Signal to Noise #65 - spring 2013

✹ THE JOURNAL OF IMPROVISED, EXPERIMENTAL & UNUSUAL MUSIC ✹

issue #65 spring 2013 $4.95 us / $5.95 can

the pre-history of the residents sam shalabi ben patterson rodrigo amado vanessa rossetto WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #65 | 1

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

#65 : SPRING 2013 rodrigo amado 6 vanessa rossetto 8 the pre-residents 10 ben patterson 18 sam shalabi 25 live reviews 28 book reviews 32 cd / dvd / lp / dl reviews 34 graphic novella 58 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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RODRIGO AMADO

Laurence Labat

Sax-man is at the heart of Lisbon's vigorous free jazz scene.

By Stuart Broomer

On his new CD Searching for Adam, the Portugese saxophonist Rodrigo Amado quotes another sax man, Sam Rivers: “Freedom does not mean unconditional renunciation of melody and rhythm, but the freedom of being able to choose what I want to play.” It’s a fitting credo for Amado, whose music dances across the boundaries of free jazz and improvised music. There’s rarely a theme in earshot, but there’s an abundance of energized particles and a strongly focused voice.

Amado is at the heart of the vigorous free jazz scene that has emerged in Lisbon since the millennium, putting together bands, organizing concerts and releasing an increasingly impressive series of CDs. His home-grown groups like Motion Trio are as impressive as meetings with international figures like Jeb Bishop and Paal NilssenLove.

Amado took up the saxophone during a long convalescence from an accident when he was 17. Before that he had listened mostly to pop, rock and funk music, including James Brown, Fela Kuti and The Meters, a likely index to persistent rhythmic emphasis: “together with my first horn, my mother gave me three jazz recordings: a Charlie Parker compilation, Phil Woods’ Three for All and a third one I’m not really sure about—probably Rollins or Coltrane— and I was immediately relating to that kind of vibe and sound.”

A few years later he was part of Lisbon trumpeter Sei Miguel’s first band and formed a long-standing duo with the band’s drummer Luis Desirat. Eventually Amado developed the Lisbon Improvisation Players “to give an identity to a series of concerts I was doing with ad-hoc formations. After LIP was created for a concert in October 2000, I realized the identity of the group became much more than just a useful tag. The music I was doing with the different line-ups of LIP all had a common vibration I could identify as my own.

Among those collaborations, one sticks out: “One concert I did that keeps coming to my mind as a perpetual inspiration happened in 2003, at Teatro Ibérico in Lisbon, and gathered me, Bobby Bradford, Joe Giardullo, Alex Cline and Ken Filiano.”

A musician as good as Amado is usually a perpetual student, but there’s no question that he sounds perfectly at home by 2004’s Teatro, matched up with the powerful rhythm section of Kent Kessler and Paal Nilssen-Love. It’s among the first of a host of collaborations, like Surface, with a string trio of Carlos Zingaro (Lisbon’s master improvising violinist), Tomas Ulrich and Ken Filiano, or 2008’s Waiting for Adam with Taylor Ho Bynum, John Hébert and Gerald Cleaver.

Those international partnerships have definitely helped get the word out. In 2006 Amado put together a version of LIP with Dennis González, who then included Amado on an eastern European tour of his band Yells at Eels with González’s sons, bassist Aaron and drummer Stefan. When Lisbon guitarist Luis Lopez put together his Humanization Quartet with Amado, the González brothers became the rhythm section in a band that has since crisscrossed the United States from New York to Texas.

In 2009 Amado created another ongoing unit in Lisbon, his Motion Trio: “I’ve always tried to have an all-Portuguese band to work regularly but never felt the right energy or empathy. Eventually, I started going to some Sunday improv sessions at [cellist] Miguel Mira’s house, where we would play for hours. On one of those sessions we had Gabriel Ferrandini over to play with us (he was 19 or 20 years old) and I was really impressed with his musicality. He represented a new generation of musician, one without genre limitations, without preconceived notions on what to play on the drums. I imagined a power trio with him and Miguel and we started Motion Trio.”

For Amado, “Motion Trio has become a kind of living entity, and all we do is go with it. We don’t force any kind of change or development, but each time we play or record, the music is in a different phase. I think that’s exactly how it should be and it’s fascinating for me to imagine how Motion Trio will sound in ten years’ time.

“By the time I put Motion Trio together I was totally focused on real-time composition. No matter how abstract the music would be, I was always thinking in terms of shapes, cycles, melodies or harmonies. Not that I would play them, but I would feel all

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these connections and relations between the sounds that make the music one, with an overall sense of a piece, with a beginning, a development and an end. I know intuitively what Gabriel or Miguel might play after a certain sound or note, and this allows me to push further. Once a certain type of interaction is comfortable, we move to a different level, destroying previous ‘standards’ and surprising each other again.” Motion Trio has now recorded on its own and with trombonist Jeb Bishop (last year’s briliant Burning Live at Jazz ao Centro, and this year’s studio album The Flame Alphabet) and there’s an up-coming date with trumpeter Peter Evans.

Meanwhile, Amado is developing other Lisbon formations, all of them with Ferrandini, with whom Amado recently toured Brazil as a duo. There’s Wire Quartet with guitarist Manuel Mota and bassist Hernani Faustino, formed to “explore more abstract ideas and a stronger connection with rock or experimental music,” and Amado’s latest band, Hurricane Trio with turntablist DJ Ride (a literal “World Champion of Scratch” who has performed and competed across Europe and Asia) and Ferrandini: “I want to integrate electronics in a totally organic manner. I played a lot with laptop improvisers and wasn’t so interested in this more contained approach, although the possibilities of electronic music interested me.

I’d worked with DJ Ride before, recorded on some of his albums, but felt he never really explored his amazing abilities as an improviser. I imagined for Hurricane the sound I wanted to hear in other people’s recordings, when they did collaborations with electronics, a sound that fascinated me but that I felt it never went as far or as deep as I needed.

“To achieve this, I needed the kind of physicality I saw in DJ Ride’s turntable playing. Although we just started, I can feel my intuition was right: Gabriel, Ride and I can move as three conventional instrumentalists, reacting in split seconds to each other’s playing. So, now, what I really want to do with Hurricane is to create something new.

And we all know how difficult that is, if not impossible. But, just the fun and pleasure of trying is more than enough.”✹

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Texan sound artist uses field recordings and strings to uncover the poetry of the mundane.

By Bill Meyer

VANESSA ROSSETTO

Consider what you might hear if you paid attention to all the sounds you encounter when you walk a city mile. Then consider what you might hear if you don’t ignore most of what’s in the air once you get wherever you’re going. Vanessa Rossetto lives in Austin Texas, and she doesn’t drive. This incapacity can’t make life easy, but it adds immeasurably to her music: she walks the streets of her town, and any other place that she visits, with recording equipment in hand.

Since her first album, a 2007 collaboration with Valerio Cosi under the name Pulga, Rossetto has assembled a discography of LPs, CDRs, Soundcloud streams, and the odd cassette or CD that uses performed and collected sounds to expose the poetry of the mundane.

Walk that city mile and you’re bound to encounter a few intersections. Rossetto’s music occurs where the avenues of free improvisation, contemporary composition, musique concrète, and field recording converge.

“The present-day composer,” Edgar Varèse once said, “refuses to die.” Rossetto’s work is a great example of how a composer in the age of downward mobility can turn whatever is at hand into living art. Like Luc Ferrari, she treats the sounds of quotidian action as raw material, something to be either represented or repurposed according to her needs. But you’ll also hear the bracing scrape of bow against viola strings in many of her pieces, injecting a sense of something happening right now into a temporally expansive sound field. Sometimes her strings sound alone, as though issuing from a player on a stage. Other times she compounds them into rough, Tony Conrad-like drones, or salts them into appropriated orchestration, which in turn might sit behind some squawking birds, a revving bus engine, a pulsing electronic hum, or a gym bag being zipped up.

She takes the extreme dynamics of Jakob Ullmann, whose music often sounds so quiet that it seems to be happening privately at some great distance, and situates it on the far side of a food court. And by judiciously mining the resources of her own record collection, she puts her hands on orchestral resources that would otherwise be out of the reach of a person who supports herself by selling books.

“I like to use recorded sounds because of their almost filmic quality,” Rossetto explains.

“While I enjoy blurring the line between the intentional and unintentional, that’s not an end in itself to me. Everything that’s there is there to serve the structure and/or narrative of the piece in question.” The construction of her pieces may suggest a time line, but it’s three-dimensional one. Pieces contain tangential asides, such as the guy who mouths the all-purpose anti-avant-garde quip “My brother can do that” on “348315,” from the recent LP Exotic Exit, and sublime wormholes, like the far-away drone tucked near the end of “Swim Bladder,” from its predecessor Mineral Orange (both on Kye Records).

Rossetto’s own life is threaded through the music, at once omnipresent and ephemeral.

You can hear her physical presence when drinks are stirred on “De Trop,” also from Exotic Exit, and when she directly addresses the listener a few minutes further into the piece to lament, “I’m so tired.” But she also transcends mere diary by stacking and restacking that phrase until it becomes a looming sonic dust devil; these sounds may come from her life, but they are still material to be transformed.

Nonetheless it’s tempting to look to Rossetto’s life for clues to explain her music. Two early sound memories that she related in an email are telling. One is an early favorite re-

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cord released by Disney. “As a kid, I was really into sound effects records and would listen to them like others did ‘musical’ records, just have them on while I was doing things. My favorite was Chilling, Thrilling Sounds of the Haunted House, that had tracks like ‘A Collection of Creaks’ and ‘Drips and Splashes.’

It all makes sense now, but at the time I think my family thought it was a little weird!”

Another is being subjected to a hearing test at school. “Do you remember those hearing test machines that played tones and you had to determine which side they came from?

They would come around to the different schools in a van. I can still very distinctly recall how the tones used sounded. I remember it getting me thinking about binaurality and the directional nature of sound --not in those terms of course, but more like ‘Oh, neat!

This makes me aware of my orientation in space’--and liking the pure quality of the tones used.”

Another key detail is that Rossetto’s education was not in music, but painting. This explains her manipulation of foreground and background elements, her use of single sound events to imply multiple significances, and her deft layering of tonal color and sonic texture. That textural facility is especially prominent on “An Indication of Presence,” from the CD Temperament as Waveform (Another Timbre), a new collaboration with English sound artist Lee Patterson. The radio static at its inception is as rough as unsanded wood, the string squeals that course though said static as quick and slick as lubricated wire. But the sense of motion imparted by ascending bowed stings and electronic tones abandons metaphor for accumulating sensation; whatever the influence of other media, Rossetto understands that music is something that happens in between two moments. ✹

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THE REST IS MYSTERY

Before they became The Residents, a circle of friends from Louisiana moved to California, messed around with modern recording technology, and streched the boundaries of rock and roll.

Jim Knipfel looks into the pre-history of one of experimental music's most enduring riddles.

The epiphany hit me like a confounding, vaguely sweet ray of greenish-orange light on an unusually warm Wisconsin summer day in 1983. That’s when, while staying with a friend, I finally heard The Residents’ 1978 (or maybe 1974) album Not Available for the first time, and that’s the moment when everything clicked.

It was a strange, sad, funny, and utterly mind-boggling opera. An alien opera.

And by that I don’t mean an opera about aliens, but one composed and performed by aliens for an alien audience. It was a singular piece of music and poetry that defied all long-held beliefs and simple descriptions. I immediately set myself the task of picking up everything these “Residents” had ever done.

Now, this was no easy task. Not exactly being what you’d call “mainstream,” their records weren’t readily stocked in the neighborhood shopping mall. Not in Wisconsin anyway. It took some doing.

Even finding them caused problems of its own. When I finally picked up my first Residents album (Tunes of Two Cities), I was expecting it to be another alien opera. It wasn’t. Instead it consisted of abrasive, almost tuneless electronic tracks alternating with light, bouncy, mildly offkilter jazz. Over the course of the album, the two styles blended in a brilliant and

disconcerting musical experiment.

The next album sounded nothing like that, nor did it sound like the one I would buy after that. They ranged from goofy, dark, primitivist dada hijinx, to album-length tone poems inspired (sort of) by traditional Eskimo music, to funny, vaguely sinister, and immorally catchy pop songs. Despite their radical differences, there was something immediately recognizable about a Residents album.

The more I heard, the more confused and intrigued I became. All that was certain was that they were creating music (and as I would soon discover, artwork and films and performances) for those freaks among us who weren’t comforted or satisfied by the crap being foisted on us by the prevailing corporate entertainment culture. We were aching for something that paid no attention to the rules—at least in the way normal people understood those rules. Beyond simply ignoring the rules, it seemed the Residents had taken that next big step, by creating not only their own rules but their own reality.

And they continued to re-invent it as they went along.

While I was thrilled to have finally found something that seemed to echo my own troubled and absurd mindset, I was still confused. The Residents were a puzzle

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people had been trying to figure out since their arrival as a collective entity in 1972 with the double single/Christmas card, Santa Dog. For all the pieces that were floating around out there, nobody seemed to be getting any closer to finding a solution.

As the years rolled along, through all the albums, the tours, the video work, the CD-ROMs, the books, the websites, the DVDs, the Internet series, and everything else they continued to create year after year, the puzzle only grew more complex: a collection of myths, rumors, half-truths, some created and disseminated by the band and their management team, others circulated by fans.

If you ask me, the realities of what they’ve done, from the glorious debacle (both intentional and unintentional) that was The Mole Show, to the influence they’ve had on pop bands and serious contemporary composers alike, to their continued recognition by the Museum of Modern Art, to the astounding list of firsts to their credit (first music video, first MIDI recordings, first geodesic eyeballs and skull to dance with Conway Twitty on network television, etc.), is far more interesting than the myths. And nothing is more impressive than the fact that as they mark their 40th anniversary this year, they con-

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tinue to work on new projects and record new music that continues to be uniquely their own, and radically different from anything else that’s being heard today. What other band can—or could ever—claim such a thing? The Rolling Stones?

Of all the pieces of the grand mystery that is The Residents, none seems to consume people more than the well-kept secret of their identities. For 40 years the band has worked and produced in anonymity, and for 40 years people have been guessing. During their most recent tour, the members of the band themselves (in elaborate disguises as always) even tried to help out by announcing their names—Randy, Chuck, Bob, and Carlos, “that asshole drummer who quit to take care of his sick mother.” Somehow, though, this didn’t seem to help matters.

I may not be a terribly clever man, but I can tell you without reservation that every bit of speculation concerning the identities of The Residents has been wrong—including those made by the Residents themselves. In fact “Who are The Residents, really?” isn’t even the right question. What matters is not who the Residents are, but what they are, why they are, and how it is they are why they are.

To even begin trying to answer those questions, we need to go back more than 40 years, to a point long before the tophatted eyeball heads were introduced, to a point long before The Residents even existed, and we need to start following several storylines, many of which begin on or near the campus of Louisiana Tech, located in the small northern Louisiana town of Ruston.

“Hardy [Fox] and I were roommates back in 1963,” recalls Homer Flynn of the Cryptic Corporation. Flynn, together with Fox, represents the management team that has handled The Residents’ business affairs for over three decades now, but he was their friend long before the beginning. “I was an engineering major, and I actually went to school on a track scholarship. Louisiana Tech was the place that offered me a scholarship, it was an engineering school, my dad was an engineer, and I’d always been kinda good at math and science, so that’s where it started.”

While at school, a small circle of friends developed. Along with Flynn and Fox (who was then working toward an art degree) there were Jay Clem and John Kennedy (the other future co-founders of the Cryptic Corporation), Palmer and Barry Eland, and what we’ll call the Pre-Residents—Randy Rose, Charles (“Chuck”) Bobuck, Bob, and Carlos.

“We were the anti-fraternity fraternity.

We were the guys who hung out and created a clique that was against the cool stuff,” Flynn says. It was within that group that the future attitude, and philosophy of The Residents would begin to gestate.

Then around 1966, Flynn dropped out of school and returned home to Shreveport, and Fox was introduced to a local teenage rock’n’roll band called The Beaten Path.

“I love to organize and I love to plan things,” says Fox. “I was friends with [The Beaten Path’s] singer at that time. I’ve always been interested in music, so I went

to rehearsal and quickly started trying to reorganize them and push my ideas off on them.”

The band consisted of two brothers and a couple of their friends from the local high school. They’d been together since they were about fourteen, mostly playing covers of popular songs of the day.

“Ruston and all of northern Louisiana was, and is, a very conservative area in the heart of the bible belt,” says Roland Sheehan, then the organ player for the band, which soon changed its name to The Alliance. “Louisiana Tech was and is a small college in the same mold. In the ’60s it was even worse with civil rights and Vietnam. Louisiana Tech had a proVietnam war rally complete with military.

Hardy was the exception.”

Sheehan, then sixteen, was living in Dubach, a small town just north of Ruston.

He’d been a sickly, frail child; by the time he’d hit his teens, he was withdrawn and depressed, and had developed a stutter.

He says he used music as an escape.

“Hardy at first was just around and nothing much happened except we connected somehow. He was in college and I was in high school so he seemed so much wiser, worldly and a breath of fresh air to me. Over time we became very close and he became our manager, promoter and a sort of overall guide. We got better as a band, in fact a lot better, and began to play a lot, and traveled quite a lot for our ages.”

Along the way, Sheehan says, he had a chance to meet and spend some time with Flynn and at least a few of the PreResidents.

“Eventually I was in the position of having to fire the singer, who was my friend,” Fox recalls. “It wasn’t all that pleasant. But I dunno, it was one of those things, I fell into it. I liked the people. It wasn’t just a manager thing, it was real personal. These kids were in high school and lived at home, so I’d visit their homes, and I’d be fed homecooked meals. It was great for me. It’s no surprise that Roland and I got along, because when I came in, he was the leader of the group. But at the same time he didn’t have a lot of self- confidence to take that role. When I came in and we were driven that the band would be successful, it became just him and me who were making all the plans. A lot of our bond came from that—I came in as manager and saw him as the leader, so he became the leader.”

Sheehan took to practicing incessantly on his Hammond B3 organ. Eventually he came out of his shell and his stutter vanished. “Hardy and I were getting very close,” Sheehan says, “and I think it was because I really wanted to do more than what the band was doing. I wanted to learn more about all different kinds of music. Hardy had jazz records. And being from Dubach, which is a little bitty town, I didn’t know much about jazz at all. He played me an album by Jimmy Smith, the jazz organ great. It was one of those things—I don’t think it’s overblown—it was a life-altering album for me.”

Then in 1968 as most of America it seemed was being set ablaze, Fox gradu-

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ated and moved to Houston, leaving the band behind. (In spite of the long-held myth regarding their Louisiana roots, Fox, Charles Bobuck, and Bob were all Texans.)

The four Pre-Residents packed up and moved to San Mateo, CA—a quiet town about twenty miles south of San Francisco. John Kennedy was already living in San Bruno (also in the Bay Area) by that point, and back in Shreveport, Flynn was thinking it was time to make a move himself.

“This was basically George Wallace times, and so the South was someplace to escape. I guess in many ways it still is.

It definitely was at those times. So you had two things going. The South being a place to escape on one hand, and the ’60s counterculture being the lure on the other side—what to escape to. You had what to escape from and what to escape to, so that was the polarity... John Kennedy was living in the Bay Area—and so far as I could tell completely oblivious to what was going on. He was a baggage handler for United Airlines living not in San Francisco but down on the peninsula.

So when it came time to start looking for places to go, that became an obvious possibility.

“As I see it now,” Flynn continues, “I was really a product of the dropout generation—what was referred to at that time as the Generation Gap. I think that was more disconcerting to my parents because they didn’t really have a clue what was going on. And in many ways I can’t say I really knew what was going on either, but I was reacting to forces that were fairly broad from a cultural point of view. When you’re in the middle of it you’re just doing what you’re doing. It wasn’t until later that I got more of a perspective.”

Since dropping out, Flynn had been working as a truck dispatcher for a concrete company. Fox, meanwhile, no longer eligible for the college deferment, was waiting to be shipped off to Vietnam.

It was just a matter of time. The two reconnected after falling out of touch since leaving school.

“Hardy came and moved in with me in Shreveport, really just kind of waiting until he got drafted,” Flynn says. “Then he got drafted. One morning I said goodbye to him and I went off to work, and at the end of work I came back and there he was.”

“I didn’t really end up getting drafted, as it turned out,” Fox explains. “Because the doctors report had come in to the draft board about a little problem I have with epilepsy.”

Given that the military was no longer an option and with no other immediate plans, in August of 1968, Fox headed out to California and moved in with John Kennedy. Five months later, in January of 1969, Flynn followed suit.

“Kennedy had a small one-bedroom apartment in San Bruno,” he says, “which calls itself, colorfully, The Airport City. He lived there mainly because it was convenient for him to get to work. And again he didn’t seem to have much interest in what was going on in San Francisco.”

A few months later, the trio moved into an old Victorian house on the edge of the Haight. Recollections of what went

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on in the house seem to get a little fuzzy.

“We lived there about a year and I got involved with a woman,” Flynn says. “She lived in San Mateo. She and I were gonna go back to college together and all this stuff, and typically the way these things work, by the time I found a place down there, and moved, she and I had broken up. That left John and Hardy living alone in the Victorian, and they didn’t want to do that, so John got himself a small apartment and Hardy moved in with me in San Mateo.”

As fate would have it, the move brought them back in touch with The Pre-Residents, who had been living in near seclusion in San Mateo. Having— like so many others in their mid-20s—no real drive, interests, or sense of purpose, the Pre-Residents were beginning to experiment with more conventional art forms, like painting, photography and silkscreening. While they all loved music— especially the psychedelic bands coming out of the San Francisco scene—the idea of performing music themselves had not yet occurred to them.

“That’s when Roland showed up,” Fox says.

“Roland arrived pulling a U-Haul trailer loaded with musical instruments, including his B3 organ. Huge, monster thing,” recalls Charles Bobuck, now the primary composer for The Residents.

It was June, 1970. Having just completed his second year at Louisiana Tech, Sheehan had signed up for a summer course at San Francisco State College.

Although Flynn and Fox didn’t have room enough for him and all his instruments in their apartment, the Pre-Residents (living near the train tracks in an iffy part of town) agreed to let him stay with them for the summer.

“I wanted to play music,” Sheehan explains. “And the only organ I had—the only keyboard I had—was that B3. If I’d had a smaller organ I obviously would have brought that because those things weigh about 400 pounds. That was probably not the wisest move in my mind, but I was 19. I didn’t know any better. And

on top of that [The Pre- Residents] lived upstairs. I think they almost threw me out before I even moved in.”

Shortly before Sheehan’s arrival with his U-Haul full of instruments, Charles Bobuck happened into what would turn out to be another fortuitous and necessary link in the eventual creation of The Residents.

“As a gay person, I’m very interested in the way men think,” he says. “The creative motivations of men. So I bonded with this guy who was just back from Vietnam, and he was going through this fundamental readjustment—‘I don’t know who I am, I’ve been in Vietnam, my life has just totally flipped over.’ We spent a lot of time together and talked about it. I played his psychologist, I guess. Eventually we figured out together that he should go back to his little pad and marry his sweetheart. He’d bought this really nice tape recorder when he was in Hong Kong—it was a high end machine, and he said, ‘I really want you to have this.’ I said, ‘No, no, you bought this, you should keep it.’ And he said, ‘No, you need this machine—basically I brought it back for you, I just didn’t know it.’ So I took it.”

“Ultimately,” Flynn elaborates, “it was a precursor of a multi-track, but it was two tracks. What made it unique was the fact that you could record the two tracks separately, but you could also record something, mix them together on the free one, mix that down to the other two, then record on the free one again. And you could just do that indefinitely. Every time you do that, you’re building up generations on the one that you’re mixing to.

It offered them an opportunity to do a rough form of multi-track recording.”

Bobuck continues, “I received this machine at the same time Roland shows up with a trailer full of instruments. So you’ve got a trailer full of musical instruments on one side, and a tape recorder on the other. So what are you gonna do? You’ve got to make noise and record it. In fact you’re going to record every single thing in the entire world. You’re gonna do nothing but tape. Tape tape tape. And then you’re gonna start cutting it together. That’s

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when I really started learning how to edit noise. That’s how it really got started on my side, as an engineer running the tape recorder, and then spending a lot of time with a razor blade, cutting it all up and putting it back together again.”

Sheehan remembers sitting around with the Pre-Residents as they played with the instruments and together they all began experimenting. “We were knocking a few ideas around. I was the only one to have any kind of musical training or knowledge at all. In my naive mind at that point in time, I was not really arguing with them, but my point was that the more musical knowledge you have, the easier it makes things. Their point was just the opposite—that that knowledge actually blocks you from trying something. I was of course saying, ‘No, that knowledge allows you to know what things to try,’ and they were saying ‘That’s the problem—you limit yourself.’ So we went round and round.”

“There were the instruments and the tape recorder,” Flynn says. “And of course there were a lot of drugs. Ultimately that was the pool of assets they were drawing from. So they just started beating on things. And of course they recorded everything they did. Roland had skill, Roland could play. They couldn’t do anything but beat on things, but they had some level of discerning taste.

You put a thousand monkeys in front of typewriters for a thousand years, one of them’ll write the Gettysburg Address. It’s the same kind of deal—you get a bunch of drug-crazed hippies beating on shit long enough and recording it, and if someone can actually pick out the little nuggets from that, then you can fashion something.”

Bobuck agrees. “It was true—it was a lot of noise making. And my sense was that it was the cutting it together and editing it that gave it organization. I always felt that I could turn just about anything into something.”

The top-floor apartment where all of this was taking place was, needless to say, not air-conditioned. One particularly hot

afternoon when everyone decided to take a break from the banging and the taping, Sheehan wandered over to one of the open windows to get some air.

“Down there on the street there was this old, dark green ’52 or ’53 model Chevrolet pickup,” he recounts. “The paint on it was already faded and up on the roof there were some rusty areas. But what I noticed though was the bed of the pickup was packed full, over and above the height of the cab, with nothing but rusty coathangers. It’s true! I don’t know how many there were—hundreds if not thousands were in that truck. So I turned around and looked at them and said ‘I got it—how about ‘Rusty Coathangers for the Doctor’?’ They looked at me like, ‘what are you talking about?’ and I said y’all come over here and look out the window.

That’s how it started.”

He’d brought a cheap Yamaha guitar along with him in the trailer, and quickly restrung it so he could play it left-handed.

“I made up about three or four chords.

I took their advice—don’t use musical knowledge—so I just randomly made three or four chords. As I remember I think they wrote most of the words. I think they just took my line and went from there. They had a two-track reel to reel, and some cheap microphones, in fact they may have just had one microphone.

And that was the way we made that. That was about as lo-tech as you can get. The Residents basically started from there.”

Shortly after finishing the four-minute “Rusty Coathangers for the Doctor,” Sheehan and the Pre-Residents recorded another song, “When Roy Stuffed Trigger,” which Sheehan describes as ‘a lovely ballad.” (Although not officially considered “Residents songs,” as they were recorded some two years before the band had a name or any real idea what it was they were doing, those two stillunreleased songs remain the most storied “mystery tracks” in Residents history, the subject of endless speculation among fans. These speculations are re-ignited every few years when a snippet of one or the other appears online via some shadowy source.)

Come the end of the summer, Sheehan packed up his instruments and returned to Louisiana. The Pre-Residents, however, having found some direction, something to do, immediately began scouring the local thrift stores and pawn shops in search of new instruments (or at least things that could be used as instruments) and continued to bang on them, recording every moment.

During that period of early experimentation, the Pre-Residents received any number of curious visitors. Along with old friends like Flynn and Fox, John Kennedy and Jay Clem (having recently emigrated to the Bay Area) stopped by occasionally, along with neighbors, dealers, and passing acquaintances. There were also a lot of girls.

“You’re talking about some pretty young kids. So they’re still at home,” Fox says. “It’s not like they’re hanging out with them or anything, cause they’re in the weird place down by the railroad tracks.

It wasn’t a good part of town. But they

were interesting, and people liked to visit them.”

Among them was Margaret Swaton (nee Smyk), a lovely, auburn-haired 19 year-old who would often visit with friends. In the months to come, she would play two pivotal roles in the future direction of what would become The Residents.

“When I was in high school I was a good kid. Never cut school. But I was always odd in my thinking,” Swaton says. “Everyone would always talk to me because they knew that I didn’t care if you got pregnant or whatever. I was pretty open minded, which is why I fit into the hippie thing so well. It just made sense to me.”

Having grown up some ten miles from The Haight, she found herself in the right place at the right time. She met Jimi Hendrix, Jerry Garcia, Timothy Leary, and Owsley. And the Pre-Residents. According to Swaton, she and her friends were regular visitors to the San Mateo apartment.

“I remember one night we had all just dropped some acid, and we were all just sitting around tripping and talking, and they brought out an old recording machine. And they had some instruments around, and everyone started banging and singing and being silly. And they said, ‘You know, you could be a great character.’ They put a microphone in front of my face and I just couldn’t talk. It scared me.

I couldn’t sing or talk, so they had to work with me just to be able to talk. It wasn’t because of the drugs. I was shy in a lot of ways.”

Swaton had worked and saved all through high school, and upon graduation in 1970 took herself on a trip to Europe. “That was the time to go with the hippies and everything. That was just a blast over there,” she says. While in London, she met up with a friend from high school, and they found themselves in Hyde Park.

“My friend was a gorgeous, gorgeous girl, so the two of us were just sitting there digging it and probably getting stoned. And two guys were there watching us and waving, and before you know it they came over. We hung out the whole two weeks we were in London. And one of the guys was Philip.”

Philip turned out to be virtuoso guitarist Philip Lithman, who in years to come would be better known as Snakefinger.

“So they showed us around London and we went camping and all this stuff,” she continues. “Philip was a phenomenal musician. He was in a group at the time over there, but anything with strings he could play. When I left to go home I told him he could come visit, and I said, ‘You’ve got to meet these friends of mine.

You have to, you’ll love them.’”

A few months later—near the end of 1970 or beginning of ’71—Lithman appeared on Swaton’s doorstep. As promised, she brought him to San Mateo to meet the Pre- Residents and hear what they were up to. Flynn says there was an instant rapport between Lithman and the Pre-Residents. So much so that within a few days, Lithman moved into their apartment.

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doing at that point, going solo without Roland and his instruments,” Flynn says.

“And Philip could really appreciate what they were doing. He could appreciate the aesthetics if not the lack of skill. They were sort of able to create something that meshed in a way that was kind of unique.

Wildly wildly experimental at that time.”

Swaton herself seems surprised at what that chance encounter in a London park had turned into. “I was just blown away at how well they got along. He ended up staying. At one point I was going to marry him to keep him legal. I forget what happened but it turns out we didn’t have to do that. But they hit it off. He was the only one who could play an instrument.”

While he was in town, Lithman was anxious to play out. In 1971, the easiest way to do this was to pack up an acoustic guitar and hit the local clubs on Monday, which was open mic night. So accompanied by Homer Flynn and Pre-Resident Randy Rose, Lithman began making the rounds.

It was not a fun night for Flynn and Rose. As Flynn describes it, “After sitting through endless James Taylor and Crosby, Stills & Nash wannabes, we were bored out the wazoo.”

As coincidence would have it, the following Monday the Mysterious N. Senada—who would go on to become The Residents’ philosophical guru—made his debut on one of those same stages.

Just as coincidentally, Flynn was lucky enough to be in the audience.

“The Mysterious N. Senada did about 15 minutes of free-form saxophone and poetry reading,” Flynn recalls. “And let me tell you, after following up eight or ten acoustic guitar players, he had no problem getting everybody’s attention in the place. For some of them this was a good thing, and for some people it wasn’t.”

More than one person recounts stories of patrons cornering the Mysterious N. Senada following his set to wildly and sincerely praise his mastery of free-form jazz.

At least one compared him with Charlie Parker. Little did these patrons know that the Mysterious N. Senada had absolutely no idea how to play the saxophone.

After noting the audience reaction, the Pre-Residents quickly began to develop plans for a more ambitious performance.

And part of those plans involved Margaret Swaton. The first step was convincing her to speak into a microphone. Once she was comfortable with that, the next step was to find a name for the character she’d be playing.

“My name being Margaret, Peggy was the nickname. Some people did call me Peg or Peggy. We were all going around and around about it, and I said something about Peggy and they said ‘Oh! Peggy Honeydew!’ I don’t know where they came up with that, but it stuck. I just put my fate in their hands—whatever you want me to be, I’ll do it.”

With the addition of an evening gown, a blonde wig, and a fancy broadbrimmed hat, Swaton was transformed into the Fabulous Miss Peggy Honeydew, the eternal and eternally classy nightclub singer who made such an indelible impression on Residents fans.

On the evening of October 18, 1971, a mob—including Snakefinger (in a tuxedo), the Mysterious N. Senada (in his traditional trenchcoat, fedora, and sunglasses), the Pre- Residents (in cheerleader outfits with the exception of Charles Bobuck, who carried a bass drum and wore a marching band uniform), Jay Clem, John Kennedy, Peggy Honeydew, Homer Flynn, Hardy Fox and a cellist in a wedding dress who just wandered in that night—commandeered the stage at The Boarding House on open mic night. After N. Senada’s innocent enough opening (“Hello everybody. How you all a-doin’ tonight? Well, here we are again, with a nice little show all worked up for ya.”), they befuddled, amused and terrified an unsuspecting audience with an unholy (and decidedly un-mellow) mixture of music, chanting, hooting, hollering, poetry and noise.

Peggy Honeydew was introduced about ten minutes into the performance, and sang a catchy little number that begins, “Go fuck yourself on the doorknob, mom / In a mouldy auditorium...” Then after some more wacky goings-on, the Mysterious N. Senada led everyone away, tooting on his saxophone. The entire absurd and baffling performance lasted about twenty minutes. A recording of the event appeared on The Residents’ Daydream B-Liver CD. “To our way of thinking,” Fox explains, “it was more of a Happening, it wasn’t a concert or anything. It was a surprise for the audience, because this was open mic night and this just happens.”

To Swaton, however, it was her first time performing in front of a real crowd.

Bizarre and funny as the entire event was intended to be, she knew she wasn’t a singer but had to sing, and she was nervous. “The place wasn’t packed that night because it was open mic night,” she says.

“But I remember that I was so scared that I couldn’t look at the people. So I played kind of the haughty type—I looked at the seating around them. Cause I was afraid if I looked at them I’d start laughing. I always laugh when I’m nervous. It was nerve-wracking for me, but I was okay once I got going. And afterwards they all gave me big hugs so I felt I better. I felt so stupid, but it was fun, I had a good time.

Just wish I could remember more of it.”

Peggy Honeydew would perform at a few more live shows, and later make an unforgettable guest appearance in The Residents’ film, Vileness Fats, flirting with Siamese twin tag-team wrestlers. Afterwards, she drifted away into legend. “It was a blast,” she says now of her days with the Pre-Residents. “It was a sign of the times.”

In the months following the Boarding House performance, the still-unnamed group recorded two unreleased albums, and Snakefinger returned to England (he came back in the late ’70s to pursue his own career, and worked closely with the Residents on a few albums until his untimely death in 1987). In 1972, Randy, Charles, Bob and Carlos left San Mateo and moved into a warehouse at 20 Sycamore Street in San Francisco. A few years later they were joined in the warehouse by the members of the newly-

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formed Cryptic Corporation: Fox, Flynn, Clem and Kennedy (their college friend Palmer Eland moved in as well, but didn’t stay long). It was in that space that The Residents—now complete with a name and a solid direction—would get down to the work that would consume them for the next forty years. But if not for a series of chance encounters, unexpected gifts, coincidental geography, and assorted cultural forces intersecting with a rare synchronicity—together with maybe just the slightest whiff of Louisiana voodoo—it might never have happened at all.

The rest, as they say, is mystery.

“Who would have thunk it forty years ago that we’d still be talking and they’d still be playing?” Swaton asks. “They were just this weird little band.”

Of course given that this weird little band we’re talking about is The Residents, it’s entirely possible that all these people have been lying. It’s also just as possible that I’ve been lying. Who knows?

Even if there is no outright fibbery involved, we’re dealing with events that occurred over four decades ago in a fog of pot smoke and acid. Memories can be funny, scratchy things sometimes, and there’s very little by way of a solid historical record to back up any of this. According to Flynn, about twenty years ago The Residents destroyed most of those early tapes—countless hours of material. “The idea that someone might come along after they died and discover all these unreleased tapes was just too horrific, so they made sure that wouldn’t happen,” he says.

There is also little if anything of a photographic record of those early years.

“Some if not all of the negatives seem to have disappeared somewhere,” Flynn admits of all the photos he took back then. “There are a few prints, but I don’t know that I have any prints at this point that were taken back in San Mateo. Or if I do it’s very few. Which is kinda too bad. I don’t know that they had that much artistic value, but they had nostalgia if nothing else, and some level of historic value. But whatever. What survives is what survives.

What’s in the museums is what survives, not necessarily what’s good.”

Fox seems even less concerned with such historical issues. “The reality is that I’m not really a person who lives in the past,” he says. “So I don’t really think about any of this time period. I have too much going on right now, too much planning out what’s next. I’m not always the best at remembering things.”

So in the end, yes, who knows what’s true and what’s not with The Residents?

Maybe they weren’t hippies at all. Maybe, as I’ve always quietly suspected, they really are extraterrestrials. And if so, does it really matter? I for one prefer to believe that Paul is dead and Elvis is alive.

It makes for a better story. As Charles Bobuck notes on his website, Codgers on the Moon, “Remember, we are all very deep within an illusion, and the bread crumbs we dropped have long since been eaten by crows.” ✹ Jim Knipfel wrote about the Residents in STN#28.

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THE FORGOTTEN MAN

Unfairly relegated to the margins of art history, Ben Patterson is a founding member of the Fluxus movement who folds together sound and visual art.

By Melissa Venator with an interview by Damon Smith.

Photos by Pete Gershon.

There are many peripheral figures associated with Fluxus, but only one was present at its birth and remained an influential and active member through most of the ’60s.

Of all Patterson's iconic Fluxus works, 1961's Variations for Double Bass has the greatest appeal for today's music audience.

Patterson wrote it as a seventeen-part solo for his instrument, partly in dialogue with prominent figures in modern classical music. But, as was typical of the 60s, he critiques these greats from a stance of gentle mockery, as when he instructs the performer to “produce a number of arco, quasi-webern [sic] sounds” after tuning the instrument to whistles and bird calls. Here the unconventional tuning undermines the pseudo-serious Webern reference. The score itself adopts the instruction format made famous by Cage, one of Patterson's great early influences, with the playful absurdity that would later define one strand of Fluxus performance.

Patterson continues this tradition of reverent irreverence in his current practice.

Consider 1993's A Short History of Twentieth-Century Art, a seven-part assemblage of everyday items and text composed on wood panels. The panel dedicated to John Cage is representative. At the bottom Patterson spells out “since John Cage this is music” in multicolored children's alphabet letters. Above he arranges two CDs, a small metronome, and a wax watermelon slice

to form a smiling face. Patterson's meaning here is ambiguous: if the smiling face represents music after Cage, how should we interpret it? Do the CD-eyes expand the reach of music or degrade its quality? Is the metronome-nose a rhythmic straitjacket, or does its harnessed state represent its eclipse? Most insidiously, the smiling watermelon-mouth is an iconic racist stereotype of African-American culture we mistakenly consign to the past. Too often, viewers interpret such contradiction as absurd nonsense; I argue that the artist presents these contradictions as an essential quality of our postmodern age. Patterson's work from the 1960s to the present reveals both the freedom and hypocrisy of today's art and musical communities.

Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1934, Ben Patterson followed a familiar path to music: childhood lessons led to private studies in double bass and a music degree from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in 1956. Note the year. In preCivil Rights Era America, African American musicians faced insurmountable barriers in orchestral music. Despite his ambition “to be the first black to ‘break the color barrier’ in an American symphony orchestra,” no one would hire him. So he went to Canada, where he served first as principal bassist of the Halifax Symphony Orchestra and later as principal bassist and assistant conductor

of the Ottawa Philharmonic Orchestra.

In Ottawa he began to experiment with electronic and serial music, an interest that led him to the 1960 International Society for Contemporary Music festival in Cologne, Germany. After a disappointing meeting with Karlheinz Stockhausen, whose “excesses of… egocentricity” revolted him, Ben met John Cage and performed at a nearby counter-festival. That day marked the start of Patterson’s engagement with neo-Dada art and music. For the next three years he moved between Germany and France, composing, performing, and organizing concerts of experimental music, including the 1962 festival in Wiesbaden where Fluxus was born.

In 1963 Patterson returned to New York City and continued to participate in Fluxus activities there while working as a music librarian. But already divisions had formed between him and the Fluxus mainstream. The Civil Rights Movement and anti-war protests electrified the nation, and Patterson heard the call to action. In contrast, Fluxus and its self-proclaimed leader George Maciunas adopted a decidedly apolitical stance. As a result of this and other factors, between 1966 and 1988 Patterson retired from art to pursue a series of leadership roles in New York music organizations. In the 1990s, increased interest in Fluxus, mostly in Europe, encouraged him to return to making art and music.

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Since then his art has grown in popularity, although without bringing widespread recognition outside gallery settings in the U.S. That all changed in 2010 with the opening of Benjamin Patterson: Born in the State of FLUX/us at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, ending many years of neglect with his first major retrospective at an American museum. The accompanying catalogue accomplishes two major feats: its essays offer a thorough introduction to the elusive Patterson, and its high-quality reproductions and two CDs of recordings document more than four decades of protean art.

Reading Born in the State of FLUX/us, I was reminded of 2000’s Yes Yoko Ono, a similarly comprehensive catalogue on an under-documented Fluxus artist that nonetheless overwhelmed even diehard Ono fans (yes, they exist) with its sheer volume of material. In contrast, this catalogue is accessible yet manages to convey the complexities of his practice. STN readers will appreciate its special attention to Patterson’s identity formation as a musician, something not all museum projects handle well. Trombonist and musicologist George Lewis’s essay on the role of improvisation in Patterson’s practice is a case in point and offers a refreshingly non-Fluxus-centric analysis.

STN readers will also enjoy the two CDs of recordings, which date from 1962 to 2010 and include all of Patterson’s major works. Of special note is a recording of a landmark early performance of the masterpiece Variations for Double Bass from a 1962 concert in Wuppertal. It is remarkable this historical recording has survived, though the audio alone is only a partial document; fortunately, the original four-page score is reproduced in the catalogue. Inspired by John Cage’s work with prepared piano, Patterson combines some of the earliest explorations of prepared bass (foreshadowing the work of Barry Guy) with neo-Dada performative elements. As a result, the recording alternates fascinating audio of early preparations with extended passages of crowd response made puzzling by the absence of video. What is he doing to make them laugh so hard?

One important point bears repeating: extant scholarship overlooks Patterson’s contribution to Fluxus during its formative years. There are several explanations for this silence (all discussed at length in the catalogue essays): Patterson’s 1967 ‘retirement’ from art in favor of a day job and regular paycheck; his criticism of George Maciunas’s leadership of Fluxus; his background as a classically-trained orchestral double bassist (an unusual pedigree in Fluxus); and the racism he encountered as an African American who came of age in a segregated society. These are all fascinating issues, and every reader will find a story that resonates with her interests.

Having read many Fluxus accounts, what impressed me most was how the constellation of viewpoints expressed by the eight essayists exposed tensions in the attempt to canonize Fluxus and name Patterson as one of its saints. In fact, one of the catalogue’s weaknesses exposes this tension: many of the essays cover the same material, especially Patterson’s early biography

and the historical events surrounding Fluxus’s 1962 birth. When I say “cover the same material,” I mean exactly the same material—over and over—in a litany of wellworn anecdotes. Ironically, this repetition emphasizes the small differences between accounts—differences that have more to do with the authors’ personal visions of Fluxus than actual historical events.

The picture that emerges, especially from Patterson’s account, is of a loosely affiliated group of like-minded ex-pats in Europe traveling under the neo-Dada banner, that in 1962 transforms overnight into the official Fluxus movement thanks to Maciunas’s (self-)promotional efforts. Lewis hits the nail on the head when he describes Fluxus as “a socio-artistic network concerned with the production of knowledge—oral, written, and graphic—about itself.” If Fluxus was a network, Maciunas was at its center.

Patterson describes Maciunas in unflattering terms: “I was not greatly impressed with his artworks. (George was a notorious plagiarizer/‘arranger’ of other people’s works.) In the end my basic problem with George was the ideological hammer with which he tried to nail together all the varied Fluxus personalities and activities into a Maciunas-controlled monolithic structure.”

For Patterson, Maciunas’s vision of Fluxus presents a contradiction: advocating a message of liberation from artistic conventions, Maciunas dictates what artistic form that message can take thanks to his entitled sense of ownership over the Fluxus brand.

This Fluxus schism plays out in the catalogue courtesy of Jon Hendricks’s contribution. The fact of Patterson’s role as co-organizer with Maciunas of the 1962 Fluxus International Festival (recognized as the birth of Fluxus) identifies them as the movement’s founding fathers. Patterson remembers his creative participation in the festival’s production as a transformational moment in his practice. Likewise the exhibition organizers memorialize the importance of this primal moment in their subtitle Born in the State of FLUX/us. Hendricks, in a moment of striking inconsistency with other accounts of the event, demotes Patterson from co-organizer to a “featured performer” on the festival program. In a well-meaning effort to stress Patterson’s historical relevance, he also cites Maciunas’s later performance of “pared-down” versions of canonical Patterson scores, to validate Patterson’s prominence in the movement.

Hendricks even reproduces Maciunas’s version of Variations, in which the original four pages of instructions are reduced to a single sentence. Why not just perform the original piece?

I normally hate articles that fixate on this sort of internal squabbling, because they never seem to answer any important questions. In this case, however, Hendricks’s desire to put Patterson in his place—appropriately subservient to Maciunas—illustrates the type of institutionalized oppression that Patterson has encountered (even as recently as last year). It is unfortunate that in the U.S. we have had to wait so long to learn about his important contributions to avantgarde art practice. Thankfully, Patterson has returned to art and is producing new works; both the exhibition and its catalogue will ensure his legacy for future generations. ✹

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Seeing Ben Patterson’s exhibition, and subsequently performing his work Variations for Double Bass (1962) as part of it, was a life-changing experience for me. Of course, Ben being a double bassist is a big part of my interest in his work. I also started to study visual art early on in a search for answers regarding abstraction in music. Art soon became a strong secondary interest and part of my work. Ben’s exhibition presented paintings, scores, objects, sound, texts, actions, and even “a normal life” all as his body of work. It gave it me a much clearer way to proceed.

When he returned to Houston for a performance at the Contemporary Art Museum Houston, we split a bucket of crawfish and dozen raw oysters at the Ragin’ Cajun before moving on to one of Houston’s best coffee shops, Greenway Coffee.

In your early Fluxus years, were you crossing paths with a lot of the different new music people and improvising musicians and free jazz musicians at the same time?

Yes. In the early Fluxus years, the very, very, very beginning, it was presumably new music that we were presenting. And my first pre-Fluxus things—beginning in Cologne in the ’60s. It was a seminal meeting with John Cage and David Tudor, Christian Wolff, and that focus was on music, although it expanded afterwards into other things. I was always reasonably close to musicians, perhaps more than many of my Fluxus colleagues, who were not necessarily musicians. And then later when I became, shall we say, not so fully engaged with Fluxus, around ’66, and worked more administratively in arts organization situations, the program I developed for the state council called Composer Performance covered, by my insistence, everything from Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor to Milton Babbitt. I don’t think that there were that many, with the exception of La Monte Young—although he had sort of backed off Fluxus—and Henry Flynt, who never really claimed to be Fluxus. But the rest were not really that focused on music. Certainly not free jazz.

Do you think that the bass specifically opened you up to the kind of art that you started to pursue with Fluxus?

That’s an interesting question. Probably yes, because when I was in university, I took composition courses also, but I never wrote anything for bass. There were a couple ensemble pieces for various instruments but the bass was never in that. I remember the first piece I wrote for bass was Variations for Double Bass. And that was after, of course, encountering John Cage live. The variations began as my answer to the prepared piano, of course. And the preparations became more elaborate and then at some point I discovered that they didn’t have to be on the strings and it became an instrument for, in simple terms, theatrics. It became an object that could be manipulated. It’s hard to do a lot of those things with the flute. So perhaps if I’d been a flute player, I wouldn’t have made variations for a flute that would have led eventually to the other things.

that’s a piece which goes beyond just the visual aspect of the work. Another piece is about frogs. [Laughs] Well you saw that, Pond. I recently discovered an internet site on which they have listed how people try to imitate frog sounds in 68 different languages. [Laughs] The English is ribbit, ribbit.

But the Chinese have their own—Russians, Afghans, and so forth. So you have the visual, but also you have to make the sounds yourself in your head, if not out loud, to make the thing work. So I use that kind of text information a lot in the work, because it adds another dimension to it beyond the color and the shape and form.

One of thing that was striking about the big retrospective you had at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston was how you didn’t leave anything behind.

It wasn’t a linear thing—like you played bass and then went into Fluxus and then stopped. You even had landscape painting at one point. And I thought that was really beautiful, that you were ready to use whatever you think you need to use to make the piece. And that’s a different attitude than a lot of people have.

Damon Smith and Ben Patterson in Houston, January 4, 2013

You did early things in Wuppertal, right?

You’re talking about the Galerie Parnass. It was in June of 1962 and George Maciunas had been invited to present a lecture about what he considered then to be Neo-Dada.

It wasn’t Fluxus yet. Fluxus was just the title of the festival that was going to happen.

And I was asked to make a music demonstration: it was not the first performance of Variations for Double Bass, but it’s the best documented performance of it from those days. And from the first two or three years, I kept adding new variations, but that was the most complete. After that, I’m not sure there were any major variations added to it.

Well, the Wuppertal thing... My activity there was based around this gallerist JeanPierre Wilhelm, who was very open and very aggressive in promoting avant-garde stuff. And Pina Bausch already was there, and then there were a couple of other names that I don’t remember right now.

But in terms of that area I think it was the most progressive.

A lot of your work in the last couple of decades seems to exist in a psychological place rather than on the wall or even in sound.

Part of my interest had always been in the notion that the market corrupted the artwork. And the simplest way would be to dematerialize the work. In other words, there is no material there and you can’t market it. And music fitted into that role.

Well, I guess you could say brain manipula-

tions, working with the whole thought process, for what is thinking?, how do you think?, and so forth. That all fitted into that pattern. So the Museum of the Subconscious, of course, belongs to that, and the latest work, which I will be performing on Sunday, called A Penny for Your Thoughts.

And this company I established called Patterson’s Interiors. We’ve been decorating, renovating, remodeling minds, great and small, since 1934. And so we will decorate your mind with tidbits and leftovers. There’s a sort of parody on radio advertisements at work: “Call now for free estimate. Or just sell your old mind for cash now!” So it has a playful aspect, of course, but it’s also a way to make you aware that thinking is a willed activity or something that you can manipulate.

You’ve had a recent period of making objects again—how do you feel that music and the interior design of the mind feed back into making objects?

A work that I recently just finished, which is now in Amsterdam, makes use of text also—well, information, which in this case can only be conveyed by words. One piece has a midnight-blue background, and then there’s a series of white circle-y things like stars, with the names of various cities in Europe. And the whole thing is called Beethoven Slept Here. [Laughs] All the places where Beethoven overnighted for whatever reasons. You have to work out the map in your own mind, just from the clues there. But the object is there. And so

Well it may be because I wasn’t a quote “trained artist.” I didn’t go to art school.

The only creative courses I took would have been in music composition, which was leading to the serial school—and cut off that with Cage, and everything was open after that. So all the visual material is all selftaught. So there was no dogma that I had to break away from or stay with.

I think one of the things that music education starts with is to give us material to relate to each other and that it’s primarily a social activity.

It’s a social activity. You can sit in your studio and paint all day long and in the end you have ten paintings done… But you can’t really have a finished piece of music until you’ve presented it in a concert.

You can rehearse it all day long, but it’s not finished until it’s performed for somebody.

And that’s the social aspect of it. So it’s very different, I think. I mean okay, every artist wants to see [their art] go into a gallery some place, but it doesn’t have to go.

It doesn’t have to. Keith Rowe said he used to think improvised music was this living music that always happened. But now he realizes that after you do an improvisation it’s dead, unless you record it and then maybe it can live there. But every time a string quartet plays a Shastikovich string quartet, they’re bringing it to life. And so this composed music can have this life beyond other music because it can just be brought to life by real people.

By real people. Right. The improvisors, yes, unless it’s recorded, it’s gone. It’s an experience that’s changed them somehow or another, even if it’s something infinitesimal.

But they couldn’t sing it back to you.

Special thanks to Valerie Cassel Oliver and Alexandra Irrera

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ARABIC STRAINS

With myriad bands and one-off projects, guitarist Sam Shalabi bridges the cultures and sound-worlds of Cairo and Montreal.

Story and photo by Michael Chamberlain

I first met guitarist, oudist, composer, and musical guerrilla Sam Shalabi on a hot summer day in the early 90s. Tim Olive, the improvising guitarist, took me over to Shalabi’s apartment in the depths of St-Henri. The two of them didn’t play together while I was there, but they talked about music, art, literature, and the absurdities of life. We drank beer. A lot of laughs. A good vibe. Over the last twenty years, I’ve encountered Shalabi occasionally and our interactions are always leavened by his intelligence and warped sense of humor. You never quite know when Sam is going to throw some remark or comment, often scatological, out of left field into the conversation.

Montreal is the type of city that people fall in love with—or they leave. And it attracts a lot of creative people. Life is wonky. The French/English situation, with its attendant challenges and opportunities, negotiated at street level, encourages improvisation. Rents have historically been low, making it easier for artists to find time to do their work. There is a leveling effect, a kind of democratization that comes from money not being the be-all and end-all, because paying the bills is possible on half a job. People who don’t fit in elsewhere, who are looking for an experience with some bite to it, come to Montreal from other places. Or at least that’s the anglo transplant view of things. There are a shitload of artists in Montreal. It’s just a really creative place, and it doesn’t matter what kind of car you have, but whether you

can entertain or inspire people in your own voice.

Shalabi does that, in his music and in all aspects of his life. Sam is a kind of Buddha figure. In a weird way, he’s everywhere and under the radar at the same time, a softspoken, mild-mannered bearish man with insatiable curiosity and wit who’s played with virtually every improvising musician in Montreal in the last two decades.

He worked for years at S. W. Welch, the English-language used bookstore, in the old location on boulevard St-Laurent, the traditional east/west, French/English dividing line of the city. Shalabi worked a regular shift behind the counter, and you could count on a funny and thought-provoking confab with him anytime you entered the store. Welch’s has since moved north into the Mile-End district, much as the creative music scene of which Shalabi was such a vital part did in the late 90s.

Sam was born Osama Shalabi to Egyptian parents in Tripoli, Libya, where his father, an engineer, was working at the time. Shortly after he was born, the family moved back to Alexandria, and when Sam was five years old, the family migrated to Prince Edward Island, on Canada’s east coast, where he grew up. The self-described book geek grew up in a home full of recordings of Arabic music.

“My dad was just a huge fanatic of Egyptian music. He had a massive record collection. Our basement and the house was just full of vinyl. And he played the

kanun—not professionally. So that was really the first music that I heard, but I wasn’t into it. The first music that I really, really got into was punk rock. It had a big influence, but really it was one of those trajectories of getting into (from punk rock) post-punk, which kind of pulls you out into weirder domains a little bit, and then free jazz, and after that getting into jazz and bebop, which is why I realized that I had to go to school.” He did that, earning a jazz performance degree from St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, Nova Scotia. A year of woodshedding in P.E.I. convinced him by 1992 that he had to move back to Montreal if he was going to be able to explore the kinds of music that he wanted to. Shalabi had been a “bebop nut,” but he never took the plunge into the Montreal jazz scene, though he did play jazz gigs here and there.

“I dabbled,” he explains. “I wasn’t averse to jazz, but mainly as an orbit to what I was into, and I wasn’t even that much into free improv at the time. The free improv I ended up doing came after I had been playing jazz for a while and kind of wanted to link up the things I was into, which was more experimental rock, punk rock, post-punk, psychedelic. After I had studied jazz and had been playing that, free jazz seemed to link all that up, in an interesting way. And Arabic music too.

“I kind of rejected Arabic music for years. I heard it every morning growing up, because my dad listened to it every morning. But then one year he gave me

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an oud for my birthday. I’d never played an unfretted instrument. And then I started to listen to the music—the classics, Om Kalthoum—and the instrument was the portal to going back and listening to the stuff again. The stuff that really, really affected me was not the stuff that my dad was into, even though I loved a lot of that music, but it was Sufi music, which is more like folk music. It was music that just came up and affected me deeply. Sufi music from Upper Egypt, Turkey, and Yemen. I know just a tiny bit of what is out there in terms of Arabic music, but that got me started. And that got me into free improv again, in a kind of funny way, playing this instrument that had ‘funny’ scales, scales other than major and minor. That had a big influence on me getting back in. After I started playing oud, it seemed to open up into a lot of other things. It was a real revitalizer for me.”

By the mid-90s, Shalabi was becoming ubiquitous at improvised gigs in Montreal.

He had a countless number of projects going on at once, it seemed, and a funny name for each aggregation. He brought Tim Berne to Montreal one weekend. They played in a loft on St-Laurent Boulevard, just down the street from Welch’s.

There weren’t many places to play in Montreal in the mid-90s. There were always lofts and galleries in the plethora of abandoned warehouses in and near Old Montreal, but everything was temporary. And the bars—Shalabi burned down a bunch of clubs. Even if they had a good night, bar owners would tell him that his music was too fucked up. He’d come back a few weeks later with a new project under a new name. But then in 1997, Don Wilke and Ian Ilavsky founded Constellation Records and began putting on extremely eclectic bills—electronic, free jazz, free improv, noise, electro-acoustic, film projections—in an empty factory loft up on Van Horne, at the north end of the Mile-End district. They called the place Hotel2Tango. The Hotel. A couple of hundred people would show up for an evening’s set of performances. Ideas were exchanged, connections were formed. By 1998, Shalabi seemed to be everywhere on the scene, and he had two very exciting projects going—Detention, with drummer Alexander MacSween, and Shalabi Effect, with Anthony Seck, Alexandre St-Onge, and Will Eizlini.

Meeting bassist/composer Alexandre St-Onge was a key encounter for Shalabi: “Meeting him helped me a lot because he was someone from that Ambiances Magnétiques scene. He and Michel F. Coté were two of the only people, at least in my experience, who were reaching out and wondering what was else going on. And part of that reaching out was to enter the Anglophone world. A lot of what happened here would not have happened in the way that it happened without Alexandre and Michel partially, because it was a bit of an anglocentric scene. And they, because of their positivity and curiosity, were able to open it all up in a sense. They were able to bring in the tradition that was already here, that they were kind of trying to push, and that met up with what people in what was becoming the experimental

anglo scene were doing. So those two guys were really important. And Alexandre is still one of the best musical relationships that I have, because he’s constantly searching. That made it so that that level of experimentation wasn’t a fad at the time. It made it so there was a kind of rigorousness in it. That influenced everybody, from rock musicians to the musique actuelle people, because they started to notice what was going on as well.

“For me, the first groups that I did during this period were Detention and Shalabi Effect. Detention, we managed to set up the improv series at Isart and then the Casa when it opened, and tried to get people to be more interested in improv and what we were doing. And at that time it wasn’t that easy, because we were outside the more institutionalized experimental music scene. So people sort of thought we were jokers or frauds, initially, I think. At one point someone said that we managed to make both camps suspicious, because we weren’t playing musique actuelle and improvised music in the way it was recognized. It was coming out of rock and punk rock, but for punk rock people, we played too well!” Shalabi says, erupting in laughter. “But that sort of suspicion disappeared.”

For Shalabi, improvisation has always been a means to an end, rather than an end in itself: “It’s how improvisers work and what they do and how that relates to composition is what I find interesting. Improvisation is a fuel. When you do it, you learn a lot. It helps how you think about structure and organization. It teaches you a lot about everything. It’s like psychotherapy sometimes. You can locate bad tendencies in your playing. You learn about structure in ways that can be genuinely surprising.

You can take away from an improvisation a little wisp of a new way of looking at composition that really is ephemeral. At least the ritual of doing it—you’ve done it. So, when you’re writing music, you’ve been involved in that ritual, it feeds into what you’re doing in the best possible way, which is unconsciously. So that when you’re writing, you’ve flexed a certain muscle through improvising and stumbling on a structure. And that’s really valuable.

You can end up challenging yourself when you’re doing it quite a bit.”

Though St-Onge is younger by a decade, he and Shalabi connected immediately as two very open-minded musicians who relished taking musical risks. Shalabi and Anthony Seck were doing Shalabi Effect as a guitar-oud duo; St-Onge played the same show. It was at the time that Shalabi and Alex MacSween were doing Rumble at Isart. St-Onge started to perform at the Rumbles. A short time later, Shalabi invited St-Onge to join Shalabi Effect.

“We connected right away,” says St. Onge. “Right away we were talking about the music that we loved that we shared, the philosophers that he was reading—I was studying literature and philosophy at the same time—and the writers we like.

From free improv slowly I was coming more and more into electronic music, so I was sharing a lot of electronic music with Sam. Sam shared with me a lot of differ-

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ent world music, folkloric music, like from pygmy music to field recordings. So we started a real heavy exchange of music. It was really dynamic. It was like love at first sight. And that’s why we played so much together. And then I introduced him to some of the people I knew, like Michel F. Coté.”

St-Onge and Coté had formed the trio Klaxon Gueule with guitarist Bernard Falaise. They loved Shalabi’s oudinfluenced guitar playing and his openminded attitude, and he played some gigs as a guest with Klaxon Gueule, but never joined the group officially. Shalabi, St-Onge, and Coté also played as a trio, which was eventually dubbed Jane and the Magic Bananas. Their self-titled album was released on Coté’s & imprint in 2012, and the trio appear with spoken-word artist Fortner Anderson on his new release on &, Solitary Pleasures. Coté explains how the franco and anglo scenes were distinct and separate up to the late 90s.

“It was really two different scenes,” he says. “People were not talking to each other. It was amazing, because it was a bit stupid. At that time, I was in this Ambiances Magnétiques community. It was totally French-speaking. I mean really French-speaking. At one point I was aware that Montreal was attracting other people, other musicians from around this country.

And they were just arriving, and they were here and there but without any contact with us. Ambiances Magnétiques at that time, twenty years ago, was becoming more and more a big affair because of Victo, because of all different things. It was clearly attractive, but the real contact was not happening. I was very surprised to discover that there was a whole community of musicians in the Mile End who were doing stuff. I’m talking about Hotel2Tango and Constellation. They did not just appear as a spontaneous generation. They were really implanted there. A lot of people arriving here were totally open-minded about music in general. It’s a big quality. Sam was definitely one of them.”

Shalabi describes his path through the 90s: “In the early 90s, there was not a lot of money in Montreal, which was great for someone like me, because the rents were really cheap. The great thing about Montreal during that period was because you couldn’t really make any money, yet you could live fairly easily in the city, you were given free rein to do art and music. It wasn’t with this idea of commerce in mind.

A lot of people were in the same situation. Both Godspeed and Shalabi Effect were reaching towards something outside of rock. And so if you put those feelers out you’re going to end up in music that maybe won’t have a stylistic affinity with what you’re doing, but maybe a political or aesthetic affinity with it. And in Montreal that was kind of the feeling, where nobody knew where this was going. And that was very exciting. I think a lot of people found themselves musically during that period.”

And then Mauro Pezzente, the bassist for Godspeed, and his partner, Kiva Stimac, opened up the Casa del Popolo, at 4873 St-Laurent Boulevard, just below St-Joseph at the nexus of Ambiances Magnétique’s Plateau Mont Royal quartier

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and the Hotel2Tango’s Mile End. Finally, the permanent venue with an open booking policy that Montreal had been dying for. Vegetarian food, good coffee, good beer selection, music seven nights a week.

Soon after, Mauro and Kiva took over the Spanish Social Club across the street from the Casa and began putting on shows in the upstairs room, the acoustically friendly Sala Rossa. Montreal went from being an out-of-the-way afterthought for touring musicians to an important destination. The local scene exploded as a result of the newly created stability and contact with artists from outside the city.

Since the late 90s, Constellation Records and Alien8 Recordings have been the two labels that have documented most of what has been going on. Though Godspeed You! Black Emperor ended up getting the international recognition, the Arabicinfluenced, electro-psychedelic post-rock improvisations of Shalabi Effect were just as emblematic of the scene, both before and since the Casa.

Shalabi Effect released four titles on Alien8: Shalabi Effect (2000), The Trial of St-Orange (2002), Pink Abyss (2004), and Unfortunately (2005). Their most recent, Feign to Delight Gaiety of Gods, was released in 2012 on Annihaya, a Beirut label.

The first, self-titled Shalabi Effect album is a beautiful, thrilling, sprawling affair, an orgy of shape-shifting textures, electronic lava, guitar-oud jams, drones, and compelling tabla grooves. The centerpiece of the album is the back-to-back pairing of “Aural Florida (Approach),” a 10-minute blast of feedback-laden hard rock and electronic roar that ends with a few plucked notes on the oud, and “Aural Florida,” a 26-minute improvisation that begins with a dramatic intro, Seck’s guitar laying a bed of hard rock counterpoint beneath a soulful oud line from Shalabi. The music is dense and textured, like Exile on Main Street, one of Shalabi’s favorite albums, and the way that coherent structures emerge from the improvisation is irresistible. The result is a landmark recording.

One hot, humid July weekend in 2000, Shalabi, St-Onge, and Seck came to my place in the woods about an hour southwest of Montreal, wandering around with recording devices in a neighboring pasture in the inky darkness, risking the hazards of the pond and the electronic fence to capture usable sounds. One piece, “Uma,” was recorded in our studio space. Some of that material eventually ended up on The Trial of St-Orange, which signaled the group’s next move by opening with processed recordings of bird songs. Shalabi refers to the next album, Pink Abyss, as the Effect’s “pop” album. It is the group’s least rewarding album, an awkward attempt to deal with genre. There’s also a studio recording by Shalabi, St-Onge, and David Kristian, simply titled Kristian, Shalabi, St-Onge (Alien8, 2001), which was made shortly after the trio’s formation. Shalabi also released On Hashish (2001), Osama (2003), and Eid (2008) under his own name on Alien8.

Shalabi quit working at the bookstore in about 2002. Since then he has made his living from his music, apart from a stint as a home nurse for Kiva Stimac’s father,

Charlie, following a serious appendix issue that sidelined Shalabi for months.

Shalabi is not very interested in commerce. Michel F. Coté says that he’s the worst businessman he has ever seen.

Alex MacSween tells of the time Shalabi sent him a C.V. that consisted of a few lines’ output from a dot-matrix printer. He doesn’t have a web page and has never had a manager. He packs his guitar in a soft bag and wraps it in articles of clothing.

Shalabi Effect did not experience the relative commercial success that Godspeed enjoyed. The group toured the continent and England, but reception was mixed: audiences seemed to expect either Godspeed or AMM. In any event, Shalabi does not crave celebrity. And his frugality is legendary, though as MacSween notes, he’s not the kind of guy who will go and eat at Subway while other people in his party are dining at a more upscale establishment.

Shalabi’s friends and associates have the utmost respect for his outwardly easygoing intellect, as Michel F. Coté explains.

“Each time he comes to Montreal, I organize a dinner at my place, and Sam is there, and we eat and drink until three in the morning. And this guy is amazing because he can soutenir une conversation on very specific philosophical topics, with Alexandre St-Onge, who studied a lot of philosophy. He’s totally nuts about maths. He’s always pulling out of his bag books about mathematics and music. He’s informed, he’s very intelligent, he’s dedicated, he’s fantastic. He’s not a businessman.” Coté laughs. “But he’s a very open-minded musician. That’s a huge quality for a musician.

And it’s not so frequent in my opinion. For me there’s no salvation without this way of thinking, in music or in the arts in general.

And Sam’s right there.”

Coté has the utmost respect for the originality of Shalabi’s guitar playing. “I don’t know if when I’m speaking of Sam if I’m contaminated by the fact that he’s an incredible oud player. I saw him one time giving a one-hour oud solo, and it was fucking amazing—and then in a retrospective way I understand what made his style so specific. He’s totally oud-informed. He has this way of walking with his hands, both hands on the strings, this way of playing the bass notes at the same time as playing the high register. It’s a bit like if he has a split brain. That is one of the many specific aspects of Sam as a guitar player.

He has his own personality on guitar. He’s a virtuoso. At the same time, he’s not afraid of taking huge risks. I like that. He’ll scrap everything on a dime and then take a U-turn and go the other way. But that’s just talking about the guitar player. He’s an amazing composer. And he’s producing a lot of music with little time and little rehearsal time. He’s a real bulldozer in terms of composing skills. And he’s very aware of songs, instrumental difficult parts. He’s blending all those things together with quite fantastic effect.”

Shalabi is modest but matter-of-fact about his work with other musicians. Besides working with virtually every musician in Montreal, he’s played with Tim Berne, Joe McPhee, John Butcher, and Peter Brötzmann, with whom he played a memo-

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rable gig at the Sala Rossa—Brötzmann walked off the stage. Shalabi thought it was a joke. It wasn’t. A clash of aesthetic sensibilities. But no hard feelings. Just another experience.

All of Shalabi’s work is a provocation—a challenge to himself and the listener—and Osama, recorded in the year following 9/11, is his most provocative work. The music is harsh, angry, funny, playful dada, a reflection on the Arabophobia that surfaced in the wake of another Osama’s much larger provocation. The album resists earnestness and the desire to attach one specific meaning to the experience: ultimately, the music is both frightening and liberating in its examination of the collective and individual psyche in the wake of that most traumatic event. Increasingly, Shalabi was exploring his roots. The Arabic influence was already present in the music, but soon his story was to become a tale of two cities. Shalabi was being drawn to Cairo. But the first version of his Land of Kush project was in 2001, before he went to Cairo. One of the women who worked at the Casa del Popolo was Egyptian, and she wanted to have a hafla, a night of Egyptian belly dance, and she asked if Shalabi was interested in doing something related to it. The group sold out La Sala Rossa two weeknights in January. The audience loved the Egyptian junkyard soul of Land of Kush’s groovefest, but Shalabi wasn’t impressed.

“I had this ridiculous idea of doing one of these big orchestral things. So I wrote a long piece of music and gathered up musicians. We did two of them, and they went over really well, people really seemed to dig them. The response was great, but the music wasn’t really that good, partially because I didn’t know what I was doing,” he laughs. “And I didn’t know how to convey what I was attempting to do to the musicians. Then I dropped it and didn’t really want to do it again.”

“So then I went to Egypt the first time in 2006, and when I came back, Mauro said they were doing a big band series, and asked if I wanted to do something.

I had done Eid, where I’d used singers like Lhasa de Sela and Katie Moore, and that was a really fun experience, and so I thought I would do it with singers, which the other versions didn’t have. I had been asked to do something in Toronto as a kind of installation around this Pynchon book, Against the Day, and that fell through, and I thought maybe I’d use what I was working on as a template for this big band piece because I was really interested in doing something around this book. And that was it. We did it, and again I thought it was going to be a one-off. It was really Don and Ian from Constellation, who for years, I would do these shows, these oneoff pieces, and they’d want me to record it, but I was never happy with the results enough to do it. But this one, they really, really wanted me to do it. They said they’d do it and I’d just have to get the band in the studio and they’d take care of the rest.

The other big difference was the band itself. I kind of lucked out in that the core members of the band were just so committed to this thing and were so into it and were so generous in terms of their time. It

was actually the band that convinced me to do it. And that got things going, and then people wanted us to do other shows.

And then we did another album.”

Land of Kush has recorded two albums, Against the Day (2009) and Monogamy (2010), the second under the name Land of Kush Egyptian Light Orchestra, with a third on the way, recorded while Shalabi was in Montreal this past fall. Land of Kush (Shalabi claims that the name originally referred solely to the Kush region of the Upper Nile and only later did he learn the pot slang meaning of “kush”; I don’t necessarily believe him) is the major vehicle through which he expresses his compositional side.

“The progression of the band is that the music is more written. With the core of Kush, people are becoming more familiar with what I do, and I am more familiar with what they can do. Most of what we did on the third album, doing it four or five years ago would have been impossible. People weren’t familiar with things, even just Arabic scales. Now, everybody kind of knows what it is, so I feel like I can write something more involved and they can do it. I don’t know when we’ll do the next thing, but I’ll keep trying that, and I’ll use them as my guinea pigs.”

In 2006, he went to Cairo for the first time, staying there for nine months. He now splits his time between Montreal and Cairo. “I just fell in love with the city. It’s a hard sell. Some places you can describe how to seduce or entice someone, but Cairo is a hard one to do. It’s the whole thing with Cairo. The music scene is not really that good there. It’s getting better, but

that’s certainly not why I fell in love with the city. The city itself has a very bizarre combination of things that should work against each other but don’t. A big one is the density and the noise. A friend of mine told me that it’s the loudest city in the world. Very loud, very dense, very polluted. But that has a weirdly calming influence on you.

“The name of Cairo is al-Qahirah, which literally means ‘that which will conquer you; that which will defeat you.’ There’s a saying there that you have to let the city defeat you. In some ways in some cities you can kind of match the rhythm. With Cairo, you can’t. And the harder you try, the more the city defeats you. So, part of it is kind of surrendering to that, and once you do, that insanity and intensity becomes common. You start noticing there’s a kind of calm to all the insanity there. The other thing is that there’s so much stimulus everywhere in the city, and you can’t make firm plans, the whole incha’allah thing, but things work out. Things weirdly work out, but you have no idea how. That goes from the traffic, to projects, to the political situation. So I’m there for the experience of living there. And the people—there’s a grace and depth of generosity there that I’ve never experienced anywhere else. It’s a cliché about the Arab world, but it’s true.”

“There’s a little anecdote. One time Alan Bishop—he’s kind of living there as well and we’re good friends and hang out a lot there—we were buying groceries to go back to my apartment to make food.

This was during one of the crazy periods when there were demonstrations and the army was killing people. My apartment

was less than a block from Tahrir. There are many funny stories about that apartment where I couldn’t leave and had to sort of hide there, or couldn’t get to it. We were walking back to my place, and there was a demo on Mohammed Mahmoud, which is to my old street. There was a demonstration, and the army started shooting, both tear gas and shooting. This huge mob starting running towards us and towards my apartment, and we had to run. So we’re running, and I’m running with my groceries, and one of my bags splits open.

Two young guys immediately stopped, gathered up my groceries, put them in the other bag, and then kept running.” He laughs. “There’s that sort of thing, where it’s almost instinctive, and you feel that there’s another way to treat each other. All over Egypt, there’s a kind of compassion that people have there, and a genuine hospitality, that is so different from here.”

Nevertheless, the situation in Cairo is fluid. Shalabi went back to Cairo on December 17. His first concern was to see if he could get to his apartment in the Garden City quarter, the scene of many protests and confrontations. He eventually had to move to an area that is not so hard to get to.“Things just kind of come my way,” he says.“I don’t know how to look for work. How does one look for music work?

Your name has to be out there, and I’m not that well known, not that connected,” he insists. “But the work comes in. I’m lucky.” ✹ Michael Chamberlain wrote about the music scene in Istanbul in STN#54

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

Faust

Faust: Steven Gunther. Spooky: Metropolitan Museum of Art

Los Angeles, CA 10.19.2012 “Charge the batteries of your pacemaker!” exults Faust comandante JeanHervé Péron as he storms the REDCAT stage. He launches into a story of the drum procession of Bergen while a cycle of films projected in negative broadcasts in anticipation of a live action that is anything but negative. “Fresh air in Tokyo,” he exhorts, continuing ever-onward, “Before there was nothing… now there is nothing but… fresh air!” and giant drummer Werner “Zappi” Diermaier joins in with his percussive pulse-beat, banging away on a giant sheet of metal at his left and a 50-gallon drum besides. The bass melodies weigh firmly on Péron’s shoulders now as he leads this particular incarnation of Faust (Péron, Diermaier, Ulan Bator guitarist Amaury Cambuzat and British voodoo painter Geraldine Swayne), and CalArts students are brought on a stage arranged for cement mixer, whispered chorus, trumpet and French horn to perform a collaborative piece, Poème pour bétonnière et ensemble (2012). Zappi whips the metal sheet as a powerful chorus rises: “And Mommy’s blue…and Daddy’s blue…” It’s very much a Rock In Opposition feeling, with Zappi sporting jaunty beachwear, meandering with purpose in his floppy flowered hat, girding a grinder that spits out sparks by the gallon. Péron admits, proudly enough, “We don’t play rock ‘n’ roll, we just have fun with… c’est… com… com… compliqué,” and that’s where he goes next, playing the track from the 2009 LP of the same name—in one astounding and completely right-the-fuck-on moment.

Faust still has that same power to bewilder and mesmerize as they did for all those puzzled students in all that grainy film footage all those years ago. I am the absolute furthest thing from a hippie but I am so completely willing to go on Faust’s trip with them that it scares my hair.

Péron then offers a tender melody on acoustic guitar, sitting while Zappi grinds on and on, filling the air with stark naked ozone. Presently, Péron rasps various surfaces throughout the REDCAT auditorium, ultimately—ultimately!—sawing his chair in half with a chainsaw. Some people

just can’t sit still. He saws the words “Lave ton coeur” (“Wash your heart”) into a man-sized panel now ablaze with powder and haze. At the other end of the stage, Swayne paints with deep and awestruck fervor and sawdust flies through strobe lights, threatening to etch the most basic of all possible instincts into tonight’s memory. Péron’s sledgehammer batters the piano that he’d previously asked someone from the audience to play and accompany the sounds. Shock upon shock, he saws at it some more. The students are brought back onstage to perform a version of “It’s a Rainy Day, Sunshine Girl” and Zappi, beating a single drum, leads them all off stage and out of the theatre, buffeting the edges of the auditorium.

At the encore, Péron reveals, “We’re all waiting for the big man with the big nose,” and the aforementioned Zappi performs a dual double-kick-and-giant-tom assault as they then perform a vastly energetic version of “Krautrock.” It is a night that leaves one and all suitably exhilarated, floating in a state of happy disbelief that refuses to dissipate—or disappoint—and when Faust graciously emerges to greet those wigs that have been well and truly flipped, it is one diamond moment that remains for now and forever. David Cotner

DJ Spooky New York City 10.26.2012 01.18.2013

Paul D. Miller’s appointment as Artist in Residence for 2012–2013 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art is the brainchild of Limor Tomer, the Museum’s Concerts and Lectures General Manager. As expected, rather than programming and presenting music in the concert hall, Miller (better known as DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid) is using the vast collection at the Museum as both the context and source for multimedia concepts. Measure the dimensions of a sculpture and the results can be turned into pitch, rhythm and dynamics.

Think of an idea to express, and there’s probably a picture, or a dozen, that both illustrate it beautifully and give it a plangent historical and cultural context.

The first two performances of the resi-

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dency haven’t exhausted the possibilities, though. In October, Miller presented a screening of the Korean film Madame Freedom with his own original and remixed music enhancing the soundtrack. This is a project that predates his residency so there was no direct connection to the Museum.

The film, a revanchist look at the beginnings of economic and social liberation for women in 1950s Korea, is interesting as a look into cultural thinking, but it’s dated, a museum piece such as it is. Miller’s new music is uneven. The best of it is rich electronic sound that updates the aesthetic and has something to say about the drama, but much of it is arrangements of bits of “All Blues” and “Autumn Leaves,” and it comes off poorly in context. His violinist, cellist and electronic drums could not play jazz idiomatically, and the diegetic jazz in the movie is immeasurably more satisfying.

His first new work at the Museum was The Nauru Elegies, a digital age lament for the fate of peoples and geography exploited by late capitalism and destroyed by climate change. It’s more ambitious than Madame Freedom and much more enjoyable, though it too asserts meaning and relevance without fully conveying them. Miller and his musicians, a string quartet from the student new music ensemble Face the Music, play and remix live and recorded music while accompanied by a film that intersperses data, quotations, scenes from the island nation of Nauru and title-card like slogans. There is a lot of sincerely and effectively elegiac loveliness in the piece, but its point is left both obscure and unproven. Miller is a great gatherer of information of all kinds, from sounds to images to architecture and databases, and when his work is at its best it’s like a compacted great liberal arts education, making connections between disparate things that bring one to a new understanding. But he tends to assume that things like “hypsographic architecture” mean the same to us that they do to him, and he neglects the mise en scène that creates the context for his own work.

As a composer, his technique is schematic repetition, and that succeeds only as much as his material is interesting. There are plenty of interesting moments in The Nauru Elegies, but not enough to make it fully successful.

George Grella

Top: Faust and Friends in Los Angeles Bottom: DJ Spooky and Face the Music

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Open Waters Festival

Halifax, Nova Scotia 01.10-12.2013 Despite what you might guess, Halifax, Nova Scotia, the Canadian Maritimes’ largest city, has a thriving local arts community.

Settled around a natural harbor with the Atlantic on one side and the great northern forest on the other, the city is a place apart.

The resulting artistic activity is a response to the landscape and the relative isolation, and a manifestation of the will to survive.

The iconoclastic nature of the Halifax arts community is reflected in the timing of the Open Waters Festival, the second weekend in January. When Nova Scotia was dubbed “Canada’s Ocean Playground,” they probably didn’t have January in mind. Fortunately, the hotel offers a spa where the sauna, Jacuzzi, and heated pool could relieve the effects of the damp, windy cold.

The performances consisted of two double bills each evening, starting at 8, at the Sir James Dunn Theatre in Dalhousie University’s Arts Centre, and at 10 in the Khyber Arts Centre, a quirky old building on downtown Barrington Street.

Thursday at the Dunn featured the trio of cellist Norman Adams, bassist Lukas Pearse, and pianist Tim Crofts, and, in the second half, guitarist Geordie Hayley’s Threnodies, with Crofts on electric keyboard, Ronald Hynes on bass, and Doug Cameron on drums. Adams, Crofts, and Pearse presented a number of short pieces that balanced the

tension between detail and overall effect, making very natural and effortless transitions in measured movements. In contrast, the Hayley quartet was a bluesy, funky, raucous affair. The serious rocking felt a little out of place in the concert theatre setting. The revelation for me was Cameron’s understated and subtle drumming.

Afterward at the Khyber, the billed opening night reception and jam left out the jam as the attendees engaged in a round of getto-know-ya and enjoyed the generous buffet.

Friday was a night full of highlights, not all of them musical. The day started with an excursion to the famous lighthouse at Peggy’s Cove, about an hour southwest of the city, courtesy of Open Waters artistic director Paul Cram. That was followed by a bus ride across the harbor to Dartmouth to visit John Doull’s used book emporium, one of the finest I’ve seen anywhere. The happiest find of the day was a used copy of Patti Smith’s Kids.

Then it was back to the Dunn for the concerts, where the opening slot was a showcase for students in Dalhousie’s music program, followed by the Paul Cram Orchestra. The student ensembles—they performed in trios and quartets—tended to fuse elements of popular/folk music with contemporary classical harmonies and textures. Cram’s orchestra has been going for over twenty years, which showed in the musicians’ cohesiveness and ability to navigate through the sometimes tricky compositional elements. One got the feeling that they would have liked to stretch out, but the set was over too quickly before it was time to head back to the Khyber for the double bill of Newfoundland-based guitarist Brad Jefford’s Trio+. Their funky set was

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quite enjoyable, an excellent warmup for the surprise of the weekend, Mother of Girl, who drew a rather large youngish audience for their wonky, whimsical take on the cabaret tradition. Songs, featuring the gorgeous voice of Ann Denny, devolved into gorgeous soundscapes as Denny, Ryan Veltmeyer, and John Snow switched around on trombone, keyboards, and drums. The group had the audience rapt from the first note—absolutely the musical highlight of the weekend.

Saturday’s bill at the Dunn was opened by subText, a longstanding Halifax quintet featuring bass clarinetist Jeff Reilly, who is fairly well-known in contemporary and improvised music circles outside Nova Scotia. The performance was punctuated by playfulness and moments of great beauty, especially during “Fragments,” Carla Bley’s “Ida Lupino,” and “1313,” a Reilly composition written for Jerry Granelli. The second half of the program was Suddenly Listen’s Hourglass Ensemble, performing settings of Robert Herrick’s poems on death. Well, it was kind of dead all around, and I left early for the Khyber to catch up with vocalist Helen Pridmore, another old friend, who did a rigorous set of John Cage compositions for voice along with bassist Andrew Reed Miller. The evening and the festival closed out with a fun, raucous performance by a large group of veteran improvisers, most of whom had appeared in the festival.

It was an enjoyable weekend of old friends and new music. But while the commitment and dedication of everyone involved is undeniable, the festival’s challenge is to connect with the wider community.

Mike Chamberlain

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

Vintage ESP-Disk' artwork by Howard Bernstein

Always in Trouble: An Oral History of ESP-Disk, the Most Outrageous Record Label in America Jason Weiss

Howard Bernstein

Wesleyan University Press

Few record labels are as iconoclastic or storied as ESP-Disk’, the imprint founded in New York in 1963 by an ambitious young music lawyer named Bernard Stollman.

Recording such visionaries as Albert Ayler, Sonny Simmons, Marion Brown, Burton Greene, the Fugs, the Godz and Milford Graves, ESP was able in the best of instances to transform these musicians’ power and incendiary vibe to wax. With artwork that blurred the line between homespun documentation and psychedelia, roughshod pressings, and recordings that see-sawed between raw incision and hazy distance, the label’s aesthetic inconsistency has always been part of its charm.

Stollman started ESP with idealist inten-

tions alongside a cashed-in inheritance: the idea was to present avant-garde music in a relatively unencumbered, honest fashion, as an important part of countercultural consciousness-raising. But with just over a hundred LP releases in less than a decade, ESP was broke—the releases sold far fewer copies than anticipated, artists were frequently underpaid (if they were paid at all), and distribution problems were rampant. As a result, Stollman’s reputation among musicians’ circles was tarnished (to put it mildly), despite the strength and importance of the label’s catalog.

Historian Jason Weiss presents the ESP-Disk’ story in fascinating detail with this volume of oral histories and interviews with Stollman and many of the surviving artists and participants. Weiss allows the interviewees to present their experiences and opinions without gloss, and he avoids steering the interviews into unmitigated criticism (as much as that might be warranted). He also draws from a diverse group of artists, representing the breadth of the ESP roster. Stollman’s interview is extensive and focuses not

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only on the label but his family heritage, youth and military service, and early legal work—the foundations of a quirky entrepreneurial spirit. He represented the estates of Charlie Parker and Billie Holiday as well as providing services for Folkways’ Moe Asch, Bud Powell, Mary Lou Williams, Cecil Taylor and Ornette Coleman.

The label started incrementally with a 1963 Esperanto-themed folk record (Ni Kantu en Esperanto), then burst onto the scene with Albert Ayler’s Spiritual Unity and several other titles in 1965, the likes of which no other American record label could have dealt with at the time.

Stollman caught a wave somewhat by accident and let it ride, without really thinking of how it would play out; he enthusiastically guaranteed sessions for artists, seemingly without rejection. Promotion and distribution weren’t something ESP ever got a handle on, though some college radio connections seemed to help out in the early years (Stollman maintains that there was no proper distribution after 1968). Long after he was able to pay for them, Stollman kept releasing LPs by new artists and re-pressing earlier titles with

different artwork; it’s anybody’s guess whether that was due to faulty accounting or spur-of-the-moment decisions. There is also a degree of unbelievability to some aspects of his story, such as wiretapping and the CIA conspiracy to wipe out counterculture-supporting labels in part by bootlegging Fugs and Pearls Before Swine LPs (full disclosure: in my 2005 interview with Stollman for All About Jazz, these anecdotes were repeated verbatim).

The long history of licensed and unlicensed titles from overseas is documented here, although culpability is not really determinable—one has to chalk it up to naïve disorganization. ESP’s return to the market in 2005 is also discussed, though there are oddly few interviews with those currently involved with or recently departed from the label’s payroll (Sun Ra historian Michael D. Anderson being the exception).

Always in Trouble also features interviews with and statements by a host of former ESP artists and associates, including some real surprises, such as Jean Erdman, whose Coach with the Six Insides was issued on ESP in 1966, and is probably among the least-talked-about in the label’s oeuvre. The LP, a record of a theatrical and modern dance happening, is comparable to a Cageian radio play. Based on Finnegans Wake, its audio is somewhat analogous to the music of Harry Partch. Sal Salgado of Cromagnon, a Connecticut-based communal psych outfit, demystifies the “tribe” somewhat as an outgrowth of a Danbury blues-rock band The King B’s/Boss Blues. There is a fascinating and detailed interview with engineer/producer Richard Alderson, who recorded numerous ESP sides in addition to working for Prestige and engineering Bob Dylan and Harry Belafonte. There are also lengthy conversations with Tom Rapp (Pearls Before Swine), Pete Stampfel and Steve Weber (Holy Modal Rounders/ Fugs, contradictory as ever), Erica Pomerance, Paul Thornton (Godz), and Montego Joe—indeed, it’s important to note that ESP wasn’t just a “free jazz” label, though it introduced figures like Ayler, Sun Ra, Gunter Hampel, Henry Grimes and Sunny Murray to a (relatively) larger audience.

The new music was wide-ranging and allencompassing, at least in Stollman’s view.

While it is an excellent resource, Always in Trouble is by no means a complete documentation of the ESP saga. The label’s discography hasn’t been sorted out, and we will have to wait for a full survey of the releases’ artwork—as much as some might want this to be the definitive text, such arcana is necessarily outside of Weiss’s purview. But one thing is clear: if Stollman hadn’t been implored to see Albert Ayler in an uptown club (sitting in with Elmo Hope, of all people), or if he hadn’t followed that advice, the landscape of modern music would look quite different today. Sure, Impulse might have come around to Ayler’s work, or Reprise might eventually have put out a token Fugs record, but the documentation of this decade’s musical swell would have been left even more to the imagination than it already is.

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

Radu Malfatti and Taku Unami in a backstage, pre-show powwow

Keith Rowe September ErstLive CD

Radu Malfatti Taku Unami Radu Malfatti Taku Unami ErstLive CD

Antoine Beuger s'approcher s'eloigner s'absenter ErstLive CD

Christian Wolff Keith Rowe Christian Wolff Keith Rowe

Yuko Zama

ErstLive CD

The motivations that impelled the manifestation of improvisation as a distinct genre, as opposed to a handy tool, originally included a wish by certain musicians to divest themselves of the baggage of chords, history, tunes, ethnicity, etc.; the need of a small audience to vicariously experience freedom at a point in time when liberation was on the rise around the globe; and the appeal of making/hearing something that hasn’t been heard before, which resonated with a social milieu suffused with the notion that society could be remade anew and better.

Nearly a half century on, more people have played and heard the stuff, and it has gotten harder every year to find ways for it to not become codified and familiar. Erstwhile Records has kept its eye on the continually moving cutting edge, evolving from a label that supports certain sorts of improvised music, particularly electro-acoustic improv, to one that that provides a platform to artists willing to leave improvisation or even music behind in their pursuit of ways to make art that challenges its audience’s perceptions and its own relevance.

In 2011 The Stone, one of Manhattan’s last bastions of non-profit-oriented music, hosted one of

Erstwhile’s periodic festivals. The four CDs under consideration here each replicate one set from AMPLIFY 11: stones. The festival’s name looks like a tip of the hat to the venue, but it refers as well to Christian Wolff’s “Stones,” a composition that was recorded in 1995 by members of the Wandelweiser collective. Wandelweiser music accepts both spontaneity and planning as entirely acceptable methods of creating a music that respects necessary sound, refuses unnecessary commotion, and considers the myriad manifestations of silence to be at least as worthy as any sound. In recent years Erstwhile has released records by Wandelweiser exponents Michael Pisaro and Radu Malfatti, and the festival began and ended with evenings devoted to Wandelweiser music.

The opening set was a trio performance of Antoine Beuger’s s’approcher s’eloigner s’absenter. The piece’s score consists of thirty pages, each with a 3x3 grid populated with instructions to play something similar to what’s being heard, something different, or no instructions at all. While the score very specifically governs when and to what degree the players approach, remain proximate to, or withdraw from the music at hand, it is up to the players — Ben Owen on electronics, Dominic Lash on double bass, and Barry Chabala on electric guitar — to decide exactly what to play. There are long passages where their playing acts like projections of colored light that layer and mix, subtly altering a progression of luminous textures projected against a lightly grained backdrop of shuffling audience sounds and turning pages. But at points the sounds turn hard and steely, as though they’ve solidified before the projection surface and cast a shadow over it. The abraded sounds that the musicians play have been current in improvisation for some time now, but methodologically, this piece changes the question from “what do we play?” to “how do we realize this together?”

On Christian Wolff/Keith Rowe’s sleeve photo, the two septuagenarians sit at a table covered with guitars and gear, looking like two hobbyists who have gotten together on Sunday afternoon to get down to the important business of making ham radios or running model trains. And there’s something similarly focused yet casual about the way they shift between direct interaction and parallel play, creating twin streams of unemphatic but never uninteresting sound. Wolff is a composer and long-time associate of Merce Cunningham and John Cage who rarely improvises. He and Rowe first improvised together in 1968, but most of their very occasional encounters have occurred as part of AMM concerts. Rowe has also performed “Edges,”

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Wolff’s score for improvisers, on multiple occasions.

So this encounter from the festival’s fourth day is both new and not, pitting decades of familiarity against Wolff’s relative innocence as an improviser and the severe compaction that Rowe has applied to his sound vocabulary over the years. Wolff plays guitar, piano, and percussion here, and his playing counters Rowe’s severe concentration with a bold and refreshing simplicity.

Time, violence, and confusion all figure on September, a solo set by Rowe, which was recorded ten years after the dire events of September 11, 2001.

As usual, he plays tabletop guitar and electronics, including a shortwave radio. The set-up and technique are old news; what matters now is how Rowe both draws on and challenges a lifetime of practice. He has stripped away the rich, layered drones and layers of activity of yore, leaving blasted thumps, blasts, and buzzes punctuated by captured radio chatter and pop songs that express the acid paranoia and vapid longing for escape that pervade our age. It’s as though he’s cutting into the canvas, not painting on it. He paces his performance with iterations of the second movement of Dvorak’s “Piano Quintet in A Major,” only to cut it abruptly short or obliterate it with ugly noise. “Can you make anything as beautiful as me?” the recording seems to ask. “Should you? Can you subdue me? Can I rise anew?” Rowe’s solo performances have moved beyond pure improvisation to a form of real-time sound painting merged with symbolically conscious collage that faces down mortality and brutality by mirroring it, living with it, and using it.

Radu Malfatti/Taku Unami opens with an overheard conversation of audience members discussing the relative merits of live and recorded music, and ends with the two performers discussing whether or not they’re done. What happens in between examines those questions with rigor and mirth. Taku Unami spent this set projecting lights and building structures out of cardboard boxes.

Malfatti plays soft, low figures that wind through the sounds of Unami’s labor, the audience, and the street outside like a small and stealthy animal navigating a thicket. If you were there, you would have been treated to a visual narrative to consider in counterpoint to the subliminal sounds; on record, this translates into random percussive sounds stepping over barely-there brass moans as they stroll through the audio environment in which the action takes place. If you just want to listen to the sounds, you might find this one to be a head-scratcher; but if you want a record to make you rethink the merits and challenges of this music and its literal place in the world, this is the one to get. Bill Meyer

Oren Ambarchi & Robin Fox Connected Kranky LP/CD

Oren Ambarchi and Robin Fox composed this music for a dance piece by Chunky Move, and I highly recommend looking up the video or still-image excerpts of it available online. The five pieces here possess minimal development, and instead set the tone for scenes in the larger production. Just because there is little development within each piece doesn’t mean there is a lack of tension, however. If anything, there is more, as subtle variations on established patterns exert massive force on the listener’s attention. Both “Standing Mandala” and “Trios” end in gigantic swells, like a sudden run uphill and then the silence of falling over a cliff. Ambarchi mostly plays guitar on these cuts and Fox generally sticks to computer, but audiences familiar with either artist’s work will recognize the fluidity with which those instruments can meld.

I particularly love Fox’s work on “Trios,” a ravenous digital swarm like a thousand microscopic birds chattering, which recalls the frenetic improv of his underappreciated duos with pianist Anthony Pateras.

The swarm slowly fades in with a layer of crackling guitar static and gets larger and larger as the track proceeds, until Ambarchi’s feedback swirls dizzyingly and the birds are growling, as if the few dozen that have survived have consumed the hundreds of others. “Invigilation” closes the release with shimmering organ from Ambarchi and an infestation of kaleidoscopic yellow light from Fox’s electronics. Using analogies from the natural world may seem counterintuitive, considering the music’s electrical origins, but the play between the human body and the mechanical functioning of the physical universe is at the center of this work. Andrew Choate

Han Bennink Trio Bennink & Co. Ilk CD/DL

Eric Boeren 4tet Coconut

Platenbakkerij CD

There was a time when Han Bennink routinely schlepped a carload of gear on stage, augmenting his sizable kit with various horns, a banjo, and all manner of smashable detritus. On these two records he plays only snare and drums, but he doesn’t sound limited at all. In fact, the reduction in equipment seems to have elicited an amplification of his ample imagination in ways to make pre-bebop technique move post-everything music; it’s also amped up the fun factor. The moments between thwacks are pregnant with anticipation, so right does each one sound.

He’s not alone in his decadespanning focus on just the good stuff, but all of the good stuff.

The Eric Boeren 4tet uses tunes

by Ornette Coleman and Booker Little as provocations for stylistically mutating collective statements; I especially love the moment on

“Padàm” where Michael Moore’s tenor darts from smoothness to sandpaper in a second while the leader’s cornet dances around him, tracing lines of astonishing imagination and irresistible mirth. I’ve never heard this group sound bad, but I’ve also never heard them sound this good. It probably helps that this set was recorded in an intimate but acoustically friendly room at the end of a three-day run; there’s no road weariness or getting-reacquainted rust-scraping, just empathy and mutual appreciation.

The dynamic is a bit different on the second album by Bennink’s own trio. It’s worth noting that he waited until 2008 to lead an ensemble; he’s always been more likely to not do what someone told him to do, steering through obstinacy, than he has been to actually tell someone what to do. But in pianist Simon Toldam and saxophonist/clarinetist Joachim Badenhorst he’s found two players who, like Michael Moore, show an almost unseemly facility with tunes that were well worn when Bennink got started. Not only that, they have a remarkably fluent command of both conventional and extended techniques, and the good sense not to overplay their hands.

Always a joker, Bennink’s best when he has a foil, and here he has two guys who can respect the sentimental passages, play it straight when Bennink yucks it up, and be right there when the improvisation gets rigorous. Put another way, Bennink’s got two straight men with perfect timing. Bill Meyer

to the old Barn Owl, but the heavily electronic instrumentation free from dust bowl signifiers make V feel like a very strong fresh start. Bill Meyer

Jaap Blonk

Keynote Dialogues Monotype CD

Traces of Speech Hybriden-Verlag book+CD

Jaap Blonk & Machinefabriek Deep Fried Kontrans CD

Jeb Bishop Jaap Blonk Lou Malozzi Frank Rosaly At the Hideout Kontrans CD

adorned. Deep Fried was recorded live in a former snack bar used by the Arnheim Music Platform, and no doubt the environs inspired the album title as well as track names like “Pickles,” “Peppers” and “Oil.” It’s at times a dizzying and dense hour, in parts peaceful and alien.

Alien, but not unfamiliar. It drifts along at a wonderfully unhurried (and sometimes abrupt) pace and if it’s the most pro forma of the three, it’s still an enjoyable listen.

At the Hideout is a great slab of old school Blonk, and in fact is released under the Kontrans “improvisors” series which has included groupings of Blonk with Mats Gustafsson and Michael Zerang, Ingar Zach and Ivar Grydeland, and fellow voice artist Maja Ratkje. This time out he’s found in Chicago with a group consisting of Jeb Bishop on trombone, Frank Rosaly on percussion and Lou Mallozzi on turntables and electronics. Blonk’s naked voice comes through the mix more strongly here than on the other two recent titles. It’s a good, oldfashioned, scattershot, chaotic and sometimes hilarious improv blowing (but not overblown) session. It might be the pick for listeners who’ve missed Blonk in recent years, but Keynote Dialogues sets a new agenda. Kurt Gottschalk

Dutch voice artist Jaap Blonk has never stopped performing, but he hasn’t had a commercial recording issued since the 2008 LP Dubbletwee with Dylan Nyoukis (Prick Decay). Four new releases have helped to fill that gap over the last year, however, and perhaps chart a promising path forward as well.

Keynote Dialogues (released by the Polish label Monotype, which has been hitting a consistently high standard of late) is the happy surprise of the lot, a record not quite like anything Blonk has done Ted Brown & before and arguably one of his Brad Linde best—certainly the best album he’s Two of a Kind made without other musicians inBleebop CD volved. His mix of dada, sense and nonsense still runs strong through Ted Brown & the record, but the 13 tracks are rich Kirk Knuffke with multi-tracking and computer Barn Owl Pound Cake Steeplechase CD processing.

And if dedications to V Thrill Jockey LP/CD/DL past word artists Antonin Artaud, There are veteran musicians and Dylan Thomas and Tristan Tzara All respect to artists who change then there are those who reach back make his motivations clear, it’s still their game when they’re on top to what an approach is all about. thoroughly modern music. Blonk’s of it. The urge to keep doing Tenor saxophonist Ted Brown (b. processing samples not just his own something that you know people 1927) is one of the latter: a student vocalese but bird calls and blowing like, and that you know you’ve of pianist-composer Lennie Tristano winds, making for an unexpectedly done well, must be hard to resist. and a frequent associate of Lee musical record.

But Barn Owl, the San FranciscoKonitz, Warne Marsh and Ronnie Traces of Speech puts a tighter based duo of Evan Caminiti and Ball, he is one of the few surviving focus on Blonk’s voice interpretaJon Porras, have not only refused tion, at least inasmuch as there’s members of the ‘school’ that grew to refill their glass with their favored more discernible vocalization at the up around Tristano (Konitz and libation, they’ve come up with a fine forefront. The CD was released in bassist Peter Ind being the other new brew. V follows Ancestral Star, an edition of 100 with a book of two that spring to mind). A player a collection of heavily road-tested drawings and a piece of original art with openness and rhythmic drive material that blew up Barn Owl’s and retails for €50 (about $65), so it (even without a drummer), Brown cosmic Americana to epic proporwon’t land in as many hands, but harks back to the origins of modern tions, and a hatful of solo records it’s an intriguing twist on Blonk’s use jazz saxophone. Rather than being by both parties that have extended of linguistic tropes nevertheless. A a disciple of Rollins or Coltrane, he their guitar-based sound into more set of his line drawings was fed into draws heavily from the influences ambient, tape-processed, and audio-generating software and, of Coleman Hawkins and Lester amp-blown directions. For their fifth separately, into Optical Character Young. In the ’70s and ’80s Brown record, they have set aside the big Recognition software to generate worked sporadically; over the last twang in favor of layers of synthesizsound beds and text (based on the few years, he has worked fairly ers, which provide pulsing rhythms, software’s attempt to decipher the often, including gigs with a number cirrus-cloud flourishes, and a stream drawings into letters and words), all of young East Coast musicians who of well-upholstered melodies. The of which were subjected to Blonk’s have digested a broad swath of tunes insinuate themselves like own artistic interpretation, filtering modern improvised music. confidence men, so that before you and layering. It’s a fascinating experWashington, DC tenorman Brad know what is happening you follow iment. The seven tracks vary widely, Linde is a fleet, cool player whose them into massive walls of sound each its own controlled realm, with interests lie in music in the line of like the church organ monolith on Blonk locking into odd and someBird and Lester Young—namely, “The Long Shadow” and the scudtimes comical patterns of words, the Tristano school, Ornette Coleding puffs of sonic wool that blow nonwords or alphanumeric streams man, Teddy Charles and Jimmy through “Against the Night.” If the against blipping electronoise.

Giuffre. Had he been born in the titles sound nocturnal, the music Blonk’s meeting with electronicist 1930s, Linde would likely have is even more so; these looming Machinefabriek (aka Rutger Zuyderwound up at the Lenox School of pieces could score a movie where velt) is a noisier—or, rather, soundiJazz in 1959. That is not to say he the sun never rises and the people er—affair, unusual because Blonk is isn’t “contemporary”—Linde is a never come out. The emphasis on primarily occupied with electronic consistently inventive saxophonist atmosphere and the absence of manipulations and his vocal utterwhose steely, oblique linearity is an lyrics maintain an unbroken tether ances are little heard, at least uninteresting foil for Brown’s painterly WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #65 | 35

koans. The pair is joined on Two of a Kind by guitarist Michael Kramer, pianist Dan Roberts, bassist Tom Baldwin and drummer Tony Martucci (all DC regulars). Across an hour of music, Brown and Linde perform originals by the elder saxophonist as well as compositions by Marsh, Konitz, Young, and Tchaikovsky (Op. 42, Third Movement), and the standards “Body and Soul” and “My Melancholy Baby.” Of course, it is a beautiful thing to hear Tristanoschool tunes like “Smog Eyes” interpreted by a living master of that music, and while Brown’s lines unfurl more slowly and delicately than they did sixty years ago, his tone is gloriously burnished and his improvisations both natural and considered.

On “Pound Cake,” his taffy-like phrasing pushes at the edge of expected tonality, supported by a robust and warm rhythm section.

It is as though Brown is driving a well-worn road that only he knows and one has to trust his navigational skill. He “pushes” the tune, but in ways that aren’t obvious or flashy.

On “My Melancholy Baby,” he is already well inside a deeply buried aspect of the changes by the time the rhythm section (who are ace, by the way) ease up on the beat. One can feel that the group is learning from the master as the record unfolds—not that there’s any shakiness, but that creative lessons are being imparted throughout.

Pound Cake is a different proposition, and finds Brown in a pianoless quartet co-led by cornetist Kirk Knuffke, with bassist John Hébert and drummer Matt Wilson. In addition to five lines by Brown and two

by Knuffke, the program includes Young’s “Pound Cake,” Konitz’s “Lennie’s,” and the chestnut “Gee Baby Ain’t I Good to You.” There is a fair amount of crossover between Pound Cake and Two of a Kind in terms of the tunes, but the interpretations are vastly different. Without the piano’s harmonic underpinning, the music here is considerably looser, Wilson and Hébert tugging and encircling as Knuffke’s fragile growls and Brown’s more pillowy approach mark the opening “Arrive.” It’s quite something to hear the knotty runs of “Feather Bed” realized without a piano or guitar because they’re so tightly woven—the music is breathtakingly netless.

Knuffke’s gulps, small runs and piled swagger on the title tune are of a contemporary nature; he’s a darting and intense player, but with a laconic sensibility that keeps him from rushing the music. Hearing the cornetist next to Brown’s huge, soft, teasingly inquisitive tenor, one can understand their affinity. The bass and drums are often tough—a little on the traditionally “muscular” side compared to Knuffke and Brown.

There is something simple yet terrifying about the horns’ improvising on “Gee Baby Ain’t I Good to You”, with its palpable balance between risk and perfection. In listening to this quartet one swallows hard as Brown, Knuffke and company continually improvise out on a limb, posing and solving problems that critics had assumed were dealt with decades ago. Marc Medwin

John Cage Song Books Sub Rosa CDx2

The 90 solo pieces for unaccompanied voice that comprise the 1970 Song Books are a keystone among John Cage’s works. The pieces provide a wealth of material which can be combined with other pieces in the set or with other of Cage’s compositions—a strategy that might not be uncommon today (see Anthony Braxton’s Ghost Trance Music), but which was as radical 40 years ago as the electronics and nonmusical sounds and the physical actions called for in the score.

There have been some remarkable recordings of the songbooks, notably the selections included in Joan La Barbara’s 1990 Singing Through (New Albion), and Amelia Cuni’s Solo for Voice 58: 18 Microtonal Ragas (released by Other Minds in 2007), in which the singer explores Indian-influenced pieces in the collection. But the complete set of compositions (317 pages of manuscript score running more than six hours in length) hadn’t been recorded before this collection by Lore Lixenberg, Gregory Rose and Robert Worby. Across two CDs, the trio presents 14 of the pieces straight-up while combining the remaining 76 into 10-to-20minute collages. The result is a staggering listen. It is at center an a cappella record with groupings of one to three voices. This is, at least, how the ear receives it, despite the fact that there is an endless array of other sorts of information entering the audio sphere. Voices echo, recognizable phrases slip in between nonverbal lines and electronically altered utterances create multiple layers of auditory hallucination.

The 90 pieces are far from monochromatic. Some pieces recall the simple solo lines of his 1940s vocal pieces, while others are in line with his “imitations,” borrowing from Mozart and Schubert. A broad variety of vocal styles is called for and texts are borrowed from Duchamp, Joyce, Satie, Buckminster Fuller, Marshall McLuhan and others. At the midpoint of this uncentered opera comes the repetition ad nauseam of a Thoreau quote: “The best form of government is no government at all.” It neatly draws a distinction between the Utopian lawlessness of classical anarchy and the chaotic melee society—or music—can turn into.

To their credit, the performances

by Lixenberg, Rose and Worby never seem like a mere trio. While there are rarely if ever more than three voices heard (although there is some electronic doubling), they truly come off as faces in a crowd.

It’s fortunate that, for such an ambitious work (and one not likely to be repeated anytime soon) we get such a dedicated performance.

Kurt Gottschalk

The Cannanes Small Batch

EXRO.FM/Lammington CD

Small Batch is a perfect name for a Cannanes record. Since they first

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recorded over a quarter century ago in Sydney, Australia, much has changed, but not their essential modesty. The group, pared down here to the core of singer Frances Gibson and guitarist Stephen O’Neil, has always had an air of humility, which might be deemed an apposite stance given their low sales numbers and years between releases. But one verse into the first song, “Bumper,” Gibson sings a hook that’ll stick in your head until next Christmas and a jaunty trumpet drives it home, and I wonder anew why these survivors of a long-defunct international pop underground never went overground.

If I had to hazard a guess, it’s that they’re a bit too real, too ordinary really, to hit it big. The world wants to forget that it broke a bottle in a fight last night and feels like an idiot this morning for doing so; the Cannanes may or may not have broken that bottle, but you believe them when they sing about it. One thing the Cannanes haven’t done is stayed stuck in an amateurish past; with production and lots of extra instrumentation supplied by producer Explosion Robinson, they’ve come up with a plush, bouncy sound that could play in any coffee shop around the world, and I mean that as a compliment.

Bill Meyer

Aaron Cassidy

A painter of figures in rooms NMC Recordings DL

Crutch of Memory Neos CD

American-born and UK-based composer Aaron Cassidy created the vocal ensemble work A painter of figures in rooms for the EXAUDI Vocal Ensemble as part of the New Music 20x12 Cultural Olympiad. It continues his research into extended tablature notation.

Using this approach, details of the physicality of performance are specifically addressed, even more so than traditional musical features. In a vocal ensemble work, this means that vowel shape, breathing, mouth and lip position, and gesture feature prominently. While this notational approach would, at first glance, seem to leave room for significant variances between performances, Cassidy’s body of work occupies a distinctive and recognizable sound world that suggests a clarity of utterance conveyed by the tablature.

When comparing his vocal music to Crutch of Memory, a recent disc of instrumental works recorded by the Elision Ensemble for Neos, certain qualities of sound surface as stylistic touchstones. Cassidy’s notation allows for an exploration of sliding pitches, timbral adjustments, and fine gradations of microtones that would likely be cumbersome to notate in traditional Western fashion.

Thus, while extremely complex and requiring a great deal from the performers, the resulting music takes on elemental concerns in organic fashion. The visceral vocalisms and muscular effusions of A painter of figures in rooms belie the notion that music in the “new complexity” or “second modern” vein is primar-

ily an intellectual exercise. Instead, it often suggests uninhibited sensuality. Christian Carey

Thomas Chapin Never Let Me Go: Quartets '95 & '96 Playscape 3xCD

William Hooker featuring Thomas Chapin Crossing Points NoBusiness CD

By the time of his death in February 1998 at age 40, Thomas Chapin had issued a string of excellent trio recordings under his own name (handily collected a year later by Knitting Factory into an 8xCD box set entitled Alive), and a couple of less radical quartet recordings, Radius and I’ve Got Your Number. The Alive set shows what a marvelously inventive and versatile player he’d become, not just on alto saxophone but also on sopranino sax and various flutes. Technically, he was at the top of his game, able to play almost anything that came to mind. He had a remarkable gift for melody, even at furious tempos and under considerable pressure, and the trio format gave him freedom to explore the highways and extensive byways of the material.

But by the mid-1990s, with the trio still going strong, Chapin had formed a quartet with pianist Peter Madsen, bassist Kiyoto Fujiwara and percussionist Reggie Nicholson. The first couple of discs in this 3xCD set present the group’s November 1995 concert at Flushing Town Hall. Perhaps because of limited rehearsal time, the musicians stick mainly to things they’d all know, i.e. standards. Only three of the ten compositions are

by Chapin. The others are ones you’d expect him to have in his repertoire, such as two by Thelonious Monk, “Ugly Beauty,” Charlie Parker’s “Red Cross,” and Cy Coleman’s “I’ve Got Your Number.”

But there are a couple of surprises too, in Artie Shaw’s “Moonray” and Jimmy Webb’s “Wichita Lineman.” If at first glance those two appear unusual choices, if not downright odd, the transcendent performances soon make them seem otherwise. The skip-andslink theme of “Moonray” invites sporadic flurries of excitement from all members of the quartet.

Chapin pinches the reed, hardens his tone, introduces skirls of circular breathing and opens up the harmonic material, while Madsen comps magnificently. He introduces choppy, slightly bluesy chords and staccato runs that push and pull at the music, subtly altering its rhythmic foundations, and provides musical hints and cues that Chapin, ever exuberant, adopts with gusto. “Wichita Lineman” is played tenderly, without exaggerated sentiment or irony, and Chapin takes the melody to interesting places it has never been before. The third disc contains a concert recorded a year later at the Knitting Factory, and of the five tracks four are by Chapin (including an old favorite, “Sky Piece”). This is a much looser,

more exploratory set, more akin to his trios, and Scott Colley (bass) and Matt Wilson (drums) are a tad more proactive and interactive than Fujiwara and Nicholson, which suits the music just fine. Madsen plays up a storm on this set, as typically does Chapin, and, really, if you like Chapin’s other recordings, you won’t want to miss this.

Because I haven’t always got on well with percussionist William Hooker’s music, I wasn’t expecting to like Crossing Points, or not very much, but it’s really rather splendid, a tour-de-force of extended freejazz improvisation that can claim direct descent from Coltrane/Ali, Konitz/Jones and Lyons/Cyrille.

Hooker batters out the polyrhythms with sufficient shifts in emphasis to hold one’s attention throughout, especially on the lengthy opening track, “The Subway,” and Chapin’s alto sax rides the maelstrom and adds melodic shards, squalls and sometimes sheer noise to its propulsive energy. “Addiction to Sound,” which is much more diverse, somewhat tribal in orientation, travels a long way from its gentle beginnings into ecstatic sound. The final track, “The Underground Dead,” reprises “The Subway” to great effect, though just beyond the halfway point it offers a welcome moment of repose before Hooker re-stokes the fire.

Brian Marley

Rhodri Davies Wound Response Alt.vinyl LP

I’ve lately been listening to fairly early recordings of harpist Rhodri Davies, specifically some of his quietest entries as part of the trio IST from the late 1990s. Back when folks didn’t quite know what to call music like Davies’, there was something about his luminous and instrumentally unrecognizable playing that summoned reviewers to scramble for new adjectives and comparisons. With several extremely compelling solo albums under his belt over the last ten years, Wound Response finds Davies in an altogether new space.

While manipulations and mutations of his instrument are nothing new for him, the extremes to which he takes it on these ten tracks certainly induce a few double-takes when you first dig into it: he’s playing a lap harp that’s smothered in bright distortion, run through two amps and supplemented with a transducer, an array of contact mics, and a few pedals. The effect is huge, chiming, and sonorous, as he mostly conjures sky-arcing arpeggios through what sounds very much like Reichelderived finger-tapping. He trades in skull-rattling repetition and variation in just the right measure, almost (and this is high praise) like solo lap harp improvisations on Meshuggah tunes.

The music was recorded in a resonant and quite old stone structure, to striking effect: it’s as if the sound of various folk idioms (audibly refracted in the rapidly shifting pieces) were being expressed through fast-growing electronic flora. It’s hypnotic, intensely focused, and beautiful in the spell it casts.

Jason Bivins

on “Flight of AZ 1734,” which you realize on the seventh listen is really a tandem lead circling ever so sneakily around Harding and Jones’ phrases.

Even the mysterious cover, a dilapidated shack attesting to the ravages of time, can be seen as the product of an unhurried process. With some grassroots sweat, it could be made to thrive again. Nathan Turk

Chris Darrow Artist Proof

Drag City LP+Cd / CD

Tony, Caro & John Blue Clouds

Drag City / Galactic Zoo Disk / Gaarden LP

Mad Music Inc. Mad Music

Drag City / Yoga LP

Woo

It’s Cozy Inside Drag City / Yoga LP/CD

Trin Tran

Dark Radar Drag City/God? LP

It’s been fascinating watching storied record labels getting to grips with the new musical-industrial climate, observing shifts in presentation, formatting, and curatorial choices sometimes slowly mutate, sometimes switch at the drop of a coin. I’ve long held a fascination with the whys and wherefores of Drag City, perhaps the only largescale independent still shrouded Neneh Cherry in mystique, from the catty asides & the Thing and smartalec humour of their web The Cherry Thing Smalltown Supersound CD presence/s, to their proliferation of side-labels and external hookups.

The Thing is Mats Gustaffson’s rockRecently they’ve headed further jazz (not jazz-rock) fetish made flesh, into reissue domain, always part of a motley crew given to covering The their remit, I guess in response to Stooges on multiple occasions, as if the archival fever that’s led imprints “L.A. Blues” hadn’t made the whole like Light In The Attic and The Thing thing redundant anyway. I Numero Group to towering success. find the intent wholly admirable But Drag City’s reissue program is Sean Conly but the execution lacking; slapping always unpredictable, turning up Alex Harding two approaches to music-making unexpected gems, like this recent Darius Jones together and expecting it to batch of refried beans.

Chad Taylor transcend to some far greater third Chris Darrow spent time in the Grass Roots is like telling some archaic story American group Kaleidoscope, Aum Fidelity CD featuring the words ‘sum’ ‘does not’ appearing on their first two albums ‘equal’ and ‘parts’. But – and here’s Grass Roots is an improvisationand writing some of their most the big but – bringing Neneh Cherheavy effort notable above all else enduring songs, like “Life Will Pass ry on board is a masterstroke, and for its meaty, satisfying front line You By.” Darrow’s also connected when Cherry lets loose, as on their of Alex Harding’s baritone sax and to the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, and cover of Martina Topley-Bird’s “Too Darius Jones’ alto sax. Jones is in has made numerous appearances Tough To Die”, she’s on staggering hungry, blues-referencing form, balas a session musician. It’s a familiar form, stretching vowels and working ancing moaning and soul-searching back-story, and in time, albums like mesmerizing glossolalia into the with the same deftness as on his 1972’s Artist Proof fall into a greater zone, under which The Thing play fantastic recent albums under his context, of one-shot loners trying to on, thoroughly adequately. At other name. Harding shadows, leads and make or break, ex-career musicians times, Cherry sounds like she’s hangs back at all the right moments; shackled to the major label wagon holding back a little, where more his Pepper Adams-y lines magnify in the ‘70s music industry fall-out, forceful prodding from her might these songs’ gutbucket bottoms with or storied characters trying on new have got The Thing to really delve the assertiveness of one who’s been outfits for the next decade. Albums deep into the DNA of what they’re in life’s arenas, wrestled demons and like Darrow’s, or Bobby James’s selftrying to do and find a way to meld returned with a championship belt. titled set, or Lonnie Mack’s The Hills both forms into something far more Simmer, spatter, pop, roll, crack, Of Indiana all inhabit similar spaces. exhilarating. Moments, there are a bend: this is the voice of the rhythm Darrow has in his favor an assured, few – the ending of The Stooges’ section of Sean Conly (bass) and but understated voice, and a set of “Dirt” burns through the speaker Chad Taylor (drums), hearkening to gorgeous songs that fall somecones like flames from screeching a time of lyrically abstract jazz when where in the cracks between rogue tyres – but it’s oddly telling that the the stage could be the corner of a country, Hardin-esque balladry, and most genuinely affecting and condowntown loft. Like so many musical some endearingly trad moments, vincing performances are on pieces wildflowers that came before, these like the fiddle vamps on “Alligator from Neneh’s father Don Cherry half-dozen songs were recorded in Man”. It was Darrow’s sole album (“Golden Heart”), and Ornette Brooklyn with a mind toward making for Fantasy, and at the time he was Coleman (“What Reason”), both natural, spontaneous, locally-grown, label-mates with Creedence, which of which suggest The Thing are far communal jazz. But Grass Roots also makes some kind of sense. stronger as a jazz outfit. Funny, that. has its slow-cooking elements, too.

Elsewhere that same year, British Jon Dale You can hear it in Conly’s bassline folk trio Tony (Doré), Caro (Caroline WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #65 | 37

Savage John Butcher Energy: plays Jeffrey the room Hayden at Houston's ShurdutRichmond with Michael Hall Ray and Marshall Allen

John Butcher Bell Trove Spools Northern Spy CD

John Butcher Matthew Shipp At OTO Fataka CD

John Butcher Guillaume Viltard Eddie Prevost All But Matchless CD

Way Out Northwest

The White Spot

Brittanie Shey

Relative Pitch CD

John Butcher may be the constant presence on these CDs, and the constancy of his skills on the soprano and tenor saxophones is not in doubt. From his starting point in the late '70s and early '80s, when the examples of British free improvisers and old electronic LPs first pointed him towards a lifetime of creative music making, he has pared away convention to get at a comprehensive command of his instruments’ potential away from the prescriptions and boundaries of genre-based roles. But the saxophone is really a means to an end, which is to be a person who can make something new and potent out of any situation he encounters. Across these records, he confronts space and the varied talents of musicians who are either familiar or unfamiliar to him; he also confronts history.

History’s a big thing, with many facets.

When Butcher plays solo, as he does on two of these CDs, he deals with his own history as a solo player and inveterate maker of unaccompanied recordings. Bell Trove Spools is his eighth, and it’s fair to ask why a man would make so many; surely the documentation of changes in practice and technique would be satisfied with less? It probably would, but that’s not all Butcher does on solo records. Bell Trove Spools continues his

practice of dealing with spaces, especially resonant ones. Most likely at some point you’ve seen some poor band done in by an unfavorable acoustic situation. For Butcher, each new room is a situation, an opportunity, even a player to be reckoned with. That’s certainly the case on this record, excerpted from concerts at the Dan Flavin installation at Richmond Hall in Houston and at Brooklyn's Issue Project Room. The Texan space is friendly, adding a halo of unobtrusive echo around Butcher’s gruff hacks and elongated lines. The NY environment, on the other hand, has such a delayed response that Butcher has the chance to place new pitches against ones that are hanging around. But it’s also a chancy space, and you can hear the care he takes in sorting out what it will do.

Sometimes improvisation rewards a bit of caution as well as abandon, and I think I hear some in the way Butcher seems to propose a sound and see what the room will do with it.

Which brings us to an important point: he is concerned with outcome as well as process.

This bodes well for people who get his records, but also raises the question of how he handles an encounter with a musician from way outside his usual circle.

At OTO is a rare encounter between Butcher and a player with links to old school American free jazz. Not that pianist Matthew Shipp is bound by such associations—he’s been playing with English improvisers quite fruitfully since he started his association with Springheel Jack nearly a decade ago. But it’s still a stretch, given that Butcher made a concerted effort to purge jazz licks from his vocabulary early on. The record includes the entire concert, which comprised two solo sets and a joint one. Butcher’s features each horn, but not the environmental influences heard on Bell Trove Spools; Shipp plays in the vein of his post-electronic phase, with a certain restraint and conciseness of phrase that brings added force to his moments of bruising force. Together they accomplish a successful overlay of each man’s approach upon the other, with a bit of subtraction to make sure that the other has space. Shipp opens his darting right hand forays for coarse, brief brays, and Butcher’s persistence of line becomes a center of gravity around which Shipp can detonate tone clusters. This is not a meeting of British free improv and jazz, but a thoughtful encounter between

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two musicians committed to making it work.

They succeed.

Way Out Northwest is a group, and one with both a sense of history and a sense of humor. With Torsten Müller on bass and Dylan Van Der Schyff on drums, the trio recapitulates the line-up Sonny Rollins favored on records like Way Out West. But instead of Butcher sporting a cowboy hat in the desert, the cover of this record shows three stockingcapped men in the snow. And instead of lengthy horn extrapolations with rhythm section firmly in support, they play an unstable three-way game in which large masses—a big ball of softly struck cymbals, or a forceful tenor cry—and tiny gestures strive to find a balance within relatively brief, concentrated improvisations. Butcher does not feel like a driving force here, but if he did, he would be showing a tin ear instead of the attentiveness this music requires. He’s one of the band, and respectful of what that means.

The free jazz comparison applies best to All But, which is the second in Eddie Prévost’s Meetings with Remarkable Saxophonists series. As with the other two (one with Evan Parker, the other with Jason Yarde), the configuration is the classic sax-bass-drums trio, and Prévost embraces it with gusto. His playing here is as dynamic as his work with AMM, but the starting point, volume-wise, is quite different; he gets quiet, but rarely silent. After all, he’s playing drums! And play he does, pushing the music forward, opening avenues for the other players, and making them sound damned good, just the way a drummer should. Viltard, until now an unknown to me, seems to understand Prévost’s intentions quite well; he constructs load-bearing structures within whatever rhythmic or energy system the drummer generates, rarely drawing attention to himself, but always making the music feel more solid. Butcher steps forward, never playing like Sonny did, but towering nonetheless. He has an instinct for complementarity and balance that he can’t forsake, but he also knows when the door is being held open, and he steps through Prévost’s openings without hesitation, shooting laser beam high frequencies and spiraling, lengthy ribbons that dart with the unpredictability of a swallow banking inside dust devil.

Without compromising his essential self, he contributes to the unstoppable victory of this lively and swinging music. Bill Meyer

Doré) & John (Clark) self-released their first album, All On The First Day. Over time this, too, has settled into a greater context, of secondtier acid-folk acts taking matters into their own hands and releasing idiosyncratic sets of psychedelic traditionalia. That Tony, Caro & John album has always been one of the more potent albums of its time and tier, and Blue Clouds is a welcome second shot, collecting previously unreleased material from 19711977. One song, “Children Of Plenty,” slipped off that debut album, but the more revelatory moments are hearing the group turn up the amps and let out spindly riffs with all the hermetic spiritualism of early Steeleye Span, as on “Forever and Ever”, or clanking out winning parts with a drum machine on “Home” and “Ton Ton Macoutes” – does this make Tony Doré psych-folk’s Shuggie Otis? (Also, check out the download for near twenty minutes’ extra material.)

These are both good, worthwhile releases, but the heads at Yoga have struck real mystique-maintenance gold with Mad Music Inc.’s private press, unearthed from late ‘70s Boston. The direct repro of the information-free album makes for a document almost as perplexing as it surely must have been on its first go ‘round the vinyl bins (the Drag City/Yoga stamp adds little). It feels more like a cipher than a record, particularly as it seems to foreshadow quite a bit of what made the ‘80s so great, from The Durutti Column’s chamber miniatures, to Virginia Astley’s pastoral drift-work From Gardens Where We Feel Secure, through to the awkwardsensual disco of Arthur Russell and his systems music collaborations with Peter Zummo (especially when trombone rears its welcome bell).

There are also touches of Popol Vuh circa Hosianna Mantra, which might have you thinking Kosmische – don’t go there, as the melodies here are far more intimate than the futurist grandiosity of cosmic music.

If it’s library music, then it’s of a rare cut, miles above even the better material from that field, and if its relationship with modern classical is more than incidental, well, Boston…

Hmm, I can think of a few names; never mind, though, Mad Music is one of the most gorgeous out-ofnowhere finds of the past few years, and I’d quite like it to stay that way.

Woo are a little more ‘above ground’ – their second album, It’s Cosy Inside was released in the early ‘90s by Independent Project Records. But it seems to have slipped through the cracks, which is a shame, as these seventeen pieces, co-written by brothers Mark and Clive Ives, are easily as mischievous and goose-bump inducing as much of the eerie electronics or ‘hauntology’ being made by Arthur Machen nutcases these days. It’s Cosy Inside shares a certain pastoralism with Mad Music Inc., but whereas the latter if all wide open spaces, Woo is more removed, the pastoral of a landscape painting hung, skewiff, in a bedroom studio. These Ives brothers have an exceptional knack for gentle melodicism, each miniature spinning on a few arborescent

chord changes, while clarinet, keys, guitar and violin shade the grey areas with little phrases and flourishes that sit ‘just so’ in the mix.

It’s a discreet, human experience, listening to this music; equal parts programmatic and playful, this is popular song sung from the bottom of a basement four-track. An absolute delight.

This doesn’t leave much space for Chicago’s Trin Tran, whose Dark Radar is the first LP on Ty Segall’s recently minted God? imprint. I say, good move Drag City, giving Segall his own label: he’s clearly someone with good, sharp ears, proven by this initial release, which bumps to vinyl some tracks that previously only circulated via CD-R and MP3. If nothing else, Dark Radar is a hymn to brevity, with no track making it past the two-minute mark, the perfect length really for these short, sharp shocks of stringy, abbreviated post-punk energy. A good example of how the one man band is a great idea, everything here is pared back to essence, with bursts of guitar seizure crashing, No Wave like, through the one-handed drums and monolithically minimal keyboard riffs. Dark Radar is the other perfect dance record for boys with perpetual nervousness. Jon Dale

Ernest Dawkins Afro Straight Delmark CD

Afro Straight is saxophonist Ernest Dawkins’ love letter to fellow saxophonists who have influenced his work on both tenor and alto.

And it’s to the Ethnic Heritage Ensemble veteran’s enduring credit that, while he plays their tunes almost exclusively, he never sounds like anyone but himself. He’s in fine form throughout, in the company of his cracking quintet (the always-aces Corey Wilkes on trumpet, pianist Willerm Delisfort, bassist Junius Paul, and drummer Isaiah Spencer), occasionally supplemented by percussion (including his own) and once

by B3. A crisp, Africanized “Mr. PC” gets things started, with burly alto capturing the mood. “United” is a rarely heard Shorter tune (one of three from Wayne), which is invigorated by all that percolating percussion, and especially from the super-crisp Spencer, whose choice rimshots are downright Haynesian.

The rearranged “Central Park West” (a rhumba) doesn’t work quite so well rhythmically, though the alto solo is terrific. But it’s hardly a misstep, and at any rate the band follows it up with an outrageously vigorous “Woody ’n You.” The nimble, harmonically rich quintet is positively all over the tune, especially Wilkes in his bravura solo. “Softly as in a Morning Sunrise” is urgent and probing, while “God Bless the Child” comes across as so soulful and testifying that it’s basically a Gospel tune (listen to that amazing tenor tone). Shorter’s “Footprints” is given a colorful, spirited reading; but it’s not a patch on the intense, churning “Juju” that follows it. And significantly, one of the most intense and joyful things here is Dawkins’ own “Old Man Blues,” where the band sound absolutely fantastic,

not least the consistently marvelous Delisfort. Jason Bivins

Karl Evangelista Taglish SUA CD

Bay Area guitarist Karl Evangelista is emerging as one of the most original instrumentalists and composers of his generation. He studied at Mills with Roscoe Mitchell, Fred Frith and Myra Melford, and conducted extensive research on South African jazz. With his wife, pianist/flutist/vocalist M. Rei Scampavia, he co-leads the duo Grex; they have three discs under their belt that draw together modern composition, free improvisation and indie-pop songwriting. Their new disc Taglish is a suite exploring Evangelista’s Filipino heritage, on which the duo is joined by drummer Jordan Glenn, bassist John-Carlos Perea, trombonist Rob Ewing, and saxophonists Francis Wong and Cory Wright.

Each movement of Taglish is both a microcosm and part of a larger whole, touching on personal associations (the compositions are dedicated to family members) and the wider Filipino-American experience.

I’ve never heard anything quite like the opener, “Iloilo Ang Banwa Ko,” a traditional march arranged with the flair of the Liberation Music Orchestra’s 1969 “Introduction”/“Song of the United Front.” Evangelista’s guitar work is dusky and tremolo-heavy, reminiscent of Hawaiian electric guitar and pinoy agit-rock, while Wong’s tenor serves as a Barbieri-esque foil. The group immediately jumps to “Reb,” Scampavia’s folksy voice skimming over rhythmic chatter and the horns’ tough intervals. Evangelista’s solo is wonderfully coiled and full of twists and turns, in dialogue with Scampavia’s rhapsodic piano work; when trombone and saxophones start riffing, it’s more Brotherhood of Breath than Basie.

The Filipino national anthem is recast as “Hymn,” which takes on a strong kwela vibe, Wong’s lurching skronk unfurling against slinking rhythmic filaments. Ewing’s trombone offers chortling cycles, elegantly matched by surging, wiry guitar and piano. (Clearly South African jazz has had a heavy influence on Evangelista’s work.) Scampavia’s electric piano is heard on the loose groove of “MRS,” setting up a hook against which guitar and tenor can wail. “Night Talk” is in two parts, a lush and grainy conversation, pretty yet toothy. Not “improvised music” and not “indie-folk,” it’s hard to know what to call this music.

“Dreams” adds Glenn’s percussion to the core duo at the outset, gradually shaded by reed and brass harmonics. The ensemble arrives at a tense minimalism, the drums hacking away in the center, before arriving at a morbid vocal duet between Scampavia and Evangelista against low piano comping and cymbal scrape.

The following uptempo inversion allows for a fine trombone solo and Evangelista’s thin, muted burble.

Taglish encompasses more than can be gleaned from a single review: Evangelista, Scampavia and their compatriots have created an extraordinary document that should

not be slept on. It is a unification of diverse artistic/personal threads, yet on a basic level Taglish is a powerful, accessible celebration of life.

Marc Medwin

Sandy Ewen Damon Smith Weasel Walter

Sandy Ewen / Damon Smith / Weasel Walter ugEXPLODE CD

Damon Smith Henry Kaiser Fan the Hammer Balance Point Acoustics DL

Houston’s improvised music community has started to accomplish its goal of expanding its footprint outside of Texas with the release of an album that features two of Houston’s real-deal experimentalists, bassist Damon Smith and guitarist Sandy Ewen, and New York City (by way of Chicago and Oakland) percussion madman Weasel Walter.

This collaboration came about due to a longtime musical relationship between Smith and Walter, who each lived in the Bay Area for years.

Smith, who relocated to Houston in August 2010, brought Walter to Texas for two concerts in Houston and one in Austin, where Ewen and Walter played together for the first time. This 78-minute recording was captured in November 2011, when Walter returned the favor by bringing Smith and Ewen to New York City for some gigs. Half the time during the album’s eight untitled improvisations, Walter holds back in terms of the amount of statements but without compromising his usual ambush.

The other half, well, it’s his prototypical palette in the hue of extended middle finger. Each piece contains a different set of strategies, but if there’s one that’s not like the others, it’s track three due to the emphasis on space and repetition. Walter’s assertions, which model the cadence and sound quality of a fireworks display, are boosted by Ewen’s feedback and Smith’s scratchy field recordings/laptop sounds. The disc’s most standout/wrecked track is the final one that features Smith’s airplane-falling-from-the-sky arco, attempts by Walter to try and destroy his drums (and if not his kit, then the idea of “music”) and Ewen’s belligerent, go-eff-yourself proclamations.

On Smith and Henry Kaiser’s Fan the Hammer, the bookends of the 20-track album include awkward, off-the-cuff spoken word conversations between Smith and experimental-music mainstay Kaiser. In these performances, Smith (double bass, six-string electric upright, cello, acoustic bass guitar) and Kaiser (electric and acoustic guitars) talk about Derek Bailey and pace their speech much like Bailey, then rap about improvised music philosophies—overall, it’s slightly interesting but gets a little collegeprofessor preachy. The discomfort subsides when decade-plus-long collaborators Kaiser (who penned the liner notes for the Ewen/Smith/ Walter effort that features Ewen’s dramatic artwork) and Smith naturally flow together in an element (“the dynamic”) that they say is one of the

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most important in improvised music.

The compatibility between the two is obvious throughout, especially on track 8—all songs are untitled on this 2011 digital download—where the two create a beautiful, discordant mess, and on tracks 9 and 15, a departure from what one might expect from this duo, moving towards a bleaker version of noise-conscious artists like James Fella and Dead Machines. Steve Jansen

Glacial

On Jones Beach Three Lobed LP

Glacial is a power trio of Lee Ranaldo (guitar), David Watson (bagpipes) and Tony Buck (drums). All have significant prior form in their chosen field – loosely put, modern approaches to improvisation – and you may think you know what to expect from the trio. You would be right, to a point, but what startles initially about On Jones Beach is how hard-nosed yet articulate the playing is – Ranaldo drills the guitar into submission from the get-go, immediately announcing a player on heightened form. Indeed, the first section of “On Jones Beach,” the opus that makes up the entirety of the LP and most of the download, is positively hallucinatory, a deep murky pool of excoriating guitar buzzes and scowls. It’s all going swimmingly until we hit the 15 minute mark, where Buck pulls out some ham-fisted rock drums which propel “On Jones Beach,” quickly, into tedium land (it’s almost as boring as the last seven or so Necks albums). Such a retreat is puzzling, particularly as to this point, Glacial have been moving along in a particularly advanced manner. There is nothing wrong with rock drums in an improv context, but they need to illuminate something about the performance, or to push everything to another level – here, Buck manages neither. It takes ten minutes for the horror to subside, and we are back on terra firma, Buck redeeming himself quickly via stalactite rainfall of metals: the leap from the dreary to the skin-tingling is shocking and welcome. From here, the trio plays out various modes of interacting: juxtaposition, drone-along, and a return to the rockist parlor for Buck, albeit in slightly less infuriating mode. By now, Ranaldo’s guitar is scalding, and Watson’s bagpipes are channeling 22nd century snake charmers. The whole forty-eight minute performance is not without its problems, but for good portions it’s a fairly thrilling ride. The download adds three miniatures, from concerts in Paris and New York. They’re nice enough, but feel surplus to requirements – the imposing edifice of “On Jones Beach” itself is just right. Jon Dale

Godspeed You! Black Emperor

'Allelujah! Don't Bend!

Ascend!

Constellation CD / LP / DL

The cold, sad truth is this: purveyors of information, content, or persuasion—and the publics they serve—are far better off without mixed messages, when inference

left isn’t on the table. Respecting an audience too much to pander to it overtly is less altruistic than career-suicidal, which is why the For Godspeed You! Black Emperor reunion platter is such a stone bummer. Don’t get me wrong: ’Allelujah!

Don’t Bend! Ascend! sounds great in lot of the ways that matter. Textually and rhythmically, this thing grinds like a milestone, stretching orchestral dissonance and moon-rocket guitar sling like hides this collective is happy to flog and tan. Occasional lapses into forlorn drone and ravine noise are fascinating to behold. As with Swans’ The Seer, there are intervals here and there where one can profitably lose sight of who, exactly, is playing here, of what came immediately prior and what awaits; this music is inexorably present, in the sense that it is impossible to pinpoint a moment, or an impression of a moment, as it’s happening. The psychic blueprint of an uprising is embedded in majestic opener “Mladic,” but overall, the album lacks elements capable of grounding the listener in the present moment: the grit of field recordings, portentous vocal samples, sweet tidal waves that hit with sledgehammer force. Godspeed albums used to have all that stuff, once, and when they were playing there was no question as to who you were listening to at any point and the nature of the politics the players were bringing to bear, the near-apocalyptic dystopia they foresaw beyond the horizon. Here they’re not interested in anything much beyond the ends of their driveways. Raymond Cummings

Frank Gratkowski Quartet La Vent et La Gorge Leo CD

Frank Gratkowski Chris Brown William Winant Gerhard E. Winkler Vermilion Traces Donaueschingen Leo CDx2

Frank Gratkowski Fo[u]r Alto Leo CD

These three distinct settings showcase reedist Frank Gratkowski’s conceptual ambition and sheer range of instrumentalism quite nicely.

It’s a special treat to hear a new record from Gratkowski’s longstanding quartet (with trombonist Wolter Wierbos, bassist Dieter Manderscheid, and percussionist Gerry Hemingway) after a fairly lengthy furlough. The lengthy “Harm-oh-nie” suite makes up the first 31 minutes of this disc, and it’s chock full of the band’s many virtues. A burly unison drone gives rise to a pert, almost Messiaen-like series of lines that manage almost impossibly to cohere, given how much is going on: Hemingway holds down the line on tuned drums, as Gratkowski spools and flits about alongside a garrulous and chortling Wierbos, always striking a perfect balance among the many elements they put into play.

Over time, the band subtly reverses

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the suite’s gravitational pull and, with dynamics engagingly low, glisses ever upward. As they do on nearly every album, the quartet also revels in craggy, Braxtonian pulse tracks; but here they play with that kind of momentum, by continually swinging the boom and dropping seamlessly into a drone unison (it’s so, so hard to do this as crisply and un-formulaically as they do). What’s perhaps even more impressive here is the vocal component of the title track, which manages not to annoy! The score sends voices scuttling apart, then brings them back together for a note, a line, almost like bumper cars. Still, the best bits on this track include the long section where Manderscheid scrapes roughly at the bridge, amidst whooshing trombone breath, bass clarinet burbles, and almost sinewave tones from Hemingway. There’s also the sweet-sour melancholy of “Lied/Song” (with a wondrously exploratory bass solo), the craggy swing of “GO!,” and the monstrous, massive contrabass clarinet study “The Flying Dutchman.”

With real control of grain and timbre, combined with an intense rhythmic language, this quartet knocks it out of the park again.

The two-disc whopper Vermilion Traces puts the secret-weapon trio of Gratkowski, keyboardist Brown, and percussionist Winant together with guest electronician Gerhard E. Winkler on one track. But the basic combination of these three distinctive musicians contains multitudes on its own. The first disc (a late 2009 studio date) opens with high squeaks and contrabass clarinet rumble, pinwheeling across Winant’s tuned percussion. Throughout, the primary concern is with texture and space, and on “Retort” there’s so much silence that each detail (a single held clarinet tone, a percussive chirp, the lowest piano note triplet) is magnified in effect. This isn’t to say that the trio holds everything back infinitely. On “Underbelly,” for example, they toy around with crashing noise, shuffling paper, and woodblocks as part of a din that somehow yields processed piano and mutated chamber music (including one passage that sounds like gathering armies of windchimes led by guttural contrabass sax). There’s singing metal on “Sirens,” moans and muffles on “Gesticulations,” and snappy counterpoint on “Opaque Circle.” The 41-minute live set from Donaueschingen starts off busily but not noisily, with a dense exchanges of bells, burbles, and cascading keys before a rushing noise opens up, then ceases abruptly. The textural range on the lengthy “Bikini Atoll” is in part due to Winkler’s presence on computers and live electronics, and it’s to everyone’s credit that the music remains spacious and restrained. After several minutes the piece races forward briefly with effusive rhythmic momentum before backing off quickly to snorting swine and scraped percussion. After a vivid “Vergin on Orange” (which sounds like tumbling icicles inside a warehouse of dragged cardboard boxes), the gorgeous “Shadow of Hands” closes the set with skulking piano notes and tiny little whips of

metal and water.

The final project’s instrumentation is indicated in its title: Gratkowski on alto joined by three other players (Florian Bergmann, Benjamin Weidekamp, and Christian Weidner) on the same horn. This is a mostly new context for Gratkowski, and he’s written a wide-open series of pieces to take advantage of the instrument’s vast range as he himself explores it in solo sections (and you can almost imagine him multi-tracking this).

There are layered, held tones and buzzing sympathetic vibrations just short of spooky on “TamTam 4a” and this sets the album’s tone in a certain sense, as there’s a real depth and gravity to these pieces. Occasionally there are ROVA-like moods of melancholic chamber experience, but there are just as frequently pipetone calliope events that are pretty wild, or polytonal and cross-hatched statements like “Molto Fluttante” (just dig the total dynamic control in this piece’s near-silent final minutes, mere breath constituting the whole).

What distinguishes the pieces here— aside from the harmonic language and use of big leaping intervals to keep things from sounding too tonal—is the use of grain and microtones as the sounds meld together.

This is most effective on “Likewise,” where the slight pitch alterations, microtones apart, give things a kind of fractured feel, and on the 31-minute “Sound 1,” an intense exploration of microtonality and vibration, where you can hear that metal singing away in your earhole. Jason Bivins

Ingebrigt Haker Flaten New York Quartet Clean Feed CD

Hairybones Snakelust Clean Feed CD

Various Artists

I Never Meta Guitar Too Clean Feed CD

Hot on the heels of their splendid duo set last year on Clean Feed, bassist Ingebrigt Haker Flaten and multi-instrumentalist Joe McPhee

(here solely on tenor) join up with trumpeter Nate Wooley and guitarist Joe Morris for a pert, inventive session as the New York Quartet. It’s a bracing and varied session filled with dazzling experimentalism and heartfelt expressionism, and the commitment to rhythmic exploration is there from the burbling, racing pizzicato of the opening “Port,” with Morris’s quick-shifting low end and occasional lateral chordal motion the key to the tension within. I most enjoyed the pieces where there was this sense of forward motion, like the lengthy “Pent,” whose abstracted proto-swing comes across like the sound of music just barely getting going, taking a few overwhelmed steps, disoriented and then losing energy, muttering to itself. It’s the kind of energy that’s even more palpable on the brisk, boiling “Rangers,” or the punchy “Knicks” and “Giants,” with spring-loaded momentum from the leader and Morris, as McPhee majestically provides contrast with lush tenor. The tension and lateral linework on “As If” is barely contained, seeming finally to exhaust itself as it settles into a rotund, initially repetitive bass figure against which Morris constructs one of his most excellently brittle solos. But there are also moments of abstraction—where the quartet scrapes and buzzes, with Wooley really shining—or spare melancholy, like the opening to “Times” (with the squeakiest trumpet cries imaginable).

Hard not to give a special tip of the hat to the beautiful bass/tenor closer “Post” too.

It’s always a raveup when Herr Brötzmann gets back on stage with plugged-in trumpeter Toshinori Kondo. As Hairy Bones (with electric bassist Massimo Pupillo and drummer Paal Nilssen-Love), they churn furiously from the start of Snakelust. The music is for the most part outrageously punked up, as Pupillo’s distorted bass stokes the fires with Kondo simply ablaze while Nilssen-Love rockets into the abyss.

Despite the generally consistent intensity, there’s a good sense of ebb and flow, and dynamics too: quasi-lyric nuggets pop up from the horns here and there (not all of

them Aylerian by any means) and the bassist often conjures a sense of chordal gravity. There are also plenty of earthy breakdowns, as with the intense, focused reeds/trumpet that erupts about 1/3 of the way through this 50-some minute bout. No doubt it’s exuberant and exhausting overall.

But there’s something about the particular language of this group, and the undeniable energies they trade in, that makes it more than just a standard blowing session. That said, the pace and the relentlessness do have a numbing effect after a while, which makes you appreciate the reflective pauses, like the sweet coda at the end.

The second volume of Clean Feed’s Elliott Sharp-curated compilations, I Never Meta Guitar Too, casts the net even more widely than its predecessor did, in terms of both style and personnel. You’ve heard of very few of these players, but who cares really? The results are varied, imaginative, and often quite bracing.

From the opening riff-chug of Ava Mendoza’s “Mandible Moonwalk,” the comp announces itself as wholly unconcerned with genre or technical style, only with guitaristic invention and enthusiasm. Mendoza has a twangy, springloaded distortion sound and uses multiple tracks to map an alien landscape, and her contribution makes for a fine intro to this nicely paced set. With Ben Tyree’s melancholy acoustic “The Gatekeeper,” the back and forth pattern of tracks makes a kind of sense, moving from there to the slashing, jagged shards of On Ka’a Davis’s “Ballet” (not always effective to these ears) to the delay-heavy, percussive, almost Krautrock-y “Guitar Song”

by Shouwang Zhang, to a sweet acoustic 12-string and slide piece from Joel Harrison. Occasionally, a piece seems so narrowly focused that it comes across as ho-hum: the simple contrast between limpid tones and distorted scrabbling on Yasuhiro Usui’s “Headland” struck me as perfunctory, while Richard Carrick’s “A-Ka” and Zachary Pruitt’s “For Electric Guitar #1” sound a tad directionless. But there’s far more here that’s good: the gorgeous finger-picker from Steve Cardenas,

“Aerial”; the brittle, hyper-robotic Reichel-style arpeggio mania from Marco Capelli on “Sits at the Other Side of the Table”; the great distorted epic from Alan Licht, “The Servant,” which genuinely sounds as if the guitar is speaking to you; the sweet, lyrical David Grubbs piece “Weird Salutation,” with tons of space and resonance between the chords. Hans Tammen’s “Spiracles” may be the most compelling piece here, a conjurer’s drone of frissons and overtones, in which are nestled dry, insistent clicks. Now that’s how you do contrast. It’s refreshing that Sharp isn’t even concerned with the degree to which the pieces are “experimental” or even especially “meta”; just boss guitar playing is all you need. Jason Bivins

Erdem Helvacioglu & Ulrich Mertin Planet X Innova CD

Science fiction films and 20th-century/avant-garde music have a long and complex history. Divorced from its cinematic context, much eerie, dissonant, and challenging music that’s embellished various cinematic flights of fancy/fantasy would drive many mainstream music listeners clean away from the communal listening area (initially, at any rate). Filmmakers with arresting styles—Hitchcock, Kubrick, Scorsese, Lynch—seek out disquieting sounds to accompany (or accent) unsettling visions and scenarios. On the other hand, some composers have found (horror/ suspense) films to be a viable means of getting their works heard by large numbers of people, including (especially?) those that have never, ever been to a concert hall featuring composed and/or improvised music solely from the 20th or 21th century.

(The Martin Scorsese movie Shutter Island utilized pieces by György Ligeti, Nam June Paik, Morton Feldman, Lou Harrison, Brian Eno, and Krysztof Penderecki alongside Johnnie Ray and Lonnie Johnson.)

Which brings us to Planet X, the story of humankind and a hellish body in the heavens, discovered, presented, and explored by intrepid

WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #65 | 41

Thanks for a great 15 years!

aural surveyors Erdem Helvacioglu (guitar, electronics, programming) and Ulrich Mertin (violin, viola, voice).

The plot: Space travelers from Earth visit Planet X, whose inhabitants are only too happy to use them as test subjects for their diabolical, Machiavellian ends. (I think I saw similar scenarios on the 1960s Outer Limits TV show once or twice. Ahem.) Some of X evokes the science fiction films of the late 1950s and for Night Gallery (somebody, please reissue Gil Mellé’s electronic and film music!). There’s not much in the way of melody in any usual sense, but lots of fragmented, somewhat Impressionistic (in general, not exactly like Debussy or Ravel), and downright spooky sonic textures and panoramas. Merten’s violin and viola scrape, tinkle, and screech demonically (but with eerie restraint), like small, hungry creatures clawing their way through your walls, ceilings, and/or floors. Helvacioglu’s guitar sputters like malfunctioning machinery, murmuring and flickering like a mirage, stylistically evoking Robert Fripp and Michael Rother, occasionally grinding akin to Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music (albeit not as loudly or as shrill) and Robert Hampson’s Main project. There is judicious use of dub-like reverb and cyclic, banging, mechanical rhythms—“banging” as in a distant shutter or sign buffeted by unyielding winds, “mechanical” as the helicopter blades whup-whup-whuping in Apocalypse Now. “Elevation” pulses and bleats like an alarm on a space station, “Final Transformation” builds and buzzes with indistinct menace like a cross between Penderecki and film composer Bernard Herrmann (composer of soundtracks to Taxi Driver and Psycho, along with several other Hitchcock films).

Planet X is a world where melody—and comfort—in any conventional sense is beside the point, but rhythm and vivid atmospheric textures dominate. While Helvacioglu and Mertin play some “conventional” instruments—guitar, violin, viola—they rarely use them in an easily identifiable manner, preferring extended and DIY techniques to be both a mini-orchestra and sound library. Get the “soundtrack” and hope someone makes a properly good movie to go with it. Whatever it might be, it’s got to be better than Prometheus. Mark Keresman

Chuck Johnson

Crows in the Basilica Three Lobed LP

Glenn Jones

My Garden State Thrill Jockey CD/LP/DL

to know guitar music — they have played other instruments in other styles. Each began recording solo acoustic music after divesting themselves of extravagant impulses, and each has found in the approach an outlet for composing whose melodic clarity conceals depths of emotional and tonal complexity.

Crows In The Basilica is only Johnson’s second solo album, but he’s been putting out music with Spatula, Pykrete, and Shark Quest since the 90s. Currently he plays electronic music as well as acoustic guitar, which may account for his particular attunement to tone. His melodies are winning and his pacing spot-on, but the music’s magnetism derives from his attention to the way proximate resonances transform each other.

Each note seems to unlock another’s depths, so that the tiny fragmentary wildness within what seems to be a single sound comes out and flies around you. It’s trance inducing without resort to the Eastern influences that players like Jack Rose and Robbie Basho used to achieve similar effects. The patterns he uses to wrangle these sounds are rooted in American folk tradition; two of the record’s eight tracks honor Roscoe Holcomb and Elizabeth Cotton, players whom the 60s revivalists held dear.

Glenn Jones, on the other hand, has made four and half solo albums (one was a split with the Black Twig Pickers) prior to My Garden State.

Like the name implies, there’s a New Jersey theme at work here. Jones spent part of his childhood there, and came back a few years ago to help put his aging mother’s affairs in order. Everything on the record was at least partly composed in that ancestral abode, and later recorded in Les and Laura Baird’s Allentown, NJ home studio. Unlike Crows, it isn’t strictly a solo album; Laura and Meg Baird add some guitar, banjo, and field recordings, and Jones also plays banjo, which gives the record a nicely varied sound. But like Johnson, Jones likes to unlock the mysteries of sound.

His key is to devise a new tuning, and then write a song in it. Despite the unhurried elegance of his singing melodies, Jones’s music is spiked with submerged dissonance, which helps to express the longing, trepidation, and loss that his music hints at. But this is not a wallow in the blues; just as Jones long ago figured out the essentials of assembling compositions, he has gotten past musical kvetching.

He spins winding, well-paced yarns that impart much more assurance and serenity than dismay. Bill Meyer

Urs Leimgruber Chicago Solo Leo CD

American Primitive Guitar has not only persevered for the dozen years Urs Leimgruber since its originator John Fahey passed Jacques Demierre on, it has acquired a new legion of Barre Phillips practitioners. Part of the style’s draw Montreuil is its openness. The established Jazzwerkstatt CD framework of playing instrumentals on a steel-stringed acoustic guitar 6ix is so sturdy, you can get along with Almost Even Further bringing in almost any influence Leo CD you choose. But the music always registers most strongly when there’s a Chicago Solo is Leimgruber’s sixth story involved. Both Chuck Johnson solo CD, recorded in a studio more and Glenn Jones are veterans who than twenty years after his first, have not only spent decades getting Statement of an Antirider, so it’s fair 42 | SIGNAL to NOISE #65 WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM

to say that he’s put considerable thought and effort into the development of this language. My favorite solo disc of his, Blue Log, his third, came out in 2000; Chicago Solo features the same concentrated experimentation with saxophone architecture and dynamics, but narrows the focus to harmonic multiplicity and abstract Lacy-ishness.

The echoes of Lacy make sense, since the two lived near each other in the 90s in Paris, but Leimgruber’s soprano and tenor pieces here demonstrate a willingness to extend sonic investigations past the notion of any reference point or center of attack. Often he concentrates so fully on the tiny nuances and slips contained within the instrument’s physical materiality that structure is abandoned. Instead, he coaxes and coerces the instruments themselves to speak, with all of their foibles and power. And, then, once a sound is begun, he follows it and pushes it around and lets it push him around.

The jumps and glitches between notes become the splintered basis for how the music proceeds—like trying to follow all paths in a forest at the same time—and the result is head-spinning.

The live record Montreuil, recorded at the venerable club Les Instants Chavirés, is the fourth record by the Leimgruber/Demierre/Phillips trio.

While they continue to explore a harsher side of improv (focusing on texture and extremes of pitch and density), this band, on this night, made some of their most accessible yet extreme music. Even though music, by its nature, is continuous, this is the music of a paused shattering. Kissy-mouth sounds and barelymade-it-out-alive-from-the-cave squawks alternate with big-buzzed piano string thwacks and long, softly sustained chords. The tension that feeds even the most seemingly innocent interactions here does manifest itself, but it’s like watching a pleasant underwater coral scene: sudden feeding frenzies erupt from the general equanimity. Threats are constantly implied, while color and vibrancy are everywhere.

6ix is a sextet project created by Demierre and Leimgruber; they are joined by Okkyung Lee (cello), Thomas Lehn (analog synth), Dorothea Schürch (voice and singing saw) and Roger Turner (percussion).

Almost Even Further is their first record, but it has precedents in the Vario 34 sextets on Blue Tower and Concepts of Doing, as well as the Screen CD on Concepts of Doing that also featured Leimgruber, Schürch and Turner. This is midsize ensemble improvisation that has learned as much from the King Übü Orchestra as from the younger generation of Berlin musicians in Phosphor. It’s very moody. Unique individuals forging a collective sound, but not necessarily bound to “the collective”: each comfortable with others making a powerful impact. The great thing about this specific collection of musicians is that none of them can be counted on to react in a consistent way to similar stimulus. When some people eat a sandwich, they want each bite to be the same every time; others prefer a variety from bite to bite: a

pickle here, a big dollop of Dijon there. A scribbling synthesizer fart here, a raspy bark there. Some sonic gestures incite a conflagration of louder and louder sonic gestures, and the volume level rises substantially and is maintained. I appreciate that the dynamic is preserved on the recording and not EQed out: sometimes life gets loud. And, even more rarely, sometimes it’s pindropon-pillowcase quiet. And you need to be able to figure out where it went. Andrew Choate

David T. Little Soldier Songs Innova CD/DL

Composer David T. Little is making a name for himself with contemporary classical works tinged with socio-political commentary and magnified with amplification.

Though he hints at humor, dark subject matter is his bread and butter.

Most acclaimed to date is his opera Dog Days, a visceral take on a dystopian future society (its libretto resembles Cormac McCarthy’s The Road with more cannibalism and, if possible, an even bleaker outlook).

He has recently returned to Soldier Songs, a vocal work written shortly after the outset of our most recent misadventures in Iraq. In early 2013 it was presented as a multimedia theater project and on a studio recording. The piece seeks to capture the various stages of indoctrination into a culture of violence that American men, first as boys and, eventually, as adult combatants, undergo. It references all the artifacts

of this process, from the warlike toys of childhood with kung fu grip (one is amazed that Hasbro hasn’t sued for the co-opting of its most famous jingle), succeeded by iPods filled with violent lyrics, guns, and heavy artillery.

Alongside relentlessly provocative interview clips from traumatized veterans, baritone David Adam Moore and Newspeak, an amplified chamber group that has been central to Little’s activities, thunder adeptly through an equally relentless score.

Little gives occasional nods to other styles of contemporary classical, but his music draws strongly upon the lingua franca of the 21st century’s incarnation of the New York Downtown scene (now so downtown that many of its participants reside in Brooklyn, Queens, and New Jersey): post-minimal gestures, peppered with postmodern instrumental effects, and a strong thread of indie rock melodies and attitude. Little is a deft orchestrator—he knows Newspeak’s capabilities inside and out—and his music brims with rhythmic vitality. His pitch language remains a step or two behind in terms of variety and sophistication.

More problematic in Soldier Songs is the issue of pacing. In order to match the fervid tenor of the text and spoken word recordings, Little pushes the music into the realm of bombast, which grows wearing.

That may well be the point. Soldier Songs will likely appeal to those on one side only of the polarized divide in our debate about American bellicosity. Those who identify with the work’s message will find it

underscored and punctuated with fiery élan. Christian Carey

Low

The Invisible Way Sub Pop CD

Retribution Gospel Choir 3

Chaperone CD

It’s official; Low have gotten some shit out of their system. The Invisible Way is their second record in a row to re-assert the primacy of unhurried tempos and celestial harmonies. The blasted sonics and frayed nerves of Drums & Guns and The Great Destroyer have been replaced by a spacious and natural sound that nicely complements those signature elements, and leaves plenty of space in between for subdued acoustic guitar and piano. This is probably the first Low record that they could play all the way through with the power out without sounding that different from the LP. Listen close and there are still signs of disquiet. “Clarence White,” for example, seems to have nothing to do with the late, great Byrds guitarist who shared its name, but plenty to do with trying to overcome some inner demon that is galling guitarist Alan Sparhawk’s conscience. But you have only to advance one song to “Four Score” and drummer Mimi Parker’s singing sounds so soothing, you can almost see that demon slinking away to sit in the corner. Keep listening and the nature of the titular

unseen path becomes evident as the couple trade songs about the succor bestowed by familial love and religious faith in a hostile world.

But sometimes Sparhawk still needs a place vent some darkness, and that’s where the Retribution Gospel Choir comes in. The Choir is another trio, and it shares bassist Steve Garrington with Low. But their sounds vary in ways that go far beyond the differences between drummer Eric Pollard’s crisp attack and Parker’s sparse cadences. This is where Sparhawk gets to be loud and impulsive. Last year RGC put out a four-song, 10-minute-long EP that sounded like an audition to be AOR stars on the same station with Boston and AC/DC. This time they’re stretching way, way out, tapping into a tradition of ballroom jamming that stretches back to the Quicksilver Messenger Service and the Velvet Underground. There’s just one song per side on this LP (and you have to buy the LP to get the CD tucked inside of the swanky sleeve). The tension builds and builds on “Can’t Walk Out,” and no matter how close Sparhawk’s guitar gets to that Crazy Horse sweet spot, it never releases. That comes on “Seven,” where Sparhawk and guest guitarist Nels Cline indulge in some Televisionary sparring that twists and turns under a cloud cover of dreamy vocal harmonies.

Low fans that only want the nicesounding stuff will probably be quite happy with The Invisible Way, but they’re missing out on some of Sparhawk’s most emotionally im-

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mediate music if they skip 3.

Bill Meyer

Bunita Marcus Sugar Cubes TestKlang CD+DVD

Those who are familiar with composer Bunita Marcus primarily as the dedicatee of a work by Morton Feldman are missing out. She operates in a creative space that is distinctive, lovely, at turns pensive and luxuriant in sonic ambiance. And yes, Marcus frequently enjoys creating slowly evolving, soft music: but anyone who reductively pigeonholes it as “postFeldman” will cause me to overfill the swear jar.

Hopefully, the release of Sugar Cubes, a CD/DVD set that is the first offering from Testklang, will help to remedy some of the aforementioned misapprehensions. The recordings feature Ensemble Adapter, conducted by Manuel Mawri, and pianist Mark Tritschler. The pianist is particularly affecting in the title work, a fleeting glimpse at Marcus’s propensity for gentle lyricism and fragilely balanced textures, and ...

But to Fashion a Lullaby for You, one of the composer’s most sumptuous works. Over its 22-minute timespan, the piece’s repeated arpeggiations become hauntingly insistent. Partway through, surprising filigrees break the trance, complicating the musical surface with additional color and rhythmic complexity. This shift in vantage point transports the piece to a new collection of harmonies and a cradle song that displays poignant vulnerability.

The ensemble work Lecture for Jo Kondo is a fine piece of musical portraiture that captures some of the essence of its dedicatee’s sound world, integrating it with Marcus’s own voice. The use of mallet instruments in ensemble contexts marries well with the prominence of piano in the texture; both are pitted against sustained high notes and occasional effects from flute and violin. Once again, a midstream introduction of a melodic line in a different, slightly faster tempo, signals a bridge point that breaks the listener’s reverie and impels the piece forward, still relatively slowly, but more inexorably. The flute, violin, and piano piece Sleeping Woman explores sustained overlapping lines in a dazzling, dissonant tapestry of sound.

The disc also gives a nod to the importance of Feldman to Marcus (not in a historical or pigeonholing fashion, but as a source of musical inspiration) by including his orchestration of Merry Christmas Mrs. Whiting, an early Marcus work.

Christian Carey

Jim McAuley Gongfarmer 36 Long Song CD

Years ago, fellow STN scribe Nate Dorward told me there was a solo guitar record I just had to hear. It was Jim McAuley’s first Gongfarmer record on Vinny Golia’s Nine Winds imprint. McAuley, who came to Los Angeles in the 1970s and has been criminally, mind-blowingly slept on by improv fanatics, could reasonably 44 | SIGNAL to NOISE #65 WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM

be called a guitarist’s guitarist. What that means is that his innovations— exclusively on a variety of acoustic guitars, from nylon-string to 12-string to baritone to trusty traditional axe— are all invested in the instrument’s idiomatic properties and can range across a variety of idioms, from Takoma folk-sounding pieces to flinty excursions that nod to Incus to the most lush ballads.

Having received some well-earned attention through the Nine Winds disc and through the Acoustic Guitar Trio on Incus (with Nels Cline and the senselessly murdered Rod Poole), McAuley released the stellar two-disc The Ultimate Frog (on Drip Audio).

It’s so nice to see this increased activity and attention, and his latest solo record is yet another triumph. Made up of studio recordings, some live shots from the Boise Experimental Music Festival, and a McAuley home practice tape, his full range is heard here. “Second Blooming” and “Una Lunga Canzone” (on classical guitar) are filled with sweetly melancholy lines, thoughtful and well-considered, with regular arpeggio sequences that sound like the sonic bloom the former’s title might be invoking. There are also more brittle, metallic pieces where McAuley uses subtle preparations: on the rattly, spindly “Another November Night,” he uses a tuning fork on his 12-string; the brief, burbling “What part of maybe (don’t you understand)” is for high-strung dobro and slide; “Plect’s Bounce” is a gorgeously abstracted classical-sounding piece performed on prepared parlor guitar; and “Joy Buzzer” is an amusing miniature, where McAuley uses an emery board to create a space-age gliss and chime effect. But then there are always those suggestive doses of vernacular goodness, as with the resolute steel-string guitar of “Blues for John Carter,” where McAuley continually returns to those resounding notes at the top as Carter did overtones. But a special nod goes to a couple of McAuley staples. The 12-string fantasy “The Eyelids of Buddha” is gorgeous, a more spacious and ruminative version than on the earlier Gongfarmer album (with some lovely, sour, almost dissonant passages in the middle). And his dedication to his wife, “nika’s Waltz,” closes out the album in fine form.

Jason Bivins

Chris McGregor

Sea Breezes: Solo Piano— Live in Durban 1987 Fledg'ling CD

Fledg’ling Records’ series of top-notch archival recordings of Chris McGregor’s work continues with this 1987 solo set in Durban, his first official performance after he left South Africa over twenty years prior. The music McGregor wrote and arranged for the Blue Notes and the Brotherhood of Breath was always chock full of exuberance, but it’s not till you hear him solo that you realize just how big a heart he had for music. The way his fingers touch the keys, with such spring, bespeaks a wide capacity for experience and an ever deeper dedication to the struggle to express it. That the

music is so full of joy is a testament to his success and the power of the belief that ubiquitous corruption and evil don’t necessarily have to be insurmountable obstructions, especially when you can slip music between the cracks. Fans of the Blue Notes and the Brotherhood of Breath will appreciate hearing “You and Me (Sejui),” “Big G,” “Sonia” and others as solo piano pieces, and be surprised at just how much of the original bounce he’s able to capture.

The recording quality is top-notch, so much so that you can hear him inhale in the downbeats, almost like he’s playing sax, but he’s really just breathing in time with the music: it filled his soul and it will fill whatever room you listen to this in, and spill outside of it when it’s over too.

Andrew Choate

Dan Melchior

The Backward Path Northern Spy CD

Once one realizes this record is a sound document of Dan Melchior’s time dealing with his wife Letha Rodman’s ongoing cancer and treatments, and with the time between treatments when they both contend with the fact that they don’t know how long she has or what kind of void awaits, the music gains an extra dimension that can make it downright hard to listen to. It’s also completely absorbing in a way his more garage-pop recordings aren’t.

Its 13 tracks cut back and forth from subdued semi-acoustic vocal-driven pieces to shards of wavering noise, delicate finger-picked dirges and sounds that might be his interpretations of brainwaves or a body’s struggles with serious illness.

This record shows Melchior as caretaker, accepting the fact that there are long stretches where what he does with his time is certain, and others where he “doesn’t know what day it [is]” and the hours are, to quote the track “Waves,” “relentless.” In one track, “The Old Future,” he looks at the past to reflect a present where he claims “nothing much has changed”; in some ways, it hasn’t. He refers to old manifestos, books featuring jetpacks, floating cars and “metallic blue unitards.” It seems to be a reminder that illness and uncertainty are always with us, despite the advance of technology or changes in political theory.

Make no mistake, this is a much quieter, less sarcastic record than Melchior has made recently. Gone is the in-the-red overload, and while Robin Hitchcock-esque pop hooks remain, when he claims “I have filled my life with useless stuff,” as he does on “I Have Known the Emptiness,” you know that, in light of his partner’s situation, he doesn’t mean to wallow in trifles. Even a track such as “Dark Age Tail Spin” takes something like a standard rock and roll riff and musses it up with C Spencer Yeh’s violin, tracked like a distant whine perpetually coming over a nearby hill. This is a seemingly schizophrenic record, with electronic experiments bookending reluctant pop. Yet, like a good episode of Louie, The Backward Path manages to wallow in its own existential dilemma while

never being less than thoughtful.

Bruce Miller

Jon Mueller Death Blues Hometapes/Taiga LP

Tatsuya Nakatani

Nakatani Gong Orchestra Taiga LP

Nowadays the drummer is the butt of countless dumb-musician jokes, but in other times and places the drummer bore great social responsibility. Their instruments facilitated distance communication, social organization, recreation and combat.

Both Jon Mueller and Tatsuya Nakatani don the mantle of percussionist as social nexus on their new LPs. Gongs have long loomed large in Japanese-born Tatsuya Nakatani’s music. A relentless road warrior, he has lugged a vanload of the things around the continental USA on numerous solo tours, and during his 2011-12 circumnavigations of the country he convened gong orchestras in any town that would have one. Nakatani would hold a 3-hour workshop, which was open to anyone willing to play, regardless of previous musical experience, on the afternoon before the concert.

Each participant would learn the basics of striking and bowing gongs, and Nakatani would note their respective abilities. That night he would hold a concert split between solo and group recitals. During the latter he conducted the workshop’s members as they played pieces whose technical simplicity unlocked a sound world of vast and gorgeous complexity. This LP, likewise split into solo and group sides, does the beauty of those concerts justice.

The audiophile recording captures the music’s immensity as it patiently drifts from sonority to sonority, like a weather front moving over the land.

Inside each sound is other sounds, some generated by multiple players, some by the rich resources of the gongs. The side edited from group performances sounds quite similar to Nakatani’s solo side, a result that testifies to his skill in guiding his amateur orchestra towards shared awareness and harmonic cooperation. In the sound, they are one.

In 2011 Milwaukee-based musician Jon Mueller released The Whole, an album that reduced his music to a solo performance of a single extended gesture. Perhaps in reaction, he set about creating a project of diametrically opposite scale. The explicit impetus of Death Blues is the awareness of mortality as a motivation to create and connect.

The endeavor exists as an entirety.

Mueller made an early CD of Death Blues sketches that he didn’t sell, but gave away to people whom he thought might think about it; he invited other people to write about its implications for a dedicated website. In the fall of 2012 he held some Death Blues concerts before small audiences who were treated to a spectacle that used dance and food as well as music to engage the senses and stymie predictability. The music was only part of the whole, and the LP’s contents betray its status

as a component, even though it’s bracing stuff. Mueller plays drums and hammered acoustic guitar, and chants wordless vocals; a couple other players thicken the textures with acoustic bass and trombone. Stark beats build up to massed marches, locked in step but with enough space for plenty of reverberation to radiate from each down-stroke. The effect is a bit like Rhys Chatham leading the current line-up of the Swans through an extended tribute to Gary Glitter’s “Rock and Roll Part 2,” and if you say there’s nothing wrong with that, I’m with you all the way. It’s just that Death Blues feels like a record, one that just happens to commemorate a much broader convergence of experiences; the enveloping sonics of Nakatani Gong Orchestra, on the other hand, make you feel like you’re part of the gathering. Both are fine LPs, but only NGO succeeds in embodying the intent of its origin.

Bill Meyer

NewYork Art Quartet Call it Art Triple Point LPx5

Anyone who knows the poetry of Paul Haines, librettist of Carla Bley’s astonishing Escalator Over the Hill, has experienced the way his phrases are connected by something dangerously close to waking logic.

But nothing really resolves, and half the fun is following the vapor trails left in the wake of Haines’ linguistic antics. I had a similar impression of disconnection and reformation when listening to these newly released recordings by the New York Art Quartet. The Paul Haines analogy may only be relevant in that he recorded the group in Michael Snow’s loft. The point isn’t even that his contribution constitutes part of five LPs that are now added to a band discography which, previously, didn’t even contain five LPs’ worth of material. The connection lies in the music itself: in NYAQ’s music, the received values of small-group logic are inverted, and tradition is tempered by fancy and the freedom of discovery. The present lavish package is a fitting monument to their legacy.

The NYAQ coalesced in the summer of 1964, emerging from the New York Contemporary Five, which, in turn, had ties to the Bill Dixon/Archie Shepp quartet. The core membership included Rudd, the late saxophonist John Tchicai, and percussionist Milford Graves, as well as a rotating cast of bass players, here including Lewis Worrell, Reggie Workman, Don Moore, Bob Cunningham and, surprisingly, Eddie Gomez just before his Bill Evans tenure. Integral to the group’s aesthetic was poet Amiri Baraka, who lent his voice to their first studio recording, on ESP, and to one of the broadcasts in Call It Art. Though the group lasted only a year and a half, its history and myriad associations, musical and sociopolitical, are complex to say the least, but Ben Young’s book-length liner notes sort the story out in exemplary fashion. He goes beyond merely recounting the band’s history, diving headlong into

the music, using it as a series of microhistorical moments to elucidate the gradual disintegration of time in 1960s small-group jazz (Ornette Coleman’s Free Jazz bespeaks a larger and somewhat different aesthetic). Young makes the case that the NYAQ ushered in the moment when strict time, or pulse, ceased to be essential to what many of its participants still refuse to call “free jazz.” The hardcover book slides out of the set’s heavy and slightly rough wooden case to reveal not only history and musical analysis, but a wealth of unpublished photographs, scores, advertisements, letters and contemporaneous reviews. Indeed, the liners point to a musical history as colorful as the personal relations that governed the band’s trajectory.

Along the way, we hear several versions of familiar pieces, are privy to the compositional process, and find a little-known Ornette Coleman tune, unrecorded by him, bubbling to the surface of a spirited Halloween loft performance.

Across these five LPs, there is only one studio track, an alternate take of “Banging on the White House Door” from the NYAQ’s second album, Mohawk (1965).

Young encourages those unfamiliar to begin with this brief excursion, as complete a manifestation of the NYAQ vision as can be expected in six and a half minutes. It’s slightly more tentative and diffuse than the released version, but also more exploratory, Rudd in particular delving into territory nowhere in sight on the Mohawk reading while Graves and Workman exercise their new-found metric freedom. The take is a tease, a microhistory in itself, restating what has been accomplished and prophetic of things to come after the group’s imminent demise.

The sonic quality of the concert material is variable, though it is all at least listenable. The band’s July 15, 1965 appearance in the Sculpture Garden of MOMA sounds remarkably good, though in mono, as does a January 17, 1964 WBAI broadcast with an incendiary Amiri Baraka: Gomez’s wild alacrity points the way toward the fire he’d breathe on a track like Sunny Murray’s “Black Art.” At long last, and in pristine stereo, we are treated to the December 31, 1964 concert from the Four Days in December series at Judson Hall. The quartet lays down the first of three versions of “No. 6,” and we have the first appearance of the collective composition “Uh-Oh,” which is also played at my favorite session in the box, the Halloween happening at Marzette Watts’ loft. This “Uh-Oh” finds Graves on conga, with Alan Shorter on trumpet and NYC5 drummer J.C. Moses, setting the stage for a strange battle of wills that pits tradition against innovation, meter against meterlessness. And the audience is clearly digging it all!

Strangest is an early 1965 session at Michael Snow’s loft, complete with breakdowns and false starts, where we experience new compositions like “Suite V” and “For Eric” in embryo.

NYAQ’s collective approach to improvisation set the group apart.

The two takes of “Uh-Oh” demon-

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strate just how fresh and malleable the group concept was. They slowly heat things up in the Judson Hall performance, the rhythm section gaining momentum as Rudd and Tchicai emote modal blues in sweet simultaneity over the vamp. Just as naturally, everything is brought down again, making way for Moore and Graves to punctuate nearsilence with the thwacks and ringing sonorities of impending seachange.

The Halloween 1965 version demonstrates that even amongst the avant-garde, the paradigm shift can be uneasy, as traps and congas drift in and out of time while keeping the heat turned way up. Marc Medwin

Noh Mercy Noh Mercy

Superior Viaduct LP/CD

Factrix

Scheintot

Superior Viaduct LP/CD

100 Flowers 100 Flowers

Superior Viaduct LP/CD

Since the latter part of 2012, Bay Area archival reissue label Superior Viaduct has been impressively productive. First bringing back into circulation San Francisco oddballs Black Humor, they’ve followed suit with the feminist punk duo Noh Mercy, California proto-industrial trio Factrix, 100 Flowers, German Shepherds, and other West Coast DIY/underground artifacts. As of this writing the label has expanded their geographic reach, reissuing Martin Rev’s post-Suicide solo debut and decidedly non-“punk” music from Gruppo di Improvisazione Nuovo Consonanza and Henry Flynt.

Consisting of vocalist/keyboardist Esmerelda, a torch singer with rage front and center, and percussionist/guitarist Tony Hotel, Noh Mercy were active between 1977 and 1980. In their lifetime as a band, they only released two tracks, which appeared on UK post-punk label Fast (the double 7” compilation Earcom 3). “Caucasian Guilt” and “Revolutionary Spy” were recorded by Tuxedomoon’s Tommy Tadlock in 1979; luckily eight other pieces from that marathon session survived for this fascinating, eponymous set, which also includes a brief live performance. A Berklee jazz student who befriended Marty Morrell, Hotel played with Chet Baker and Roy Meriwether; her dry, methodical and sensitively pummeling approach to rhythm is the theatrical pair’s secret weapon.

Esmerelda often dressed in Japanese performance garb, and while this is not performance art in the strictest sense, their theatrical intensity cuts through the recordings.

Railing against racism (“Caucasian Guilt”), bourgeois materialism (“Fashion Chant”) and Harvey Milk’s assassination (“Furious”), the music ranges from growling, free declamations to art-rock minisuites. Words don’t really do justice to the primal, psycho-sonic power of Noh Mercy, however; it’s preferable to simply drop the needle 46 | SIGNAL to NOISE #65 WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM

on one of 2012’s finest unearthed documents.

Emerging from the scene that produced Minimal Man and Tuxedomoon, Factrix like Noh Mercy bubbled up and disappeared in a brief window (1980-1983). While perhaps aligned with such diverse outsider groups as Chrome and the Residents, Factrix present a troubling lysergic stew along the lines of 39 Clocks, but without the Lou Reed panache or antagonism.

Consisting of vocalist/keyboardist Cole Palme, guitarist/violist Bond Bergland and bassist Joseph Jacobs, their instrumental palette is a wash of tape collages, drum machines, non-Western instruments and disembodied sighs. One of their two LPs, their debut Scheintot (tr: suspended animation), was issued on Adolescent Records; perhaps as a nod to the idea that this music isn’t as deathly serious as one might assume, the original A and B sides were respectively labeled “Party Side” and “Grim Side.” The Superior Viaduct issue adds the preceding “Empire of Passion”/“Splice of Life” single.

The opening “Eerie Lights” has a dirty slink, a plasticized and borderline-funky riff enclosed in warped electronics, which is carried over to the minimal grotesquerie of “Heavy Breathing.” But that’s not to say Factrix can’t do songs; “Center of the Doll” pits a mesmerizing pulse against sinewy clatter and a wispy croon, while the second side’s “Ballad of the Grim Rider” is the closest thing on Scheintot to a folk-rock ramble, surrounded as it is by haranguing monochord lope, metallic clatter and grimy, hazy halfrecitations. Factrix presents warped California mayhem that’s well worth revisiting.

The trio of bassist John TalleyJones, guitarist Kjehl Johansen and drummer Kevin Barrett came out of the LA punk scene in 1978, first performing as the Urinals, then reorganizing as 100 Flowers. Though punk and post-punk thrived in the affordable singles market, 100 Flowers issued a barnstormer of an LP on their own Happy Squid label in 1983, which has been remastered and reissued as part of the Superior Viaduct catalog. With 16 tracks and 40 minutes of music, the album shows that 100 Flowers eclipsed the tossed-offness of their Urinals upbringing, in the process learning how to write incisive, hooky grooves like the one that permeates “All Sexed Up” (shades of the Social Climbers). “Our Fallout” is a glassy, motorik raver that reveals a serious amount of mass, more than one would expect from a taut SoCal power trio. Apparently the group was a formative influence on the Minutemen, and it’s not hard to hear a connection to San Pedro’s finest in Talley-Jones’ massive, undulating bass and Johansen’s gruff shout atop eliding, wiry slide on “Head, No Heart.”

Their resonant, bright choogle and youthful irreverence is also reminiscent of Kiwi bands like The Clean, though that owes more to time and like experience than any real crosspollination. Like other documents

in the Superior Viaduct annals, 100 Flowers exerted a lot of power with minimal means, and created a slice of lasting music that was clearly ahead of its time. Marc Medwin

Evan Parker Electroacoustic Ensemble Hasselt Psi CD

John Coxon Evan Parker Eddie Prevost Cinema Fataka CD

Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra Improcherto (for HB) Lorram CD

Grutronic and Evan Parker

Together in Zero Space Psi CD

The indefatigable Evan Parker shows up here in three distinctive ensembles, each showcasing a range of his manifold activity. Culled from successive nights’ performances, Hasselt features the latest version of Parker’s now fifteen-yearsold (!) ElectroAcoustic Ensemble.

He’s maintained a steady core of electronicians since the group’s ECM debut and has since then modified the additional personnel depending on circumstance and whim, but they’re all long-time associates of his. For Hasselt, the group includes: Peter Evans (trumpet and piccolo trumpet), Ishikawa Ko (sho), Ned Rothenberg (clarinets), Peter van Bergen (clarinets), Augusti Fernandez (prepared and unprepared piano), bassist Barry Guy, Paul Lytton (percussion, live electronics), FURT (Richard Barrett and Paul Obermayer on live electronics), Joel Ryan (sample and signal processing), Walter Prati (live electronics and computer processing), Lawrence Casserley (signal processing instrument, percussion, voice), Marco Vecchi (sound processing and sound projection), and Parker on soprano. Not surprisingly, there is a vast instrumental range here and Parker is smart enough to break these performances down by subsection in many cases. The opening trio, for example, is just Ko, Fernandez, and Prati, but they generate a considerable sound from high tones and plinking piano, and lots of processed string action that eventually boils over as Fernandez mashes a single note. The marvelously creaky “Hasselt 2” is for Guy, FURT, and van Bergen on contrabass clarinet (though I could swear there were some woody shakuhachi notes in there amidst the basement burbles and tiny squeaks). The tightly focused timbres on “Hasselt 3” come from Ko, Fernandez, Lytton, and especially from Evans and Rothenberg in a superbly controlled overtone merge. This piece contains multitudes, as skulking piano clouds well up for moments of drama, rattling metal, and spooled circular breathing. The fourth performance, nearly 35 minutes, is focused on Parker’s own soprano, a chirpy, effusive

piece which forces the ensemble to move away from laminal improvising and explore nearly percussive phraseology. Fernandez’s marvelous prepared piano lines wend their way deep into the electronic fabric, with brass and overtones creating some kind of wind-based forest for a spell.

For Cinema, Parker is joined

by John Coxon on electric guitar and prepared piano, and percussionist Eddie Prevost. In a single, 55-minute improvisation they create music that is wafting and cloudlike or flinty by turns. Coxon’s instruments are closer in timbre than you might expect, which surely is by design, but as an improviser he’s often either scratchy and cautious, or overbearing in volume. The gentle dabs and whorls from Prevost fit well with the oscillations Parker explores in the opening minutes, and initially Coxon uses volume pedal and controlled feedback judiciously, wending his way between bowed cymbals and sax overtones.

But every so often he’ll bust out a downtuned riff, slam out some wah-wah effects, and it tends to push the music into a kind of default of long droning sections without much tension or granulation. When the music leaves the drone-space, Coxon starts serrating the strings, doing little spring-sproing things, and peeling off distorted runs that are too loud and don’t quite fit with Parker’s and Prevost’s language.

Parker has played with the GIO before, and it’s always a treat to hear players from this overlooked scene (some readers will be familiar with guitarist Neil Davidson, saxophonist Raymond MacDonald, and others, though the ensemble is strong as a whole). But what makes this 40-minute “Improcherto” stand out even more is the presence of another distinguished guest, the late and deeply missed Lol Coxhill.

Groaning strings and avian flutes open things up, followed by a population of muted brass and side-stepping saxophones (the range of timbre and instrumentation is considerable among these 20some players). The aesthetic is very much like a large version of Parker’s London Airlift recording, a quick whoosh, a burnished wow-wow on the sax, an assemblage of Sequenzas being played simultaneously.

Of course, Parker sounds inimitable when he enters for a tenor churn, and Coxhill deals out some incisive soprano (there’s a deliciously tart solo statement from MacDonald too). But I do confess that I like the densest moments the best here, as when a sizzling sequence of hand percussion is followed by a sheer cloud of sound. Things can be brash and brassy, or elegantly tensile as the music filters through viola and cello. In addition to range, there’s a deftness and delicacy to the GIO that’s heard in small forest fauna sections or slow-moving ensemble passages that sound like wafting clouds of Takemitsu or Messiaen. It’s this kind of admirable restraint that’s so tough for an ensemble of this size to realize, and the GIO nails it.

With the electronics ensemble Grutronic, Parker once again situates himself in a non-idiomatic

space and subjects himself to processing. Recorded at Bratislava’s Next Festival of Advanced Music, the contexts conjured on these two lengthy tracks reveal the particularities of Grutronic as an ensemble.

Stephen Grew’s keyboards and processing are responsible for some of the more lambent and environmental contributions, but the other three players (Nicholas Grew is credited with transduction, David Ross plays his homemade Droscillator, and Richard Scott wields the Wigi, the Blippoo Box, and Buchla Lightning) create a live tapestry of bleeps, animal sounds, squiggles, and toyboxes.

Parker on soprano on the first piece makes plenty of chirruping mischief in their midst, and the results are initially quite promising.

On “Filigree and Circuitry” (as apt a description of the proceedings as any), things get rather spacious and one of the electronicians—against Parker’s insistent patterns—slows down and speeds up things like tape being mangled around the spools. Such good moments are found throughout the piece, and it’s incessantly alive with detail, even if the specific instrumental/electronic language isn’t always my bag. The mashing Farfisa sound gives things an interesting alternate gravity at times, its occasional dalliance with idiomatic sound creating a hiccup in the otherwise dense outpouring. “Mesomerism in Rhythm” is somewhat different. Still dense, it’s got a cavernous feel and sounds continually like you’re being led through sonic structures precisely at the moment of their collapse: into water, into flame, into bundles of metallic piping. Jason Bivins

Michael Pisaro The Middle of Life Gravity Wave CD

The Punishment of the Tribe by its Elders Gravity Wave CD

The latest two releases on Michael Pisaro’s Gravity Wave label point to a change in his compositional aesthetic. This phase of the transformation may have begun with Fields have Ears 6, where Pisaro’s usual soundworlds—landscape field recordings, sine tones and guitar— became so densely layered that they seemed to bloom beyond the composers’ control. Where ealier compositions explored myriad facets of a single sound, there has been an expansion, a multilayered transcendence of boundaries. The two compositions under discussion here present starker, equally diverse and ultimately complementary aspects of Pisaro’s evolving music.

Middle of Life strikes a pastoral chord from the opening sine tone-infused moments, a strangely peaceful vibe seemingly in direct contrast to the Oswald Egger line so fundamental to the work’s construction and delivered, in multiple languages, throughout the piece: “In the middle of life, I found myself again in a forest with no path.” Whatever the psychological import of those words might be, the music itself bespeaks dis and reorientation as environ-

ments shift and merge more quickly than is usual in a Pisaro piece. Even Graham Lambkin’s voice, presumably coming over the phone, seems recessed, almost buried. Each environmental sound of wind, machine and water is lush and all-enveloping, but unlike the afore-mentioned Fields have Ears and Transparent City series, there is a disconcerting inconstancy to their juxtaposition. By the time we hear Julia Holter’s voice, emerging and fragmenting along the stereo spectrum, the turn away from such overt density is refreshing.

Punishment does not thrive on density in quite the same way, but this isn’t to say that it constitutes any sort of return to a simpler aesthetic.

On his blog, Pisaro states that the material was recorded for Middle of Life, but he also speaks of Punishment’s foreboding quality; the deep tones throughout most of it do kconjure very different visions. Again, Pisaro has evolved his use of sine tones, this time working with their articulation in juxtaposition with what sounds like gongs of various sizes.

The piece is a study of wildly diverse dynamics and timbres, and while I don’t want to say too much about the sounds in play, even those long familiar with Pisaro’s soundworld may be surprised at how things unfold, especially in the second half.

If the two pieces have anything in common, maybe it’s a more rapid movement between sonic environments. This is exemplified on Crosshatches, Pisaro’s collaboration with Toshiya Tsunoda released last year on Erstwhile, but some back-listening reveals the processes already in play on earlier releases.

Sample Wave and Waves for a more serialized version of the juxtapositions I’m seeking to articulate, and then read Brian Olewnick’s excellent blogpost concerning why the music is so difficult to discuss. Whatever the impetus for the changes, and whatever the reasons for the relatively rapid transformations, Pisaro’s work is certainly in a state of flux, and we are the beneficiaries.

Marc Medwin

Ratchet Orchestra Hemlock Drip Audio CD

Montreal-based bassist/composer Nicolas Caloia has been directing his 30-some-piece Ratchet Orchestra for a number of years now. Hemlock is the band’s second album, and this fine effort covers a wide swath of 20th-century classical music, big band jazz, free jazz, musique actuelle, and Broadway show tunes. Many of the musicians will be familiar to those who know the Montreal scene, including stalwarts Jean Derome, Sam Shalabi, Tom Walsh, Josh Zubot, Jean René, Isaiah Ceccarelli, and others, as well as a number of semi-amateur musicians in what can be regarded as something of a large orchestra workshop.

The album is sprawling, but the music itself is always coherent. Caloia’s compositions feature ingenious, often abrupt transitions that appear perfectly natural upon aural digestion. While there

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are elements of free jazz, Caloia’s approach is Ellingtonian, and he lets the individual musicians’ voices come through, as Derome’s saxophone and Walsh’s trombone do on “Winnow,” the elegant first track. This is a Montreal band, so of course there is a certain whimsical element to much of the music, including the standards pastiche of “Yield” and the 58 seconds of “Kick,” a mock-hipster recitation of variations on the line “Kick that habit, man.” “Hemlock, Part 1,” opens with Caloia bowing a drone on his bass before a drum beat heralds the arrival of the band, Derome’s flute fluttering on top of the delicate maelstrom. A cheesy “Bitches Brew”-like organ enters over snarling guitar as the piece segues into “Part 2,” which starts out with a jungle beat on kettle drums and a free blowing section that trails off into a pastoral soufflé of flute and strings. Caloia steps in again, and violinists Jean René and Josh Zubot take the piece out in a stunningly nuanced and affecting violin duo. The music moves in balance, the dancing with my musical funny bone. Mike Chamberlain

Marc Riordan Quartet Binoculars Club Nerodia CD

Marc Riordan is primarily known as a drummer, though with this record and his work in the free improv trio Tres Hongos it’s clear his piano playing is no tangential foray. He’s got a distinctive Monk-meetsMengelberg vibe, as well as the imagination and chops to make that work. Of the eight tunes here, he wrote all of them except Monk’s “A Merrier Christmas.” Drawing from a warm—not frenetically hot and not West Coast cool—lineage of post-bop swinging and justslightly frayed soloing, the quartet of Peter Hanson (alto sax), Daniel Thatcher (bass) and Tim Daisy (drums) nurtures a delicate balance between playing straight-ahead melodies and updating the tradition of sweet, head-nodding jazz that is just as easy to listen to while sipping a cocktail as driving to work in the morning. “On the 6th” and “Lesson Learned” are imbued with an ineffable sense of satisfied, swinging relaxation. The taut but deeply comfortable rhythm section of Daisy and Thatcher are so wellsynced throughout that it perfectly highlights the moments when Hanson and Riordan take modern liberties with tone color and rhythmic synchronicity. Lesser contemporary bands that come from the world of improv and decide they want to play more traditional fare typically end up juxtaposing overly composed heads with moments of total freakout improv, as if that pattern was new. The Marc Riordan Quartet instead opts for something subtler and more difficult to pull off: old-style compositions executed with contemporary sensibilities: a flutter-tongue here, an intervallic sinew of tone clusters there, all in the service of enriching the original tune. Andrew Choate

Alasdair Roberts & Friends

A Wonder Working Stone Drag City LP/CD/DL

You want to hear about class warfare? It’s nothing new, and Americans are rank amateurs compared to our ancestors in the United Kingdom.

Consider just this example: beginning in the late 1700s, Scottish landowners started “improving” their landholdings by moving people off the land in order to make room for sheep. Forced emigration, famine, and depopulation followed during the bleak time known as the Highland Clearances. The sad story informs “The Year of the Burning,” a rousingly sung tale of loss parked near the front of A Wonder Working Stone. But don’t worry, this ain’t no Braveheart shit; Roberts would rather linger on the totality of knowledge, all rue and sorrow and the triumph of mere survival, than celebrate blood lust and bogus heroism.

Alasdair Roberts knows his history, and since he grew up in a musical family, he also knows his folk music.

But neither his roots nor his raising binds the Glaswegian singerguitarist. He’s also a contemporary artist, interested in making his music speak for his world, for his friends, and for himself. Once willing to play alone, he now records mostly live with a mass of mates who give him the reach to incorporate jazzy swing, Irish melody, parlor orchestration, folk-rock electricity, and a touch of Welsh rap. Despite his Scottish roots, his music encompasses styles from around the UK and also the fruits of the diaspora that crossed the Atlantic in search of better bets on survival and opportunity. There’s even one tune with a New Orleans funeral theme woven into its fabric. The world he sings about may or may not be a kingdom, but it’s truly united by a love for song. And to satisfy his ambitions as an artist in the 21st century, he writes songs that use antique language and historical awareness to extend the reach of a very contemporary take on the mysteries of love, justice, and coexistence. He takes his time getting a point across, which means this isn’t an especially immediate record. But give it time and it’ll give back new revelations, getting deeper and more beautiful the more you play it. Bill Meyer

Jason Robinson Tiresian Symmetry Cuneiform CD

The Ancient Greeks spoke of a guy named Tiresias who had uncommon insight into which sex had it better off in the act of lovemaking. “Tiresian symmetry” is a pretty apt description of the source of his wisdom (he was not always a he!), but Jason Robinson’s new album isn’t so much about symmetry as it is about just plain bigness. Two saxophones, a clarinet and two tubas occupy the front line, with assistance underneath from two drum kits, a bass and guitar, for a total of nine guys playing compositions stretching frequently to the 10-minute mark. Those horns do serious damage when they triple tag-team the choruses in “Stratum 3”: in a small club, on a summer

night, you could imagine sweat droplets being upper-cutted off your face. The double drums of Ches Smith and George Schuller make a shifting, percolating bed over which the tubas of Marcus Rojas and Bill Lowe arc in midair, trapeze-style, beside Drew Gress’s bass. The bigtop feel of Tiresian Symmetry begs for breaths of fire, and reeds player Marty Ehrlich obliges in “Radiate” with the meanest C-flute you’ll hear this season. Robinson’s everythingin-the-pot approach is heady at times, but makes for stories that, like Tiresias’s, are well worth repeat visits.

Nathan Turk

András Schiff

Das Wohltemperierte Klavier, books 1 and 2 ECM CDx4

J.S. Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier is known as the Old Testament for the piano, and as with the 32 Beethoven sonatas, it’s a rite of passage for any pianist to record it. Since Edwin Fischer’s pioneering 1930s cycle, every approach imaginable has been tried on Bach’s famous 48. Summing up the opposing aesthetics of various interpretations for piano would be an impossible task, not to mention those on other instruments, influenced by the historically informed performance practice movement.

Now, András Schiff gives us a WellTempered Clavier that addresses emotive and scholarly issues in a way that sets his interpretation apart from any other version I’ve heard.

Opinions on what makes a good Well-Tempered Clavier are strongly divided. Does a recording conform to what we believe were the rhetorical conventions of Bach’s time, without losing emotional import and structural clarity? Piano versions tend to be romantic, such as Sviatoslav Richter’s RCA reading, or structurally revelatory but icy, as with Glenn Gould or Friedrich Gulda. Of course, these are gross oversimplifications, but on this, his second traversal of the work, Schiff resolves these conflicts, rendering each prelude and fugue’s soundworld unique while maintaining moment-to-moment freshness.

In recent interviews, Schiff spoke of eliminating sentimentality in this new 48, and indeed, there is a clarity of articulation and phrasing that eschews romanticism. However, his handling of dynamics has become stunning in its subtlety. Most pianists, even historically informed musicians such as Angela Hewitt or Rosalyn Tureck, change dynamics globally from phrase to phrase for expressive purposes; Schiff combines very subtle volume shifts with extraordinary articulation. He finds a dynamic bass line and works within it to stunning effect, varying note length and using accents as might a harpsichordist while relying very little on the pedal, saving more traditional piano gestures until strategic moments. His book 1 C-minor prelude is a case in point, the concluding cadenza a perfect contrast to the opening’s fleet staccati. This does not mean that emotion is lacking, quite the contrary! Book 2’s G-Major prelude dances along, elegantly

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playful, while the A-minor fugue, from which Mozart gained inspiration for his Requiem, is by turn strident and introspective. Similarly, the Bminor fugue concluding book 1, so beloved of Stravinsky, is as deep as I’ve ever heard it. Any global dynamics are saved for individual lines, each brought out with uncanny precision.

Yet Schiff’s most modern innovation is reserved for the pauses between pieces, which are very carefully measured. Many are less than a second long, giving the entire cycle a jump-cut cinematic quality.

The closest I’ve experienced in this regard is Evgeni Koroliov’s version, but, wonderful as it is, his lacks the attention to detail in Schiff’s reading.

The final ingredient, the mortar holding the project together, is ECM’s superb production. As with Schiff’s Beethoven sonata cycle, the sound is at once intimate and atmospheric. We get a sense of spatial perspective while remaining up close, so that every color and nuance in Schiff’s playing is captured.

This is now the finest piano version of the Well-Tempered Clavier that I’ve heard, even eclipsing my former modern favorite by Roger Woodward. Schiff’s accomplishments are myriad, and the playing and recorded sound are absolutely delicious, so even if you own his Decca cycle, please don’t miss the revelations afforded by this new version.

Mark Medwin

Wadada Leo Smith & Louis Moholo-Moholo Ancestors TUM CD

The gorgeously packaged Ancestors puts the spotlight on two of the greatest going, a study in texture and contrast from the first note of Smith’s “Moholo-Moholo/Golden Spirit,” where patient, burnished mute lines stride within percussive subtleties. The two met for the first time at one of Derek Bailey’s Company Weeks in the 1970s. But while both are veterans of the duo format (and Smith has played some memorable ones with percussionists), this is their first time recording together. Beginning with a slowly rolling tattoo from Moholo-Moholo, and the most intense, perfect lyric kernels from Smith, it’s riveting from the start. The drummer’s techniques are sui generis: hear him work certain spaces and patterns again and again, almost obsessively creating his own drum-world in the way that someone like Baby Sommer can do. This is especially audible on the second of Smith’s dedication pieces “No Name in the Street, James Baldwin,” where they generate a bit more heat and urgency than elsewhere. Always focused, never merely splashy, the music lives in resonant details: a slice of loping funk, a splash, a rotund low tom, a trumpet trill against paradiddle.

Both can play with such force and conviction without simply bashing or blaring, and their thoughtful, polyvocal playing on pieces like “Jackson Pollock—Action” is filled with detail and formal focus as a result: Smith’s eddies and curlicues before those gloriously held sustains, or Moholo-

Moholo’s dynamic and effective patterns (especially powerful on the piece for his father, “Siholaro,” with a downright Ellingtonian swing feel).

The balance of the album is the fivepart, improvised title suite, paced and structured like a ritual: shakers and hand percussion open it like an invocation, then a bustling groove, some racing swing that reminds me of Lacy’s dictum that jazz is still dancing music, and a final section for small but purposeful gestures and focused vocalization. Jason Bivins

Talibam!

Puff Up the Volume Critical Heights CD

To a certain extent, one could be forgiven for asking which is the real Talibam!? After all, the interests and approaches of drummer Kevin Shea and keyboardist Matt Mottel are broad, encompassing free improvisation, psychedelia, theater, performance scores, audio comic books, art rock, appropriative remixes, and now a bona fide rap album. But this diversity, while irreverent, isn’t a complete put-on. As they have put it in the recent past, “Talibam! is the first word of the new language”—a dadaist consciousness-shift that one can make at will. Released on the UK imprint Critical Heights, Puff Up the Volume is their official entrée into the rap game, although it’s basically a follow-up to Boogie in the Breeze Blocks, their zany and brilliantly executed art-prog manifesto (ESPDisk’, 2009). For the record, Talibam! performs here under their noms-deplume MC Moaty Mogulz (Mottel) and MC K-Wizzle (Shea).

And what of the goods? Musically, Puff Up the Volume is a crisp new notch in the duo’s lengthy discography, cleanly recorded and surprisingly speed-bump-free for a Talibam! record. Sure, Shea’s drums retain their falling-downstairs im/ precision, in tandem with electronic beats and Mottel’s demonic fuzz, giving the proceedings a fleet and unruly presence. Of course, they’ve honed their motorik clatter over thirty recordings and seven years of tour-heavy performance, but their ability to bring rhymes was up for debate—at least until the needle dropped. The verdict? K-Wizzle and Moaty Mogulz have a surprising amount of genial flow for a couple of irreverent white improvisers living in Brooklyn. Mogulz’ delivery is terse but warmly laconic, while K-Wizzle is incisively hyper—their flows match their instrumental personalities to a T. It will be interesting to see how their rapping and instrumental flow within this approach develops over subsequent performances—indeed, the first few live Puff Up gigs varied wildly in execution.

While wry comedy is integral to their art, the content isn’t all day-glo absurdity. “It’s a Tough Day, Hard Day” is a compelling downtempo yarn spun of their difficulty as working musicians trying to “break through,” while the hooky “Step into the Marina” reprises the environmental apocalypse at the heart of 2011’s Discover Atlantass!!! “#NoSchool Rap Report” is a partially Autotuned rave-up, like a slice of party-ready electro, while “Sweet Leader” toys with rap machismo. The opening “Zombie from Albequerque” is a

definitive statement of clomping swagger, carried over into the jejune perversions of “All Your Money.”

But it wouldn’t be Talibam! without the presence of complete insanity— Condoleeza Rice gets sexed up and innocent Little Jimmy is let dangerously loose. Will Talibam! and the “new language” cross over as a result of Puff Up the Volume? It’s an infectiously bizarre slice of work from Mottel and Shea, more accessible than some of their releases, though there’s satisfaction in knowing their neo-dada vision won’t be the soundtrack to everyone’s lives—not just yet. Marc Medwin

Richard Teitelbaum Solo Live Mutable CD

While he doesn’t get a lot of credit, Richard Teitelbaum is one of the innovators of electronic music of the 1960s (and beyond, for that matter).

For one thing, electronic music used to be primarily a studio/laboratory/ academic creation—Teitelbaum (who studied with classical composers Mel Powell [formerly a Swing Era jazz pianist] and Luigi Nono) performed on a Moog synthesizer in a concert context. In 1967 he composed “In Tune” for amplified brainwaves, heartbeats, breath, and Moog synthesizer. Further, he performed as an improvising musician with Musica Elettronica Viva (which included Alvin Curran, Steve Lacy, and others), and with Anthony Braxton (the duet disc Timezones, 1977), and George Lewis (Homage to Charles Parker, 1979).

Solo Live was recorded in perfor-

mance in Baltimore in April 2009.

Just two extended compositions (… or improvisations? There are, alas, no liner notes), Solo is both a freeflowing and enveloping experience.

“TBCi/bRT” features quiet hums that evolve into the thundering buzz of a beehive; at the start, solitary, vaguely pretty piano notes ring in the morning light, and ambient plucked tones herald the twilight.

This track recalls the semi-ambient, quasi-New Age solo adventures of Hans-Joachim Roedelius. “Threshold Symphonies” has some of the eerie, cavernous environments of the delightfully murky dub-scapes of Bill Laswell and Mick Harris and the agreeable, moody, nature-evoking, rambling-but-not-exactly-soothing early works of Edgar Froese (197479).

This album occupies an atypical zone—it might be too “chilled-out” for the très avant crowd (I once asked a very “out” saxophonist what he thought of a Charlie Haden Quartet West album—he replied, “Too much jazz, not enough grit.”

Too much jazz?!?); and perhaps too bristly (and beatless) for those into ambient/drone/IDM modes. But, hey, that can be an endorsement in itself—Teitelbaum’s Solo Live staking out a zone of its own, oblivious to even the avant-garde’s orthodoxies. Mark Keresman

Henry Threadgill Tomorrow Sunny / The Revelry, Spp Pi CD

Zooid can be seen as the natural culmination of the various bands

The BPA catalog in full quality + digital only releases available at: balancepointacoustics.bandcamp.com Coming soon: BPA 015 Alvin Fielder Houston Quartet CD+DL

The first digital only releases: BPA -1 "Background Information" Sandy Ewen / Damon Smith BPA -2 "Burns Longer" Fred Van Hove / Peter Jacquemyn / Damon Smith Physical cds still available at www.balancepointacoustics.com Digital downloads at Emusic, itunes and everywhere else.

Releases by Guillermo Gregorio, Joëlle Léandre, Ariel Shibolet, Remi Álvarez & others to follow.

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Henry Threadgill has fronted over his 40-plus-year career—acoustic bass guitarist Stomu Takeishi, for example, played in the earlier Make a Move band, while Christopher Hoffman occupies the cello chair previously held by Diedre Murray (in Threadgill’s Sextett) and Dana Leong (who appeared on the 2001 Zooid recording Up Popped the Two Lips). With Threadgill’s alto sax and flute leading the way, the band makes his intricate charts sound easy, which testifies to the generous amount of rehearsal time prior to the recording. In a given Zooid composition, group members act more as colorists than soloists, each filling in tiny details within the album’s contrapuntal setpieces.

That approach is clearest in the slower settings, such as “See the Blackbird Now,” another in a long line of Threadgill dirges, where it’s easier to hear exactly how the players’ individual statements thread themselves together.

One thing long-standing Threadgill listeners will note is the relative quietness of the new recording: it’s restrained, even delicate music.

That’s not always the case, however: “Ambient Pressure Thereby” finds Hoffman, drummer Elliot Humberto Kavee, and trombonist/tubaist Jose Davila navigating the track’s complex pathways with a verve and aplomb reminiscent of Very Very Circus. This concise, 45-minute set doesn’t signify a radical advance on Threadgill’s previous work, but it shows that, as Threadgill nears seventy, his unique voice and admirably uncompromising vision remain intact. Ron Schepper

William Tyler

Impossible Truth Merge CD / LP / DL

The truth, impossible though it may seem, is that William Tyler is a songwriter. Even though the eight tracks on this album fail an essential criterion — no words! — they feel like songs. They have hooks, they progress in ways that suggest a narrative, and they impart vivid emotional messages, just like songs should. They even have characterdefining quotes, like the recurring snatch of “Paint It Black” that turns “Geography Of Nowhere” into a psycho-geography of trepidation.

It’s telling that the music which informed Impossible Truth’s creation, as cataloged in a Soundcloud mix that you might find with a search for “Nashville Ear Control Volume 3,” is full of songs by the likes of Robert Wyatt, Randy Newman, Chris Darrow, and the Roches, all storytellers and unflinching reporters of the human condition. The rare instrumental interludes, by English ambient ensemble Durutti Column and sacred steel guitarist Lonnie Harris, are electric, and so is this record; despite a past appearance on a volume of Imaginational Anthem, Tyler stays plugged in for all but two songs here, the better to tug bell-like tones with his fingers and swipe big, slow-to-fade chords with his pick. The first track, “Country of Illusion,” starts out solo, but that lasts less than a minute; soon Tyler is joined by stand-up bass, and 50 | SIGNAL to NOISE #65

throughout the record vibes, drums, and brass make discrete appearances, turning deft instrumental exercises into yearning pleas, affectionate remembrances, and even a Yo La Tengo-style meltdown a couple minutes short of the album’s end. The truth’s too precious to leave to the facts; open your ears and Tyler will sing it to you without opening his mouth. Bill Meyer

Various

Trad Dads, Dirty Boppers and Free Fusioneers Reel CD

and the wonderful drummer Alan Jackson.

Reedman Gary Windo (19411992) is the subject of a recent heart-wrenching memoir, Him Through Me, written by his widow, the pianist and composer Pam Windo. His under-recorded free jazzrock group Symbiosis is represented by the piece “Steadfast” (1971), featuring trumpeter Mongezi Feza (the saxophonist’s “soulmate” according to Ms. Windo), trombonist Nick Evans, drummer Robert Wyatt, bassist Roy Babbington and guitarist Steve Florence. Wyatt’s loose and muscular time is a fine match for the wheeling, off-kilter funk and screaming maelstroms that emerge from this harrier of a sextet. South African drummer Louis Moholo makes an unexpected appearance here with Elton Dean’s loose jazz-rock unit Just Us (1972), lending his circular, cutting rhythms to the group’s bluesy fusion amble. Following a track by the Lol Coxhill/Steve Miller group, the set closes with a curious blues (composed for the musical The World Upside Down) performed by Graham Collier Music with, among others, vocalist Norma Winstone, flugelhornist Harry Beckett and drummer John Marshall. If ever an introductory window was desired for Brit-jazz during this period, this Reel Recordings compilation would serve perfectly, and for those who are fans of this music it’s a wonderful bit of additional documentation.

Marc Medwin

The past decade and a half has seen a flowering of archival British jazz treasures, most of which barely if ever saw the light of day in their time. The “new jazz” of the ’60s and ’70s went from being nearly homeless, to finding a home with Ronnie Scott’s “Old Place” and token-yetimportant major label releases, to relying on musician cooperatives, shoestring budgets, and DIY catalogues. Labels like Emanem, Cuneiform, FMR and the Canadian imprint Reel Recordings have ensured that at least some of this music is again in circulation. A companion audio compilation to Duncan Henning’s new book of the same name, Trad Dads, Dirty Boppers and Free Fusioneers is a compilation of rare and previously unissued tracks curated by Reel Recordings’ Mike King and covering the crucial 1960-1975 period.

A few of these selections represent ensembles with previous releases to their name, but even then Wilbur Ware there are some surprises—altoist/ Super Bass Wilber Ware Institute CD composer Joe Harriott’s working unit with pianist Pat Smythe (1966) At long last, a session of which here features flugelhornist Kenny connoisseurs were aware but that Wheeler and bassist Ron Mathewson nobody thought would ever see the performing “Shadows” (more “free” light of day. Bassist Wilbur Ware’s than the variant on 1962’s Abstract), second album as leader has been and there’s a strong selection from released as the inaugural offering the Amancio d’Silva/Don Rendell/ by the institute that bears his name, Ian Carr group with Michael Garrick and it is a revelation, encapsulating on harpsichord. The set opens with a the diverse trends in play at the morare 1960 performance from pianistment of its creation. While no one composer Mike Taylor’s group with saxophonist Dave Tomlin. Taylor, a would ever consider Ware a free collaborator of Jack Bruce and Pete jazz bassist, his late 1950s work with Brown who died young, is mostly Monk and Coltrane, which shook known (if at all) via two progressive up Five Spot patrons for months in LPs (Pendulum and Trio) released on late 1957, certainly stretched the EMI-Columbia Lansdowne in 1966 boundaries of tonality. Recorded in and 1967. He’s heard here in a much 1968, Super Bass is at once a logical more straight-ahead hardbop conevolution of Ware’s work in Monk’s text, and a little roughly-recorded, group and a fascinating departure; but his piece “Phrygie” is a valuable little wonder, as we find him in the evolutionary document. company of Don Cherry, Ed BlackOne real gem of this set is the prewell and Clifford Jordan, the album’s Spontaneous Music Ensemble John original producer and archivist of Stevens Seven, with brothers Chris the tapes we are now privileged to and Mick Pyne on trombone and pihear. ano, as well as Wheeler, Mathewson, Tradition and innovation blend and saxophonists Ray Warleigh and on tracks like “A Real Nice Lady,” Alan Skidmore. Recorded in 1965, which is Ware’s take on EllingChris Pyne’s “Number Three” is one ton’s “Sophisticated Lady.” I am of about nine pieces performed at reminded of Coltrane’s 1958 comLondon’s Paris Cinema for a BBC ments about the enigmatic way broadcast. The group is on fire and Ware would approach harmony the music is ebullient yet tough, in the Monk combo, because this indicative of the music that would approach is in full effect here as the appear on the SME’s Challenge LP skeletal sonorities are filled out by five months later. A precursor to the Cherry and Jordan. Ware’s sound is Jazz in Britain ’68-’69 LP on Decca rich and full as he circumvents the Eclipse, a 1966 piece by the Mike melody at every turn, in the Charlie Osborne-John Surman Quartet is Parker “Embraceable You” tradition rugged and jumpy, alto and baritone but even freer as Cherry’s muted saxophones skirling and blowsy with solo unfolds. When Jordan solos, the support of bassist Harry Miller there is a return to the blues before WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM

Cherry plays one of the closest approximations to the melody that we get. All the while, Blackwell is providing support with tastily swinging brushwork, making this track a real meeting of eras. Similar concerns pervade “New Red Cross,” a swinging take on the Charlie Parker tune in which Ware recomposes the main lick and gives Jordan and Cherry a new melody. It’s a wonder to hear Blackwell and Jordan hooking up on this one, digging down deep into the blues but drawing on everything that has been learned since.

The whole album, and the appended alternate takes, exude this vision of tradition filtered through an avant-garde lens. Most revealing is a bass solo titled “Symphony for JR,” one of two long solos on the album. “Symphony” is a wild ride, and I’d swear that Jimmy Blanton’s contributions to “Jack the Bear” serve as the brew from which the solo is formed, as Ware quotes it, masterfully changing key, time and timbre along the way.

The recording and mix are less than ideal, but this is a minor concern given the rarity of the session and the beauty of the music.

This is an extraordinary document, recorded at a turbulent time by an unlikely but remarkable gathering of musicians. Marc Medwin

Yo La Tengo Fade

Matador CD/DL/LP

In 2009 Yo La Tengo took stock of the zeitgeist and crafted an LP called Popular Songs that stood ready to help people through troubled times. This time it seems like they’re dealing with troubles of their own. Nothing too drastic: Georgia Hubley, Ira Kaplan, and James McNew are all still alive, still in the band, still writing and singing graceful tunes that cherry pick their favorite parts from the last 50 years of popular music, and still splitting a couple of those tunes apart with guitar freak-out lightning bolts. But Kaplan did play their 2011 Hanukah charity gigs from a chair, benched by a health scare (he was back on his feet in 2012). And with any group of people in their 40s and 50s, matters of change and loss intrude. Yo La Tengo’s lyrics rarely put the band members’ personal issues up front, but this one includes songs about the stress of good times fading, people getting remote, and seeing yourself get old—just the sort of stuff you face if you live long enough.

The other big change on Fade involves production location and style. After nearly two decades of recording in Nashville, they made Fade in Chicago with John McEntire (Tortoise, Stereolab, Eleventh Dream Day). The drums are at once bigger and more spacious, as though the music is happening inside them; the keyboards and orchestration are a little plusher, the vocals a little closer. There’s also a greater sense of restraint: fewer guitar blowouts, no “what haven’t we done before” left turns—just ten strong songs that feel like a handwritten letter from an old friend.

Bill Meyer

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

Black Pus

Black Pus is the solo project of Lightning recitations taken from the Beckett poem of Bolt’s Brian Chippendale. His furious drumming the same name, multi-instrumentalists Ryan (and distorted vocals) has long been a key to McGuire, John Garchia, and Ricardo Donoso that band’s tightly scripted assault. But left to create a thick, almost organic music from elechis own devices, Chippendale explores the tronics and modified instruments that makes spasmodic intersection of heavy noise, free imthis in many ways more like an electro-acoustic provisation, and popular song. The results on record than a “metal” one (some of the vinyl All My Relations (Thrill Jockey) are pretty braccrackle and vocal samples, indeed, remind me ing, from the guttural distortion of “Marauder” of Too Beautiful to Burn). It’s a four-part suite (where he gets in touch with his inner Jello Biathat takes in quite a lot of material, ranging fra) to the disaffected sounding Bowie-in-Berlin from feral vocals and downtuned bass to arco grind of “Fly on the Wall.” With a wide sonic contrabass and clean-toned guitar improvisarange, all definitely on the heavy end of things, tions, from high lonesome arpeggios out of Chippendale clearly had a lot of fun in adding recent Earth to dynamic tension out of Kayo tons of detail and layers to these tunes (note Dot. A special nod to the spectral, rumbling the multi-tracked vocals on “Hear No Evil”). third part, where Ehnahre is joined by trumpetThe grooving “1,000 Years” hears him explore ers Greg Kelley and Forbes Graham. some rhythmic diversity, something that characFunerary Call’s Fragments from the Aethyr terizes many of these pieces: the tuned percus(Crucial Blast) is altogether more cosmic, cavsion on “All Out of Sorts,” or the dancing ride ernous, and spooky. “Libation” has a deep void rhythms of the closing “A Better Man” (which in its sights, and the generally ominous feel is otherwise is lit with grinding heavy distorfilled with plaintive violin, sizzling single guitar tion). But I have to say that it’s the fuzzed out notes (recalling Raoul Bjorkenheim, believe it or heaviness I prefer the most. The tripped out, not), and a steadily forward-pressing electronic distorted bass improv on “Nowhere to Run” is rumble, the whole thing forming a blackened a highlight, as is the crumbling noise of “Word wall of sound. “Fragments” plays with the on the Street,” all with enough sonic filigree to contrast of super-guttural electronic sound and make it textured and to give it more impact. reverbed-out violin – a shrieking overtone, an In the case of the latter, it’s like Bombay street emphatic pluck by the bridge, a somber lyrical music with pounding drums and distortion. wave. Other details abound (a timpani swell, a Boston trio Ehnahre impressed WotW jarring collapse) and FC’s music basically comes with their previous release, which displayed a across like orchestral horror soundtrack stuff genuine understanding of experimental music more than “metal.” Note this amid the nicely that makes them a viable candidate for column dark Bartokian material that keeps emerging, poster band. On Old Earth (Crucial Blast), with with strings often rocking back and forth on a 52 | SIGNAL to NOISE #65 WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM

single interval like a jammy Dead Can Dance piece. The real changeup is on the vocallic and aqueous “Transference from the Void,” whose clanking and creaking metal reverberates as if expending great effort.

Another gorgeous package from blackened drone outfit Theologian, The Chasms of My Heart (Crucial Blast) is a frosty 80-minute blast.

Sculpted electronic sound and a feel of distant reverberation characterizes the whole, as if the record strands one in a silent cosmos. Details stand out with some regularity: there is muffled vocalization, occasional industrial tattoo, and insistent intervallic tension. But it’s overall immersive, with a narrative/cinematic quality that manages to avoid being trite or showy (because it’s generally so resistant to gesture).

In fact it makes me wonder: is Theologian the Tomas Koner or Fennesz of this column? Quite possibly. “My Body is Made of Ash . . . I Live as Ash” is by far the most caustic, like ground glass. “We Can’t All Be Victims” is kind of like black drone influenced by Skinny Puppy, some kind of stuttering machinelike pulse evolving its own language. But ultimately the record leads to the crumbling edifice of “Every Road Leads to Abandonment.” Quite the dark voyage.

WotW was championing Northwest cosmic doom purveyors YOB long before Pitchfork and the NYT acknowledged the trio’s greatness. So in this final column, I’d be remiss if I didn’t sing the praises of Norska, a Portland quartet containing a YOB member among its kindred spirits. The music on their self-titled debut full-length (Brutal Panda) is also pretty obviously indebted to the sound, and rhythmic lurch of their fellow Oregonians. But Norska – while they howl aplenty, and gleefully indulge in cavernous doomy riffs (listen only to the stomp of “Nobody One Knows” or “Cholera” for confirmation) – use a lot more tempo changes and post-hardcore sectional songwriting (“Amnesia,” for example). While they’re most doomy on the closing “Two Coins for the Ferryman,” I’m compelled by their marriage of that style with the interlocking parts and counterlines of the twinned guitars. Most impressively, they stretch out over a quarter-hour on “They Mostly Come at Night,” with some majesty and guitar filigree that recalls Mastodon’s larger compositional ambitions (with tons of space and texture in the middle).

More doomy still is Amenra’s Mass V (Neurot), which has some of the ritual drama of label bosses Neurosis to their sound. The fundaments are recognizable and deeply satisfying: chiming guitars, lots of space, then heavy thuds before the abjected “Locust Star” howl that reoccurs throughout, as when it pushes “Dearborn and Buried” into its birth throes.

Conceptually, the record is a meditation on WWII battlefields still strewn with wreckage in the Belgian band’s native Europe. The sludge/ doom troupe play not so much with misanthropy as a sense of stunned, enraged disbelief in the face of misery. Through grinding repetition, Amenra manages to put the spotlight on a number of compelling sub-sections of their sound: buried layers of clean vocals like Prince

of Persia soundtrack mewling, some of the bludgeoning power of Isis, and lots of tense silences, buildups, with a real focus on atmosphere and dynamics on tunes like “Boden” and “A Mon Ame.” And the clean vocals that open “Nowena/9.10” (with a Scott Kelly guest spot) suggest a study of recent Celtic Frost and Triptykon.

The latest from Italian psych-doom masters Ufomammut, Oro: Opus Primum (Neurot) completes their two-record voyage into longform, Floyd-influenced ritual. Wordless save for some layered samples and barely formed, Aaron Turner-esque incantations, this is music that’s all about the slow build and hypnosis, transforming basic riffage in ways that illustrate their overall alchemical obsessions. Different ideas flow together, merge, and separate once more, with leitmotifs wending their way through shimmering texture or coalescing into thunderous stomps (the opening “Oroborus” growls and lurches powerfully). As often as they plummet into the riff-heavy abyss, there are equal numbers of Floyd-in-rocketships moments like the grooving “Sulphurdew” (with abundant processed, electronic noise) or the dynamic “Sublime.”

The latter half of 2012 saw two brutish blasts from Southern California’s death-grind mavens Nails. Obscene Humanity (Southern Lord) hears the trio getting in touch with their inner Entombed, with re-recorded versions of three tunes from their debut. They trade in stripped-down repetition at the core of brief whips like the title track, in staggered mid-tempo struts like “Confront Them,” and in sheer Converge-like howl on tunes like “Lies.” In anticipation of their next full-length, Nails also filled the gap with a split EP (no label) with Skin Like Iron (a more conventional hardcore band, competent but a bit forgettable). Nails tracks “Annihilation” and “Cry Wolf” are altogether more urgent and frenetic, downright vitriolic in fact. Definitely putting the “core” back in grindcore, Nails won’t impress in the way that PxDx (whose Book Burner was at the very top of 2012’s releases and should be considered essential) or Brutal Truth do (nor even Rotten Sound) but it’s visceral and satisfying.

(Quickly noted, for fans of this kind of heaviness, do yourselves a favor and sample Baptists’ corrosive Bushcraft (Southern Lord), where they’ve really expanded their Convergeinfluenced sound (and for goodness’ sake, buy the new Converge). Also worth your time is Rotten Sound’s stop-gap EP Species at War (Relapse)).

Blockheads is a French grind unit that’s been deep in the underground for two decades. Combining something of the splenetic fury of early Nasum (think “A Civil Critique”) with the roar and lurch of Tombs, it’s a pretty winning combo. Now signed to Relapse, they’ll get loads more exposure for This World is Dead. Tunes like “Born Among Bastards” and “Bastards” definitely thrash about pretty righteously, and some early Napalm is audible here too. And while such moves might now be fairly conventional, I’m still a sucker for a whip-crack breakdown like those on “Final Arise.” “All These Dreams” stomps around like Lair of the Minotaur and Entombed in places, before returning to grind fury. And of course, there’s the requisite leftist social aggression that makes grindcore fairly distinctive among heavy genres (just check “Famine,” “Human Oil,” “Pro-Lifers,” or “Doctrine of Mutual Destruction”).

Another column, another deluxe Relapse reissue from Florida’s seminal Death, the brainchild of the late (and sorely missed) Chuck Schuldiner. 1990’s Spiritual Healing marked an important moment when the early death metal pioneers started getting in touch with their inner prog freaks. While they would develop and extend the combination of heaviness and prog technique much further on their later albums, this one (packed to the gills with

sixteen unreleased outtakes, rehearsal versions, and demos) is marked by its serious, guttural heaviness. “Living Monstrosity” alone is a tour de force, with blistering thrash parts, infectious low-end riffage, and the kind of compositional left turns that Mastodon are praised for over two decades later. “Altering the Future” is all bludgeoning mid-tempo with spidery, harmonic dissonance (but such fleet, elegant guitar work and solos). And whereas there’s a pre-echo of early Nile on “Within the Mind,” “Low Life” is like a Sisters of Mercy cover in its spookiness. A few tracks, like “Genetic Reconstruction,” seem a bit undercooked – but undercooked Death pretty much destroyed everything else, and mostly still does so.

After their justly celebrated The Codex Necro, British duo Anaal Nathrakh haven’t so much foundered on previous releases as coasted on the formula they there established: fierce, jarring sonic barrages, heavy on black metal atmospherics and samples, with a blast beat industrialism that is equal parts Skinny Puppy, Behemoth, and Darkthrone. For all those waiting for a return to form, consider Vanitas (Candlelight) a full-throated declamation of AN’s will to power. The programmed bits (drum machine, some guitars, some electronics) don’t give this a false or cheap sensibility but add menace and edge to the fury shriek of tunes like the opening “The Blood-Dimmed Tide.” It gives fierce essays like “To Spite the Face” and “Todos Somos Humanos,” which would be kicking in their own right, a stuttering, pummeling quality. The sound is sweeping and borderline majestic on “Forging Towards the Sunset,” and some of the more operatic vocals recall Strapping Young Lad (but it’s never long before you have demon mewls like Trevor Strnad and Corpsegrinder gutturalisms). The vaguely sepulchral closer “A Metaphor for the Dead” still has the barbed-wire guitar lines and furious riffing, but a Hammer horror keyboard core that makes it a fitting closing ceremony (although the Pagliacci quotes do rather suck).

As I’ve written so frequently in this column, there are vast reaches of “underground” or “experimental” heaviness that simply would not exist with Neurosis. And during the lifespan of WotW, readers have seen me rave about the glorious 2007 full-length Given to the Rising and a rich series of reissues mostly from the band’s earlier days. Now at a quarter century, Neurosis own their age gracefully (in much the same way that, say, Nick Cave does).

Without compromising either intensity or aesthetic, their latest – Honor Found in Decay (Neurot) – finds the band going deeper into their sound, refining rather than reinventing it. There’s also a considerable and compelling lyrical engagement with the album’s thematics: death, decay, and steadfastness. From the opening “We All Rage in Gold,” there’s a return to the cinematic sweep of their mid1990s triumphs, with plenty of swirling strings textures in particular, and loads of those spare breakdowns for croaking vocals that await the massively pummeling riff to come.

The textural swirl and tribal drums of “At the Well” are powerful, but no more so than the mournful reverberant slides framing lines like “all we have is blood.” The stunning “My Heart for Deliverance” is the heart of the record to me, its long chug giving way to a chiming middle (with a beautiful recitation that I won’t spoil here), followed by a gloriously cosmic ascent with hurdy-gurdy/violin quaver underwriting the sheer heaviness. After the furious churn of “Bleed the Pigs,” the chiming folksy repetitions of “Casting of the Ages” go on just a bit too long. But as always, the band’s combination of sober reflection with heaviness (of both purpose and riff) is unique and ever affecting (not least in the fiddle and noise fadeout that ends the hour). Essential in every way, it’s a lovely record to salute as I end this column. ✹ WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #65 | 53

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

Kevin Riley

Hot Guts

Edges (Blind Prophet) by Hot Guts, is a used to take things down a notch in the good deceivingly thoughtful take on a few different old days. genres. They delve into post-coldwave synth Haves & Thirds' It's Mostly Guess Work / It'll pop, emerging from the Cold Cave with new Clean You Out But It'll Leave You Hollow Inside treasures and old ambitions, and also go in a LP was sent to me by Hot Releases a few weeks much more satisfying post-punk direction that ago without a jacket, and I can't find any info on carries on the tradition of bands like Wilderness it, so I'll assume it's coming out soon and say it and even The Chameleons. Quite a vast-soundloud and somewhat proudly: YOU NEED THIS, ing record considering how few elements are though I'm not sure what 'this' is. Some chop-'n'at play most of the time; just a digi-drum beat, screw, some Expressway Yo-Yo Dieting, some Endesert-afternoon keys and a lot of disaffected semble Economique, some of that Not Not Fun yelling (yes that makes sense) holding it all dance stuff, a pinch of Pell Mell (which might be together and shooting for the sun. Great tomwhat I love most of all), Torngat and everything based drums that set the whole scene too, a in between. You'll realize suddenly that two drum trippy vamp waiting to happen. Not sure who lit beats are colliding like asteroids, scrambling you a fire under their ass during "Radium Girls" and up as you hold onto dear life, the onslaught of "The Ballad of John Simon" but thank you. It's movie samples (from Naked Gun, Goonies) keepas if Liars never existed ... What a nasty couple ing you tethered, however tenuously, to reality. of cuts. NOW I remember the band from those This music truly sparkles, the samples/effects Badmaster 7-inches all those (three) years ago. obviously having received a good shining in the Where have you been? studio despite the overall lo-fi sheen. Or maybe Cairo Gang -- nee Emmett Kelly -- has an they got lucky; either way the underground wins. interesting, if spare, recorded history, with Any double-CD set carries with it an aspect of albums on Narnack and Blackest Rainbow (not 'here we gooooo,' but Thousands Raised to the to mention Drag City) and a 10-inch collab with Sixth (Handmade Birds) manages its expanses Bonnie "Prince" Billy to his credit. But he also of time well, Our Love Will Destroy The World has played/toured with the likes of Joan Of Arc, proving to be jacks of many improv-noise trades.

Terry Reid, Pillars & Tongues and Sonny Smith.

Skipping from Landed-style electronic dirges to He's on his own once again, and The Corner hand drums-led out-sound ragas to lazer quests Man (Empty Cellar) is a well-engineered effort to rooms full of collapsing clocks might sound that bounces between solo guitar/voice comeasy to you, but trust me, there ain't nothin' easy positions and full-band work-outs. Reminds me about it. And that's just the first CD, man. Don't of that first Dios album, The Impossible Shapes, expect any mercy during at-bat no. 2, either.

Magnolia Electric Co./Songs Ohia, Holopaw Right away Campbell Kneale (also of Birchville and ... hell, I'll just stop right there because Kelly Cat Motel; oh so NOW you pay attention!) goes carves a new niche, memorably gloomy and back to the drill, the noise, the samples, the absorbed in his roll as director. "Put on a Smile" strings whittled down to the breaking point, the is a particular favorite, like when Isaac Brock octopus-tentacles-around-your-throat reams of 54 | SIGNAL to NOISE #65 WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM

effects and the ... wood sticks? Yes, those. Too much to accurately summarize, however, so I'll save the ink. Just expect a lot of layers; a oneman Avarus if Avarus were more of a hard-noise/electronic outfit. It's not much but it'll have to do.

Heavier than most metal could ever be ...

Bad Braids hit pretty hard right from the start, their Bowerbirds (but female, and simpler, and better) approach to folk working better than I thought it could. Maybe if Julie Byrne and/or Prudence Teacup and Liz Janes fronted Folk Uke or The Pierces this would be the result. Or not.

Arrow and Orb (Haute Magie) is flat-out impressive though, inhabiting a tough-to-define space in the folk-time continuum with a lot of confidence, not to mention slide guitar and a pinch of attitude. Didn't wanna go there, but Neko Case is probably going to be mentioned by others so why not? Not a bad place to be at all, just don't put out a 7-inch with a bad Bob Dylan cover on the flip, OK? Hey, anyone remember Brightblack Morning Light? Just wonderin'.

If you take anything away from the final "Smokin' Dat Rock," it should be Rat Column's Sceptre Hole (Smartguy). Save a late-album hiccup it's the perfect post-punk LP, a great deal of thought put into every rise and ripple. Even more importantly, the man in charge, Australian David West (of Rank/Xerox and Total Control), has the tools and the capability to meet the emotional needs inherent in a full-length, A-to-B-all-the-waythrough experience. He can drift/drone, he can drip an uptempo rocker dry, he can 'interlude' and he can carry a slow rumble on his back like a sack of indie-rocks. Smiths, The Clean and Robyn Hitchcock all pop in for a visit, and just as well; we need them more than ever. West's vocals register at about the right level of disinterest and/or aloofness; no problems in that department at all, and that's what allows the splendorous arrangements to ring out so mightily (and catchily). "Ashes of a Rose" aches to affect all who witness it, and I'm more than willing to oblige; I don't want this review to end, frankly, nor this column. Nor Rat Columns. Keep on, boys.

If you missed out on this band, who sound like they're about to break up, and did after two years in 2008, you need to re-up and get freed-up via La Peur Est Une Illusion: Singles 2006-2008 (Captcha). The Feeling Of Love ride the dissolving line between bad taste and irony and come out victorious, though it might take a few listens to hardwire your brain to accept this stuff on its rigid terms. At first it's like your body rejecting a foreign organ; you recoil at the super-long French rants, the minimal electronix, the amateurish designs and the simple beats. Then a cut like "The Right Bitch at the Right Place" slaps your pasty man-face and you zone out further than you maybe have in awhile. It just works, despite its deconstructionist self. Not quite Les Georges Leningrad, but if I even mention that band you know what you're in for. Also Le Shok (a lot of the GSL bands, in fact), Fatal Flying Guilloteens, The Make-Up, Royal Trux; wherever asses were and are being kicked, you'll find a coke-whiff of The Feeling Of Love, so get some into your system before it's too late. Super-sweet, shiny red-pink vinyl, too.

Phantom Horse's self-titled LP (Dekorder)

sounds like Bitchin Bajas with a few layers of kosmic keys draped overtop, not a work with a whole lot of peaks and valleys, just a straightlaced take on what Harmonia might sound like today. Seems a little toothless at first, so let it sink in for a bit. Some of the best experiments are the shortest, too, so don't be shy with the turntable needle. Use it. Side B is where the euphoria really hits anyway. When people used to describe múm to me, I thought "Rongo Rongo" was what they were going to sound like. Also: a softer Battles, maybe, with lots of ticks/tocks and a clockwork rhythm. At-times stunning, sometimes middling; such is life.

If you blinked last year (and many of you did) you might have missed Warm Blood (Poulpe Mort), an understated gem on a fledgling label from Blithe Field, a dude you've never heard of.

Your loss. Field isn't The Answer to the problems left behind by the dissolution of The Books, yet he's trying and things can only get better from here. Pregnant were on this track a few years ago with their stuttering acoustic-hop. One of the later tracks sounds almost like Lymbyc System or Vowels, all cut-up and nasty, but it's a short-lived fascination and we're soon back to strolling through the neighborhood. A laid-back acoustic riff is soon buttressed by otherworldly bass throbs and pitch-bent vocals with a hint of reverse-soul, as if Duster were remixed by Nobody. Find this.

Mentally Ill isn't a band name you want if you're not a sick son of a bitch, and this punk reissue lives up to the moniker. Strike the Bottom Red (Last Laugh) came out in 1999 and yet it doesn't deliver anything the band didn't when it was first developing in 1979, from what I can hear. A few of the Hellcatt bands went for this sound but I like Mentally Ill's take on a postJohnny Rotten best, and it's lo-fi enough to fuck with your speakers a little. A guitar showcase will come in and the volume goes up by half at least, then it drops right back down when the singer kicks in. And kick in he does; he's unhinged and uncontrollable and there's a chorus or two in here that will make you laugh your ass off with its faux-serious harmonies. Real fun stuff, glad to welcome it (another Steve Albini notch) to the family. The song title "Bathroom Gays": yay or nay? Discuss.

If you're going to dance to dippy, semi-EDM, powder-puffin' audio, do it to Founding Fathers (Captcha) by Chandeliers and you might embarrass yourself a little less. Very vibrant and bouncy fare with the flare you expect from modern-day instrumental synth-pop provocateurs, and the tendency is to dissect whether these guys really mean it or not. I say who cares? This is Sparks for the future and the past, like Soft Metals and a half-dozen other Grimes-y acts shoved into a blender and poured over disco-fried beat-nuggets. They would have raved the shit out of this record back in '98. The Beverly Hills Cop theme came and went, and we thought it was all over. It wasn't. I'm kinda glad, if not overjoyed.

Welcome to Toytowne (Perennial), can I take your order, courtesy of Cairo Python? (No, I will not dignify this plot twist for the entirety of the review.) Yes, you may: I want synths and I want 'em now. Big ones. Shiny ones. Keys that glow and stream and generate heat, keys that unite ice (via coldwave and Crocodiles) with steam (via Indian Jewelry) and fire (via the synths off every Wolf Parade project ever) over an indie-rock beat ... You think I'm kidding here, don't you? HA. They're all over the place with references to Olivia Tremor Control and many others I don't have space to mention. Cairo Python don't warrant a revolution, yet their compositions explode with color when the synths lock onto the drums like a lusty leech.

Lyrics that bite fill out the package; a grower for a day and age wherein fewer and fewer bands are willing to take the risk of a slow burn.

It's amazing how much ground Sad Horse cover within the punken folds of Purple on Purple Makes Purple (Water Wing). They've got an frenzied side that wants to yammer in your ear and play fast, like that chick from Sleetmute

Nightmute fronting a late '70s group of mohawked rippers. INTENSITY! Then they abruptly split up, each going his/her own way as you give chase, scrambling from skillfully droll Lou Reed/ Velvets workouts to Lee Ranaldo-saluting improv jams to halting, math-y indie while still working in a few pennies' worth of punk when they can.

Throughout solos are bungled, drum showcases are defecated upon and several strings are bent to the breaking point, but Sad Horse hold onto just enough dignity to bring it all across, snapping back into rhythm when the situation calls for it and breaking in a decent duo harmony or two.

Good for starters; what now, punks?

The Best of Dave Arvedon Volume 3 (Mighty Mouth) shines a light on the Psychopaths frontman for whom this 'collection' was named.

Your job (and mine, I suppose) is to determine whether you give a shit about a private-press record issued to friends in 1971. If you ask me, ol' Arvy is more than engaging enough to retain our attention over the course of an LP, mostly because he's got a lo-fi sense of humor that would be an unthinkable feat in today's superdetached underground. If you don't believe me, Google "Trying to Get a Suntan" and tell me the innocuous lyrics and bittersweet delivery don't melt you down like heated solder. There's a sadness there, as if by singing about casual fare he's acknowledging there's little else to life. He takes these inane subjects and lends them depth they don't even have or deserve, and it works. He also is in possession of what Sir Paul would have called the pipes of peace; he can belt 'em out, and in a higher register than most. The rollicking '70s nature of it all puts the lid right on the jar, as you can almost hear the mustaches growing. The trumpets and other horns are but a trombonus.

If you get queasy thinking of those never-ending freak-folk records of the Wooden Wand era you might want to take a pass on Natural Snow Buildings altogether. Night Coercion in the Company of Wolves (Ba Da Bing), issued on vinyl for the first time following a CD-R release in 2008, is a relentless, mammoth 4XLP set that bludgeons the listener over time and worship at the altar of the sidelong excursion. Epic, baby, epic, not to mention dense as a clump of wet dog hair. This is your typical drone-raga setting, with hand-drum rhythms setting the tone for the entire dish, tambourine, assorted percussion, nearly unrecognizable guitar, flute/lute abuse, clarinet, occasional chants and, most importantly, a searing array of drones and unidentifiable sounds that can seem like a marching army when it's all slapped onto the same battlefield. Not exactly a mud-brown canvass when you smoosh so many instruments together, but it's not virgin-white either. It almost sounds like someone had to die for this record to be made; rather dramatic considering it was originally created for 22 people, a miniscule selfreleased edition that eventually found the right ears. If you're the adventurous type, see that it finds yours.

Right off the bat, a song like "Lord Scrumptious" can throw you off the trail, so be sure to persevere because Big Dipper -- and by extension Crashes on the Platinum Planet (Almost Ready) -- are worth your sweat and blood, even if you've been in a noise/drone/solo synth coma for a few years now (not that I'm insinuating anything; I'm sayin' it!). That they worship Robert Pollard enough to name a song after him is a given, as their joyous jangle and vocal style owe Uncle Bob everything. And for the record, I'll take this over a Superchunk album any day, despite the inherent drawbacks that cause you to wonder if the same band is producing the alternately delightful/maddening songs. The answer, of course, is two songwriters (and a lesser third) who take turns writing solo, then collaborate. My money's on the team efforts, as they come out with more POP and circumstance.

To get to the point where I'm even receiving music from an imprint like Munster (of Spain) is insane; double-true in this case because it also happens to be a raging label with several

sub-divisions (Vinilissimo, Vampi Soul, Beat Generation and more) and comps of weird-ass experimental music to its name. Lyres are the opposite of weird; they're traditional to the point of near-frustration, yet that's what so may of us love(d) about them. Lyres Lyres originally came out in '86, and while I can't say it's aged well, what was always there sounds a lot better than it used to. Tighter, snappier, more balanced and thankfully still unhinged. "Stormy" is where the rubber hits the road, a four/floor beat with an eternal kick barging onto the scene as a ?/ Mysterions Vox organ and a rippin' riff back it up.

Always saving the best for last, those Lyres. The four b-sides don't offer anything the first 13 tracks didn't, but then again I don't think I've ever heard a Lyres song that did. That's not the point, see.

"I'll Try Anyway" is the best, Ramones yapping and more of that toothy organ. YES! Long before there were Sonic Youth, AIDS Wolf or Chromatics there was Mars. You've heard this speech before if you've been around a few years, so don't tune out on me because there's a lot to be said for being out of tune. Just ask this fucking band, intent on string destruction and ear annihilation, no wave or no. Live At Irvine Plaza (Feeding Tube) is a fantastic concert recording -- and I'm usually ambivalent about live documents -- that carries out this Mars' mission well, offering every side of the diverse ensemble you'd care to ask about. You get the freeform freakouts with disturbing, "yip-yip"-yikes female vocals, the more straight-up rails of industrial grind, flattened-out and served with growls and moans and a fair share of in-between diddling and fiddling. I envision Kim Gordon fiddling with a noise pedal every time I hear these guys twist their compositions into a knot in that certain way; that's how engrained Mars really were in the sound of the noise-rockers that followed.

So few heard this stuff back when it was actually happened, and now two of the dudes involved are dead (Sumner Crane, Nancy Arlen), so what better time to celebrate this inspiring artifact of punk's junkheap than now?

You have no idea on this one, trust me. Ghédalia Tazartès' voice, borne of woman in 1947, can do just about anything, from tremble and emote in high registers like John Jacob Niles to rrrrroar and rumble like the guttural throat-gropes of that Phurpa record. On Voyage À L'Ombre (Hot Releases; originally issued on Demosaurus in 1997) he also goes all psycho (not Mike Muirpsycho; more like Half Japanese-psycho) on us pretty much from start to finish, and we're left to wonder: 'Was that a pleasurable experience?'

For me it's Tazartès' instrumental sections as much as his show-y vocals, what with their Terry Riley gist, though it is daunting to realize he can do more with his vocal cords than I can with my whole body. Quite a left-turn sort of experience from a label that usually deals in current artists.

I'm guessing Mike Patton people predestined to enjoy this will do so, as will those who enjoy the more dramatic, and occasionally operatic, side of experimental music. A head-turner.

I've sat on For Ostland (Lo Bit Landscapes) for so long it's become embarrassing so I'm going to finally share it and let it go. Nihiti put a record out a few years ago I didn't cotton to much, and I've seen them lashed by reviewers before, so going into this smoky-clear LP I didn't expect to be bowled over, and while it's not quite the great Corpus Christi hurricane of 1919 I definitely got wet on this one. An extremely sober-yet-fuzzy mind put For Ostland together, fusing its darkwave instincts to electronics and noise and allowing a nearly equal balance of each to hold sway.

Things get nearly spiritual; that's not something I take lightly. Inspiration struck, and it happened to be captured for us to enjoy. So simple, yet how often does that legitimately occur? It sounds good, too; don't hold that against it. There's murk only when expressly intended. Don't stumble too far into 2013 without back-tracking to Ostland for a visit. ✹

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REISSUE REDUX

Bill Meyer surveys the season’s key reissues.

Mark Pickerel

Lee Hazlewood

When I started doing the Redux, at least half to gain a second life. For example, the three of every issue was devoted to jazz records, but self-released CDRs by Natural Snow Buildings nowadays labels are playing it so safe that it’s that are compiled on Night Coercion Into The hard for a record by someone other than John Company of Witches (Ba Da Bing) were initially Coltrane and Miles Davis to get another goissued in the mid-aughts in numbers inadequate around; now it’s easier to score the La Dusselto supply the French duo’s friends and family, let dorf catalog than Gil Evans’s. This time there along fans. Now you can get them as either a are just two. Scott Fields’ 5 Frozen Eggs was budget triple CD or swanky triple LP. NSB makes originally recorded in Wisconsin during the freeform music that ranges from witchy sprawl decidedly non-frigid month of July 1996, and to well-amped guitar crumble. Ba Da Bing issued by Music And Arts. Lately the guitarist seems to be giving the duo the same degree of spends most of his time in Europe, and it is the support that they recently accorded the Dead Portuguese label Clean Feed that has brought it C; they followed the triple up with a double-CD, back. With pianist Marilyn Crispell, bassist Hans The Stormbringer Cult, which pairs an especially Sturm, and drummer Hamid Drake at his back, forlorn set with another disc of gentler, more Fields conceived a music full of suspended tensong-oriented material by the duo’s two solo sion, spontaneous counterpoint, and quick shifts projects, Isengrind and Twinsistermoon. These from reflection to dust-devil turbulence. records start another trend I’ve noted of late; Eight (+1) Tristano Compositions For Warne reissues that forgo any explanatory text. Perhaps Marsh is a typically atypical tribute by Anthony labels figure you can find everything out on the Braxton to one of his personal saxophone idols. internet now?

This is a reissue of a reissue; hatOLOGY’s first Grouper’s Dragging A Dead Deer Up A Hill CD has been out of print for years, and if you is another record that has passed through the have the original LP with its two performances of valley of instant scarcity. Originally released in standards dear to Tristano and Marshe’s hearts, 2008 by Type, a label not prone to repressing don’t do anything foolish with it. But if you don’t its wares, this effort by the one-woman band have an earlier edition, this is a delightful occahas been out of print for several years, which sion to hear Braxton exacting sly revenge on the is rather a shame given that its convergence of people who said that neither (or either) he nor fragile songs and woozy pedal murk represents Tristano could swing. With Andrew Cyrille and the apotheosis of Liz Harris’s melancholy oeuvre.

Cecil McBee powering this quintet, this is brisk Kranky has brought it back in both CD and LP bebop of the highest order. versions, which don’t differ from the Type verA decade ago, the CD was ascendant; now sions. reissues do an awkward dance, leaping from Supreme Commander is, like Natural Snow format to format. This permits records that origiBuildings’ records, pretty impossible to find in its nally came out in outrageously small numbers original form despite only being a couple years 56 | SIGNAL to NOISE #65 WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM

old. Kraus is, despite the Teutonic name, one guy from New Zealand who previously released this music on cassette and lathe cut single. It certainly deserves a wider release than it got, and Monicker, another Chicago-based label, has stepped in to do the job with a bang-up, gray marbled LP edition. Vinyl’s bulbous mid-range adds some heft to Kraus’s low-res Sun Ra meets 80s video game electronics and swaggering ashcan drums. If you like to imagine yourself the time-traveling returning king of the arcade, this record is your jam. You probably didn’t know you were sleeping on it before; this time, there’s no excuse.

The Mego label, once a single entity devoted to savagely digital music, has mutated into a hydra-headed collective that facilitates a variety of personal agendas. Recollection GRM is a vinyl-only imprint devoted entirely to trolling the archives of the French Groupe Recherche Musicale, which happens to be one of the deepest troves of institutionally supported electronic music. They certainly treat the music like it’s treasure, encasing it in beautiful textured sleeves and cutting the lacquers at Dubplates and Mastering in Berlin. These aren’t fetish objects; they’re true love objects. GRM Works 19571962 isn’t strictly a reissue, but a collection of four classic electronic tracks by Iannis Xenakis from the days right after he changed the game for all of music at the World Fair in Brussels.

The physicality of the format makes the huge, seething proto-industrial soundworld of “Bohor” more vivid.

Ivo Malec’s Triola ou Symphonie Pour Moi-meme (Recollection GRM) was recorded between 1972 and 1978, but it sounds like a master class for the current class of modular synth players. The Croation synthesist martialed brutal rhythms, spectacular twist o’ the knob pitch sweeps, and electric bird calls into a masterfully controlled expression of the pitilessly destructive beauty. Trust me, if you’ve dug recent Keith Fullerton Whitman or Thomas Ankersmit efforts, you need this.

And as long as the word electronic is being slung around, let it be known that an apparently legit, well-executed edition of Erkin Koray’s Elektronik Türküler (Electronic Ballads) has just come out on Pharaway Sounds on both CD and LP. Since the Turkish music business is as seriously mobbed-up as any in the world, sketchy knock-offs have generally been the order of the day, and this is one album that really deserves better. Although it was recorded in 1974, when Koray had already been recording for a dozen years, it was the first record that he conceived as an LP rather than a 45. If you haven’t encountered Koray before, this combination of fuzzed-out boogie, lilting Anatolian folk, and vertiginous guitar freak-outs is an excellent place to start. Special credit goes to whoever decided to hire Angela Sawyer of Weirdo Records to do the liner notes — as anyone who subscribes to her store’s weekly update already knows, she slings colorful verbiage like Byron Coley on a good day without forgetting to serve up the hard facts.

Another pillar of Near Eastern trippery has passed form vinyl to CD. Sublime Frequen-

cies first issued Guitar El Chark, a collection of twangy, boingy instrumentals by guitarist and film personality Omar Khorshid as a double LP in 2010. Imagine if Duane Eddy and Joe Meek had gotten together in their prime to make Egyptian film soundtracks, and you have an idea of what these instrumentals sound like. Reconfigured for CD, the album now has ten extra tracks and a swanky booklet full of movie stills.

Sublime Frequencies is run by Alan Bishop, late of the Sun City Girls and an occasional recording artist under the moniker Alvarius B. Abduction, a label that focuses purely on SCG-related material, has reissued rarities by both parties.

Alvarius B was originally a 39-song double LP of acoustic solo material that Bishop recorded by himself on cassettes during the Girls’ frequent quiet periods, and you can hear the boomboxgenerated distortion when he hits the low guitar notes. But such distortion is actually a good seasoning for Bishop’s impossibly elastic voice.

This double CD version adds six more songs, along with a booklet of lyrics for sociopathic nuggets like “Rage Counselor” and “Satan’s Blanket” that will help you to be fully prepared to get yourself banned from every open mike in town. Go on, it’ll be worth it. Eye Mohini is the third volume of SCGs singles to be released in the past few years, and it is drawn chiefly from a couple of their finer over-stuffed 7” efforts, the one that gave the collection its name and Three Fake Female Orgasms. If you prefer the SCGs that sang fake Asian folk songs and ripped their way through surf-punk instrumentals doomed to be gutted by manic improvisational interludes, this is the one you’ve been waiting for.

Overhang Party never had to fake anything Asian, since they were Japanese. And there was never anything fake about the ensemble, which gathered, shattered, and re-coalesced around singer-guitarist-violinist Rinji Fukuoka from 1991-2005. Fukuoka was a restless sort, more concerned with finding different ways to leave you feeling haunted than taking any particular direction to its ultimate conclusion. Important Records has collect all of Overhang Party’s studio material, four albums plus out-takes, into a four disc (take your pick) set that’s impressive not only for the intensity of Fukuoka’s psychedelic explorations, anguished ballads, and aurapixilating improvisations, but for the confidence the label has in letting the music speak for itself.

Aside from English translations of the lyrics and instrumental credits, the booklet gives no history, nor any other contextualization — not even a band picture. Since the internet isn’t overburdened with Overhang Party interviews, a bit of information would have been nice, but I have to

admit that letting this music remain mysterious works to its advantage.

Loop, the late 80s rock combo led by Main’s Robert Hampson, has likewise opted to skip the explanatory text, but heap on the bonus tracks in their comprehensive reissue campaign on Reactor Records. Fade Out, Heaven’s End, and A Gilded Eternity each come with the original album on one CD and a bonus disc of BBC sessions and/or demos; the EP collection And The World In Your Eyes has swollen to a tripledisc set. More important, they’ve been given a necessary sonic upgrade; with the passage of twenty years, the merits of mid-range have been recognized and the necessary frequencies restored. Loop were often compared negatively to Spacemen 3 back in the day; each took primal 60s rock influences like the Seeds and the Stooges and magnified them with massive volume and remorseless repetition. But where the Spacemen 3 played with a hint of chaos and disorientation that probably reflected their prodigious pharmaceutical intake, and Loop were heavy and precise. A couple decades on, it’s not a bad trade-off.

Right around the time that Loop morphed into Main, Low surfaced with a claim on the far end of the dynamic range. The Duluth, MN-based trio flew in the face of prevailing heaviosity by making some of the quietest rock music ever for the now-defunct Vernon Yard label. They earned a reputation for understated orneriness by playing hushed, slow airs for uncomprehending Midwest punk audiences.

Plain Recordings has released I Could Live In Hope, Long Division, and When The Curtain Hits The Cast with bonus tracks previously found on Low’s out-of-print A Lifetime Of Temporary Relief collection and a remastering job that is more present without undermining the music’s essential fragility. Bafflingly, Curtain gives no information about the source of its seven extra tracks, but having ‘em without the details is still better not having them at all.

One thing that’s definitely shifted over the past decade is the search for more and more obscure music to reissue. The Red Rippers are about as obscure as it gets. The “band” was actually singer-guitarist Edwin Bankston, a Vietnam vet who worked as a flight instructor and played in cover bands in Florida during the early 80s, plus some nameless session players on bass and drums. Over There… And Over Here (Paradise of Bachelors) is the only album he ever made, and that’s not the only way in which it stands alone. Bankston wrote its songs as a sort of a purge, telling the stories of his old Nam mates and working off a lot of bitterness over the way

vets were treated when they came home from the war; he sold most of the original pressing from the stage or through ads in Soldier Of Fortune magazine. The music is an amalgam of 80s-flavored drums, Waylon Jennings-style singing, and chameleonic guitar that is too slick to be underground and too bare to be commercial. You haven’t heard anything quite like it, and it deserves to be heard. The cover has been updated to bear a replica of the Soldier Of Fortune ad.

Lee Hazlewood’s Trouble Is A Lonesome Town (Light in the Attic) has been blown up to more than double its original length. In 1963, Hazlewood was mainly known as a DJ and Duane Eddy’s producer. He hatched the notion to record a concept album four years before the Beatles did by stringing together tales about the folks in a town best suited for leaving. Lee’s wry spoken intros lead into sparse, rambling songs framed by Western-style strumming so dry, you can practically taste the dust blown up by the train that doesn’t stop anymore. The extras included a handful of singles, some recorded under the assumed name Mark Robinson, and some with Eddy’s inimitable twang on board.

A dozen years down the road, Hazlewood had moved to Sweden in order to shelter his son from the draft. Whilst there, he kept making records which have since become collector’s bait.

A House Safe For Tigers is one of those. The music is a blend of down tempo country, punchy cop-show funk, and baroque orchestral pop wrapped around self-mocking melodramas and shaggy dog tales. Light In The Attic has given it a deluxe treatment, with a thick booklet full of color images taken from an accompanying film that never made it out of Sweden and reminiscences by the Swedes Hazlewood ultimately left behind.

Every career that spans nearly have a century has its ups and downs, and British folk hero Bert Jansch's had a few. According to its personal and affectionate notes, Heartbreak (Omnivore) was recorded during a point when alcohol had so completely taken over Jansch’s life that firsttime producers/fanboys Rick and John Chelew had to negotiate with him to limit his intake to beer until the recording sessions were over for the day. Despite being a bit green, the Chelews found a fairly sympathetic backing ensemble and recommended some strong cover tunes, including “Heartbreak Hotel” and “Wild Mountain Thyme.” Slippery electric bass dates this session to 1981, but it’s still a huge advance over Jansch’s previous California adventure, LA Turnaround. ✹

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