Signal to Noise #60 - winter 2011

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

marina rosenfeld + angel nevarez & valerie tevere at oslo’s ultima festival

ryuichi sakamoto stereolab evan parker kemialliset ysravat giuseppe ielasi

akbank jazz festival guelph jazz festival thee oh sees in denver debo band in chicago jazz em agosto in lisbon on land in san francisco

inhabitants chris riggs in search of space rock: plastic crimewave

issue #60 winter 2011 $4.95 us / $5.95 can

we want the airwaves!

the struggle to save student-run freeformWWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM radio in Houston SIGNAL to NOISE #60 | 1

2 | SIGNAL to NOISE #60 WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM

WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #60 | 3

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

#60 : WINTER 2011 chris riggs 6 inhabitants 8 julian cowley in oslo 10 ktru 16 ryuichi sakamoto 32 live reviews 40 cd / dvd / lp / dl reviews 48 graphic novella 82 PUBLISHER pete gershon COPY EDITOR nate dorward BLOG MASTER christian carey CONTRIBUTORS clifford allen ✹ bill barton ✹ caroline bell ✹ darren bergstein ✹ jason bivins ✹ marcus boon ✹ shawn brackbill ✹ stuart broomer ✹ pat buzby ✹ joel calahan ✹ christian carey ✹ john chacona ✹ mike chamberlain ✹ 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 ✹ grant purdum ✹ chad radford ✹ casey rae-hunter ✹ gino robair ✹ michael rosenstein ✹ elise ryerson ✹ ron schepper ✹ steve smith ✹ thomas stanley ✹ adam strohm ✹ john szwed ✹ nathan turk ✹ dan warburton ✹ alan waters ✹ ben watson ✹ seth watter ✹ charlie wilmoth ADVERTISING e-mail for rates & info: operations@signaltonoisemagazine.org DISTRIBUTION

Via Ingram, Source Interlink, Ubiquity & Small Changes. We are available in most Borders and Barnes & Nobles outlets, and we sell directly to Downtown Music Gallery (NYC), End of an Ear (Austin), Sound Exchange (Houston), Newbury Comics (New England), Jackpot Records (Portland, OR), Bulldog Records (Seattle, WA), Jazz Record Mart (Chicago), Dusty Groove America (Chicago), Lunchbox Records (Charlotte, NC), Squidco (NC), Euclid Records (St. Louis). We encourage you to support your local, independently-owned retailers! If you’d like to carry us in your store, please contact one of our distributors, or if you’d prefer to order direct (min.

10 copies / no returns), drop us a line.

Please apprise us of any address changes to avoid the inconvenience and extra expense of lost issues! Send your new address to: operations@signaltonoisemagazine.org The publisher accepts no responsibility for any opinions expressed by the writers or subjects of SIGNAL to NOISE. All contents are © 2011 STN Publishing LLC and/or its individual contributors. No portion of this document may be reproduced by any means without the written consent of SIGNAL to NOISE. 1128 Waverly Street, Houston Texas 77008 operations@signaltonoisemagazine.org

studio door at KTRU-FM, Houston TX, September 2010 by Pete Gershon Cover art by Charlie Hardwick

4 | SIGNAL to NOISE #60 WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM

WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #60 | 5

CHRIS RIGGS

Eric Gallippo

Detroit-based guitarist expands his instrument’s language. By Eric Gallippo Hunched over a horizontally aligned electric guitar, Christopher Riggs has a short, thick coil spring jammed between the strings and the body; his free hand works a tuning peg, his mind seems focused on the moment ahead and what device to employ next. “That’s a new one,” he says of the technique, smiling a little.

Behind him in a corner of his parents’ suburban Detroit basement, a quartet of gray spraypainted speaker boxes produces a lurch and gurgle of twisted signals as Riggs scrapes, pressures and bows the strings, sometimes placing different objects onto the pickups. There’s a certain disconnect between the guitarist’s calm, methodical manipulations and the unruly, un-guitarlike racket that spews forth, a sound with more resemblance to circuitbent electronics than “guitar playing.” Which is probably why underground noise propagators (Hanson Records, Catholic Tapes, American Tapes, etc.) have released recordings showcasing his deranged playing.

Maybe more impressive is that these sounds are created without effects pedals or processing (with the exception of a volume pedal). “When I was presented with playing guitar in an experimental setting, I didn’t want to just fuck around with a pedal; that didn’t make any sense,” Riggs says. “I’ve heard good stuff by people who do that, but it just didn’t fit with what I was interested in. It made more sense to develop really specific techniques that just use what’s already there on the guitar.”

Riggs began formally exploring “extended technique” guitar while studying classical performance and composition at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music. “I was really good at the classical guitar, but it didn’t gel with what I listened to, so I was trying to find a way to reconcile that,” he says.

Eight-hour-a-day rehearsal regimens gave way to three-hour sessions spent studying and documenting the possibilities of the

uneffected guitar and inventing ways to “practice.”

“I eventually gave up on this, but I created a spreadsheet that had a list of every single sound I could make on the guitar,” he says, laughing at himself. “It involved a lot of redundancies, so there was a lot of copying and pasting, depending on where something was placed, what pickup it was placed on.

There were over 1,000 on there.”

He used a random number generator to produce chance pieces. “It would say, ‘Play sound No. 900 and whatever,’ and then I would practice this piece, and then I would generate another piece.” Then came improvising and recording the final product.

The result is a mash-up equally informed by New Music and the Midwest noise underground of his surroundings. He’s hesitant to say so for fear of sounding arrogant, but, to his knowledge, no one else is approaching the guitar in quite the same way. “I haven’t found anyone,” he says.

While finishing up at Oberlin, Riggs started playing with a pair of like-minded Detroitarea improvisers, percussionist Ben Hall and violinist Mike Khoury, whom he credits as major influences and contributors to not only his sound, but the “New American Improvisation” scene (a term he borrows from Khoury).

Back in Michigan, while figuring out what to do after graduation, Riggs and Hall took to daily jam sessions. Soon they were recording and performing as free guitar-drum duo Trauma, and Riggs was asked to join Hall and John Olson (Wolf Eyes, American Tapes, Spykes, etc.) as a touring member of their long standing creep-speed free jazz unit Graveyards for a couple of trips.

It was also Hall, who heads the Broken Research imprint, who encouraged Riggs to start his own label. In early 2007, Riggs launched Holy Cheever Church, starting with CD-Rs before making the jump to limited-run tapes in the summer of ’08.

Starting with releases of his own music and

6 | SIGNAL to NOISE #60 WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM

his friends’, he eventually got the courage to solicit submissions from other artists, and he has since put out tapes by the likes of California percussionist Gino Robair, Cincinnati guitarist Pete Fosco and Cleveland noise artist Skin Graft, as well as plenty of his own material and collaborations.

Over the summer, he celebrated the label’s 50th release with its first vinyl LP, featuring a duo of Riggs and trumpeter Liz Allbee performing under the moniker Forced Collapse.

When it came time to apply for grad school, Holy Cheever became something of a portfolio. In September, Riggs moved east to pursue his M.A. in composition under no less a musical mind than Anthony Braxton at Wesleyan University in Connecticut.

Riggs’ interest in subversive music education goes beyond his own. Earlier this year he self-published 1,000 copies of The SixStringed Adventure, his own guitar instruction book for young children with an accompanying CD of audio examples. Written in a straightforward, kid-friendly style, the unassuming book covers the rudimentary basics of any beginner’s manual, but it goes beyond introducing “notes” and “chords” to include “noises” (pick scrapes, strumming above the nut), listening comprehension and composing one’s own pieces (sometimes by chance with the aid of shuffled, numbered cards).

The idea came from his time giving guitar lessons to young kids who didn’t practice or retain much. Instead of drilling pointless exercises into them, he started teaching them to listen to and identify different qualities in music and to improvise and compose. By the end of the half hour, he could see the students had actually learned something about music. “I was able to progress to the point where these 11-year-old kids were writing pieces, and they were writing weird pieces, and we were recording them,” he says.

Only time will tell if the lessons stick, but who knows? Maybe some day he’ll release one of their tapes. ✹

WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #60 | 7

Vancouver collective lets the grooves sink in and the sounds bleed.

By Nate Dorward

Tamara Lee

INHABITANTS “Is it jazz?” Hardly: spin an Inhabitants album and, yes, there’s jazz there—drummer Skye Brooks’ love of the classic jazz-kit sound rings out in everything he does, for starters— but there’s also grunge, ambient, bass-heavy dub, math-rock trickery, freak-out improv...

Yet slicing things up according to genre or lumping the Inhabitants into the “post-rock” category makes no sense with music this distinctive and unified in mood.

In concert (I caught them twice in 2010, at Vancouver’s Ironworks and Toronto’s Tranzac), JP Carter is the guy on the right with the mess of red hair: damaged, soft-spoken sounds swirl around or jackrabbit away from his trumpet, which he feeds through an amp and some basic effects. On the left— comfortably seated, neatly bearded, in a working-man’s shirt, jeans and sneakers—is guitarist Dave Sikula, the band’s “singer.”

No, there aren’t any vocals, but the slowecstasy solos he unfurls over the longer numbers don’t lack for nerve-tingling melodic power. (On the nutty improv bits, though, he’s totally nonlinear, twisting knobs until everything crackles dangerously: “You wouldn’t believe the number of times people come up to Dave after the show,” says Brooks: “‘Your amp was broken!’”)

And then there’s the warm, deep hookup between Brooks and bass guitarist Pete Schmitt, developed over many years. Having first met as high school students in Mission, B.C., they have collaborated frequently since moving to Vancouver, including a long stint in a funk band and more recently their rock/ pop band Copilots. When the Inhabitants play “The Rancher” in concert it becomes an extended nailbiter, bassist and drummer pushing its spasmodic central riff towards collapse. Skye: “Pete and I are often getting a kick out of it, because we are literally almost falling apart, just on the edge of not being able to quite play it—we like it that way.” Schmitt’s monsters-of-the-deep sound probes and feeds off the room ambience, his steady groove sinking into the listener’s pores. He remarks: “I have always been moved by melodic simplicity and rhythmic complexity. Having performed hiphop (with Josh Martinez) and African music (with Doun-

dounba) for many years, my playing style has its roots in tone over speed and agility.”

Inhabitants emerged in 2004 from what was then a hub of Vancouver’s creative music scene, a restaurant/bar called The Sugar Refinery where Brooks and Carter curated an improv series. The four musicians had already played together in various combinations: Sikula and Carter in their ethereal Carsick duo, and Carter, Schmitt and Brooks in the Broken Crow Quartet with the guitarist Marc Wild. Sikula: “I remember checking that band out and just having this feeling well up inside... that something was going to happen. Skye and Pete grew up together playing music, and they have this amazing chemistry. I remember thinking to myself that they sound like Crazy Horse, whom I loved then and still love today.”

The band’s self-titled debut was recorded shortly after formation, and became one of the first releases on Jesse Zubot’s Drip Audio label. There’s an open-sky celebratory feeling and transparency to the CD that will strike a chord with fans of Bill Frisell, but it wasn’t long before the band started tapping murkier emotional and sonic waters. Their second and third discs, The Furniture Moves Beneath and A Vacant Lot, were both recorded in 2007, though the latter only emerged in 2010. A Vacant Lot is an especially strong example of how the band will harness the ritual power of a groove or hook: “Journey of the Loach” and “Pacific Central” are some of the intensest rides along the pain/pleasure borderline you’ll ever hear.

Though both records were made in Vancouver’s Factory studio, Furniture was a conventionally produced studio album while the other came about almost incidentally.

Sikula: “JP had the idea of putting out a little EP on the heels of Furniture. I had recorded a couple of demos with us set up in our ‘live’ configuration (no isolation, sound baffles, headphones, etc.) and was impressed with the quality of the performances. The dynamic extremes were coming across in a way that was difficult to achieve in the sterile, isolated ‘headphone’ environment. JP and I discussed trying this approach for the EP recording. The live room at the studio we were

8 | SIGNAL to NOISE #60 WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM

working in was quite large, so we decided to try it out. We all left feeling it the most natural-feeling, relaxed session we’d ever done.

Pete and Skye each brought in a couple of new tunes, and we also did a couple things off the cuff that made the cut, so we ended up with enough material for another fulllength release.”

That live acoustic is especially crucial for a band whose sound and vibe emerge naturally from resonance, feedback and distortion.

JP: “I have a live microphone going through the amplifier, so I’m picking up everything else that’s happening and it is going into the sound that comes out through the amp....

When it got really loud and the drums were really kicking, yeah, the stuff that was coming out of my amplifier just became a big wash.”

About his setup, Carter states: “I keep it really simple: I’ve been using the same effects for almost [15 years]. The main one is a delay/reverb pedal that has certain quirks that are unique to it. It’s probably just a defect in the pedal originally, but it does some cool stuff that I get a kick out of. I do have a distortion pedal, and the other important thing is a wah pedal. But a lot of it is using low-powered amps that distort really fast. I noticed playing with amps that were more powerful that you get a clean, brittle sound—and having an open mike, it causes all kind of trouble. If I keep the wattage down it makes a nice, warmer but intense enough sound.”

Though they’ve not achieved the wider prominence of the math-rock collective Fond of Tigers (of which Carter and Brooks are both members), the Inhabitants have accumulated a strong local following over the years, as the packed crowd at their latenight performance at this year’s Vancouver International Jazz Festival attested. One key recognition of their continued vitality came just this November: a week’s residency at the Western Front, culminating in a performance and recording of all-new material, including an extended composition by Carter. It’s a chance for them to do what they do best—working themselves deep into a sound, a physical and emotional space, a groove—and the results should be well worth the wait. ✹

WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #60 | 9

10 | SIGNAL to NOISE #60 WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM

THE NEW STANDARDS

Julian Cowley finds two provocative “cover versions” at Oslo’s Ultima Music Festival. Photos by Rune Kongsro.

Jenny Hval with the Norewgian Radio Orchestra at the Norwegian Opera House, September 10, 2010

Norwegian architect Tarald Lundevall’s dazzling Norwegian Opera House, which opened in 2008, sits on the waterfront at the head of Oslo Fjord like a gleaming glass and sloping white marble iceberg. In the choppy water, a stone’s throw away, an angular sculpture by Italian artist Monica Bonvicini bobs on the tide and turns with the wind. In form it resembles a modified miniature version of the building, made with acid-resistant steel and reflective glass panes.

During September 2010 the Opera House was one of the venues for Oslo’s adventurous and thought-provoking Ultima Contemporary Music Festival. One startling performance there teamed singer Jenny Hval with the weighty musical presence of the Norwegian Radio Orchestra. Hval, elfin in appearance with bobbed blonde hair, barefoot and dressed simply in black, delivered with precision and commitment the melody and lyrics of Culture Club’s “The War Song.” Around her thundered a dynamic sweeping arrangement by Jon Øivind Ness, heavy on militaristic brass and percussion.

In 1984, when Boy George’s original version made position 17 in the US pop charts (it reached 2 in the UK, and 5 in Norway), my own vinyl collection was packed with LPs

by John Coltrane, Albert Ayler, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Derek Bailey. To my ears, “The War Song” was no more than an irritant, heard by chance on radios or other people’s record players. But this performance at the Oslo Opera House was truly absorbing, a transformation of that pop tune’s banal melody and inane lyrics into a memorable event.

The song became unexpectedly resonant with meaning, not least because in December 2009 the very same Norwegian Radio Orchestra had played at a concert celebrating the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Barack Obama.

WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNALTONOISEMAGA SIGNAL to NOISE #60 | 11

It was initially disarming to find myself being hooked in, a quarter of a century down the line, by a make-over of this artless piece of pop. But on reflection, I recognized that John Coltrane’s alchemical reworking of “My Favorite Things” has been a highlight of my listening life; that Albert Ayler’s apparently iconoclastic blowing was deeply suffused with field hollers, righteous blues and gospel tunes; that Karlheinz Stockhausen made his epic Hymnen from a stew of national anthems; and that even the uncompromisingly idiosyncratic Derek Bailey left us recordings of his versions of “Body and Soul” and “Stella

By Starlight.” Popular music, in the broadest sense, has arguably always in some way nourished visionary and heterodox voices, who in turn have redeployed what’s popular as an agent of revelation, subversive pleasure or potential change.

The dynamics of appropriation and renewal are, of course, complex and often unpredictable. Lars Petter Hagen, Ultima’s inspired artistic director, ran a stimulating thread of provocative cover versions through a Festival whose declared theme was the apparently safe notion of craftsmanship. Berlin-based ensemble Zeitkratzer, which a few years ago presented us with a caustic chamber-group interpretation of Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music, brought their corrosive energy to bear on Norwegian folk materials and produced some fabulously malformed reworkings.

Zeitkratzer visibly alienated en route a large percentage of their audience that night, who clearly preferred their folk music domesticated and branded with the familiar stamp of authenticity.

Another visitor from Berlin, composer Johannes Kreidler, turned the whole idea of authenticity inside out by presenting in a small theatre instances of his own work, played by Ensemble Mosaik, along with versions of that work made by a Chinese composer-for-hire and a cut-rate Indian computer programmer, both paid by Kreidler for their services. He held up photographs of his remote collaborators and itemized the money that changed hands. The result was hilarious out-sourced self-pastiche, but also a pungent meta-musical discourse that shed incisive critical light on the nature and status of creativity within the intractable material realities of a globalized capitalist economy.

The revelatory appropriation of “The War Song” by Jenny Hval and Jon Øivind Ness was actually conceived by New York-based artists Angel Nevarez and Valerie Tevere. They hatched the idea, engaged the participants and made a video recording of the performance, which in edited form will be shown in galleries, re-contextualizing the song further and opening it up to other layers of potential meaning. “A cover song is a concurrent musical transgression and transposition,” Nevarez and Tevere observe in a series of jointlycomposed e-mails. “We’re very interested in this idea of a song first recorded or made popular by someone, and then re-interpreted by somebody else; the cover’s constant comparison to, yet transformation from what has preceded it—a renewal, looking forward and listening backward.”

“In his 1972 video work, Baldessari Sings LeWitt,” they continue, “John Baldessari chose to sing Sol LeWitt’s sentences on conceptual art. He felt that the act of singing those sentences would bring them to a much

larger public. It seems that communicating a work of art as a song—as a cover version— renders it more accessible. Perhaps Baldessari was on to something. The addition of melody and harmony may in fact render a work approachable, and therefore disarming. Pop music as a whole has this disarming nature.”

In 2008 Nevarez and Tevere made a twochannel video work called Touching from a Distance. Fans of post-punk rock may recognize that the title alludes to a line from Joy Division’s “Transmission.” The artists invited Mariachi Ciudad de Guadalajara, the official mariachi band of that Mexican city, to perform its own interpretation of that Joy Division song. “That re-arrangement was our first attempt at musical contravention,” they explain.

“In Touching from a Distance we were also interested in the space of performance—in this case, Plaza de la Liberación, Guadalajara. As the Mariachi band plays, dressed in traditional attire, a protest takes place in the Plaza against inefficient use of regional public funds. The song in a sense functions as the soundtrack to that particular afternoon’s events. The work vacillates between the spatial simultaneity of performance, protest, and public use.”

“Certainly one might read these adaptations as parody,” they acknowledge. “Recontextualization of material from popular culture’s history can sometimes read as retrokitsch or parody. However, using ‘The War Song’ and ‘Transmission’ we attempted to stay away from parody and look at the material in a new way. How might ‘The War Song’ sound as re-arranged for a fifty-three piece orchestra, slowed down and sung in a higher octave, and performed in front of a seated audience at the Norwegian Opera House?

The contemporary version, re-arranged by Jon Øyvind Ness, has become an entirely new song, referencing the original but with a darker and more somber tone.”

The nature of the audience, the context of the performance are no longer incidentals but have become active ingredients in Nevarez and Tevere’s work. That remains the case in the afterlife of the concert, when the videotaped version circulates through contemporary art venues. “Like any public sphere the exhibition environment comes with its problematics and potentialities,” the artists observe. “The art audience is, more or less, a particularized audience who consume, collect, and debate on a specific level. The audience of pop culture is, as Bettina Funcke has pointed out, an anonymous and more heterogeneous audience that consumes on a mass level. The question of art making a difference is a difficult one. But we are interested in producing works that have inherent critiques of dominant structures and institutions, that can elicit curiosity, discussion, and potentially transform thought.”

With that broad goal in mind, and driven by their interest in extended notions of collaboration, Nevarez and Tevere have initiated Another Protest Song, a two-part project. “It began with the question, ‘What does a 21st Century protest song sound like?’ Technological shifts in production—electronic effects, the mash-up, sampling, and so on—may have inspired transformations in protest music. We are interested to learn in what forms songwriters and musicians are now working, and with what political content. Unlike the Vietnam War era, contemporary protest music rarely gets airplay in the United States—this has much to

LTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM 12 | SIGNAL to NOISE #60 WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM

do with corporate media consolidation, syndication and perhaps even censorship.”

“We felt that the music was out there and wanted to provide a framework for it, so in 2008 we set up a web-based archive, and invited users to upload their own original protest material. As administrators, we do not place value judgments on the songs uploaded, although we will not tolerate hate speech or songs that promote right-wing agendas. At this point we have not had to expurgate any songs for those reasons.”

The second part of the project, Another Protest Song: Karaoke with a Message, aims to adapt the karaoke songbook into a vehicle for political enunciation. “As the November 2008 elections were approaching, we grew interested in providing a mediated space in which users might get on their soapboxes and profess their political interests and dislikes, without feeling uncomfortable. In the era of American Idol and innumerable karaoke bars everyone is a singer, and the choice of song speaks a lot about the performer, especially if that song includes identifiable political content. Over a two-day period—as a part of the Creative Time project Democracy in America: The National Campaign—we organized a karaoke suite of protest songs and a performance stage in two parks in New York City. For six hours each day pedestrians, parkgoers, cyclists, the general public sang songs of protest, sober and under the warm sun.”

Involvement with politicized karaoke, including some pop songs not intended originally to have that kind or weight of content, is another aspect of Nevarez and Tevere’s interest in cover songs. In conventional karaoke, of course, constant comparison to the authentic version is required to gauge success. In ‘protest karaoke’ there’s a different dynamic. The song speaks of a history attached to a political situation—or maybe not strictly attached, but newly reconsidered in the light of such a situation.

Their interest in collaborative musical strategies has also been pursued in another work entitled We need a theory to continue.

Nevarez and Tevere provided a set of song lyrics and invited three bands based in Austin, Texas to interpret them in their own way, in their own distinctive musical style. “It was written as a protest song with atypical protest lyrics,” they explain. “The chorus is actually a quote from Michel Foucault’s book The Order of Things. The lyrics focus on the transformation of a subject from the position of questioning to action. The three dissimilar songs were performed by the bands at the public performance venue of Austin City Hall. We saw that architectural container of municipal ‘democracy’ as the appropriate stage for an evening of live performative democracy in musical form. The performances were videorecorded and are exhibited as a three-channel video installation. A take-away lyric sheet was also provided, in the hope that it may perhaps prompt further versions.”

After witnessing Nevarez and Tevere’s The War Song at the Oslo Opera House, New York-based composer, sound artist, turntablist and improviser Marina Rosenfeld remarked to me that Jenny Hval on stage reminded her of Peter Pan. That image exactly captures the singer’s projection of androgynous grace and wilful innocence, a key component in the project’s artistic success. Rosenfeld brought

WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #60 | 13

N&T: Amoula il Majnoona | all others: Rune Kongsro

14 | SIGNAL to NOISE #60 WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM

opposite: Marina Rosenfeld's Teenage Lontano, Fabrikken, Oslo, September 9, 2010. below, clockwise from left: Wire deputy editor Anne Hilde Neset interviews Marina Rosenfeld before the performance, Valerie Tevere and Angel Nevarez, and Johannes Kreidler with Ensemble Mozaik

her own cover version to the Ultima Festival.

Teenage Lontano is her imaginative reworking of Hungarian composer György Ligeti’s famously challenging Lontano, an orchestral work completed in 1967. Rosenfeld has adapted its nebulous late modernist complexity for use by non-specialist performers.

For this Oslo concert, which took place in a former chocolate factory, around thirty local teenagers stood in a line, grouped in pairs that faced alternately, two by two, in opposite directions. In response to cues delivered by Rosenfeld, via mp3 players with earbuds shared between the pairs, their voices blended into a shimmering acoustic haze, transmitting a beguiling auditory glow through the otherwise gloomy room. “I don’t think Teenage Lontano is parody in any sense,” the composer reflects. “I’m way too serious about getting at the transcendent beauty that attracted me to Ligeti’s Lontano in the first place. But it’s not homage either. I think of it as a ‘cover version’—which to me means a very personal, intimate account of how I heard something else.”

“I’m just as interested in the nether regions of authorship as in the more condoned zone of creativity that does not openly acknowledge influence. At the time that I wrote Teenage Lontano, I was looking at artists like Ferruccio Busoni who would find a composer from the past he liked, simply hyphenate his name onto theirs and rewrite the music the way he wanted to hear it, emphasizing its more contemporary possibilities and replacing its ‘style’ with his. Liszt did the same thing.

These were early remix artists, who saw the past as malleable, as material.”

“I love Lontano and find aspects of it fascinating, especially how the impression of ‘clouds’ or blurred edges, the sense of constant flux, is paradoxically achieved with incredible precision in the notation and orchestration. It’s a level of notational articulation that takes the piece outside of the realm of the possible for most who encounter it. In other words, it is a highly specialized document—as it must be—but I couldn’t help wondering what it would be like to expose its architecture to a different audience and different performers.”

Above the young singers in the Oslo factory space a speaker, rotating like a turntable, scrawled a vivid electronic tag across the walls of the venue. This additional musical element was Rosenfeld’s signature, her personalization of this inspired cover version. “It was important to insert or interpolate an element into the final composition that had no relationship to Ligeti’s music,” she explains. “The fact that it sweeps the architecture of the room, as well as being a sonic element, has to do with my version addressing the site of the music, its situation, not just its notes or sounds.”

Rosenfeld had prepared her non-professional teenage choir to focus intensely on the sounds and to project their own voices in a way that produced a truly concentrated performance. But in contrast to the Opera

House’s seated formality, members of this audience were invited by the composer to move around the space, to walk through the sonic cloud and experience its subtle fluctuations and mutations. Teenage Lontano is a work rich in implied dialogue—across generations, between the disparate performance identities of schooled virtuosity and non-professional commitment, between formally configured and less regulated space, between collective and personal modes of expression and amongst technologies of musical reproduction. Listeners are left free to draw out those and other implications.

Rosenfeld’s personal background is steeped in music. Her father was a professional cellist and she started learning to play piano when only four years old. During the early 1990s, at the California Institute of the Arts in Los Angeles, she studied not only with composer Morton Subotnick but also with conceptual artist Michael Asher. It was at that time she created the Sheer Frost Orchestra, an ensemble of 17 women who use glass nail-polish bottles to generate sounds from horizontal electric guitars according to the directions in Rosenfeld’s graphic score. The piece has been widely performed subsequently, involving performers local to each particular venue, and with the participation of untrained players as well as accomplished musicians. A recorded version, The Sheer Frost Orchestra: Hop, Drop, Drone, Slide, Scratch and A for Anything, appeared on the Charhizma imprint in 2001.

Rosenfeld has been notably active as a turntablist, making her own acetate dub plates for use in performance in a wide range of contexts. That experience has had significant impact upon her perception of music as malleable material. “Firstly, because records are objects before—and after—they are anything else,” she says. “And I think my ears were radically changed by spending a lot of time playing two records at once. There’s no better way to describe it. When I began DJing, the more simultaneousness I experienced, the more the notion of dissonance, that identification of certain musical moves as a ‘problem,’ that judgement about two musics or two sonorities at the same time, began to fall apart. I had the pleasure of re-learning to hear.”

“Technologies in themselves are not really a subject matter for me, or even a preoccupation,” she adds in clarification. “I’m more interested in the whole spectrum of social and ecological conditions around music— who gets to make what music, who speaks or sings, what musics are prohibited in what situations. These sorts of questions seem to condition how I listen to music, and what I can understand, and what my ears want or enjoy in a given situation. I’ve always experienced my own listening as changing and morphing all the time.”

“The personal media device for this generation—the mp3 player—makes Teenage Lontano possible,” Rosenfeld continues, “in the sense that it replaces a certain kind of notational literacy with social, cultural,

corporeal literacy. The kids don’t have to know how to read music, but they do have to know how to listen to music in one ear and hear the world selectively through the other. That kind of radical simultaneity is easy for them.”

Teenage Lontano was premiered in the cavernous Drill Hall space of the Park Avenue Armory in New York as part of the Whitney Biennial in 2008. Its European premiere took place in Amsterdam in June 2009. As Nevarez and Tevere have noted, in the era of American Idol everyone is a singer. Preparing teenagers for the New York premiere of her work, Rosenfeld was also struck by the pervasive influence of that reality TV competition, especially by the emotionally stylised, highly artificial manner of singing that the show has made fashionable. Three snippets extracted from those preparatory sessions for the Armory event can be heard on Rosenfeld’s 2009 CD Plastic Materials, issued by the Australian label Room40.

They give some sense of what happens when György Ligeti encounters American Idol.

“I’ve always been interested in the social conditions that a musical work demands and also troubled by the lines drawn around certain musics,” Rosenfeld goes on to explain.

“In this case, you could say I heard in Lontano some kind of aspiration to a utopian scenario, where the lines drawn around instruments, anyway, or pitches, were being blurred; where a different social formation was being imagined, but which couldn’t maintain its politics to the end of the line....”

“The last self-described generation of modernists—the institutional composers, the academics—were very ridiculous in certain ways. Minimalists and hippies and visual artists moonlighting in music didn’t have to work hard to produce an alternative to the angry white man proclaiming that audiences didn’t matter and that certain harmonies were for idiots.

“Something I felt but couldn’t articulate for a long time was that the prevailing ‘postmodern’ musics I came up into as a student in the 1980s and 1990s were boring and conservative because they didn’t look back and challenge the right 20th-century moment— the moment when so-called ‘art music’ was a high-minded activity of specialists, but was also politically aspirational, even utopian—a situation that is much harder to challenge.

“I was impressed by the obsessional grappling with the idea of the modern in the visual arts, which had no real corollary in music. So it was very liberating for me at a certain moment, to decide to leapfrog over the recent past and look a little farther back—to be specific, to imagine another response to Ligeti that didn’t reflexively challenge complexity or dissonance or beauty, but looked back at the politics and social conditions—the real mechanics of the making of the music—and in Teenage Lontano I’ve tried to deal with that.” ✹ Julian Cowley lives in the UK. He wrote about Howard Riley and Keith Tippett in STN#51.

WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #60 | 15

WE WANT THE AIRWAVES!

Are we nearing the end of student-run radio?

Pete Gershon explores the history and covert sale of Rice University's free-form radio station, KTRU. Kelsey Yule and Joey Yang at KTRU protest rally, August 21, 2010

The afternoon of Sunday, August the 21st is sunny and blazing hot on the main quad at the center of the Rice University campus.

School is not yet in session and most students have yet to return to Houston, but gathered at the base of the prominent bronze statue of the school’s founder, the nineteenth-century financier William Marsh Rice, are some two hundred students and community members who have turned out to support the school’s endangered student-run free-form radio station, KTRU. “My name is Kelsey Yule,” says a slender young woman with thick glasses and curly blond hair as she stands on a small riser behind a microphone, “I’m the student station manager here at KTRU, and a junior here at Rice. As all of you know, the administration of Rice University has recently announced its decision to sell KTRU’s frequency, transmitter and FCC rights, a shocking announcement as it was done without the consultation or even the notification of students, alumni, faculty or community whose dedication over the past 43 years has made it what it is today. While KTRU’s signal and transmitter may be placed into the control of the all-classical station KUHC as early as tomorrow, that silence will not mark the end of our fight. The FCC rights of the station will not have changed hands, and there will continue to be many outlets through which we can influence and hopefully halt the proposed sale.”

KTRU has occupied a singular niche on Houston’s radio dial as a wholly student-run station dedicated to diverse underground programming. Freak folk, electro-acoustics, IDM, contemporary classical and unabashed noise are routinely juxtaposed with avantgarde jazz, vintage blues, soul, bluegrass, music from around the world, and occasionally even animal sounds, often within the same hour. Dengue Fever Presents Electric Cambodia (Minky) led a recent list of top plays for the week ending September 26th, with Smithsonian Folkways’s Classic Appalachian Blues, Porter’s The Complete Recordings Volume 2 by Philadelphia’s incredible ’70s jazz fusion unit Catalyst, and outsider rocker Daniel Johnston’s 1994 Atlantic release Fun (inexplicably but delightfully in the “new add” section) all making strong showings. Eclecticism is

built in, with DJs tacitly encouraged to make transitions as jarring as possible. The station’s transmitter in Humble, 22 miles north of the city center, broadcasts a 50,000-watt signal that can be heard throughout the majority of the country’s sixth-largest radio market. It’s an immense amount of power to rest in student hands (especially such weird ones) and over the year it’s translated into significant exposure for the kind of musicians who populate the pages of this magazine.

The station’s on-air talent comprises music fans drawn from the Rice campus and from the greater Houston community, usually experts on some strange musical sub-category or another, with a tendency to speak on-air with a sort of casual sloppiness that can be endearing or irritating. I myself have hosted the final hours of KTRU’s Sunday jazz show on alternating weeks for the past year and a half, and have enjoyed tuning in since my first visit to Houston in 2001. But like most things in life, you rarely appreciate what you have until you’re in danger of losing it. I’ve been punctual and professional in my role as DJ and have enjoyed the chance to share music with Houstonians at large, but until the station’s sale I hadn’t bothered to find out much about its history or about my fellow KTRU DJs. Next up behind the makeshift podium was one of them: Kevin Bush, a second-year Rice student, and a KTRU DJ and board member.

“Like so many people before me, when I first tuned in to a KTRU broadcast, I had only one initial reaction: ‘what the hell did I just hear?’

I first discovered KTRU in high school while skimming through the radio dial in my car.

Although I found the station to be very inaccessible, I was intrigued by its uniqueness and open-mindedness. I gradually became a regular listener of the station. I came to appreciate that KTRU was, like my other favorite radio station, KPFT, a vital outlet for independent voices in local media. Its DJs cared passionately about the music they played, and the station was willing to give challenging music airplay regardless of its commercial viability.”

When Bush was ready for college, Rice was his first choice and he applied under its early decision program. “I was elated to receive my acceptance,” he continues, “not in small part because it meant I could become part of a

16 | SIGNAL to NOISE #60 WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM

radio station I’d grown to love… One of Rice’s recently adopted slogans extols ‘unconventional wisdom.’ KTRU’s mission to broadcast eclectic, progressive and underexposed music through the airwaves matches this sentiment exactly. However… the sale of the KTRU transmitter and the strictly bottom-line rationale behind it debase Rice’s commitment to originality and radical thinking to a self-serving marketing gimmick.”

KTRU’s own staff was shocked to learn of the impending sale on August 16th from an article published on the Houston Chronicle’s webpage the night before a meeting of the University of Houston’s board of regents.

The board would be voting to authorize the school’s president, Renu Khator, to purchase KTRU’s FCC license on U of H’s behalf, as well as “other assets includ[ing] other FCC licenses, real property, and tangible assets such as the tower, transmitter building, and other pertinent equipment,” in exchange for $9.5 million in cash, as well as six paid internships at the new station. On the 18th, U of H announced the transaction in a press release, noting that the National Public Radio affiliate they already own and operate, KUHF, would immediately upon signing begin to broadcast round-the-clock classical music on the 91.7 frequency under the call letters KUHC, while U of H would convert their existing signal at 88.7 FM to a 24-hour NPR news and talk format.

“The acquisition of a second public radio station delivers on our promise to keep the University of Houston at the forefront of creating strong cultural, educational and artistic opportunities that benefit students and the city of Houston,” said Khator in the release.

For his part, Rice University president David Leebron announced the sale on the day of the board’s vote in a carefully scripted campuswide e-mail, citing budget cuts necessitated by the economic downturn as the main impetus, while also noting, “In an era when Internet radio is rapidly growing in popularity, it became apparent that the 50,000-watt radio station that broadcasts KTRU’s programming is a valuable but vastly underutilized resource that is not essential to providing our students the wide range of opportunities they need…

We realize that some loyal fans of KTRU may lament these changes, but it is important to

WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #60 | 17

18 | SIGNAL to NOISE #60 WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM

The transmitter and tower in Humble, TX, still broadcasting KTRU on September 5th, 2010

remember that KTRU is not going away. Fans can still find KTRU’s unique blend of music and programming online. Meanwhile, a greater number of students can benefit from the improvements in campus facilities and offerings made possible by the sale of the broadcast tower.”

More specifically, Leebron would clarify in November, $2 million will go to the construction of a new dining hall, the “East Servery”.

About $6 million will be put toward the school’s endowment, with a million reserved for improvements and ongoing expenses at KTRU. With regards to the secrecy that’s so rankled the students and wider community, Leebron wrote, “As much as I prefer to consult widely and involve all stakeholders in important decisions, this sale required months of complicated and, by necessity, confidential negotiations. My management team and I approached those discussions always with the best interests of our students, faculty and alumni and the future of our university as our highest priorities.”

Back at the quad, Heather Nodler (KTRU station manager from 1997 to ’99) is addressing the crowd. “Oscar Wilde said, ‘a cynic is man who knows the price of everything, but the value of nothing.’… What exactly do we mean when we speak of ‘value’? Are we referring to something’s fair market value, how many dollars it can fetch in a confidential transaction involving lawyers and negotiations, or do we mean something more, something incalculable and intangible? I’ve read that the human body when broken down into its component parts, oxygen, carbon, nitrogen and the like, is worth about four dollars and fifty cents. Yet nobody tells you your body, which allows you to breathe in life every day, and share in experiences with other human beings, is an underutilized resource that should be liquidated!”

As a Rice alumnus who’s gone on to work at several of Houston’s most important cultural facilities including the Menil Collection, Holocaust Museum Houston, and the Museum of Fine Arts (where she was chosen over another applicant due to her KTRU experience) and as one of the hosts of Scordatura, KTRU’s twice-weekly contemporary classical show, Nodler’s well situated to speak about the station’s importance off-campus (or as they like to say at Rice, “beyond the hedges”): “To the greater Houston area, KTRU is an oasis on the radio dial, giving some sense of life in a flat desert of radio sameness that stretches out across the city into the suburbs, echoing the bleakness of Houston’s miles and miles of billboards and strip malls. Through its unique programming, KTRU gives life not only to the inner-loop avant-garde and art scenes, but also to Houston’s far-flung cultural communities, playing African, Aegean, Indian, jazz, hip hop, blues, and so many more musical styles that reflect one of Houston’s primary

accomplishments—its great diversity.”

Several more speakers come and go, relating their own personal stories about how the station turned them onto creative music, attracted them to Rice, and improved their lives.

Conspicuous among the procession is faculty member Dr. Steven Cox, a computational and applied mathematics professor whose areas of specialty include neuronal network modeling and synaptic plasticity. Though soft-spoken and ill-at-ease at the mic, he seems every bit as frustrated as any member of the station’s operational team. “It’s got to be here,” he asserts not long before the rally breaks up, “got to be broadcast, got to be FM!” “Tuesday, God weighed in, and apparently he’s a KTRU fan,” remarks the Houston Press’s Richard Connelly in his Hair Balls column later in the week, referencing a “massive lightning strike” on KUHF’s Missouri City tower that caused power to be lost for several days (the station immediately switched to its back-up transmitter for uninterrupted service). “That’s about as clear a statement of ‘Play me some more Pan-African/fusion jazz!!’ as we can imagine.”

What began in 1967 with a few engineering students tinkering with their dorm’s buzzer system evolved into a powerful terrestrial broadcast in small hops followed by one great leap. In 1991, KTRU jumped from 650 to 50,000 watts thanks to a windfall donation of a new transmitter by their neighbor on the FM dial, KRTS, which was forced by the FCC to upgrade KTRU’s transmitter in order to boost its own signal. The transmitter allowed KTRU to be heard well beyond Houston’s expansive city limits (halfway to Austin, in fact), but despite years of the administration’s verbal reassurances to the contrary, it seemed inevitable to many that such a valuable resource would eventually be courted by establishment radio.

With regards to the station’s cost to Rice, it has been relatively minimal. KTRU’s current primary operating budget (concerts and events, station power and upkeep) is $17,000 annually, paid for by a “blanket tax” for student organizations which works out to about $5.50 per student (multiplied by about 5,300 undergraduates). The staff includes one full-time general manager, Will Robedee; a part-time chief engineer, Bob Cham; and a part-time clerical aide, whose salaries are paid by the University. The FCC collects no license fee from KTRU as a non-commercial station, but the transmitter in Humble consumes a few thousand dollars a month in electricity, which until only recently continued to be paid for by an endowment set up for operating expenses by the benefactor station, KRTS. Nonetheless, a series of appraisals of KTRU’s resources began as early as 2005 without the staff’s knowledge. In an article entitled “UH Radio Deal Not Turning On Any KTRU Fans,” Vice President of Public Affairs Linda Thrane told the Houston Chronicle that

Rice first offered the station to U of H about a year previous to the sale’s announcement, but that a search for a buyer began “in earnest” in the spring.

“Rice University chose to sell KTRU some time ago,” wrote KUHF’s CEO John Proffitt in an e-mail to a concerned listener, which was subsequently posted in mid-August to the Save KTRU blog. “They engaged a media broker to assist with the sale. The media broker contacted UH and KUHF after the fact to ascertain our possible interest in acquiring the property for sale.”

The broker in turn contacted Public Radio Capital, a national non-profit based in Boulder, Colorado which provides, according to their website, “comprehensive consulting services for strengthening, expanding and financing public media in communities nationwide… We turn ideas into viable business options.” PRC was established by the federallyfunded Corporation for Public Broadcasting in 2001, and has since grown into an influential force in the radio industry, facilitating over 200 transactions across the country thus far.

“Rice wanted to sell,” confirms Erik Langner, director of acquisitions and legal affairs at PRC. “Had it not been for the U of H stepping in, it would have gone to a noncommercial religious broadcaster. When those deals happen, generally the buyer is a large national consolidated entity, like Educational Media Foundation.” The Georgia-based EMF controls over 250 stations nationwide, programming them with “positive, encouraging” faith-based content.

Langner contends that “Houston up to this point has been dramatically underserved with respect to public radio: [it’s] one of the only markets in the country that doesn’t have a dedicated news and information service [or a] dedicated classical service. So by doing this deal, the city of Houston is getting 24 new hours of content, significantly more local reporting and journalism, and news programming internationally, nationally, and locally, and certainly much more classical and fine arts radio.”

“There is a trend of universities selling,” he acknowledges, “because their primary mission obviously is to educate, and for some institutions, a radio station is not necessarily viewed as core to that mission. For other universities, it’s the exact opposite. They very much see their radio station as an extension of their core mission.” He cites Ohio State and the U of South Florida as schools that PRC has recently assisted with purchases. “It’s really cutting both ways: some universities are selling, others are buying.”

“Some of these stations do need help,” allows Ernesto Aguilar, a U of H graduate who’s now the program director at Houston’s community-based Pacifica station, KPFT. While he recognizes what an organization like PRC has to offer, Aguilar proposes that there’s more to healthy public media than simply keeping

WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #60 | 19

local ownership, especially when many buyer stations will be broadcasting syndicated NPR programming produced out-of-state and without much direct community input. “Public Radio Capital has an ethical obligation to public radio listeners and community radio listeners to understand the importance of localism,” he says. “The FCC has pushed this idea of localism for well over a decade. Public Radio Capital needs to consider that and address that in a way that understands the character of the community and of the station that’s going away.”

The transaction at Rice seems to be a significant milestone in the trend away from student-run radio. On December 10, 2008, the last day of its fall semester, Lubbock’s Texas Tech University abruptly deactivated its own 47-year-old, 35,000-watt radio station, KTXT, citing budget shortfalls. However, in this case, the school retained the transmitter and license, transferring them to its public radio sister-station KOHM, which now broadcasts automated programming through the KTXT frequency. Students are still struggling to regain control of their signal.

“It happened here, and now it’s happening to Rice,” says Jason Rhode, a Texas Tech graduate student who helped to mount a “Save KTXT” movement. “People who get into higher education and then shut down parts of schools while raising tuition aren’t interested in learning. They should have gone into banking. Fakedemics and badministrators. Large-scale, this is public radio being handed over to commercial, private power, as universities like Texas Tech and Rice raise tuition and their endowments while slashing actual learning facilities. They must be licking their lips across the country.”

Rhode scoffs at the notion that terrestrial radio is a thing of the past, as administrators from Rice, Texas Tech, and elsewhere have suggested. He points to the government’s own report, available online from the Bureau of Labor, which states in part that “keen competition is expected for many jobs [in broadcasting]” and that job prospects will be best for those with hands-on experience, including college radio. “In this highly competitive industry,” the Bureau’s website states, “broadcasters are less willing to provide onthe-job training, and instead seek candidates who can perform the job immediately.”

He cites a 2008 American Media Services Index study showing strong support for the medium in general. According to the report, 61% of Americans listen to the radio every day, and 73% usually turn it on in the car.

“Additionally,” says Rhode, “when asked how they prefer to listen to the radio, Americans by far chose regular radio: 77 percent, compared with 15 percent for satellite radio, 2 percent for Internet radio and 1 percent for HD radio.”

“Worst of all,” he continues, “universities who shut down radio stations deny a voice to all who come after at Rice and Texas Tech; they deny students entry into a wonderful, interesting, dynamic field. How many students will they cheat of this possibility? Those who believe in higher education as a place of teaching—as opposed to a sinecure for disgraced politicians who run schools like a bordello madam’s bookkeeper—must fight against the silencing of student voices. What is happening in Texas will happen everywhere.”

And it is happening elsewhere. On Sep-

tember 16th, Vanderbilt Student Communications at Vanderbilt University in Nashville announced that they would be considering a “migration” of their historic radio station WRVU “to exclusively online programming and the sale of its broadcast license” unless the station could become financially selfsufficient. According to a report published on WRVU’s website, VSC chair and English professor Mark Wolleager, when taken to task over the decision, shrugged and responded, “Hey, [better this than] doing the Rice thing where you just sell the damn station. Do it over the summer and hope people don’t get angry.” Clearly, this is hardly a local phenomenon. Student- and community-run radio is in danger everywhere.

The proposed transaction appeared on the agenda of the August U of H Board of Regents meeting, expressed in rather vague terms. The board would vote “to delegate authority to the Chancellor to negotiate and execute an asset agreement, up to $10 million, related to the purchase of a radio station for use by KUHF.” But U of H’s Associate Vice President for University Relations Karen Clarke told the Texaswatchdog.org website that at an August 11th meeting of the finance and administration committee, a PowerPoint presentation specifically named KTRU as the holder of the frequency being considered, adding that Rice was “concerned about why it would go public and even said, ‘Why do we have to do this in public?’ We said, ‘This is how we do business. We have no intention of concealing this or dissuading anyone from speaking out about the deal.’” (Clarke did not respond to my request for further comment, nor was anyone from Rice’s administration willing to speak with me for the purpose of this article).

The board, a cross-section of Houston’s powerful elite appointed by conservative Governor Rick Perry, approved the purchase by a 4–3 vote. Voting in favor were regents Tilman Fertitta (CEO of the Landry’s restaurant chain), Nelda Luce Blair (chairman of the board of Houston’s affluent The Woodlands suburb), Carroll Robertson Ray (an attorney and pet resort owner), and chairman Welcome Wilson (a real-estate tycoon and former LBJ-appointed ambassador to Nicaragua).

Voting against the sale were attorney Nandita Venkateswaran Berry, labor lawyer Jacob Monty, and journalist and consul to Iceland Mica Mosbacher.

“I thought about this long and hard,” Berry announced at the meeting, according to an article in the Houston Press. “I stand opposed to the purchase of this radio station.

We currently have a standalone radio station that bears the University’s name and uses the University’s resources, over which we have very little oversight and which has not had as its top priority the promotion of the University of Houston, its students or faculty. I’m told that the new station will be different, but I have trouble believing it.”

Chairman Wilson declined a formal interview, but in a brief e-mail in late August told me that “we are simply arm’s length buyers who are satisfied with the purchase of the frequency and other assets.” As far as the Save KTRU movement is concerned, he wrote, “that is a matter for the Rice leaders, faculty and students to weigh in on.”

“I just sort of got thrown into this,” says Joey

20 | SIGNAL to NOISE #60 WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM

Yang, a junior studying mechanical engineering when he’s not inadvertently helping to lead the resistance as KTRU’s program manager, looking a bit tired and overwhelmed as we sit in a room adjacent to the station’s control room. Hailing from Ohio, Yang first came to the station on an early campus visit after he’d revealed to his host (who happened to be a KTRU DJ), that he’d written one of his entrance essays on the homogenization of mainstream music. He was already DJing by the beginning of his first semester. He worked in the music acquisitions department, held a seat on the board, and “before long they slotted me into program director, which is second on the totem pole to the station manager.” At first, Yang wasn’t sure this was a position he wanted. “Yeah, I had all this other stuff on my plate, and while I’m trying to sort this all out, sure enough, we get this call, that the station’s for sale. Or that it’s been sold, really.”

It was the night before the Board of Regents’ meeting, and Yang and DJ Director Patricia Bacalao were the only members of KTRU’s student hierarchy already on campus in Houston, having returned early to help new students during orientation week. “Yeah, [we had] one DJ director, one program manager, we had Austin [Williams], who organizes small concerts, and Lily, our ‘sultan of stick’ whose job it is to send out bumper stickers. And that was it.”

Yang’s computer began filling up with messages from people who’d read the story about the sale posted to the Houston Press webpage, and a conference call with Will Robedee, the station’s general manager, was hastily arranged to share what little was known about the sale. The next morning, Yang began heading to the U of H board meeting, then decided instead to return to the station to begin to assemble a “command center” in the newsroom. He put out a call to the station’s listserv for help, and with the aid of a few local station alumni started to assemble a press release, organize an emergency DJ meeting, and revive the savektru.org website, which someone had wisely kept since the station’s last brush with extinction, a late-2000 skirmish with university officials over sports coverage which shut down the station for eight days until a groundswell of public support forced the administration to compromise with station management.

A few days after the board meeting, President Leebron, Vice President Kevin Kirby, Vice President of Public Affairs Linda Thrane and Dean of Undergraduates John Hutchinson agreed to meet face-to-face with Yang, Kelsey Yule and Kevin Bush. The staff was warned that their signal would be broadcast for only another week at the most. “They basically said, ‘times are rough, you don’t measure in Arbitron, so… we sold you,” Yang sighs.

“And they went through some kind of verbal gymnastics to justify what they did, and the impression I got was, ‘This is the university’s, William Marsh Rice University owns it, tough luck.’”

“It’s a betrayal of the highest order,” says Yang, placing the station among a series of popular traditions, all founded and cultivated by students, including ‘O’-week (upperclassadministered orientation for freshmen) and the annual ‘beer bike’ race (there is beer, bikes, and college students… you can probably figure out the rest) that make Rice unique.

“The personality of Rice is the personality of

its students. So for the administration to step in and say, ‘hey, we think students need this and not this, seeya, bye.’… Some people didn’t have a rosy view of the administration.

Me, I didn’t mind them. But this has opened my eyes quite a bit.”

With his bags not yet unpacked, he’s balancing a full courseload while also carrying on his shoulders the hopes and expectations of the station’s listeners, staff and alumni. “It’s not exactly the position I want to be in,” he says as he fiddles with the microphone stand he’s picked up from the station’s floor, “or at least I would have liked to have spent more than two weeks preparing for it. But this has just blindsided all of us.”

Yang fully understands who’s David and who’s Goliath in this fight. It takes a lot to get in the way of ten million dollars, and what else can a handful of students and supporters do other than stage rallies, write editorials, organize meetings, hang signs and collect petition signatures? Still, to a certain extent, the protest movement seems to be making an impact. Yang says he’s heard of calls to the development office revoking donations, and the station remains on the air for the time being. “Some of our sources have said that U of H is saying, ‘whoa, whoa, whoa, you said there wasn’t going to be a backlash.’ And it calls into question exactly how badly [Rice] needs this ten million dollars. Are they willing to wade through this PR minefield to get there?”

Ultimately Yang’s frustration and disappointment seem inextricably linked to the pride he feels for his school. “President Leebron has expressed that he really values students who are artistic, quirky, and not apathetic,” says Yang, “and I think he’s in danger of losing those students. They could go to a liberal arts school like Vassar or Skidmore, but they’ve chosen to come here. This station has been a deciding factor for me and a lot of us to come to Rice.”

“You know,” he says, “this servery they’re building with the KTRU money is for my [residential dorm], it’s where I’ll be eating. That’s pretty thick irony, huh?”

“Your frequency is gone.”

It’s not what anyone wanted to hear, but this is how Tag Borland began his remarks during an emergency campus meeting on August 19th. As an early KTRU manager, a successful Rice alumnus who (as founder and CEO of Logitek Electronic Systems, Inc.) donated much of the equipment in the station’s control room, and the parent of a current Rice student, he speaks on the matter from a unique position.

“I sort of opened with that,” says Borland, “and I have to say I was not happy that day.

I told them I was very upset that they had pissed away the opportunity. I’d found out a few days before that, that this was going to happen. In fact, one of my employees was setting up [KUHF’s] second studio, and they’d had him under a confidentiality agreement that excluded me. The only thing in town that anybody wouldn’t want me to know about was the sale of KTRU! But I certainly knew that U of H had been looking for another frequency for more than a decade. [And Rice has also] been thinking about this for a long, long time, and they actually tried to sell it to U of H a year ago, and U of H was uncooperative until the price was lowered. Rice wanted

out of this enough that they’re willing to give up almost $10 million to do it. My understanding is that the broker they hired to give an opinion on the value on the station at the time [gave a figure of] 20 million dollars. And Rice was unable to get that from anybody.”

It’s a few days after the meeting and I’ve gone out to visit Borland at Logitek’s Houston headquarters, bringing with me Jim Ellinger, a community radio expert from Austin who’s been attracted by the situation. “They don’t talk to me much after my speech,” Borland says of the station’s present-day team, laughing uncomfortably, though he readily assures us that “there are more backroom deals going on. Death is a little premature at the moment.”

Rice’s original FM signal had just gone on the air when Borland arrived on campus in the fall of 1971. What had begun in February of 1967 as a small engineering project that sent a two-watt signal through the buzzer system in the Hanzen dorm had evolved into KOWL, a viable AM station which broadcast live coverage of the launch of the Apollo 12 space mission as well as the bitterly opposed appointment (and resignation, five days later) of Rice president William Masterson.

A Board of Governors meeting on June 12th, 1970 authorized the station to apply for a FCC license, cautiously building in conditions that “the installation be at no expense to the university; the broadcasting to clearly state that the station is operated by the students of Rice University and reflects their opinions; that it does not represent the official position of the University; that the policies governing the operation of the station shall be determined by the President of the University and continuous supervision of the broadcasting shall be maintained by the President.”

Students selected a new set of call letters, KTRU (acronyming The Rice University), and proposed in their application “to provide the university and the surrounding community with quality educational and communicational service which does not attempt to duplicate commercial radio service.” The application was granted in February of 1971 and on May 21st, KTRU began broadcasting its FM signal from the roof of Rice’s Sid Richardson dormitory. “[The university] bought the antenna, I think, and we got given a 10-watt exciter out of someone else’s transmitter,” says Borland.

“It was a complete piece of junk.”

Whatever assistance the school may have lent in terms of purchasing equipment, the station was a student-run project, from top to bottom. By 1972, a stereo generator had also been donated, and the growing collection of equipment required “three or four hours of maintenance each week, just to keep them living.” And the range of the station’s broadcasts at this point? “Oh, ten watts, at about 15 stories tall… maybe ten miles if you were lucky. It didn’t come close to filling the inner loop.”

Of KTRU’s programming at the time, he says, “these days you’d call it progressive rock. All we had [in Houston then] were country and top 40 stations. Of the bands like Yes and the Who, there were very few of them on the radio, and they usually had one or two of the real top hits, but nothing else. So we’d play all the other stuff that you didn’t hear, and a lot of smaller bands in the same genre.” In 1973 the station began airing WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #60 | 21

a university-sponsored guest lecture series.

The presentations “weren’t always interesting, or useful,” says Borland, but he recalls a particularly memorable broadcast of a lecture by the beloved French mime Marcel Marceau, filled with long patches of seemingly dead air.

“He’d demonstrate something and then talk for two or three minutes,” Borland laughs. “It made no sense at all, because you couldn’t see what he was doing.”

There were student-produced news programs, weekly classical and jazz blocks, and even at this early point, community DJs, though not many. “Not more than five or ten percent,” Borland estimates. “Even older students tended not to come and play. I left it to the newer students, because it was their toy.”

Borland graduated in 1975 and in 1979 cofounded Logitek, which designs and manufactures digital audio products for the broadcast and professional audio industries, including the Pilot Control Surface, a user-friendly console which was test-driven in KTRU’s broadcast booth before its recent release. “I’m still in the industry,” laughs Borland. “I make radio station equipment. Without that KTRU experience, I’d be doing something very different.

I’d started out programming large computers with accounting programs, which was not the most interesting thing in the world, so it gave me an alternative that was a lot more fun.”

“We had to work a little harder,” contends Borland. “I’m not sure Rice did the students any favors by getting a paid manager.” He concedes that engineer Bob Cham is essential “because kids that age don’t know about these huge pieces of equipment,” but says for himself and his crew, “It was a little more intense on the management side. Plus we were always trying to expand and get the university to buy us stuff.”

During the station’s building phase in the ’70s and ’80s, explains Borland, “it was very much on everybody’s mind how to stake out the maximum power for that license as you could to get the most performance, so in each management group from year to year it was ingrained: you have to grow, and you have to work with the university to get it done.” In fact, through student activism, power increased steadily, first to 250 watts in April 1974, then to 650 watts in October 1980, at which point KTRU could be heard just about anywhere in Houston’s “inner loop,” which is to say the downtown area enclosed by the 610 beltway.

“Then out of heaven falls this big thing north of town,” says Borland, referring to the donation of the 50,000-watt transmitter, “and they’ve never had to worry again. That transmitter’s hemmed in, it’s not getting any bigger, and if something breaks, somebody fixes it for them. So the whole setup is arranged, unlikely at all intentionally, to make KTRU into a club rather than a radio station.” Ah, but a club with a difference. “There’s no other club on campus that has ten million dollars worth of assets. That’s my answer to people who say, ‘if they can do this to the radio station, they could do this to any club.’ No other club has anything worth taking!”

But with the school’s endowment valued at $3.6 billion dollars in a 2009 report by Business Week magazine (with Princeton, Harvard, Yale, and Stanford, it’s one of the five largest for universities worldwide), could this really have been only about the money? Borland laughs nervously. “Hmmm, my father-in-law

had a favorite phrase. ‘It’s always about the money, and it’s never about the money.’ If the money was the only criterion, they could have found it in other places. And they are, they’re cutting back, trying to save money, so even things on the order of a few million dollars are getting cut. They’re getting their benefit from saving a dime in a thousand places.”

And what about the four million dollar servery? “Last night I Twittered that I certainly hope it’s in one of the poor neighborhoods in Houston, which has a nationally prominent hunger issue,” quips Jim Ellinger.

“Look,” says Borland, “The parents pay for food for their kids, they should get what they pay for. The other day they had trout almondine with fresh broccoli. We got prison food when I went there! To get the class of students they want, they have to make life… comfortable.”

“Rice is a very good university that does unique things,” he continues. “If you want to know how to fight TB by making a $100 microscope instead of a $10,000 microscope, you go to Rice, they’ll make it for you.” But, he contends, without a communications program or a journalism school, what value would a radio station hold for the administration? “So that would leave it up to these Rice kids,” he continues. “If they made a mistake, it was not realizing they had a big, real-world toy, and not realizing that they weren’t in Kansas anymore. At that point they really had to make the decision to make themselves worthwhile.”

I arrive around 6:30 on August 28th for my regular Sunday evening shift. Generally, the station is empty when I’m there, but tonight about a dozen people have squeezed inside for one of the now almost-daily meetings meant to update board members on the status of operations and to brainstorm. As I sit behind the console sorting out the start of my playlist, Joey Yang tosses me a t-shirt from a large cardboard box he’s just carried in, leftovers from the previous night’s benefit concert. Charlie Hardwick’s striking design, which has also been spotted around town in poster form, shows a stylized representation of the disputed transmitter radiating intensity in shades of day-glo orange and yellow above the simple slogan “SAVE KTRU.” Yang communicates a few basics. The deal has been approved but still hasn’t been signed. The benefit show raised about $1,200 dollars, bringing the Save KTRU movement’s cash on hand to close to $4,000 (kept separate from the University-controlled KTRU account, which also has money in reserve).

And he announces that a campus-wide open meeting, presumably with university representatives present, would take place the following Wednesday evening. Yang dodges a question raised by one DJ about a rumor he’d heard that KTRU might continue to be broadcast through the station’s ‘translator,’ a 10-watt relay tower mounted on the football stadium rerouting the signal from the main transmitter in Humble around Houston’s skyscraper district and into the Rice campus area on the south side of the city on the adjacent frequency 91.5.

“So we would be, what? Like a pirate radio station?” said one DJ. “Yeah, K-T-arrrrrrrrr-U!” replied two others in unison.

The meeting soon breaks up. As I noticed

22 | SIGNAL to NOISE #60 WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM

Yang moving from one cluster of DJs to another asking for “ideas? ideas?” I thought of Jack Lemmon’s character in Glengarry Glen Ross desperately moving through the realty office seeking out the “leads” that would help him save his sick little daughter.

Another DJ read aloud from a satirical piece on the back page of the Thresher, pertaining to a comment made by Rice’s VP for public affairs Linda Thrane. At 11:09 AM on August 17th, just hours after Leebron had officially announced the impending sale, Thrane Twittered that “Change is hard, sometimes harder for younger fol[k]s than for us older, wiser heads. Routines are comforting, Jumping over the fence is more fun.”

“Sorry,” read the DJ from the anonymouslyauthored sidebar, “does KTRU playing classical music all the time offer some sort of exciting opportunity we were not aware of?

Or is this some sort of pro-illegal immigration stance?” Above the text is an unflattering image of Thrane mugging for someone’s camera, presumably scavenged from the Internet. (Elswehere, burndownblog.wordpress. com has posted an image of a smiling Thrane behind a KUHF mic that had been taken during their fundraising drive).

I’d noticed that while Yang had done almost all of the talking, station manager Kelsey Yule spent most of the meeting quietly slumped in the doorway to the control room. At 1:13 AM on Tuesday the 30th, Yule sent an e-mail to the KTRU community listserv, announcing, “This letter announces my resignation as KTRU Station Manager. I know that the timing of this letter may serve as an unexpected blow to morale, but I want to assure you that my decision is a personal one that should not reflect on the fight to save the station. In fact, I believe that the struggle should only increase in fervor as we move forward.”

Weeks later, Yule expresses her frustration as we meet at the station. An environmental science major who “fell in love with college radio” listening to WRVU back home in Nashville, Yule says, “for me, in order to protest, I had to be angry at my university, and to be angry at my university all the time is not, like, a sustainable way for me to finish my schooling.” Not that she isn’t, in fact, quite angry at her university. “Pretty much the same time I stepped down, I decided I was going to graduate from Rice a year early, and how I feel about Rice in general is hugely impacted by what’s happened. To me, it’s at least not what they advertised. It’s not what they sold me on.”

Effective immediately, with Yule’s appointment and the board’s ratification, Joey Yang was now KTRU’s station manager. In his acceptance e-mail, he wrote, “this fight is far from over. We have already come a long way in the last two weeks, and this ‘done deal’ WILL be fought. And let me further assure you that I, and the rest of the KTRU family… will be heard no matter what, and if we go down, we go down swinging.”

Yang would publicly debut his new role during Wednesday night’s forum in a large auditorium-style classroom at campus center in Rice’s Sewell Hall. I encountered Jim Ellinger on the way to the building, where he gave me a five-pound sack of rice to bring. He carried a stop sign which, as we settled into our seats in the middle of the room, he modified with a paint marker to read “STOP… the sale of KTRU.” “You never really know if you’re going

to need props with something like this,” he said.

Yang and Kevin Bush sat at a long folding table beside two empty seats, each with a hand-lettered cardboard placard reading “administration official.” Yang explained that President Leebron, Vice President Kirby, and VP for public affairs Thrane all had been invited to attend the event. All declined. “At which point, we extended an open invitation to anyone from the administration to serve as a representative, and, ah…” Rueful laughs from the audience as he gestures towards the devastatingly empty seats. “We’ve tried to tailor this around the administration’s schedule. However, it appears that they just seem uninterested. So I’d like to apologize to everyone who came out expecting that they’d be able to talk to the administration.”

“They’re scared!” yells a voice from the back of the room. Applause.

Yang and Bush both remark briefly and generally on the situation before several audience members stand and speak. One woman plans to complain to the FCC (which though open to public comment, doesn’t involve itself in format issues). A Rice student who’s clearly sympathetic consoles nobody by postulating that radio is a “dying format.” Another speaker wonders about the formation of a trust to safeguard KTRU in the event that it manages to stay on the air, which seems like it would have been a good idea for someone to have done five years ago.

Walking out of Sewell Hall with his rice and his stop sign, Jim Ellinger seemed deflated, somehow having expected more direction, more spunk, more something from the students. “I just got back from Haiti,” he says, sighing and looking out across the leafy, immaculately manicured campus with its palatial brick buildings. “As far as crises go, this is a pretty nice one.”

Speaking to him on the phone before he went back to Austin the following afternoon, I mention the live roundtable discussion hosted by several past and present KTRU managers that’ll be broadcast that evening. “Yeah, at eight o’clock on a Saturday night,” says Ellinger. “I’m sure all the Rice students will be listening. Tell those guys good luck with that.”

For those of us with a less active social life than the typical 20-year-old Rice student, it was compelling listening, touching on various key issues, from the secrecy that surrounded the sale to the problems inherent in an abruptly un-phased transition from FM to Internet broadcast. Vincent Capurso, a U of H student and current KTRU DJ, talks about how easy it was for him to find a welcoming place on Rice’s airwaves. By contrast, he says, “I called KUHF Friday, and asked as a U of H student how could I be involved, and they said there was no way, that it was not student-run at all.” They referred him to a student booster club being organized by the marketing department, which will represent the station at public functions. “I do that for KTRU all the time,” he says, “but it’s different when you’re really involved.”

Rice alumnus and former station manager Johnny So said he’d always looked at Rice as a school that “doesn’t place monetary interest over everything else” and noted that in his role as 2000-2001 station manager, “we were okay with events that would lose money” simply because they felt they would benefit the community on- or off-campus. In a par-

ticularly free-wheeling moment, he compares the university to someone “who runs around town wearing a t-shirt that says ‘#1 Dad,’ then you find out later that dad’s at the bar with women he doesn’t know, instead of at home reading stories to his children.”

A question from a caller, again about the translator: “Is the 91.5 FM translator part of the deal with U of H, and will Rice let the students use the lower power frequency after 91.7 gets converted to classical music?”

“That’s a difficult question to answer, because the terms of this deal are still confidential,” says Ian Wells, a DJ and co-producer of KTRU’s news program “The Revelry Report,” “so we don’t know exactly if the translator was included in the purchase... From speaking with the only person with insider information of the deal who’s authorized to talk to us, [we think] their method of feeding information to the transmitter is different from ours in a way that might preclude operation of our translator. If I had to give an engineering guess, I’d say that they don’t intend to keep the translator on top of the stadium working.”

And then there’s the issue of holding on to a license with which to broadcast. And even if you could, there’s the very limited range. “As a long-term solution, it doesn’t seem likely.”

Then, a quick conclusion. “We’d like to stress again that this isn’t over,” says Joey Yang. “Nor will it be over for some time…

Just because we may be off the air doesn’t mean it’s over. It’s not over until the fat lady sings. No, it’s not over even after the fat lady sings. There are always things to be done.”

At around 9 AM on the morning of Sunday, September 5th, I began the approximately thirty-minute drive north of Houston to the KTRU transmitter and tower in Humble, Texas, a few exits up Route 59 from the George Bush International Airport. Looking past the sprawl on either side of the road I wondered how many older folks in this area who don’t own computers (or probably many CDs for that matter) were about to lose the jazz or blues programming they look forward to all week. Off the highway and past the tidy Kingwood campus of Lone Star College, a left turn takes me into a little suburban neighborhood, fairly nondescript except for an immense red and white metal structure rising 502 feet into the sky that can occasionally be glimpsed through the trees.

I pull over, park, and get out to take some pictures. A dirt trail leads north from the road, into and through an overgrown shrubby area (which I note to be completely free of “No Trespassing” signs). Past a picnic table overturned in a large puddle, the short, muddy footpath leads to the base of the tower. There isn’t much to see, really. Behind a chain-link fence are two small enclosures placed side by side, one of them behind a second fence with the tower adjacent. Both structures have a small set of steps leading to a door as an access point. The tower is anchored in three places, with seven cables leading to each metal mount sunk into concrete at ground level. The anchors are protected by short chain-link fences that look like ballfield backstops.

I drive back to 59 and south to Houston.

My radio dial hasn’t budged from 91.7 since this all began, and a KTRU alumnus named Mike Scott is spinning records and remarking on the professionalism of the current studio WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #60 | 23

in contrast to the windowless subterranean room he knew. Touchingly, he’s joined by his daughter Caitlin, a current Rice student and an active KTRU DJ. The elder Scott worked at the station from 1981 through ’85 and was one of the first to curate a 4-to-7 AM shift when the station first offered round-the-clock programming.

Eventually he made DJ director and piloted the prized Thursday prime-time slot before moving on to graduate school at Cal Tech.

In Scott’s era, the station broadcast from the basement of the Rice Student Center, beside the popular campus watering hole Willy’s Pub. “Being on air while the pub was open was great as we were allowed take cold beverages [in]to the station,” he tells me via e-mail, pointing out that the station’s fare was typical for the era. “Musically, the darlings of college radio at the time were the art rock artists (Peter Gabriel, Genesis, Roxy Music, Talking Heads, Yes, Psychedelic Furs), the new wave/ post-punk artists from the UK (Elvis Costello, Joe Jackson, Squeeze, English Beat, U2) and the US college town groups like R.E.M., Aztec Camera and the Outnumbered.”

But Scott got more out of his station experience than most. “As the DJ Director, I gave my girlfriend a late afternoon shift,” he recalls. “She hadn’t done any of the graveyard shifts, but did work in the news department for a while. A few years later she became my wife. Our kids had the misfortune of having to listen to our favorite music while they were growing up and thus have quite an unusual taste in music. When Caitlin got into the Rice School of Architecture, we encouraged her to become a DJ. Surprisingly she listened to her parents and did. After that, I always offered to help her out during her shift, but she always declined.”

Perhaps Scott was destined to come back into the fold. “Apparently Patricia [Bacalao, the current DJ director] was having a hard time filling the Sunday 7-10 am shift this semester and Caitlin offered me up as a solution,” says Scott. “I agreed to do the show if Caitlin would train me in the new studio. It was special having Caitlin train me as it was a weird parent-child role reversal.” At first he was a bit alarmed to find a studio full of unfamiliar music. “Where’s the U2? In the old days, it would take me less than 30 seconds to find and cue up the perfect segue… now I recognized none of the bands in the main studio. Fortunately Caitlin picked most of the music and I just concentrated on putting the songs into the computer.” Scott’s gone on to do several more shows on his own, figuring out the playlist requirements and exploring the stacks. “Caitlin now sleeps like a normal college student during my shift but we’ll go out for breakfast afterwards. It’s been fun being able to find music that I haven’t heard in 25 years and spin it again.”

Guitarist Tom Carter, who’s made his name in the world of experimental music as one-half of the formerly Houston-based Charalambides, recalls that when he moved to town in the ’80s, “the underground/punk flag seemed to be firmly in the hands of KPFT,” and that while KTRU had its moments, he concurs that it was “a bit more... how else to say... collegiate.”

He suggests things began to go in a stranger direction in 1989 when he and his partner Christina were among the new wave of “musically motivated” DJs that came in

and began stocking the station with back catalog titles from the used-CD section at the neighborhood’s hip music store, the Sound Exchange. “I remember a lot of late-night shifts, spinning weird album sides, zoned on whatever fave chemical was around that day,” says Carter. “Usually 25-cent beers from [campus drinkery] Valhalla.”

Another of these DJs, Ramon Medina, seized control of the weekly local music show, which in fact was playing largely regional bands. He began building a library of truly local music, but found that few of Houston’s bands had the financial means to record. Consequently, Medina converted a storage room filled with “a lot of old sound equipment in various stages of disrepair” into a studio fit for broadcasting live performances. “That is kind of what KTRU was and is about,” says Medina. “People putting their time, money, and sweat into the station.”

“It’s not that much of a stretch to say that Charalambides wouldn’t even exist without Ramon and the local show,” says Carter, “since he was the first to encourage us to play on the air and go beyond a few random shows at the Pik-n-Pak.” And while he says the band ultimately “wimped out,” the cassette they recorded for airplay in lieu of a live broadcast would become their first album, Our Bed Is Green. “The Mike Gunn also has a huge debt to KTRU, since we recorded a lot of stuff there, as does Dry Nod, Rusted Shut, Rotten Piece, and about a gazillion other bands,” says Carter, ticking off a list of some of the city’s most important (and noisiest) groups of the era.

From the mid-’80s until well into the new century, KTRU’s faculty adviser was electrical and computer engineering professor William L. “Dr. Bill” Wilson. A much-beloved figure on campus and a Weiss College resident associate for almost thirty years, Wilson retired in 2006 and moved to Warren, Vermont, where he died in January of 2009. Given his field of study, he was a perfect fit for a station founded by a handful of engineering students. There had been a jump from 250 to 650 watts in October of 1980, but in a station history published in the Thresher in 2000, Wilson is quoted as saying that “by about ’85 or ’86, we were running out of students who had either the knowledge or the interest to do anything on the transmitter site.”

At a glass-topped conference table in a large meeting room at Stude Investments/Big Covey Exploration, high in downtown Houston’s breathtaking Italian-renaissance–style Esperson Building, Mike Stude is sketching a series of circles loosely representing various frequencies on the low end of Houston’s radio dial. One bubble south of the city represents the reach of the original transmitter at KRTS 92.1, the commercial classical station he owned and operated for some 18 years. A smaller bubble, serviced by KTRU’s erstwhile 650-watt campus transmitter, stands stubbornly, almost irritatingly, between KRTS and downtown. Stude explains that he wanted to boost his station’s power so that its signal would reach the rest of the city. However, according to FCC regulations, he couldn’t legally do it without a commensurate increase in 91.7’s wattage… otherwise KRTS’s signal would have drowned out KTRU’s entirely.

“This is a huge simplification,” recounts Stude, “but the FCC essentially said, ‘OK, you

24 | SIGNAL to NOISE #60 WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM

get Rice to move, and you can make your signal bigger.’ Rice also gets a bigger signal, so everybody benefits. And that’s what motivates the FCC, in theory, is for everyone to benefit.

We negotiated for quite a while, maybe six months, and we reached an agreement. And that’s really it in a nutshell.”

Stude, 71, is the adopted son of Brown & Root founder Herman Brown. In addition to his long and successful career as an engineer and investor, Stude is known as one of Houston’s most prominent civic leaders. He’s the chairman emeritus of the board of trustees of the Houston Symphony Society, and as the Vice President of the philanthropic Brown Foundation, a major donor to Rice University.

Stude launched KRTS in 1987 to fill the void left by the collapse of Houston’s previous commercial classical outlet, KLEF. He took time away from his career as an engineer to research the radio business and found he’d have to swim against forces of deregulation and consolidation that were quickly changing the landscape. “That was a huge loss for the country in my opinion. In the old days, if Pete Gershon liked jazz, and he wanted to play it on the radio, he bought a transmitter and an antenna and played the best jazz. The radio business isn’t like that anymore.” More than once during our meeting he expresses admiration for radio pioneer David Sarnoff: “You know, Sarnoff’s the one who wanted the FCC to allow universities and prep schools to have radio stations.”

He seems a bit reluctant to weigh in on the controversy or what the current station’s absence will mean for the city. “It will be a loss, yes,” he acknowledges, but also points out that “in my years in the business, I knew a lot of people who looked at Rice as irresponsible radio. You know, we all had short names for our station with the FCC, and Rice’s was ‘F-word radio,’ you know, kind of like shooting your finger at the FCC in particular.” In the end, however, he chalks it up to competition over a scarcity of resources. “Those antennas are going to be gobbled up by those institutions that make the most money. It’s kinda that simple. The rich stations are gonna gobble up the ones that aren’t that profitable. It’s all about that bottom line.”

By the terms of the agreement negotiated in 1989 and 1990, Stude would provide Rice University with the new 50,000-watt transmitter and its tower. He would cover the maintenance and operational costs of the transmitter site so long as KRTS was on the air.

And moreover, in the event of KRTS’s eventual sale, a share of the proceeds would fund an endowment to continue to pay for those expenses, a fund which, according to several of those involved, has only recently run out. (In 2004, Stude sold KRTS to Washington DC’s Radio One, Inc. for $72.5 million.) “It was a win-win situation for everyone,” says Stude of the bargain he struck with Rice.

In fact, the deal had almost been the station’s death warrant. I’m talking to Texas State Representative Scott Hochberg, a 1975 Rice graduate and KTRU alumnus who in 1974 wrote the FCC application that increased the station’s power from 10 to 250 watts. In the early ’70s, while pursuing a double major in electrical engineering and political science, he worked alongside Tag Borland to build the station and later on helped to co-found and head Logitek; in 1989 he was enlisted to help negotiate the donation of the new transmitter.

“The original proposal was to take the station off the air in exchange for a certain amount of money,” says Hochberg. “Does that sound familiar?” He recalls a member of the board of governors protesting at the time that “‘we would no sooner sell the chemistry department than the radio station.’

So,” laughs Hochberg, “I think the chemistry department needs to be worried.”

“In the negotiations, they didn’t seem to give any weight to the fact that Mr. Stude was well known to them, and came from a family that were longtime benefactors to the University,” Hochberg tells me. “They approached it as a business transaction and not a charity deal for a friend of the university.” And certainly not as a fancy present for the students who ran the radio station. “Yeah, in fact, I think they shared a concern with the students about what this was going to mean. But at the same time, they didn’t want to appear obstinate without cause.”

To purchase and install the transmitter, Stude called upon one of his best engineers at KRTS. Bill Cordell is a veteran radio man who got his ham license in 1964 at the age of 14. Since then he’s signed on almost 70 radio and TV stations, and constructed transmission towers internationally, some as tall as 2,000 feet. “It’s been like a hobby I get paid for,” he tells me as we meet for coffee. “I’m the luckiest guy you’ll ever sit with.”

When Cordell first arrived on the scene to begin the transition, Hochberg showed him the 650-watt transmitter, which was kept in a poorly ventilated closet in the dorm. He remembers telling the students, “oh my gosh, you’re lucky you haven’t burned this place to the ground!”

Cordell selected a site north of the city and in early 1991 construction on the tower began. “We put it in this sandpit area, [which] scared me to death,” says Cordell, who fortified the site with as much concrete as he’d used for towers four times as tall. Cordell worked side by side on the project with an older Pennsylvania Dutch bridgebuilder named Underwood who suggested they elevate the site an additional four feet. Three years later, the San Jacinto River flooded.

Water rose to the transmitter room’s doorstep, but the station remained on the air. “We couldn’t get to it for three weeks,” remembers Cordell. “I called him up after that flood and told him, ‘they oughta be kissing your butt, you saved that transmitter.’”

The new transmitter was signed on after what Cordell estimates was about four and a half months of construction. “I called the young man on the air and said ‘you’re not on the transmitter downtown [anymore]. I need you to give the call letters so I can sign it off on the log. By the way, what you’re talking about, they’re going to hear from Beaumont to halfway to Victoria, so you need to be careful what you say.’ And that was it, I left the maintenance log out at the transmitter site.

You know, ‘here’s the keys to the car, it’s yours now.’” But he left them with a warning, too: “Guys,” he told them presciently, “it won’t be long before they see what this thing will really do. It will be like my alma mater, University of Houston. It will become more of a conventional radio station as opposed to something for the students to enjoy.”

Cordell was responsible for the site’s maintenance for about ten years, but because the equipment was all brand new and top of

the line, there was very little to be repaired.

He did, however, act as a technical broker on Rice’s behalf to lease tower space: “We had it loaded up, paging was super-hot and they had every pager on it, because that was the only tall tower up there.” Cordell estimates that it might have amounted to about $5,000 per month at one time (despite one mid-’90s article suggesting only $100 annual profit), but with cellphones having replaced pagers, and most cellphone providers now owning their own facilities, it’s no longer a revenue stream.

Of course, in the mid-’90s, with Mike Stude’s endowment and with the station’s annual operating budget of approximately $14,000 already funded by the student ‘blanket tax,’ this was a better-than-break-even prospect for the university.

Could it be said that the arrival of the new transmitter was simultaneously the best thing and the worst thing that could have happened to the station? “Yeah, you could argue that convincingly,” says Rodney Gibbs, now a successful software developer in Austin working on computer games and mobile phone applications. But from 1990 through ’92, Gibbs was still an undergrad at Rice and KTRU’s general manager, his term straddling the transmitter upgrade. At 650 watts, KTRU’s signal may not have reached everywhere inside of the 610 loop (and Cordell supposes that at that wattage they might have eventually fallen prey to encroaching neighboring frequencies), but even so, the station was fulfilling its mission to reach out to the wider Houston community and to give students ‘real world’ experience. The station received a steady flow of material for airplay and attracted musicians and public figures for on-air interviews and performances. “We still had a lot of cache if you were trying to get the hip inner Houston crowd into art and music,” says Gibbs. “But then, the 50,000 watts took that up to a whole different level.”

Gibbs and others at the station sensed trouble immediately. “I wasn’t alone, there was a general resistance to this. When I came in as manager, the deal was already done, although I was involved in the negotiations.

Actually, ‘negotiations’ probably isn’t the right word. We were brought in to be told what was going to happen.” While there wasn’t exactly an uprising, Gibbs says, “it did give some of us a queasy feeling. At 50,000 watts, it’s not a little rinky-dink thing for the kids anymore.” He says they put it to then-president George Rupp that it was “quite a treasure just for college kids to play crazy music” but that they “were assured that that’s what it was, and that this had been decided, and basically not to look a gift horse in the mouth.”

An attorney at Baker & Botts (and yet another KTRU alumnus) named Ken Alexander worked alongside Hochberg to help negotiate the deal with Stude, and he, too, encouraged the KTRU staff to embrace the upgrade. “He was definitely on the side of the administration,” remembers Gibbs. “You know, ‘this is a gift from the gods, now they’re gonna hear you halfway to Austin, let’s all get in line and enjoy this.’ So we just took their word, and hoped that we wouldn’t incur the ire of suburban Houston, but at least it seemed that the university had our back on this.”

With the new equipment came other innovations, including an increase in studio guests (Gibbs relishes the memory of interviewing WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #60 | 25

Opposite, top: KTRU staff in 1992, including Rodney Gibbs, Kyle Bruckmann and Vincent Kargatis.

Bottom: Memories of days gone by (and views of the transmitter) on KTRU's bulletin board.

figures like Spaulding Gray and Phillip Glass on the air: “contrary to the knee-jerk reaction about KTRU, you know, that it’s just a bunch of weird, noisy rock music”) and even more importantly the institution of an annual outdoor music festival that has become one of the campus’s most popular events, bringing the likes of John Fahey, Jello Biafra, Arthur Doyle, Sam Prekop, AMM, and Daniel Johnston.

“I found that my time at KTRU was the most hands-on training I ever had at Rice,” says Gibbs, echoing Tag Borland’s experience. “You dealt with the public, you had to manage people, negotiate contracts, all these things that students are rarely expected to do.” This is coming from someone who also had an internship at KUHF, “getting coffee for people, logging tapes, fact checking.”

But Gibbs feels like he learned far more from KTRU’s “tremendous real-world experience that was a unique aspect of Rice University.”

Looking at what’s happening at his alma mater, Gibbs says, is “severely distressful to me. I’ve done alumni interviews for prospective Rice students since I graduated, and I’ve always enjoyed talking about KTRU, because I think it epitomizes this unique thing about Rice, that they put a lot of trust and responsibility in the hands of the students, something very unusual in higher learning. And this [sale] has soured my view of Rice. Not just that they’ve sold it off, but the way they sold it, without any consultation, without any discussion, and then seeing them try and justify it after the fact with some canards about, ‘oh, you know, Internet radio is the future and the station is underutilized,’ and really that’s hogwash, is what I think.”

Really? A computer savvy fellow like Gibbs takes issue with Rice’s assertion that Internet radio is the wave of the future? “I have particular insight into that,” says Gibbs. “In part because of my KTRU experience, I’m on the board at KUT, which is Austin’s NPR station, the equivalent of KUHF in Houston. And KUT is very successful, it’s got the highest per capita listenership of any NPR station in the country, and they do a lot of forward-thinking things when it comes to technology and how to engage listeners on the Internet, so we’re looking at this. And I called and talked to President Leebron [and told him] that for him to say that FM is dead and that students should just embrace it and be happy about it, that it just doesn’t hold water. Yes, online is growing, but until cars have the Internet in them, it’s not a feasible substitution. It may be in ten years, but certainly not today. And moreover, the way to go about it is not to just yank the FM away. What Rice has done with other major initiatives is to study them, make a plan, determine it statistically and smartly, and I don’t see that they’ve done anything like that with this.”

In some ways, it seems impossible to disentangle the pragmatic from the merely sentimental. Is this radio station a valuable, but ultimately expendable asset that’s mostly wasted by the broadcast of strange music, or is it a club, dorm, fine arts organization, internship and student-run communications department all rolled into one, given to the University and used for the betterment of countless students for many years at little or no cost?

“To a lot of us, KTRU was our college,” asserts Gibbs. “We might have lived in Brown, or Hantzen, but KTRU is where we made our friendships, where we spent the majority of our time, where we did our homework, where we socialized, met boyfriends and girlfriends, this is where we lived our lives… I would not be anywhere near so upset if Rice had been straightforward and open. There would have been opposition, but it would have been constructive and maybe we could have helped Rice solve their problem. But the way they did this, I’d say it’s anathema to what Rice is. I’m really struck by how tone-deaf they’ve been about all of it.”

The new transmitter had brought a little piece of the University into the homes of countless listeners in and around Houston.

Inversely, community DJs continued to bring the city’s culture to campus. Ramon Medina remembers once speaking with a student who described Rice as “very insular… how you could stay on campus and live inside that small tree-lined world without ever feeling the need to step outside, and how KTRU was what made them realize that there was more out there: a city and a community they could also be a part of.” He contends that “the Rice administration could care less about that kind of interaction between Rice and the community, but for the community and the students at KTRU that bridge is an invaluable relationship.”

Along with Medina and Tom Carter, the new wave of DJs moving ahead from the late ’80s into the early ’90s included Vincent Kargatis and Kyle Bruckmann, both Rice students and jazz fans who’d push the Sunday jazz block decidedly towards the avant-garde.

Kargatis, a 1989 Rice graduate who went on to earn his masters there in 1996 in the field of physics and astronomy, writes via e-mail from Atlanta that he was “a minor but regular face at staff meetings” who “worked to make the station’s playlist more eclectic and worked to downplay the rock dominance that naturally came with a steady influx of young DJs… Overall, I saw jazz and improvised music gaining a higher profile within the station’s programming and the staff’s awareness over those years, which was nice.” Kargartis’s countless lucid reviews taped inside the jewel boxes of many of the station’s jazz CDs con-

26 | SIGNAL to NOISE #60 WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM

tinue to inform DJs today, and the tradition of Sunday jazz with a particular predilection for European masters like Peter Brötzmann, Evan Parker and Alex von Schlippenbach continues forcefully.

Kargatis and then-Station Manager Heidi Bullinga hatched an audacious plan to blow the station’s “entire budget for the year” on a two day Avant-Jazz Festival held at the Shepherd School’s Duncan Recital Hall on March 12th and 13th,1993. Kargatis curated with intuition and practicality: “I just went for some of my favorite artists with whom I’d had some personal contact with in the past.”

San Francisco’s ROVA saxophone quartet and the New York-based duo of saxophonist Tim Berne and cellist Hank Roberts would be the headliners, “a musically fortuitous pairing since ROVA had recently commissioned and recorded Berne’s ‘The Visible Man’ (which they performed at the show),” Kargatis points out. He fleshed out the lineup with “two creative bands with whom I had a closer personal relationship, and that knew each other and the headliners—Splatter Trio from San Francisco and Debris from Boston. They’d performed a Braxton album together, the Splatter guys of course knew ROVA, and Myles Boisen often engineered ROVA records. Debris had played with Berne before and counted him as a significant influence. I thought they’d all make a nice, cogent two-day festival, though in retrospect I probably should have tried a more deliberately eclectic programming.”

Still, he says, “the music turned out great.”

Bruckmann, who’s become well-regarded in the global improv community as a composer and instrumentalist, recently recalled his KTRU experience for the program notes to a performance of his work “On Procedural Grounds.”

In 1993, he writes, he was “an undergrad at Rice University, diligently trying to master the oboe, gamely trying to drink the house Kool-Aid regarding the instrument’s natural habitat (namely, the High Art of Western European High Imperialism). But my heart is really across a muddy field from the conservatory, at campus radio station KTRU. As DJ and co-Music Director, I gorge myself, launching from the hardcore and industrial that fueled my adolescence, through the gateway drug of John Zorn, eventually into the realms of avant-garde jazz…”

Of the festival, he vividly writes that “in the very recital hall where I’d dozed through countless classmates’ Brahms, I’m at last punched square in the face with a conclusion so obvious in retrospect it’s almost pathetic: this music is vital, legit, alive; it speaks to me, it matters, and maybe I could—no, have to— actually play it myself. On the oboe, even.”

Ten years later, in 2003, Bruckmann goes to his first gig as a Bay Area resident and sits down next to ROVA’s Jon Raskin. “There’s

WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #60 | 27

still a KTRU bumper sticker on his bari case,” writes Bruckmann. “He kindly introduces himself. No, good sir, we’ve met before, but I can’t imagine you’d have nearly as much reason to remember as do I.” In early 1997, on the cusp of a six-year, $5-million capital campaign, Rice’s Strategic Planning Committee released “Rice: The Next Century,” a report compiled to address the “serious challenges in the years ahead that will require a substantial, sustained commitment to planning for our future.” KTRU is addressed directly in “Initiative 26” which describes “enthusiastic discussions concerning the greatly enlarged broadcast capacity of KTRU. We believe it is appropriate to begin using this valuable resource in a variety of new ways that would supplement its current programming.” A range of opportunities were suggested, including lectures, language courses, sports events, and live classical music broadcasts from Rice’s Shepherd School.

“An expanded KTRU could be a fine training ground for many students with disparate interests while providing a public voice for the University that could attract and enrich a large listening public,” stated the report.

A “president’s committee on KTRU” was convened to look more carefully at the station and how it could better serve the University’s interests. Led by then-dean of the school of Continuing Studies, Mary McIntire, the panel also involved students, alumni, and additional administrators. Surveys were submitted to all Rice community members, as well as some 300 other college radio stations in an attempt to develop a comprehensive plan. The report they submitted to President Malcolm Gillis in April of 1997 contained numerous suggestions, from upgrading station facilities to broadcasting over the Internet (then in its infancy) and featuring “university programming” (as opposed to mere music) for 6 to 12 hours of each day.

“We said, ‘yeah, we’d love to do more of this, it’s just a matter of having the infrastructure in place,” says Heather Nodler, who’d become station manager in 1997 shortly after the report was released. “There was a consensus that Rice has a lot of interesting things going on, and it would be great if we could broadcast some of them.” But the obstacles quickly became apparent. “We would say, ‘okay, we want to do more Shepherd School broadcasts.’ And we’d go and visit with them, and they’d say, ‘yeah, that’s great, but we don’t have the resources to do that. You’re on your own.’”

The committee also recommended the hiring of a professional general manager who would serve as an advisor, facilitator and school liaison, as well as the hiring of a part-time engineer. Nodler served on the committee that launched an intensive search, noting that “we were very insistent that the students be largely involved in the process.”

One of Linda Thrane’s predecessors as VP for public affairs, Janet McNeill, was the search committee chair, and in a 1998 Thresher article, she remarked that “throughout the search process, the committee kept the interests of both students and administration in mind—we didn’t think there had to be a conflict between them.”

Unfortunately, conflict arose regardless, after three finalists were selected. “There was one candidate that was the student favorite,”

says Nodler, “another candidate was the administration’s favorite. We were told they couldn’t work out a salary with the students’ choice, so they hired Will Robedee, the administration’s favorite.”

Robedee had previously been the director of the Media Center at the State University of New Paltz, which housed two student-run but professionally-managed radio stations.

He’s also the past chair of Collegiate Broadcasters, Inc., an advocacy group for non-print student media. In the same 1998 Thresher article, Robedee acknowledged, “this is a student-run organization. They’re fearful of being dictated to,” and Nodler’s predecessor as station manager Heather Colvin is quoted as saying, “Will’s a great guy and I really think he can help us. [KTRU student staff members] still have apprehension and fears, but I think many of them have been [calmed] by meeting Will.”

He began work as KTRU’s first paid employee on July 1, 1998, and he’s held the position ever since.

With his job hanging in the balance of the station’s current sale, Robedee declined to be interviewed for this piece (“I don’t think it would be, ah, helpful,” he told me with a rueful smile at a gloomy station meeting shortly after the sale was announced). He’s being loyal to his employer, and understandably so.

As Joey Yang agrees, “right now he’s the very definition of being between a rock and a hard place.”

“We were concerned that this was going to be a gradual removal of control over KTRU from the students,” remarks Nodler of the ’97 recommendations, “that the administration sees us as an underutilized resource, and this is the beginning of the end. We said that at the time.” Indeed, the open letter from station management published in the Thresher on April 25, 1997 expresses a balance of alarm, hope, and resignation: “While we are aware of the potential dangers involved in hiring a professional General Manager, we believe that the changes occurring at KTRU are for the best. We are confident that these changes will allow us to expand the scope of KTRU’s activities without significantly changing its essential character and while allowing it to remain a radio station run by the students of Rice University.”

“There were assurances of student agency in the situation,” says Nodler, “but the reality is that the university was just doing what it was going to do. The truth is, I can’t imagine what could have been done differently other than a complete coup to remove the station from the control of the university. But we were naïve. There was a sense that we had so much to gain by cooperating with the University.”

At this same time, Rice commissioned an Arbitron ratings study and found that around 23,000 Houstonians tuned in to KTRU for three hours per week, on average (others who’ve glimpsed subsequent ratings reports put their figures at close to 30,000). That’s not a bad number for radio with an unabashed educational purpose, and anyway, given the small sample sizes involved and underrepresentation of young and minority listeners, it’s been notoriously hard to quantify ratings at the left end of the dial.

Regardless, the staff’s attention was focused not on boosting their ratings but on artfully programming the station and presenting live music on campus, including further development of the annual “outdoor show.” Nodler

28 | SIGNAL to NOISE #60 WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM

recalls hosting the likes of Daniel Johnston (“I can still vividly remember his manager telling me not to give him any drugs, no matter how much he asked for them”) and John Fahey (“My all-time favorite KTRU moment was getting to take John Fahey to Denny’s. He ate like three grand slam breakfasts and told us all about how he maximized his revenue from his paintings by pressing the wet originals onto blank pieces of paper, thus producing a higher volume.”)

New generations of student management moved in and out, with a steady incorporation of ‘university-oriented’ programming, including news and sporadic broadcasts of campus lectures and events. But in 2000, the administration threatened to withhold the station’s operating budget unless management agreed to double the amount of airtime given to the broadcast of Rice sporting events.

The station acquiesced to their demand to broadcast at least five games per week, but on the evening of November 28th, two KTRU DJs, Pat Glauthier and Viki Keener, arrived at the station to find the regular “Tuesday Nitro” set unexpectedly pre-empted by a women’s basketball game.

“Obviously, they weren’t happy,” says Johnny So, who was station manager at the time. He points out their technical responsibility was to do nothing more than punch in the sports feed, then “sit there, read a book, fade in and out during halftime. They didn’t do that. Well, actually they did do that, but they also played another channel on top of it which was punk rock music they had specifically chosen to provoke a certain response.” They played, among other things, The Ramones’ “We Want the Airwaves,” Minor Threat’s “I Don’t Want to Hear It” and cuts from Flipper, Bikini Kill, Black Flag, and a German ska band called “No Sports”… all artfully superimposed over the loss of Rice’s Lady Owls to the Arizona Wildcats, yielding a mashup of fury and outrage that mirrored the DJs’ sour mood.

Keener remembers the simulcast as “a spur of the moment decision. We decided it would be a valid form of civil disobedience and protest, and had the possibility of getting more attention than the other channels KTRU had tried at that point.” The phone immediately lit up with calls. “Most were from regular listeners to Tuesday Nitro, who were obviously into it. Some of the calls were from people who were confused as to what was going on, and were interested to learn more about the situation, and some were from people who were annoyed that they couldn’t hear the basketball game clearly. It was a little while before we got a call from an administrator. I believe it was John Hutchinson, who is now the Dean of Undergraduates at Rice. Patrick says he remembers that he definitely implied there would be trouble if we didn’t quit it.

Patrick and I were having a lot of fun with it—I feel very alive when fighting for something I believe in, and it’s hard to be more passionate about something than when you’re 19 and full of punk rock and hormones.”

So found out about the incident early the next morning when he received a call from a very agitated Vice President of Finance Neil Binford, who demanded to know what he as station manager planned to do to discipline the offending DJs. “I wasn’t real pleased,” says So. “We’re in negotiations, trying to be accommodating, trying to be understanding, so this really took the legs out from under us.”

“I probably should have suspended them or fired them,” says So, who’s now an environmental lawyer as well as a stakeholder in Fitzgerald’s, a legendary Houston live music venue that’s recently been relaunched. “But at the time my thought was, well, they’re only doing what they think is right and appropriate, and what they did wasn’t really inconsistent with [the station’s] position.” That night, So wrote to the KTRU listserv that “the job of station manager is not to be [the university’s] yes-man and expunge the political enemies of the administration.”

“I couldn’t simultaneously fire them while still being true to the station’s DJs and mission,” he explains. “And because I didn’t do what the administration wanted, they interpreted that to mean that there was no accountability at the station at all.”

Three days later, at 8 AM, the station’s signal went dead in the middle of a track by Miles Davis. According to a 2001 Houston Press article, “two well-dressed Rice administrators,” VP for Student Affairs Zenaido Camacho and then-assistant VPSA Hutchinson, arrived at the station and escorted “pajama-clad” DJ Kristin Stecher, to the door. “It was so weird,” Stecher told the Press. “They came in and they were all professional, and I was just this kid behind the music.” The station’s feed was toggled over to the satellite-serviced World Radio Network (an option sometimes deployed during technical difficulties). The collection of yellow-and-black KTRU bumper stickers was scraped from the door (in what So calls “an attempt to maliciously eviscerate the organization’s cultural identity”), and its access code changed. An e-mail from the administration announced a “reorganization” to the staff.

That night, more than 300 angry students and community members showed up at a contentious meeting precariously co-led by So and Camacho, demanding their station back. “You better turn the station on or the community’s going to turn it up on y’all,” shouted Rosa Guerrero, who resigned her post as a staff assistant in the Admission Office days later. Camacho read from prepared remarks and said that “in the last few months, it has become quite clear to me that we could not continue on the road we’ve been following. It’s one where collaboration and compromise did not take place.”

“I have to give Dr. Camacho accolades,” says So in retrospect. “He stepped up to the plate and was willing to accept the barbs from students and community members, and now [the current administration is] just so completely dismissive. Maybe they learned from that, don’t put yourself out there to be crucified unless you absolutely have to.”

Perhaps even more effective was a silent protest a few nights later at the board of trustees’ meeting at President Malcolm Gillis’s on-campus residence. “It was cold,” So remembers. “Everyone drove up in their own cars, or in chauffeured cars, and the whole driveway was lined with people with KTRU bumper stickers covering their mouths.” A few trustees glanced briefly at the 80 or so protesters, but most completely ignored the presence of the students whose educations they held in their hands. “It was a powerful message about how seriously we took it, and that we wanted to reach out to these people who are unreachable in their ivory tower.”

“The issue here isn’t about free speech,” another of Thrane’s predocessors, Terry Shepard, opined in a 2000 article published by the Student Press Law Center, perhaps missing the point entirely. Instead, Shepard remarked rather sharply, it was “about using someone else’s radio transmitter.”

As the week wore on, So became overwhelmed and “divorced from the proceedings” and it was left to Student Association President Lindsay Botsford, and KTRU DJ Directors Ben Horne and Sarah Pitre to hammer out a new policy with Dr. Camacho, stipulating that KTRU would continue to be a “studentrun radio station.” As a compromise with the administration, three to four sports events per week, plus most tournament games, would be broadcast for the next two years, but after that the athletic committee would need to re-negotiate these terms.

The station manager would henceforth be elected by the student body, and as the administration’s liaison, the general manager would have an appeal process to the Student Association senate should any disagreements arise. But most strikingly, a “KTRU Friendly Committee” was organized to oversee the station, consisting of three undergraduate students, three faculty members (nominated by the Faculty Committee on Committees— no joke, most all colleges have them), the

station manager, one president-appointed staff member, and one alumnus with KTRU experience. With 6 of 9 votes required to pass a measure, students would retain veto power over anything that might come into the committee.

“I don’t think [a shutdown] can ever happen again, quite honestly,” SA President Botsford told the Thresher at the time. “Certainly the administration can do whatever they want technically, but this document puts the backing behind the students and holds the university accountable to certain standards, which they weren’t before.”

DJs who’d carried out their shifts off-the-air, spinning records from a table in the student center in an attempt to keep their plight visible and their mission alive, returned to the station and the interrupted Miles Davis track resumed around 4 PM on December 8th.

The KTRU friendly committee would meet occasionally for a few years, then unoffically disbanded. “I am not sure about why it did not meet much after 2004,” says Ben Horne, who’d helped push for its existance. “The ending could have something do do with the administration changing around 2004. First a new president, then the firing of the vice president who signed the documentation for the KFC. Those were the two signatories.

While in principle the agreement should still apply, thus there should be student, faculty, staff and alumni involvement in any change in programming, including a proposed sale, it is clear that Leebron does not think this holds legal weight.”

As new generations of station management came in and out in the ensuing years, Nodler and others who survived the shutdown presume that there was something of an “institutional loss of memory” where with the committee dormant and the administration silent, most students assumed any issues over the station’s control and oversight had been settled for good.

On September 23rd, around 2:30 PM, KTRU’s feed momentarily cuts out, replaced for just a few seconds by KUHF’s classical music feed. Their on-air personality Rob Rice identifies himself. And then, abruptly, back to KTRU’s programming.

But as September stretches into October, the deal still has not officially been signed,

WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #60 | 29

with speculation pointing to an easement issue as the holdup. The same texaswatchdog. com article that reported on U of H rep Karen Clarke’s concern about the sale’s secrecy also quoted her as saying, “Rice did not have full land rights or the easement to the actual tower… It is the equivalent of selling a house and the driveway, and the garage is on someone else’s property.”

Bill Cordell remembers the extensive digging of the sandpit on the small, triangular patch of land in Humble and asking the neighbor from which they’d obtained the property if he could position the mounts slightly across the boundary so as to avoid the area being excavated. “Put ’em anywhere you want, boy,” the man replied. Presumably that old fellow was now renegotiating the agreement over what must have suddenly become Humble’s hottest, if smallest, piece of real estate.

Amidst the uncertainty over the station’s fate, the music plays on. Bassist Aaron Gonzalez and guitarist Gregg Prickett drive four hours from Dallas on September 25th to join a pair of talented locals, saxophonist Jason Jackson and a drummer known as Spike the Percussionist, for a 90-minute set of non-idiomatic improvisation broadcast live from the cramped bandroom at the KTRU studios at around 6PM. Countless hip Houstonians hear them play on their way home from work.

“I believe we were sandwiched in between George Crumb and Flossie and the Unicorns,” says Gonzalez. “It doesn’t seem that anybody in Houston, or indeed at the University, really knows what they are losing.

There is a lot of culture at the fingertips of the people in Houston, certainly more than the world at large recognizes, and getting rid of this station further marginalizes that culture out of people’s minds and lives.” It’s typical for local musicians to perform live on any given show and such visiting artists as Mike Watt, Negativland, the Wu Tang Clan, Lydia Lunch, and AMM have dropped by the studio to talk and play (and many have signed and inscribed KTRU bumper stickers that now adorn one of the walls).

Likewise, KTRU produced a second season of live broadcasts from the gorgeous, mahogany-trimmed Stude Concert Hall at Rice’s Shepherd School of Music—ironically, one of the most-frequently cited ways in which the school and the radio station could synergistically work together. After a fruitless attempt in the late ’90s, the subject seemed to have been dropped, according to Shepherd School composition student Joelle Zigman, who in her role as a KTRU DJ decided to take charge of getting her school’s symphony and chamber orchestra concerts on the air.

From a technical standpoint, things at Shepherd’s facility had advanced to where engineer Bob Cham could offer a live feed to be simply faded in and out at KTRU’s control board. But Zigman takes the production aspects seriously, carefully settling the rights with music publishers for each proposed broadcast, and recording interviews with composers and instrumentalists ahead of time, editing them together into a finished presentation to fill the set breaks. At the same time, KTRU allows it to be presented in a decidely un-stuffy context. “Last semester they did a Beethoven symphony,” she says, “and I played ‘Roll Over Beethoven’ by Chuck Berry afterwards, and the only time you'd get to do something as ri30 | SIGNAL to NOISE #60 WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM

diculous and crazy as that is on college radio.”

While Zigman acted as a charismatic master of ceremonies at the rally at Willie’s statue back in August, she’s lately been a less visible member of the Save KTRU movement. She admits to feeling a bit conflicted, since she’s had friendly working relations with members of KUHF’s staff, not to mention she’s been invited to produce Shepherd School programming for the new KUHF channel. “It seems like they do want to do a program where they support local music,” she says, “but they don’t want to do live broadcasts, so I’ll probably continue to do those on on KTRU on the Internet, as a service to Shepherd.”

With a foot in the door, she says she plans to advocate for more contemporary music on KUHF’s new classical station, but admits, “it’ll be a fight, whereas with KTRU you can kind of do what you want.” She points out that the Shepherd School’s involvement there isn’t limited to the live broadcasts. Shepherd students frequently become KTRU DJs and appear on the twice-weekly new music program Scordatura, where ZIgman says, “we’re having a composers forum, and they’re interviewing some Shepherd composers, who are having their pieces performed on the show.”

Though most of her energy is devoted to her own composing (she expresses particular admiration for recent hybrid projects by the likes of Sufjan Stevens and Darcy James Argue), based on her KTRU experience, she feels confident that “I could get into classical music radio seriously now, if I wanted to.”

“As someone who's an advocate of classical music,” she says, “I do think it’s important for a city to have an all-classical station. But I think what’s more important is supporting the local atmosphere, because that’s how you get diversity springing up, that's how you move music forward.”

And then, on October 20th, the announcement comes from U of H’s Richard Bonnin that the asset purchase agreement for “the broadcast tower, FM frequency and license used by Rice station KTRU for $9.5 million” has been signed. The pact would now be filed with the FCC, initiating a 90-day period of public comment. “The FCC may grant its Consent to the Transfer of License as early as January,” suggests the statement. In the meantime, KTRU would be “required” to run on-air announcements about the transaction, as if that hadn’t been happening hourly for the past six weeks.

“We will consult with KTRU’s student managers about the timing for turning the tower over to KUHF, but we expect that to occur by the end of the semester or calendar year,” said Rice President Leebron in a prepared statement. “We are also working with KTRU leadership to explore some alternatives in addition to the online station. We will dedicate some proceeds from the sale to KTRU for improvements now and ongoing support in the future. KTRU has played an important role at Rice, and we expect it will continue to play an important role in campus life in the future.”

Joey Yang isn’t all that impressed. “‘Ongoing support in the future’ is a vague term,” he says, noting that student management has been closed out of discussions about what form such improvements and support might take. In the meantime, the Save KTRU movement has retained the law firm of Paul, Hastings, Janofsky & Walker to represent them in

their fight against FCC approval. Such a challenge could unfold over a period of as long as three years, but apparently that won't stop the turnover in programming at the year's end. “Rice will still be the licensee [pending FCC approval],” says Yang, “so they’d be accountable for what U of H does, but that's all perfectly legal. There’ll be an agreement in place [by then] to transfer control.”

Isn’t asking station management to choose their sign-off date twisting the knife a little?

“It's like asking a death row inmate when he wants the chair,” agrees Yang. “It’s stupid, but at the same time, they're gonna save face and say, ‘hey, we consulted with the students.’”

Yang says he’s ready to serve as station manager until he graduates at the end of next year, and he struggles to stay optimistic. Others have already become disillusioned. One long-time DJ expressed regret that alumni and community members hadn’t done more to proactively insulate the station from this kind of sale, allowing that this kind of foresight would be a lot to expect from a handful of transient students who are simultaneously trying to make the most of an expensive education and embark on their own careers. “If it’s just a toy for rich kids…” he sighs, “Well, rich kids always break their toys.”

“The FCC created the idea of noncommercial radio with the concept that there should be a space on the dial where it’s not all about advertisers and sponsors,” KPFT’s Ernesto Aguilar says. “Too many buyers and sellers, and Public Radio Capital frankly, are treating these things like commercial transactions, as if there’s no responsibility or accountability for the fact that someone’s looking to unload a license, and what impact that will have on the community.”

Of the Save KTRU movement’s chances for legal redress, he says, “litigation is increasingly becoming an issue for listeners who feel like administrators are ignoring them, buyers are ignoring them, sellers are ignoring them.

The people who own these licenses, owning them for educational reasons, they don’t care, and they’re treating them like they are their commercial toys.” But he admits that he can’t think of a single instance where the FCC has rejected an application in a case like this one. “The FCC isn’t looking at that, but they should be. The Corporation of Public Broadcasting should be stepping in on this.

Congress should be stepping in on this.”

Also, like so many things that are supposed to be cheap and easy, the conversion from a terrestrial radio station to an Internet-only station is fraught with complications. First there’s the practical issue of compliance with a complex and evolving set of rules dictating webcasting rates and terms. Dave Black, general manager of Madison, Wisconsin’s WSUM-FM who sits on College Broadcasters, Inc.’s board of directors, says that the Copyright Royalty Board, which by law sets these rates, “has sided strongly with the recording industry not only that they should be compensated, but by basing said compensation on a per listener, per song basis. That kind of recordkeeping alone, if actually enforced, would shut down most operations. Add an unpredictably expensive compensation invoice on top of that and the lack of any kind of revenue model for web streaming and the outlook for college Internet radio is pretty grim.”

Then there’s the more obvious if less tan-

gible point that there’s a difference between being a conspicuous alternative amongst a handful of choices on the radio dial, and being merely one choice lost among hundreds of thousands of Internet radio stations. Loyal listeners who are affluent enough to own a computer may continue to tune in from time to time, but you’ve eliminated almost all of your occasional and accidental listenership, which in a city as large and diverse as Houston, full of people driving back and forth across its paved-over expanse, can be considerable. And how do you maintain a motivated staff in the absence of a powerful terrestrial signal? If there’s a plan in place, nobody’s talking about it.

“Here’s what’s really going to happen if KTRU goes off the air,” writes long-time KTRU DJ Larry Pirkle in a comment posted to the Rice Standard website. “Some of the dj’s will put on a brave [face] and ‘broadcast’ over the Internet for a while. That will eventually (and soon) become more effort than it’s worth and those efforts will then cease. At that point, KTRU will die. Permanently… Make no mistake, KTRU is a RADIO station. The misappropriation of its essential assets is the death penalty.”

“I think there is real potential for some Internet growth,” offers KPFT’s Aguilar cautiously when asked what KTRU faces going forward as an Intrernet-only station, adding that he sees more potential in Podcasting than streaming. “That doesn’t mean there aren’t listeners, people looking for niche things on Internet radio that they wouldn’t find commercially, but it’s going to be a hard road.”

Aguilar points out the potential for more localized Low Power FM, now being mapped out at a glacial pace in Congress, to allow KTRU’s eventual return to terrestrial radio, and should the promise of HD2 radio (which currently requires an expensive, specialized receiver) bear fruit, KPFT has offered much of its as-yet-unutilized HD capability to KTRU DJs. Discussions about this are ongoing, and hope springs eternal.

Listening to the station during its final days, every song began to sound like the music from the end of some farewell party, blaring from a boom box as the lights come up and any remaining drinks are drunk. Or, in the case of Albert Ayler’s “Spirits Rejoice,” more like the Titanic band scrambling to the deck and sinking into the icy deep with their horns and bows blazing. No doubt, the station’s imminent shutdown leaves plenty of room for reflection. Scott Hochberg comments: “My regret is that the university never found a way to work with the students to make this asset valuable to the university as a whole, without undermining what the students had built.”

Ramon Medina is considerably more blunt. “The sad fact is that the majority of the population could give two shits about KTRU and that is why it will die. The students are too stupid and short-sighted to appreciate what they have and that plays right into the Rice stereotype of privileged rich kids. It’s a shame but perhaps that is all the administration wants, both as an image and as a student body.” ✹ Pete Gershon is the publisher of Signal to Noise. He wrote about Giuseppe Logan in STN#53

WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #60 | 31

32 | SIGNAL to NOISE #60 WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM

OUT OF NOISE

From electro-pop to glitch electronica, field recordings, film scores and beyond, composer and keyboardist Ryuichi Sakamoto has challenged expectations and infiltrated mainstream culture.

Story by Christian Carey Photos by Michael Galinsky

At 58 years of age, Japanese composer and pianist Ryuichi Sakamoto has long since achieved mainstream acclaim, but he shows no signs of sticking to the tried and true. Instead, his musical endeavors are permeated by a sense of exploration and curiosity. From the influential electropop of Yellow Magic Orchestra to film scores and classical music, whether leading his own projects or working as a collaborator or session musician, Sakamoto has been an eclectic and exceedingly prolific creative force.

Still, he’s willing to take an occasional glance in the rearview mirror. His latest US release, for Decca, is a double CD: Playing the Piano/Out of Noise. Its first disc consists of solo piano renditions of some of Sakamoto’s best-known pieces, particularly dwelling on his film scores for movies such as The Sheltering Sky, The Last Emperor, and Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence.

“Actually, I worked on Playing the Piano a few years ago, so it doesn’t feel very current for me,” says Sakamoto when we meet at Decca’s New York office. “When I was looking for a label to release my latest recording, Out of Noise, in the United States, we decided that it might be best to release it as a double album with Playing the Piano: neither had been released in the US. Of course, when I worked on Playing the Piano, I was happy to revisit my earlier music. But Out of Noise is my current endeavor: it’s the direction I’m currently most interested in pursuing.”

Out of Noise and Sakamoto’s previous WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNALTONOISEMAGA SIGNAL to NOISE #60 | 33

Ryuichi Sakamoto in New York City, October 2010

record, Chasm, contain work that’s explicitly avant-classical, both minimalist and experimental, and that draws upon the talents of a host of collaborators. Korea’s MC Sniper sounds right at home on a track from Chasm that employs hip hop beats—albeit carefully cultivated ones—and Out of Noise features Icelandic multi-instrumentalist Skúli Sverrisson, sho player Tamami Tohno, guitarist Christian Fennesz, and Keigo Oyamada (perhaps better known as Cornelius).

“Keigo has done several performances with Yellow Magic Orchestra in recent years, but not doing electronica: he plays guitar with the group. And he’s able to make these incredible noises on the electric guitar,” says Sakamoto. “On Out of Noise, I use samples of his guitar-playing in a similar fashion to the way that I employ field recordings. I edit carefully and incorporate snippets of them into the pieces.”

While Sakamoto clearly has his eyes steadily on the future, Playing the Piano is a useful way for new listeners to catch up on some highlights from his compendious back catalog. It includes a rarity or two that may have even eluded die-hard fans, like “Thousand Knives” from his 1978 solo debut LP. While listeners may be familiar with these pieces from his lushly orchestrated film scores, at their heart they were conceived at the piano—Sakamoto’s principal instrument.

Whereas some artists might be tempted to update their music by adding more sizzle— and perhaps many overdubs—to the mix, Sakamoto’s approach is fluid yet economical.

“I was in my twenties and thirties when I composed much of the music on Playing the Piano. Now that I’m a bit older, I find that I approach these pieces differently. Back then I had a sense of energy—of fire—that was exciting. Now, I bring years of experience as a composer and performer to bear.

I now find that you can create something special without using so many ideas—that it is important to be selective: to edit. In these newer solo versions of pieces written by the ‘younger me,’ I hope that the spirit of both time periods is captured.”

Born in Tokyo in 1952, Sakamoto started playing the piano at age three, and early on developed omnivorous musical tastes.

He cites Debussy as a particularly formative influence. As he puts it, “Asian music influenced Debussy, and Debussy influenced me. So the music goes around the world and comes full circle.”

One can hear Debussy’s influence in Sakamoto’s music, particularly in its harmonic palette. One can also hear the ghost of another Impressionist lurking in the margins of Sakamoto’s more reflective pieces, whose

slow-motion stride recalls Erik Satie’s Gymnopédies and Gnossiennes.

While his Francophile tendencies are palpable, Sakamoto doesn’t eschew the Teutonic classicists. As with many pianists, during his student days Beethoven loomed large. He’s long been an ardent admirer of J.S. Bach. One of Sakamoto’s latest passions is the symphonies of Gustav Mahler; he’s studying the orchestral scores and comparing various recordings.

“The conductor Pierre Boulez led me to Mahler,” says Sakamoto. “I used to think that Mahler was overwrought, but Boulez’s recordings won me over. His interpretations are excellent. He finds a sense of balance in the Mahler symphonies and at the same time makes them very moving. My favorite is Symphony Ten: just one movement—Adagio— but it contains so much incredible music.”

Though well versed in the standard symphonic repertory, Sakamoto is also interested in contemporary music: in particular, minimalism. “Steve Reich is a big influence on my work,” he says. “I love the early pieces with tape—It’s Gonna Rain and Come Out. Also, his piece for taped voices and string quartet, Different Trains—that’s very moving. I really like the way he used speech to create a musical structure. He creates melodies using the contours of the spoken-word samples: it’s inventive and affecting.”

He studied composition in college, receiving Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from Tokyo’s National University of Fine Arts and Music. Here he was inspired to explore an even wider range of concert music, adding electronics and the avant-garde to his musical palette. Sakamoto has also long been preoccupied with the music and philosophy of John Cage. Cage’s fascination with Zen and the I Ching mirrors a similar willingness on Sakamoto’s part to fuse elements from both Eastern and Western traditions into his compositional process. And Cage’s use of chance elements such as dice or coin tosses has been a strong influence on Sakamoto’s more technologically elaborate forms of indeterminacy—making use of the graphing possibilities of Pro Tools and multiple splicing techniques.

One might not hear Cage’s overt avantgardism in Sakamoto’s mainstream film scores or pop recordings, but a kindred sense of open-minded exploration has flourished in the margins of Sakamoto’s output. He contributed a trippy, bleep-heavy electronica piece entitled “Haiku FM” to the 1993 John Cage tribute album A Chance Operation. Since then, an interest in new approaches to sound has become ever more explicit in Sakamoto’s music. Cage’s penchant for large-scale musical events where multiple genres collide is certainly

34 | SIGNAL to NOISE #60 WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM

evident in Sakamoto’s opera LIFE. The work premiered as a stage production in 1999, but was reincarnated as a museum installation a decade later. There’s very little about LIFE that’s obviously related to traditional conceptions of opera. Instead, it’s much closer to Cage’s idea of an “art circus.” Prima donnas are replaced by video projections of iconic figures such as Robert Oppenheimer, Bernardo Bertolucci, Salman Rushdie, and the Dalai Lama.

“I think of the word opera as it was first intended—as a ‘work.’ Early operas—during the time of Monteverdi in the early baroque era—combined all sorts of artistic genres: dance, scenic design, and stage machinery.

These were balanced with the singing. Even though LIFE has been presented both as an opera and as an installation, it’s still a work in progress: we’re still refining it.”

Another relatively recent passion is early music. Sakamoto says that, if time travel were possible, he’d want to meet the Renaissance lutenist-composer John Dowland (15631626), if only to ask him why he composed such melancholy music. One of his recent collaborations is with the viol consort Fretwork, a group that specializes in Elizabethan music but also cultivates a growing crop of contemporary works.

Says Sakamoto, “I’m fascinated by the sound of the viol: its tonal purity and the lack of vibrato. When I was growing up, classical music training often started with Bach—and little music before Bach! Today, there are so many early music ensembles who are bringing a better standard of performance to Renaissance and early Baroque music.

Hearing strings play without vibrato is so refreshing. And the period performance movement hasn’t stopped with Dowland.

It now extends into the standard repertoire.

There are even performances and recordings of 19th-century symphonies where the string players do not use as much vibrato—even when playing Brahms! It’s a recent development, but it’s becoming quite popular.”

He demonstrates the opening of the Brahms Second Symphony, singing the opening cello melody, sans vibrato, with a lively spring to its step.

“Fretwork plays on the Out of Noise track ‘Still Life.’ But the music sounds very different from what one is used to hearing them perform. The main instruments are the piano and viols, but I also include another: Tamami Tohno’s sho [a Japanese mouth organ]. The idea was to create music with no meter, no tempo—just floating and flowing. I gave Fretwork a very unusual type of score to play.

There were no bar-lines, just a set of simple melodic phrases—perhaps twenty-five of

WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #60 | 35

36 | SIGNAL to NOISE #60 WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM

them. There are six players in Fretwork, and I asked them to each perform these phrases in a different order and at different tempi.

It’s the first time that I tried to use this kind of scoring.”

The resulting music does indeed float, slowly perambulating through an ambient sound world that is one of Out of Noise’s most arresting stretches. And its randomized deployment of predetermined material shares an affinity with Cage. But these slowly moving, delicately articulated pieces also display a kinship with the early music of Morton Feldman, which also frequently made use of graphic scores.

Concert music, both repertory favorites and contemporary pieces, has remained a touchstone throughout Sakamoto’s career.

But alongside his formal training as a pianist and composer, he quickly also became enamored with popular music. Like many teenagers during the British Invasion era, he found rock via the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. While in high school, he performed in jazz bands. And while one can readily see his classical training at work in his compositional approach, it’s usually infused with the sounds of other musical traditions. Indeed, it wasn’t until 1998—twenty years into his recording career—that Sakamoto released what he considered his first ‘classical’ album: Dischord. But even here, next to the conventional piano and orchestra are DJ Spooky playing turntables and David Torn’s electric guitar.

While Sakamoto’s early music was already eclectic, his formal composition degrees suggested someone on track for a career in the concert music world. But after graduate school, he changed trajectory again. After working on solo recordings that resulted in two early albums, he decided to embark on an extended spell of collaboration. Along with bassist Haruomi Hosono and drummer Yukihiro Takahashi, Sakamoto formed a synth pop trio called Yellow Magic Orchestra. It was with YMO that Sakamoto would first receive wide renown.

The band’s early sound was heavily influenced by Krautrock; one can hear the imprint of Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream on their 1978 self-titled debut LP. But the album contained a surprise hit. The song “Computer Game” referenced the thenburgeoning scene of arcade video games with arcade noises and effusive 8-bit bleeps.

Perfectly timed to capture the cultural zeitgeist, it made it to the Top Twenty on the UK pop charts. Elsewhere, the group combined disco beats with Eastern-tinged melodies on “Firecracker” (a cover of the Martin Denny exotica number) and “La Yellow Magic (Tong Poo).”

YMO’s second LP, 1979’s Solid State Survivor, further expanded their reach. They engaged English lyricist Chris Modell to write the words for several sci-fi-themed songs, which they frequently sung with the assistance of a vocoder. The collaboration spawned their biggest international hit: “Behind the Mask,” a song that would later be covered by Greg Philanganes and then Eric Clapton. Perhaps more audaciously, they covered the Beatles’ “Day Tripper” in an idiosyncratically deconstructed new wave fashion.

Though today some of the music sounds a bit mawkish, Yellow Magic Orchestra was

on to something. Setting aside the novelty songs, their music was breaking new ground: a fusion of East and West and amalgam of organic and synthetic instrumentation. At the same time the group perfectly caught the wave of enthusiasm for new technology, from synthesizers and arcade games to science fiction movies and novels. In Japan, the style was called “Technopop,” and it spawned myriad imitators and even influenced couture and hairstyles.

The group would release five more albums, plus several compilations, live recordings, and variants, between 1980 and 1983, their star continuously in the ascendant. In 1984, the group took a long hiatus as the members focused on solo careers and other collaborations. They reunited for the 1993 LP Technodon and have since collaborated on various occasions (both Hosono and Takahashi appear on Chasm, billed as Sketch Show). While their meetings are sporadic, of late they’ve given a few performances each year, often benefit concerts for causes such as climate change.

During their heyday, YMO’s blend of seemingly disparate elements seldom seemed forced and had a lightness of touch that eluded many other technopop collectives. The arrangements certainly sound of their time—the analog synthesizers and 8-bit beats carbon-date the music—but their vitality and ebullience ensure that the music retains its charm.

As his time with YMO wound down, another phase of Sakamoto’s career began with a flourish. He was asked to provide the score for Nagisa Oshima’s 1983 movie Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence. What’s more, Oshima cast him in one of the film’s lead roles, opposite another musician: the singer David Bowie. Sakamoto plays the commandant of a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp, while Bowie is one of its more recalcitrant prisoners. If the film doesn’t rise to the level of Bridge on the River Kwai, and in places tends towards lavish depictions of heavy-handed brutality, it’s certainly daring in its delicate and humane approach to the subject of homosexuality.

Today, Sakamoto is self-effacing about his acting abilities, but the appearance yielded him still more mainstream recognition. And he proved to be a talented film composer.

The score’s title theme was released as a single, with lyrics and vocals by David Sylvian: it remains one of Sakamoto’s best-known songs. He would collaborate again with Sylvian on a number of subsequent occasions, most recently in 2005 on Sakamoto’s Chasm.

Sylvian’s Secrets of the Beehive (1987) is one of their most close-knit collaborations: Sakamoto appears on every track and contributes to several arrangements.

In 1987, Sakamoto was asked to contribute music to the Bernardo Bertolucci film The Last Emperor. He wasn’t the only musician working on the film—another contributor was David Byrne—and, as he mildly puts it, “Bertolucci didn’t use everything I gave him.” Despite this, he collaborated with Bertolucci on other projects, including 1990’s The Sheltering Sky and 1994’s Little Buddha.

He’s also scored films for several other directors, and, in a twist reminiscent of his early days in Yellow Magic Orchestra, created the scores for video games for PlayStation and

Dreamcast. In 1993, he made a brief foray into television, providing music for Oliver Stone’s mini-series Wild Palms.

Sakamoto’s film music is noteworthy for both its stylistic range and its restraint. His scores frequently incorporate elements of Asian music, employing melodic materials such as the pentatonic (five-note) scale and whole-tone passages. But Sakamoto also seamlessly connects these elements with richly hued Western orchestrations and, where appropriate, subtle inflections of jazz and pop.

And, in movies like Wuthering Heights (1992) and The Handmaid’s Tale (1990), he dispenses with Eastern references altogether while still supplying evocative music.

When watching a movie scored by Sakamoto, one is most struck by the music’s spaciousness and economy. He’s often willing to let a simple sequence, led by a motive of quiet eloquence, underscore an entire scene.

One never gets the sense that he is over-scoring, or getting in the way of what’s happening onscreen. On the contrary, in movies like The Sheltering Sky and 2007’s Silk, one often feels that the music becomes a part of the scenery (albeit an essential one), painted on in gentle Impressionist watercolor hues.

If one compares Sakamoto to another of Japan’s prominent classically trained film composers, Toru Takemitsu (1930-96), one can see a number of similarities. Both move adroitly between classical reference points, ethnic musical signatures, and pop styles.

But, perhaps revealing a generational difference, something that distinguishes them is the way in which the public identifies them.

As the composer Ken Ueno put it in conversation: “The biggest difference between them is that Takemitsu developed an identity as a concert composer, while Sakamoto performs his own music and is a pop star!”

Indeed, even at the height of his activities as a film composer, Sakamoto continued along a parallel track as a ‘pop star.’ The list of artists with whom he has collaborated is nearly encyclopedic: he’s worked with everyone from punk icon Iggy Pop to operatic tenor José Carreras; he’s also jammed with funk bassist Bootsy Collins and jazz drummer Tony Williams. Some of these collaborative projects are almost extravagant in their polystylism, such as Sakamoto’s mix of R&B, dancehall techno, and Japanese traditional music samples on the 1986 Jill Jones single “You Do Me.” 1994’s “Love and Hate,” a collaboration with Holly Johnson (of Frankie Goes to Hollywood fame) is an inspired pairing of seeming opposites.

His wide-ranging efforts as a solo artist and pop collaborator might best be described by the title of his 1988 album: Neo Geo. As with his film work, Asian and Western elements fuse together to create a fascinating hybrid genre. But there are a number of other musical styles in the mix too: ethnic music from nations across the globe, borrowings from the American urban music scene, and subtly cultivated echoes of jazz.

Sakamoto’s relationship to jazz is hard to assess. As mentioned earlier, he’s played in jazz bands since his teens, but even in his most overtly “jazzy” projects, there’s never a sense that he is swinging hard. Also, he doesn’t eschew gestures from more popular neo-jazz genres, occasionally giving his playing a taste of “cocktail piano” rather than the voicings of a post-bop purist. Indeed,

WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #60 | 37

Sakamoto the pianist focuses on the ballad end of the spectrum; he’s seldom given to up-tempo numbers or ostentatious filigree.

Rather, his playing has a rhythmic lilt that reveals his debt to bossa nova.

And while it might cause jazz aficionados to scratch their heads, he’s recorded two bossa nova albums with vocalist Paula Morelbaum and cellist Jacques Morelbaum.

For the 2001 CD Casa, the trio travelled to Rio, recording parts of the album in Antonio Carlos Jobim’s home, with Sakamoto playing the bossa king’s piano. A Day in New York (2003) captures a live date on which the trio performs songs by Jobim, Veloso and Gilberto, as well as a few originals. Bossa nova is just one of many genres that Sakamoto has been able to inhabit with surprising success.

In recent years, and at the other end of the musical spectrum, Sakamoto has also become an important figure in the ambient electronica movement, recording two albums with the guitarist Christian Fennesz.

He has also collaborated with some of the pioneers of glitch electronica, a subgenre particularly suited to his explorations of noise, splices, loops, and field recordings.

Most notably, he’s made five recordings with microsonic glitch artist Carsten Nicolai (who records under the name Alva Noto).

On October 18, 2010, I had a chance to hear Sakamoto perform at the Skirball Center for the Performing Arts at New York University. It was the second show in a twomonth-long U.S. concert tour promoting Playing the Piano/Out of Noise. In recent years, many entertainers have become outspoken about the consequences of their jet-setting ways. Big-name pop acts—Bono, Sting, David Byrne—have drawn attention to climate change, the environmental impact of concert tours, and human rights and fair trade issues. But it isn’t only artists at the top of the charts who are trying to change their business practices. Sakamoto has become a forthright advocate for these causes as well. His touring schedule is crafted with climate impact in mind. A carbon offset is made to counteract the carbon dioxide emissions from the U.S. tour.

The offset isn’t the only environmentally conscious gesture on this tour. During the concert, several pieces are accompanied by projections or incorporate spoken-word recordings. Some of the visuals are abstract kinetic art—kind of benevolent largescale screen-savers. But others encourage engagement with social issues important to Sakamoto, ranging from discussions of the melting polar ice caps by Greenland official Karen Filskov to the Dalai Lama’s principles for engaging in reconciliation. Sakamoto’s subtle insertion of topical material in this manner is far more effective than the polemical speeches some artists make between songs, and it blends organically with the music, since he incorporates these ideas into the compositions themselves.

One of the most overt examples of this is the piece “Glacier.” The composition appears on Out of Noise, and it frequently serves as the opener at Sakamoto’s concerts. It incorporates excerpts from field recordings that Sakamoto made at the sites of several rapidly melting glaciers in Greenland. The sounds are haunting: alternately brittle and percussive shards of cracking ice, the sound of flowing

water, and howls from biting winds.

“Using field recordings is another exercise in editing—in being selective,” says Sakamoto. “You have to be very patient.

When I record sounds, I collect a lot of audio: hours and hours of it. Then, once I’m home, I listen to it very carefully. Out of all of those hours of tape, I may decide to use just a little moment from here or there. And sometimes, I may not find an appropriate use for them in my current project. Some sounds I’ve waited to use for years and returned to them at just the right time!”

Once he collects them, Sakamoto works very hard to incorporate found sounds into his music in an organic way. His response to the sounds of Greenland’s glaciers is to play inside the piano, using his fingers to elicit scratches, thumps, and plucked strings.

Amplification and reverb add a cavernous echo to these extended sonorities.

Though “Glacier” is powerful enough on the original recording, the live performance really brings its message home. The concert starts in darkness, with glitch electronica and field recordings emanating from onstage speakers, creating an eerie ambience.

Sakamoto takes the stage, standing beside one of the two grand pianos that adorn it, illumined by icy projections playing from a screen behind him and a small light on the piano. Playing inside the piano in this dimly lit setting, he is visually accompanied by projected titles that translate a calmly spoken but clearly urgent narrative about the impact of climate change on Greenland’s fragile ecosystem and on the fisherman who eke out a precarious living in the region: a vanishing way of life.

The music could scarcely be further from the public’s perception of Sakamoto, which is guided by Neo Geo fusion pop and hummable film score themes. Doubtless some of the sold-out crowd is taken aback, but they are very responsive to “Glacier”: to both its message and its music.

“Going to Greenland was a moving experience,” says Sakamoto. “After visiting, I felt that I had to create something that communicated what I’d seen, heard, and learned on my trip.”

“Glacier,” like other socially engaged pieces on the program, manages to communicate without overreaching or seeming preachy. Just as Sakamoto is known for restraint and balance in his compositions, his approach to activism is similar in approach: gentle yet potent.

Knowing his interest in Cage’s music, and seeing his use of inside-the-piano techniques, I asked Sakamoto if he had ever incorporated prepared piano into his live shows. He replies, “I tried to on one tour, but it was kind of a nightmare touring with a prepared instrument! It’s so much work to get it set up and broken down and to make sure that, despite the preparations, it stays properly tuned and maintained. So, instead I only do inside-thepiano sounds that I can create with my hands and fingers. I’ve found plenty of interesting sounds using just this approach.”

During the concert, Sakamoto presents several other pieces from Out of Noise. If one wonders why the pianist has two grand pianos onstage, the answer is supplied by the evening’s second selection: a new piece called “Hibari.” Sakamoto plays one piano, while the opposing MIDI grand creates

38 | SIGNAL to NOISE #60 WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM

a virtual duet, echoing back some of the music he’s already performed. It’s great fun to watch the keys move seemingly of their own accord, like a player piano. It’s even more fun to listen to the accumulation of repeating layers, over which Sakamoto weaves successively more intricate harmonic clusters and diaphanous lines. The overall effect is simultaneously minimalist and postImpressionist. It’s as if Steve Reich and Oliver Messiaen were given “mash-up” treatment, with a little bit of the score for Silk thrown in for good measure! “In the Red” is more avant-ambient in texture. The second piano remains silent, but Sakamoto is “accompanied” by glitch guitar samples supplied by Cornelius and Christian Fennesz.

While there’s plenty of new material on the NY concert, Sakamoto also gives the audience an ample measure of older songs.

He even reaches back into his Yellow Magic Orchestra catalog, playing an instrumental version of “Behind the Mask.” He leaves the original’s vocoder at home, but the lyrics are displayed on the projection screen. This “music minus one” endeavor leaves more room for Sakamoto to craft an elaborately syncopated accompaniment; and the scrolling lyrics encourage audience members to indulge in a little concert karaoke.

Spontaneous audience participation and multiple encores featuring Sakamoto’s biggest hits close out the show. But as soon as the houselights go up, we hear a recording of more glitch electronica from Out of Noise, bringing the evening full circle. And so it is with Sakamoto, who’s eager to present his latest creative endeavors, even to his oldest fans. Unlike some ‘dinosaurs of rock’ tours, where the audience grumbles when the concerts contain too many “songs from the new album,” few at NYU seem to mind— the queue for autographs is so long that it extends further than the line for the exits.

In checking on his set list the next morning, I learn that Sakamoto changes things up every night while on tour, preferring spontaneity to familiarity. And while his career focus remains firmly on music-making itself, his activities have recently expanded beyond his own material to more curatorial endeavors. In 2006, he started his own record label, commmons (he tells me that “the extra ‘m’ stands for music”). In addition to a corporate ethos that is environmentally friendly, it’s also an opportunity for Sakamoto to release the music of artists who pique his eclectic interests in one fashion or another.

The label’s catalog includes noise-rockers the Boredoms, their all-female offshoot OOIOO, and Why Waste Time, an EP by postrock collective Tortoise.

“As people get older, normally their ears close to new sounds,” says Sakamoto. “My ears get more open as I get older. There are always interesting young talents—artists, bands, DJs—and I hear something surprising, an unexpected sound or noise, every day. Even walking down the street in New York City, you get to hear lots of unexpected sounds. That’s what inspires me to create something new in my own music.” ✹ Christian Carey is a composer, performer, and writer based in New Jersey. He’s Senior Editor of the contemporary classical website Sequenza 21 (www.sequenza21.com/carey) and wrote about Elliott Carter in STN#41.

WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #60 | 39

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

Akbank Jazz Festival Istanbul, Turkey 9.23–10.12.2010

Having the infectious swing of the Count Basie Orchestra and the layered walls of trumpet and electronics of Graham Haynes’ Hardedge on the same program illustrates both the difficulties of negotiating the notion of “jazz” itself, and the creative possibilities implied by its current diversity. Celebrating its 20th anniversary (counting a dormant year in 1999 due to the catastrophic earthquake in Turkey) with a huge 20-day, 30-odd-event program and a handsome coffee-table book, the Akbank Jazz Festival (organized and directed by the Pozitif agency) presented something for everyone and covered a wide range, stylistically and geographically: from the majestic space of the Aya Irini Church within the borders of Topkapi Palace to the tiny crowded Nublu Istanbul club in the alleys of Beyoglu; and beyond Istanbul, carrying live music into university campuses in Izmir, Ankara, Eskisehir and Gaziantep, part of the promoters’ dedicated effort to enlarge the audience for the music. Over the last 20 years Istanbul and Turkey have changed deeply: the town is now a hub of international business, and anyone approaching it with notions of Orientalistic slowness is in for a shock. But violent modernization comes with a heavy price: what twenty years ago were dark streets with a few traditional restaurants are today packed with a boisterous international crowd. The crowds were so dense it became positively impossible on the weekend to access the Babylon club where several concerts took place.

The festival opened with two concerts successfully joining European chamber music with jazz improvisation: John Surman with Chris Laurence and the Trans4mation string quartet, and the Paganini Trio with percussionist Burhan Oçal. Surman’s themes have a unmistakable flavor somewhere between Renaissance music and English folk, but the project’s greatest charm is the tension between the saxophone improvisations—be it the roar of the baritone or the agility of the soprano—and

the fixed structures of the string quartet, with the Laurence’s bass also adding rhythmic tensions and countermelodies; the music came out best when these elements set each other off. The manic virtuosity of Paganini’s compositions suits Oçal well, and his percussion inevitably became the focus of the concert; the performance was most successful when the speed picked up, as if hot on the devilish violinist’s trail.

Both concerts had serious sound balance problems, and I suspect that the music would have been better served by just relying on the church’s natural acoustic.

Electric bassist Alp Ersonmez was featured both as a leader of his own quartet and as a member of Ilhan Ersahin’s Istanbul Sessions; rightly so, because he has a personal approach to composition and a delicate, orchestral way of playing his instrument. Ersahin was born in Sweden to a Turkish family and now resides in New York, where he operates the Nublu club in the East Village. His quartet draws on some of the most in-demand sessionmen of the Istanbul jazz, rock, pop and ethno scenes, and also features Erik Truffaz as a semi-permanent guest. Truffaz’s classic trumpet sound and electronics were admirably propelled on this occasion by the inventive exchanges of Turgut Alp Bekoglu and Izzet Kizil. The Babylon club was mostly filled to standing capacity, and there the acoustic issues were different— namely, the excessive volume that seems a commonplace in Turkey’s music scene.

A few days later, the ICP Orchestra nicely filled the venue without amplification, with some of Han Bennink’s fortissimos reaching quite respectable loudness, enhancing the experience of an ensemble which effortlessly switches from chamber-music precision to explosive rowdiness.

Trombonist Craig Harris, a frequent visitor to Istanbul, was part of pianist Ali Perret’s international band, including Italian bass player Furio DiCastri: the Mingusinfluenced concert was successful at times, but the material was spread too thin and despite the individual musicians’ mastery the solos became tiresome after a while.

Trumpeter Imer Demirer is according to many the hidden treasure of Turkish jazz: a brilliant melodist, he has just released a highly recommended CD on Doublemoon, and he presented the same group at Babylon with great success. Two modern

40 | SIGNAL to NOISE #60 WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM

and comfortable but rather anonymous theatres in the area of Taksim Square saw concerts by international groups like the Sun Ra Arkestra under the direction of Marshall Allen, Miroslav Vitous’s Remembering Weather Report, and Omar Sosa’s Africanos (with Italian Paolo Fresu guesting). Seeing Sun Ra live was a life-changing experience for the three founders of Pozitif/Babylon, and the Arkestra’s parade along the Istiklal avenue was a key event of the festival’s 1990 debut. While not reaching those mythical proportions, this concert was intense, and had the audience dancing in the aisles. On the other hand, this incarnation of Sosa’s group is comparatively unexciting, making unimaginative use of electronics, and Vitous’s band is an enigma to me, since it changes from concert to concert but rarely has much to do with the Weather Report sound; he uses so much reverb on his bass that his notes blur into molasses. Distinguished contributions

by Swiss trumpet master Flavio Ambrosetti, though.

Nils Petter Molvaer is in contrast a master of electronics, increasingly focusing on singing into the bell of the trumpet as a primary sound generator: arcane and fascinating. His trio gave one of the all-around best concerts in the program. In the tiny hall within the AkBank Art Center, another European master, Evan Parker, met the Istanbul improvising group konstruKt. The opening soprano saxophone solo showed Parker distilling his vocabulary, accentuating the sinewy, powerful structure of his music while mantaining his unmistakable sound universe where Coltrane’s solos meet Bach’s suites. KonstruKt is a free-improvising band whose record label has produced excellent CDs with Eugene Chadbourne and Dom Minasi among others; on this occasion they seemed to have some difficulties finding common ground with Parker. Their work in Istanbul’s avant-garde music scene is however to be admired and supported. The tiny new Istanbul branch of Nublu, on the back of Babylon, operated as an after-hours club during the festival, showcasing the raw street sounds of Siyasiyabend or the art-rock of 1,2,3, and it will now become a permanent fixture of a scene that bears the imprint of Pozitif’s work over the last 20 years. Francesco Martinelli

Francesco Martinelli

Top: Nils Petter Molvaer Bottom: Craig Harris, warming up

WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #60 | 41

Ratchet Orchetsra at Guelph’s Norfolk Street United Church

Guelph Jazz Festival

Ratchet: Marek Lazarski / www.cooljazzphotos.com | The Oh Sees: Rocky Mock

Guelph, Ontario 09.08-12.2010

Of all the editions of the Guelph Jazz Festival that I have attended (all but one since 1999) this year’s edition, the 15th, felt the strangest. It got off to a slow start midweek with the proceedings of the festival’s colloquium (theme: “Improvising Bodies”), highlighted by a panel discussion with Roscoe Mitchell, Muhal Richard Abrams, and George Lewis on Friday morning. Thursday’s traditional late-night show was missing from this year’s schedule, but it would have been just the ticket after the evening’s subdued double-bill. The duo set of Ben Grossman’s whimsical, sensitive hurdy-gurdy and Germaine Liu’s delicate percussion shadings was lovely, but a one-off quartet of Bob Ostertag, Sylvie Courvoisier, Taylor Ho Bynum, and Jim Black was uneven. While Courvoisier and Black engaged in some beautiful interplay, Bynum was content to explore a very small range of what he can do on trumpet, alternating bursts of short and medium-length notes, and Ostertag’s work with an iPad was virtually inaudible.

Disappointing, considering the caliber of the musicians.

Apart from a late-night performance by Jane Bunnett, Henry Grimes, and Chad Taylor, which offered moments of inspired interplay but seemed to drag on past its expiration date, Friday was a low point, the

nadir reached with cellist David Darling’s self-indulgent meanderings in the sanctuary of St. George’s Church. By this point in the proceedings, it was beginning to feel like the Guelph Not Jazz Festival. But my cranky mood was swept away by Marilyn Crispell’s 50-minute tour-de-force, a Saturday morning wake-up call for the festival itself. Crispell has reached a point in her career where she has fused the firebrand Cecil Taylor-influenced playing of her early years with the lyricism that she’s discovered in the past decade. Her playing contains worlds of emotional expression, from the depths to the very heights, its bracing vigor the fruit of honesty and hardwon experience. Rolling left-hand chords conveying darker emotions were sustained under fanciful and poignant right-hand runs.

She took the audience through the wringer with her, and when we emerged into the sunlight of a Saturday morning, it was like a rebirth.

There was, as is the norm, a large Quebec presence at this year’s GJF. The Ratchet Orchestra is a 27-piece aggregation led by bassist Nicolas Caloia, which includes improvisers of differing degrees of experience.

The range of sounds is wide; in addition to the normal big band instrumentation, there is electric guitar, violins, even a euphonium and a sousaphone. Caloia’s compositions make full use of the sonic palette, playing with contrasts, in a polyphonic call and response that is loose, swinging, and joyful.

Fanfare Pourpour, another Montreal group, performed later on Saturday afternoon as part of the free outdoor program. Their dance-worthy set was a light-hearted combination of Québécois folk and gypsy swing.

42 | SIGNAL to NOISE #60 WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM

Every year at Guelph, much to the festival’s credit, there is one set that challenges attendees. This year, it was the set by Roscoe Mitchell, Muhal Richard Abrams, and George Lewis, forty minutes of uncompromising austerity, Mitchell sending out long tones that Abrams danced around on the keyboard and Lewis punctuated with short bursts from his trombone. Many in the audience didn’t get it, and they voted with their feet. The hardcore devotees of adventurous music in the audience, though, were in raptures over the performance’s uncompromisingly harsh beauty.

The remainder of the festival was equally exciting. The set by Rob Mazurek and Chad Taylor, the Chicago Underground Duo, was surprisingly restrained at first, but built up tension and excitement as it went along, and DJ extraordinaire Kid Koala kept the (mainly) young audience dancing for the better part of two hours with joyful and masterfully improvised mixes. Marc Ribot’s Sunday morning set with Henry Grimes and Chad Taylor was an outstanding send-off.

The guitarist showed a side of his playing I hadn’t seen before, chording furiously for the most part in a “sheets of sound” manner rather than playing the single-note lines he tends toward with the Zorn projects, while Grimes and Taylor locked into a loose, gritty groove.

In the end, we got what we came for: music that stretched the boundaries of jazz and improvisation. If, perhaps, too much of the music rested outside those boundaries, there was still enough to satisfy the patient, open-eared festival-goer.

Mike Chamberlain

Debo Band and Fendika Chicago, IL 09.25.2010

The Chicago World Music Festival has survived in an age of shrinking subsidies and elusive visas by spreading out to venues all over the city and tapping domestic talent.

Sometimes the results are pretty swell, sometimes quite underwhelming. This evening’s event, at Chicago's intimate North Center venue Martyr's, showed both sides.

Local sextet Magic Carpet opened with a set that induced some less than pleasant feelings of dislocation. Despite the presence of a percussionist who played Moroccan castanets and a set of originals that flirted with African grooves, the time and place which they most evoked was a Midwestern college town bar in the early ’80s. Impassive, apparently bored with themselves, and as unwilling to break a sweat as they were incapable of wringing perspiration from their audience, Magic Carpet played with the lassitude of cover band hacks who only care when they’re going to get to play their next note-perfect, perfectly dull solo.

But the Debo Band were something else entirely. Based in Somerville, MA, the eleven-piece ensemble looks unlikely enough onstage. To the left are an accordionist and a pair of fiddlers who look like refugees from an Irish folk band; to the right, a multi-racial horn section who look like the next Daptone Records signing; and in the middle a couple of drummers, one playing traditional Ethiopian hand percussion and the other a conventional trap kit, and a dapper young fellow who sings in flawless Amharic.

The band’s repertoire is drawn from the early ’70s golden age of Ethiopian pop music, when a relaxing of royalist control allowed the country to ignite in a brief burst of youthoriented cultural ferment. Recent tours by the Either/Orchestra and the Ex have partnered Western music obsessives of a certain age with survivors from that generation, but the Debo Band is a bit different. Tenor and baritone saxophonist Danny Mekonnen, an EthiopianAmerican, founded the Debo Band in 2006 after matriculating at Berklee College of Music.

He had a notion to get closer to a heritage he hadn’t really thought about very much when growing up in Texas, but in 2009 the group made the jump from East coast party band to cultural ambassadors when they played concerts in Ethiopia and Zanzibar. There they established a partnership with Fendika, a singing and dancing group led by Melaku Belay.

If you caught one of Getatchew Mekurya and the Ex’s American shows in 2008, Belay was their spear-wielding dancer.

Flamingoh, the band’s self-released debut CD, suggests that they can generate a head of steam on their own, but tonight they benefited immeasurably from Fendika’s presence.

It wasn’t just that they had several people on stage that grew up with the intricate rhythms that get clapped over most classic Ethiopian tunes, or the benefit of their gloriously flamboyant attire. Fendika brought an enormous fund of energy. Singer Selamnesh Zemene’s ululations and Belay and Zinash Tsegaye’s gyrations worked as a conduit that transferred the enthusiasm of a small but enthusiastic

Ethiopian contingent on the dance floor onto the stage, then focused Debo Band’s grooves on knocking out one celebratory, hyperemotional song after another. By the time they encored with a regal version of “Musicawi Silt,” they had re-animated the bygone age of Swinging Addis Ababa and made it sway in autumnal Chicago. Bill Meyer

Thee Oh Sees Denver, Colorado 09.25.2010

The thing I admire most about Thee Oh Sees’ singer, guitarist and founder John Dwyer is his fluidity as an artist. The guy is liquid. You wouldn’t know it if you haven’t been paying close attention, but his track record is beyond reproach. He participated in Landed, a sort of precursor to chillwave if chillwave were invented by demons and banished from hell for being too evil; Pink & Brown, a post-Arab On Radar band in the days when many didn’t realize we’d need a post-Arab On Radar band; Coachwhips, the ultimate steed-whippin’ rough-riders; and, perhaps most importantly, Dig That Body Up It’s Alive, a balls-out deathmetal one-off that showed D-Wyer is perfectly capable of bringing the WOOD to just about any persuasion/project he touches. (He started Yikes, too, and played in Burmese and The Hospitals). Toss in Thee Oh Sees’ early “OCS” days as a muffled electric-blues-noise solo project—the era I find to be the most satisfying; check out 3 & 4 if you dare, or the Fahey-ish 2 if you really wanna get wet—and you have a decade dedicated to dizzying diversity.

At a bar in Denver called Bender’s, Dwyer,

along with second vocalist Brigid Dawson, drummer Mike Shoun and second guitarist Petey Dammit, reaffirmed his place in the rock canon with a monstrous, dizzying, spitting performance that made the same point a dozenodd times but made it well. The whole thing was a blur. One minute the quartet were jamming on a juiced-up Ramones-circa-“Pinhead” platter, circa “I Can’t Pay You to Disappear” from the excellent Dog Poison record, the next they were... well, bopping around on some other two-/three-chord combo. As much as I’ve always viewed Thee Oh Sees as a psychaddled garage band, when they play live it’s all about punkin’ things up and keeping a fast, steady tempo. Dammit was particularly impressive with his stationary, often frantic head-bobbing and his veiny, tattooed arms, but this was Dwyer’s show to either rampage all over or ruin, and he managed the former while throwing in a bit of the latter. I overheard someone next to me say to a friend, “His [Dwyer’s] hair is half the band,” and that’s a simple-Simon way to look at things but I don’t disagree and even see this as a prescient comment, because with every mop-flop so went Thee Oh Sees, and when Dwyer muddled up a guitar break, as he did a few times, it wasn’t something you could just ignore. Then again, the rest of the crowd seemed to be doing exactly that, hoppin’ and a-floppin’; the show was intense enough to warrant oversight on the technical end. A more plodding jam from this year’s Warm Slime appeared to take a few of the punters aback, and that’s a shame, as to me it was an essential part of the show. The crispy West Coast psych nuggets leavened the set full of chuggers, adding another dimension and conjuring Thee Oh Sees’ noisome, more-trippy beginnings.

Grant Purdum

Thee Oh Sees in Thee Mile High City

WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #60 | 43

Joaquim Mendes

Top: Frode Gjerstad and Sabir Mateen Bottom: Sol 6

44 | SIGNAL to NOISE #60 WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM

Jazz em Agosto

Lisbon, Portugal 08.06-08;13-15.2010 Lisbon has become a center for adventurous jazz and improvised music, as is evidenced by the productivity of two CD labels located there—Clean Feed and Creative Sources. They’re backed up by the quality and frequency with which creative music, both local and international, is presented in the region. The festival Jazz em Agosto, begun in 1984, is a catalyst and an emblem of a listening public that’s engaged with and receptive to challenging music. Sponsored by the Gulbenkian Foundation and held in its beautiful amphitheater and intimate concert spaces, Jazz em Agosto is constructed by artistic director Rui Neves with rare vision. In its two August weekends of concerts, there will inevitably be moments of genuine brilliance, as well as a project or two to challenge a listener’s definitions.

Jazz em Agosto seeks fresh perspectives and presents big projects that rarely travel. In recent years these have included Vancouver’s NOW Orchestra with George Lewis, OrchestROVA, the Globe Unity Orchestra and Exploding Star Orchestra with Bill Dixon. This year played with the theme of European/American dialogues and emphasized particular groupings—the duo, the piano trio, and, true to the festival’s ambitions, the trans-national, multi-cultural, electro-acoustic, improvising big band.

Evan Parker’s Electro-Acoustic Ensemble assembled musicians from various Parker projects into an extraordinary mirror universe with acoustic soloists linked to electronic sound manipulators and independent musicians in a variety of relationships. Having begun as a sextet combining the Parker/Guy/Lytton trio and three sound manipulators, the group has gradually expanded to 18 musicians and a video artist, including electronics coordinator Lawrence Casserley, recent additions Peter Evans and Ned Rothenberg, and several firsttimers: sho player Ko Ishikawa, electronic musician Ikue Mori, and guitarist John Russell. Generally each segment in the six-part work moved from acoustic soloists to an expanded electronic treatment, the electronic components amplified independently and sounding above and behind so that the audience became encapsulated in refractory outdoor sound. Improvised within only the slightest of organizational frameworks, the music is extraordinary for its richness of texture and sense of control.

A week later, Norwegian saxophonist Frode Gjerstad’s Circulasione Totale Orchestra concluded the festival. The large ensemble—13 musicians here—has existed in varying forms since the 1980s.

Recently reconstituted, it spans several generations, countries and improvisational cultures, including free jazz veterans like trumpeter Bobby Bradford, drummer Louis Moholo-Moholo and bassist Nick Stephens; the younger Norwegian improvising all-stars, drummer Paal Nilssen-Love and bassist Ingebrigt Håker Flaten; and a younger generation of improvisers immersed in electronics like Lasse Marhaug

and guitarist Anders Hana. In Gjerstad’s hands, the band achieves coherence and shape with a minimum of organizing, moving organically from the structuring lyricism of Bradford to the energized wails of reed player Sabir Mateen, from the physical power of the three drummers to the blocks of wattage thrown off by the electronics.

At the core of the group is a great small free jazz band—Bradford, Stephens and vibraphonist Kevin Norton stand out—that lends it elasticity and crowns its most radiant moments.

Sol6, co-led by pianist Veryan Weston and bassist Luc Ex, is unusual in the extreme, a clear outgrowth of their collaboration in 4Walls. Driven along by the momentum of Ex and drummer Tony Buck, the group has four musicians doubling as singers, each of them concentrating on a particular composer. Cellist Hannah Marshall sang Charles Ives; Veryan Weston Erik Satie; saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock sang something that sounded like Kurt Weill.

Each was knit readily into the postmodern cabaret that the group combines with its improvisatory intensity. And, oh yes, Mandy Drummond plays viola and turns in straight-up renditions of Burt Bacharach a la The Carpenters and Dionne Warwick.

It’s an implausible delight in the midst of exciting visionary music, with Weston shifting constantly and effortlessly between structural elements and kinetic free improvisation and Laubrock a master of subtle shifts in timbre and placement.

The veteran duo of John Surman and Jack DeJohnette play with relaxed precision, form flowing through as a deep structure. On this night the music ranged from immediate, powerful and engaging to the sometimes woolly and portentous, usually based on the amount of added electronics. They were strongest with traditional approaches, with Surman working in multiphonics and wild register shifts on an R&B riff; the two brilliant on a boppish theme; then masterful on the ballad “What’s New.” Switching on the machinery, though, led to mock-Indian music on an electronic wind instrument and electronic tablas; Surman then played with a triad generator that sounded like a mechanical reduction of Roland Kirk; next, he used so much reverb his primary notes sounded redundant.

In a duo with pianist Guus Janssen, drummer Han Bennink gave a fairly typical performance, great swing-style snare drumming with deliberated theatrical interjections. Sitting at a solitary snare, Bennink beat out patterns with unquestionable energy and precision, suggesting Big Sid Catlett. It works particularly well with pianists of the Monk school, and Janssen is one of them. Soon Bennink would sit or lie on the floor and continue drumming; here he drummed on the underside of the piano, then wandered off-stage, leaving Janssen to solo then eventually interrupting the solo by pushing a ladder through a stage door. As is common among Bennink’s regular partners, Janssen often played as if he were alone.

The festival also presented Hazentijd, a documentary about Bennink’s life and art

by Jellie Dekker. During the screening Bennink stomped his foot vigorously in time

to a sequence with African drummers, said “Sorry” (and sounded sincere) when an on-screen bassist complained of Bennink destroying all his little musical inspirations.

Asked a question in the following Q&A session, he shouted “I have to PEE...very BADLY” and was quickly led away by a guide.

Local music was well represented by two trios. Open Speech are dedicated free improvisers led by flutist Carlos Bechegas with cellist Ulrich Mitzlaff and Miguel Feraso Cabral, who extends the role of percussionist to include a banjo-like string instrument as well as a host of small instruments. It was an engaging group to watch, as Bechegas employed scissors to create rhythm patterns and at one point the three musicians all crumpled aluminum foil on their microphones, but Bechegas’ virtuoso command of extended flute techniques, including unison vocalizing, provided most of the highlights.

Red Trio is a piano trio that plays with the intensity of early Cecil Taylor groups, pianist Rodrigo Pinheiro building walls of tremoloed clusters against the physical force of bassist Hernâni Faustino and the intense drumming of Gabriel Ferrandini, whose dense polyrhythms and barrage of random accents create a feeling of constant motion. The group can also slow down and play with space, and it was an effective introduction to a group with tremendous promise.

Another European piano trio presented marked contrasts, with Pat Thomas alternately creating vast tracts of spacious drone and attacking the piano with a kind of casual aggression. Bassist Clayton Thomas, the group’s most articulate and linear player, has a repertoire of effects that extends to preparing his bass with a license plate, while drummer Raymond Strid is consistently detached and witty. The trio got better and better as the concert went along, concluding with a series of triumphant short pieces.

A great festival will always stretch a listener, maybe further than a listener can go. In my case here it was Steamboat Switzerland, a trio consisting of organist (and sometimes vocalist) Dominik Blum, electric bassist Marino Pliakas and drummer Lucas Niggli, whose ferocious drumming extended to conducting duties. The group is preoccupied with volume and rapid-fire aggression, complex phrases delivered in violent lock-step and abutting washes of free improvisation. How loud was it?

Lisbon’s airport is in the heart of the city and the Gulbenkian amphitheater is very near the flight path. It’s almost inevitable that you hear planes. Not with Steamboat Switzerland. You could see the planes, but you couldn’t hear them.

The festival includes screenings and talks as well, and this year presented Italian scholar Francesco Martinelli in a brilliant demonstration of musical connections that revealed close concordances between African pygmy song and Monk’s “Misterioso,” and found the same Puccini aria in recordings by Sidney Bechet and Jelly Roll Morton. It made jazz history at once larger and more immediate, a rare achievement.

Stuart Broomer

WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #60 | 45

On Land

San Francisco, CA 09.02-05.2010

YOUR AD HERE FOR ONLY:

$50

stn's box ads are an easy, affordable way to connect with our unique readership, especially for small organizations, shops, labels and individuals on a budget. For more information, e-mail us at:

operations@signaltonoisemagazine.org

Despite significant noise and experimental music festivals peppering New York, Massachusetts, Illinois, and Vermont, there haven’t been enough opportunities for West Coast drone and ambient acolytes to converge for a full weekend. Maxwell August Croy and Jefre Cantu-Ledesma, co-founders of the small, stylish label Root Strata, were inspired both by the feverish pacing and aural clatter of Carlos Giffoni’s No Fun Fest (which, after six years, is relocating to Sweden) as well as their own desire to bring friends and like minds together. In 2009, the duo founded On Land, a four-day experimental music festival docked in San Francisco.

On Land’s second installation unfolded over Labor Day weekend, with nearly 30 artists represented, many affiliated with Root Strata (and a great deal reprising their appearances from the previous year).

And with over half of the lineup based in California or Oregon, most of the weekend’s performers didn’t travel far, either.

The San Francisco-Portland axis of connection was one emphasis; Friday’s show— heavily weighted by sets from adored PDX acts White Rainbow, Pete Swanson, Operative, and Golden Retriever—was deemed the unofficial ‘Portland night.’

Café du Nord, a midsized subterranean venue in San Francisc’'s Mission District, has great sound but a terrible, narrow shape. At the festival’s more congested moments, I couldn’t see a thing. On the final night—end-loaded with On Land’s most honored elders Bill Orcutt, Daniel Higgs, and Charalambides—the festival relocated upstairs to the Swedish American Music Hall, an unadorned, mahoganypaneled theater with beamed ceilings and warm, honeyed acoustics.

Though there were many stirring, graceful sets from artists more overtly anchored in drone and ambient traditions—particularly spellbinding were Grasslung, Barn Owl, Grouper, Pete Swanson, and Xela— the most unforgettable musicians of the weekend actively sought to break up the patches of timbral homogeny. Providence, RI-based duo Eli Keszler and Ashley Paul, playing under the name Aster, were an unfamiliar sonic deviation for the crowd, I suspect. Yet I adored the caffeinated vigor of both the ear-splitting resonances that Keszler drew from a series of metal disks and cymbals, as well as Paul’s alto saxophone’s high-register emissions and impressive sustains.

Operative married home-built analog and digital synthesizers with live percussion in a rhythmically complex, propulsive way. The quartet’s variation of techno and house was alternately unhinged and mathematically precise, their brief set the only frenzied dance moment of the weekend. Who didn’t notice Operative’s Scott Goodwin grinning like a maniac throughout? Similarly, the feral, free jazz blasts tumbling out of Los Angeles-based group Metal Rouge energized the festival with

46 | SIGNAL to NOISE #60 WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM

dissonant, Dead C-infused rock’n’roll.

But drone concerts aren’t normally that visually kinetic. Bodies tend to sit or crouch.

Compositions are cast over the audience like a thick cloak. Croy and CantuLedesma remedied this visual tedium by placing a pointed emphasis on the presence of film and video, which seems to be a natural step in the evolution of the contemporary live drone performance. At least a third of the musicians performed in tandem with video artists and filmmakers, with some of the collaborations premeditated and others completely serendipitous.

Portland-based artist Brenna Murphy joined the bill just days before the festival, and her playfully tiled video abstractions hummed right along with Operative’s own whirring gears. Montreal musician Roger Tellier-Craig (playing as Komische revivalist Le Révélateur) and video artist Sabrina Ratté were another lively pairing, and his glowing synthesizer arpeggios clicked effortlessly with her saturated, flickering kaleidoscopes.

Paul Clipson had never met nor even heard the music of Golden Retriever prior to their On Land collaboration. Yet the San Francisco-based artist’s elegiac, crisp, black-and-white live Super 8mm film—presented as ‘loosely-themed visual streams,’ and punctuated with blooms of brilliant color—was a striking match to the duo’s foggy, keening cries. (He appeared twice more that weekend, with works projected alongside both Barn Owl and Grouper).

On Land concluded with its most robust night yet, as Bill Orcutt, grasping his fourstring acoustic guitar, settled into his chair barefoot. The breathless agility and atonal, arrhythmic predilections from his former Harry Pussy days have only grown weirder with time. Orcutt’s brief, fiery instrumental set, minced with erratic vocal yelps and mutterings, were a crystalline potion of hardcore, blues, and a little Derek Bailey.

The frequency of live Charalambides events has diminished in recent times— On Land marked their first live performance in two years—and the acid-psych duo roared back with an unassailable force. Fittingly, their lengthy set of all-new material concluded the festival; I can’t imagine a more elemental force to throw the audience into trembling captivity.

Christina Carter’s voice is a singular, irrefutable weapon: at some moments quivering and small, at other times rounded and full, like a swinging hammer. I was glad to have the opportunity to see her play solo, too, at a small in-store performance at Aquarius Records.

On Land doesn’t quite create the scummy whirlpools of sonic bedlam for which other North American festivals like No Fun are known, and I wonder if anyone ached for a few crazy nights out. Due to rental agreements, each evening ended abruptly at midnight, and the happy audience streamed obediently outside. Despite the festival’s apparent docility, the atmosphere is fuzzy, friendly, and engaging (I heard it described as a ‘glorified family reunion’ more than once), and the music reliably sterling. With everyone so cozy, who needs to party? Natasha Li Pickowicz

Natasha Pickowicz

Top: Charalambides Bottom: festival founders Maxwell August Croy and Jefre Cantu-Ledesma at Aquarius Records

WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #60 | 47

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

Stereolab

Stereolab Not Music

Drag City CD / DL / LP x 2

Laetitia Sadier The Trip

Steve Double

Drag City CD / DL / LP

In the wake of the Eagles and the Stooges’ resurrections as viable touring acts, it’s asking for trouble to consider any band break-up final until they’re all dead. So we’ll go with Stereolab’s assertion that they’re on hiatus even though they look awfully broken up. The core couple of Tim Gane and Laetitia Sadier has been romantically split for years, and now she’s recording solo; no new Stereolab music is being made, no tours scheduled; and now they’re releasing Not Music, a collection of music left over from the sessions for their last album Chemical Chords.

To be fair, Not Music was conceived while Stereolab was still a going concern. They’ve always been exceedingly productive, and in the preparation for Chords Gane assembled literally dozens of rhythm tracks,

which became the germs for songs, so the material was there. And while the working title for the set was Chemical Chords 2, Not Music has its own identity, even when you’re looking at two tunes made from the same groove. The first record’s “One Finger Symphony” feels rigid, locked into Sadier’s vocal chant, but the same rhythm gets turned into something much more rollicking with piano and a more lilting vocal melody to the fore on the new album’s “Two Finger Symphony.” Where much of Chemical Chords was self-consciously bouncy, with Motown-derived bass lines, Not Music seems to let the songs be what they’ll be; one song churns like Philip Glass gone pop, another bumps like early ’80s discotheque fare. How you feel about this record will probably depend on how you feel about Stereolab’s other post-millennial output; it’s just as consistent and just as familiar.

Sadier has recorded apart from Stereolab before, most prominently with the decidedly snoozy Monade, but The Trip represents her solo debut. She’s made the point that on this record she got to fit the music to the words, the opposite of what she had to do in Stereolab. The music definitely feels more functional; while Sadier still

48 | SIGNAL to NOISE #60 WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM

likes sounds, the whizzing synths, crisply strummed guitars, and Association-style vocal arrangements are all there to articulate hooks and support lyrics. Sadier’s songs are more succinct than your average Stereolab track, the lyrical content definitely seems less incidental, and Sadier’s got something to say, since her sister committed suicide shortly before she started writing The Trip’s songs. The album starts strong with “One Million Year Trip,” which lays out the path through grief with poignant simplicity over a bass line that is as sturdy as it is indelible. The next couple of songs find Sadier sorting through memories and coming to terms with death and what it means to live past it; they also throttle back on the tempos, which is where Sadier hits the slippery slope. She has fewer resources as a ballad singer, and sounds positively clunky crooning the line “Burning with sensuality” at a funereal pace on “Statues Can Bend.”

Happily, sensuality is restored on a percolating, frothy electro-disco cover of Les Rita Mitsouko’s “Un Soir, Un Chien,” and overall The Trip feels like a promising new beginning. Sadier just has to remember to keep putting Benzedrine in her Ovaltine.

Bill Meyer

Rez Abbasi Acoustic Quartet Natural Selection Sunnyside CD

Tim Brady

24 Frames—Trance

Ambiences Magnétiques CD + DVD

Marc Ribot Silent Movies Pi CD

Various Artists

I Never Meta Guitar Clean Feed CD

Give a guitar to 19 people, and a range of personalities, techniques and sonic worlds will emerge.

That’s hardly surprising, but still, the spectrum of sounds on display on these four recordings is a reassuring illustration that the 3,000-year-old instrument never grows old when it’s in the hands of creative artists.

Rez Abbasi sounds like he’s mining some of that ancient territory on Natural Selection, which eschews his customary electric instrument and pairs him with vibraphonist Bill Ware.

On “Lament,” a composition by Sufi singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, the layered textures play as big a role as the melody—Stephan Crump alternating between gruff, tensile arco and dark, resonant pizzicato. A version of Keith Jarrett’s “Personal Mountains” is also highly textural, with Abbasi driving the piece forward with a bright tone that contrasts with the dense bottom end created by Crump and drummer Eric McPherson, as Ware provides spectral light. The guitarist explores his own sonic spectrum on “When Light Falls,” which opens with broad chords that bring to mind Bill Frisell’s Americana projects, and a gorgeous, multi-tracked solo take on Bill Withers’ “Ain’t No Sunshine.”

Abbasi’s composition “Up on the Hill”—dedicated to pianist Andrew Hill—uses Ware’s vibes to add depth and rich harmony, and the pair combines on “Blu Vindaloo” to paint a mysterious mood. Despite these free-floating interludes, Natural Selection is dominated by the energy that the quartet generates—both the suppressed power of pieces like Abbasi’s “Pakistani Minor” and the harder-driving “Bees” and “Punjab,” where guitar and vibes combine in rich unison.

Montreal-based composer/guitarist Tim Brady ends 24 Frames— Trance, which includes a DVD of impressionistic light paintings by Martin Messier, with a composition called “57 Ways of Playing Guitar.”

Indeed, Brady, who specializes in layering instrumental tracks into dense, orchestral soundscapes, is a master at varying his attack and tonal quality, and a wide range of his approaches is included on these 10 pieces—or “frames.” “Trance” sounds like Eddie Van Halen discovering a latent interest in polyphony and multi-tracking—bursting with manic riffs that spiral upwards to join a buzzy, staccato line. Eventually, these metal lead lines are subsumed by an aggressively percussive movement that appears to be an exaggerated and amplified sample of the sound created when pick meets string.

A similar effect dominates “Melis-

matic,” one of five brief movements between the guitar’s past and future. that comprise “Switch.” Elsewhere James Hale in this suite, “Seconds” presents a Afrocubism frantic, overdriven single line, while Afrocubism “Liquid” consists of a quiet chorus Nonesuch CD of notes. These stark contrasts could be seen as a sign of a short attenHardly anyone realizes that when the tion span, but Brady is a long-form Buena Vista Social Club phenomcomposer, and 24 Frames—Trance enon took off back in 1996, reviving works best if you view it as a series the careers of a whole team of older of sonic gestures. In fact, following and in some cases retired Cuban “Switch,” the impenetrably stacked musicians, the original plan was for “O Is for Ostinato” and the dark, something quite different. What was dense “Invisible Quartet,” “57 Ways supposed to have happened was of Playing Guitar” sounds like a sumthat a group of Malian musicians mary statement. were to fly into Cuba and collaborate While Brady works on a huge with those Cuban instrumentalcanvas, on Silent Movies Marc ists and singers. Last-minute travel Ribot maintains a tight focus on a complications prevented this from baker’s dozen of pieces written for happening, and Ry Cooder became films and re-imagined as solo guitar the focal point and catalyst for the performances. For the most part, project instead. Now, 14 years later, Ribot works with a minimalist’s ear that original plan has come to fruihere, letting notes ring on “Variation tion. Nick Gold of World Circuit Re1,” mining an array of small motivic cords, who was behind the original gestures on “Empty,” and contrastventure, has brought together some ing single notes against arpeggiated of the masters of Malian music and lower strings on “Solaris.” He also some of the Buena Vista veterans dabbles with the power of electric in a recording that perfectly blends noise. On “Natalia in E-flat Major” the trans-Atlantic elements of these he establishes tension with bitingtwo traditions. From the Malian side but-choked feedback before moving there’s guitarist extraordinaire Djeliinto a quieter melodic section, and mady Tounkara, singer Kasse Mady alters that technique on “Postcard Diabate, kora virtuoso Toumani from N.Y.,” where he utilizes a gauzy Diabate, balofonist Lassana Diabate, electronic mist to set the mood for and others. The Cuban team inthe main acoustic body of the piece. cludes singer-guitarist Eliades Ochoa On the aptly named “Radio” his and his band Grupo Patria, one of understated electric lead is treated Cuba’s longest-running and most reto sound like a 1930s broadcast. vered bands. Of course Cuban music Atmospherics rule on Silent Movies, has long been a strong influence although Ribot moves beyond that in Mali, so the merger of the two on “Fat Man Blues,” which alludes cultures on this recording is more a to John Lee Hooker with its steady continuation of that relationship than pulse and spare melody, and “The an altogether new departure. The Kid,” with its pretty refrain that songs themselves are drawn from wouldn’t sound out of place at a preMalian and Cuban sources. Ochoa war Paris café. contributes “A la Luna yo me Voy,” On I Never Meta Guitar, Ribot’s the group does Benny Moré’s “La contemporary Elliott Sharp plays the Culebra,” and the disc closes with a role of curator, collecting 15 artists delicate rendering of the standard plus himself to run the gamut of “Guantanamera” played on ngoni, sounds and techniques available to kora and guitar. The Malian material guitarists in the 21st century. With draws on traditional griot composithe exception of Michael Gregory’s tions as well as original songs by “Blue Blue,” which is performed by a Djelimady Tounkara, Toumani Diatrio, these are all solo explorations— bate and several of the other West including some impressive multiAfrican participants. The stateliness hued live performances by Henry and delicacy of the Malian sound Kaiser and Sharp himself. Two of the mixes seamlessly with the drive players—Raoul Björkenheim and and intricacy of the Cuban rhythms, Brandon Ross—expand the palette giving the music an intriguing and to include viola da gamba and banjo very pleasing atmosphere. Now that respectively. There is a sense of histhis multicultural collaboration has at tory and instrumental evolution on last been achieved, we can only wait several of these tracks, in particular to see if it takes flight like the Buena Mike Cooper’s interpretation of Vista project did back in the ’90s.

Ornette Coleman’s “Storyteller” as Alan Waters rural blues and Nels Cline’s homage to the “classic” hollow-body jazz Remi Álvarez sound on “Study for Hairpin and Mark Dresser Hatbox.” There are traces of delta Soul to Soul blues in Sharp’s “Telemetry” and Clean Feed CD Spanish formalism in Janet Feder’s dark-tinged “Heater.” But for leaping Remi Álvarez stylistic boundaries and drawing Pere Soto together divergent attacks, no one Remisotopos approaches Mary Halvorson, who Intolerancia CD opens the recording with a stunMexican saxophonist/flutist Remi ning solo work called “In Two Parts Álvarez has made a point of learning Missing.” Her fast picking and sense from the best—studies with Steve of momentum sounds almost like Lacy, Evan Parker, Anthony Braxton, flamenco, but the notes constantly and George Lewis, among others— collide and ping-pong around, and without sacrificing individuality. Sturdy at several junctures she introduces chops, real eloquence on all his her technique of radical octave instruments (his soprano is particularly shifting. Both percussive and tonal, distinctive, and surprisingly indepenher performance serves as a bridge WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM

dent of the obvious models), and a tough, self-interrogative approach that goes from Ornettey sing-song to nonmotivic whirls and whistles in a Euro/UK improv vein—it’s a pretty impressive package all told.

The duo with bassist Mark Dresser is very much “free fall” improvisation: dark, gorgeous, and almost maddeningly open-ended, the lines twisting and flailing about like a nest of snakes. It’s a tough go, since it can feel like the music is constantly gesturing towards horizons it never reaches—a little more consolidation and structure would have been nice—but it’s still a pleasure to hear Álvarez’s tirelessly varied responses to Dresser’s percussive string-attack and downright scary bow-work.

When they’re really burning—like Álvarez’s slo-mo screams in response to Dresser’s sheets-of-flame arco on “Maka-Paka”—it’s enough to make any quibbles seem pretty irrelevant.

The encounter with Spanish guitarist Pere Soto is altogether more unhinged and joyously impure in idiom.

Soto veers happily from abstract blues snarls to hyped-up Hot Club rhythms, from folkie’s-nightmare chording to stoopid rock mayhem and amusingly over-the-top FX work. I find his acoustic playing especially absorbing—it’s got a wonderful anything-can-happen-next vibe, occasionally reaching Chadbournesque levels of goofball frenzy—but he does interesting things on electric too, at times virtually parodying his own virtuosity. Álvarez sticks to tenor for most of the disc, and he’s in a wonderfully splenetic mood. His eloquence lends the music genuine grandeur, though he’s also willing to just blast away without inhibitions when things take a perverse detour (like the heavy metal shredding that abruptly swamps “R/S 6”). Two tracks add electronic processing by Gerry Rosado—quite effectively on the sax solo “Monologo+1,” rather less so on the final track, an overextended skit for processed flute, nonsense vocals and self-consciously wacky guitar.

But that’s really the only misfire on an otherwise impressive and enjoyable disc. Nate Dorward

Ray Anderson / Marty Ehrlich Quartet Hear You Say: Live in Willisau

Double Moon / Challenge / Intuition CD

This quartet of veterans proves there’s a fine art to combining unchecked creativity and accessible groove, ribald humor and understated grace.

Ray Anderson on trombone, Marty Ehrlich on clarinet, alto and soprano saxophones, bassist Brad Jones and drummer Matt Wilson are a group of simpatico spirits out for a good time, and they want to make sure that you have one too. The opening “Portrait of Leroy Jenkins” is Ehrlich’s tribute to the late violinist and AACM stalwart, exploring the soundworlds of both his blues-dance pieces and his thornier chamber music in a multi-colored 13 minutes. Anderson’s “Hot Crab Pot” takes the complex caffeinated lines of bebop down-home with a bit of a swampy touch. (Imagine Bird out crabbing with Henry “Red” Allen or maybe Roswell Rudd.) “My Wish” is a rapturous ballad with a Strayhorn tinge that showcases Anderson’s SIGNAL to NOISE #60 | 49

Savage Energy: Jeffrey Hayden Shurdut with Michael Ray and Marshall Allen

Kemialliset Ysravat: Finland's floating collective

Islaja

Paa Keraaminen Fonal CD

Kemialliset Ysravat Ullakkopalo Fonal CD

Hototogisu

Floating Japanese Oof! Gardens of the 21st Century

courtesy Fonal Records

Important CD x 2

These two remarkable releases from Finland’s wonderful Fonal label, and a reissue of a 2005 Hototogisu epic, each inhabit their own, quite singular universes.

Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon once observed of Islaja’s 2007 Ulual Yyy that she’d never heard anything so otherworldly, and a quick trawl through Merja Kokkonen’s (real name) back catalog makes it hard to disagree.

Islaja’s 2004 debut, the haunting Meritie, illuminated a beguiling, primal landscape, in which toys, accordions, and fractured guitars enshrouded ghostly vocals, like mists rising from the ground. Even at its starkest, though, orthodox song elements rarely seemed far away. Her fourth Fonal release (whose title means “Ceramic Head”) evolves further; layers of warm keyboards bed her exquisite voice in arrangements that maintain the sense of mystery, while offering recognizable points of entry. Opener “Joku toi radion” has a stirring chorus that

evokes Kate Bush; other tracks, like “Rakkaudn palvelija/14. Kasky”or “Ihmispuku,” are more conventional than much of her earlier work, but still float freely in those beguiling mists. Kokkonen’s voice is a delicate, thrilling instrument, and Paa Keraaminen displays it fully, from breathy whispers to glorious choirs of Islajas. There is an unusual beauty to this woman’s world that draws one in more deeply with each hearing.

Kemialliset Ystavat, a floating collective led by Jan Anderzén, has also evolved their sound; listeners used to their live, ceremonial drone action may be surprised by the studio-enhanced layers on their new Ullakkopalo. Like Islaja (an occasional collaborator), KY utilizes all manner of sound generators, from toys and electronics to more conventional ones. Mood-wise, much of this tickles the ear in a manner akin to Matmos circa Supreme Balloon, but there’s a darker, more primordial squish to this motion.

Brenna Murphy’s cover art (recalling Steven Cerio’s early work) complements the music perfectly; odd shapes, weird textures, and unlikely tunnels link together like a constantly morphing organism that refuses to cease growing. The constantly shifting pieces offer striking, even madcap juxtapositions, but still feel organically drawn, and often go surprisingly deep. “Nitty Veden Alla” winds a lonely keyboard figure through gradually accumulating layers of shimmering lights, recalling John Cage’s HPSCHD; the progrockish “Ala Koske Lintuja” has an eerie, oscillating drone that spaces me out every time, and winds up in a merry-go-round of accordion tones. “Suohuuruja” summons the London of Burial’s first album, while “Suosikkiorjalleni” has a cinematic feel,

50 | SIGNAL to NOISE #60 WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM

evoking Disney-esque characters rotating in space, and a quick snatch of conversation to further befuddle the listener. “Kajastusmuseo” hits on blues piano, tabla beats, and avant-funk in a weird concoction that reminds me of Sun Araw’s Heavy Deeds.

“Muutujat/Saattajat” comes closest to their live sound, keyboards and voices layered over drones and ritualistic percussion. This is some seriously amazing music.

Kemialliset Ystavat once shared a split release with Matthew Bower’s Sunroof!, and Bower’s duo with Marcia Bassett, Hototogisu, sees their 2005 3-LP set, Floating Japanese Oof! Gardens of the 21st Century, issued on CD for the first time. Spread over two discs, the unnamed tracks easily form a single, (in)coherent experience. Hototogisu can roar like nobody’s business, but here they’re in something of a bliss/drone mode that flashes like Terry Riley’s solo organ performances. Like Riley, too, Bower and Bassett play with stretched time; the overall approach reminds me of Bower’s Skullflower persona, circa his 2006 Tribulation, where relentless guitar voltage gained accretive detail over the long haul; here, though, the colors are prettier, the mood more contemplative than violent. Nevertheless, listen closely and you’ll hear nattering little creatures attacking the ecstasy vibes like poor Karen Black in Trilogy of Terror. Disembodied voices mutter and hum under the music; the organ player from Question Mark and The Mysterians resuscitates long enough to rest his foot for eternity on his keyboard; Sun Ra beams in on that synth thing he did that sounded like a vacuum cleaner. Listen long enough to Oof! Gardens and your reality can get way dislocated. Larry Nai

in an opulent white box, Elektrofoni gathers together the work of “micro intervallic” guitarist Bjørn Fongaard, whose ingenious method of outfitting his guitars with numerous extra frets enabled him to subdivide quarter tones into “micro tones.” Influential on a whole generation of Norwegian guitarists and composers (Terje Rypdal, for one), Fongaard is virtually unknown to the rest of the planet save for the lucky few who obtained the original Electronic Music from Norway LP (one of whom, fortunately, was Prisma label co-owner and noisician Lasse Marhaug). The music here comprises a mammoth undertaking for both the ear and intellect, best appreciated in small doses, since it takes a while for the music’s more academic aspects to fade away and its unique qualities to shine through. Disc one’s 1973 centerpiece, “Galaxy” (for three quarter-tone guitars) comes off like a one-man string orchestra reformatted by Stockhausen and Keith Rowe—Fongaard plucks, picks, and transforms his tones in chunky, random blocks of sound that perform perverse dances inside the inner ear. The other two discs similarly flit between abstraction and cacophony, rage and reticence. In addition to the exhaustively documented text and photos in the accompanying booklet, the DVD contains TV appearances, a radio interview and ephemera. Challenging, uncompromising music, of both historical and continued interest.

Darren Bergstein

gorgeous tone and stunning control of widely spaced intervals plus a lovely soprano solo. “The Lion’s Tanz” opens with the co-leaders unaccompanied in a chattering, boisterous conversation before Wilson hits hard with a klezmer-style beat that eventually morphs into free fireworks. “The Git Go” references classic bebop again, slightly altered, plus lots of open-form improvisation and a few nods to New Orleans; Jones and Ehrlich’s shadow-dancing during the latter’s deft clarinet solo is a highlight.

“Alligatory Rhumba” is a familiar Anderson tune sure to induce bootyshaking. It’s simultaneously “out” and “in.” Wilson absolutely tears it up on his solo and breaks. “Hear You Say” (Ehrlich) has a gospel foundation and a funk first floor. I’ll bet that Julius Hemphill would have loved it.

Bill Barton

distortion on “White Light”; on “Summer Girl,” he allows the stately chordal melody to be assaulted by feedback and a tempo glitch which sounds like someone messing with a tape recorder’s speed control. The short coda “Silver Clouds” avoids melody altogether in favor of an abrasive staccato pulse. Overall, the combination of idyllic beauty and edgy sonic gestures aligns Georgopoulos most closely with the delightfully open-ended Eno/Cluster collaborations of the 1970s and 1980s. Bill Tilland

Thomas Ankersmit

Just when you thought it was safe to give up on the guitar… Of course that’s a grand overstatement, but the ties between that perennial soundmaker and the ever-evolving mutant strands of electronica and soundscaping seem if anything to be getting stronger these days. Prime exponents of contemporary stringbending such as Oren Ambarchi, Fennesz, James Plotkin, Robert Opalio, hell, a whole gaggle of European and American musicians and an infinite variety of pond-linked boutique labels (Home Normal, Experimedia, Milieu Music, Type, Preservation, etc.), have distributed missives reminding us that the guitar ain’t anywhere near its Barn Owl expiration date. I’ve had my doubts Ancestral Star to be sure, but curiosity and patient Thrill Jockey CD / LP investigation have unearthed some damn fascinating music despite perSome of the song titles on this sonal misgivings; it certainly proves San Francisco duo’s third album of the maxim that in the right hands, a wordless music describe landscapes: craftsman can forge his art with any “Visions in Dust,” “Flatlands” and tool.

“Light from the Mesa.” Other titles AUN, the duo of guitarist/multihave a more mystical or astronomical instrumentalist Martin Dumais and air about them, such as “Incantation” synthesist Julie Leblanc, have already or “Ancestral Star.” These names are issued a clutch of recordings using perfect matches for the moods and Dumais’ weapon of choice as the images that these brooding, atmolaunching pad for a brisk ride through spheric compositions evoke. Evan scratchy landscapes and prickly Caminiti and Jon Porras’s primary confines. On Black Pyramid, the instruments are their electric guitars, duo’s debut for Cyclic Law (Canada’s and the glowing hum of a sustained prime exponent of darkest ambient), chord is the dominant sound throughDumais’ guitar is barely recognizable, out the 10 pieces on this album. The sandblasted by Leblanc’s electronic drawn-out, feedback-saturated notes matrix into a seething domain of on the opening track, “Sundown,” blanched tones and windswept could be the intro to a heavy-metal measures. “Ursa Major” is perhaps epic. But instead of going in that the closest realization of Cyclic Law’s direction, this slow-motion fanfare isolationist climes—layers of fuzz concludes with just a single, dramatic creep and stir about a soundscape thump on a drum. With a few exceplaid to waste by a perpetual blizzard tions, these are short songs, only a as half-glimpsed ‘voices’ curl and twist few minutes long, and they flow from between polar vortices. “Ursa Minor” one track to the next like movements is its twilight doppelganger, insistent in a suite. Stately guitar reverberpulsations of muted feedback masates above the foundation of those saged into a weeping symphony of droning chords—short sequences of strings, a sense of majesty deflectnotes, often discordant but occasioning the music’s scorched horizons. ally ringing out with the bright gleam Though aesthetically the opposite of a major chord. Guest musicians of Fennesz’s ectoplasmic drift, AUN’s add more textures to the Barn Owl soundworlds make a similarly vivid, sound, including Marielle Jakobsons brave noise. on violin, producer The Norman On a mission to spread the word Conquest on vocals and members about Norway’s electroacoustic pioof the group Portraits on gong, bells, neers, the Prisma label has done the singing bowls and percussive metals. world a favor by rescuing such artists But at its core, this is the music of two from terminal obscurity (while in the guitarists working in close unison. process reaffirming the CD as a wholTheir strings and amps make ominous ly viable, relevant format, dammit). roars, while giving off a strangely A 3-CD and single DVD set housed serene light. Robert Loerzel WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM

Live in Utrecht Ash International CD

Berliner Thomas Ankersmit isn’t one to rush things. He’s been performing for over a decade, during which he’s shared split LPs with Jim O’Rourke and Kevin Drumm as well as numerous performance spaces with Phill Niblock, but this is his first complete album. The deliberation that has kept him from flooding the marketplace also makes its place in his music; while he’s credited with playing modular synth and alto sax, space and time are his real materials. Ankersmit often circulates around a space, using his saxophone to sound out its acoustic qualities. That’s hard to duplicate on CD, so instead he messes with the space inside your head by hard-panning elongated, Niblockian sax tones and scattering synth flickers across the stereo spectrum like droplets escaping from a centrifuge whose top has just come unlatched. The effect is pretty psychedelic, and intensified by the expanse of time that it takes to unfold. The piece lasts 40 minutes, long enough for you to get into it, get used to it, and get a little out of your head. It’s time well spent. Bill Meyer

ARP

The Soft Waves

Smalltown Supersound CD

EM magic from Alexis Georgopoulos, who favors the exotic, otherworldly sounds of vintage analog synthesizers. On this, his second release, Georgopoulos extends his musical palette by discreetly mixing in flute, piano and guitar. The focus, though, is still analog electronics, and although Georgopoulos favors the sunnier side of the emotional spectrum, the nine selections include enough grit and unexpected wrinkles to avoid mere prettiness. The program opens with the impressive “Pastoral Symphony,” a layered work which features an ethereal drone, bouncy bass ostinato and some amazing synth textures.

New age synthesist Ray Lynch might be a point of comparison, and Brian Eno’s spacey synth pieces are also a touchstone, particularly on the mellow vocal track “From a Balcony Overlooking the Sea.” On several pieces, Georgopoulos exhibits an unexpected experimental edge. He mixes lyricism and a touch of buzzsaw

AUN

Black Pyramid Cyclic Law CD

Bjørn Fongaard Elektrofoni

Prisma CD x 3 + DVD

Alexander Berne

The Soprano Saxophone Choir / The Saduk / The Abandoned Orchestra Innova CD x 3

Reedman/composer Alexander Berne’s ambient solo atmospherics reach oceanic, continental, and yeah, cosmic reaches in this 3-CD set, the culmination of years of nuanced, dreamy studio labors. “The Soprano Saxophone Choir” sets off on currents of layered sax lines. The first track is called “Shores,” but it’s open ocean all the way, with nothing in view but Berne’s deep-breathing, contemplative soprano. Each tone approaches, becomes the center of attention, and recedes to a distant vanishing point.

It’s a pelagic world with no edges, troubled only by fugitive ripples and currents, but that’s not to say the trip is monotonous. Relax in the diving bell and a variety of life forms, voices and overtones drift by, wiggling their fins, whipping their tentacles or flashing with bioluminescence until they vanish into the glimmer. Berne showcases his own invention on the second disc, “The Saduk.” It’s a flute/ reed hybrid modeled after the Armenian duduk, a mournful creature that keens like a loon in captivity. Choral and organ-like echoes bring out the saduk’s prayerful sound. Here, the rising and falling tones suggest the slow release of ancient folk melodies, long compressed under the strata of centuries. The third disc, “The Abandoned Orchestra,” has a denser event horizon, with articulated beats and an overlay of aural glyphs that jump from the underlying watercolor wash, hinting of Arab bazaars, catacombs, sandstorms and circuits. If they’re still making “east meets west” CDs 500 years from now, these are the sounds they will probably emit.

I longed to listen while sipping the spiced neutron nectar we’ll doubtless be living on by then, but for now, a cigar and a glass of Drambuie sufficed.

Larry Cosentino

Jeb Bishop Trio 2009

Better Animal CD

Trombonist Jeb Bishop certainly hasn’t been idle during the ten years that separate the release of this record from its predecessor Afternoons (Okkadisk). During that time he’s contributed to and/or co-led the Lucky 7s, Engines, and Atomic/School Days.

But in a milieu where some musicians put out half a dozen albums a year, the gap still bears minding. Putting out just one feels like a statement; it’s not just another hour of music, but an assertion of artistic identity. “This,” to paraphrase another man with a horn, “is my music.”

The current line-up of Bishop’s trio plays that music with relaxed authority and a nimble command of dynamics.

Bassist Jason Roebke, who in other settings can be pretty expansive, gets right to the nut here, playing springy rhythms in accompaniment and making stark, emphatic contributions to the less time-based conversations.

Drummer Frank Rosaly would hold the prize for Chicago’s percussive MVP these days if there were such a thing, and the way he applies unerring attention to dynamics and details SIGNAL to NOISE #60 | 51

Giuseppe Ielasi: Techno for the thinking man.

Giuseppe Ielasi Aix

12k CD / Minority LP

(another) Stunt Taiga / Schoolmap 12" EP

Tools 12k CD

In the mid-1960s, Michael Fried praised Frank Stella for his use of unconventionally shaped canvases. Beginning with the notched chevrons of the V Series and culminating in his Irregular Polygons (currently on view at the Hood Museum), Stella showed himself to be an exemplary modernist. In addition to making use of unusual shapes and proportions, Stella emphasized the frame in the painting itself by repeating its geometry in bold, fluorescent outlines. Fried found this emphasis on structure reassuring in an era when the work of art threatened to dissolve into its very surroundings.

The cover of Giuseppe Ielasi’s Aix brings these issues to mind. A photograph of a building under construction in Barcelona presents us with an enormous grid, its forms repeated on each ascending level; the forms within each block accentuate the contours of these squares and rectangles, while columns of zigzagging stairwells puncture the spatial homogeneity. The image is indicative of Ielasi’s recent move toward a grid-like mode of composition, a radical departure from the long-form drone works of his earlier releases on Hapna and 12k. Since then, the Milanese artist has put his faith in rhythmic regularity, symmetry and stasis; as with Stella’s work, the form of an Ielasi recording can be grasped almost instantaneously.

People often complain that electronic music sounds ‘cold’ and ‘soulless,’ while praising DJs like Jan Jelinek for their ability to make synthetic material ‘warm’ and ‘organic.’ What they fail to realize is that this has less to do with acoustic or electronic origins than the way sounds are deployed in a musical form— as Heidegger notes, the civilized ear identifies a structure long before it proceeds to the raw

sense data behind it. Aix proves this by working its organic foundation into something rigid and mechanical, leaving behind the conventional structure of rising action, climax and resolution exploited to such stunning effect on 2007’s August. Here, even the most identifiable sounds become weird and uncanny.

On these nine untitled tracks—Ielasi has never found naming of much interest—simple beat patterns create a framework for the composer’s expert mixing and layering techniques.

The rhythms do not significantly evolve, providing monomorphic as opposed to dramatic structures. The material is culled from brief samples and rich synthetic textures. We hear hints of squeaky doors, zippers, rubber bands, clacking bells, unidentifiable snippets and twitters, whistling and stuttering, mechanic rattles and vinyl crackles tossed together in Ielasi’s spacious sound mix. The sonic material is atomized into split-second intervals; each becomes part of a chain that reiterates the basic structure. As the work progresses, more recognizable sources present themselves for the listener’s consideration. Track seven is permeated by loose hand percussion, gentle guitar washes and marimba—a tropical digitalization. On track eight, harp, guitar, and possibly a balafon are cut and pasted into one continuous melody; sublime horns soar over a mix of the clacking and slapping rhythms one has come to expect from Aix. As the luminous reds, greens, blues and yellows that suffuse the album’s industrial cover art might suggest, we can begin to discern a faint garden here within the machine.

Last year’s (another) Stunt is a sequel to 2008’s Stunt EP and a similarly concentrated effort in minimalist avant-garde techno.

The beats are pared down to a handful of elements per song, and Ielasi uses the same grid-like structure and rapid sampling that he does on his full-length. In a bold departure, he introduces the human voice as a compositional element. On track one, a man from Mississippi mumbles something quasiintelligible about being on the road with his kerosene lamp, while track two’s vocals are reduced to a simple “zuh zuh zuh” behind

52 | SIGNAL to NOISE #60 WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM

the rhythm track. Synthetic sounds are distorted without losing their rhythmic vigor, though their enunciation tends toward a stutter that gives the impression of skipping, circular movement. Track four turns brass instruments into a group of clattering pots and pans, brief squawks released in staccato runs; track three adds new sonic elements over its percussive loops, connecting them like jigsaw pieces before stripping them away with perfect symmetry. The mix giveth and the mix taketh away.

Tools is another brief sample of Ielasi’s artistry, this one even starker and more ascetic than the last. Every track on Tools was created with a single object, and if one was in any doubt as to source material, the composer gives it away in titles like “Cooking Pan,” “Rubber Band” and “Paper Lamp.” One may think of Aube’s Pages from the Book, a record consisting entirely of the sound of a Bible being torn apart, though Ielasi has no interest in shock value, choosing to focus instead on the most everyday of objects.

Normally, such functional items provide us with sustenance and comfort; here they are pressed into service as art. Each is sampled, layered, and played with the same skill Ielasi once applied to guitar. The rubber band is a curiously resonant and elastic rhythmic device; removed from its context in home and office, it would sit comfortably within any DJ’s sample archive. The “Polystyrene Box” is both traditionally percussive and capable of the most alien textures. “Aluminum Foil” falls somewhere between finger snaps, hi-hat and static, while “Metal Rod” emits the industrial noise of the factory that most likely produced it. Ielasi seems neither inside nor outside his objects; he is thinking alongside them, finding the nodes at which their intrinsic qualities best complement his own mental blueprint.

As in Bellows, his project with Nicola Ratti, Ielasi continues to explore the melancholy beauty of organic sound in a state of decay.

Yet in their sonic austerity and polyrhythmic complexity, these twenty minutes inside the artist’s toolkit are among his best work yet.

Seth Watter

shows why. He furnishes just the right amount of activity to maintain optimum pressure, and when it’s time to fly with the groove, he’s got wings. And Bishop has grown as a player; not only does he combine the sound effects and agitated mutter of Paul Rutherford-inspired freedom with open-hearted expressions of melody, he makes them coexist in a way that makes sense. It’s a bit of a cliché to characterize trombonists as vocal players, but when Bishop delivers a tune as fetchingly emotional as “Awomblin’” you not only hear voices, you want to know the words.

He combines spirited, technically adept playing with eloquent writing, and there’s no bifurcation between his compositional and instrumental talents; they work in concert to fashion music that is immediately appealing and built to last. Bill Meyer

Ran Blake Christine Correa Out of the Shadows Red Piano CD

Ran Blake Sara Serpa

Camera Obscura Inner Circle CD

Ran Blake

That Certain Feeling hatOLOGY CD

For Ran Blake, songs are the heart and soul of jazz, and their interpretive potential he finds almost limitless.

When playing solo he savors the melodies, dropping them, often one isolated note at a time, into a cloudbed of chords, as though seeding them.

His approach is somewhat different when working with a vocalist. Rather than just accompany the singer, i.e., be discreetly supportive, he plays in and around the vocal line, introducing dissonances and counter-melodies, key and tempo shifts, fragmenting the rhythm and addressing the material anew. At times this enrichment can be so startling that the traditional roles get reversed, and the vocalist becomes, in effect, the accompanist.

Out of the Shadows is the second CD that Blake has recorded with Christine Correa. They didn’t exactly rush into the studio to record the follow-up, their first album having been issued almost two decades ago.

Correa has a soft, tightly-controlled vibrato, and she’s secure on the lowest notes within her register.

She responds well to the emotions expressed in the lyrics, as does Blake—in fact, this is one of his finest qualities, especially when there’s a dramatic twist or a feeling of sadness or loss to convey. There are two versions of the title track, the second of which is a solo by Correa. She also tackles a Blake favourite, “Una Matica de Ruda,” on her own, drawing its Sephardic strains into Native American territory, to great effect. Blake gets a couple of solo spots too— “Goodbye” and “This Will All Seem Funny”—and they demonstrate that his way of touching the keyboard is as expressively distinctive as ever.

Sara Serpa is a rather different kind of vocalist from Correa. In the main she sings without vibrato, producing trumpet-like notes. To make this work she has to hit the note full on and be

pitch perfect, which she does and is, though on long notes her tone can coarsen very slightly. She has a stratospheric upper register which is absolutely secure. This is a short CD, a mere 29 minutes, and even though it was recorded over two days it feels like an informal, one-take affair. Blake’s triste waltz, “Short Life of Barbara Monk,” gets an airing, Serpa singing the vocal line wordlessly. Other Blake perennials such as “Vanguard” and “Driftwood” are given new life too.

The standout track is the opener, “When Sunny Gets Blue,” which has an unsettled and unsettling quality, as though Blake and Serpa know the song well but don’t know where their playing partner will take it.

That Certain Feeling is a 1990 session involving Ricky Ford (tenor saxophone) and Steve Lacy (soprano saxophone). One could, for fun, say that Ford’s more traditional jazz leanings are the equivalent of Correa’s vocals, and Lacy’s clear bat-tones are reminiscent of Serpa’s. Both saxophonists acquit themselves well, and, unsurprisingly, the George Gershwin songbook (which Blake has visited on other occasions), provides a rich seam of material. Lacy plays with stately elegance on “The Man I Love,” Ford brings a breathy sensuousness to “I Got Rhythm” and on Blake’s solo tracks, in particular “It Ain’t Necessarily So,” his interpretations sound like major reinventions, losing nothing of Gershwin’s magic while gaining something new. Brian Marley

Anthony Braxton Gerry Hemingway Old Dogs (2007) Mode CD x 4

From 1983 to 1994, drummer Gerry Hemingway was part of one of Anthony Braxton’s best ensembles (a group whose work is reprehensibly all but out of print) but the two had not worked together since then. So when they convened at Wesleyan for two days in August of 2007 to record this session, there was a celebratory air. Braxton utilized what he refers to as “a composite register strategy [involving] the complete range of my saxophones,” from sopranino to the growling B-flat contrabass horn (missing only his tenor, which had recently been stolen). Hemingway took an orchestral approach as well, augmenting his kit with marimba, xylophone, and electronics. The two decided to eschew any pre-arranged forms other than to use Braxton’s hourglass to set the duration of the improvisations.

Listening to the four hour-long excursions is an immersion in an erudite, multidimensional dialog.

Both Braxton and Hemingway are virtuosos with complex, personalized solo languages as well as a formalist approach to group interplay. So while this is spontaneous music, structures are always in evidence. Graham Lock’s liner notes include insightful commentary from both musicians. Braxton describes a litany of approaches to improvisation—“syntactical improvisation,” “timbre and/or register focused improvisation,” “metric and pulse improvisation,” “transitional improvisation,” and “parallel improvisation”—while Hemingway talks about transitions as “continuous transformation,” where elements are

seamlessly swapped in and out.

The duo’s playing is intricate and angular, though it can also swing like mad. Both musicians use the breadth of timbres and instrumental color at their disposal holistically: linear themes are alluded to, but other sections become studies in timbral layering, as seismic contrabass saxophone groans tumble across cymbal splashes or high-end reed overtones shimmer against bright xylophone. I’ve been mulling over this set for weeks now and still feel as if I’m just scratching its surface. This is a welcome reunion for two “old dogs,” and a major entry in Braxton’s voluminous discography. If you’re only going to buy one Braxton multi-disc set this year (and it’s never long till the next one comes along), this one should be it. Michael Rosenstein

Peter Brötzmann Hamid Drake Brötzmann / Drake Brö CD

Frank Gratkowski Hamid Drake Frank Gratkowski & Hamid Drake Valid CD

Peter Brötzmann’s Brö Records has a special history, beginning with his first LPs, For Adolphe Sax and Machine Gun. In 2002 he revived the label with Eremite Records’ Michael Ehlers, using it for low-volume, special projects, including LPs. Most of the recordings have been CDs made to sell on specific tours, and they’ve all featured Brötzmann in duet with drummers, one in 2005 with Nasheet Waits and two for a tour with Han Bennink in 2006. Recorded in 2004 at Cleveland’s Beachland Ballroom Tavern, this one is with Hamid Drake, a regular Brötzmann partner both in small groups and the Chicago Tentet.

Like the previous CDs it’s packaged in a hand-printed piece of folded cardboard with a rubber nipple to hold the CD in place. It’s as simple and functional as packaging can be and the limited-edition CDs were available only from the musicians on their 2010 tour or directly from Eremite. The casual brilliance of the packaging is an ideal format for the music, which is as intense, direct and personal as one expects Brötzmann’s art to be, four pieces in which he moves from alto to tarogato to tenor, in constant dialogue with Drake, who is a master at creating the kind of polyrhythmic parade rhythms that Ed Blackwell did so well. Each piece is an exercise in the visceral free improvisation that has always defined Brötzmann’s music, initial melodic impulses reduced to a trill, a wail, a bugle call, a portion of a scale, or a travesty of a traditional ballad. The longest track at 18 minutes, “Nr. 02” is a dialogue for tarogato and frame drum, Drake creating different pitch patterns and rhythmic figures as Brötzmann develops swirling modal patterns in which the rapid, repeated lines begin to double up into multiphonics before the piece moves to a keening dirge evocative of the Middle East. “Nr. 03” may be Brötzmann’s most powerful statement here, a classic tenor oration that magnifies emotion to an epic scale before Drake enters to supply both

sonic backdrop and rhythmic fuel.

This is genuinely elemental music, an authentic encounter between two musicians deeply attuned to one another’s methods and impulses.

Stuart Broomer Even though Drake has worked with saxophone/clarinet player Frank Gratkowski since the mid-’90s, they’ve never struck me as obvious partners.

Despite Gratkowski’s devotion to certain American jazzmen (particularly Charlie Mariano and Steve Lacy) he’s very much a European musician, with a strong affinity for classical sounds and structures as well as a taste for extended techniques that ensure his alto sax playing will never be confused with Charlie Parker’s. That he appreciates playing with Drake is less surprising; the Chicagoan has a knack for confronting whoever is on the bandstand with something they don’t usually play, though he puts it over with such power, grace, and graciousness that even when he stumps ’em, they’re enthralled. But what you have here is not oil and water, or rock and paper, but rain and topsoil: two dissimilar elements that, when put together, make many fine things grow. Drake has played duos with better-known or more predictably compatible reedists—Brötzmann is one example, Fred Anderson is another—but he and Gratkowski prove to be splendidly simpatico on this set, which was recorded in New Orleans. Each man takes full advantage of the room afforded by the drums and reeds duo format.

One moment Gratkowski is like some giant prehistoric bird, harshly clucking and buzzing; the next he’s carving exquisite tonal shapes at the edge of audibility. Drake varies the dynamic and style from spare shakers to pummeling near-funk grooves. Sometimes his choices sound like they shouldn’t work, but they always do. The unpredictability of their interactions makes this record as rewarding as it is bracing. Bill Meyer

Isobel Campbell Mark Lanegan Hawk

Vanguard CD

Isobel Campbell and Mark Lanegan’s three-album collaboration will be told in Beauty and the Beast language— seeing photos of the pair, you can kind of see the point, though it’s easy journalistic shorthand, and sells the collaboration short. More to the point, Lanegan’s voice is the most convincingly, unsettlingly beautiful sound on Hawk, the album where this meeting of minds finally makes perfect sense.

If previous albums, though approachable enough, were stranded in a no-person’s-land of stereo- and archetype, Hawk somehow transcends this by intensifying the genre specifications. So, there’s maudlin Motown on “Come Undone,” raunchy rockabilly action on “Get Behind Me,” and a thick swathe of acoustic guitar melancholy, most notably on two beautiful Townes Van Zandt songs, “Snake Song” and “No Place to Fall.”

The latter is most notable for Lanegan dropping his usual graveyard croon, which bubbles up through the thick tar at the bottom of a smoker’s lungs, for a gorgeously pitched alto serenade, heartbreakingly pure in its

WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #60 | 53

A Man for All Seasons: Evan Parker

Evan Parker Whitstable Solo Psi CD

Schlippenbach Trio Bauhaus Desau Intakt CD

Evan Parker Barry Guy Paul Lytton + Peter Evans

Scenes in the House of Music Clean Feed CD

Evan Parker Sten Sandell Psalms Psi CD

Evan Parker Urs Leimgruber Twine Clean Feed CD

The question is not whether or not the music is good. With an Evan Parker solo soprano saxophone recital, a set by the Schlippenbach Trio, or the Evan Parker/ Barry Guy/Paul Lytton Trio, superlative music is the norm. Rather, the question is why one should keep checking in, and each disc answers that in its own way. Two more CDs present Parker in less familiar settings, each

with its own merits.

No one on earth can match Parker’s command of the soprano sax. But when he starts circular breathing and overlaying fingering patterns, it’s easy to think, “Oh, he’s doing it again.” Because he is, and because it’s no small task to suss out exactly what he’s doing. Whitstable Solo has its share of such moments, but embedded within them are moments when he turns on his own language. My favorite moment comes on “Whitstable solo 4,” when he suddenly drops his own tongue entirely for a flawless recreation of Steve Lacy’s. It’s not a séance-like moment, it’s more one of Lacy talking through his old pal for a second. The brotherhood of soprano saxophonists worth listening to is a small one, and they don’t forget their own. Neither should we.

Parker, pianist Alexander Von Schlippenbach, and drummer Paul Lovens have been playing together for 40 years, recently touring on an annual basis. You probably know what they sound like together, and they don’t disappoint here. But if the music doesn’t surprise with its grand design, it still thrills in the details, and it reasserts its aesthetic ethics—of intensity, musicality, mutual support and challenge, and underneath it all an allegiance to good old-fashioned jazz (which is reinforced by Parker’s decision to stick to tenor sax)—with the familiar passion of a preacher for whom the liturgy is not just something he’s said thousands of times, but a recounting of the meaning of his life.

Yeah, it’s that good.

The Parker/Guy/Lytton Trio has been around since 1980, although its members played together in various combinations for years before that. The dynamic they have developed of split-second response and the atomized music it yields is the acme of improvisation founded upon ever-intensifying attunement and activity.

54 | SIGNAL to NOISE #60 WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM

The three Britons have turned on more than one occasion to Americans who are sympathetic, but don’t necessarily play the same realm. While it’s worth noting that the Yank who joins them this time wasn’t even alive when the trio formed, it’s more pertinent to note that trumpeter Peter Evans is not at all frightened to leap into their maelstrom, nor need he be. He’s got the chops, the timing, and the instincts to not only join their game, but to shake things up a bit by making his scorching phrases scythe through the trio’s web, although he’s also quite capable of weaving his way into it. The Portuguese audience eats it up, whooping like well-liquored soccer fans on the winning side, and when it’s done I feel like joining them.

Psalms was, like Whitstable Solo, recorded at St. Peter’s Church, but it takes greater advantage of its setting. Lively acoustics aside, the building also has an organ, played here by Sten Sandell. Sandell and Parker aren’t exactly strangers, but this is their first duet recording as well as Parker’s first with a church organ. In Sandell’s hands the organ isn’t an ungainly thing, but an impressively rich source of melting tones and intricate figures as well as big billowing draperies of sound. Parker, sticking to tenor, is not so athletic here. He answers big gestures with small ones, and at times his tone is so plush, it’s as though he’s summoning his inner Lester Young.

Twine is a thornier encounter. Swiss saxophonist Urs Leimgruber plays the same horns as Parker, and he’s nearly as facile at managing and maneuvering extra-conventional materials. And that’s where they stay, fashioning music so dense and elaborate that identity dissolves into a writhing sonic surface. If you long for more of the rusty-gate side of Parker’s playing, here’s your record. Bill Meyer

delivery. He should sing like this far more often. “We Die and See Beauty Reign” shadows the melody of The Carpenters’ “Superstar”; “Time of the Season” could have fallen from Bobbie Gentry’s The Delta Sweete.

But even though you can pick out the influences, there’s something about Hawk that transcends these parameters. It’s partly the sound of the record—warm, clear, smartly produced, the quieter moments buffered in cottonwool, the rockier songs just next to period piece—but also, the songs are uniformly strong, and the performances assured, breezy. It’s quite the best thing Campbell has been involved with, full stop, and Lanegan’s best since his 1990 solo album, The Winding Sheet. Jon Dale

Cluster & Farnbauer Live in Vienna 1980 Important CD x 2

DMX Krew Wave Funk

Rephlex CD x 2 / DL

Two generations of whiz kids, both enthralled by the wonders of aural electronix, using similar means to pursue different ends, irrevocably bound by the technology of the day yet imploring their tools to scale hitherto unexpected heights.

In 1980, Cluster had already worked with Eno and were busy mapping out the logistics that would eventually inform contemporary electronica and laptop experimentation, not to mention severing their ties with late ’70s krautrock. With Joshi Farnbauer as the third member (a stand-in for long departed Kluster member Conrad Schnitzler, perhaps?), they performed live at the Wiener Festwochen Alternativ festival on the 12th of June, 1980, recording the lengthy improv sessions on this 2-disc set (originally released on an ultra-obscure cassette). Forget their work with Eno, forget the Sky recordings the duo had yielded up until that point—this live outing finds Cluster revisiting the aesthetics of early Kluster with staggering results.

Opening piece “Service” intercepts alien signals wrenched from deep space, the last gasps of epochdefining big bangs. These strange chirrups, buzzes, fizzing electrical currents, and sundry Sturm und Klang suggest Cluster and Farnbauer had bigger things on their minds than Germanic counterculture and tunedout psychedelia. Though there are dramatic sound shifts that recall Klaus Schulze’s Irrlicht and Tangerine Dream’s Zeit, the trio erect sonic structures quite unique and daring for their day—improvising on vast unknown electronic devices, merging gentle-then-discordant piano phrases, clacking away at mysterious percussion and otherwise warbling at the moon. It’s spellbinding, a rescued relic that hasn’t dated a day.

Ed DMX, who is DMX Krew, loves his technology just as much as Cluster, but he takes his cues from Afrika Bambaataa and early ’80s New York electro rather than ’70s Euro-Teutonic templates. His equipment list is a synth fetishist’s wet dream, a randy collection of Roland drum machines, Kurzweils, Yamahas, Korgs and

other synth/sound processors. DMX Krew’s territorial imperative is firmly anchored in the post-dance world of beats ’n’ pieces, but his kinetic rhythms suggest irresistible forces at work: tricky time signatures, off-kilter BPMs, and atmospheric concoctions of grimy tech noir. Anyone in love with those tinny drum machines so beloved of early ’80s synth-poppers and electro artisans will want to embrace the Krew’s svelte minimalism. DMX’s tongue remains firmly in cheek as well: you don’t name tracks “Cherry Ripe,” “Gravity Boots,” or “Neon Slime” without some serious asswag being part and parcel of your m.o. Wave Funk is all about groove, gumption and gusto, DMX’s synths percolating like old-world coffeemakers, beats resurrecting the hoary days of blissful Human League and Italo disco space odysseys, the whole enterprise coated in layers of chocolate funk that just about effervesce upon contact. Is there something disposable about this particular skein of Wave Funk? Yep, but therein lies the charm—as with bubblegum, the flavor may not last long but you can always chew on another piece.

Darren Bergstein

Osvaldo Coluccino Neuma Q

Die Schachtel CD

Angelo Petronella Rimandi e Scoperte Die Schachtel CD

Pietro Grossi Combinatoria Die Schachtel CD x 2

and cricket chirp. “Parte 2” also includes footsteps, muffled clanking poles and a thin film of buzz. The occasional loud plunks seem to map the nebulously indistinct place for humanity amidst animals and technology. It’s a demanding and rewarding listen that destabilizes even the most jaded of ears. Exceptional juxtapositions of timbre and time make it clear that you are listening to the work of a very skilled and thoughtful composer, underscoring just how rare that combination can be in this genre.

The Combinatoria of Pietro Grossi is a two-disc box that compiles work from 1965-68 from the Studio de Fonologia Musicale di Firenzi (S 2F M), which Grossi founded in 1963. It is the third release of Grossi’s on Die Schachtel, and the first disc includes three excerpts from longer Grossi compositions, four pieces by other composers that were created in his studio, and two pieces made contemporaneously in similar studios in Turin and Padua. Numerous pieces, but especially the excerpt from Grossi’s “SP” (1965), remind me of the works of Dick Raaijmakers and Henk Badings available on several surveys of early Dutch electronic music. The beeps and jigsaw scribbles sound like tests, albeit very listenable and fascinating tests. Fans of Antonioni will appreciate Vittorio Gelmetti’s “Modulazioni per Michelangelo” (1965), from his soundtrack for Red Desert.

Unfortunately, the disc ends with “Interferenze 2” (1967) from the Nuove Proposte Sonore studio in Padua, an obnoxious blast of screaming alarms that is at least eight times the decibel level of the rest of the disc.

The second disc is devoted to a series of pieces by Grossi that are meant to be listened to on shuffle play in order to explore “artificial creativity” and form a protest against the notion of “closed” works. There are 22 sections made between 1971 and 1985, and each permutation I have encountered is pleasant, but feels a little historical. Gooey analog synth gurgles are always welcome, and moments of silence are also programmed into the mix for that refresh-the-sonic-palate sensation. Bach’s Art of the Fugue and Scarlatti’s Sonata 119 are major influences on several sections, and the results occasionally touch on the silly territory of Switched-On Bach.

For the most part, however, these touchstones allow Grossi to simultaneously examine what fascinates him about both electronic music and the canon. When the two concerns align perfectly, as in “Create [a]” and “Monodia,” the effect is delirious aural mayhem. Andrew Choate

Over the years, Die Schachtel has issued many fine electronic and concrète releases by Italian musicians, and here are three more. This particular batch highlights three generations of Italian composers—youngish, middle-aged, and legendary. Osvaldo Coluccino is the youngest, and his disc opens with a kind of pressurized electronic morph that hits several spectrums in quick succession. It is so specific and dense in these opening moments that it seems iconic, like a movie studio’s signature that rolls before the film begins. (Wink, wink, burgeoning spaghetti shoegazer filmmaker.) Much of the bulk of the disc, however, is an intricate study of the varieties of electronic wind, especially the final track, “4,” a long tunnel of hum. Tiny popping bubbles and squeaky, rusty bike-chain growths percolate, yet it is the powerful opening that situates you in the dramas that are about to unfold.

Angelo Petronella’s disc is more complicated. Richly layered crystalline Jerome Cooper shimmering tests not only your endurA Magical Approach ance, but also your ear’s capacity to Mutable CD follow the movement of the tones: the sounds are so slippery and bent Jerome Cooper has been following that they create a kind of vertigo. a path of sound exploration in the Initially a drummer, and founding field of drums and percussion since member of the 1970s psych/noise he came of age at the legendary outfit Insieme Musica Diversa (whose Du Sable High School on Chicago’s work has also been released on Southside in the early ’60s. He Die Schachtel), Petronella has now subsequently went on to work with gravitated toward field recordings Andrew Hill, Anthony Braxton, Steve and sound installations; this release Lacy, George Adams and Sam documents a recent three-part Rivers, among others. His recorded composition. Though the sounds are work includes collaborations with purely electronic, there is a distinct, Cecil Taylor, Roland Kirk, Lester comforting undercurrent of birdsong Bowie and, perhaps most promiWWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM

nently, with Leroy Jenkins and Sirone in the Revolutionary Ensemble, as well as numerous releases under his own name. Cooper has described his very personal approach as aimed at raising the cultural status of drumming by treating it as a solo activity and developing its melodic, harmonic and conceptual aspects, and this is very much in evidence on A Magical Approach. The first piece included here, “Root Assumptions” (recorded back in 1978!) is a minimalist 17-minute rumination for bass drum, hi-hat and balafon that moves through a sequence of gradually shifting 5/4 and 3/4 patterns.

The other five tracks were recorded in concert in 2007. The continuity between the earlier piece and the later pieces testifies to the consistent focus that Cooper has maintained across the years. He augments his drum/percussion set-up with a chiramia—a double-reeded wind instrument from Mexico—and a Yamaha synthesizer, all of which played together result in a kind of one-manband effect. Cooper has cultivated a style of drumming that is light years away from the Gene Krupa school of bombast and technical flashiness.

Instead he very much challenges his listeners to hear drums within a new sonic and aesthetic framework.

While his work with the Revolutionary Ensemble is probably his most well-known and compelling to date, and he dedicates the third track on this disc, “My Birds,” to his two recently deceased comrades from that group, his solo work is nonetheless subtle and captivating. Only in the final composition presented here, the 19-minute “For the People—In Fear—In Chaos,” does he let loose with a full-tilt drums/percussion/ synthesizer barrage, and there you can hear all the elements of his experimental vision of drumming melded together—spontaneity, tonal coloring, layered patterns and raw originality. No serious student of drumming should overlook Cooper’s pioneering contribution as a percussionist. Alan Waters

Darksmith Total Vacuum Hanson LP

Total Vacuum essentially recontextualizes the sickly dulcet tones that for many signify “haunting” or “oh shit”—the unholy rasp of ungreased hinges, rippling bursts of static, rattles, creaks, things going “bump” in the proverbial night—as a vicarious horror-flick kick, dread crumbling confidence like desiccated Ritz crackers. In this manner, sunbathers tanning in Rio can, if so inclined, imagine themselves cowering and trembling in fear in the catacombs of an abandoned mansion somewhere in the country, eyes widening with fear as Freddy Krueger’s freakish blades slice closer, and closer, and closer. Alone. At night. In the unrelenting dark. That’s the thing about audio recordings; because you can’t watch what you’re hearing as it’s happening, you’re essentially blind, and blindness makes the starkly realized rustling of paper, the shifting and rubbing together of gears, the snap of plastic on plastic, the discordant, uneven hum of genSIGNAL to NOISE #60 | 55

erator units, the not-quite-sourceable squeals and shrieks of noise all the more disorienting, disquieting. But when Tom Darksmith—probably not his real name, but an apt handle given what he’s about—abandons his melange/collage pretensions and edges close to actual songcraft (cf. irradiated drone-dirge “Everything Is Breaking”), Total Vacuum almost threatens to lose its nail-bitten edge.

Almost. Raymond Cummings

Dead Country

Dead Country featuring Eugene Chadbourne Konnex CD

Here’s a group of improvisers from Istanbul who’ve teamed up with provocateur Dr. Eugene Chadbourne on a set of five pieces confirming that yes, Virginia, there is such a thing as country blues thrash jazz—and by Jove, it works.

Chadbourne contributes guitar, banjo, and vocals, while the members of Dead Country—guitarists Umut Çaglar and Sevket Akıncı, bassist Demirhan Baylan, drummer Kerem Oktem (some members of free improvising groups konstruKt and Islak Kopek, among others on the small but increasingly active and interesting Istanbul scene)—churn twanging guitars furiously over bass and drums, making some gloriously beautiful noise. The standout track of the album (recorded in Istanbul in October 2009) is the traditional “Mole in the Ground.” Chadbourne strums at his banjo, singing the story of a man tormented by jealousy, and then after the verse, the song goes all rock and roll, driving back beat and all. “Dead Country Blues” is stone-free jazz. On “Intro/Sooner or Later” a funky bass line leads into a guitar riff soon joined by a singlenote line, and then, gradually, things start to fall apart, the beat divorced from the drum line, guitars crashing all around, squalls of feedback, lines looping in and out of the mix. This is a totally joyful, exhilarating album, one of my favorite recent releases.

Mike Chamberlain

Decoy & Joe McPhee OTO

Bo'Weavil CD

ing down a rain of multi-hued metal tones and arco forays that gore like a bull defending his territory.

Hawkins exploits both the organ’s immense range of sounds and its unique attack; sounds bubble, burst, inflate and deflate so that you can never quite get hold of them despite their immense presence. This is a band worth nurturing; here’s hoping that someone figures out how to surmount the logistical challenges imposed by their allegiance to the Hammond organ so that they can take this sound around. Bill Meyer

Vladislav Delay as Sistol Remasters & Remakes Phthalo CD x 2

On the Bright Side Phthalo CD

These three CDs chart the development of Sistol, one of the several alter egos of Finnish electronic producer Vladislav Delay (real name Sasu Ripatti). The original Sistol release, newly remastered here by Ripatti, was first issued in 1999, before his work began to attract international attention. As such, its stark click ’n’ pop rhythms serve as a prototype of Ripatti’s developing style, not only as Vladislav Delay but also under the guises of Luomo, Conoco, Usitalo and as a member of the Moritz von Oswald Trio. Eleven years later, the debut recording sounds rather primitive and anachronistic, at least on the surface. It is almost entirely percussive and minimalist to a fault, but Ripatti’s early infatuation with jazz drumming (he cites Philly Joe Jones as an important influence) gives the music a rhythmic complexity beyond the usual for this subgenre. As the listener acclimates himself to Ripatti’s sonic universe, satisfaction can ultimately be derived from tiny changes in the rhythmic pulse, subtle additions of rhythmic counterpoint and occasional wisps of tonal color, e.g., the almost subliminal use of drone elements.

The Remakes CD includes contributions not only from fellow Finnish producers but also from techno DJ notables such as Sutekh, Mike Huckaby and John Tejada. Since the remixers are working with very spare and largely percussive source material, they have substantial latitude to superimpose their own ideas and sensibilities. The results are both more and less than the originals—more, certainly, in terms of variety, color, texture and general ear candy, but with the peculiarities of Ripatti’s original vision necessarily diluted. Nonetheless, the casual techno consumer may find this CD much more approachable than the remastered original.

The third CD in the series, On the Bright Side, is really the best of both worlds, because it presents the undiluted Sistol/Vladislav Delay experience, but circa 2010. The music still has a stark, percussive base with overtly electronic timbres, but the rhythms are more regular and Ripatti adds a generous helping of synth layering and counterpoint. The music on the CD is, in fact, very club-friendly, which is certainly not something that could be said about the 1999 version of Sistol. All three of the CDs in the series have their virtues, but this is the one which does the best job of com-

Last year the London-based trio Decoy released a pair of splendid recordings that proved the Hammond organ trio can still be a crucible of creative ferment as well as a source of reliable thrills. OTO, which is named for the café where it was recorded last December, shows that organist Alexander Hawkins, bassist John Edwards, and drummer Steve Noble can meet musicians who aren’t known for their commitment to the format and come up with something fresh. Joined

by American multi-instrumentalist Joe McPhee, they range freely from heavy post-Lifetime rumbling to open, atmospheric exchanges.

McPhee plays soprano and tenor sax, favoring long and winding lines on the former instrument and adding gruff authority and historic depth to the heaviest passages on the latter.

Edwards and Noble offer the most vigorous challenges to B3-as-usual practice in the open passages, bring56 | SIGNAL to NOISE #60 WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM

bining head and heart—or combining experimentation with mainstream techno appeal. Bill Tilland

Axel Dörner & Diego Chamy

Super Axel Dorner Absinth 7" LP

Super Axel Dörner begins with a long gurgling noise. The sensation is one of air obstructed, a cry trapped like a lump in the throat. It is, of course, the trumpet of Axel Dörner, an improviser whose almost-exclusive use of extended techniques has made him a key figure on the electro-acoustic scene. To say that Dörner plays trumpet is like saying that Pollock used a brush. He is a composer of brass and wind whose playing makes full use of the trumpet as an object that transports air through a winding cylinder; as something modified by means of depressed valves, quantity of breath, and the position of the lips and tongue; an instrument capable of sounding through both exhalation and inhalation. This 2006 work with Diego Chamy stays true to his vision, a radical aesthetic governed by judicious restraint. No sound is wasted; the trumpeter would rather play the same note again and again, altering it by means of vibrato or mute, than resort to a superfluous change of direction. Two consecutive notes is the closest Dörner comes to traditionalism. Chamy is credited with voice, percussion, and dance; of course, the latter can only be implied on disc.

In his liner notes, Chamy notes that the noise at 8:51 of track two is “me ripping off my T-shirt.” The detail is likely to go unnoticed; there is nothing of violence in the gesture, only a long, low crackle. It seems to reflect the description of Chamy’s dance as “maintaining a certain amount of tension, releasing only micro movements.” Clearly these two artists were meant for each other.

“April 20, 2006” is a minor masterpiece culled from a performance in Dörner’s Berlin home. Its clever editing creates a dynamic soundscape of hissing, gurgling, clearly sounded notes, vocal trilling, mumbled Spanish, and repetitive rhythms played on the orchestral bass drum. The longer “September 5, 2006” was taped live at Berlin’s Electronic Church. While not as consistently exciting as the quiet storm preceding it, the range of sounds is yet wider and more suggestive: hints of radio static, steam escaping from a tea kettle, rustling cymbals, reverberating glasswork, burps amid the palpable silence. This music hovers on the very edge of audibility—constantly reminding the listener of its own imminent disappearance. Seth Watter

David Dove & Lucas Gorham

Screwed Anthologies El Cangrejito CD-R x 2

Jawwaad Taylor & David Dove Scattered Remains of the Now El Cangrejito CD-R

Rap’s storied “chopped and screwed” phenomenon—a studio technique, pioneered by the late DJ

Screw, where nasty Southern street bangers are retarded and stuttered in such a manner that the listener believes that he or she is in the thick of a brown LSD psychedelic misadventure—has yet to infiltrate the mainstream or underground rock cultures in any significant way; doubtless someone’s slaving away in a dimly lit bedroom, struggling to bridge these divides. I wouldn’t say that Houston trombonist David Dove is in the hunt, but he deserves mention, because on Screwed Anthologies (subtitled “improvised music under the influence of DJ Screw”), Dove—in concert with steel guitarist Lucas Gorham—has stumbled upon a novel way to make screw music intriguing again. Namely: weave an uneven tapestry of select DJ Screw slurries, fold in pop-music steals (the guitar riff and vocal from Diana Ross’s “I’m Coming Out,” for instance), and improvise an accompanying abyss-deep, ochre-noise/doom jazz hybrid that mirrors the lawless urban decay and nihilism of (most) of the source material: a dirge parade, humid bone-rattling rumble after humid bone-rattling rumble. The impact of listening to this stuff in the car on a hot summer day is gently profound—like slow-sipping Long Island Ice Teas on your porch until it suddenly occurs to you that you’re hopelessly immobile—it causes one to consider one’s surroundings in an askew, altered-state way, through quivering glass.

Scattered Remains in the Now, where Dove’s trombone grapples with the electronics, trumpeting, and fractured poetics of Jawwaad Taylor, is immersive in a different way, the squalid, pallid buzz, brrrrrrrrrur, squawk, and dog’s-hearing-pitch frequencies of the pair’s collaborative congress plugging the conceptual voids in Taylor’s non-sequitur/daisychain streams of half-consciousness.

Raymond Cummings

Either/Orchestra Mood Music for Time Travellers Accurate CD

Conceived of in 1985 as a “little big band,” saxophonist Russ Gershon’s Boston-based Either/Orchestra has the flexibility and improvisational latitudes of a small combo and the increased tonal colors available to a large ensemble. The E/O has been through many personnel changes in its history (well-known alumni include Josh Roseman, John Medeski, Matt Wilson and Miguel Zenon), but aside from Gershon, trumpeter Tom Halter is the only remaining charter member. The line-up on this recording is Halter and Daniel Rosenthal, trumpets; Joel Yennior, trombone; Godwin Louis, alto saxophone; Gershon, tenor and soprano saxophones; Rafael Alcada, piano and Hammond B3 organ; Rick McLaughlin, double and electric basses; Pablo Bencid, drums; and Vicente Lebron, congas, bongos and percussion.

Charlie Kohlhase plays baritone sax on five of the ten tracks, with Kurtis Rivers on bari for three others, and flutist Henry Cook added on two.

The group returns to a program of all original compositions after a fruitful crossover project with Ethiopian jazz

musicians. Still, African and Afro-Cuban rhythms play an important part in the group’s signature sound. The compositions and improvisations are adventurous, forward-looking and— in many cases—quite complex, but there’s a joyful, egalitarian, populist feel too; it wouldn’t be a stretch imagining a dance-floor crowded with bodies gyrating to much of this music, particularly bassist McLaughlin’s “History Lesson,” a nod to Fela Kuti. Bill Barton

other wrinkles in the original. But that’s a small complaint set against the group’s spirit, especially on the closing track. Their read on Rahsaan Roland Kirk’s “The Inflated Tear” is inspired, alternating between rich jazz tones and clanging distorted guitars, with an extended feedback passage that suggests Kirk’s multiple horn blowing. Throughout the record, but especially at these moments, their reverence is, literally, electric. Kurt Gottschalk

son on songs as good as these.

Bill Meyer

Exploding Star Orchestra Stars Have Shapes Delmark CD / LP

Jason Adasiewicz Sun Rooms Delmark CD

Cornetist and electronic/visual artist Rob Mazurek has a highly distinctive take on orchestration as a process.

Emergency!

The Ex His work with the Chicago UnderLive in Copenhagen Catch My Shoe ground has ranged from duos (with JVT CD Ex Records CD / DL / LP percussionist Chad Taylor) to larger groups, but even when pared down While Otomo Yoshihide’s talents for Cut down a bush and grows back it sounds greater than the sum of conceptualization and for arranging stronger. The same applies to The its parts through extensive overlays sounds in space have long been Ex, who lost singer and founding and electronics. The Exploding Star apparent, his prowess as a guitarist member G.W. Sok a couple years Orchestra, a large ensemble he has been sneaking up more slowly. ago only to rebound renewed with has directed for several years that After using the guitar as a noise a new singer, an evolved sound, features the cream of Chicago immachine early in his career (even and this swell new album. It’s still provisers (Jason Adasiewicz, Nicole designing one with a turntable atinstantly identifiable as The Ex; Mitchell, Josh Abrams, Jason Stein, tached to its face), he seemed to set there’s no other guitar duo that Damon Locks, et al.), has become the instrument aside until his more can orchestrate the slash and crash a vehicle for larger-scale acoustic recent forays into leading jazz-based of coarse-edged chords like Andy compositions, including a 2007 colensembles. With his New Jazz EnMoor and Terrie Hessels. No other laboration with trumpeter-composer semble, Quintet and Orchestra, he drummer combining martial rigidity Bill Dixon. Stars Have Shapes, the combined that same excellent sense and effortless flow like Katherina third Exploding Star disc to date, of timing with a fairly orthodox apBornefeld, and she still has a way differs markedly from the previous proach to guitar-playing, and applied with a non-English song. New guy two in that it concentrates on electroit to compositions by Eric Dolphy, Arnold de Boer is a more melodic acoustic explorations.

Charlie Haden, John Lennon, Jim singer than his predecessor, and On the 20-minute “Ascension O’Rourke, Wayne Shorter, James brings his own angle to the longGhost Impression #2,” a seismic “Blood” Ulmer and others. standing Ex practice of calling out swirl of digital fuzz envelops the 13That effort is upped again in the the world’s wrongs and considering member ensemble as flecks of reed/ quartet Emergency! (punctuation one’s own complicity with them. brass and thrashing percussion pop theirs). A dual guitar explosion, He also brings a third guitar, which out. The fracas dies away halfway the band works like a traditional leaves room for one or the other through to reveal a soft ensemble high-energy jazz group even without of the veteran stringers to add a line that spotlights Mazurek’s light, horns. Yoshihide and Ryochi Saito bit of bass with a baritone guitar, incisive cornet over a loose sashay.

(Yoshihide’s Core Anode, Fernando but also adds an extra incendiary Electronic flutter soon rises to Saunders) play twin melodicists, conspark to the instrumental tangle on the top of orchestral collectivity; stantly supporting and vamping off “Bicycle Illusion.” In the last issue as drums and bass clarinet peek of one another in front of the steady, of Signal to Noise The Ex spoke through the gauze, one gets the driving rhythm section of upright at length about their mutually impression of the orchestra as itself bassist Hiroaki Mizutani (Yoshihide’s nurturing relationship with Africa engulfed within a larger sonic field.

New Jazz Orchestra, Tipographica, and Africans; Catch My Shoe is their Mazurek has worked in rock-oriented Akira Sakata) and longtime Yoshihide most African album yet, but not in contexts, and odd-metered rock drummer Yasuhiro Yoshigaki (who’s a showy way—the African elements rhythms have crept into Exploding also worked with Saunders as well as are fully digested elements of the Star before. Here, the flinty, knotty Kazutoki Umezu, and was a member lives they live. “Maybe I Was a “ChromoRocker” spotlights the of Altered States and Rovo).

Pilot” may be founded upon a riff juggernaut of vibraphonist Jason Live in Copenhagen is their third they learned from Ugandan harpist Adasiewicz, bassist Matt Lux, and CD, recorded in 2006 at their first Iganitiyo Ekacholi, but you only drummers John Herndon and Mike concert outside of Japan. It’s a blisterknow it because they give him Reed. But electronic and sampled ing hour, just as excitingly contemcredit. They’ve turned it into driving sound environments remain the porary (and just as respectful of the rock music that is just as raw and most interesting aspect of Mazurek’s tradition) as the New Jazz groups. The remorseless as anything they played work as a composer—the way he set opens with the only original comin their punk-rock squat days. The swathes acoustic tones and snippets position, Yoshigaki’s “Re-Baptizum,” same goes for “Double Order’s” of jazz phrasing in a broad, gauzy which in title and focus on percussion interlocking, staccato figures, which architecture. Increasingly in his work, would seem to be a dedication to close the circle with Konono No. 1’s the ensemble-as-instrument has Famoudou Don Moye and the Art guitar-like thumb pianos by making given way to the whole sound.

Ensemble of Chicago. It wanders electric guitars sound like Konono’s Sun Rooms is Adasiewicz’s latest somewhat, providing an opening amplified likembes. Trumpeter Roy disc, on which he’s joined by Reed of restrained tension and eventually Paci, who is a member of The Ex’s and bassist Nate McBride for a mix opening up to the electricity of the horn-enhanced Brass Unbound of originals and well-chosen covers guitars. That leads (with a posttouring project, joins the band (Sun Ra, Ellington, and the legendary production fade-in) into a remarkable for two songs. His unbridled but Hasaan Ibn Ali). For a small group, interpretation of Louis Prima’s “Sing perfectly slotted blare significantly the sound is massive, and it’s heard Sing Sing.” Here as on the following raises their temperature, and his to special advantage on the opening tracks they’re more concerned with presence simultaneously channels “Get in There,” based on frantic, vamping on the theme, using it as a the past and opens a door to the gooey tempo relationships, Reed suggestion for forays and foragfuture. On the one hand, hearing surging ahead as vibes and bass ing, than with playing through the his probing lines over Moor’s guitar pitch and yaw. Bowed bass and mepiece. The arrangements are loose, brings back sweet memories of tallic rumble introduce Hasaan’s “Off and the band jammier than the Dogfaced Hermans, the marvelous My Back Jack” (from his lone 1964 New Jazz groups, which is fun but and much-missed combo where he Atlantic LP), the vibist’s solo wandercan leave a desire for more. Their honed his skills before joining The ing over Reed’s brushy shuffle and take on Charles Mingus’s “Fables of Ex. But it also makes me hope that McBride’s rubbery plenum. There’s Faubus” is wonderfully visceral, but the Ex makes a record with Brass a glassy sheen to Adasciewicz’s it’s hard not to think of what more Unbound before very long; imagine phrasing on “Life,” his percussive the band would be capable of if they the thrill of having Wolter Wierbos, rivulets and thin clusters spreading stuck with the double-times and the Ken Vandermark, and Mats GustafsWWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #60 | 57

out over a loose jog; the tune itself recalls Andrew Hill’s “The Griots.”

His edge-of-distortion chords and buzzing, resonant glow on the ballad “Rose Garden,” on the other hand, recall his work in the Exploding Star Orchestra’s electric color-fields.

This date is at once a fine example of modern jazz vibraphone, and a stellar example of the music coming from the current Chicago scene.

Clifford Allen

Expo 70

Where Does Your Mind Go? Immune 2 x LP + DL

The Vanishing World Within Solid Melts C40 cassette

authentic experience from the virus of post-millennial ephemerality.

Bill Meyer

Fennesz David Daniell Tony Buck Knoxville Thrill Jockey CD

It’s almost a good thing that this live trio recording is a mere 31 minutes long ... because much more would have quickly become too much of a good thing. Whether or not they played longer than half an hour at the 2009 Big Ears Festival in Knoxville, where this was recorded, isn’t clear, but certainly they didn’t need to. They cover the placid, the psychedelic and the monotone with a vibrant intensity, managing to move from one setting to another in quicker time than each generally does in other projects, but nevertheless with an ease that saves it from seeming rushed or showy. Guitarist/electronicist David Daniell is probably the least-known personality here, although his recent duo recording Sycamore with fellow Chicagoan (and Tortoise member) Douglas McCombs gives some indication of his electro-abstractions.

His soundwork has ranged from projects with Loren Connors and Greg Davis to Thurston Moore and Rhys Chatham, putting him squarely in the midst of electric guitar exploration. Christian Fennesz, of course, with his laptop-processed guitar, has been key to the development of a new kind of psychedelic abstraction, and the rich loam of his past work is kneaded in with this trio as well. The real fun here, however, is listening to Tony Buck play underneath the guitaresque ebbs and flows. A drummer of almost frightening patience and precision, Buck is flightier here than he is in the longstanding reductivist jazz trio The Necks, but still playing with a wider scope than in his more rock-leaning projects. In a sense, the sound around him is huge enough that he can do whatever he wants, and what he wants is to be tastefully nonrepetitive. The four tracks seem to cross-fade from one to another a little too easily here, suggesting it may in fact have been pared down from a longer live set, but that hardly matters. As a recording, it’s a concise and expert survey of some fascinating musical terrain. Kurt Gottschalk

In concert Justin Wright, Expo 70’s main (but not always only) man, sits cross-legged before his amp. He faces in the same direction as his audience so that they become one, like a communal organism with many eyes looking at the same squat box and pulsing light show, all sharing a night flight into the ether. On record he issues invitations into that same state of beyond via titles like “Close Your Eyes and Effortlessly Drift Away.” The music is made from simple elements: a patiently sputtering drum machine, echo-dipped guitars, and fat-toned, old-fashioned synths (Moog, Korg, and Crumar, if you’re checking the brands) that span the audio spectrum from comet-trail whistles to dinosaurbelly rumbles. But it connects with surprising force.

The Vanishing World Within was made incrementally over the course of a year in Wright’s home studio.

While he lays down all of the guitars and organs and most of the synths, it features contributions from a couple other musicians. McKinley Jones’s Moog synthesizer melts into the layered electronics on “Phase II”; coupled with the squashing effect of the cassette medium, it’s hard to tell who’s doing what. But when David Williams’ drum kit kicks in on the following track, the music lurches into unstoppable forward motion, surging like Hawkwind in a hurry to pay some bills. When he’s on board, this feels like a band, and a satisfyingly rocking one at that.

Where Does Your Mind Go? was recorded live at Black Dirt Studio in New York State during a single night in the middle of Expo 70’s 2009 tour.

Rendered on deluxe vinyl, its sounds linger and drift with the clarity of a Garrison Fewell perfect Pacific sunset far different Variable Density from Vanishing World’s foggy blur.

Sound Particle 47 Stoked from the road, Wright and Creative Nation CD fellow multi-instrumentalist Matt Hill achieve a quasi-chemical combusEric Hofbauer tion, a gradual but progressive American Fear! reaction that lights the drones from Creative Nation CD within and gives the reverberating synth voices and Alice Coltrane-light Joel Yennior Trio piano trills an eyeball-scrubbing halo.

Big City Circus Their road-tested empathy gives Brass Wheel CD the performances a gravitas that puts the efforts of other kosmische Sound Particle 47 is the second revivalists in the shadow. The music’s release by Boston-based guitarist heft is matched by the weight of the Garrison Fewell’s large ensemble. The vinyl and the muted lavishness of the Variable Density Sound Orchestra album’s gatefold sleeve. With this has increased to a 9-piece with the package and the equally splendid job addition of trombonist Steve Swell that they did recently on Stephen R. and tenor saxophonist Kelly Roberge Smith’s Cities, Immune has earned a as well as a second bassist, Dmitry place next to Eremite and ThreeIshenko. Returning members include Lobed as an imprint that is defending 58 | SIGNAL to NOISE #60 WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM

drummer Miki Matsuki, trumpeter Roy Campbell, bassist John Voigt, reed player Achille Succi and fellow guitarist Eric Hofbauer. It’s a formidable ensemble essaying memorable compositions with unusual formal structures that keep the improvisers on their toes. Hofbauer’s “Terra Firma, Terra Incognito” combines composed material with freely improvised passages by Fewell and Ishenko. The ensemble’s braying, riffing horns playing over the splinters tossed out by the two improvisers bring to mind Mingus’s own large bands. Fewell cowrote “Long Distance Unity’s” lovely theme by e-mail with his long-time collaborator John Tchicai, and he arranges Tchicai’s “Afro-Danish No. 6” for two guitars here as well. Several other tracks are improvisations by various subsections of the ensemble, including a remarkable duo by Campbell and Swell. It’s a complete program that holds together like a suite.

Hofbauer has been a member of several groups based in the Boston area including the Infrared Band and the Blueprint Project. American Fear is his second solo album (following 2004’s American Vanity) and presents an original player with his own view of history. Covers of “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” and “Hot for Teacher” indicate his musical ethos was formed in the ’80s, but versions of Hank Williams’ “Blue Highway” and Andrew Hill’s “Black Fire” show he goes a lot deeper than that. The fact that the originals sound both improvised and composed prove his creative impulse is wide. Technically Hofbauer can obviously play the standard jazz guitar game but it’s clear he doesn’t want to be hemmed in by the cliches of its tradition. His prepared guitar rendition of Bird’s “Moose the Mooche” is one way out, and the sliding guitar patterns of “American Wonder” are another.

Trombonist Joel Yennior is a New England mainstay and he’s been a member of Boston’s Either/Orchestra for over ten years, but Big City Circus is his debut as a leader. His rich buttery sound and legato phrasing serve him well on ballads like Burt Bacharach’s “A House Is Not a Home.”

Backed by Hofbauer and drummer Gary Fieldman, this trio ambles through an interesting program of less-explored covers (Ran Blake’s “Breakthru” and Monk’s “Gallop’s Gallop”) and several originals. The absence of bass gives the ensemble a light, buoyant texture that serves it well. The disc’s centerpiece is “Justice Lost: A Suite in Three Parts.” Starting with a tension-filled rubato first section, it modulates to a loping second movement filled with Ellingtonian wah-trombone, adeptly delivered.

The final movement, the disc’s title track, lives up to its name, striking a unique mixture of uneasiness and mirth. By the conclusion, one gets the impression of the wheels of (in)justice grinding on. Robert Iannapollo

David First

Privacy Issues (Droneworks 1996-2009) XI CD x 3

Compiling thirteen years’ worth of work over three discs, and clocking in at almost three hours, Droneworks

1996-2009 isn’t an easy album to digest, but David First rewards the intrepid listener who’s willing to take the plunge. Active in New York since the 1970s, First is a composer, guitarist, and Notekiller whose output is scattered across the borders between rock, jazz, minimalism, and classical music. Droneworks reflects First’s compositional diversity, albeit in a more confined scope, with drones ranging from deep, viscous glaciers of low end to crisp, clear electronic streams and high-frequency auditory needlework. The collection’s instrumentation is equally heterogeneous, and includes computers, strings, woodwinds, guitars, radio transistors, and even a slide whistle. The end effect is a drone-oriented collection that’s far less monotonous than the pessimist might expect.

Tone-wrangler extraordinaire Phill Niblock works with subtle changes, his music seemingly monolithic until increases in volume and attention reveal the work’s inner magic. First takes a different approach, often relying on complex conceptual underpinnings to create music that’s more upfront in its declaration of intent and transparent in its movements. These three discs test the sea legs of the listener; those in search of meditative relaxation will need to look elsewhere. First finds ways to give some of the drones a particularly visceral punch, often lacing Droneworks with beat tones, using shallow fluctuation in pitch to introduce a sense of queasiness into even the simplest compositions. Realtime electromagnetic measurements inspire dizzying showers of seemingly random tones, and intricate tuning algorithms are used to construct massive drifts, teeming with sound.

The music sometimes attacks the ears in insistent swarms; at other times it flows around the head with palpable physicality. These drones, no matter their nature, are rarely passive events.

Droneworks demands attention, and a listener, whether annoyed or absorbed, isn’t likely to drift into somnolence while David First is at work.

Marc Medwin

Marcus Fjellstrom Schattenspieler Miasmah CD

Swedish composer Marcus Fjellstrom, who has worked with chamber and ballet orchestras as well as filmmakers, displays on this CD an uncanny talent for the integration of classical and avant garde materials, and an equally impressive ability to combine orchestral strings, haunting synthesizer motifs and electroacoustic sources.

The eleven compositions are loosely united by their nightmarish sense of foreboding, but Fjellstrom manipulates his sonic palette throughout the CD and his music never settles into predictability.

The CD opens with “The Disjointed,” a mournful, ultra-romantic string motif undercut by ominous low rumbling and occasional sounds of a more disquieting nature, such as a distant booming and the sound of the sky being torn apart. The next piece, “Bis Einer Weint,” features a watery, phase-shifted synth pattern supported by white noise, a gorgeously sad cello line and tense, dissonant strings. “Antichrist Architecture

Management’s” repeated synth notes are as insistent and maddening as a toothache, while “Uncanny Valleys” uses background hiss and static together with a simple synth organ pattern reminiscent of Harold Budd’s bleak “Abandoned Cities.”

And so it goes—shrill flutes, dull reverbed crashes, massed low strings, muted roaring, distant alarums. And simple string motifs, always in minor keys, which sound like the saddest music in the world. The sound is enveloping, claustrophobic and yet crystal clear, with background chaos always on the verge of displacing melody and pattern. At times, you imagine that you’re listening to a musical representation of the dissolution of the universe. Clearly, this CD would make great soundtrack music, though it’s hard to imagine visuals with the same power as Fjellstrom’s soundworld. While it’s easy to indulge in the delicious horrors of the Goth music subgenre while at the same time feeling a little guilty about the cheap thrills, I have no such feelings while listening to this CD. There’s nothing cheap or campy about it. In fact, it’s scary as hell and impressively depressing. Bill Tilland

Garaj Mahal

More Mr. Nice Guy

hardt also appear on Spirit & Spice, one of two Indian jazz/rock efforts by saxophonist George Brooks. ExPonty/Journey drummer Steve Smith rounds out the core quartet on this disc, and also joins Brooks and guitarist Prasanna for the Raga Bop Trio.

Brooks has some of Sonny Rollins’s ability to make gutsy statements out of innocent themes, although when the tunes get languid he can also bring to mind lesser, smoother influences. The trio disc grapples with the challenge of maintaining interest with this austere lineup, but it allows for more fire from Smith, and McLaughlin fans will note Prasanna’s similar efforts to get sitar-style bent notes from the guitar. Spirit & Spice goes in the opposite direction, bringing in a varied set of guest musicians (with the biggest name being Zakir Hussain on one track) as well as placing more focus on Brooks’ exploration of odd beat cycles and meditative themes.

It’d be a great CD if it was all as lively as the opening blues or as pretty as the closer, but elsewhere the disc leaves one wanting less polish and more fire. Pat Buzby

Gate

A Republic of Sadness Ba Da Bing LP

Theoretically, high fidelity should not become Michael Morley. The Garaj Mahal & expectation, cultivated over decades Fareed Haque of projects and recordings, is that Discovery Morley-related sonics will arrive Moog Guitar CD covered in at least three layers of sedimentary distortion, tape-hiss, and George Brooks feedback. This has certainly been Summit the case with Gate, his long-running, Spirit and Spice guitar-based solo project. Dead C Earth Brother CD neophytes would be forgiven for believing that the Gate “singles Steve Smith collection” Golden was recorded on George Brooks the tarmac of an especially hectic Air Prasanna Force base, while previous and subseRaga Bop Trio quent offerings were no less oblique, Abstract Logix CD often suggesting a frustrated guitarist openly wrestling with the concept Much of the current support for jazz of conventional guitar playing in a fusion exists in the jamband scene. cramped anteroom full of out-of-tune It’s allowed Garaj Mahal to keep a knock-offs and blown amps. Morley’s steady road schedule for a decade, vocal presence felt no less rudimenand the resulting tightness shows on tary, as if he were reaching deep their two new CDs. Keyboardist Eric down into some primordial abyss and Levy has an agreeably gritty Rhodes dredging up unexplainable emotions and synth setup and a jazz-educated, he hadn’t known were there, hoisting ungimmicky improvising style, while them up above his head, one by one, guitarist Fareed Haque can tear it up like spike-encrusted medicine balls. in McLaughlin fashion but also has the By contrast, Republic of Sadness is a taste to keep the solos brief and to fit puzzler, an outlier, seeming sacrilege. them into well-structured pieces. The Its static skein feels cosmetic. There instrumentals range from the straightare discernable synthesized beat forward rocker “The Long Form” to loops. Desert-island keyboard motifs. the Indian-flavored “Witch Doctor” Morley’s inchoate yearnings are to the Phish-esque “Frankly Frankie much the same as they’ve always Ford.” Two vocals by new drummer been—crepuscular, muscular, sweatSean Rickman on More Mr. Nice Guy stained—but if you overheard Sadhave one typical fusion ailment (the ness in passing, you might file it under lyrics aren’t as brainy as the music), “experimental techno” or “industrial” but at least they aren’t the strained as you went on your merry way. You crossover nightmares that often result might jot a mental note to give Flying from adding singing to this style.

Saucer Attack’s Mirror a spin later, to Nothing particularly new here, but the cue up Tortoise at their most hyperacquartet explores the terrain of Mahavtive or Nine Inch Nails at their most ishnu and Return to Forever as capaspare. You might make an effort to bly as many respected piano trios or figure out what you heard in passing, sax-trumpet quintets re-examine the get over the shock of discovering work of Bill Evans or Art Blakey. More that this un-Gate electronic clatter is Mr. Nice Guy is more of a band effort, actually Gate, and ultimately come while Discovery, with several tracks to embrace the nu-Gate paradigm, featuring Haque demoing the Moog wherein Morley has conceived a new guitar, has more of a techno bent. language to express his distended Haque and Garaj bassist Kai Ecksorrows, with modes ranging from WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM Owl Studios CD

lithe film-score cavalier (“Forever”) to spastic-synths-looped-to-kill, from tambourines (“Desert”) to skippingstone glitch pinball (“Freak”). Loneliness is still loneliness, sadness still, alas, sadness, eternity as endless and damning as ever, except that now the soundtrack to these feelings and states is more like being trapped in a Tron video game than Lee Ranaldo’s garage. Raymond Cummings

Henry Grimes Rashied Ali Spirits Aloft Porter CD

Before the 35-year hiatus in his musical career, bassist Henry Grimes had recorded with Rashied Ali only once, back in 1965 on Archie Shepp’s On This Night, which was actually one of Ali’s first major recordings.

Following his resumption of active playing in 2003, Grimes recorded a first duo performance with the great drummer, Going to the Ritual, which was released on Porter records in 2008. And now from the same label we get the follow-up, Spirits Aloft, which was recorded at a concert at the Rutgers-Camden Center for the Arts in February, 2009, just six months before Ali’s passing. The duo of Grimes on bass and violin and Ali on drums is so full, convincing and complex that you quickly forget that it’s just two musicians. In fact, in this concert they frequently solo at length separately from each other while the other one sits out, as if the power of each one of them individually is so vast that their playing together would be simply overwhelming. But play together they do, exploring timbres, textures and tonalities that seem not to have existed until their moment of discovery by these two master improvisers. The opening track is a 15-minute tour de force of ferocious brush work by Ali and bowing wizardry by Grimes, which they’ve aptly titled “Rapid Transit.” In subsequent tracks Grimes, alternating between upright and violin, moves through zones of psychedelic dissonance while Ali compresses the entire history of jazz drumming into his quick, fluttering patterns on the set. The fourth selection is almost entirely devoted to a thunderous and utterly original tom-tom solo by Ali. We have learned that Grimes worked at poetry during his absence from the scene, and this concert opens and closes with him briefly reciting some of his work.

There’s a special poignancy to this recording which pairs the returned and re-established Grimes with the now departed Ali, making their duo encounters seem even more fleeting than most free jazz sessions. At the very close of the recording you can hear them promise the audience— amid continuing applause—that they’ll be back to play again. But it was not to be. Alan Waters

Gunn-Truscinski Duo Sand City

Three Lobed LP+DL

On Steve Gunn’s last solo LP Boerum Palace he seemed to be reaching for greatness and not quite grasping it. This time he’s got it, and he’s not letting it go; Sand City is one of the most thrilling guitar performances SIGNAL to NOISE #60 | 59

I’ve heard all year. Mind you, calling it a guitar record is only telling one third of the story. Drummer John Truscinski bears another third of the responsibility for this record’s success; spare, loose, and every bit as oriented towards tone as rhythm, his playing is just the thing you want to hear around Gunn’s hypnotic, buzzing lines. The rest of the credit goes to the chemistry between the two men.

They’ve been playing together for years in the much more full-on GHQ, but this instrumental duo is a different entity, one composed as much of the carefully sculpted space between them as the unabashedly gorgeous sounds they make.

Sometimes the most obvious thing to do is also the right thing, and so it is on Sand City, which is divided into acoustic and electric sides. Each tune has some easily identifiable antecedents, but they’re starting points, not ends in themselves. Gunn opens “Taksim II” with a sunrise flourish, then Truscinski adds a relaxed yet unstoppable tom and hi-hat groove; then they exhale the same rarefied air that Sandy Bull and Billy Higgins blew on “Blend,” carving exotic vistas out of enveloping resonance and hypnotic beats. “B38 Blues” is less exotic but every bit as exhilarating; Gunn is in a tough but tender Takoma mood that meshes surprisingly well with Truscinski’s broad slashes of bowed cymbals. Flip the record over and “Wythe Raag” answers the question, “What if the intro of Richard Thompson’s ‘Calvary Cross’ had led into a smoldering raga-rock jam instead of a mortality-steeped meditation?” It doesn’t owe much to raga form, but the music’s Eastern aura is pretty thirdeye-opening. The album winds down with a brief “Outro” that returns to “Taksim II’s” theme and vibe, only this time plugged in. It rides the electric surge for three minutes, and then fades into an ether that’ll part to let your hand through as you reach to try and stop them from going. Guess you’ll just have to play the record again. Bill Meyer

yet futuristic in the extreme, it appears now as the template for retro-fetishists like Stereolab and Black Moth Super Rainbow. Farad demonstrates how a device like the vocoder could be used to lend coherence to the most diverse musical material; this striking invention has had a long afterlife in genres that otherwise have little or nothing to do with each other. Like Ken Russell, the British director of Tommy, Haack turned to psychedelia less for its countercultural value than as a medium for his expressive, baroque vision of human life. Electric Lucifer, represented on Farad by three songs, is necessarily a masterpiece of its genre, it being the only one of its kind: an avant-garde children’s concept album based on the dichotomy of Heaven/ Hell and the all-conquering force of Powerlove. Farad also collects three tracks from Electric Lucifer Book II, the unreleased 1979 followup. The selections from Together (1971) are in an entirely different vein, innocuous but enjoyable folk-pop bolstered by the synthetic likenesses of acoustic guitar and banjo. Haackula saw the inventor in a darker vein, and Bite (1981) was released with cleaned-up versions of its often vulgar and cynical lyrics; of these tracks, “Program Me” is by far the most spectacular, a hypnotic hymn to the machine age whose vocal duties are shared by 13-year-old Ed Harvey. The compilation finishes with “Party Machine” (1982), Haack’s proto-hip-hop collaboration with Russell Simmons and a perennial dance favorite. While none of this is new per se, Farad does unearth two singles I was previously unfamiliar with: “Rita” (1975), a fun tune utilizing the simple rhythms and chord progressions of garage rock, and “The King” (1982), a swaggering dirge whose heavy vocoder almost bypasses lyrics entirely to become a pure wash of sound smeared across Haack’s synthetic bass line and drum machine. Even if most of his lyrics remain unintelligible, the composer might remind us that it’s merely the devil who resides in the details. Seth Watter

Bruce Haack

Mary Halvorson Quintet

Farad: The Electric Voice Stones Throw CD

Although the first vocoder was patented in 1939 by Bell Labs’ Homer Dudley, it wasn’t until 1970 that the device was introduced to a mass audience by Wendy Carlos and Robert Moog on the soundtrack to Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange. Bruce Haack’s vocoder was of his own touch-based design, and he named it ‘Farad’ after 19th-century physicist Michael Faraday. He’s long been a cult hero, but the past several years have seen an official resuscitation of Haack’s music in the form of reissues and compilations; Australia’s Omni Recording Corporation recently released Electric Lucifer (1970/2007) and the previously unissued Haackula (1978/2008) on CD, lovingly remastered and historically framed for posterity. Stones Throw, known for releases by the likes of Madlib, J. Dilla and Dam-Funk, has tossed its hat into the Haack arena with Farad: The Electric Voice, a collection of vocoder-based recordings made between 1970 and 1982.

Haack’s music was practically made to be forgotten and rediscovered; catchy 60 | SIGNAL to NOISE #60 WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM

Saturn Sings Firehouse 12 CD

Tomas Fujiwara & The Hook Up Actionspeak 482 Music CD

Ingrid Laubrock Anti-House Intakt CD

Ches Smith & These Arches Finally Out of My Hands Skirl CD

Guitarist Mary Halvorson’s readily identifiable guitar work explores the nexus of jazz tonalities, skewed harmonics, jangling distortion, and free-form play. There’s her work with Anthony Braxton, various groups with Taylor Ho Bynum, her duo with Jessica Pavone, the collective trios MAP and Crackleknob, the skronk rock group People, and various groups with musicians like Tim Berne, Tom Rainey, and Marc Ribot, not to mention her own group with drummer

Ches Smith and bassist John Hébert.

Here’s four new releases featuring Halvorson as both leader and collaborator.

Saturn Sings is the follow-up to Dragon’s Head, Halvorson’s striking debut as a leader. This time out, her trio with Smith and Hébert is augmented with Jonathan Finlayson’s trumpet and Jon Irabagon’s alto sax.

Halvorson takes a polyglot approach to writing, name-checking influences as diverse as Clifford Brown, Sam Cooke, Monk, Scriabin, Shostakovich, and Robert Wyatt while coming up with a sound that is totally her own, full of multi-hued sonorities and weblike lines. Her playing is getting more accomplished all the time, and it’s fully complemented by Smith’s elastic sense of time and Hébert’s buoyant cadences. Finlayson and Irabagon fit neatly into the group, too: Irabagon is warmly sonorous one moment then tumultuous and acidic the next, and Finlayson adds his own rounded richness and sharp post-bop phrasing.

Drummer Tomas Fujiwara’s debut Actionspeak includes Halvorson and Finlayson, plus bassist Danton Boller and tenor saxophonist Brian Settles.

Despite the similar instrumentation to Halvorson’s CD, the music is quite different, oriented toward free-bop. Fujiwara’s melodic approach and lissome drive (which owe much to his studies with drum legend Alan Dawson) are effectively complemented by Boller’s nimble, resonant bass playing, and Settles’ lush tone and legato phrasing play beautifully off of Finlayson’s fluid trumpet. Halvorson really sets things on fire here, skittering across the ensemble, letting resonant jazz chords hang in the air and then stomping out boisterous distortions that push the music in wholly new directions.

Despite the distinctiveness of each player’s voice, what comes through is a strong sense of ensemble. Fujiwara has already established himself as a vital player, particularly in Taylor Ho Bynum’s groups, but this release shows he’s an adept leader and canny composer as well.

Reed player Ingrid Laubrock’s new recording Anti-House brings her together with Halvorson, Hébert, drummer Tom Rainey, and pianist Kris Davis, for a mix of compositions and improvisations. Laubrock is a melodicist at heart, using her somewhat strident soprano and breathy, vibrato-rich tenor to draw out the thorny melodic arcs of her tunes or layer quavering tones into the free improvisations. Rainey’s sense of time and color is integral to the music: he flits across his kit, rubbing and bowing its surfaces, adding cymbal splashes, and tossing in a little glockenspiel— then does a hairpin turn and perfectly nails a rhythm. Halvorson is more reserved in this set, her off-kilter chords shading in the ensembles or caroming off of Laubrock and Davis, though she still pushes things with sections of fuzzed-out energy. It’s an intriguing confluence of strong players.

Ches Smith’s quartet has Halvorson, tenor player Tony Malaby, and (on accordion, organ, and electronics) Andrea Parkins. They caterwaul their way across seven compact originals whose see-sawing parts make the most of Malaby’s crying, husky reeds and Parkins’ switches from folk-like

harmonies to shuddering squalls.

Halvorson’s rock-tinged playing bucks across the free cross-rhythms, often filling in the bass role, while Smith drives the group with stuttering, stop/ start grooves. What’s particularly exciting here is how each musician behaves with resolute unpredictability, while still paying close attention to the group sound. Michael Rosenstein

Hauschka

Foreign Landscapes Fat Cat CD

German pianist/composer Volker Bertelmann, using the nom de plume Hauschka, has acquired a reputation for prepared-piano performances that make use of kitchen foil, ping pong balls, bottle tops, etc. However, his abilities as a composer take center stage on this recording, where only three pieces in the program are for solo piano. The remaining nine compositions are played by a twelvepiece chamber ensemble made up of musicians from San Francisco’s Magik Magik Orchestra. All music was inspired by Hauschka’s travels and his desire to find musical equivalents for memorable locations that he visited.

The three piano pieces all convey a thoughtful romanticism with strong intimations of Debussy and Satie.

“Mt. Hood” is the most striking, with some tasteful overdubbing and the use of dampened note clusters to create marimba-like timbres. Elsewhere though, the piano is just part of the ensemble and is often inaudible or half-hidden. The ensemble pieces are uniformly excellent examples of classical chamber music, with winds and strings pairing-off contrapuntally.

The vocabulary could be described as a kind of casual minimalism—not as doctrinaire as a typical Philip Glass piece, but still within that general framework. Other points of comparison might be the work of Michael Nyman, Gavin Bryars or even some of Terry Riley’s string writing.

The moody, astringent sonorities of “Iron Shoes,” “Madeira” and “Trost” also recall the late romanticism of Hindemith, Schoenberg and Reger, although “Trost” is unique in its total avoidance of the minimalist pulse.

Tempos are nicely mixed throughout the program, alternating between languid and sprightly. Understatement is the watchword; nothing will grab the listener by the scruff of the neck. This is music for active, civilized contemplation—and none the worse for that. Bill Tilland

Erdem Helvacioglu Per Boysen Sub City 2064

rhythms of “Metal Sky” gird spacious guitar lines, while on “Legends of Lost Land” a wailing sax evokes a sense of loss. The action picks up on “Reef Edge Race,” which has the same kind of manic swagger as “Goin’ Out West” from Tom Waits’ Bone Machine. Washes of electronic sound build up the intensity of “Pump Five Accident.” There’s a timeless feel to the gentle rhythms of “Harvesting Alga,” and the gorgeous Middle Eastern melody of “Physalia Physalis” connects the imaginary future landscape to the huzzun, or melancholy, of Helvacioglu’s home city, Istanbul.

The album concludes on a somewhat more optimistic note, the sounds and rhythms becoming less mechanical in texture: on “New Prospects” it’s as if the guitar lines are straining to free themselves from the oppression of the underwater environment, leading into the pastoral of “Future Wide Open.” If you’re a fan of electronic compositions with forward-moving narrative elements, you’ll want to check this out. Mike Chamberlain

iNK oN pAPER iNK oN pAPER High Mayhem CD

Hailing from the surprisingly varied scene of Santa Fe, New Mexico, iNK oN pAPER’s Milton Villarrubia III and Carlos Santistevan strip down, mash up and rumble their way through a menu of trim, focused duets on their debut CD as a duo. As if drum ’n’ bass took a detour through an electro-acoustic free-punk Jucifer, the pieces hint at chaos but slyly adhere to unexpected structures. Villarrubia III’s warm and crisp drum sound is an effective foil for Santistevan’s roiling, urgent bass, and the nuanced recording meticulously captures the duo’s raw immediacy. The set launches with the no-nonsense “17 Hits,” precisely what the title indicates: 17 unison non-metrical slams, followed by a dense flurry of improvisation, with the 17 hits returning periodically as a spine to hold the beast together.

The odd meter “Sid-mars” features a sinewy 31-beat line and some plaintive Alan Silva-style bow work from Santistevan. The duo mixes willingness to take improvisational risks with surprising compositional elements, like Villarrubia’s wandering street-beat and Santistevan’s aggressive bowed bass on “Salt A&B.” Though these brief tracks leave room for roiling, grungy buzz and explosive gestures, each piece ultimately has the feel of a self-contained composition.

Peter Breslin

Instant Coffee!

Instant Coffee!

BMMI CD

Sub City 2064, the soundtrack for an imaginary horror sci-fi film set in an underwater world 50 years in the future, is a long-distance collaboration between two renowned sound artists, Istanbul’s Erdem Helvacioglu and Stockholm’s Per Boysen. Using guitars, saxes, live looping and interactive electronics, the two create pulsing soundscapes that throb with foreboding. Dynamo hum, the crackling of sparks, and metal-on-metal scrapes suffuse the opening track, “Radiation Patrol.” The Krautrock

Alga Marghen LP

Given this group’s name, one might expect their self-titled debut to be a full pot of caffeinated clamor, served piping hot. Instead, the trio concoct a murkier brew, with a flavor all its own. Instant Coffee! is Baltimore noisenik Jason Willett, bassist Lisle Ellis, and (Martin) M.C. Schmidt, otherwise known as half of the mad scientist duo Matmos. The product of their union is a series of confabs in inscrutable dialects, six improvised idiosyncrasies cobbled into a twisted

whole. The trio take up a smorgasbord of instruments, with Willett’s first credit on rubber band, and Schmidt augmenting his electronics with what he colorfully describes as junk cymbal, crappy flutes, and a plastic bag. Ellis isn’t left out of the fun: his bass can be processed past the point of recognition, becoming another mystery voice in Instant Coffee!’s curious blend.

Electronic emissions rub elbows with acoustic manipulations of everyday materials, though despite the platter’s kitchen-sink clatter, the trio don’t rely on all-out cacophony. Tracks tend to evolve slowly, all the better for the album’s sense of mystery, sprouting unexpected limbs and folding in upon themselves with no apparent hurry. Only “Clumsy Dumpster” is a proper studio rearrangement, and while the rest of the tracks been edited here and there, no one’s going to see the scars beneath the album’s bumpy terrain. Rhythms come and go, the fragments and stunted sections never insistent enough to pull the rest of the music into step. Beauty is birthed and subsequently spoiled, silliness sinks under the heft of brooding darkness, and the only constant is the unpredictability of what might come next. Like too many cups of the band’s namesake, this album might be bad for the nerves, or for others, an irresistible fix. Adam Strohm

Jon Irabagon with Barry Altschul Foxy

Hot Cup CD

Anders Svanoe Jon Irabagon Duets

self-released CD

Saxophonist Jon Irabagon is getting some well-deserved attention these days, whether as a member of Mostly Other People Do the Killing, in mainstream settings like his work with Kenny Barron and Victor Lewis, as leader of his group Outright!, or as a member of a host of other projects.

Foxy is Irabagon’s fourth as a leader and from the initial fade-in to full-tilt blowing, the reed player and his triomates charge through an expansive blowing session with nods to multiple areas of the jazz tradition. As with MOPDTK’s releases, the cover of this one is a tongue-in-cheek take-off on a classic jazz album. This time, it’s Sonny Rollins’ Way Out West, trading a coy bikini-clad model and blow-up cactus for Rollins’ gunslinger stance. There’s a clear nod to Rollins’ tune “Doxy,” the band taking off on the 16-bar riff and blasting through 78-minutes of constantly morphing refractions of the theme. Don’t be fooled by the CD cover, which lists 12 cuts with names like “Proxy,” “Chicken Poxy,” “Epoxy,” and even “Foxy [Radio Edit]”; this is one long take with Irabagon’s tenor bobbing and weaving with pugilistic intensity, locked in to the thundering wave of bassist Peter Brendler and drummer Barry Altschul.

The drummer is rarely heard from these days, but he roars along in full form here, calling up memories of his potent work with Sam Rivers. Brendler calls up a strapping intensity as well, rumbling fiercely and vaulting his way across the bounding polyrhythms.

WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #60 | 61

Irabagon freely weaves in bop-like phrasing, elliptical quotes, rambunctious tough-tenor honks and brays, and asymmetrical swing, never flagging for a minute until the final abrupt cut, as if the tape ran out mid-phrase.

This one fully captures the tenor trio tradition while carving out a sound of its own.

Irabagon’s Duets with multi-reed player Anders Svanoe is a quite different affair. Svanoe studied with Frank Morgan in the mid-’90s and has worked with Roscoe Mitchell for the last decade. Mitchell’s structuralism comes through on this paring of Svanoe’s alto, tenor, and bari with Irabagon’s tenor over the course of composed and freely improvised pieces. Svanoe explains that “the entire focus of the record was to create an improvisational situation where the two of us could play as freely as possible within a somewhat rigid structure.” Svanoe’s pieces use angular themes and contrapuntal forms which encourage the musicians to toss lines back and forth, their interplay as dense as latticework. Irabagon’s single piece here is a labyrinthine structure that finds the two moving in and out of unison themes, building repeatedly to tag-team intensity. The free improvisations are sometimes strident but still avoid total abstraction. Taken together, these two CDs reveal a few more facets of Irabagon’s wonderfully unpredictable personality and voice.

Michael Rosenstein

Ahmad Jamal

The Complete Ahmad Jamal Trio Argo Sessions 1956-1962 Mosaic CD x 9

There’s always something uplifting about Ahmad Jamal’s pianism.

Playing with Art Tatum’s staggering virtuosity but avoiding repetition, he approaches the keyboard with mindboggling ease and consummate skill; each gesture brims with the excitement of a sudden dynamic shift, an accent that brings an unpredictable moment of what I’ll call controlled abandon. The trio sessions that make up this 9-CD set typify his breezily pithy approach perfectly, bringing together some of his finest and most beloved sides in an excellent and wonderful-sounding package befitting Mosaic’s excellent reputation.

By the time of the first sessions for the Chess-owned Argo label, Jamal had fully formed the style introduced on his 1951 drummerless trio sessions for Okeh. Those formative dates sometimes included bassist Israel Crosby, who would go on to play an important role in the 1956-1962 albums. By the time of the first sessions in the Mosaic set, from September of 1956, Crosby had been joined by drummer Walter Perkins, who would then be replaced

by Vernel Fournier; this trio became the house band at Chicago’s Pershing hotel, where the ubiquitous But Not for Me LP, containing the surprise hit “Poinciana,” was recorded in January of 1958. The trio’s work came to a halt when Israel Crosby died in 1962, the last session in this set coming from January of that year. While this trio alone comprises most of the sessions, they’re augmented by a beautifully ar62 | SIGNAL to NOISE #60 WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM

ranged string section for a 1959 New York recording, a precursor for work that Jamal would wax with larger ensembles some ten years later.

The music is fantastic throughout, but just as revelatory is the sound. This is down to engineer extraordinaire Malcolm Addey, who had to perform miracles of restoration on some of this material. The first session in particular (Count ’em 88) existed only in rechanneled stereo taken from a vinyl master, which is how I initially became familiar with the music. It was Addey’s job to remedy the situation, which he did with excellent results by creating a mono restoration. Music that was previously diffuse is rendered with startling clarity, making the session listenable for the first time. The rest of the set sounds just as good, each recording presented in fuller, deeper sound than I’d heard before. All of the hair-pin dynamic contrasts are emphasized, and each instrument’s sound has taken on welcome heft.

The liners, by drummer Kenny Washington, speak to Jamal’s dissatisfaction with many reissues of his work, so I can imagine his pleasure at hearing his music restored so expertly.

Along with Washington’s incisive notes, we are treated to a long and informative interview with Jamal, rounding out one of Mosaic’s finest packages. It was about time that some of Jamal’s most important work received such a reissue, and as with Bill Evans’ Riverside recordings of the same period, it should have pride of place on any serious collector’s shelf.

Marc Medwin

Philip Jeck

An Ark for the Listener Touch CD

What’s an artist to do when events knock out one of the cornerstone notions of his work? In Philip Jeck’s work old turntables and scratchy records have served as an apt vehicle for contemplations upon decay and the passage of time. But now that vinyl’s come back, what can he say about it? Turns out everything he’s done has prepared him for the next phase, which is to engage more directly with mortality and loss. The title is taken from “The Wreck of the Deutschland,” Hopkins’ poem about the death at sea of five exiled German nuns, and seven of the album’s nine tracks work as a suite that takes you through the sad events that led up to their encounter with their maker.

Although the material is all sourced from concerts that Jeck performed in his usual way, by playing looped and processed fragments from a crate of records and augmenting them with a touch of keyboard or bass, their vinyl origin is unusually obscured and the usually omnipresent crackle nearly absent. Instead of discrete passages, he seems to be working with sounds that feel hollowed out and ephemeral, except for the moments when they totally overwhelm you. Jeck’s music has often sounded tragic in the way that losing something from your youth feels like a crushing blow, but when it comes to representing actual death, quiet and absence seem more appropriate.

The two pieces appended at the end are mixes of material from the

excellent vinyl-only album Suite: Live in Liverpool, and they sound much more of a piece with his earlier work.

Pre-formed melodies bob gently by, buoyed up by surface noise. “All That’s Allowed” has a stillness that resonates with the rest of the album, while “Chime, Chime (re-rung)” finishes on a brighter, almost frothy note that makes me think that the morning after the ship sank, the whitecaps that danced over the nuns’ submerged bodies probably looked quite lovely.

Bill Meyer

Bobby Jackson

The Café Extra-Ordinaire Story Jazzman CD

This disc is the sole recorded fruit to come from the all-but-forgotten Minneapolis jazz club owned by composer, bassist and pianist Bobby Jackson, a venue that flourished between 1966 and the early 1970s.

In fact, the liner notes don’t even deal with the music heard here, but instead tell the story of how Jackson came to open the Café Extra-Ordinaire and how said club housed some perhaps sadly little-known Minnesota players, who often backed bigger names when they passed through (Freddie Hubbard, Elvin Jones and Rahsaan Roland Kirk played there).

An alcohol-free venue, it attracted a coffee house crowd and provided Jackson an outlet for promoting the music he truly cared about: metered, modal, small-band jazz influenced by the likes of Miles Davis’s classic mid1960s quintet, Kirk, and Elvin Jones’ post-Trane groups. While Jackson appeared willing to buck burgeoning rock trends by even opening such a venue, he also turned down a chance to book Sun Ra, figuring Ra was too out and, as a result, not likely to draw patrons. However, even many mainstream jazz players found themselves on the margins as the music’s audience decreased in the mid-1960s.

The tracks heard here, all anchored

by Jackson’s bass while a flurry of pianists, drummers and horn players come and go, are the solid work of a group of unknowns paying something of an homage to the music’s past, while creating music definitely worth the reissue. There’s nothing groundbreaking on the disc; Hubbard, Davis and others had already long since fertilized the improv soil with this type of sometimes skeletal, post-bop groove. Yet there’s no denying this

music’s quality. Having local musicians play all-original compositions of this caliber would do any mid-sized city proud. The soloing, typically by trumpeter Sam Bivens, tenor player Morris Wilson and whoever was at the keyboard, is at once tight and buoyant. Jackson’s own “Peepin’,” a measured, introspective tune not unlike some of Wayne Shorter’s better compositions, is simply beautiful. It’s too bad that the music on this disc, number seven in Jazzman’s “Holy Grail” series, wasn’t heard by a wider audience when it initially appeared in 1977. Jackson took a huge financial risk opening such a club, and sadly, a lack of enthusiasm for the kind of jazz he wanted to bring in ultimately proved the Extra-Ordinaire’s undoing.

Yet, Jackson and the musicians his club nurtured finally get a proper hearing with this reissue. Bruce Miller

Thomas Koner Nunatak / Teimo / Permafrost Type CD x 3

Listening to this reissue of Thomas Koner’s first three albums raises the question: Why is this music labeled “Dark Ambient”? How can such luminous constructions be pigeonholed in such a narrow box? Should we call Roland Kayn’s music dark, or Ligeti’s “Lux Eterna”? Such questions aside, these are albums brimming with invention, shedding light on Koner’s journey toward the vast, sweeping gestures by which we know him today.

Released in 1990, Nunatak now sounds positively pointillistic, albeit drenched in reverb. It’s pervaded by a sense of disjunct melody, events unfolding in brief bursts throughout the fairly concise tracks. Hard-edged gong-forged percussives alternate with soft chromatic hoots and low rumbles as the craggy landscape emerges. By 1992’s Teimo, the edges have softened, the lines blurred, and the long-form drones are beginning to manifest themselves in what are still fairly brief sonic excursions. There are breathtaking moments of minor tonality flowering from subterranean utterances that never seem jarring. In fact, each moment progressing to the next somehow sounds as if it could be no other way, so natural (another loaded term?) is each transition.

Koner’s sense of time becomes more elastic on his sophomore effort: duration is rendered nearly meaningless

as longer forms built on simultaneities are employed.

With Permafrost comes unity. All of the first two albums’ elements are present, or rather, their aftertones are present. They’ve been incorporated into a series of multivalent soundscapes that are not at all well-served by the term “drone.” Lows dissolve, supplanted by gorgeously crystalline highs as one long slow fade leads to another, forming pools of liquid stone.

Koner himself is supposed to have remastered these recordings, though I have not heard the originals. If this important set proves anything, it’s that we need better descriptors for such music, which relies as much on timbre as on pitch. Marc Medwin

Dave Liebman Big Band As Always Mama CD

Richie Beirach Dave Liebman Frankfurt Radio Bigband Quest for Freedom Sunnyside CD

Contact

Five on One Pirouet CD

One big band date from a bunch of New York heavies, another by an ace German outfit: both prove excellent contexts for Dave Liebman, the charts expanding in different ways upon the buzzing intensity and winding lyricism of the saxophonist’s playing.

Liebman’s own big band, under the directorship of Gunnar Mossblad, is responsible for As Always, a set of six Liebman originals arranged by various hands. The materials range from his early days with Elvin Jones and Quest to the recent tone-poem “Philippe Under the Green Bridge.”

The ensemble feel benefits strongly from the relaxed empathy of the rhythm section, which is Liebman’s current working group (Vic Juris, Tony Marino, Marko Marcinko)—check out “Turn It Around,” for instance, where Juris gets all twangy over the goofy accordion-driven rockabilly riff.

Liebman sticks to soprano throughout (adding wooden flute on the exotica number “Anubis”), and it’s a particular pleasure when the arrangements set his profoundly human outcry in dialogue with Charles Pillow’s oboe, which is equally sinuous and high-

pitched but altogether more mysterious. Lovely music.

It’s pipped, though, by Quest for Freedom, which potently renews the classic Liebman/Richie Beirach partnership. The teetering, self-consuming drama of the opener “Pendulum” is worth the price of admission alone: the pianist’s high-wire dance burns bright before Liebman’s woolly soprano rips into the music’s fabric and things get really crazy, the arrangement shaking apart into Cubist fragments. Jim McNeely’s arranging is absolutely killer throughout the CD, seizing on a particularly strong batch of Liebman tunes (chromatically oblique ballads and tone-poems, for the most part) and turning them into shapeshifting mixtures of rhapsody and heightened ambiguity. “Jung” is a whole sensory universe unto itself—the kind of jazz a Symbolist could dig—while “WTC” is a riveting 9/11 memorial: in one sense a fairly literal tone-poem plotting the course of that day (complete with dissonant orchestral shock waves and untethered free blowing), but it’s a lot subtler than that might sound, thoughtfully exploring the larger sense of a world being unmade. “The Sky’s the Limit” is the only McNeely original here, and it’s a stunner: the opening is bogglingly dense in the manner of 1950s George Russell, and as the music shifts towards streamlined modal blowing the writing keeps turning fresh corners: creamy close-voiced washes behind Liebman, Latinesque crags and peaks jutting into Beirach’s solo spot, and much more.

The quintet date by Contact (Liebman, John Abercrombie, Marc Copland, Drew Gress, Billy Hart) is a relatively informal supergroup affair, benefitting from the long-standing musical relationships between all five players even though this is not itself a working group. Despite the sympathy between the musicians, it’s a slightly divergent mix of personalities and flavours. Liebman’s passionately swooping playing is smoothed-out a bit on this occasion but still contrasts with the silken textures from Copland and Abercrombie (who glide along a little too comfortably for this reviewer at times). Gress and Hart lay provocative rhythms underneath, in any case, and though occasionally things don’t gel (awkward rhythmic changeups in the middle of “Sendup,” the all-over-theplace reading of “You and the Night and the Music”), more usually they hit the right note: a mix of relaxed

WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #60 | 63

support and the occasional pointed divergence from the music’s flow.

Gress’s two tunes are the simplest ones, really just mood pieces, but bring out some of the best playing here: “Like It Never Was” is the best kind of downer groove, a slow sashay into a deep-blue funk, and “My Refrain” is a steady chordal ferment that gives Hart plenty of scope for circling/backtracking games-play.

Nate Dorward

John McNeil Bill McHenry

Chill Morn He Climb Jenny Sunnyside CD

Rich Halley Quartet with Bobby Bradford Live at the Penofin Jazz Festival Pine Eagle CD

Dennis González's Yells at Eels with Louis Moholo-Moholo Cape of Storms Ayler CD

Three new releases feature some of the strongest trumpet/cornet players working in jazz, exploring and reinvigorating the traditions of free-bop and beyond, from cool to incendiary.

Trumpet player John McNeil is an overlooked master, both as a musician and long-time faculty member at the New England Conservatory of Music. McNeil has had an ongoing fascination with reworking the music of the late ’50s, whether digging into the “West Coast Cool” of Russ Freeman and Gerry Mulligan or breathing new life into tunes by Wilbur Harden or Thad Jones. He’s found a particularly sympathetic partner in up-and-coming tenor player Bill McHenry whose thoughtful muscularity highlights the understated agility of McNeil’s playing. This recording captures a live date at the Cornelia Street Café with bassist Joe Martin and drummer Jochen Rueckert. Kicking off with “Moonlight in Vermont” is a chancy proposition—is it possible to find life in a hoary number like this? But the four dive in and make it their own, building from a musing flutter, mining the soulful melody, and stretching the piece toward freedom without straying from the lyrical underpinnings. They push against the lyrical rumba rhythms of Freeman’s “Maid in Mexico” without losing its intrinsic flow, while the Latin-tinged “Carioca” is delivered with blazing intensity. Martin and Rueckert are the perfect rhythm section for these two, anchoring the music without locking things in, darting across speed-bop changes and stoking the simmering ballads. McNeil and McHenry trade barbs throughout, electrifying the set with sparkling interplay. Here’s another winner for this group and one that will hopefully provide them with some well-deserved visibility.

Tenor player Rich Halley has been a vital part of the Oregon jazz scene for the past three decades as leader, collaborator, and founder of Oregon’s Creative Music Guild. Here, his working trio with bassist Clyde Reed and drummer Carson Halley is joined by frequent collaborator Bobby Bradford on cornet. Bradford, of course, is a 64 | SIGNAL to NOISE #60 WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM

wizard in these sorts of settings, having honed his music in the company of Ornette Coleman and John Carter, and his anthemic attack and dancing solos are as vibrant as ever, complementing Halley’s gruff sound. The saxophonist’s brawny heft and insideoutside vigor are essential in driving the music, and Reed and Carson Halley grab the simple vamps and crank them. There’s an elemental directness to the playing here: the four musicians romp across Halley’s themes, spin off on free flights and then circle back in for charged contrapuntal exchanges.

A looseness pervades the set, but the four never let things ramble, delivering a live set of free bop at its finest.

Finally, there’s intrepid trumpeter/ cornetist Dennis González and Yells at Eels, his collective group with sons Aaron and Stefan and a revolving roster of guests. This time out, the three are joined by New Orleans tenor player Tim Green and guest drummer Louis Moholo-Moholo, whom the elder González played with back in the late ’80s. While the leader’s tart tone and mellifluous phrasing are central to this music, it is truly a collective effort. The set flows between various solo segments for all the members, sub-groupings, and full-bore collective playing. With Moholo-Moholo aboard, Stefan González spends a lot of his time on mallet instruments and percussion: on “Document for Walt Dickerson,” for instance, the metallic sheen of the vibes accentuates the earthy trumpet and Aaron González’s full-bodied, booming bass. Dennis González plays with a soulful free lyricism full of wistful smears and muted cries, taking the simple themes and pushing them to stirring heights, and he also enriches the textures by doubling on percussion. Yells at Eels have developed into a heady collective unit and these sessions with Green and Moholo-Moholo are another in a string of strong releases by the group.

Michael Rosenstein

Merzbow

Live at Henie Onstad Art Centre Prisma CD

It takes about fifteen minutes, but the arrival of total bliss on Merzbow’s Live at Henie Onstad Art Centre comes exactly when you’d expect it to: amid total audio bedlam. Wending through the sheets of static, small-percussion battery and shrieks-from-electronicsgraveyards are hypnotic, even pleasant oscillating hummmmmmmms. The beauty and noise raise each other up: it’s an aurora borealis over a battlefield, translated into the language of laptops, a synthesizer, homemade blunt objects and lots of effects pedals. Merzbow (aka Masami Akita) in this sort of mode is an exciting prospect, but so is the old-school, all-cylinders-go power electronics that make up the other stretches of this single, uncut track.

Without belaboring all the musical metaphors for Armageddon, terror, etc., it can be said simply that the peaceful vegan—who’s now in his mid-50s (!)—hasn’t lost any of his fire. (For a full exposition of his slightly calmer, almost-melodic side, see his mind-blowing collaborations with Richard Pinhas.) Oh, and speak-

ing of old-school Merzbow, the October 11, 2009 performance that this disc captures was part of the “Kurt Schwitters in Norway” exhibition, which included in its repertoire a reconstruction of a room from Schwitters’ famous avant-architecture house Merzbau (“Merz house”).

Yep, that’s where Akita got the name. He got the chance to climb inside the installation for a photo, as seen in the insert—Merzbow inside Merzbau! The metaphor’s a fitting one, given the looking-inward-toone’s-roots on display in these 42 minutes. Nathan Turk

The Microscopic Septet

Friday the 13th: The Micros Play Monk Cuneiform CD

For much of his life, pianist and composer Thelonious Monk was regarded as an eccentric who wrote weird little tunes and played them badly. He was even an object of ridicule in some jazz circles, though he eventually became one of the iconic figures in modern music, his tunes challenging and inspiring countless musicians. Monk generally preferred solo performance or the standard jazz quartet, but it’s always a pleasure to hear his tunes arranged for larger ensembles, and the Microscopic Septet (a saxophone quartet with added piano, bass and drums) is ideally suited to reinterpret Monk’s catalog. Soprano saxophonist Philip Johnston and pianist Joel Forrester handle the arrangements expertly. Forrester in particular is a man who knows Monk and his music intimately: in the 1970s a chance encounter with the Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter led to a friendship with Monk during his twilight years.

The arrangements pay homage to the spirit of the compositions while stretching them in all kinds of fresh directions, breathing life into even the most familiar tunes: “Pannonica,” “Off Minor,” “Misterioso,” “Epistrophy.” The counterpoint is sharp and crackling, the solos are tight and economical, and the ensemble is adept at following all the melodies’ twists and turns. It’s really quite the musical package. If you like Monk’s music, jazz in general, or creative music of any sort, this CD should be in your collection. Bill Tilland

Nina Nastasia Outlaster FatCat CD

After recording four solo albums, Nina Nastasia gave equal billing to drummer Jim White on her 2007 record You Follow Me—an unusual juxtaposition of strong percussion with acoustic guitar and vocals.

Three years later, Nastasia is back with a different sort of collaboration, combining her folk rock with the elegant sounds of a chamber orchestra. Arranger Paul Bryan (who’s worked with Aimee Mann and others) adapted Nastasia’s songs for strings and woodwinds. Drummer Jay Bellerose has played with Nastasia before, but his work on this album is most reminiscent of the distinctive beats he has provided in the past for Sam Phillips. Jeff Parker of

Tortoise played guitar, and producer Steve Albini captured it all at his Electrical Audio studio in Chicago.

Outlaster masterfully mixes all of these elements—often shifting back and forth between strummed guitars and exquisite orchestration within the course of a single song. The strings and woodwinds bring out a wistful quality in Nastasia’s voice.

On many of these songs, beginning with the lovely opening lullaby, “Cry, Cry, Baby,” Nastasia’s understated vocals in the verses fly up into a higher register for the choruses. The remarkable “This Familiar Way” begins with little more than a whisper, before bursting out into a stringquartet tango. The closing track, “Outlaster,” is a pensive lament with a melody resembling an ancient sea shanty—and maritime lyrics to match. Describing a sailor, Nastasia sings: “At peace from drowning, far out he sings: ‘What can forever but misery bring?’” At this moment, the strings and drums are whispering, too—giving space for Nastasia to cry out quietly for the lost sailor. That delicate balance is what makes this album one of her best so far.

Robert Loerzel

naïve, bedsit beginnings and refine her musical vision. Bill Tilland

Charlemagne Palestine

Strumming Music: For Piano, Harpsichord & String Ensemble Sub Rosa CD x 3

Charlemagne Palestine grew up at once connected to, yet outside of, particular cultural and intellectual traditions. He sang with Jewish cantors who fled Nazi Germany and resettled in the US. He found his way to CalArts’ stash of Bosendorfer pianos in the early 1970s, winning free rein of them through his tremendous enthusiasm as a student studying there under Morton Subotnick. Yet his musical approach is influenced by his time spent as a carillon bell ringer in a New York City church. To this day he sees performance as ritual, and anyone who’s either attended a Palestine performance or read about one knows he surrounds himself with stuffed animals, smokes Indonesian cigarettes and drinks cognac during performances. Detractors may detect a whiff of eccentric showbiz in such things, but it’s worth remembering that for many years Palestine Silje Nes didn’t perform at all, preferring Opticks to concentrate on sculpture. His FatCat CD music, whether made on keyboards, bells, or motorcycles while cruising The wispy, frail voice of Norwegian around islands and approximating singer/composer Nes is not going to the sounds his motor makes with command much attention on its own, his voice, is about trance, slapping although it does have an unstudied the face of the cold, academic charm and natural intimacy. On her rigidity that needs to classify him. first bedsit recording, done famously And “Strumming Music,” the 1975 on a laptop with a built-in microphone, Nes’s vocals functioned largely performance of which was originally released on the Shandar label, is as musical texture. This new CD gives his best-known work. Though this them more prominence, and largely recording has been available on to good effect, but her real strength is compact disc in one form or another how she blends them with a plethora since 1995, Sub Rosa’s re-reissue of instruments (xylophone, keyboards, adds two other performances, one percussion, guitar, viola, concertina,

by Betsy Freeman on harpsichord flute, etc.) and simple electronic treatand another by musicians from the ments. Her compositional approach, San Francisco Conservatory and conas she describes it, is to take stock of ducted by Palestine, both recorded her musical resources and then emin 1977. ploy “basically anything I have lying The piece, which originally allowed around, adding random recordings the composer to play two notes of things, video clips, effects…” And repeatedly until their resonances when everything comes together, seemed to replace what was actuthe result is a trip into a musical fanally being played in a mad circular tasyland filled with odd but beguiling dance, changes considerably in Freemusical shapes and textures. man’s hands. With a harpsichord, The CD opens strongly with “The the overtones are seemingly absent.

Glass Harp”: Nes eases into the song The piece feels more rigorous, more and then, as a trance-like rhythm kicks pronounced and deliberate, but still in, she half-chants, half-sings the vointeresting in its own way. The vercal, supported by plaintive viola and a sion for strings loses its initial percusbrief patch of electric guitar shredding sive attack, but makes up for this in that suggests an incipient movement a sweeping intensity that builds and into shoegazer territory. “Symmetry of ebbs during the performance’s final Empty Space” is perhaps even more ten minutes. Yet it is Palestine’s own typical, with a simple little melody, 52-minute presentation, recorded in liquid water-drop percussion and delihis TriBeCa, NYC loft, that makes this cately strummed guitar. In general, set truly matter. His own attack, overthe most accessible tracks are those whelmingly intense, all-engulfing with gentle percussive momentum, and indifferent to time, insists on a a clear melody line and inventive listener’s complete surrender. Notes but restrained instrumental support. between notes begin to appear Other tracks, though, simply meander almost immediately, building slowly; from one musical fragment to the undercurrents hover at times and next without coalescing into anything then break away as the initial patsolid. And the music falls flat (literally) tern settles in, lowering the volume when the compositions place too before the next build. It is music that many demands upon Nes’s uncertain simply demands entering fully, and intonation and limited vocal range. it is no doubt one of minimalism’s If she wishes to continue developing high points. To truly hear it demands as a composer and musician, Nes will stillness, meditation and ultimately probably need to move beyond her WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM

an ability to deal on multiple levels.

The rewards of doing so are endless.

Bruce Miller

William Parker Organ Quartet

Uncle Joe's Spirit House Centering CD

Oliver Lake Organ Quartet Plan

Passin' Thru CD

The organ combo has never really caught fire in free jazz settings.

Sure, we’ve got Larry Young’s later recordings, Lester Bowie’s group with Amina Claudine Myers, some experiments by Sun Ra, Don Pullen and Dave Burrell, and more recently Michiel Braam’s Wurli Trio and the Decoy Trio; but for the most part the instrument’s been relegated to neo-fusion and retreads of ’60s soul jazz. So I’d hoped these two outings

by William Parker and Oliver Lake would light a fire under the tradition.

Parker’s entry has all the makings of a memorable joust with tradition with Cooper-Moore (for his debut recording on organ), Darryl Foster on tenor, and Gerald Cleaver on drums. The bassist has long-standing musical relationships with each of the players, particularly with CooperMoore from his In Order to Survive quartet. Parker dedicates the set to his elderly Aunt Carrie Lee and Uncle Joe, and the music harnesses the leader’s ear for simple, catchy heads to the shuffling grooves of soul-jazz. Rather than letting loose, the four maintain a relaxed simmer throughout. Sure, there are unexpected tempo shifts and the pulse has a supple freedom. CooperMoore throws in the odd curveball, playing with the basic song forms, from bossa nova to hymn to loping shuffles, and Darryl Foster is a solid tenor player, riding the music’s coursing momentum with a muscular tone and warm lyricism. Parker’s stalwart bass work provides a focal point for the ensemble while constantly pushing the flow of the improvisations. There’s a sense of nostalgia that pervades this set, and while the group digs in to Parker’s themes with earnestness, they seem reluctant to really let loose. One wonders what a more fiery reed player like Sabir Mateen might bring to the tunes.

Oliver Lake’s organ date finds him in the company of Jared Gold on Hammond B3, trumpeter Freddie Hendrix, and drummer Johnathan Blake, all of whom have solid postbop credentials. Things charge out of the gate with “Plan,” one of Lake’s Dolphy-like themes, and he quickly sails into some incendiary blowing over the churning groove. But from there, this heads into a melding of free-bop and gamboling, soulful strut. There are some open-form experiments where the four parry flurries and smeared phrases back and forth, but the group sounds most assured when navigating more linear territory. Hendrix is a solid player with a warm, round tone which provides an effective foil for Lake’s biting attack. This may be an organ quartet, but Gold never overplays, instead pushing at the edges of things with oblique phrasing and an angular SIGNAL to NOISE #60 | 65

sense of time. Blake really provides a spark to the session, riding the pulse with a limber sense of swing.

There’s some catchy writing here, and Lake can still summon up the firebrand energy of his work in the ’70s, but like Parker’s session, this one pushes at the edges of tradition without ever quite charging ahead full steam. Michael Rosenstein

Peña Peña

Secret Stash CD + DVD

Secret Stash’s Eric Foss has claimed of Afro-Peruvian music, “hardly anyone outside of Peru is familiar with it.”

Perhaps this is so, but it wouldn’t be the fault of the Rough Guide, which released a collection of sounds from the country’s rich coast, nor of David Byrne, whose Luaka Bop label released a superb album of vintage and contemporary Afro-Peruvian tracks some 15 years ago. And then of course, there’s the Topic label’s Jarana’s Four Aces, which showcases 1930s-era vocal duels on the streets of Lima, many of them by African descendants and all of them featuring the cajon, the percussive box invented by those descendants of slaves who eventually settled on Peru’s coast.

Whatever the case, this collection is unique in that it’s practically a field document, recorded by Foss and label partner Cory Wong in Lima in April 2010. It features a small assemblage of acoustic guitarists, cajon players and occasional vocalists, and goes farther than anything else available outside the country’s borders in showing how alive this music still is. In fact, Wong, who studied with master guitarist Andrés Prado, is the featured six-string player on many of the tracks here, with Prado often playing as well. Like even the rawest of Brazilian samba, the music here is soft, warm and undeniably accessible. Occasional upright bass gives a few sessions a jazzy feel and the vocals of Colombian singer Sofia Rei Koutsovitis make a few tracks downright slick, though none of the music was recorded in what could be considered a proper studio. Peña comes with a DVD that allows Wong and Foss to explain how they managed to amass some 50 tracks in a mere week. It shows the pair record-shopping and gives plenty of time to the musicians, who are well aware of the importance of keeping the music breathing. Yet it’s perhaps misleading to focus solely on the music’s Afro-roots. The African influence here isn’t as overt as it is in, say, the Garifuna-inhabited Central American coastline, the Ewe-influenced drummers of Bahia, Brazil, and rural Cuba or the music of large swaths of the French, Dutch and British Caribbean, where rhythmic patterns suggesting a kinship with Dahomey may still be found. Peña is ultimately a marriage between an African population who were ultimately denied the drum by their slave masters, and the unavoidable Spanish dominance. Yet a track such as “El Mayoral” breaks into cajon-backed chant for the chorus, allowing West Africa, for a few seconds, to come to the fore. In that moment there’s a reminder of Africa’s influence, not only on the folk-based sounds of Lima, but also on so much of the Americas’ music. Bruce Miller

Richard Pinhas Metal / Crystal Cuneiform CD x 2

On this new double-disc release, guitarist Richard Pinhas moves further into noise metal territory, collaborating not only with Merzbow (as he did on Keio Line), but also with the members of noise band Wolf Eyes.

The roster is rounded out by longtime Pinhas collaborators Antoine Pagnotti (drums), Didier Batard (bass), Patrick Gauthier (mini-Moog) and Jerome Schmidt (electronics). On the opener, “Bi-Polarity,” Pinhas’s treated guitar produces wave after wave of dense, hypnotic scalar runs while Pagnotti and Batard lay down a solid rhythmic foundation. “Paranoia” is a more or less beatless equivalent, given over to an extended dose of drifting guitar harmonics. “Depression” and “Schizophrenia” are half-hour-long walls of sound, and it’s really impossible to do verbal justice to them, but suffice it to say that there’s a lot going on—looped guitar drones, clangorous chimes, metallic squealing, noise of all shapes and colors, a squirting sequencer pulse, bubbling arpeggios from Gauthier’s mini-Moog, sepulchral groans from Batard’s bass, Pagnotti’s free jazz percussive thrash. The only options for the besieged listener are a hasty retreat, or total immersion and surrender. These two pieces are reason enough for any experimental music enthusiast to add Metal/Crystal to their collection.

“Hysteria,” on disc 2, appears to be given over to Merzbow and Wolf Eyes, as there are no obvious guitar sounds present. Nonetheless, this is quality noisecore and will surely appeal to fans of the genre. A shorter bonus track, “Legend,” is by contrast a mixture of clean, overlapping drones harking back to Pinhas’ earlier experiments with “Metatronics,” his personal extension of Robert Fripp’s guitar-loop aesthetic. Although this may be old territory for Pinhas, it’s still more fully realized here than in earlier editions (better electronics, perhaps?), and it would be interesting to hear him revisiting this style in more depth on his next recording session.

Bill Tilland

Puma

Half Nelson Courtship Rune Grammefon CD

Following the lead of the Supersilent trio, the Norwegian power trio known as Puma integrates free jazz, noise rock and avant garde electronics to stunning effect on this, their first Rune Grammofon release. The opening track, “Bison Woven,” sets the stage with an aura of ominous dread. Restrained, delicate electric guitar pinging from Stian Westerhus is superimposed upon Oystein Moen’s cavernous synth drones. The title piece cranks up the intensity to epic proportions, with sputtering static, synth roars and creative fretboard flaying from Westerhus, who gradually increases intensity with rapid singlenote progressions, eventually adding harmonic overtones for a splendid wall of sound. Westerhus then ratchets up the drama further with bestial moans and howls, before everything finally eases to a close. Ace work here, too, from Moen and drummer

Gard Nilssen, flailing away at his kit and very much part of the texture of things. “Last Waltz” provides another example of Puma’s dynamic range. Westerhus’s dissonant but delicate high-register guitar blends with Moen’s watery synth patterns while Nilssen provides minimalist percussion in 3/4 time. It’s a genuinely beautiful piece, but is immediately followed by screaming guitar feedback and polyrhythmic thrashing, with Moen supplying an impressive variety of synth textures and noises, some very melodic and some not at all. The creativity and musical surprises continue throughout the program, ending with “Hachioji Silk Blues,” which starts serenely but then evolves into intense guitar shredding supported by dramatic organ chords. Within the free jazz/rock/noise genre, it’s typical for a band to fasten upon one or two compositional strategies and then put the (effects) pedals to the metal.

The excellence of Puma is found in the variety of compositional strategies employed and the emotional range of their music. Bill Tilland

Louis Sclavis Lost on the Way ECM CD

Louis Sclavis Craig Taborn Tom Rainey Eldorado Trio Clean Feed CD

Aki Takase Louis Sclavis Yokohama Intakt CD

Frenchman Louis Sclavis is one of the preeminent bass clarinetists in contemporary improvised music, an artist for whom it is the primary axe (though he also plays soprano saxophone and B-flat clarinet). He has been on the scene since the 1970s, initially working in the Workshop de Lyon, followed by an unrecorded stint in Chris McGregor’s Brotherhood of Breath. Though he began in free jazz, he’s since moved in other directions, seeking in his own work to blend Breton folk music, modern chamber music, rock and improvisation. That said, he’s certainly adept in more open contexts, as Eldorado Trio and Yokohama attest.

Lost on the Way is Sclavis’ sixth album for ECM and second to feature guitarist Maxime Delpierre. The quintet is fleshed out with electric bassist Olivier Lété, drummer François Merville, and saxophonist Matthieu Metzger across twelve originals, which are based on episodes from Homer’s Odyssey. There’s a calm seafaring lilt to “De Charybde en Scylla” that becomes more turbulent and contrapuntal as the reedmen navigate rhythmic eddies, brushy stomp and needling guitar and bass: Delpierre makes flinty digs at Sclavis’ woody orations, and the band hacks away at Metzger’s spindly soprano turn. Sclavis definitely has his own language on the bass clarinet: grandly eloquent, with a tenor-sax steeliness, building to glossolalia through thick, repeated statements. “Bain d’or,” like the opening “Charybde,” employs a Mediterranean-Brittany soprano/ alto call over delicate percussive skip

66 | SIGNAL to NOISE #60 WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM

and allows for brief leg-stretches from the string players. “Le Sommeil des Sirènes” at first seems darkly incidental, until delicate reed-bass lullabies weave together over guitar, drums and electronics, Delpierre exploding in gritty cackle before the end.

Several pretty, filmic compositions serve as interludes to the disc’s slinky avant-fusion of sinewy melodies and the chunky rhythms. Hopefully Lost on the Way is an indicator of things to come from this fine quintet.

The Eldorado Trio joins the reedman with two Americans, drummer Tom Rainey and pianist/keyboardist Craig Taborn. “Let It Drop” begins with a knotty Rainey salvo and moves through pecking volleys and broad strokes as the theme is introduced. Taborn is first out of the gates, pointillist and clustered; when Sclavis stretches out, piano and traps rustle and jab around him in a gutsy midrange fracas. “To Steve Lacy” finds Sclavis on soprano, his sound touching on the dedicatee’s delicate koans even though it’s also distinctly akin to his clarinet sound. Taborn and Rainey have developed a language of their own, a seamlessly pulsing giveand-take that occupies a busy microworld during Sclavis’ flights. Taborn’s opening solo on “La Visite” dives into a stark, roiling romanticism, laying the groundwork for a particularly deep and wrenching series of statements from Sclavis.

Yokohama is the first documented encounter between Sclavis and pianist Aki Takase, following in the footsteps of her ongoing work with German bass clarinetist Rudi Mahall.

The material here was composed for an arts festival commemorating the 150th anniversary of the opening of Yokohama Harbor. The pairing is extraordinarily spry, Takase jovially motoring through tone rows and dropping occasional clusters in the playful “Kawaraban” as Sclavis flutters and dives on the low horn. Winsome soprano flights, alternately crazed and sweet, are mated to brushy pianistic shoves and sparse, spiky aggregates on “Bella Lux.” Sclavis’ “Vol” is East European drive splaying out into rivulets and pools of action, Takase picking apart tempo and progression as the bass clarinet’s rhythmic bounce turns into abstract wheeze. Yokohama isn’t as unruly as Takase’s dates with Mahall, but she finds ways to open up Sclavis’ highly kinetic compositions, filling them with subtle abruptness and odd intervals. That said, she’s also a straightforwardly beautiful instrumentalist, as the gorgeous title track demonstrates. As both musicians are strong composers as well as improvisers, they’re always concerned with the particularities of structure and mood, respectful of grand statements while also mindful that the work is not cast in stone. Clifford Allen

Ravi Shankar

Nine Decades, Vol. 1: 1967-68 East Meets West CD

Fed up by the way his back catalog has been treated by various labels, Ravi Shankar has decided to do it himself. The titular nine decades refers to how long he’s been alive, and this inaugural release for his own label is an introductory dip into the man’s

personal archive that raises some questions about whether Shankar is really up to stewarding his own legacy. The bulk of the CD is given over to a 1968 performance of Shankar’s original “Raga Gangeshwari” that was recorded live on the banks of the Ganges River, a claim backed up by the water fowl that call out over the music’s opening minutes. For a first dip into the vaults, it feels distressingly middle-drawer. The problem isn’t with the music, which is superb; the sitarist sounds in control and on a roll throughout, completely in synch with tabla player Ustad Alla Rakha. But their scorching performance is marred by some galling tape dropouts and a distorted, too-hot recording. To make matters worse, one of the two remaining tracks is a twelve-minute collage of shamelessly worshipful commentary recorded by dazed audience members recorded as they exited a 1967 American concert. “It’s sort of like watching a God.” Please—a minute of this stuff might have made sense on the nightly news back in 1967, but 43 years after the fact, what is the point? Shankar would do well to hire a producer with a strong instinct for quality control before he puts out many more volumes. Bill Meyer

Sun City Girls Funeral Mariachi Abduction CD / LP

Funeral Mariachi is the last record that the Sun City Girls worked on before cancer took drummer Charles Gocher on February 19, 2007. A quick consultation of the calendar notes that three and a half years passed between his death and its release, and you can hear from the first track that the tapes didn’t spend all those months sitting in a can; the Bishop brothers clearly spent some time buffing and plumping this one up before they put it on the shelf. Until now the Sun City Girls have never bothered much with audiophile priorities or studio craft in general; in earlier times it would not be surprising to hear that they’d used the mastering services of some Indonesian CD-R pirate, either to save a buck, or just to go along on that particular ride. This is the first SCGs record to feature slick digital editing and tricks like recording a piano through a Leslie cabinet. Still, Funeral Mariachi (don’t put too much stock in the name; it was reportedly selected before Gocher’s final decline) stays true to their trickster spirit. Sure, the record’s a bit easier on the ears.

They indulge their most accessible modalities—you’ve got your Italian film-soundtrack atmospherics, hashden trip-outs, and more than the usual number of sharp Rick Bishop guitar licks and delightfully preening Alan Bishop Asian pop-starlet vocal turns. But they’re still ready to pull the rug out from under you. “Ben’s Radio” kicks the record off with a collage of pan-lingual babbling, a tart groove, and some honest-togoodness shredding that plays like a startlingly lucky spin of the shortwave radio dial. And stuck in the middle of side two (the LP came out a month before the CD, and this is definitely packaged and sequenced according to vinyl precepts) are a couple of tunes that take dark brooding and maudlin wistfulness so far you figure

they’re pulling your leg, just like when they sung about stringing up the preacher. Or were they? Are they? It wouldn’t be the Sun City Girls if they didn’t leave you wondering “what the fuck” about something. The card sharp may have gone out wearing a nice new coat, but he still lifted your wallet just before they closed the casket. Bill Meyer

Swans

My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky Young God CD / LP / DL

The legend of Michael Gira’s Swans is made of very powerful stuff. Formed in the early 1980s and extinguished— or, it would now seem, temporarily halted—in the mid-1990s, their early efforts in transcendence-throughdebasement, at maximum volume, transformed over time into acoustic eschatology, and then the holy scriptures of albums like Soundtracks to the Blind. Throughout, Gira’s devotion to the drone as accumulative force, as a way to channel the essence of existence to sonorous form, remained unbroken. Though the music is imposing at first, living inside Swans albums—the only real way to engage with the group—becomes purging, then welcoming, then glorious.

With this return to Swans comes great expectations—though with Gira, possibly the most dignified of modern artists, you know the motives are pure, the intent basically to re-engage with that sound. On My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky, he does it best on the more monstrous of tracks—the opening “No Worship/ No Thoughts,” for example, whose episodic structure allows for the glorious interchange of blocks of abraded sound so overwhelmingly luminous they pierce your cranium.

Any cynicism I had over the return of Swans was washed clean by my first encounter with My Father...—it simply felt right, good, true.

The best, most inspiring songs here are the most monolithic—“My Birth” lurches with threatening swagger; “Jim” sways mastodon-like as the group pounds its simple riff into dirt; the glottal nightmare of horns that closes “You Fucking People Make Me Sick” shears skin from bone. In contrast, Gira’s turns to more traditional songwriterly mores, as on “Reeling the Liars In,” are good enough, but seem a little out of place.

Perhaps My Father... is a transitional document, a readjustment to the all-consuming fire of Swans. But it’s a breath-taking album in toto, a glorious return. Jon Dale

Timeless Pulse Trio Timeless Pulse Trio Taige LP x 2

This ensemble, featuring experimental music veteran Pauline Oliveros, is normally a quintet; however, the group’s sound-world—lots of drones from Oliveros’s accordion, bowed cymbals, splashes of percussion, rattling, and good degree of playfulness—is still very much unchanged on this set, which was recorded by the trio of Oliveros and percussionists Jennifer Wilsey and George Marsh.

The music is quite often hushed, the players responding to each WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #60 | 67

other with clipped notes; there are occasional drawn-out tones from the accordion, under which the other two players respond with marimba or cymbal splashes. That said, there is variety. Spread across two LPs are 16 pieces, which allows for slight adjustments within their formalized take on unmetered improvisation.

Two versions of “Maxed Out” allow Marsh to display his affinity for Max Roach, pulling this album as close as it gets toward exuberance. A few tracks later, “Time/No Time” is a short meditation played on two gongs.

That this group came from Oliveros’s Deep Listening musical retreats, where sound is placed in a variety of reverberant settings from caves to cathedrals, is apparent. This kind of approach feeds off the performance space, allowing ambience a place in the music, or giving percussive sustain a spotlight. The trouble is, despite the fact that some of the pieces were recorded in the musicians’ homes, the music feels clinical. It exists in some joyless place between authentic field recording and classical composition.

Bruce Miller

Trio X

Live on Tour 2008 CIMPoL CD x 5

Trio X, consisting of saxophonist/brass man Joe McPhee, bassist Dominic Duval and drummer Jay Rosen, is one of the most artistically successful endeavors under the Cadence label umbrella (i.e. Cadence Jazz Records and CIMP). This five-disc set focuses on a 2008 tour, which just so happened to mark the group’s tenth anniversary

as a unit. The shows are not from marquee venues in major metropolitan centers; rather, the settings are college towns in New York, Michigan, Illinois, Indiana and Ohio. It’s passionate, no-BS, from-the-soul music that offers a compelling blend of thematic material and free expressionism. Although McPhee in particular is known for high-intensity playing, this is not the balls-out energy music that one might expect: Rosen frequently favors brushes over sticks, while Duval is robust yet graceful. On this particular tour, the calypso-tinged “Brownskin Girl” is the most frequent touchstone, though the group draws on many other tunes: the haunting “Motherless Child,” “Secret Love,” Curtis Mayfield’s anthemic “People Get Ready,” “Ol’ Man River,” and Monk’s “Well, You Needn’t” and “Round Midnight.”

It’s fascinating to hear the differences in how the group approaches the material each night. The Colgate session, for instance, is a generally contemplative outing, while the Edgefest appearance in Ann Arbor is fiery and fun. The University of Illinois performance is arguably the most compelling: McPhee focuses almost exclusively on tenor, aside from brass and soprano on the opening spiritual, “Krannert Welcome.” There’s ballistic blues on “Prairie Fire,” reflection on “Ol’ Man River,” Monkish bop on “You Need You Need Not” and a lovely serenity on “Secret Love.”

Though Trio X has been amply documented over the years, this economically priced collection offers a perfect opportunity for both the curious and the committed to savor the trio’s art in a wide variety of settings. Jay Collins

Uz Jsme Doma Caves / Jeskyne Cuneiform CD

Czechoslovakian rock group Uz Jsme Doma (idiomatically translated as “now I get it”) was formed in 1985, four years prior to the Czech revolution and liberation from Russian rule.

Its lineup has evolved over the years, but current leader Miroslav Wanek dates from 1986, and the group has maintained its essential direction and focus for the past 25 years. Current band members include Wanek on vocals, guitar and piano, Pepa Cervinka on bass and vocals, Adam Tomasek on trumpet and vocals and Tomas Paleta on drums and percussion. A fifth member, Martin Velisek, serves as the group’s visual artist and multimedia expert for live shows.

A fascinating variety of influences are at work in UJD’s music, but prior to any explication and dissection, it’s important to note that this group effing rawks!!! The CD has punch, drama, virtuosity, hooks—all the things that make for a dynamic listening experience. Anyone with a taste for RIO groups and other high-power ethnic rock groups such as Samla Mammas Manna, Etron Fou Leboublan, Manu Chao, Café Tacuba, Aterclopelados, etc., will find the music herein to be very, very appealing. The music is characterized by prominent use of trumpet, power riffing from the guitars, fierce drumming, complex melody lines and tight ensemble work. Perhaps the most obvious influence is the music of Frank Zappa. Vaclav Havel, Czechoslovakia’s first democratically elected president, famously appointed Zappa as his Special Ambassador to the West on Trade, Culture and Tourism, and Zappa’s albums were highly prized

by Czech dissidents in the late 1960s and 1970s and widely circulated throughout Czechoslovakia. Punk music is part of UJD’s heritage as well (they WERE legally banned from performing before the revolution) and the writing also makes prominent use of ethnic folk motifs. It’s all perfectly integrated—and highly recommended. Bill Tilland

Sharon Van Etten Epic

Ba Da Bing CD

As soon as the acoustic guitar strums the opening chords on the first track of Epic, it’s clear Sharon Van Etten is going for a bigger, less introspective sound on her second album. On her 2009 debut, Because I Was in Love, this Brooklyn-based singer-songwriter was low-key and somewhat lo-fi, performing understated songs in the plaintive style of old English folk rock.

On Epic, she moves closer to the mainstream, belting out strong melodies and writing catchy alt-country songs that wouldn’t sound out of place on a record by Neko Case or Gillian Welch. One can even imagine an adult-contemporary balladeer like Sarah McLachlan doing a cover of Van Etten’s song “Don’t Do It.” But despite using a full band to fill out her arrangements (including backing vocals by Meg Baird of Espers and Cat Martino and Jessica Larrabee of She Keeps Bees), she hasn’t abandoned the homemade charms of her earlier 68 | SIGNAL to NOISE #60 WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM

music. Rather than being polished studio concoctions, these recordings are more like high-fidelity live performances. On the song “DSharpG,” Van Etten intones her melody over a droning harmonium and a primitive drumbeat, sounding more like Nico than Neko. The breathy vibrations of the harmonium return on the album’s closing song, “Love More” (which has already been covered in concert

by Bon Iver and The National).

“You chained me to the wall like a dog,” she sings—a dark accusation delivered in a sorrowful tone. As the narrator of the song recounts receiving such abuse, she paradoxically concludes, “It made me love more.”

Like the rest of Epic, it’s bittersweet and beautiful. Robert Loerzel

Jozef Van Wissem Ex Patris

Important CD / DL / LP

Inscribed within the digipak of Ex Patris is a passage by Gilles Deleuze about the transgressive nature of repetition. Transgression and repetition are both essential to lutenist Jozef Van Wissem’s music. He has combined the palindromic structure of classical lute music with the tracing and retracing of more contemporary minimalist composition. And in the interest of rehabilitating his ancient instrument he has dragged the lute into some profane settings, such as playing duets with experimental and blues guitarists, and letting Maurizio Bianchi turn 500-year-old lute compositions into a black cloud of industrial sound. Here he makes nice without compromising his essential structural concerns. The tunes are as rigorously constructed as ever, composed of palindromes that step up and then back down, and are repeated with subtle variations throughout each piece. What’s different is how overtly pretty the figures are, and how he uses overdubbing to layer them so that the compositions open up like sped-up films of blossoming flowers.

While it has served Van Wissem’s proselytizing purpose to put the lute in unusual places, it also makes sense that at some point he would make a record this user-friendly. He’s done it, though, without compromise, and you would have to be unhealthily in love with your own bad-assedness to turn your back on music this lovely.

And to reach out even more, Van Wissem has presented this album three different ways. The 4-track LP looks and sounds gorgeous; the CD adds two extra tracks, and is mastered so richly that the non-turntableenabled population should not feel slighted; and if you want to check it out risk-free, he’s placed the whole album online (http://www.ubu.com/ sound/van-wissem.html). You have no excuse not to listen. Bill Meyer

Various Artists

Sixty Interpretations of Sixty Seconds by Sixty Solo Improvisers Apprise CD

David Sait is a Toronto-based improviser and organizer who specializes in playing the guzheng. He’s been responsible for a publication called Soundlist, an e-mail list of local music events. That interest in outreach

finds full creative form here in this literally-titled assemblage of sixtysecond improvised solos. The notion of sixty-second pieces as a form has been explored before, most notably in Elliott Sharp’s substantial State of the Union compilations beginning as an LP in 1982 and climaxing with vast two- (1996) and three-CD (2001) sets, but many of Sharp’s inclusions were formal compositions and bands.

Sait’s program is very different, more personal, less doctrinaire—there are pieces here that are less than a minute and some that are more. His reach is large, taking in improvisers from numerous countries and scenes and embracing a range of technologies and instruments. There are improvisers working in ethnic modes and pentatonics (like Araz Salek, a Canadian playing tar, and others from Japan, Ukraine, Australia and Spain) and traditional genres (American bluegrass banjo player Todd Taylor), and others using electronics, radio, feedback and turntables. Some present non-idiomatic performances on traditional instruments (trombonist Jeff Albert and the oboists Kyle Bruckmann and Paulo Chagas among them); others employ novel instruments, like the Austrian chairplayer Herbert Friedl and Johannes Berkman of Sweden who plays platform. There are people here who are well-known, at least by improvised music standards (Andrea Centazzo, Gino Robair, Paul Dunmall, John Butcher and Lawrence Casserley), but the range of reputation extends to some who are unfamiliar, at least to this writer (guitarist Leanid Narushevich from Belarus is new to me, as is American violinist Carmel Raz). There’s a strong Canadian contingent (including Michael Snow, John Oswald and Michael Keith), a stunning instant of almost absent trumpeting by Argentinian Leonel Kaplan, and a moment of tuneful keyboard and whistling by Italian Alessandro Alessandroni that is virtually definitive lounge music.

The most remarkable part of Sait’s achievement is the way he has combined his far-flung contributors into groups of six pieces, which at times feel like rounds. The result is virtually composition, whether by affinity of timbre, pitch, style or mood, or contrast alone. It focuses attention on issues of context and editing in ways that may surprise, as well as presenting some of the ways an improviser can interpret the idea of the minute.

As beautiful as some of the instants are, Sait’s striking sense of organization lends a kind of authorship to this diversity. Stuart Broomer

Various Artists

Viva Negativa! A Tribute to the New Blockaders Vol. 3 Important CD x 2

An Anthology of Noise and Electronic Music Vol. 6 Sub Rosa CD x 2

The sounds collected on these two double-CD compilations are severe, demanding and dividing; yet they kill any notion of the term “anti-music,” as much as the New Blockaders claimed to represent such a non-thing. In one thumbtack-andnail-saturated lump, the tracks on Viva

Negativa! are solid representatives of harsh noise’s extremes, but a focused aural wade through the sonic muck reveals layers of repetition and with it, grooves of a sort. Aside from the first few minutes of Controlled Bleeding’s “The Latest Hole in My Head,” Prurient’s “Majdanek Slaughterhouse,” and Idea Fire Company’s haunting “Les Heros de la Barricade Finale,” this is a speaker-cone-defying hourplus arm-lock takedown of grinding inner-ear murder. Yet sounds jell, storm surges lock in, while a listener who dares to hold on is rewarded with an awareness of just how much controlled logic this stuff has. It’s also a hell of an excuse to celebrate a variety of noise artists from Z’EV to The Haters, Daniel Menche to Keith Fullerton Whitman. Perhaps celebrating early ’80s industrial pioneers The New Blockaders is a mere excuse to get ugly, especially considering the NB had a sense of dada, of sustain and release, an ability to let up and leave space that most of the tracks here, if not the artists themselves, don’t have.

The Sub Rosa collection includes noisy dollops of its own, thanks to cuts by Hijokaidan, Torturing Nurse and Incapacitants, but hearing it after Viva Negativa! feels ultimately like a breath of crisp Himalayan foothill air after having panted through the labyrinthine streets of Darjeeling.

Henry Cowell’s “The Banshee” is a reminder that the true Godfather of noise, John Cage, had his influences as well, and the placid drone of Ultraphonist’s “How to Practice Scales” is soothing. Both Z’EV and Daniel Menche reappear from the Blockaders collection, but here Z’EV pours himself into metallic percussion in a manner not unlike Lê Quan Ninh and Menche deals with a sense of order and cohesion more in tune with his Body Melt LP than the track on the Important compilation. In this way, Sub Rosa’s anthology is the calm after Viva Negativa!’s storm. Bruce Miller

Various Artists

Salsa Explosion: The New York Salsa Revolution 1969-1979 Stunt / Fania CD

There’s little doubt that during the 1970s the Fania label defined the sound of Latin music in New York and beyond. Sometimes called “the Latin Motown,” Fania assembled a roster of artists in this period that reads like a who’s who of Latin performers, and Salsa Explosion gives a fine introduction to this array of talent, including tracks by Eddie Palmieri, Ray Barretto, Hector Lavoe, Louie Ramirez and Celia Cruz, as well as the Fania All Stars, the label’s own in-house supergroup. The late ’60s and ’70s were a particularly energized time for Latin music in New York. Charanga, boogaloo, R&B, strands of disco and funk, Cuban son, cumbia, and other styles were being woven together in different experimental combinations in a scene that was teeming with bands, singers, nightclubs and record shops. Fania was at the center of this ferment, fueling it and focusing it with a steady flow of album releases, including work by a young Panamanian songwriter named Ruben Blades. In fact Fania can be credited really with

forging the marketing niche of ‘salsa’ music, a generic, pan-Latin category encompassing many different styles and rhythms. The entire Fania output from the 1940s through the ’80s exceeds a staggering 4,000 albums.

The present collection is an initial offering in what promises to be a fruitful partnership between Fania and the UK-based Strut label. While there are no weak tracks on Salsa Explosion, there are several outstanding ones that call for special mention. There’s Willie Colon’s rendering of the Ghanaian children’s song “Che Che Cole” which, despite noticeable distortion in the recording of the horn section, is a thoroughly fun and propulsive version of this traditional West African number. Also, there is Mongo Santamaria’s “O Mi Shango,” taken from his 1976 album Sofrito. This track blends Latin and funk influences in a way that strikingly resembles Fela’s Afrobeat sound, making one wonder whether the great conguero wasn’t listening to the Nigerian superstar at that time.

The rest of the collection is filled out with selections from Sonora Poncena, the Joe Cuba Sextet, Ralfi Pagan, Tito Puente, Johnny Pacheco and others.

An overall very satisfying compilation, and a great start to what promises to be a major re-issue series of enduring Latin music. Alan Waters

Various Artists

The NYFA Collection: 25 Years of New York New Music Innova CD x 5

Anne Lebaron 1,2,3,4 Innova CD

Blob

Earphonious Swamphony Innova CD

Newman Taylor Baker Drum Suite Life Innova CD

Since the program’s inception in 1983, the New York State Council on the Arts has granted the New York Foundation for the Arts more than $26 million for fellowships in 16 disciplines to more than 4,000 New York artists. There’s nothing in The NYFA Collection that would make your brother-in-law say “They give grants for this?” Well, maybe a couple of things: Stefan Tcherepnin’s “Ouvretorture,” a wrecking ball of out-and-out electronic noise, and perhaps “Blob,” a gloriously amorphous mass of primal blurts and spasms. But that’s only a dozen or so minutes out of seven hours of music, spread over five discs, by a huge variety of New York composers and performers. The collection shades its way from electronica to jazz to chamber to symphonic to choral music, with gradations in between.

Yes, it’s a long trip, but not so strange. After listening to the whole shebang, it’s hard to shake that light-headed, 21st-century feeling— that when it comes to music, we’re fifth-generation landholders, subsub-sub-dividing strips of ancestral estates hewn from forest and rock by the Stravinskys, Stockhausens, Mileses, Coltranes and Colemans of the 20th century. Take the Joan Tower

piece that ends the NYFA set. It’s full of symphonic huffing and puffing that just doesn’t intimidate, especially after extremists like Shostakovich and Messiaen had their way with the modern orchestra. Other pieces in the set work from the “x-meets-y” formula that probably helps get you a grant the same way “soccer-meets-SouthAfrica” helps you get backing for a movie. Jeff Raheb’s “Zu Twa Szi,” for flute and guitar, blithely exhibits the light cultural window-shopping that often passes for a distinctive compositional voice. (“I utilize extended techniques for the guitar to imitate the buzzing sound of various African percussion instruments,” the composer writes in the notes. Cha-ching.)

The long view may be sobering, but there’s still a pile of variegated nuggets in this generous set. Joseph Bertolozzi’s “Meltdown” from Bridge Music, generated by beating and strumming a suspension bridge, rises to a thrilling grandeur. The second of two Fred Ho tracks, “No Home to Return To,” is an epic drama with a shattering conclusion. “Tuba Thrush,” by Daniel Goode, clocking in at almost 15 minutes (a generous allotment in this set), is a dazzling sequence of shimmering woodwind chords strung on dewdrops of harpsichord and kicked in the behind by a squawking tuba. “Hexa,” Lois V. Vierk and Anita Feldman’s ambitious work for tap dancers, works miracles with the bending, echoing timbres of human feet striking various surfaces.

There are also a myriad of small surprises: 12 seconds of complete silence in the middle of “ScascadeHo,” a piece by Bruce Gremo for shakuhachi and computers in which ancient echoes meet the hum of the machine.

A round of guffaws bubbles up in the Greenwich House Music School audience at the broad gestures of David Simons’ “Cipher,” for a string quartet of cello, viola, zheng and styrobab.

The sudden, zipped-up last chord of Raphael Mosel’s “Night and Day” is all the more striking after the noble, bell-like tolling of a brass choir.

Maybe the kingdom has been fenced off and subdivided to death, but there’s still fascination in microsoundscapes and kitchen-sink realia.

Eric John Eigner’s crazy “Music for Faucet” makes a grand noise. Annie Gosfield’s “Don’t Bite the Hand That Feeds Back” serves samples of prepared piano and inside-thepiano sounds recorded on a cheap, ornery cassette recorder. Jose Jalac’s “Blown 2” is a close-miked, crowded canvas of breaths, key slaps and tones on bass clarinet, with piano whumps and breath whooshing through plastic tubes.

The mind boggles at the curatorial decisions that must have gone into this massive set. It makes sense to group the electronic, jazz, chamber and choral pieces together, but some works are too close to one another in style or instrumentation to be juxtaposed. When Elizabeth Brown’s haunting flute piece evoking the loons of Lake Superior follows Sorrel Hays’ haunting flute piece evoking the Nazi occupation of Holland, loons and Nazis start blending together in your mind—not good. It’s more fun when the curators slap you with a wild change-up, as when the squishy

WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #60 | 69

“Blob” is steamrollered by conventional grand piano flourishes from composer Augusta Read Thomas.

As for packaging, the set’s postmodern biomorphic-technological artwork is just right for the pygmy pleasures of the music within. The extensive notes contain some interesting artist statements, including unintentional humor. “At the risk of jargon, I would call this a ‘weighted permutational passacaglia,’” Goode writes of “Tuba Thrush,” confusing risk with certainty. Unfortunately, some artists provided no notes at all, and the rest are bulging with boilerplate enumerating achievements and awards, along with the usual x-hasplayed-with-y lists.

Some of the artists anthologized on the NYFA collection can be explored at length on their own separate releases, as part of the NYFA series on the Innova label. Blob’s magnificent Earphonious Swamphony oozes to the fore, by virtue of its outrageous and relentless refusal to coalesce into anything specific while remaining as loud as possible. Avant-garde harpist Anne Lebaron’s 1,2,3,4 goes in the opposite direction by wandering through a crepuscular world of tiny sounds, alternate tunings and enigmatic spaces. Newman Taylor Baker’s Drum Suite Life is an ambitious, sensitively shaded exploration of blues, gospel, and classical music via solo drums, tuned to seven pitches.

If anyone stands out as a genuine giant among the NYFA artists—if anyone is capable of applying the razor of fresh experience to the academic avant-garde blancmange—it’s that venerable revolutionary priestess, Meredith Monk. Monk’s “Sound Patterns and Tropes” busts open the NYFA set by lowering a formal university concert choir on a bed of hot-coal percussion and sending it on a collective bender of chance music and improvisation that feels deliciously forbidden and liberating. No formula, no reduction, can touch her. Monk gave me relief from a strange feeling: for all the diversity of the artists gathered in the NYFA collection, if you got them all at the same restaurant, they’d order the same Chardonnay. Not Monk. She drinks fire. Larry Cosentino

David S. Ware Onecept

AUM Fidelity CD

William Parker & The Inside Songs of Curtis Mayfield I Plan to Stay a Believer AUM Fidelity CD

In the 1990s, when free improvisation and creative music were gaining fresh attention and new listeners, saxophonist David S. Ware and bassist William Parker were championed as two-thirds of the triumvirate of contemporary energy music (the third being Matthew Shipp). Some compared the work of these artists to 1960s precedents (Albert Ayler, Cecil Taylor, etc.), even though they were making their own very distinct music, and Parker and Ware had been steadily recording since the early 1970s (Ware’s sideman debut was actually in 1968 with altoist Abdul-

Hannan). Forty years on, they’re now elder statesmen and have histories as important as their forebears’. Two new releases on Aum Fidelity show how their work has continued to strike out in new directions.

Onecept is Ware’s first group recording since 2008. He dissolved his working quartet with Shipp, Parker, and drummer Guillermo E. Brown in 2007, returning to record with guitarist Joe Morris and percussionist Warren Smith on Shakti (Aum Fidelity, 2009) before a well-publicized kidney transplant. The new disc is a trio of Ware, Parker and Smith, harking back to the saxophonist’s Silkheart power trio (Passage to Music, 1988, with drummer Marc Edwards). As on that date, Ware plays stritch and saxello in addition to tenor across nine pieces. On the straightened alto favored by Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Ware is acerbic and squirrely, somewhat flatly opening “Book of Krittika” unaccompanied before bull fiddle and mallet play fill out the canvas. It’s interesting to hear Ware and Parker in this extraordinarily open context, and Warren Smith’s spare poise keeps the sands shifting, all three players alternately diving in and expressing slight reservation (listening together). The rhythm section often ricochets rather than locking into a groove, and this seems to inspire the leader to irascible volleys and muscular curlicues, as on the flinty “Celestial.” At times, the three don’t jell, but that occasional clash of approaches is what makes Onecept such a refreshing entry in Ware’s discography.

Parker’s project The Inside Songs of Curtis Mayfield is an altogether different beast, realizing Amiri Baraka’s dictum in “The Changing Same” (in Black Music, 1968) about the importance of avant-garde Black musicians engaging R&B and popular forms. On the double CD I Plan to Stay a Believer, the group’s second release, Parker joins trumpeter Lewis Barnes, saxophonists Darryl Foster and Sabir Mateen, pianist Dave Burrell, drummer Hamid Drake, vocalist Leena Conquest and Baraka on a program of Mayfield originals and improvised pieces.

Pianists Lafayette Gilchrist and Achille Gajo, guitarist Asim Barnes and drummer Guillermo Brown also sit in at various points, and on six tracks a children’s gospel choir is present. The set ranges from clean, funky cover versions to slightly more disheveled affairs. Conquest’s vocals sometimes recall Mayfield, but more often resemble the half-sung/ half-spoken declamations of Barbara Simmons on Jackie McLean’s ’Bout Soul (1967). At its loosest (and most interesting), I Plan to Stay a Believer recalls the avant-party records Archie Shepp recorded for America in 19691970, Mateen’s piercing flywheel screams and Foster’s crisp soprano rising out of caterwauling backbeat freedom. One might expect Parker and company to take Mayfield’s tunes “out,” but that’s not necessarily the case here either: the group is respectful of the their structure and intent, even as they stretch them through improvisation. The pairing of Baraka and Conquest is sometimes unbalanced—his gruff poetry under-

mining her floating lyrical riffs—but certainly embodies the two sides of Mayfield’s art. It’s not always as integrated as one would like it to be—the choral pieces are rousing, but don’t allow much room for instrumental exploration—but the way the project is torn between the poles of freedom and reverence is fascinating in itself. Clifford Allen

Wizard Prison Next Cycle Feeding Tube CD

Cyborg banjo shredding that gathers velocity until it’s counterfeit bhangra, scattering ball bearings. Loose, rolling drum hits cobble a boogie; guitar strokes shiver and brummmm.

A rogue frequency hyperventilates, then slackens. Stoner metal riffs bellow and smite. Drooping garageorgan chords and unnervingly nonchalant percussion are cut with vocal samples squirrel-sped to simulate uneasy whimsy and syrup-slowed to project possession by demon hosts; we’re irrevocably drawn into catacombs, into ceremony. Thunder explodes into black cascades.

Laconic cosmic synthesizer pinball tournaments. Feedback struggles to emancipate itself from repressive amps, blow by blinding blow. Like extracted geologic cross-sections of earth, like a mouthful of Stride Shift, like a lottery scratch-off that refuses to cease revealing new wonders, Next Cycle is, in a sense, unfolding forever: a psychoactive DJ mix that never breaks its stride, a dozen obscure mindfucks melded, reinvention incarnate. That it doesn’t say anything definitive doesn’t diminish how astonishing and absorbing it is.

Raymond Cummings

Robert Wyatt Gilad Atzmon Ros Stephen

For The Ghosts Within Domino CD

One of the more unusual collaborations in recent memory, this recording represents the work of three seasoned auteurs who have created a true labor of love. Robert Wyatt, who needs no introduction, handles vocals on six of the eleven tracks, including jazz standards “Laura,” “Lush Life,” “What’s New” and the pop chestnut “What a Wonderful World.” Wyatt’s quavery, idiosyncratic voice might not seem well suited for the standard jazz repertoire, but he is a master of phrasing and nuance—and his wistful, world-weary vulnerability adds depth to lyrics that might otherwise come across as overly familiar. Wyatt also contributes two of his own songs, “Maryan” and “At Last I Am Free,” along with “Lullaby for Irena,” with lyrics written by Wyatt’s wife Alfie.

Violinist and composer Ros Stephen supports Wyatt’s voice with absolutely brilliant writing for string quartet and bass, with an assist from pianist Jonathan Taylor on several arrangements. Stephen’s model was the groundbreaking Charlie Parker Bird with Strings album, and she captures its spirit admirably. Wyatt’s voice is not a dominating instrument, but Stephen’s arrangements

70 | SIGNAL to NOISE #60 WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM

have their own magic and they shift the balance so that Wyatt is not required to be the songs’ focal point.

Alto saxophonist Gilad Atzmon is a strong, fluid player: a dazzling solo voice on several instrumental tracks, and the perfect complement to Wyatt’s vocals. Atzmon, who produced the CD, also enlisted support from additional musicians on the title song and “Where Are They Now?” The former is a haunting number sung

by Tali Atzmon, with keening alto from Atzmon and a vocal chorus that produces goose bumps. The latter piece starts with a sprightly, almost cartoonish little theme and variations featuring clarinet and sax and then segues into a rap segment featuring guest artists Ramallah Underground.

On any other CD, this piece might seem out of place, but here, it’s just one of many delightful musical surprises, and it fits right in. Bill Tilland

Yair Yona Remember

Strange Attractors CD / LP

Indulging in finger-picked six-string steel guitar instrumentals that have at least a tenuous connection to Delta blues while taking on aspects of raga and other repetitive forms based on sustained build-up and climax simply cannot be done without referencing John Fahey. And since his death we’ve heard from quite a number of “Takoma School” players; Glenn Jones and the late Jack Rose no doubt sit at the top of the list.

Perhaps what sets Yona apart is that he’s from Tel Aviv. As a result his absorption of Americana in any form can’t help but be a bit more forced.

It certainly didn’t come as easily as Fahey’s, who was able to seek out some of his influences before they passed. In fact, the track “Sympathy for the Jack,” a tune inspired by the then still living Jack Rose, seems like a re-working of either Rose’s or Fahey’s re-tooling of the blues. Yet there’s nothing about this album that should suggest that, with Yona, the world has one Fahey-esque guitarist too many. On the contrary, the best of this record adds a few new twists and turns to the paths laid out by the aforementioned players.

“Russian Dance,” which he explains was partially influenced by a dance he saw on TV and otherwise by repeated listenings to Tom Waits’ Black Rider, benefits from marrying bluesy finger-picking with a chorus of banjo, accordion and mandolin.

“Floodgate Opens to Allow a Ship to Come Through (As It Carries the Passenger Fahey on It)” washes a synthesized drone over his playing.

As the tune’s rhythm quickens, the drone cranks up like the voice of God herself. Finally, “Skinny Fists,” with its clear Godspeed You! Black Emperor influence, adds drums, electric guitar and a trio of strings to build to the kind of climax the Canadian collective is known for. The way Yona so naively relates particular albums’ or TV shows’ influences in the disc’s liner notes might fool one into thinking there was less depth to this music than there really is. Yet Remember is an LP that adds to the huge, but not exhausted, acousticguitar conversation. Bruce Miller

SOUNDWATCH

Kurt Gottschalk turns on and tunes in for the season’s blockbuster video releases.

Angel Oloshove

Dustin Wong

It might be easy to assume you know everything, or at least enough, about Ravi Shankar, the Indian sitarist who provided eastern influence and training to 1960s rock. The easy way out of that trap is the 1971 film Raga: A Film Journey Into the Soul of India, now issued on DVD by East Meets West Music.

The film was originally released in 1971, at what might have been the height of his recognition. That same year he played the Concert for Bangladesh at Madison Square Garden organized by George Harrison and featuring Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, Ringo Starr, Leon Russell, and documented in a concert movie and triple album. But Raga barely touches on Shankar’s rock star cred. There is a brief scene showing him giving Harrison a lakeside lesson (in what looks to be circa 1966 footage), and includes encounters with Yehudi Menuhin, as well as Baba Ustad Allauddin Khan and Uday Shankar. But for the most part director Howard Worth focuses on Shankar in his homeland, playing, teaching and contemplating the new multi-culturalism. That’s laudable enough, given that the film was originally released as an Apple Films production; Shankar even comments in a voice-over that “it is strange to see pop musicians with sitars. I was confused at first.

It has so little to do with our classical music.” But it’s not what’s omitted that makes the film great. it’s the opportunity to hear the sitarist, his nation’s first international celebrity, considering the economic and environmental problems his homeland faced.

On that last point, there is some surprising footage of a nightmarish ritual dance that is far from the meditatively peaceful trance usually considered to typify Indian culture. The film is still a period piece, and ends with a psychedelic montage of birds, neon signs, tapestries, concert posters and blondes sporting bindis.

Another icon of the era gets fine treatment in a contemporary concert film. Leonard Cohen: Songs from the Road (Columbia/Legacy) shows the 75year-old singer/songwriter is still a powerful figure.

The 12-song DVD set (the program is mirrored in an accompanying CD) is culled from 2008 and 2009 large-hall concerts across Europe, Israel, the United States and Cohen’s Canadian homeland but comes remarkably close to looking like a single show, at least until Coachella, with its latter-day hippies chanting “Leonard! Leonard!” in the setting

sun. Onstage there’s not much activity — Cohen is about as animated as a Vulcan holding court, but he drips with presence. And if it’s needed, sideman Javier Mas’s string collection (including banduria, laud, archilaud) gives a focal point. The set of course includes his classics (“Bird on the Wire,” “Chelsea Hotel,” “Suzanne,” “Hallelujah”) as well as a take on the great “Closing Time,” from his 1992 “comeback” album The Future during which he actually dances! Backstage interviews with the band in the bonus features shed a little light on the man but it’s the music that moves it.

One of the great, or strange anyway, collaborations as rock moved from the ’60s into the ’70s was the various partnerings of David Bowie, Iggy Pop and Lou Reed. They worked together, partied together and publicly hinted at sexual liaisons, but none of them have talked much about their relationships since, whether because they don’t want to ruin the game or simply don’t remember. Sacred Triangle: Bowie, Iggy & Lou 1971-1973 (Sexy Intellectual) doesn’t do much to fill in the blanks, but it’s a fun watch with lots of good footage. In light of their individual levels of success in the years that followed, it’s easy to forget that Bowie was the newcomer, looking for identity and strategically allying himself with the Stooges and the Velvet Underground. Through interviews with ex-wife Angela Bowie, Andy Warhol assistant Billy Name, glam rock gender bender Jayne County and others the scene they moved in is recalled entertainingly.

Carrying on with aging rockers: Laibach, who have never been accused of lacking heavy-handedness, have issued a DVD version of what might be the band’s most perfect project. The uniformed Slovenians have played with fascist imagery and nationalist pride for 30 years without aligning themselves to any political identity, which made their 2006 release Volk a perfect extension of the band’s imagery-overideology front. That collection of 13 national anthems is all the better (more effective, hilarious) with visual realization. Volk: Dead in Trbovlje (Mute) includes live performances of the anthems, sung in English, with six additional concert tracks. The intense gravity of their stageshow makes the songs that much better, but they really come to life in the videos made for 10 of them. The divisions of the planet and the pride of people based on their geography come to seem

just ludicrous, which may well be what the band has always been trying to say, even if the antlers and swastikas were a bit distracting.

Although he hasn’t been on the planet nearly so long as the musicians mentioned above, Dustin Wong seems like an old soul. The Baltimore guitarist is a member of the bands Ponytail and Ecstatic Sunshine, and the double-CD plus DVD set Infinite Love (Thrill Jockey) represents not just his first solo release but the first project he conceived of for solo performance. As a player, he’s into tightly controlled loops and crashing swells of major-key ebullience, some Robert Fripp mixed with a bit more Cornelius.

It’s a somewhat structured hourlong composition, played twice with improvisatory differences primarily in the middle. The DVD also includes both versions, starting out the same and then varying, using a montage of visuals (by Wong, Andrew Shenker and Angel Oldshove) of video effects and real footage (shopping malls, dripping water) like an updated and mildly hallucinogenic retelling of Philip Glass’s Koyaanisqatsi, but more joyful and less foreboding.

Composer Mark Applebaum’s work is always inventive, generally interesting and usually just a little squirrely somehow. His piece The Metaphysics of Notation is too open-ended to be captured solely on audio or video, but by releasing a DVD with an audio collage of performances, a short documentary about the piece and still and scrolling images of the score — which itself is actually a gallery installation — Innova (the label responsible for most of Applebaum’s releases) has taken a brave stab at it. The whole project becomes a questioning of how graphic notation works as composition, and that question is put to several of the 70 musicians (including Paul Dresher, Brian Ferneyhough, Philip Gelb, Vic Rawlings, Jane Rigler and Gino Robair) heard interpreting the piece in different groupings.

Summer Storm might similarly be more musical than music itself, even if it does have a score (which seemingly was added on later). The DVD, released

by Microcinema International, collects some rough footage from Butoh founder Hijikata Tatsumi in his final performance in 1973. With a small company of dancers, Tatsumi presented a series of scenes at Kyoto University that are evocatively painful and alien. The dancer’s slow, contorted movements are caught on three cameras, giving a rich variety to the bare stage set. The graininess of the film only adds to the atmosphere. The electronic soundtrack by percussionist Yas-Kaz (known for his world music fusion) is fitting enough, but doesn’t really add much to the “dance of darkness” originator’s work.

The sort of dance depicted in Let Your Feet Do the Talking (Dust to Digital) couldn’t be further from Tatsumi’s butoh. The compelling 30-minute documentary tells the story of Thomas Maupin, who at age 70 is purported to be one of the greatest “oldtime” dancers alive. The program is rounded out with a number of features, including the 1957 short film To Hear Your Banjo Play starring Pete Seeger.

But the feature attraction is the story of a rural Tennessee man traveling throughout the South on weekends to perform at festivals and county fairs.

Stewart Copeland’s film focuses on the relationship between Maupin and his grandson Daniel, who at 16 is already a talented banjo picker. Neither are getting rich off their crafts, and the film ends up being a story of overcoming hardships (including Maupin’s own cancer diagnosis), in no small part through the love of music. ✹

WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #60 | 71

CONTINENTAL RIFFS Peter Margasak travels the world in search of subversive sounds.

On Radioclit Present: The Sound of Club Secousse Tinariwen and Etran Finatawa. The quartet, led by Vol. 1 (Crammed Discs) the UK-based production ace guitarist Bibi Ahmed, is back with their second duo behind The Very Best unveil the curatorial side album (and third installment in the series). Sadly, the of their DJ work, collecting crowd faves from the group’s old guitarist Adi Mohammed was shot and Secousse club nights they present in London and killed, victim to the ongoing struggles between the Paris. In his liner notes Etienne Tron discusses the government and Tuareg rebels. His replacement global dance aesthetic, but the music here focuses Koudede Maman, however, does an excellent job. strictly on Africa, particularly South Africa and the The latest album was recorded in 2010 by the label’s Lusophone nations Angola and Cape Verde. The Hisham Mayet in the capital city of Niamey, as a trip compilation is heavy on South African house, kuto the Agadez region had been forbidden by the rulduro, funana, bubu, and couple decale, with some ing junta. The sound quality is appropriately raw and tracks based on original elements, while others, like urgent, with the ringing guitar counterpoint creating Batida’s “Nufeko Disole,” hijack vintage tracks and a buzzing drone from which Ahmed’s stabbing leads jack them up with programmed rhythms. There are flare. The fidelity diminishes the deep soulfulness some duds among the 17 high-energy selections, of Ahmed’s vocals a little, but there’s no missing the but Radioclit do an excellent job at exposing a power of his voice. Another great one. forceful, growing movement, with Africans hijacking A different kind of intensity turns up on Hands hip-hop and American and European club styles and (Dare2), a collaborative project between jazz bassist tweaking them to their own specs. The collection Dave Holland and the brilliant flamenco guitarist also underlines how the Internet has made this a Pepe Habichuela; most of the tracks feature unobgenuinely international phenomenon, with loads of trusive cajon and rhythm guitar as well. The music transnational collaboration. suffers here and there when disparate traditions— The King of History (Sterns) offers an excellent even ones both heavily reliant on improvisation— survey of primo music by Kenya’s mighty D.O. collide. On the two pieces composed by Holland, Misiani and Shirati Jazz, one of benga’s greatest the guitarist compromises his tough rhythmic fire practitioners. Misiani, who was born in neighboring to match the tunes’ strolling, fluid grooves, which Tanganyika (now part of Tanzania), spent most of pushes him uncomfortably toward Al DiMeola territhe ’60s bouncing around different Kenyan groups tory. Luckily, such moments are mostly aberrations. as a sideman, but toward the end of the decade Most of the pieces are rooted in traditional flamenco the roots of Shirati Jazz were planted in Nairobi. forms and Holland expertly finds a way into those, This new compilation focuses on his golden era in underlining the pulsing rhythms and taking solos the ’70s, when both his popularity and influence that lack for neither energy nor spirit. were enormous, helping to install benga as the Brazilian thrush Nina Becker, a charter member undisputed popular music of Kenya with its lattice of of Rio’s great neo-samba troupe Orquestra Imperial, sweet-toned, ringing electric guitars playing dense has made her solo debut with not one, but two interlocking patterns, soulful group singing, spare albums. As opposed to the tropical-leaning sounds kit-drum percussion, and loping bass lines delivering of her main band, on her own Becker opts mainly for the primary melodic content. The drumming on the intimate pop balladry, especially on Azul (YB Music), earliest tracks uses little more than clicking on the where the emphasis is on sultry melody and mood. snare’s rim, while the material from the late ’70s is The lean arrangements gently support her pretty, more involved, with kinetic high-hat action. Misiani breathy voice with sweet, resonant guitars and remained active until he was killed in a tragic 2006 light percussion. On Vermelho (YB Music)—the title auto accident, but this is the music upon which is translates to “red,” to the other album’s “blue”—the reputation rests. tempos get a touch hotter, as in mid-tempo, with Rikki Ililonga and his band Musi-O-Tunya were some bossa swerve and greater percussive force. progenitors of what’s known now as Zamrock— Becker had in hand writing some of the tunes, but funky, hard-rocking music that emerged from Zamthe others were penned by some of Brazil’s best bia in the mid-’70s, created by a handful of bands composers—Jorge Mautner, Romulo Fróes, Moreno currently being rediscovered like Witch, Amanaz, Veloso, Nelson Jacobina, and Domenico Lancellotti, and Chrissy Zebby—and on the magnificently among them, many of them cohorts in Imperial. packaged double-CD Dark Sunrise (Now-Again) In his refreshingly candid liner notes to The we gain a much deeper understanding of how it Roots of Chicha 2: Psychedelic Cumbias from Peru developed. The first disc focuses on music from (Barbès), Olivier Conan admits that his research for the band’s album Wings of Africa, where tough, its predecessor wasn’t deep enough, and that by horn-stoked grooves are routinely punctured by luck, he had found some of the low-class pop style’s extended fuzzed-out, wah-wah-heavy guitar solos, finest moments. The second volume eschews the and it’s rounded out by singles dating back to 1973, heavy Andean flavor and cheesy aesthetic of the first while the second disc is occupied by the group’s volume for a much broader and rewarding panoply sophomore album, Zambia and Sunshine Love, with of sounds that more explicitly address the legacy of the group expanding its sound to include soul-rock, cumbia in the country during the late ’60s and ’70s, folk-rock, and blues. Not everything here is strong, as well as serving up some purer expressions of Afrobut the music possesses a distinctive, gripping Cuban influence (“El Hueleguiso” by Manzanita y su sound that lends an imperturbable rhythmic oomph Conjunto sounds like a blueprint for Marc Ribot’s Los to everything. The book-like packaging includes Cubanos Postizos). Twangy surf guitar remains a key superb liner notes from compiler and label owner signpost, but the rhythmic drive is generally stronger Eothen Alapatt. here and the melodies go deeper than repurposed Niger’s Group Inerane kicked off the Guitars from Andean folk and pop tunes. While there’s no mistakAgadez series on Sublime Frequencies a couple of ing the music as something related to the wiggy years ago, helping to usher in a deep underground contents of the first collection, it’s nice to learn how analog to the more polished Saharan desert rock of stylistically wide chicha’s manifestations really were.

72 | SIGNAL to NOISE #60 WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM

On Viva La Tradicion (Concord Picante), the fourth album from New York’s Spanish Harlem Orchestra since it formed a decade ago, the big band led by pianist Oscar Hernandez is no longer operating as a preservationist concern. When it started, the band, comprising mostly veteran sideman for some of salsa’s most important figures, explicitly sought to celebrate the music’s golden era of the mid-’60s and ’70s, when Fania Records could do no wrong. That’s not to say that the group has softened its attack; the album opens with tough and brassy “La Salsa Dura” (the hard salsa) and with hardcore heavies like trombonist Jimmy Bosch and timbalero Luisito Quintero among its ranks, the band’s ferocious rhythmic attack rarely falters, and even if the arrangements convey a contemporary gloss the band eschews the sappy, ballad-heavy sound of so much salsa today. The great Cuban singer Issac Delgado makes a cameo on the album closer “El Negro Tiene Tumbao,” but the band’s three resident singers get the job done with no need for outside help.

It seems like paying homage to the Persian poet Rumi is now a requirement for Iranian artists, and the phenomenal vocalist Ali Reza Ghorbani gets his turn on Songs of Rebirth (Accords Croisés). Widely considered the heir to the great Mohammed Reza Shajarian, Ghorbani is indeed a powerhouse singer, and he navigates his original settings for Rumi’s poetry with serpentine elegance and agility, his voice leaping into its ecstatic upper register with fluidity and conviction, to arrive at a stunning melisma. He gets traditional accompaniment from an accomplished group of young players on tar, kamancheh, ney, and tombak.

On a terrific new self-titled recording billed to Mozafar Shafii and the Râst Ensemble (released

by Ocora) we hear a more austere take on Persian traditional music, with two different dastgahs—most recordings focus on one longer elucidating of a single dastgah (or mode). Shafii is a magnificent nonprofessional singer and on both works here, each recorded with different groups of musicians, the performances hark back to an earlier interpretation of Persian classical music; the liner notes ask if this recording will allow “this art form to be rediscovered as it is likely to survive the fashions, fusions, and mass media taste.” Of course, at its heart, there is nothing new here, but her focus and restrained technical excellence run counter to more flashy recordings.

Over the last few years Baltimore record collector Ian Nagoski has been sharing his riches, producing the excellent Black Mirror compilation for Dust-toDigital a few years ago and A String of Pearls for his own Canary label. But he’s outdone himself with The Further the Flame, the Worse It Burns Me: Greek Folk Music in New York City, 1919-28 (Canary/Mississippi) by the astonishing singer Marika Papagika.

Although Papagika is often lumped as a rebetika singer, Nagoski, a self-styled ethnomusicologist who’s seriously advanced the scholarship on her work, points out that her repertoire included lots of older folk material from Greece. The first side of this beautifully packaged LP features early acoustical recordings, while the flip focuses on electric recordings, but in all of them Papagika’s voice pierces the arrangements with heartbreaking pathos and steely determination. The tracks all feature her husband Constantinos “Gus” Papagikas on cimbalom with either clarinet, violin, or cello. Nagoski’s excellent liner notes are presented in an attractive insert booklet. ✹

WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #60 | 73

IN ‘N’ OUT

Larry Cosentino examines modern-day manifestations of bop and beyond.

John Rogers

Bunky Green and Rudresh Mahanthappa

Rudresh Mahanthappa and Bunky Green: To say it is to smile. Jazz is happily formula-resistant in the 21st century, but if there’s any recent disc that gets to the knobby nub of the new eclecticism, it’s Apex (Pi), which pairs a 75-year-old hard-bop warrior with the 39-year-old icon of modern multicultural jazz. After the obligatory Eastern-style invocation, Mahanthappa flips a series of ascending scales, like a bank of switches, and activates a furnace of drums and bass (Jack DeJohnette and François Moutin). Instantly, a two-alto alloy is forged. Green’s silvery, angular cries meld mightily with Mahanthappa’s coppery, burnished murmur through a generous set of compositions that runs to free duets, taut ensemble passages, call-and-response, and even classic head-to-head alto battles. Pianist Jason Moran is almost crowded out of the ring, but makes the most of some shining moments, especially in the pensive ballad “Soft.”

The disc’s refusal to conform to formula signals another feature of 21st-century jazz, the story-telling impulse. Yes, there’s a track called “The Journey,” but give it to these guys. They come by it honestly.

What could be more interesting than walking the shores where seas of “out” lash shores of “in” and seeing what washes up? Saxophonist Antonio Arnedo, bassist Dominic Duval, and drummer Brian Willson skirt that shore absorbingly on The Crossing (Not Two), a prolonged and penetrating ramble along the boundaries of free improv and traditional jazz. It’s rare to encounter a soprano saxman who is listenable for long stretches, but Arnedo gives you very comfortable walking shoes. A ravishing ballad, “Dibujo,” is as lovely a jazz track as we’re likely to get for a long while. But Arnedo’s digressions and codas, never rushed and always open to last-minute turns, absorb the ear as much or more than the melodies or contained solos. As if to build a nest in Arnedo’s high register, Willson uses a lot of cymbals and high hat, with Duval’s bass as quiet counterweight. The trio picks gently at standards like “In a Sentimental

Mood” and Wayne Shorter’s “Fee Fi Fo Fum” with the same focus and attention they devote to labyrinthine originals like “D Minor”—like a child on summer vacation trying out a new stick.

One thing you can say about The Warriors, a post-bop super-group, and their new CD, The Cookers (Jazz Legacy), is that neither name is good enough. When a group is this strong, what else could they do but pose like a seven-headed Mount Jazzmore on the cover: Billy Harper, Eddie Henderson, David Weiss, Craig Handy, George Cables, Cecil McBee, and Billy Hart—over 250 collective years of cooking and warring. While they cover familiar ground, the point here is that they cover it together, as if they’ve been a team all along, giving each other loving, lush launching pads for inspired soloing.

The heightened sense of occasion gives the music a polished ensemble feel that made me long for the rough edges of early energy jazz, but the power still pulses under the formal wear. If anyone stands out here, it’s Harper, who writhes and soars over the grooves ecstatically The repertoire is mainly from the power-jazz books of McBee and Harper, but there are some sweet change-ups in mood. After Handy’s flute lilts through the waltz “Sweet Rita Suite,” the group comes back with the deep thrusting soul of “Capra Black,” with Harper in supreme command.

The Dymaxion Quartet’s Sympathetic Vibrations (self-released) is a smart, fresh listen, a contrapuntal brain massage in an oxygenated room. The music’s clarity owes something to the pianoless quartets of West Coast cool jazz and the cerebral arrangements of Bob Brookmeyer, teacher of Dymaxion drummer Gabriel Gloege, but this quartet has a subtle tension all its own. Without the chordal weight of a piano, the trumpet-saxophone tandem of Mike Shobe and Mark Small slip like spiders from corner to corner, now doubling one another, now working at right angles, weaving strong webs out of light material.

The protean guitarist Ben Monder can calibrate

74 | SIGNAL to NOISE #60 WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM

his sound from hot planetary chunks to cool mist, and he uses the skill wisely in I Will Follow You (Bee Jazz), a terse trio set with saxophonist Jerome Sabbagh and veteran drummer Daniel Humair. The title is a dead-on description of their sweaty-close rapport. In the ’60s, Humair was a go-to drummer for American visitors and expats like Dexter Gordon and Bud Powell, and at 72 he’s thrown himself onto the leading edge of creative improv. The tracks are concise and the gestures are punchy, with more tone rows and muscular jabs than melodies, but Sabbagh and Monder manage a dozen compelling shadow dances along the way. On the disc’s killer track, “More,” Monder tails Sabbagh like a Yeti shambling after a skier, while Humair implies melody so convincingly you’d swear he was blowing into his drumsticks.

There are as many structures, moods, and timbres as there are tracks on this disc, but this trio always smells like itself. They’re on such a roll that after a crackling run of originals and improvisations, they have a go at one of the oldest pages in the book—“I Should Care.” In their hands, it’s as fine as falling leaves.

Olives and Orchids (EF), a tough, tight set from the Chicago sextet Herculaneum, is one of the strongest releases of the season. The group’s modus operandi is to roll out a relentless ostinato under bold harmonic declamations from the four-horn front line. Inside these corridors of steel and concrete, the soloists blow like the Chicago wind. The formula is strong, but not rigid; the title track pitches and yaws to an odd rhythm (first eight, then nine beats to the bar), inducing a jittery solo from trumpeter Patrick Newbery over drummer Greg Danek’s skittering rim shots. Tight as each composition is wired, most have contrasting sections that surprise, if not relax, the ear. The middle of “Temporary Orca” chills like a pool inside a James Bond villain’s rocky lair, with the ominous fin of trombonist Nick Broste circling inside.

After the hardness of Herculaneum, it’s a relief to sink into the juicy energy of percussionist Sameer Gupta’s Namaskar (Motema), a jazz-inflected mashup of raga, traditional Indian folk music and Bollywood glitz. Acoustic sounds (Arun Ramanurthy’s violin, Neil Murgai’s sitar, Prasant Radhakrishnan’s carnatic sax) give the weave a natural, cottony structure, while judiciously deployed electronics add the flash of synthetics. This is a whirling night on the town, not a sober evening with the classics. The double agent in this mission is soulful jazz pianist Marc Cary, who toggles from laptop to electric keyboard to McCoy Tyner-scale grand piano as needed. Namaskar is a pinnacle in the recent run of east-meets-west jazz recordings and a smashing lesson in the art of addition without subtraction. The energy is high, but an undercurrent of melancholy is never far away.

As the moon wheels behind the garage and my eyeballs grow narrow and numb, an intimate duo disc is often my nightcap. Forever, with bass legend Eddie Gomez and Brazilian-French pianist Cesarius Alvim, is my closer of choice this winter. The duo vividly conjures the melancholy spirit of Bill Evans (with whom Gomez played from 1966 to 1977), but has a rootedness all its own. More than anything, Forever is a showcase for Gomez, who is still going strong in his 60s and really gets to stretch his melodic, harmonic and percussive chops here. Pianist Alvim is a man of fewer notes than Evans, but his sure touch with the hammers turns every chord and melody into a sparkling cavern where Gomez can spelunk freely.

Dig it! ✹

WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #60 | 75

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

From the good folks at Neurot comes an essential—and I mean essential!—reissue: a twentieth anniversary edition of Neurosis’s Enemy of the Sun. As has been widely remarked, it was with this record that the Bay Area quintet moved beyond the crust and sludge influences of their first two records to explore something with more grandeur, more ritualistic power, and more weight. Sporting lovely retouched artwork and a pair of bonus tracks (a demo and a live track), this is worth springing for even if you’ve had the original for years. But for anyone new(ish) to the game, it’s a fair bet that at least 2/3rds of the bands praised in this column since its inception simply wouldn’t exist without Neurosis. And this is where the goodness really started to well up like the tide.

It’s handy to have the most recent Neurosis live document on hand to chart this fantastic course, as Live at Roadburn 2007 (Neurot) opens with the title track from their latest, Given to the Rising, and over 80 minutes sees the band tackling recent tracks (“Distill,” “Water Is Not Enough”) along with venerables “The Doorway,” “Burn” and “Crawl Back In.” With their customary blend of edge, sonic range, and tons of epic riffs, Neurosis are aging wonderfully without losing an ounce of what has always made them so compelling.

Aging less gracefully is vocalist Ian Astbury, late of The Cult and currently with the exhumed version of The Doors. Joining up with hipster (and critical) darlings Boris for the four-song EP BXI (Southern Lord), Astbury just doesn’t sound at home. And so whatever one thinks of Boris, this one simply doesn’t work, as the crooner seems to be dialing into a different kind of nostalgia than Boris, resulting in a chugging mess on four tunes that can’t seem to decide if they want to be ZZ Top (via The Cult’s Electric), Boris’s recent garagecore (“We Are Witches”), or stadium anthems (“Magickal Child”). Perhaps I was never meant to like this, as Astbury’s rock god pretensions have never convinced me; and each “Oh! Oh!” or “Yayuh!” sounds particularly grating at this stage of his career. But even on a well-meaning cover of The Cult’s “Rain,” Wata’s relatively effective space guitar can’t overcome the stiff rhythm and the cute coquettish vocals she phones in.

From a different end of the spectrum altogether, the ambitious ensemble Kayo Dot has always worn its art music ambitions on its sleeve, regularly namechecking as influences The Cure, Ornette, Herbie Hancock, Swans, and Scott Walker. Why not go all the way and rope in Bach, AMM, and Ravi Shankar too? Still, there is something about the musical range and ambition of this now-veteran outfit (still centered around the sound world of Toby Driver) that impresses rather than comes across as pretentious or wearisome (though they have their moments).

Their latest full-length Coyote (Hydra Head) is as dreamy, dense, and occasionally violent as their other releases, with its combination of scratchy strings, plaintive vocals, and weird psychedelic trawl like a dark This Mortal Coil. Occasionally the limpid guitar tones recall mid-1990s Frisell, but there is always a harried section just around the corner, with crashing noise and urgent vocals.

On the sprawling two-part “Abyss Hinge,” the reach exceeds the grasp a bit, as the voicings and orchestrations sound fairly mannered (quasiminimalist brass stutters, a semi-precious use of triangle, oleaginous electric bass, etc.). But overall, I still find the band compelling.

Less mannered and equally weird is WotW favorite Wrnlrd, who returns with a new EP, Death Drive (Flingco). It opens as improbably as ever, with wending electric bass amidst a wall of black sound, like two worlds of bedroom jams colliding. The union gives birth to a lumbering riff on “Precursor,” which is a brief polyharmonic slab of noise like the best of Gorguts. The cool frosty wind that opens “Grave Dowser” gives way to another improbable groove, almost flirting with a Melvins feel were it not for the spectral vocals buried behind the growl—oh yes, and there are sudden chorales of weirdly abstracted horns too. Wrnlrd is generally quite solitary, but this time invites a few guests on board for a dash of slide guitar or even some guest vocals (Dwid Hellion contributes to “Midnight Ride”). The piano track “Luster” is pretty unconvincing but the title track—with low brass and accordion in the heart of the drone—is stellar. Each record I hear by Wrnlrd convinces me further of what a weird American maverick this fellow is, like the Butthole Surfers of black metal or something similarly grand.

Straining audibly against the constraints of this column is Dwarr’s Animals (Drag City). The singular world of Duane Warr has very little to do with “metal,” but who cares? It’s musically and conceptually heavy in the most suggestive way.

Taking its cues equally from early Sabbath, Syd Barrett, Dead Meadow, and other lysergically damaged riff merchants, Dwarr combines instrumentation and approaches to yield music that is unexpected in the happiest of ways. Sometimes it sounds like the Roman circus of Os Mutantes via the paranoia of Barrett and a Beefheartian sense of form (and his drowsy vocal delivery certainly invites comparisons with Ozzy and Syd, especially on haunted tunes like “Just Keep Running”). But elsewhere he looks to the crypt keeper: “That Deadly Night” is creepy like an early Sabbath tune, as is the more riff-heavy “Ghost Lovers.”

Warr is deeply engaged with religious questions (“Christ, Christ, are you real? Tell me if my soul can heal”) and is uninterested in accommodating his musical vision to anyone’s expectations. You get the sense that he’s a jittery fellow at odds with the world, and in his reactive mind anything may happen in sonic form. And it usually does, whether in the psych freakout on “Chocolate Mescaline,” the creepy noise track “Evil Lures,” or the Chinese street market feel of “Time.”

Perhaps least categorizable of all these releases is the latest harrowing recording from Gnaw Their Tongues, L’Arrivée de la Terne Mort Triomphante (Crucial Blast). Unconcerned with genre, instrumentation, or scene of any sort— and refreshingly free of the bland “brutal” or “necro” gestures of some metal—GTT combines sounds, instruments, and approaches in multiple fashions on a journey into the deep. From the first notes of struck metal and grinding buzz of the title track, it struck me that this time around

76 | SIGNAL to NOISE #60 WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM

he was approximating the sound of a really twisted, industrial, blackened Dead Can Dance or something. Again, there is weird harmonic development as on the previous GTT release, as if a bunch of late romantic symphony records were being melted together, Bruckner in hell with Nurse with Wound. Over these five tracks, head-expanding pitch-bending, shrieks, flutes and piccolos all collapse into each other in a crypt acoustic to create something that is very much the equal of recent Sunn 0))) experiments.

It’s unreal how doggedly GTT pursues its weird medieval death doom vision and how uncompromising the sound is. Essential.

One-man Aussie black metal outfit Nekrasov puts the lie to the hobbyist’s occasional fascination with black metal on the ferocious Extinction (Crucial Blast). It’s a genuine storm of sound from its opening notes, with oppressive layers of sound like a Kevin Drumm track on “Disillusion.” But it’s also sonically interesting and diverse in a way that most genre entries couldn’t dream up, plunging regularly into permafrost caverns like “Matter Is the Bastard,” near silence on “Void Into NonVoid,” or—on the suggestively titled “Chant the name of god in a thousand languages until all is blood and feces”—digging into the substratum of sound with an unending, seesawing organ interval devoid of Hammer House cheapness. For fans of WOLD, Anaal Nathrakh, Grief No Absolution, and Lustmord, it’s terrific stuff.

A Forest of Stars is nominally a U.S. black metal band, but on Opportunistic Thieves of Spring they play sonically rich music in that vein while divesting themselves entirely of the groaninducing conventions that plague the genre.

Some of the sonic elements remain—such as ragged vocals, blast beats, walls of guitar noise, and so on—but there’s a panoramic sense of space here that, when abetted by the lonely My Dying Bride-ish violin, really catches your ear.

They have a fine sense of sonic detail (the mouth harp on “Raven’s Eye”) and a good instinct for knowing how to use heavily layered repetition for a crisp headfuck. Sometimes the combination of majesty and aggression recalls Ulver or Enslaved and elsewhere (“Thunder’s Cannonade”) the dissonance nods to Gorguts (that’s two references in this column—can you tell I’m excited about the new lineup?). Best of all is “Starfire’s Memory,” a chugging dirgelike piece to begin with, before haunting female vocals recall the deep space of early Neurosis.

Chapel Hill drone metal mavens Horseback might raise some suspicious eyebrows, given that the town a few miles down the road from WotW is hardly known for its appetite for heaviness. But on The Invisible Mountain (Relapse), they take inspiration from the Jodorowsky epic to deliver four hypnotic tracks that bury spare Rhodes patterns in warm, distorted, coiling riffs for the perfect soundtrack to violent summer storms.

Jenks Miller’s slightly raspy vocals work perfectly and aren’t at all affected. Rather, they provide gorgeous contrast to the beautiful swirl of sound here that, on the title track, makes you just want to drown. This record has been one of my major addictions of the summer, and now into the autumn.✹

WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #60 | 77

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

Shawn Brackbill

Kurt Vile

Black Heart Procession are definitely looking to to dive into his piles of money; considering the take things Bigger, Broader and Brighter, starting droves of material he’s created, Pollard is, above with last year’s twist-heavy 6 and continuing all else, a manic musician who works so hard through Blood Bunny/Black Rabbit (Temporary it only makes sense to check in with him every Residence). Is that a good thing? It’s going to once in awhile—or maniacally. It’s always nice to depend on whom you ask. I’d say it’s a toss-up, catch him on a good week, too, as his new Bosalbeit one that could lead to increasingly betton Spaceships project attests. He spry, feeling ter experiments in the future. “Blank Page” is good-ood and randy, by god. Our Cubehouse shockingly vibrant, intense like the older stuff but Still Rocks (Merge) is the album I’ve been waiting much more muscular and proggy. “The Orchid” to hear from a Pollard project since... I can’t even sounds like BHP making the transition Sufjan’s remember anymore. Just know it’s good, a ripbeen making in a way, floating effects over pin’ roll with a fierce energy urging it on. There piano/keys over-easy with heavily echo-decked is a tipping point where maybe the drums (by a vocals. From there, the remixes start, and they’re Decemberist, John Moen) and guitar get a little good, especially Eluvium’s, it’s just jarring to hear too stadium-sized for their own good—hammy, them; they don’t seem apt accompaniment for even. But that’s a small blip on a big radar; “John BHP, especially the “MEOOWW”-ing. Seriously, the Dwarf Wants to Become an Angel” is so full there’s a dude meowing on Perry’s remix! Still of razor-straight, cutting riffs and GBV jump-kicka nice record considering the upheaval taking FLIPs a Pollard fan with any stake in the deal is place (apparently Black Heart Procession pared obligated to blow this out during camping trips. down to a duo for this recording); forge on, Next year, I mean... gettin’ a little cold out there. brothers.

Running smack-dab into the Oneohtrix Point I can imagine Robert Pollard swimming in Never/Caboladies split cassette (NNA Tapes) his vast ocean of songs the way Scrooge used might end up being the most relaxing hour78 | SIGNAL to NOISE #60 WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM

or-so you’ve ever experienced. Or, during the storm-cloud portions, it might cause you to hide indoors from the downpour. Oneohtrix Point Never definitely think outside the box, and their half of this tape is the Living End: cold icicle tinkles, large power supplies that holt and JERK, and then the bottom falls out and we get those gorgeously rendered, Edmond De Deyster/ Morton Subotnick-esque synths, the chief reason Oneohtrix PN seem to be humping the tip of everyone’s tongue lately. Caboladies give off a village-percussion vibe from the get-up-and-go, all manner of hand drums, background talking, and strange spider-web effects giving no doubt as to the Gulcher stomp being committed to tape here. Later on we’re treated to spare electrical currents that don’t ever seem to burn or boil over. It’s all windswept effect-rattling from there.

Bruce Russell knows what he’s doing. He’s got some of the sharpest sawblades in the shed via his “day job” Dead C. What you might not have known is how much all-consuming noise-rot he and C co-worker Michael Morley, who just put out another Gate record, have been stirring up on their own. Russell’s Antikythera Mechanism (Spring Press) is a raw belch of droning power madness, a lathe on top of a paint shaker on top of a cement mixer on top of your head... good alarm-clock music, Side A is. The flip is a little tougher to pin down. That industrious grind is the fulcrum once again for, say, 15 seconds, at which point the bottom falls out like a maggotridden wooden floor and Wiese-ian psychsquiggles paint yr back porch red. Catastrophic caterwauling ensues, like a seagull tangled up in a powerline; Russell’s a damn-good egg.

The last time we caught up with Kurt Vile he was a Childish Prodigy; now, he reports that God Is Saying This to You (Mexican Summer) via his plunderous string explorations and baritone-heavy, longshoremen sensibility on the mic. He’s a talented guy, a reasonably worthy totem for sounds that come through him and a budding wordsmith to boot. There are rare but full variations in the tray of tunes served up here, folk-style, and it’d probably be best if we just let him go with the groove he’s been riding like a magic carpet the last few years. Mixed into the g-folk ramblings, sparingly, are delicately carved effects stretches that could narcotize a coked-up camel; Side B starts with them and it’s tough to shake the feeling of being hypnotized. Once the swirlies are over it’s back to business with the acoustic. Slay, KV. Stooges/garage worship is such a delicate thing; so great when tackled with grit and abandon by a taut, torturous trio yet so often clumsily translated for modern times (by The “nu” Stooges themselves, note) and lamely delivered. Purling Hiss suss the task out nicely with Hissteria (Richie/Testostertunes), pumping out bass-heavy nut-clubbers with barely any guitar noticeable and a reasonably able singer who, more than anything, brings a lot of variety to the table, then drinks everyone under it. Get ready for “Sympathy for the Devil” “doo-doo-dooloo”ing, MC5 riffs/rhythms that chop/slash, and one of the best records of its kind to come out this year. There are a few songs on here that are hotter than a sun-sucked chunk of metal, conjuring a

wild ride at midnight with perhaps a few mishaps in the rearview; they’ll take you around town, get you drunk and then leave you in the morning. It’s embarrassing but... that’s rock. Or life. Or both.

Bass Puppy/Fuck You Folk Singers (Load) is not what you’d expect from a Load act nor, if I remember correctly, what you’d envision emerging from the Shit & Shine camp. Their latest 12-inch opens with an ominous filth-beat akin to Massive Attack’s “Angel” before warping like sun-spiked plastic into cruel and unusual shapes and spewing smoke that’ll rot yr brain. It’s quite the agile side, what with the moments of near-silence, the tense nail-chewing, the dubness, the beats that hit you so hard you swear you can’t remember the preceding 12 hours. They’re hitting a stride as Side A spins into the sun, so the flip feels a bit like starting over, never quite developing beyond its beginnings and resorting to a lot of random accompaniment when maybe changing gears a bit might have benefited the compositions more.

In any event, Side A wins out in the A vs B contest, and, by exension, you win, Shine-heads (or would you prefer I call you...).

I would call the climes of Kites Sail High’s Alone/Secrets (Life’s Blood) “rhythmic” only when compared to the sloopy, sloppy, meatwadded chunks of beat beef piled high by Shit & Shine.

S&S grind you down, whereas Kites Sail High let you fly in a hopeful universe with tube/pod vehicles and space outfits. The future metaphor works great with Alone/Secrets because the hiccups, helicopter flutters, drilling effects blurbs and constantly-frittering-away b-b-beats are, through their disrespect for “proper” anything, neatly summarizing what could be the future of grisly indie-scene beat-killing. Expect a lot of stuttering rhythms straight outta modern dub offshoots, witch house and certain post-Pell Mell strains of post-rock. This music is not for the DJ set, but for those who prefer the sound of turntables, samples and delay pedals being torched to death.

Metal Rouge’s Trails (Emerald Cocoon) is a smooth, pick-ridden stretch of guitar wank, which is all well and good, but thank god for Side B, one of the best flips I’ve dipped into this year. You could parse its song cycle as a five-parter if you wanted to leave a dozen parts out—uhhh yes, what I mean to say is, Trails branches off in several directions during its trek through the electric woods, echo-prone guitar slashing in and out like a rusty sawblade. It’s like a post-rock album decided to drrrop the structure and aim its arrows at the sky, achieving satisfying climax through aggressive fluctuation between guitar bend and drum twirl, effects dumpage and sub-sub-subHella two-man action, haunting chant vox and a-six-string-vs.-itself battle to the death. So many sides to this rube-cube—you’ll want to investigate Trails’ sloppy squall sooner than later.

If you’re looking to GET IT ON, look no further than HoZac Hookup Klub Round One (Hozac Records), a full-length compilation LP with all-exclusive tracks, the fruits of which result in a playlist both raw and, often, rowdy. This is a shrewd series that offers an odd variety of bangers/mashers while presenting, in general, a sound you can’t help but associate with the ’Zac/Goner/In the Red crowd. Let’s do this up “Fastest 3 Minutes in Football”-style: Idle Times travel far to revisit Nirvana a thousand times over with “Million Miles Away,” and they’re not gonna crack. Woven Bones are derivative of JMAC/Ramones and in the best possible way, as their contributions attest.

Dum Dum Girls add a little more class, a little less self-pity to the Vivian Girls sound. Teeth (a Blank Dogs side dish) offer one of the more interesting arrangements based around a Joy Division riff I’ve heard in at LEAST four days, and this series fits Box Elders like a glove of love; their “Tiny Sioux” is like Ganglians gone garage, though it’s not thrilling as you might think. Mother of Tears’ punk varietals didn’t bowl me over, but their oldschool aggression—and surprising Wire chemicals that will seep into your open ears/sores—is nothing to sneeze sideways at. ✹

YOUR AD HERE FOR ONLY:

$50

stn's box ads are an easy, affordable way to connect with our unique readership, especially for small organizations, shops, labels and individuals on a budget. For more information, e-mail us at:

operations@signaltonoisemagazine.org

WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #60 | 79

REISSUE REDUX

Bill Meyer surveys the season’s key reissues.

While the redux sat out Sony’s effort to snag your tax refund with that box that includes everything Miles Davis recorded for Columbia, we must tip the proverbial hat to the Columbia Legacy 40th anniversary edition of Bitches Brew. They’ve replaced the late ’90s boxed set’s tons of not-that-similar extras with more relevant material: 45 rpm edits of four tunes, previously unissued alternate takes of two more, and (most important) a DVD of the 1969 lost quintet playing about half the Brew for Danish TV. If you miss the murk of the original LP, you’re out of luck. This version sticks with the 1998 remix and adds an even more defined mastering job. If you want more mystery, I guess you’ll have to smoke with your windows closed.

A much older Miles session, the 1951 date that yielded Dig, is amongst Concord’s new crop of remastered Original Jazz Classics, alongside some celebrated sessions by Bill Evans, Chet Baker, and Wes Montgomery. The attentive will point out that many of these titles have already been rotated through two new editions in the past decade, and they would be right. The good news is that this time they’ve scaled back the excessive, borderingon-distorted compression that afflicted the Fantasy versions. Miles is just hanging on through the changes of this pure bebop set; most of the heat comes from Art Blakey and Sonny Rollins. Another title worth your attention is Jazz Impressions of Black Orpheus by the Vince Guaraldi Trio. Recorded in 1961, years before Guaraldi painted himself into a corner as the Peanuts piano guy, this album is what gained him broad public notice in the first place.

Breezy, graceful, and not at all phoned in, it has lost none of its charm.

If Miles can go multi-media, why not Sun Ra? ESP-Disk has assembled all three volumes of The Heliocentric Worlds of Sun Ra in one duo-fold digipak. One might take a dim view of the choice to consign Volume Two’s cover, which is one of the best LP sleeves in the history of music, to an inner tray position, but you can also access the front and back of all three albums as files on one of the discs.

There’s also a short video and a trove of liner notes and contemporary press responses to the first two sets, but be warned; if, like this correspondent, you have obsolete versions of Quicktime and Acrobat you may have a lot of trouble viewing them. HatOLOGY has just put out a new version of Ra’s Sunrise In Different Dimensions, a splendid 1980 live date by a nine-piece version of the Arkestra. Sadly it does not restore the three tunes excised when this album first made the transition from double LP to CD in 2001, but the sound is much more vividly rendered. This is a great example of the Arkestra in their prime, when they were willing to play anything and still able to do it.

Should you be inclined towards more earthly pleasures, the self-titled 1969 release by Jane Birkin and Serge Gainsbourg might be just your soundtrack. Its button-pushing, banned-in-umpteen burgs single “Je T’Aime… Moi Non Plus” has plenty of heavy breathing, and the rest of the album keeps up its slick strings, heavy bass, and beauty vs. beast vocal dynamic (Wait, who’s the beast? Serge may have looked and acted beastly, but it’s his almostchild bride who has trouble hitting the notes). Light In The Attic haven’t drastically changed the sound, but they’ve added a b-side and a swell booklet with

lots of text, a bunch of lecherous drawings, and reproductions of 11 different single sleeves; for a banned song, “Je T’Aime” sure got around.

Recorded three years later, the second, self-titled album by Lo Borges is equally iconic, but for different reasons. The Brazilian crooner, who first flew onto most people’s radar by singing duets with Milton Nascimento, adorned the sleeve with a pair of well-worn high-tops. What better way to endear yourself to the world’s soccer-playing multitudes?

It worked for him. Dip inside and the record is an eclectic mix of heavy grooves, light keyboard flourishes, and singer-songwriter moves that made the world safe for The Sea and Cake, even if no one knew it at the time. Water has departed from their usual practice of adding context-setting liner notes, but in light of their drastically slowed-down release schedule I suppose we should be glad they’re still doing CDs at all. Don’t give up, guys.

Iconic isn’t the word I’d pick to describe I, Brute Force’s Confections of Love (Bar/None), but if you’re a veteran Doctor Demento listener there are parts of this record that’ll probably bring a tear to your eye. Back in 1967 Mr. Force was just another show tune song-slinger, but he somehow lucked out and managed to make one big-budget record for Columbia. If the prospect of a clone of the early Neil Diamond doing ultra-dramatic, snarky songs about romantic and relational misadventures with names like “Tapeworm of Love” tickles your funny bone, this long-MIA platter is now available on disc along with its even more notorious follow-up.

Somehow Mr. Force persuaded Apple records to release the song “King of Fuh” as a single, only to have Apple’s distributors refuse to circulate it. Why? Say the words “Fuh King” moderately fast and you’ve got both the song’s chorus and your reason.

For a far more effective use of twisted humor, check out A Can of Bees and Underwater Moonlight by The Soft Boys. In the mid-’70s Robyn Hitchcock was one bitter man; his youthful hippy dreams had been smothered by the drear of energy crisis-era England, and the musical culture around him was embracing a thuggish punk ethos that was totally at odds with his growing cleverness as a songwriter. His solution? Get cleverer and meaner.

Bees overflows with bile and bursts of Beefhearty stun guitar, but it’s so well wrought that it’ll put you in touch with your inner disillusioned young man and have you, too, singing “Do the Chisel.” Moonlight is more tuneful, steeped in then-unfashionable influences like the Byrds and Syd Barrett, and to this day it’s one of Hitchcock’s peak moments. The Soft Boys catalog has been around the block a few times—comprehensive reissues, boxed set, the works—but Yep Roc has decided to go back to the basics. No bonus tracks, no liner notes, just the LPs’ songs mastered nice and punchy and packaged in little gatefold sleeves. If you already have these albums, these are hardly an upgrade, but if you just discovered them on some blog, here is an excellent chance to make an honest person of yourself.

Hitchcock’s been loved and pilloried for his rampant Englishness, but they don’t come any more English than Shirley Collins. One of the great singers of the English folk revival, it’s a bit startling to recall that American folk archivist Alan Lomax coproduced her first recordings. Sweet England has been out on CD before, but Collins is involved with

80 | SIGNAL to NOISE #60 WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM

this one so Fledgling representing it as definitive.

The new digipak cover is blandly pretty, and Collins’ new notes replace the scholarship of previous ones with personal remembrance and apologies. Collins seems a bit embarrassed by this record, especially the lighthearted songs, but she shouldn’t be. She’s in great voice, already accomplished at homing in on a song’s truth, and her banjo accompaniment has a simple charm of its own. If you haven’t heard this record and you think you like British folk, you owe it to yourself to check it out now.

If Collins represents folk music as something consciously reconstructed, Ola Belle Reed is a good example of where they got the parts. Reed grew up before World War II in North Carolinian Appalachia, and learned her songs and banjo licks from friends and family; along the way she added a few of her own that celebrated the folk who raised her. Her takes on relatively contemporary material like Hank Williams’ “I Saw the Light” sound every bit as lived the versions of “Nine Pound Hammer,” “Bonaparte’s Retreat,” and “Foggy Mountain Top” that she took first to the radio in the ’40s. Rising Melodies (Smithsonian) isn’t exactly a reissue; it combines eleven songs originally released on a couple of Folkways LPs and eight more recorded during the ’70s but never previously released.

The material is well sequenced and comes with a 40-page booklet full of photos and reminiscences about the family life from which her music grew.

The country boys in Riley probably had someone a little like Ola Belle in mind when they wrote the title song of Grandma’s Roadhouse (Delmore), although they seem not to have had such fond feelings for the mothers and girlfriends who do their songs’ protagonists wrong almost as much as city ways do their heads in. The trio was augmented in the studio by future Nashville honky-tonk hero Gary Stewart, which has a lot to do with why this 1970 record, which was originally released in a pressing of 500 with hand-stamped covers, is being unearthed now. But even though they made no headway in their time, their gospel-rooted singing and boogierock guitars suit ears tuned to Creedence Clearwater Revival or Link Wray’s Three Track Shack material.

The Soundway and Africa Analog labels have kept up a steady stream of compilations skimming the cream of ’70s African pop music, but not many complete albums have been reissued. QDK has stepped up with some records that haven’t been seen since their initial pressings sold out in Zambia and Nigeria. Witch hailed from the former nation, but if you ignore their accents you might think they came from a garage in mid-America after spending some time huddled around a record player stacked high with Yardbirds records. Introduction (QDK/ Normal), their first album, is replete with groovy organ, fuzztone guitar, righteous riffs, and lyrics full of youthful defiance. Tirogo, from Nigeria, betray another US influence on Float (QDK/Normal). With its big, bold guitar lines arcing over propulsive polyrhythms, they remarkably close to mid-’70s (and thus contemporaneous) Santana. But the sentiments sung by lead singer Wilfred Ekanen are resolutely local; instead of platitudes about brotherhood, he sings about working with one’s hands to keep the country from starving. Both of these albums are fairly short, under a half an hour. Neither sports the elaborate packaging of a Soundway ef-

CROSSWORD by puzzlemaster Ben Tausig

43. Wide shoe width 44. "So this guy walks into ___" 45. Borden bovine 46. Tissue used in beatboxing 49. Memo opener 51. *A Dirty Projector 57. Wheels to the Newport Folk Festival 60. Jacket type seen on many 60s album covers 61. This band's offshoot is known as "The Orchestra" 62. *Minimal Ohio band on Hanson records 64. Early Commodore computers 66. Brooklyn indie band since 1992 67. Be introduced to 68. Notoriously freaky marquis 69. Trip agent 70. Pre-trip guesses: Abbr.

71. *"Slam" trio

across 1. *Band that became Mazzy Star 5. Jack of "Rio Lobo" 9. Pere Ubu's city, for short 12. Former NBA center Olajuwon 15. Notes after do 16. Sloshed 17. Morbid 18. *New Zealand pop outfit on Sub Pop 20. New York Giant Mel 21. Janitor's tool

23. ___ Dukes (Nugent group) 24. *John O'Regan moniker with "Show Me Your Stuff" 27. ___ of cash (lots of money) 28. Former Disney chief Michael 32. Words from a friend at the door 35. ESP-Disk genre 38. Anka's "___ Beso" 39. Sandwich staple 40. Sch. with more than 50,000 students 41. Place for checking email, on campus

down 1. "Lordy!"

2. "Confessions ___" (2004 Usher single) 3. Tough Japanese dog 4. Guitar legend Paul 5. Typo, e.g.

6. Israel's Bank ___ 7. U.N. diplomat: Abbr.

8. Pat Morita character, in "The Karate Kid" 9. Word after Astral Social or Black Devil Disco 10. Prefix with type 11. Craft-selling website 13. Pushed for position, in a mosh pit 14. Loy of "The Thin Man" 19. Some text messages, for short 22. Miscellaneous task 25. Title for Mrs. Cass 26. Pince-___ glasses 29. Wilco guitarist Cline 30. Morales of "NYPD Blue" 31. Post-shower attire 32. "Suuuure ..."

33. Palm smartphone 34. Spotted 36. Sick ___ dog 37. Pavement's "___ is Stained" 41. Department store scent 42. Staff figure?

44. Priestly garb 47. Natural history museum suffix 48. "Why not?"

50. U.S.-Canada defense acronym 52. Came to a conclusion 53. Sits out for a while 54. Actress Fox 55. Tom Jones's "She's ___" 56. "___ (in the Champagne Room)" (Chris Rock piece) 57. Facial cover 58. Vaguely-defined war justification: Abbr.

59. Unit of sweat 63. Tennis do-over 65. SLR setting

fort, but each has some new interview material and Introduction has some vintage photos.

Bansuri flute player T.R. Mahalingam (19261986), was as legendary for his spiritual playing as he was for his George Jones-like reliability. If that’s not an argument for getting records, I don’t know what is. Mahalingam spent a lot of time in the northern hemisphere, particularly the US, but it falls to a Japanese label to reissue a couple of his 40-year-old LPs. Mali: Essential Recordings of Carnatic Bamboo Flute, 1969-70 (Em) comes in both vinyl and CD versions. Em have a reputation to uphold when

it comes to packaging and sound reproduction, and they do themselves no dishonor here. The CD comes in a double gatefold, and opts for fidelity to the music’s original sound rather than beefing it up.

This music doesn’t need bolstering; Mahalingam’s patient, intricate phrasing and sure tone will banish any doubts you might have about the merits of the flute as a solo instrument.

Fifteen years ago Yazoo records issued three CDs stuffed with ethnographic recordings made around the world during the 78 rpm age. These have become the foundation for the efforts of contempo-

rary vinyl-centric imprints like Canary and Parlortone, and Yazoo has recruited Hisham Mayet of Sublime Frequencies to do vinyl versions. The one I have, The Secret Museum of Mankind Volume 3 (Yazoo), is a record junkie’s dream, with big, quiet, vividly mastered pressings (taken from the original shellac) and a swanky gatefold sleeve unmarred by a UPC code. The real treat, however, lies in taking sidelong journeys that start in Angola and end in an Arizona reservation, or wind from Persia to Albania to Laos.

The globe spins before you, flattened and impaled upon your turntable. ✹

WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #60 | 81

82 | SIGNAL to NOISE #60 WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM

WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #60 | 83

84 | SIGNAL to NOISE #60 WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM

SIGNAL TO NOISE #60 WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #60 | 85