesthetic of this period that he has helped forge and further in his work as musician and author. This CD’s “Yellow Power, Yellow Soul Suite” comprises four tracks that fall into that terrain, based on traditional Japanese, Korean, and Chinese folk and martial songs. Just as blues and jazz deliver an Africaninflected American sound, this part of Ho’s work lays out Asian inflections of the same American vocabulary.

Finally, it helps to be a saxophone aficionado and a student of music theory, because Arthur Song’s liner notes let you in on the details of the players’ gear and the various compositions’ meter, form, and system.

That’s because Fred Ho is a musician’s musician, an American master, and what some Asian cultures might call a Living Treasure. Mike Heffley

Allan Holdsworth Hard Hat Area Moonjune CD

None Too Soon Moonjune CD

Guitarist Allan Holdsworth’s records and live appearances were both scarce for a while, so it’s nice that Moonjune has worked to restore both. Hard Hat Area (1993), the first of two recent reissues from this label, was one of the last of a string of small-band studio records Holdsworth put out regularly starting in the early 80s. Unlike some of the others, this one features no vocals and only a few guitar synth experiments, as well as a consistent lineup driven by longtime Holdsworth drummer Gary Husband. Fusion might be the

best one-word term for the musical style, but this fusion sounds like no one else’s. Holdsworth’s music occupies its own odd niche—post-bop improvising filtered through prog/ metal textures. His gifts (rapid, legato phrasing as well as an ability to steer through the most daunting chord sequences) have been well-known among musicians since his work with Soft Machine and Tony Williams in the 70s, and his composing focuses almost exclusively on finding ways to challenge those abilities. (For reference, imagine an entire Coltrane album in “Giant Steps” mode, minus the ballads and blues.) It takes a while to adapt to this musical terrain, but there’s beauty in the architecture.

With tunes by such undisputed icons as Coltrane, Joe Henderson and Bill Evans, None Too Soon (1996) finds Holdsworth firmly “in the tradition.” Well, sort of—he candidly acknowledges in the liner notes that he hadn’t previously learned most of this material, and that he approached it the same way as his own pieces. That points to both the virtues and limitations of this outing.

Holdsworth shreds as fiercely as ever, and keyboardist Gordon Beck can come close to his speed as well as supplying a relaxed blues feeling rarely heard on a Holdsworth date.

However, there’s a tension between the rapidfire solos and the overly polite swing feel the group brings to the themes, and Holdsworth’s take on “How Deep Is The Ocean” leaves one wanting more warmth and less statistical density. Beck’s two compositions fit Holdsworth’s style as well as providing a slower-moving modal framework than what Holdsworth himself usually writes, and listeners new to his music might appreciate hearing him play over blues and standard changes. However, to get a true sense of Holdsworth’s music it’s best to head to Hard Hat Area.

Pat Buzby

Iskra 1903

Goldsmiths (1972) Emanem CD

The working trio of Derek Bailey, Paul Rutherford, and Barry Guy was only together for about four years, from 1970 to 1974; but by any reckoning, it was one of the seminal working groups in free improvisation. Over the years, Martin Davidson has pulled together what recordings he could, putting out the brilliant 3-CD collection Chapter One and a soundtrack the three recorded for a film.

There were plans for Organ of Corti to release a concert from 1972, but nothing has materialized until now.

The bulk of this recording consists of a performance at Goldsmiths College in front of a small audience.

While the general vocabularies and approach to trio interaction had been clearly established, it’s nonetheless constantly surprising, spontaneous music, forged from Bailey’s brittle coruscations and fractured clusters, Rutherford’s vociferous brays, smears, hisses, and flurries, and Guy’s dark resonances, percussive plucks, bent harmonics, and cracked textures. The use of amplification is also key, as Guy and Bailey zero in on particular overtones

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and frequencies, at times toying with feedback. The rescued tapes of the two long improvisations have been fastidiously mastered, and the sound and spatial placement of the musicians come through with remarkable clarity; the CD is filled out with two excerpts from another performance from the same period.

Michael Rosenstein

Eli Keszler Catching Net Pan CD x 2

Catching Net represents the inverse of the GIGO (Garbage In, Garbage Out) principle. Keszler’s influences, which are diverse and unimpeachable, include Duke Ellington, Iannis Xenakis, and Richard Serra. If you wonder how the hell geniuses of tone and personality, mathematics and electronics, and scale and material go together, rest assured, so has he; this stuff is the outcome of plenty of processing. “Cold Pin,” which appears in five different versions across this double CD, is immense in sound and scale, precise in intent, yet open to transformation by the involvement of the right musicians.

Not just anyone would know how to inhabit a piece that, on its own, involves piano wires strung across a dome and played by motorized beaters. The space is the instrument, and the sound it makes is huge, raw, and complex. No problem.

One solution, of course, is to let the installation operate alone, which is a great way to revise your understanding of just what constitutes a musical instrument. There is also an exactly scored version for installation, string quartet, and piano, which feels even more gigantic. The piano is like a sonar blip, mostly there to establish the immensity and contours of the environment, and the string tones pour down the insides of the installation’s sonorities like a Ligeti piece that melts and runs after it has been turned into a candle. The versions realized with improvisers, two of which have already appeared on a now sold-out LP, are more mobile; the restlessness of, amongst others, Geoff Mullen’s truculent guitar and Greg Kelley’s microtonal trumpet blares accentuates the restlessness of Keszler’s automated percussive attack. The sixth piece is another installation recording. Like the name says, “Collecting Basin” documents another piece that involves piano wire strung from a water tower, with two basins used as amplifiers. Each sound is at once utterly artless—a big, blunt groan—and marvelously complex, as it echoes and mutates.

Nothing, Keszler seems to be saying, is as simple as it seems.

Bill Meyer

Thomas Köner Novaya Zemlya Touch CD

Where do you file the music of Thomas Köner? Under minimalist or electronic, or techno (Köner is also one-half of the noteworthy techno duo Porter Ricks), drone, ambient, minimal techno, and then there’s the handy, ever-abstract appellation of “sound artist.” Any and all fit the sound-world(s) of Mr. Köner and he’d 50 | SIGNAL to NOISE #64 WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM

likely have words to append this list.

Aside from being the title of his latest opus, Novaya Zemlya is an archipelago in the Arctic Ocean, ’round Russia way. Köner is a painter with sound, and his discs are canvases conveying harsh, remorseless, wintry environs sonically—if you’ve ever seen nature documentaries on TV of the Arctic and/or the Antarctic, you know what I’m referring to.

These places are forbidding yet possessed of a desolate, eerie splendor, and Köner vividly distills that imagery with sound. It’s not always an easy listen—there’s little in the way of melody or rhythm in any conventional sense. But—and this is a John Cage-ian concept, I know— environments produce sounds and the “rhythms” are there if we listen closely enough. As rainfall has its own cadence(s), so does ice cracking and giving way to temperature changes, geological shifts, whatever.

At first, Novaya Zemlya seems very austere and with good reason (it is), but by the time “Part 3” (it’s a threepart “suite”) rolls around, distantsounding yet distinctly gentle motifs waft through, vaguely evoking Brian Eno’s Discreet Music.

Novaya Zemlya is relatively short (35 & 1/2 minutes) and is recommended for lovers of the seemingly chilliest ambiance—“seemingly,” because (way) beneath the indifferent permafrost beats the munificent heart of Mother Gaia.

Mark Keresman

Andrew Liles

The Flesh Creeping Gonzoid Dirter CD x 6

“I’m just an ordinary woman, built the same as other women…” It’s one of those disembodied, heavily manipulated voices anyone familiar with Andrew Liles’ skewed musical vision might expect, and she continues, “but I love to masturbate my penis.”

Only then does it really sink in that she’s being ghosted about a fourth down by a voice that is decidedly masculine, throwing into question just whose sexuality is on display, and who exactly owns the member in question. Of course, both voices come from the same woman. As the voice provides the excruciating details, it inhabits both masculine and feminine worlds, sometimes simultaneously, sometimes not. Liles’ world can be strange, but it’s also deep, and nowhere better is it all nicely summed up than in this sixdisc compilation.

“An Ordinary Extraordinary Woman,” from volume two of the set, is the tip of the proverbial iceberg. This is billed as a set of compilation appearances, outtakes and unreleased tracks, but, as with most other Liles multi-disc releases, it’s more like a series of programs where whimsy, rather than any chronological dogma or urge to catalogue, determines the order of events. Listen as the milesdeep drone and layered surrealism of “Wolf Teeth” leads into the snarly aggression, doggy-style, of “Leader of the Pack,” both on volume four.

However, by the time “The Relentlessly Banal Landscape” is reached, we’ve achieved a sort of modal calm; it might be a chamber-music piece,

with delicate piano, weeping violin or viola and hints of percussion.

The longer-form pieces work along similarly bemusing lines, though they thrive on a wild kind of recurrence. “The Last Few Minutes of a Lonely Life,” whose nearly 25 minutes grace the third volume, presents a few clicks and ratchets before engulfing the listener with the mother of all drones. It seems to generate its own rhythms as it builds with glacial slowness out of deep silence, until eight minutes later, Liles slaps the unsuspecting square in the face with a sudden bang and a return to the opening mechanical clicks. As with the last volume in his Vortex Vault series, Liles creates long journeys out of elastic moments strung together in unexpected ways, often negating chronological time in the process.

As is somehow fitting, the set ends with one of the briefest tracks, a quick build to nearly speakerdestroying loudness before the thing cuts off, disappearing into the void that spawned it. As with NWW, with whom Liles is often identified, there is no simple categorization for this music, and that’s what makes it so interesting, funny, sometimes touching and always refreshing.

Marc Medwin

Dieter Moebius & Asmus Tietchens Moebius + Tietchens bureau-b CD / LP / DL

Dieter Moebius and Asmus Tietchens are two of the almost-literal fathers of Krautrock, electronica,

New Age, and ambient. Moebius was a member of Kluster (later Cluster) and Harmonia and collaborated with Conny Plank and Brian Eno; Tietchens is “affiliated” more with the German avant-garde and musique concrète spheres. These two got together and it’s a riddle inside a puzzle inside a conundrum… and that’s meant in the best possible sense. The resulting disc is a collection of 13 bite-sized tracks, ranging from two to ten minutes in length.

Much of Moebius +Tietchens is truly creepy, a soundtrack looking for a film (David Lynch directing something based on Samuel Beckett’s Fizzles). “Plan” is snaps and crackles with the semi-regular pulse of what sounds like a tabla in the distance, intermingling with moans (human? animal?), creaks, and cries. “Mach Auf!” has a soothing harmonious motif (could almost be Stereolab or Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark) over which some chilling industrial clangor (the monster in the cistern?) is heard. “Kattrepel” is a rhythm-driven monologue, its metallic scrapings taking on a violin-like tone towards its conclusion. “Thorax” and “Yes, Yes” recall the spare, sharp-edged minimal fragments of Autechre and (while not particularly “glitch-y”) early Oval. “Grimm” lives up to its title, evoking abrasive, pre-groove-thang Cabaret Voltaire. (Fyi: I’m not dissing CV… honest.) A few pieces are more “chill” and pretty, as with “Herrlichkeit” and the wintry-wistful, ethereal “Fontenay,” but a sense of hazy dread is never far off. Moebius + Tietchens may confound its “target” audience—it lacks the sleek “pulse”

and nonfigurative warmth of Cluster and it’s (marginally) more “accessible” than what the avant/noise posse is used to… and I suspect that the pair would be delighted by this happenstance. Mark Keresman

Simon Nabatov

Spinning Songs of Herbie Nichols Leo CD

Pianist and composer Herbie Nichols is the textbook example of the neglected jazz master who, during his lifetime, was met with indifference by the jazz press and public. This despite a brace of Blue Note 10”s where he presented his own compositions that combined an advanced harmonic language similar to Monk’s and a sense of melody and rhythmic ingenuity that was all his own. He was active mainly in the 1950s and died in 1963 with a mere three albums to his credit. But toward the end of his life he was attracting a number of young protégés (Roswell Rudd, Steve Lacy, Archie Shepp) who have since propagated his music through recordings and interviews.

He was also heard by the Dutch avant-gardists and as early as 1965, Misha Mengelberg had composed a tribute, “Remembering Herbie.”

The Herbie Nichols revival began in earnest in the early 80s when Mosaic issued his complete Blue Note recordings as their initial release. Since then there have been a number of recordings of his compositions.

Pianist Simon Nabatov was born

in Russia (light years away from Nichols’ San Juan Hill neighborhood) and conservatory-trained.

But obviously Nichols’ music had an impact on him. He emigrated to the U.S. in 1979 and has since established himself as an in-demand pianist, having worked with Steve Lacy, Ray Anderson, and Perry Robinson, as well as leading his own groups. Nabatov performs the difficult feat of injecting his own musical personality into a distinctive body of work without compromising either.

He achieves this by adding lengthy improvisational prologues to each piece before arriving at the song proper. These are fantasias that go off in a number of directions, wandering far afield with dense expressionistic harmonies, virtuosic keyboard sweeps, crashing dissonances, etc. His conservatory training is obvious. But when he turns to the song itself, Nabatov pays his respect to Nichols the master pianist and composer by sticking closely to his original conception, emphasizing the puckish harmonies and innate rhythms of the song itself. It’s a nice way to pay tribute and a nice alternate way to hear Nichols’ music as well as becoming familiar with Nabatov. Robert Iannapollo

Stephen O’Malley & Steve Noble St. Francis Duo Bo Weavil CD

Some of the most exciting music in recent years has come from the downtempo gallows of experimental metal, and no one has champi-

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oned that cause more than guitarist/ producer Stephen O’Malley. He’s not the only game in town (track down the band Like Drone Razors Through Flesh Sphere for some really deep reverberations), but as a member of Sunn O))) and a proprietor of Southern Lord records, he has done much to build the audience for new doom, stoner and black metal. As with past eras of jazz and classical musics, what has made the New Wave of Experimental Heavy Metal so exciting is the extension of a codified musical language into a largely improvised form. The next move—as with Matthew Shipp and the Anti-Pop Consortium or Christian Wolff and AMM or Charlie Parker’s meeting with Igor Stravinsky—is generally the genre-traipsing crossover.

The meeting of O’Malley and drummer Steve Noble could be said to be as much, except that the two play so naturally together that such backstory is irrelevant. Noble, of course, represents the London Musicians’ Collective wing of the post-genre improvisation movement, having worked extensively with such luminaries as Derek Bailey, Lol Coxhill and John Edwards. But he also played with the post-punk avant groove band Rip, Rig and Panic, and studied under Nigerian master Elkan Ogunde, which mean he also wouldn’t be out of place if this were funk or African music, which it’s not. Nor is he out of place with O’Malley. They two play together in the NWEHM band Æthnor, so they’re no strangers. As is perhaps to be expected, this is atempo metal, like deep-sea diving tuned down to a low D. This is heavy electricity at only a handful of bpm, recorded over two nights at London’s Café Oto. Such slow-paced, high volume overdrive is addictive to those who love it, and as evidenced in KTL—his duo with Peter Rehberg on laptop—O’Malley can carry the load with only a rhythm track. What makes St. Francis Duo stand out is the subtleties Noble brings to the stage. He doesn’t play lightly, or “jazzy,” but he’s not wedded to heavy metal thunder either. The interplay (and there’s a lot of it) brings out something different in O’Malley’s playing over the four long tracks. It’s as if there’s a little more activity on the surface of the dark pond. It may not be a standout release in the realms of experimental metal, but it’s an appealing one.

Kurt Gottschalk

Daphne Oram

The Oram Tapes Volume One Young Americans CD x 2

It’s possible to get hung up on a couple salient points of Daphne Oram’s biography. She was an early maker of electronic music, but so sidelined by general English fustiness that she and her colleagues weren’t allowed to call what they did music; mustn’t piss off the orchestras or the musician’s union, you know. The BBC Radiophonic Workshop nonetheless made some of the first electronic music and 52 | SIGNAL to NOISE #64 WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM

sound design to impact public consciousness, in particular via the sci-fi serial Dr. Who. But Oram didn’t stop there. She developed the first graphic interface for electronic music, a system called Oramics that enabled people to compose by drawing rather than writing out notes. Her work ranged from commercial—there are tracks here that were destined for banking and headache remedy advertisements— to purely experimental, and from perkily engaging to pitilessly abrasive. This swanky double CD set follows up an earlier set called Oramics, and it gets farther into Oram’s uneasy work with non-notatable sound. She blurred the roles of composer and player, working with the raw stuff of electricity, magnetic tape, and vibrating surfaces as much as organizing principles like melody and rhythm. The music goes from whimsical to anxiety-provoking, but it’s always fascinating. Bill Meyer

Penny Royale This Town

Sleepy Hollow CS

Diablo Twins

Sleepy Hollow CS

Twins 2

Sleepy Hollow CS

OPPONENTS Broken Divine Sleepy Hollow CS

Husere Grav Separation Sleepy Hollow CS

Flesh Coffin Chop Chop Sleepy Hollow CS

Rust Worship

Comfort in Prospects Sleepy Hollow CS

F.E. Denning

Descent Into Darkness Sleepy Hollow CS

Like snowflakes, no two noises are alike. Everyone for whom extreme sound is a calling finds a singular path to self-expression. Given the tape’s crud-crusted lineage, one might reasonably expect the Sleepy Hollow Editions cassette series— curated by NYC underground maven Bob Bellarue—to be a raging bacchanal, a fiesta of incessant, gratuitous battery. Sometimes it is, but more often than not the entries are surprising in refreshing ways.

The most elastic and propulsive of this grinding cache, Penny Royale’s This Town lodges in the gums like a jagged piece of glass.

There’s a visceral, almost eternal unease to this music; whether you’re turning in for the first time or the five-hundredth, this tape is capable of evoking goose bumps.

Kyle Kessler’s wildin’-out paddle-ball electronics and broken assemblyline crunches fall somewhere between psych-ward mania and total mechanical collapse. Each side herky-jerks the listener from a different angle: “La-Bar-Tu” (Side A) suggests a drastic, flame-broiling re-interpretation of the Looney Tunes theme, while the strung-with-

a-bicycle-chain “A.R.C.O.S.T.I.C.K.” (Side B) figuratively immortalizes efforts to turn over a car engine someone has filled with gravel and popcorn kernels. This is brawny, hiss-drenched anti-pop—wrapping one’s head around it is tough going, but that’s maybe a third of the point.

At least we know who’s behind Penny Royale. Diablo is an unknown quantity of mysterious provenance and shattered fidelity. Twins and Twins 2 purport to be this entity’s— well, how else to quantify whatever created this?—unofficial mission statements, and I’m not exaggerating too greatly when I use the phrase “the rapid and unceremonial crumpling of unwanted handbills” as a lazy, shorthand descriptor for the vibe here. There’s more happening here, of course. Twins condenses its geysers of sputtering grit into 10 efficient minutes: all the desperate scrapes and violent vacillations, bruised purples and blue shadows caused by a machinist’s tools, exclamations scrabbling into upper tonal registers, winding of cranks, and grumble of unoiled gears you could ever want. Meanwhile, Twins 2 pushes the 30-minute mark with competing, hyperventilating static segues and rattling ripcord rumbles and barber trimmer-esque buzzes and impossibly high, hissing drones capable of producing—at moments—an intensely narcotic effect. If I’ve gotta pick a side, though, put me on Team Twins.

NYC’s OPPONENTS go in for snuffling, soldiers-marchingthrough-fields-of-feedback synthesizers—pin-prickly on Side

B, more horizontally distributed on Side A—that put me in mind of the Knight Rider theme song, albeit turned inside out. Norway’s Flesh Coffin conjures a distorted, chaotic conflagration on the first side of Chop Chop, then turns to steel-onsteel sword clashes buried under heaps of noise for Side B. Husere Grav—allegedly from Texas—enthusiastically simulates the physical act of straining on the curiously suffocating Separation: enter a queasy, nightmarish world where the emphasis seems to shift from naked squeals to ripping, grinding industrialism to sustained crackling drone.

Horns and reverberated-to-Hell vocals float in and out of the mix.

There’s a thrumming, sinister blackmetal cast to Separation that lends the recording a certain foreboding integrity, with an unsettled washingmachine lilt governing everything like an unseen despot. Brooklyn’s Rust Worship offer the sort of drone that suggests an endless spool of fishing line fed out, reel by reel, to sadomasochistic lake trout on Comfort in Prospects: there’s definitely a melody at play, but it’s got serious heart palpitations.

Meanwhile, F.E. Denning’s Descent Into Darkness is a swirling baroque morass of gloomy pianos, symphonic samples, and operatic arias swathed in echoes and noise and finger-on-the-pause-button delirium: there’s a delicious, familiarly unfamiliar uncertainty to all of it, like a full-body bruise that aches slightly but somehow prevents you from pulling yourself to an upright position because whatever you’re

listening to is undoubtedly waiting to eat you in the foyer.

Raymond Cummings

Michael Pisaro Toshiya Tsunoda Crosshatches Erstwhile CD x 2

It’s not too hard to describe this piece of music, but devilishly hard to get at how it gets to you. Crosshatches is a collaboration between the California-based composer/ guitarist Michael Pisaro and Toshiya Tsunoda, a Japanese sound artist whose field recordings draw attention to the act of hearing. It was realized over the course of fourteen months of email exchanges that were translated by artist Yuko Zama, who also contributed the package art and design. It’s safe to say that every aspect of this album is carefully considered.

While the field recordings don’t sound filtered, they’ve been subjected to other processes; looping, for sure, and layering, so that distant conversation, close-up birdsong, and what might be surf all coexist with tolling sounds—guitar? electronics?—and sine tones.

Pisaro’s hand is easily identified in the deployment of those tones. As in certain of his other pieces, they refocus the piece at key moments; whenever they’re introduced, they demand attention, and even if nothing else changes, when they leave the music sounds different. But beyond that, the music’s provenance and methodology are elusive.

Pisaro has been known to use field

recordings in his own compositions, so we can’t be sure that there’s a tidy breakdown of one man playing instruments and another providing environmental sounds. I don’t suppose we can even know for sure that Tsunoda didn’t contribute electronics. The album’s pack, the artists’ websites, and the label’s website are mute on these matters.

One must thus fall back upon one’s own senses to make sense of this music. Since it’s 85 minutes long and comprises almost completely non-melodic, non-metric material, Crosshatches’ shape is quite hard to grasp. It’s tempting to treat it like ambient music, but there are changes extreme enough to bring it out of the background. Individual sounds vary in their degrees of vividness and assertiveness, so that sometimes you can be lulled, but only to have your attention commanded by a sharp rap or a stiff breeze or a surging jet roar. And the more you let your senses be close to these sounds, the harder they are to read.

Due to either layering or essential ambiguity, they simultaneously reward and frustrate close listening.

The reward is the music’s essential richness; it just sounds good, man!

But it frustrates efforts to know it, leaving you with more questions the more you listen. Who did what?

What are these sounds? Why have the two men placed those elements together? Perhaps this is the point; the more you try to get to know something, the more you discover that you don’t know the things you really thought you knew. To engage with Crosshatches is to surrender

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AquaSonic AquaSonic AquaSonic AquaSonic AquaSonic AquaSonic

the need to know and embrace the desire to be. Bill Meyer

Jon Porras Black Mesa

Thrill Jockey CD / LP / DL

Evan Caminiti Night Dust Immune LP / DL

Dreamless Sleep Thrill Jockey CD / LP / DL

As Barn Owl, Jon Porras and Evan Caminiti have fashioned a body of mainly instrumental music inspired by both the imaginary soundtrack work of Roy Montgomery and actual soundtracks by Neil Young and Popol Vuh. On their own, each man has tended to adhere less to form than they do when they work together; Porras’s music has been frankly ambient, lovely and soft around the sides, while Caminiti has sought out the harder edges of guitar-based music. On these three records they seem to be swapping positions and mapping the spaces in between.

With its stark twang over a funeral beat that rises to a screaming crescendo, “Into Midnight,” the opening track on Black Mesa, might as well be a Barn Owl track. It might also represent the town that this record must leave in order to get where it’s going. Other sounds drift in and out, but the predominance of reverberant guitar makes the record feel like a spirit quest carried out at night during the week with no moon, dark, spooky, and alone. It’s starker than a Barn Owl session, but that’s ok; you don’t want extra baggage when you’re crossing the desert anyway.

Caminiti, on the other hand, has largely abandoned the smoking amplifier vibe of his earlier solo records in favor of a sound obtained by layering and processing. Both albums were recorded to cassette four-track, and they exploit what might be a problem in other hands— the inevitable loss of sonic definition when you bounce recordings from one track to another in order to make room for more overdubs—to achieve a softer-focused sound that is not at all squashed. Some deft EQ-ing has wiped away the tape hiss and made it seem as though the music’s layers don’t quite touch.

Night Dust comes first, both in terms of when it was recorded and in the sequence of atmospheres that it evokes. Like Black Mesa, it starts at night, and also with a bit of Barn Owl’s trademark twang in evidence.

But like the title says, it never leaves the dark. On “Returning Spirits,” wan synths and low amp thumps reverberate like the sounds of debris dropped into a deep canyon; on “Last Blue Moment,” muffled power chords seethe like storm clouds barely perceived in the nocturnal sky.

But for Caminiti, the dark is a place of comfort and transformation; rough sounds give way to plush ones, and pillowy synths neutralize the guitars’ sting. The record fades out with a wash of tube crackle like a distant glimpsed campfire. Dreamless Sleep takes off from Night Dust’s most upholstered passages. On some tracks, guitars snake through 54 | SIGNAL to NOISE #64 WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM

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looming banks of synthesizer and wordless voices; elsewhere, delaysoaked licks traverse throbbing bass surfaces with ginger steps. Each piece lingers longer, swapping Night Dust’s succinct expression for patient contemplation. Caminiti isn’t searching anymore. He’s waiting, watching, and remembering, the way one might in the hour before daybreak.

Bill Meyer

Mike Reed’s People, Places & Things Clean on the Corner 482 Music CD / DL

With the first three records by People, Places & Things, Chicagobased drummer Mike Reed explored his curiosity about the dialogue between past and present from several angles. One record asked what today’s musician can learn from an artistic movement, in this case hard bop, that walked the same streets a half century before; the next brought surviving representatives of that scene into the circle. The third record used guest appearances to expose PPT’s connections with its own milieu, and this one? It draws on aspects of its predecessors—the engagement with the legacies of 50s hard bop, the AACM, and a community of sympathetic players—to express something more ephemeral and highly personal. The titles Reed has given to his compositions suggest endings, mishaps, and the succor of companionship, and they span a musical spectrum characterized by discontinuities—the jump from bop to the avant-garde, the splits between Chicago, tempo-free consideration of small sounds and heart-on-sleeve balladry—with fluid ease. Reed is, as usual, not a showy instrumentalist; his drumming sets the stage for the horns of alto saxophonist Greg Ward, tenor saxophonist Tim Haldeman, and guest cornetist Josh Berman, who reach beyond Reed’s well-crafted melodies to get at sentiments of longing, uncertainty, and wry humor. If Reed has turned a corner here, it’s to shift from music about the three components of this combo’s unwieldy name to music about his place in things. I’m already curious to hear where he’ll go next.

Bill Meyer

Six Organs of Admittance Ascent

Drag City CD / LP / DL

Rangda

Formerly Extinct Drag City CD / LP / DL

Last year Six Organs of Admittance released Asleep on the Floodplain, an all-acoustic affair that defined one boundary of the territory that Ben Chasney has marked out for himself.

Previous records have employed more kosmische or improvisational elements, but it should be said that they’re rarely all in one vein, and so it is with this one. Chasney reunited with his old mates in Comets On Fire to make it, so you know the potential existed for wigged-out heaviosity. There are definitely some hard-rocking moments here, some amps turned up loud enough to

move the breeze, some fiery trips up the fretboard, and some drumming that lumbers like a grizzly bear who doesn’t much care who knows that he’s coming. But they’re balanced by imploring acoustic ballads sung with an emotive voice that suffuses the music with a sense of spiritual estrangement. Chasney may be ready to rock, but this is not a onenote effort, and in that respect it’s very much in keeping with what he’s done before.

Rangda is the collective trio of Chasney, Sir Richard Bishop, and Chris Corsano. We won’t call it a super-group because, while they’ve all earned renown for earlier activities and they’re all superb musicians, they’re not sipping cocktails with Steve Winwood and Eric Clapton, ok? The musicianship is very much the focus on Formerly Extinct, which is their second outing. As with the recent Six Organs record, wildness is threatened, but most of the time it stays on a leash; only the closing “Night Porter” blazes with the abandon I’ve seen Rangda whip up in concert. This record’s material sounds a bit more worked-out than the first effort’s “we showed up and we played” open-endedness.

Corsano seems to be tapping into his inner Bill Bruford here, shadowing intricate twin-guitar leads with fleet parallel snare cracks and splashing cymbal cannonballs over the heavier-riffing sections. Indeed, this record sounds like the answer to a record-geek fantasy—“Man, what if King Crimson c. 1974 fired that bass player and started playing Sun City Girls instrumentals?” Mind you, that doesn’t make space for the slippery C&W of “Goodbye Mr. Gentry,” nor acknowledge the floating quality of their 11-minute wind down the “Silver Nile”; these guys know things about getting and sustaining a relaxed vibe that Crimson never knew, and the music is much better for it. Bill Meyer

Swans

We Rose From Your Bed With the Sun in Our Head Young God CDx2

Thirty years after Swans initially scared the hell out audiences with a combination of proto-doom and industrial bleakness, devoid of melody but long on terror and humorlessness, and some 15 years after leader and only constant member Michael Gira pulled the plug on its existence, they drop this, a double CD of live intensity not to be equaled, even in their own back catalog. The sextet here, with long time guitarist Norman Westburg back in the fold, is the same one that recorded 2010’s My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky, their first album of new material in 14 years, and this LP is a collection of performances from the tour to support that release.

Several tracks from that album, plus a couple from the about to be released double disc The Seer find their way into this collection, as do earlier tracks from Children of God and Cop. But history, or Gira’s ability to surf through an enormous back catalog, would mean nothing if this weren’t a contender for the mostintense-album-of-the-year category.

The first thirty minutes, a droning, squawling intro that finally slams into a series of orchestrated, endlessly hammering riffs before becoming “No Words/No Thoughts,” from My Father, is as cathartically rewarding as it is claustrophobic. The same goes for the “The Seer/I Crawled.”

Here, the band kicks off with a basic 4/4 beat before layering percussion, whining lap steel and pulverizing intensity for the next 10 minutes.

Half way through the 30-minute track, they calm down; Gira blows harmonica, and they then venture into a tune from 1984’s Young God EP. While guitar slurries, harmolodic ambiance and space have replaced “I Crawled’s” initial bass-n-drums thud, the ferociousness remains, especially in the song’s climatic final moments.

Elsewhere, the band revels in a type of relentless repetition they’ve long ago made their own. “Beautiful Child,” with Gira’s hoarse croak making the proceedings even more threatening, is as punishing as anything they’ve ever done. “Eden Prison,” rides and builds over a single pulse, with multi-instrumentalist Thor Harris’ vibes acting as a portending voice as much as a cushion for the coming onslaught; Gira howls “I’m Free,” before plunging the band into a single repeated chord that, after several minutes, begins to unfold, as Christoph Hahn’s lap steel skitters and Phil Puleo’s drums shift rhythms.

However, this is not the work of a band going through a midlife crisis/ reunion; Swans, free of the shackles that earned them a redoubtable rep based on their earliest years- even though the bulk of their initial 15 year run found them dealing with dance grooves, acoustic work, ambience and found sound- are as invigorated as ever, and this live collection is the work of a band still finding avenues in a soundscape as bleak as it is joyful. It also shows use of the textures Swans employed in the 90s, most successfully on 1996’s essential Soundtracks for the Blind.

They not only continue to be a force with which to reckon, they continue to challenge themselves, and as a result, an entire pack of younger turks with their eyes (and ears) on sonic assaults with near-religious payoffs. The gods have spoken; all we have to do is bear witness. Bruce Miller

led his own groups as well as contributing to many, many side-projects and collaborations. A complete sessionography for Taylor would read like a who’s who of modern Ghanaian music. Appia Kwa Bridge is Taylor’s latest release, and it is a beautiful document of this full career.

The title track describes a landmark bridge which serves as a lover’s lane in Taylor’s hometown of Saltpond, Ghana, on the Atlantic near Cape Coast. Taylor performs solo on two tracks for acoustic guitar and voice in the palm-wine style—a brisk, spirited rendering of the highlife classic “Yaa Amponsah,” and “Barrima,” a haunting and exquisite memorial to his recently deceased wife. Afrobeat legend Tony Allen plays drumset on three tracks, highlife keyboardist Kwame Yeboah contributes on a number of songs, and Eric Owusu adds percussion and vocals on most tracks. Throughout the recording both the ensemble work and Taylor’s vocals are forceful yet relaxed, and utterly solid. Strut Records has produced a five-minute online video to accompany the opening track “Ayesama,” which is based on an Akan war song from olden times. Showing scenes of daily life in Saltpond—street vendors hawking their wares, children playing soccer in a dirt lot, fishermen hauling in their nets on the beach, women having their hair done, the local buildings and countryside draped in the thick tropical air, and everywhere people moving and dancing—the video collage supplies a visual context for Taylor’s life and creativity, explaining in pictures where the earthiness and vitality of his music come from. It is always gratifying to see an important regional musician finally gain the broader international recognition which he or she has earned many times over, and Appia Kwa Bridge should accomplish exactly this for the formidable Ebo Taylor. Alan Waters

Tetras

Pareidolia

Flingco LP x 2 / DL

Jason Kahn

On Metal Shore Editions LP

recording metal pipes, ladders, water tanks, and siding, then playing the sounds through various other metal objects in his studio. He then layered this material with environmental sounds using a computer. The effect is somewhat like a collage of sloweddown recordings of Harry Bertoia sculptures with commentary by the crickets and birds who were disturbed while they were being played. This music is well matched to the vinyl medium; the product of physical processes, it gets a final frisson from the palpability of playback. Fetishizing aside, its two side-long pieces are rich and often gorgeous expositions of unbound sound.

Tetras, on the other hand, represents Kahn’s return after many years to something sort of like jazz and/ or rock music. Kahn plays a drum kit for the first time since, I think, the first Repeat CD; double bassist Christian Weber and sound engineer Jeroen Visser on organ and synth round out the trio. The album’s four tracks are collectively improvised, but they don’t generally sound like “improvised music.” Kahn’s near-metronomic drumming generates the same sort of looming presence as his more recent work playing a synthesizer through a snare drum; you sense his sound waves radiating away from some centered place, smacking walls and ceilings, establishing the shape of the space like pitched-down, monstrously magnified bat cries. Visser adds to the impression of group sound as a hovering presence by favoring long tones and slowly morphing chords, leaving it to Weber to imply forward motion with plucked lines and questing arco forays. It’s as though selected slivers of electric Miles Davis—a few seconds of In a Silent Way, the organ interludes on Agharta—were blown up to the size of clouds, given life, then unleashed into unstable weather.

Although each side seems to be a separate performance, the two LPs build like a single piece. After an hour of slow build, the music bursts like a raincloud on the final side, with Visser’s synths breaking out of the collective boom to blast and rumble like thunder and lightning caroming down a long canyon.

Bill Meyer

The methodologies behind these Rafael Toral two albums differ drastically, but Davu Seru they’re united in presentation, sound, Live in Minneapolis and personnel.

Both were made Ebo Taylor Clean Feed CD by percussion/electronics player Appia Kwa Bridge Portuguese experimental musician Jason Kahn, an American living in Strut CD Rafael Toral has spent the last halfSwitzerland. Readers of a certain age Ghanaian guitar master Ebo Taylor, decade pursuing a focused aesthetic might have first encountered him in now in his sixth decade of performendeavor that he calls the Space California-based SST bands Universal ing and recording, has achieved Program. It’s music born of refusal.

Congress Of and Trotsky Icepick, a perfect blending of the highlife Toral is a former master sculptor but since the late 90s he’s worked and Afrobeat styles. No other West of guitar drones who retired at the mainly in Europe with the likes of African musician has so consistently top of his game. When he stopped, Toshimaru Nakamura, Günter Müller, sought that meeting point where he not only gave up the safety net Christian Wolfarth, and Asher. Kahn the urgency and musical militancy of of continuous sound, he rejected also ran the late and much-missed Afrobeat merges with the jauntier, certain common shortcuts and Cut label until 2009; On Metal Shore lilting highlife pulse. Taylor is a guitar shortfalls of contemporary electronic is the first release of his new imprint player’s guitar player—fluid, underimprovisation: no loops, no samples, Editions, which will be devoted solely stated, ensemble-oriented, always and no sitting behind a screen. Put to his own work. Cut released CDs, inventive, never show-boating. You simply, he uses self-devised and but both of these are vinyl releases, can hear strands of jazz, soul and highly customized electronic devices and on each Kahn made the covers calypso seamlessly woven together that must be played, not triggered, himself. It would appear that being in his playing, along with Afro-funk, to improvise against a backdrop of able to leave the marks of his touch rumba, highlife and his native palmunforgiving, all-revealing silence. on the things he makes is one way wine stylings. Taylor first picked up a If you have followed Toral, you he is fighting the disembodiment of guitar as a young man in the 1950s, already know all that, and you also contemporary digital culture. and throughout a full career he has know that every album he’s made Kahn made On Metal Shore alone, WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #64 | 55

since 2006 has been part of a planned, comprehensive program that will demonstrate how his instruments and ideas work on their own and in exchanges with other musicians. Live in Minneapolis is the first record he’s made since the project began to not have the word “space” in its title; he wasn’t planning on this one. Even so, its music would fit right in on Space Elements, the three-volume series of records that catalog Toral’s Space-time encounters with other musicians. But if he had included it in that series, we’d only have gotten a small excerpt, and apparently Toral thought enough of this encounter with Twin Cities percussionist Davu Seru to issue the whole thing. I can see why. Seru, who has also worked with Milo Fine, Paul Metzger, and George Cartwright, has a vocabulary that comes out of a free jazz lineage—there are moments when his playing reminds me of Milford Graves, Rashied Ali, and Whit Dickey. But he has great instincts for when to push, when to be silent, and how this music should be shaped. This enables Toral to function like a horn player, drawing that proverbial line and following it, without betraying the voltage-based essence of his instruments. A mere excerpt wouldn’t convey the way this performance builds, mutates, and flares into incandescence; they were right to release the whole thing. Bill Meyer

Various Artists

Saigon Rock and Soul: Vietnamese Classic Tracks 1968-1974 Sublime Frequencies CD

This is a collection of obscure recordings pried from the crevices of history, a group of songs performed by Vietnamese bands in the last years of the war, when traditional Vietnamese ballads, long intertwined with French chanson, further assumed the sounds and content of American pop music.

The result is a strange mélange of Southeast Asian melodies and a host of divergent Western influences, including lightweight pop tunes, surf rock drumbeats, Stax-Volt horn sections and aciddrenched guitar distortion. The music, though, is hardly quaint or merely novel. Vestiges of a culture that was destroyed in the fall of Saigon, this music expresses a kind of desperate necessity, a need for new forms. Rhythms, moods and tonalities collide in an expressive emergency, as if someone is trying to sing a traditional Vietnamese song of frustrated love to the accompaniment of Mike Bloomfield and the Tijuana Brass.

“Magical Night,” sung by Phuong Tam, is an example of the kind of surprise to be heard here— the vocal presentation has all the majesty of a folk song hewn in time as if it were stone, the sentiment “If we can be together for one night, then we can love forever” part of a universal wisdom born of war. But in its realization here, it’s surrounded by the sounds of late-sixties psychedelia and soul, from the

fuzz-tone guitar to the Hammond organ and the King Curtis-inspired tenor saxophone. The ultimate musical construction is a collision of cultures that sets the song in a circumstance of absolute urgency and visceral energy, as the trappings of American pop culture become literally the sounds of conflict. That energy is common here. You catch another dimension of it in “Black Sun”—“Life is like a homeless dog at night”—in which Minh Xuan’s impassioned vocal is driven by Hendrix-inspired guitar.

The material here was compiled and notated by Mark Gergis, who presents both a brilliant collection of material (the band Con Ba’ Cu [The CBC Group] and Elvis Phuong are among the stand-outs) and a fascinating portrait of the Saigon rock scene—earnest, exploratory and already ephemeral in the moment of creation. This isn’t music for specialists; it speaks intensely of the human experience amidst globalized conflict. Stuart Broomer

Various Artists

Air Texture Volume II Air Texture CD

Its CD version already out of print, last year's first volume of the Air Texture series was nothing less than a revelation. Curated by bvdub (Brock Van Wey) and Andrew Thomas, the double album compilation was an incredible show of strength for recent ambient music, offering a mixture of known entities in the field (Atlas Sound, Oneohtrix Point Never, Wolfgang Voigt aka Gas) and various up-and-comers in a varied, surprising and intriguing mix that would chart new paths for the music. Canadian artist loscil (Scott Morgan) and producer/composer/ gadfly Rafael Anton Irisarri are the curators for two more CD's worth of known artists and newcomers, though more of the later this time.

In as spare a medium as ambient music, judgments are even more subjective than usual, but there's the sense that the selections by the two well-seasoned compilers don't quite involve the listener in the mood and atmosphere the way that Van Wey and Thomas did before.

Too often, the music here stays stubbornly in the background without inviting the listener into its sonic world, which means that you might miss hearing most of it unless you're giving it your total concentration.

Exceptions include sweet, yearning Eno-like sounds from Marcus Fisher and Simon Scott, sleepy Harold Budd-like piano in a wind tunnel selections from Eluvium and Irisarri, space transmissions from Chris Herbert, spooky alien landscapes from Marcus Fjellstrom and pleasing, distant storm sounds from Rob Bridgett. But you'll also sit through static interference from Pan American and sub-sub-sonics of Strategy and the otherwise engaging Solo Andata and too-steady drones from P. Jorgensen, Sawako, Benoit Pioulard, Kyle Bobby Dunn, Lawrence English and Morgan himself which bleed into each other so much that you might be forgiven for not being able to distinguish between them.

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Still, there's enough promise in this second volume that the next and final volume of the series (curated

by DJ Olive) should still hold some promise at least. Jason Gross

Marco von Orelli 6

Close Ties on Hidden Lines hatOLOGY CD

Swiss trumpeter and composer Marco von Orelli is equally at home in both traditional and “out” settings.

Close Ties on Hidden Lanes is a snapshot of a band versatile enough to encompass both ends of the jazz spectrum—as well as a healthy dose of Messiaen, Ives and Scelsi. The recording consists of eight originals by von Orelli, fleshed out with arranging help from pianist/synth player Michel Wintsch, who isn’t averse to adding electronic rocket fire periodically to the proceedings.

These two are joined by trombonist Lukas Briggen, bass clarinetist Lukas Roos, bassist Kaspar von Grünigen, and drummer Samuel Dühsler.

Make no mistake, however, even when they move towards posttonal terrain, they maintain a strong sense of rhythm. On “Urban Ways,” wah-wah trumpets and drawn-out pitch bends are undergirded by a post-bop groove. The rhythm section eventually coalesces in a series of pounding dissonant verticals that recall Stravinsky. Even in the freeplay environment of “Poetry,” in which talking muted brass overtake the rhythm section for an extended period, there is still a sense of forward drive in the solos. When drums, bass, and keys forcefully reenter, one doesn’t feel that gears shift, but that the underlying groove has been maintained during their absence.

A particularly fetching tune which shows off all of the players is “Narragonia,” the album’s 15-minute centerpiece. It embraces lyrical neonoir trumpet and trombone duets, chorale-like passages, and impressively controlled upper register interjections from Roos. A bracing middle section filled with coruscating piano and terse responses from the winds gives way to a howling cadenza from Roos. Wintsch, von Orelli, and Briggen follow suit, each soloing in equally questing fashion.

After an explosive tutti, we shift into a mysterious soundscape filled with filigree repetitions, whole-tone piano riffs, and low-register glissandi. Another cadenza, this time from trombone, is accompanied by synth, prepared piano, and alternately shimmering and terse percussion textures. Gradually, von Orelli and Roos reassert themselves, and the opening chorale, deconstructed and elaborately ornamented, brings us full circle. Close Ties on Hidden Lanes brings together notation and improvisation, freedom and structure, chamber music and jazz in a vibrant amalgamation. Christian Carey

David S. Ware

Planetary Unknown Live at Jazzfestival Saalfeden 2011 Aum Fidelity CD

On a formal level, you know David

S. Ware is not going to surprise you. The saxophonist has known for several decades precisely what he wants to do, musically speaking, and the changes wrought in recent years—adding extra horns, affiliating with players outside his usual circle—are about further realizing a vision first articulated in the age of rotary phones. And there’s nothing wrong with that at all, so long as you aren’t seduced by the need for constant novelty. But the question still stands, when you’ve been working this long: what is the point of each new record? If, in this case, you have a shelf of records by the David S. Ware Quartet already, will you need this one?

That depends upon what you need. If you just need an example of what he does in this setting, you might already be set. But if you want to hear a master taking to his medium one more time—like Monet and those haystacks—this record has a lot to give to you. It’s a damned fine performance by a combo that recreates the tenorpiano-bass-drums format of Ware’s finest accomplishments, but with some different players who take the music in somewhat different directions. Certainly Cooper-Moore is no Matthew Shipp, but he’s never been a better Cooper-Moore than he is here. He appears less concerned than Shipp with the creative influence of structure, and also seems less beholden to the notion that you need to destroy in order to create, which underlay much of Shipp’s work in the Quartet. His sense of accompaniment seems to be more

focused on enhancing the emotional vibe of Ware’s playing, so that their music flows together like twin streams converging: the encounter is turbulent, but that tumult results in an invigorating oneness. Parker, the returning Quartet vet, mostly holds to bass-as-fulcrum mode, anchoring and channeling the action with unbreakable lines and bowed cries.

The opportunity to play with veteran drummer Muhammad Ali is one of the reasons that Ware convened this band to begin with, and he justifies that impulse by switching with admirable flexibility between energy-vector and explicit swing modes. Ali’s best moment comes in a thrilling passage halfway through “Processional 2,” where the music turns combative and the different players in turn see what they can bring to the match. Ware seems more engaged with what this drummer is doing than he tended to be in the Quartet’s later days, and his response to rhythmic information further invigorates his playing.

There’s that word again: as Ware struggles to outdistance the travails imposed by declining health, each concert and record takes on an additional sense of importance. He honors that here with a performance that operates at a very high technical level—man, that circular breathing passage in “Processional 1”! But the challenging playing isn’t the end. It serves the purpose of manifesting a spiritual-musical state, which these players do very well. If you’re up for that, so are they.

Bill Meyer

Katharina Weber Barry Guy Balts Nill

Games and Improvisations: Hommage à György Kurtág Intakt CD

Paul Plimley Barry Guy Lucas Niggli Hexentrio Intakt CD

Contrabass wizard Barry Guy has long enjoyed the support of the Swiss Intakt label, and here we find him in the middle of two very different piano trios. Weber and Nill are new names to me, and they deliver a focused, intense impressionism across 20 miniatures (a sustained homage to the octogenarian JewishHungarian contemporary composer György Kurtág). It’s a music that lives in its subtlest inflections, its tastiest details, each rendered luminescent in this spare setting. After an exquisitely delicate opening fragment (the set alternates between little pieces, all from Kurtág, and group improvisations), the three together gather up threads to create a brief flurry of tension and density. I’m a total sucker for this idiom, and the classically trained Weber strikes a lovely balance between the very different pianistic approaches of John Tilbury and Paul Bley. Guy is adept at coaxing out of the merest inkling a fully formed compositional shape that doesn’t lose an ounce of spontaneity or urgency, and Nill is if anything almost too restrained (though terrific).

The middle sections of the record get more spindly, spiky, and woody but despite this comparative excess of information the pieces are still defined more by their undercurrent of tension: the brief tease of playful bounce, or tentative hand percussion set against crushed glass chords.

But it’s those spare, impressionistic pieces I favor the most, sounding almost as if they’re defined by the process of winding down, cooling off, then wafting away.

The trio with the marvelous Paul Plimley and percussionist Lucas Niggli is more garrulous and muscular but no less restrained and focused. It’s simply a more expressive language. This has less to do with the other disc’s engagement with Kurtág than with Plimley’s incredibly active, complex harmonic language—with which Guy is quite familiar. But the music is rarely florid, and certainly never merely so. There are limpid moments from the start, like “Flo Vi Ru” where Guy’s crisp pizz and slurred double-stops suggest a Miroslav Vitous schooled on Kowald. The trio is in gorgeously lyrical form on “Arcdesedo,” with Niggli playing only his cymbals, so delicate and apt. Things get a bit more punchy on “Totius Quotius” and “Iron Works,” both with pounding low end and lines snaking off in multiple directions. The vocal piece “Come and Go” doesn’t work as well to these ears, but I admit to bias in this area. But it’s over quickly, making way for “Mutualita,” rough and scratchy against a lyrical backdrop, and the gorgeously mournful “Passport (expired).” Jason Bivins

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IN ‘N’ OUT

John Chacona examines modern-day manifestations of bop and beyond.

Omer Avital: Basketload of killer melodies

The most dangerous words a jazz fan can utter North African and European concert music, and might be, “I can remember when . . . “ (this goes maqam, the Middle Eastern system of scales. double for those of us who write about the muThe music is ravishingly beautiful and songful, sic). Yet, there are enough wonders to witness, but the fire and commitment of Avital’s band enough good players and interesting ideas out keep things from sagging into mere prettithere to make the case that this is a new golden ness. Trumpeter Avishai Cohen and versatile, age of sorts. Who would want to turn the clock inventive tenorist Joel Frahm really get after back? Well, maybe a few venturesome musicians Cohen’s meaty lines and Omer Klein’s piano and and labels, that’s who, and not for the obvious drummer Daniel Freedman are constant forward reasons (namely, money, sales and, obviously, motion. In a way, Suite from the East is a modmoney). ern updating of a Horace Silver session: tuneful, Case in point: Ryan Truesdell’s Centennial swinging and explosively joyous.

Newly Discovered Works of Gil Evans, looks at The notion of the “next big breakthrough” more than a half-century of the arranger's music. must be creeping up on retirement age, too.

The CD has a terrific backstory: Truesdell, with People have been saying that jazz has no new the help of the Evans family, discovered some 50 territory to claim, maybe since Coltrane’s death.

Evans compositions and arrangements that had The intervening 45 years have proven that nonever been recorded (and many of which had tion false, of course, but really, where are the never been played). Eleven of them made it to unconquered lands? The Western 12-tone scale this CD and they are a banquet, from the early is one, and though artists like Ornette Coleman arrangements for Claude Thornhill, all of which have been pecking away at its primacy for a contain the DNA of Evans’ mature style, to the long time, Post-Chromodal Out! (Pi Recordings) vocal charts (nicely handled by Wendy Gilles, by tenor saxophonist Hafez Modirzadeh, feels Kate McGarry and Luciana Souza) and culminatlike a major assault on the old fortress. Even ing in the fervid, roiling “Waltz/Variation on the ears accustomed to non-idiomatic music may Misery/So Long” from Evans’ wild and wooly have a tough time adjusting to his experiments electric period. Two things make this work: the (and especially Vijay Iyer’s microtonal piano, heavyweight soloists (Steve Wilson, Donny Mcboldly played). But even while Iyer, Modirzadeh Caslin and Frank Kimbrough among them) hew and trumpeter Amir ElSaffar are getting crazy close to the spirit of the era for which the charts on top, the superb rhythm team of Ken Filiano were written, and sacrifice little originality in the on bass and royal hartigan on drums (the latprocess. The other factor is the sound, which ter a ridiculously underexposed player) keep allows every line of these intricate charts to be things swinging underneath. It’s a gambit a bit heard. If for years you’ve been asking How did reminiscent of Eric Dolphy’s early 60s Prestige he do it? your answer is here. Now, about those recordings. Or could Modirzadeh, another other 39 charts . . .

Californian with an ear for unusual intervals, have Now to another perennial question: who’s had Jackie McLean's Destination Out! in mind? writing killer melodies anymore? One answer It’s an ambitious notion, but then this is a greatly is bassist Omer Avital, whose Suite from the ambitious CD. East (Anzic Records) has a basketload of them.

A different kind of pan-tonality is on display on Written when Avital was studying in Israel, these Tomorrow Sunny/The Revelry,Spp (Pi Recordseven compositions reflect his immersion in ings), the latest chapter in the long-running saga 58 | SIGNAL to NOISE #64 WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM

of Henry Threadgill’s Zooid. By adding Christopher Hoffman’s cello, the band is back to its original, string-dominant configuration. And the music feels like a consolidation, with Threadgill’s motile harmonic sense, love of marching bands and dirges and tart soloing all center-stage. It’s piquant, instantly recognizable stuff; no one else writes music remotely like this. It’s also enormously complex, shot through with Threadgill’s highly personal approach to structure and line.

Yet the players, in addition to the leader and Hoffman, guitarist Liberty Ellman, Jose Davila on trombone and tuba, Stomu Takeishi on acoustic bass guitar, and drummer Elliot Humberto Kavee on drums, make it sound as easy as blowing on “Rhythm” changes.

The influence of another Chicago alto player, Steve Coleman, is all over Figurations (Sunnyside) by guitarist Miles Okazaki. According to Okazaki’s schema, it’s the last of a three-part series documenting the way improvising musicians approach their music. Mostly what it is, though, is fervent, burning music that incorporates Coleman’s jittery rhythmic logic and snaky, seismographic lines, and played with highly caffeinated virtuosity by Okazaki’s crack band: altoist Miguel Zenón, Thomas Morgan on bass and percussionist Dan Weiss. Zenón is a particular marvel, adding a pulsating heat to Okazaki’s complex and mathematical lines.

Where Figurations is dense, Russ Lossing’s Drum Music: Music of Paul Motian (Sunnyside), a solo piano session, can startle with the directness of its utterance. As a player, Motian abjured unnecessary notes or gestures, and his compositions have a similar plainspoken eloquence and spooky matter-of-factness. Yet at the bottom, they are profoundly moving documents, often imbued with a deep melancholy. Not surprisingly, they are also highly rhythmic, though in Motian’s obstinately unconventional manner.

Motian peppered his compositions with potent little rhythmic and intervallic cells, Monkish springboards for the pianist’s rich, exploratory improvisations. Lossing, who played with the late drummer for more than a decade, conceived this project as an 80th birthday tribute. Sadly, circumstances made it a memorial, and perhaps a landmark in a growing body of recordings of Motian’s compositions.

Reunion: Live in New York (Pi Recordings), the posthumous release of a historic 2007 concert by Sam Rivers, David Holland and Barry Altschul, is another memorial intended as a birthday tribute, in this case, for Rivers’ 89th. It’s a cliché to say that this is instead a celebration, but that would the only cliché one could associate with this project. For a half-century, Rivers worked tirelessly to wring the commonplace, the uninspired and the banal from his playing. At 84, his vitality on tenor and soprano saxophones, flute and especially on piano is a miracle of strength and invention. Despite an interval of a quarter century, the interplay between the three players is undiminished, and so is their fearlessness. The music, two sets on two CDs of continuous, on-the-spot improvisation, is Rivers’ method in a nutshell: explore, reveal, refine. It’s also the great big beating heart of the music, and it’s happening right here, right now. ✹

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THE WEIGHT OF THE WORLD Jason Bivins digs metal, doom and heavy music in all its permutations.

Brutal Truth

Locrian’s The Clearing and the Final Epoch (Relapse, here reissuing the formerly vinyl-only release from 2011) opens with a cavernous, scraping sound that envelops melancholy acoustic guitar. The music feels spacious and melancholy, like Loss or Seidr, with a more sonically adventurous streak (the percussionist in particular sounds as if he’s listened to Eddie Prevost quite a bit). With piano fading in and out, and regular pileups of sound and tapes and buried moaning lyrics, you have to admit that this Chicago trio is the kind of group this column was built to showcase. With “Augury in an Evaporating Tower” they shift to smoldering, smothering black metal noise which, aside from the cavernous mix, sounds (briefly) fairly perfunctory. But before long, Locrian becomes an Ummagumma cover band: “Coprolite” is all crackling noise and manipulated tapes, and the 17-minute “The Clearing” is like early Floyd crossed with Gnaw Their Tongues in a psychedelic horror movie soundtrack (specifically, an Italian zombie film from the 1970s, given those analogue keyboards). Electronics swaddle “The Final Epoch,” garlanded by beautiful ebow guitar layered in alongside muffled shrieks. The high-pitched, eai-ish “On a Calcified Shore” confirms that these guys are experimentalists who play dark music more than they are any conventional kind of metal. This record is a must for anyone who reads this column regularly.

Mithras (Relapse) is the latest from Chapel Hill black/noise/drone merchants Horseback, and this time around Jenks Miller’s troupe sounds even more pared down and pointed, not like a weapon but at some kind of awakening. Resounding arpeggios, low scuzzy rumble, and Rhodes provide the context for mewlings

and incantations that suggest (with titles like “Arjuna” and “Hermetic Gifts”) Horseback is staring down the esoteric. While I enjoy their growing flirtation with genuine melodicism on “Ahriman,” it’s hard not to feel most compelled by the buzzing, bright drone of “Inheritance (The Changeling),” the incisive trip to the dentist that is “Spiritual Junk,” and the heady swirl of the closing part of the “Hallucigenia” suite: “The Emerald Tablet.”

Pervertor (Candlelight), the sophomore album from Chicago’s Lord Mantis, is if anything even more misanthropic than its predecessor. Featuring members of Windy City combos Indian and Nachtmystium, it’s got that default feel of abjection, a fierce riff vocabulary, and a black metal via psychedelia range of textures and settings all delivered with whipcrack rhythms, downtuned guitars, and unsettling shrieked vocals. The opening “Perverter” ratchets up a real claustrophobic intensity, after which the rumbling “Septichrist” finds a sound halfway between Jesus Lizard and Nachtmystium, a feel that defines the majority of this record (and if that’s not a recommendation, I don’t know what is).

Some particular highlights are the downtuned, computer-voice “Levia,” packed with metallic whip sounds and Mastodonian crater drops, and “At the Mouth,” with a truly unnerving use of vocals as a percussion instrument.

Revisitations of the 1970s have become pretty ubiquitous in heavy music over the last decade (though the outsider curmudgeon would say metal remains time-locked in that shaggy decade), from the stoner-psych world of Tee Pee records to the lysergic properties detectable hither and yon in the world of the heavy. One development has seen a rise in

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four-on-the-floor groups that pair 70s hard rock grooves with some of the imagery of demonological metal and throaty fem vox. Try as I might, though, I’ve not warmed entirely to either The Devil’s Blood (too much Fleetwood Mac) or Christian Mistress (though their recent platter on Relapse was a major step forward and will please tons of listeners). Taking these basic ingredients in an entirely different, and altogether refreshing, direction is Royal Thunder’s CVI (Relapse). I wasn’t completely knocked out by their sludgy, satisfying EP last year, but their first full-length is a major step forward and one of WOTW’s favorite summer records. Mlny Parsonz has an absolutely superb voice, clear and with a considerable range. Alongside her supple bass playing, she plays it straight and just sings. With well-wrought songs like the hooky “Parsonz Curse,” the band indulges in no excess or mindless riffery; it’s all in service of compositional development, something achieved in impressive fashion here. Killer stuff from first to last. Go see them while they’re out on tour and wait along with me for the follow-up.

Loincloth is a devastatingly tight and aggressive combo mostly from Richmond (but with some strong Raleigh ties). On Iron Balls of Steel (Southern Lord), the Cloth embraces the over-the-top signifying of metal but articulates it not in the way that sweaty power metallers do but almost like a downtuned, riff-obsessed Don Caballero having congress with Dysrhythmia. These are short, bludgeoning songs with killer guitar tones, coiling phrases and endless breakdowns. They’re tight; like, Meshuggahtight. And the tunes demand that. But the music is, lest you’re worrying at this point, neither arch nor self-indulgently off-putting. It all has the feel of a beatdown, but by really smart dudes from whom you didn’t expect it (and hey, one tune is actually called “The Poundry”). Occasionally they reveal the capacity for speed (“Theme”) but Loincloth’s songs are – regardless of tempo – always about those spaces, gaps, fractures, and drop-offs, a palpable tension running through the whole record like a whip. And to top it off, there’s a gorgeous descent into ice blue on “Clostfroth” (with ace electronic contributions from Tomas Phillips).

Playing a very much more expressive kind of prog-metal is Zebulon Pike, an instrumental Minneapolis quartet (featuring members of Happy Apple and other “jazz” groups), whose Space is the Corpse of Time (Unfortunate Music) is pretty uncontainable in its energies and ambitions. “Spectrum Threshold” gets things started with a crazy “Negative Creep” via Knut monstrosity and I’m hooked. Each track is stuffed to the gills with great changeups, hesitations, sudden clean filigree, and an endless supply of riffs. At times I’m also tempted to compare them to a much heavier Mars Volta (sans vocals of course) but they have elements of Kayo Dot, Dysrhythmia, and similar voyagers.

But what they also have is a knack for creating really interesting moments or details – like an unexpected wall of cymbals over wafting arpeggios – that don’t seem arbitrary or indulgent, just part of a terrific overall sense of form and

possibility. “Echoic Worlds” is a vibrant study in detuning/retuning that over time, almost grudgingly, indulges in heaviness of the highest order.

Things are ominous and spacious on “Powers of the Living – Manifestations of the Dead,” while the title track seems initially to be the most conventionally grooving (until, that is, ZP slowly layers in what sounds like a detuned autoharp).

One of the finest releases of the year so far (well, technically late 2011, but it’s taken me a while to digest this one) by a band that should be far better known.

Australia’s doom combo Inverloch is just beginning its recording career with the three-song EP Dusk . . . Subside (Relapse). But half of this quartet did time in the legendary diSEMBOWELMENT, the doom/death band that disbanded nearly 20 years ago, but not before influencing almost every stalwart doom act out there. With a feel for dynamics and development, Inverloch combines something of the plodding ritual feel of OM with sudden flareups of blast-beats and guttural flailing. But for all the sludge and trudge, there’s a fleetness and near gracefulness to the double-time sections of “Within Frozen Beauty.” As compelling as those moments can be, though, it’s hard not to be most engaged by the slower, reverb-drenched voyages into the depths (most of “The Menin Road”). The ambient sections stitching together the three songs don’t seem perfunctory, since the compositions do seem to flow into each other and it’s a glimpse into where the band might be going next. For now, the EP is quite a good start for this band, and anyone vaguely interested in Evoken, Loss, or Mournful Congregation should proceed posthaste.

Mares of Thrace is a Saskatchewan duo who, on The Pilgrimage (Sonic Unyon), specialize in a hybrid of dirty AmRep noise, crust punk, and doom. With screeching, intense vocals, and a lot of power for just a duo, there’s a nasty, gritty edge to tunes like “The Gallwasp” that gives this music a sense of menace rather than mere muscle-flexing. There are riffs aplenty, but it’s the jagged and antsy feel of all that serrated metal and feedback that works best. Fine noise tracks like “Triple B” stitch together the three acts of the “Bathsheba” suite where they combine something of the mournfulness of recent Earth with the more primal elements of their sound (and supplement this with a healthy use of organ and electronics throughout), especially on “The Three-Legged Courtesan.”

Chicago’s Pelican have dropped the brief EP Ataraxia/Taraxis (Southern Lord), which turns out to be their last with co-founder, guitarist Laurent Lebec. It follows on the strengths of What We All Come to Need, and opens with a big yawing drone that recalls Pink Floyd’s “One of These Days” crossed with an acoustic guitar figure from Kid A. When it shifts into “Lathe Biosas,” there’s a spacy minimalism that combines with the last record’s lyricism and the band’s trademark overlapping rhythms to prove one of the best and most concise things they’ve done in their career to date. They weave melancholy arpeggios through shifting dynamics of heaviness on “Parasite Colony,” and close things out with what almost sounds like a harmonium to anchor the hand-on-snare patter and acoustics of “Taraxis.” Pelican seems to be hitting their peak well into their career, and I’ll be eager to hear where they go next.

Longtime readers know that I have a serious jones for funeral doom, likely because of all those early Cure and Sisters of Mercy records I bought in the early 1980s, their echo lingering still in my consciousness (speaking of which, a quick shout-out to Ides of Gemini; their recent release has the feel of early Celtic Frost crossed with Siouxsie and Neurosis). So it’s hard not to love bands like Thergothon, Paradise Lost, My Dying Bride, and others who pursue either the wine-drunk candelabra vision or the seriously despondent. Leaning emphatically towards the latter is Germany’s Ahab, who have finally

delivered their long awaited third record, The Giant (Napalm). It’s a further refinement of the formula they’ve been exploring for years: a nautical obsession in thematic materials, a watery echo-drenched sound that shifts between lonesome clean guitars and vocals, and a cavernous heaviness. While some fans blanch to hear some of the more mawkish, maudlin lyrical moments (“Further South”), it’s hard to deny those more frequent passages when heaviness and harmonic progression combine for serious hull-shaking impact (“Aeons Elapse” and especially the crushing “Antarctica the Polymorphess”). They also compel with their use of sweet arpeggiating and repetition throughout, as on “Deliverance.”

And on The Giant they’ve expanded their sonic range just a bit, with an almost reflective sound on “Fathoms Deep Blue” and elsewhere full-on majesty on the title track, with Alice in Chainslike harmonies and power doom.

Aldebaran’s Embracing the Lightless Depths (Profound Lore) isn’t as conventionally heavy as Ahab’s CD, nor as riff-chocked. But its dynamic range, harmonic texture, and sheer despondency pitch them somewhere between Agalloch and Corrupted, with hints of Skyrim soundtrack grandeur. After “Occultation of Hali’s Gates,” the 25-minute “Forever in the Dream of Death” proceeds patiently, incrementally through minor variations and returns that recall the methodology of both Sleep’s Dopesmoker (recently reissued on Southern Lord, along with High on Fire’s debut platter, both wholly essential) and the Necks. The second and third “Occultation” tracks are chiming, arpeggiating palate cleansers of a sort, laced through the two epic tracks that make up the bulk of the record, like the punishing “Sentinel of a Sunless Abyss.”

Fantastic.

Sutcliffe Jugend is the solo outlet for Kevin Tomkins (voice, autoharp, violin, guitar, piano, organ, tapes), and on Blue Rabbit (Crucial Blast) he crafts an atmosphere that’s consistent with the experimentalism of Crucial Blast’s recent strong run of releases. Its opening glitchy atmosphere is populated by distant sawed metal, cavernous drips, and muttered vocals like Attila with Sunn 0))). Poetry recitations are the thing here, and it’s often quite strong and compelling, as on “Seedless.” What’s more, his tape and instrumental manipulations are often quite subtle, focusing on the grit and scrape of the instruments in a way that often recalls Vanessa Rossetto’s work in an ostensibly different idiom.

Check out “Feeding the Mouth That Bites You” in particular here. But while I dug the feel overall, and there were some admirable changeups like the lambent organ on “The Good Child,” I think 35 or 40 minutes’ worth of creepy confessionalism would probably have been sufficient.

Finally, we come to T.O.M.B.’s UAG (Crucial Blast). It’s positively a blast furnace from the start, a noisy metallic 11-part assault that might best be described as a cracked industrial tone poem of the sort Kevin Drumm might have come up with if he wasn’t just paying tribute to black metal but was actually a horror soundtrack, Blaze in the Northern Sky kind of noise junkie.

Which he is, of course, but you get my point.

T.O.M.B.’s music is emphatic but far more subtle than you might expect if you see it in this column (although almost everything ever reviewed in this column would likely befuddle most associations with “metal,” which are generally about as useful as associating “jazz” with martini parties and Beat poetry, but I digress). Some of the percussive clangs amid thunderclouds on “Mausoleum Witchcraft” remind me of Z’ev and in fact much of the music is in this vein, with various percussive devices deployed amidst a generally sonorous metallic space, with a feel that’s both ritualistic and cinematic. Things get quite sick and noisy on “Blood Vortex,” with a Fennesz-y drone and copter blades. And there are some unsettling guitars and crying voices on the deep, muffled “EMPLEH.” Overall, it’s singular, aggressive, and a bit perverse. ✹

the new

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“record of the year so far? Easily.”

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SMOKING THAT ROCK Grant Purdum gets down with messed-up modern rock.

Marielle V. Jakobsons

If someone were to ask me, “What really kicked Broadcast and they were still allowed into the ass in 2012?" I'd probably play Guardian Alien indie-rock club. And so it goes: A battle to the (Swill Children) and pump up the volume like a death between two groups you'll be tempted to pair of old Reeboks. This record has it all. Guardlump in with the witch-housers, but I'd resist that ian Alien leave just a sliver of space on each LP urge if I were you. This is a complicated subject, side and use the expanse wisely, nudging the rife with post-modern flair and ambition. †‡† listener from sensation to sensation. Barracuda bring an intense mix of blustery beats and layer jamming, like Ganglians with their wig split and upon layer of metronome trickery, topped off by conscience corroded, ensues, and rage-drums a whisper-thin voice that floats high above like a and soprano vocals join the six strings and sudJapanese dragon kite. Fostercare couldn't be a denly Acid Mothers Temple, Sylvester Anfang II, better match, though this solo project of Marc JaComets On Fire and Psychic Paramount—with son is tethered to its vocals and tends to change double-bass in tow—arrive. Scary, with whiffs of up its approach more often, up to and including a little of everything coming through the misty downpitched villain-vocals. It's a super-strange orange fog, no psych-rock left unturned. Not an mix that at times gets downright nasty, surging easy album to put down, even after 4 a.m. Olivebeats polluting splendorous dreamscapes. green wax in a paper bag = magic.

I’ve only reviewed one other compilation in Singing with the unbridled preciousness of this column, so when it does happen you know to Stephen Steinbrink, of French Quarter, is such a look out for it. Robot Elephant Vs. Tundra Dubs risky proposition in these post-emo/-etc. times. is an inspired back-and-forth that hits upon the That's why Desert Wasn't Welcome (Offtempo) best traits of each imprint. Tundra Dubs, home is such a pleasant surprise: Steinbrink sings as if to bands like GuMMy†Be▲R! (lord), offer their he isn’t aware of the pitfalls of such an approach best entry in the form of Funerals' “Water Over at all, and that's exactly what brings the record Night,” a mix of post-Tricky mumbles, Niobe across. That, and some gorgeous instances of fem-croons and a textbook bubble-wrapped Pac Northwest-style instrumental breakdowns witch house beat. Mascara's “Sonnambula” that evoke Duster and long, between-shows is a high-order ear treat as well, shining like roadtrips. I’ve seen a review or two that mention platinum and weirdin’ out with heavily processed Death Cab For Cutie, but that doesn't seem vocals. Robot Elephant's picks represent a fair. Early Modest Mouse instrumentals fronted pseudo-dancefloor trip as well, from the drive by the singers from fellow Northwesterners of Husband’s computer-disk sequences to the Parenthetical Girls and now-defunct Yarn Owl? straight-up head-knocking of keytard Church Of That's the ticket! Easily the best “pure” indie-rock Synth that almost sounds like black-metal played record in this edition of Smokin’. Check out FQ’s on Casios when it ramps up its tempo. Ourobonic nice LP from a few years back on Life's Blood/ Plague might have all the others sacked, with Gilgongo, too. lazer kicks, vocals straight out of a gangster-rap †‡† Vs. Fostercare (Robot Elephant) isn't exskit and a groaning maw of a sample leading the actly “smokin’” or “rockin’,” but hey, neither were charge. If Expressway Yo-Yo Dieting pulled back 62 | SIGNAL to NOISE #64 WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM

a little (OK, pulled back a lot) they might sound a little like “The Outer Alphabet.” Far out, men.

Exterminating Angel (Dark Entries) is everything you want an '80s reissue to be: Timeless, relevant and ... fuckin' weird. Synth-based Dark Day provide an intriguing mix of Edward Ka-Spel vocals (when there are vocals), synth burbles, minimalist drumming and an extremely active guitarist underpinning what would normally be straight-up synthpop numbers with a dose of rock. This is straightup perplexity, on par with Spanish underground/ exp. compilations on Munster and Fred Frith’s seedier pursuits. Could this really have come out in 1980? Exterminating Angel makes you feel small when you hear it; how could this have existed all these years in (relative) anonymity? And what other surprises do the '80s have rolled up their sleeve?

It would be nice if millions could hear records like this; seeing as that will never happen, you hearing it is the next best thing, so make it happen.

Sic may or may not have been influenced by Devo, but that's what I hear, first and foremost, albeit a female-fronted varietal. Thought Noises (Dark Entries) is full of propulsive tunes, guided by iron-fist synths, polka-dot drum machines and a bass guitar that jumps all over the compositions, one of the least shy four-string performances you'll hear from this era. The base elements function well together, particularly when they take peculiar chances that would seem ridiculous to risk if you had any aspirations whatsoever. Which, I guess, is why Thought Noises is solid and Sowing the Seeds of Love seems to exist purely to shit on the entire decade’s accomplishments.

Another nice find.

It's like I always say: If you're going to plod, it's got to be worth the listener's while. Marielle V. Jakobsons’ Glass Canyon (Students of Decay) is a case in point: It’s a gradual build, and it never ceases to justify the patience it requires. Side A is a can't-miss progression of sonic whirls spiraling through the sky as subtle sound sketches and blobs of throbbing bass inhabit the remaining space. This is like two drone compositions fighting each other, one of them Stars Of The Lid-like and the other a Born To Kill tape side. A victory for the genre and easily among the best experimental sides of 2012. The flip takes longer to get going, but its surges midway through are powerful and engrossing, as are the menacing hordes of drone-noise that eternally cloud “Shale Hollows.” A distinguished debut release from this member of Date Palms and Myrmyr; do find time to climb Jakobsons’ ladder.

Moonbell, in paying tribute to the shoegaze/ dreampop gods, go in a direction similar to that of contemporaries Pink Playground, but without venturing as far into the abyss of perfumed MBV sludge. Their new self-titled LP (Loglady), which also came out CD-wise on Deep Space Recordings, makes the same case you’ve heard hundreds of other bands make if you’ve been around for awhile (remember Astral?), though I’d argue they do a better job of it than most.

We get the predictable male-female vocalssplit, and, also predictably, I prefer the dreamier numbers helmed by Stacia Benevento; she’s like a smoother Alison Shaw, blessed with a seductive presence that will hold up in the presence of just about any reasonable rock fan you’ll find. While

it's disappointing she didn’t take on more of a workload, what’s-his-name does just fine, and the instrumentals answer to no one; they're solid.

Scythian Lamb (self-released)? That’s ... quite a title. Are Erode And Disappear up to the task here? Yes, apparently they are. Kind of a bitchin’ little record, replete with a lot of macho At The Drive-In vocal taunts, drums that have tickets to the gun show and a reasonably tight pick job on the geet’. The songs never really live up to the disorienting first few minutes of the first side, but it's not for lack of trying. These guys rally around their songs like true team players, filling up the high and low end with enough buzz to break the bank. I remember my buddies in Seattle’s Bullet Club doing something similar to this years ago. Definitely a head-says-no, heartsays-HELL-YESSS experience for me, as many of my instincts are hardened against such obvious rock gallantry. But that’s what makes it magical: It’s so hard to find good, hard rock of this variety I’d almost given up hope. Rally the troops for this one.

I’m not sure how Damian Valles milks the sounds of Nonparallel in Four Movements (Students of Decay) from classic 1960s and '70s Nonesuch computer-music LPs, and frankly, I don’t want to know. The result is solid enough that I trust the method, end of story. I suppose the “drone” tag would be slapped on this by most, which is unfortunate, as the contents of Nonparallel seem to me to be more like compositions/movements than improv one-offs recorded at art installations (not that there's anything wrong with that). It's like a canyon mouth yawning up at the night sky, an absolute immense audio wall that cloaks the ear like a soft desert wind. Lead Sister ii, Stephan Mathieu, Kranky; that's Side A, and the flip is even better: richer, warmer, softer and infinitely more powerful. You put this up against just about any drone tape and it's not even fair. Mesmerizing.

The Ketamines go all-out, at the very least, on Spaced Out (Mammoth Cave). A bit of ‘50s rock ‘n‘ roll, a jigger of blue-rock, some psych, some garage—tight delivery justifies every last impulse they follow, as they aspire to greater heights than many of the Ty Segall/Oh Sees ilk. Think small-time circa Box Elders and Hell Shovel, and big-picture circa Velvet Davenport and BJM, but more riffy, more linear, yet more dripped in synth/effects, too. It'd be nice, in fact, if the riffs of Spaced Out were allowed to air out even more, as they constantly seem to be sacrificed by the tight song cycles (perhaps in time this will prove to be a plus—keep us wanting more). Doesn't really matter, if/when you step up and take a hard strap to the mic the way these chaps do.

Fresh Sip wouldn’t seem to be an ideal fit for the Feeding Tube label, at first. But as this 2XLP unravels, the sort of eccentricities you expect from this crowd begin to pop up. That, and Chris Weisman proves a prodigious penner of ye olde insanely catchy melody. Good luck excising cuts like “Hardcore Experimentation” from your every thought once it has dug its claws into you.

It's a practice in futility. A heady combination of Half-Handed Cloud (a column regular) and Kimya Dawson (not a column regular) is what I ultimately chalk Fresh Sip up to, and that's not meant as a reductive comparison whatsoever, though I'd wager this fellow may one day eclipse both.

Like most of the misfits on their (latest) label, Eggs, Eggs take eccentricity to a whole new level. The Cleansing Power of Fruit (Feeding Tube) is a gratifying purge, but is it ultimately to the benefit of the listener? What a harrowing experience, two sides of white-hot maniac stew. Where, pray tell, do you find guys like this lead singer? He's a crazy person, the type of guy you'd tell to get off your lawn, or stoop.

I‘d almost pay the man to get beyond the little “she sells sea shells”/“pleased to meet you” routines—and the momentary bouts of vocal silence aren't any easier to handle because

the backing band is like xNoBBQx without the sauce. Worth injecting into your (hopefully) moist ear hole, no matter how antsy you might get while you're in the “shit.” Bonus points for the more rockin' sections that salute Black Flag and Beefheart. Snappy? Haha, no.

Yawning chasm, anyone? Insect Factory's Melodies From a Dead Radio (Fabrica) is adrift like all the best drone expeditions, shimmering tones tangling and merging and tiny power lines rippling in the wind. Insect Factory ask the big questions and aim for the stars; while this brand of longform cosmic worm-tunnel isn’t hard to find these days, I certainly appreciate a well thought-out stab at it, and Melodies most certainly is that, with enough of a spark to enable that “tingly” feeling (I‘ve said too much), especially on Side B, when a spellbinding stretch followed by pin-point guitar plucking takes the record in a whole new direction.

Lorelle Meets The Obsolete's On Wellfare (Captcha) burns slow and angry, sharp guitars and busty bass trippin’ hard on Black Angels while adding a layer of noise-rock scuzz. Expect elements of psych, garage, BJM, dreampop, The Warlocks, a few of the HoZac platters and the Velvets, albeit with a steam-valve tension that often never gets released. “Waitin’ for the Orange Sunshine” is where the stakes get higher and so do you—this is mind-melt you can span time to, and the fact that its splendor is effectively presented within a traditional song structure is all the more remarkable. Side B strips a bit of the mystery away, never a good thing, but the current remains, and the more spike-shouldered slant balances out the dreamier Side A aptly.

Lorelle and Ela Orleans are co-queens of deeep indie, no doubt.

Eerie spoken-word sections, now commonplace in the oeuvre of most experimental musicians of the day, are the meat/potatoes of what Bryan Lewis Saunders does via Bed Bugs 1-3 (Private Leisure Industries). And by “eerie,” I mean ... well, let's just say you're going to want to listen to this one through before you play it around the house. Saunders is sick and, while not proud of it, he doesn't mind talking about his obsessions. Makes Eric Paul seem almost happygo-lucky, and that in itself is reason enough to cause a few to convert to an extreme religion after Bed Bugs crawls up their legs. Spellbinding if you're up for it—if—and backed by a swirling cloud of dronoise. You make the call: ...

Have you met Father Murphy? He’s a moody son-of-a-gun who knows how to shimmy up a ladder and break every dad-gum rung, and his latest product, Anyway Your Children Will Deny It (Aagoo), steps on all sorts of toes in the indierock community, up to and including Liars/These Are Powers, Slaraffenland, labelmates Au and Spires That In The Sunset Rise? Yep, at times.

Pounding drums coming from all different angles, snarling strings, chimes of freedom threshing, bits of space bottled and sold—albums that spiral out of control like this are perhaps more commonplace than they used to be, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t care. Not always great, and sometimes almost Tarantula-corny, but never, ever boring. Music is a movie.

If that recent Chrome Jackson (ex-Arab On Radar guitarist Stephen Mattos) record joined forces with Andrew Plante and Fuck Buttons you‘d land somewhere near the charred earth inhabited by Viktor Timofeev by way of Give Health999 (Lo Bit Landscapes). But what about that sudden segue into splashing water buttressed by Pink Priest close-mic-ing and distant oars being swung into wood? That's completely unaccounted for in the annals of the experimental underground. And is it possible to shoot lasers through liquid? Guess it'd be almost neglectful not to try ... Truly a one-of-a-kind ride that turns your couch into a steel-railed cart, your surroundings into a surreal film reel and your mind into a helpless glob of jelly. I surrender, sir Timofeev, if that is your real name.

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REISSUE REDUX

Bill Meyer surveys the season’s key reissues.

Although Hat Hut was originally founded to rerecreates the fanciful gatefold sleeve crafted by lease a Joe McPhee album, some of his work for Cherry’s wife Moki, and throws in a booklet with the label has not been in print in any format for an excellent essay by the aforementioned Mr. over 30 years. Now Corbett Vs. Dempsey, a new Corbett. This is how these things should be done. operation which is co-led by the same man who One record that has definitely been in need of once selected Atavistic’s Unheard Music Series improvement is The Quintet: Live at Massey Hall releases, has stepped into the breach to reissue

by Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Powell, Glasses and Variations on a Blue Line / Round Max Roach, and Charles Mingus. The harsh, noisy Midnight. Both were recorded on the same day sound of Fantasy’s 20-Bit master from ten years in October 1977 at a café in Rouen, France, and ago has not aged at all well. Now that Concord each features solos performed on flugelhorn and owns the catalog, they’ve done a decent job tenor or soprano sax. One could consider them of fixing things up. The instruments stand out the next step past his classic Tenor, since they clearer, and if you play it back to back with the show him extending his practice of shuttling be2002 version it feels like a layer of gunk has been tween emotive jazz (free and otherwise)-derived scraped out of your ears. material and pure sound. Glasses also includes The erratic treatment accorded the Impulse some unplanned percussive interventions. On the catalog over the years, with John Coltrane’s title tune, McPhee plays the venue’s serving vesrecords being issued over and over while others sels; and on a lengthy free improvisation called are neglected, is a source of some frustration, “New Potatoes,” percussionist Reto Weber so I guess we should be grateful for the two-fer steps out of the crowd to join him on stage for a CDs that have come out over the past two years discursive performance that summons the spirit like Marion Brown’s Geechee Recollections/ of those marvelous Don Cherry and Ed Blackwell Sweet Earth Flying, Alice Coltrane’s Huntington albums. Both records preserve the original Hat Ashram Monastery/World Galaxy, and Archie Hut covers, which are things of beauty rarely Shepp’s For Losers/Kwanza. Each comes with a seen nowadays. And since the original tapes are booklet that reproduces the original album art gone, they were mastered from John Corbett’s in eye-punishingly small dimensions; I needed not-quite-flawless vinyl for an authentic late 70s a magnifying glass to read some of the Brown listening experience.

CD’s notes. But you can’t beat ’em for musical Now called Hatology, the Swiss imprint is value. Marion Brown’s albums comprise 2/3rds of doing its best to keep at least some of its back a trilogy inspired by the poetry of Jean Toomer catalog in print. Jump Up is a superb 1980 and Brown’s rural Georgian upbringing. The concert recording that reunited the two-thirds of former emphasizes recitations and percussion the Cecil Taylor Trio who were not named Cecil over Brown’s saxophone, while the latter has an Taylor. In 1962 Jimmy Lyons and Sunny Murray extraordinary dueling keyboard line-up of Muhal were part of a revolution at the Café Montmartre Richard Abrams and Paul Bley; both are quite that turned the world on its head; here, joined singular efforts. The first Alice Coltrane record by bassist John Lindberg, they refused to rest is a meditative trio date that sets her in-the-red on their laurels. Lyons may have been a vital harp against the satisfyingly profound grooves member of Taylor’s Unit, but his own composiof Ron Carter and Rashied Ali, while the second tions favor sharp turns and intricate exchanges is a much better recorded orchestral date that over the master’s fractal energy transfers. Lyons’ revisits a couple of her late husband’s best-loved darting alto sounds marvelous here, so much so themes. And Shepp’s two albums are marvelously that one wishes that the missing side from the messy documentations of the saxophonist’s effort original double LP could be restored. to pull together the jazz he grew up loving, the Freestyle Band is another free jazz trio recordnew thing he’d become identified with, and coning from the 80s re-released on a European label, temporary R&B performed by singers as loose this time No Business from Lithuania. Clarinetist and over the top in style as his horn playing. The Henry P. Warner, electric bassist Earl Freeman, acme of oddness is Leon Thomas’s yodeling and hand drummer Philip Sprigner were all loft on the pop waltz “Spoo Pee Doo.” All of these jazz veterans who had played with stellar sorts, sets are pretty affordable, so you’ll have enough but had to self-release their sole LP together. money left over after buying them to get that Their unusual line-up contributes to a distinctive magnifying glass. sound; Warner’s wails would sound pretty wooly As long as we’re talking about the collision of on any sax, but the pinched sound of his clarinets avant-garde jazz and pop during the 70s, let’s confers a laser-like sharpness to his playing that talk about Annette Peacock’s I’m the One (Light contrasts drastically with Freeman’s bulbous bass. in the Attic). First released in 1972, this record Don Cherry not only put out records on the established her as a sui generis talent ready to other side of the Atlantic, he lived in Sweden and challenge any boundary you might care to put raised a family there. Organic Information Society in front of her. A gifted electronic musician as (Caprice) dates from that time, and it is indelwell as a ferociously bluesy singer, she saw no ibly marked by Cherry’s experiences of traveling reason not to put together acidic, dissonant the globe and taking up in a hippy commune.

Moog excursions and gospel-steeped analyses Elements of Brazilian and Indian music, as well as of sexual satisfaction on the same record. This is Cherry’s experiences as a summer camp music that record. Like usual, LITA has done it right with teacher, all come together on this collection of non-revisionist sound, a swell digipak sleeve, and sprawling chants, percussive work-outs, chaotic a well-designed booklet. orchestral passages, and spiritually themed If you’ve been mining the Anatolian rock that’s songs; Cherry sings more often than he plays his come over the past few years on Guerssen on trumpet. Originally a double LP, this CD reissue Sublime Frequencies, get ready for some gold.

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BarișManço started playing rock after he saw Erkin Koray and heard Elvis Presley, and his career took him through innumerable stages, including stabs at French pop and eventual Turkish stardom as a singer of nostalgic children’s songs. But the three 70s-vintage records that the Spanish Guerssen imprint has done up on CD and vinyl are monuments to all-channels-open pop craft. You want poetry mixed with string synths and wackawacka funk? Turkish Country & Western? Noble ballads? Middle Eastern orchestration sweeping over birdsong? Manço’s your man, and Dunden Bugune, 2023, and Sakla Samani Gelir Zamani are waiting for you. All three records are worth your time, but each has its own merits. Dunden Bugune, a collection of singles from 1971, was his first long player, and it’s the most consistent thing here, with restrained psychedelic touches that work in the service of the songs. 2023 is the freakiest, with long songs and cosmic recitations over spacy electronics; it’s just the sort of thing a guy who had been making singles for twenty years might make when you turned him loose on a long player. Sakla Samani Gelir Zamani, another singles collection from 1976 whose track selection has been rearranged slightly from the original due to some contractual issues, is the most generous and the closest to the Middle Eastern pop that issued from the far side of the Mediterranean.

Head a bit further south still to Nigeria, the common ground of two very different ensembles who shared a member. Blo started out as a funky rock band, but by the time they got to their third record Step Three (Hot Casa) the rock influence was fading and the groove was smoother; methinks someone had been spending their time listening to Curtis Mayfield. Part of this transition could be attributed to the recruitment of a new member, Biddy Wright, a peripatetic multi-instrumentalist whose credits include a stint in Ronnie Lane’s Slim Chance. This reissue brings the original Nigerian record, nothing more or less, and it’s a solid next step if you have enjoyed the band’s contributions to Soundway’s Nigerian Special compilations. Wright’s guitar, horns, and synthesizer are all over Sunshine, the third release in Knitting Factory’s series of re-releases by the Lijadu Sisters. The Sisters were twins who hitched their wagon to Ginger Baker for a time before ending up in New York. There they recorded several records with Wright before one twin, Kehinde, injured her spine in a fall and the act took a 20-year hiatus. On Sunshine, which was recorded in 1978, it sounds as though Wright spent more time getting the backing tracks right than the voices; the sisters’ harmonies are pretty wayward and their English-language singing way too naïve for an act that had already been around for years. However, they win points for including a pro-reincarnation reggae song.

Shirley and Dolly Collins’ As Many As I Will (Fledgling) brought their long-running sister act to a close in the same year. They went out in style, with an album that sounds hundreds of years old even when they were singing a four-year-old song

by Richard Thompson or Dolly was bolstering her ornate portative organ figures with a bit of synthesizer. You’ve heard of family harmonizing? Dolly’s keyboard playing fits Shirley’s voice

CROSSWORD "Fantasy Remixes" by puzzlemaster Ben Tausig

Across 1. Instructing the actors 6. Toothpaste flavor 10. Coltrane's "The ___ Coast Jazz Scene" 14. Four-time Indy champ Al 15. Prog supergroup 16. Guitar-playing Gallagher 17. Pantera album remixed to tell a story about a wet brush that keeps slipping away?

20. "Don't Stop ___ You Get Enough" 21. Ricky Martin, publicly, since 2010 22. Sushi topper 23. CA hardcore county 25. Sleater-Kinney album remixed to be about a gangsta Stroganoff?

30. Dole (out) 31. Nu metal band with "Sattelite" 32. Rhythmic brass sound 33. Part of R&D: Abbr.

34. Band Jah Wobble left in 1980 35. Mood lifting drug 36. Dirty Projectors album remixed to be about the trysts of a flying cave creature?

39. Like Spotify, for a fee 42. Musical aptitude 43. "Ben-___" (Heston film) 46. Sin city of the bible 47. "Spring ahead" hrs.

48. No Clue 50. After 1-Down, MC5 album remixed to be about a personalized tan airplane?

52. Juke Blues subject 54. Heavy weight 55. Jam band with a period after its name 56. Pendergrass's "Love ___" 57. Miles Davis album remixed to be about perfectly fresh fruit?

63. Much of the internet 64. Pennsylvania city with lake effect weather 65. Treat with icing 66. Steps on a pedal 67. Thing licensed through ASCAP 68. Takes care of one's pet, in a way

like a sibling’s intuitively sung accompaniment.

It kind of boggles the mind to know that she retired in order to garden full time, but I guess that a couple decades of music this lovely would discharge any woman’s debts to humanity.

Recorded at almost exactly the same time but in a completely different world, The Avengers’ self-titled, posthumously released LP was one of the most persuasive arguments in favor of the American punk rock that rose up in the wake of the Sex Pistols and the Ramones. They were, like so many other bands, pissed-off, defiant, and not terribly insightful about the limits of their righteousness; but they were also one hell of a tuneful rock unit, so much so that even a second CD of live and demo versions of the same material doesn’t wear out their welcome on Water’s double-disc resurrection.

Drag City flies the West Coast hippy flag high on their re-release of Carol Kleyn’s Takin’ the Time. The label’s been picking private press

folk records that manage to spike slick straightness with just the right strain of oddity, and this one keeps the thread unbroken. Produced by Kleyn’s partner Bobby Brown, this album is a bit more dressed up than DC’s first Kleyn reissue Love Has Made Me Stronger. She’s still singing about preserving the planet and bittersweet love, though this time her harp often takes a back seat to clean electric guitar and bright-as-dew synths, but the glistening backing makes this just the thing for that Pacific Coast Highway drive you’ll take in your mind as you sit in some miserable traffic jam. But if you’re driving into a fog bank, might I suggest A | A by the Portland, Oregonbased Grouper? Her voice and guitar are so enshrouded with reverb and distance that they feel untouchable and quiet at any volume. The one-woman band originally self-released Dream Loss and Alien Observer in 2011 on vinyl, but now that those pressings have dried up Kranky has stepped in with a CD version. It’s a double,

Down 1. See 50-Across 2. Still an intern, say 3. Put in a soundproof space, 4. Times ___ Viking 5. One of the Allman Brothers 6. R&B singer Gray 7. Equi- kin 8. Ass 9. Talking too loud at shows 10. "Before and After Science" musician 11. Co. that used to flood mailboxes with CDs 12. "On the Road" narrator Paradise 13. Commandment pronoun 18. Carly ___ Jepsen 19. Hat for Bob Dylan 24. Absolutely wrong 25. Most divine 26. Said "there, there," say 27. Gossip website 28. Lisa P. Jackson's org.

29. WWII female enlistee 31. Site of an orchestra 34. Reed's "The Raven" is based on his work 35. Hipster's canful 37. Pays 38. Animal on the cover of Wavves's "King Of The Beach" 39. Pose a question 40. Outburst from Homer 41. Govt. Rx watchdog 44. Private line?

45. About to topple over 47. Cofounder of the Tribeca Film Festival 49. Hangmen's tools 51. It's bad if they bomb on stage 52. Avatar Actress Saldana 53. Nobel-winning Irish poet 55. MP3 part 57. Letters on lotion bottle 58. Winning tic-tac-toe line 59. Alice Coltrane cut?

60. AC/DC album or single 61. Reznor band, on T-shirts 62. Rapper Rick Ross's former job for answers, see our facebook page

although both records could have fit on one disc, but the separateness makes sense, as does the double gatefold sleeve’s paucity of text and color; this music is all about the hazy grays.

But when you’re ready to come back into the light, Mind Over Mirrors’ High and Upon is waiting for you. MOM is another one-person act. Jaime Fennelly originally conceived of this music whilst doing forestry work in the Pacific Northwest, but finished recording it in Chicago.

He uses a harmonium and oscillators to build up churning sonic surfaces that sound like I suppose the ocean looks when viewed through a break in the forest. The album was originally released as a cassette, but the vinyl version by Aguirre is a compelling argument for vinyl as the medium of kings. The LP’s immaculate pressing imparts a physicality and clarity to the music’s high end that the cassette just can’t match, and the sleeve, unlike certain CD booklets discussed in this column, is a joy to behold. ✹

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art: Emma Ball | text: John King via Kurt Gottschalk

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