Signal to Noise #54 - summer 2009

THE QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF IMPROVISED, EXPERIMENTAL & UNUSUAL MUSIC

sonic youth

sunn o))) on location: istanbul bell orchestre frank gratkowski pontiak

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issue #54 ✹ $4.95 us / $5.95 can

✹ summer 2009

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SIGNAL TO NOISE

THE JOURNAL OF IMPROVISED, EXPERIMENTAL & UNUSUAL MUSIC ISSUE #54 : SUMMER 2009 CONTACT 1128 Waverly Street, Houston Texas 77008 operations@signaltonoisemagazine.org PUBLISHER pete gershon COPY EDITOR nate dorward CONTRIBUTORS clifford allen ✹ bill barton ✹ caroline bell ✹ darren bergstein ✹ jason bivins ✹ marcus boon ✹ shawn brackbill ✹ stuart broomer ✹ pat buzby ✹ joel calahan ✹ christian carey ✹ john chacona ✹ mike chamberlain ✹ cindy chen ✹ andrew choate ✹ jay collins ✹ dennis cook ✹ larry cosentino ✹ david cotner ✹ ethan covey ✹ julian cowley ✹ raymond cummings ✹ jonathan dale ✹ christopher delaurenti ✹ tom djll ✹ nate dorward ✹ lawrence english ✹ phil freeman ✹ gerard futrick ✹ andrew gaerig ✹ michael galinsky ✹ david greenberger ✹ kurt gottschalk ✹ spencer grady ✹ jason gross ✹ kory grow ✹ james hale ✹ jennifer hale ✹ carl hanni ✹ ed hazell ✹ andrey henkin ✹ jesse jarnow ✹ chris kelsey ✹ mark keresman ✹ steve kobak ✹ robert loerzel ✹ howard mandel ✹ peter margasak ✹ brian marley ✹ marc masters ✹ libby mclinn ✹ marc medwin ✹ bill meyer ✹ sean molnar ✹ richard moule ✹ larry nai ✹ kyle oddson ✹ chad radford ✹ casey rae-hunter ✹ gino robair ✹ michael rosenstein ✹ elise ryerson ✹ ron schepper ✹ steve smith ✹ thomas stanley ✹ john szwed ✹ nathan turk ✹ dan warburton ✹ alan waters ✹ ben watson ✹ seth watter ✹ charlie wilmoth

CONTENTS 54 pontiak 6 bell orchestre 8 frank gratkowski 10

sonic youth 12 on location: istanbul 22 sunn o))) 30 live reviews 38 book reviews 44 cd / dvd / lp / dl reviews 46 crossword 81 graphic novella 82

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Virginia’s Carney brothers bend vintage rock and roll into sidelong manifestos and acoustic shambles.

By Grayson Currin

PONTIAK

Van Carney uses the beige sedan’s brakes just barely as he angles into the sharp bend of the gravel road that leads to the farmhouse his older brother, Jennings, rents. The taillights flash for a few moments as Van makes the corner. He straightens, speeds up and—after another short bit—pulls into the driveway that flanks the verdant lawn of a large rural Virginia estate. Van keeps driving and pulls close to the little ranch home in the back. He and Jennings bound from the car.

Lain, the youngest of the three, has been chopping wood into long, thin slivers near the small lot’s front fence, and he’s collecting the pieces. He heads inside, and the rest of the party follows. Jennings lives here with his girlfriend, an abundance of books and family photographs, and the panoply of large amps, guitars, keyboards, cords, cables, drums, sticks, microphones and machines that the three brothers use in their rock band, Pontiak. He thanks Lain, who’s already throwing the kindling into the wood-burning stove in the living room, and heads into the kitchen to drop off the groceries he purchased back in town.

The Carneys have old roots here in the distant D.C. outcropping of Warrenton, Va.: Their father still refers to the nearby commercial district where the groceries were purchased as “the bypass.” Full of chain restaurants and gas stations, the area rose as a response to a then-new road that skirted Warrenton’s small downtown. It’s an addition to an old place the family knows well.

That’s sort of how the music of the Carneys feels, too: At Pontiak’s center is a hearthstone of vintage rock ’n’ roll, from the barreling organ bulk of The Doors and the winding Southern roar of The Allman Brothers Band to the grind of grunge progenitors and the brittle tones of stoner metal. But Pontiak accepts old refer-

ences only as an invitation to damage them.

Maker—the trio’s second album for Thrill Jockey—condenses tunes into 74-second bursts and stretches them into 14-minute manifestos, placing hooky five-minute anthems alongside browbeaten acoustic shambles. Familiar but fucked-up, Maker pays homage to the old ways by disrupting them with the nebulous and unproven.

“I never know what I want. I just know what I don’t want,” says Van Carney, sitting at a weathered picnic table on the front lawn. He skids into a tangent in which he equates playing music to the trial-error-experience experience of finding palatable fast food on the road.

His brothers help finish the story, which happens very often. “That seems kind of negative, but the only way you know anything is from experience.”

The Carneys left Warrenton for those experiences and only brought the band back home to roost and record last year: In 2003, Jennings was living in Colorado, on the last leg of the failing relationship that had taken him west.

Van and Lain had been tinkering with recording in their mom’s basement, and Jennings had made a tape with them while he was briefly back in Virginia. Lain subsequently headed to England to study, and Van moved into D.C. to work for National Public Radio. Jennings went back to Colorado, and things didn’t improve.

After seven months, he returned east and moved into a cheap Georgetown apartment with Van. Lain’s term in England came to a close, and he headed to Maryland to finish school. His brothers abandoned D.C. for Baltimore. As the Carneys immersed themselves in an inclusive scene that taught them to open their ears, to be more accepting of new ideas that might filter into their music, Pontiak lumbered into its weird shape. They’d all played in

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bands before, but Baltimore showed them that they could make mostly anything and find an audience.

“I would say I’m probably musically illiterate.

Well, I’m not really, but, growing up, I didn’t really listen to that much at all. I’m always surprised by what I can do. I can do anything, I guess,” says Van, speaking not with arrogance but instead with the awareness of someone who understands he hasn’t heard or tried everything. Baltimore was his education. “Realizing that you can do—not that we do just whatever—but that you can, especially when it’s attainable, and you’re friends with everybody. It’s that inclusive idea.”

Van left Baltimore for New York in 2007, but he soon discovered that heading back into Maryland to record and rehearse drained the band financially and physically. In 2008, they all came back to Warrenton, dispersing around the town. They regularly gather here at Jennings’ little house, taking that sharp turn on that old gravel road, to write and record in a tiny square of a room. Every two months, they hit the road for one month, leaving home to play and, as it were, gather more experience. It prevents isolation and lets them bypass getting too comfortable at home.

“Recordings are cool as a snippet in time of how a band develops,” says Jennings, the outline of the billion-year old Shenandoah Mountains tracing the sky behind his head. “I really enjoy the live setting. I really like traveling.

I don’t like waiting around to play the show.”

So, as Lain adds, they carve pipes from old walnut flanks from trees in Van’s backyard. They take the wood, whittle it away in venues and in the van and—eventually—bring the new shape back to its old Virginia home. ✹

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Montreal sextet blends chamber pop with post-punk noise and improvisation.

By Vish Khanna

Marzena Abrahamik

BELL ORCHESTRE On a lazy Sunday night, Bell Orchestre’s Kaveh Nabatian is in the early stages of a dinner party at his Montreal home and, even through the phone line, things already sound boisterous. Last night his band played a show a few hours away in Kingston, Ontario, supporting their ambitious new record, As Seen Through Windows, and, while some members are aware of our interview appointment, there’s some sarcasm in Nabatian’s voice when I ask if anyone else from Bell Orchestre is kicking about.

“Two of them are, though neither of them are famous Arcade Fire people,” he says dryly. “Sarah’s on her way soon so, if you really want her, you can have her.”

While Nabatian’s joking, it’s obvious he’s used to being part of an ensemble that lives in the shadow of one of the most popular indie-rock bands on the planet. Richard Reed Parry and Sarah Neufeld might be best known for their membership in Arcade Fire but, some nine years ago, they and drummer Stefan Schneider quietly formed the explosive instrumental ensemble Bell Orchestre to create live soundscapes for dance theatre troupes. Pietro Amato of Torngat (also a one-time touring member of Arcade Fire) and Nabatian soon joined the fold and the five-piece entered Montreal’s Hotel2Tango studio with Howard Bilerman to make a record in 2003, just as Arcade Fire began to supernova.

When Recording a Tape the Colour of the Light was released by Rough Trade in 2005, listeners raved about Bell Orchestre’s debut album, embracing their tricky amalgam of chamber pop, post-punk noise,

and improvised music. Even within the ‘Montreal music fever’ running high then, Bell Orchestre’s widespread acceptance was somewhat surprising, given that the band creates music they themselves have difficulty articulating. “It’s hell, yeah,” Nabatian says. “We’re very aware of not getting stuck in anything; that’s really important to all of us. We’re really excited about bringing new elements to the band and push ourselves to not get stuck in some kind of ambient, drfit-y, strings-and-horns thing.”

“We’ve been playing together for eight or nine years, but all of us influence each other because we learned how to play at the same time,” Amato adds. “We’re musically connected and created a little language for ourselves that’s our own.”

In an effort to keep things fresh, Bell Orchestre welcomed some new collaborators for As Seen Through Windows. Michael Feuerstack of Snailhouse and the Wooden Stars and reed wizard Colin Stetson each joined the band as regular contributors. A gifted guitarist, Feuerstack contributed lap steel to the first album and joined the band live sporadically. “We used to call ‘Les Lumieres’ ‘Feuerstack’ because it featured him,” Nabatian recalls. “He started playing more shows and on more songs so we just said, ‘Fuck, why don’t you just be in the band?’”

“As soon as we put Mike on that song, we were like, ‘Whoa, what is this new layer?’” Neufeld explains. “He comes up with these parts that sound like they’ve been missing; they glide through the weird tapestry that is us and knot everything together. Colin’s sort of the same thing. He really boosts everything because he’s just

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such a balls-out musician; we actually play better technically, with more action and spirit because he’s so ‘on 11’ all the time.

When he plays the bass saxophone, it really blasts the low end in this exciting way; every time we hear it we’re like, ‘Yeah! Oh shit, it’s that thing that we love!’”

Looking to challenge themselves further, Bell Orchestre opted to leave Montreal and bring their latest songs to Chicago’s Soma Studios to work with John McEntire of Tortoise and The Sea and Cake. The mission: to make the most of working with a genuine hero and capture their elusive sound in a new way.

“We really trusted him because we respect him so much,” Neufeld explains. “It was like working with a mentor even if he didn’t know it; there was subtle fawning. We had a lot of ideas in terms of pushing the aesthetics and creating this cloud effect we get live, and he ran with it further. He was like, ‘Okay, you want it to be crazy like this?

What about crazy like this?’ And he’d come up with exactly the kind of thing we were dreaming of but even more awesome; he’s really good at realizing these vague sonic descriptions.”

With As Seen Through Windows hot in their pocket, Bell Orchestre’s members must now meet the challenge of making time for each other, just as external considerations clog up their respective schedules. “It’s difficult but we just had a meeting today, which kinda confirmed that it’s really important to us, even if it’s difficult,” Nabatian says.

“Everyone has a million things to do but this isn’t any less important than anything else.

This band isn’t going anywhere. ✹

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Berlin’s multi-reed maverick explores the realm of “instant composition” with small group combos and solo articulations.

By Pete Gershon

FRANK GRATKOWSKI “Every note is a living thing, I think,” says Frank Gratkowski, sitting in a Houston cafe and speaking about the philosophy that lies behind his music. “A living organism. You play a note, and it becomes alive. For me, all good music has that spirit, has a sort of message behind it, a human message. I don’t just play things because they’re mathematically or theoretically interesting, there has to be something more.“ That seems about right for this Berlin-based multi-reedist, who with his alto sax and clarinets in hand, seems to be on a relentless quest for new sounds and novel playing situations.

Whether he's performing solo concerts, in ad hoc groups on tour stops in Amsterdam, Chicago and New Orleans, or working with one of the several ongoing small units he’s established, Gratkowski’s blend of Braxtonian astringency and a melodicism recalling that of Lee Konitz has cemented his reputation as one of the most important improvisers of his generation.

“I prefer the term ’instant composing’ to improvisation,“ says Gratkowski, “because I’m really composing in the moment instead of just playing, playing, playing. There has to be a compositional idea behind it, that grows with the piece.“ He points to his long-running trio with pianist Achim Kaufmann and bassist Wilbert deJoode as an example of the kind of “compositional stance“ he seeks out, even in a unit that uses no written music or pre-planned structures. “We always seem to synch immediately somehow, finding ways to connect, so that it’s not about single voices anymore. We never talk about anything, and we never rehearse.

Never, ever. Same as when I work with [pianist] Georg Graewe. When I work with my quartet, I bring my own compositions, but I never tell them what to do. We play the written compositions, but I don’t tell them how to play. If I don’t like it, I change the composition!“ The quartet with drummer Gerry Hemingway, bassist Dieter Manderscheid and trombonist Wolter Wierbos, which has released five records including 2003’s widely-acclaimed Spectral Reflections on Leo, has its roots in a large ensemble led in the mid-’90s by pianist Klaus König which

featured Gratkowski, Hemingway and Manderscheid among its members. “At the end of the tour with the large ensemble, the very next day, we went into the studio and I spent my whole fee from the tour to record my first trio CD [1996’s Gestalten], where almost nothing at all was notated. Then I began to get ideas about what to write for the band. I need to know how people sound before I can write for them.“ “Later I needed another melody instrument,“ Gratkowski continues, “I have to say, I originally had [trombonist] George Lewis in mind, but he was teaching and writing and didn’t want to tour, so I called Walter Wierbos. You know with Wolter, you can write this impossible shit and you show it to him and ask, ’Can you play this?’

And he’ll say, ’No. But I can fake it.’ And that’s exactly what I want! We’ll do a few takes and when I listen back, it’s the take where he’s played something different than what I’d written that ends up on the record.“ Another of Gratkowski’s ongoing concerns is his trio with drummer William Winant and Chris Brown on piano and live electronics. They’ve recently released Wake, a live recording from 2007 on Red Toucan, and are preparing for an engagement at the 2009 Donaueschingen festival where they’ll perform an improv set as well as an interactive piece by Austrian composer Gerhard Winkler. “In the future it might be interesting to do written music,“ Gratkowski says of his work with the unit, “but at the moment as long as it’s not getting boring I’d like to just keep improvising with them.“ Gratkowski, 46, grew up in Hamburg and began teaching himself to play the saxophone at age 16. He cites a chance encounter with Anthony Braxton’s Berlin/Montreaux LP as a formative experience, though at the time the budding musician was spending more time with the records of Santana, Genesis and Yes. He joined his school’s rock and jazz bands, though he admits he possessed more enthusiasm than technique. “I had no idea about the changes, I just played in E flat all the time, out of tune even. I’d show up at a jam session, and people would say, ’oh no, here comes that guy.’“ He

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continued to seek out any playing situations he could, ranging from piano bar gigs (“they liked me because they had problems with their neighbors, and I played very quietly“) to smoky jam sessions with members of Can. By his early twenties, he’d begun working with peers like Kaufmann and Graewe and even started to land gigs alongside well-established players like drummer Willie Kellers and bassist Peter Kowald. Private lessons with saxophonists Charlie Mariano and Steve Lacy further aided his pursuit of his own personal style (though he admits he became so strongly influenced by Lacy that he’s permanently retired his soprano sax).

An omnivorous player who’s as interested in free noise as he is contemporary classical music (“I hate all kinds of dogma, I hate ’scenes’“), Gratkowski’s own personality might be glimpsed most easily in the many solo concerts he plays around the globe, and indeed, that’s often where his music has evolved the most. “The trick is not to do everything you know in the first ten minutes. You develop a sense of timing. How long can I work with just this one note? How long can I vary the texture? Sometimes with this music, you end up in situations where you have to fight to make things happen ... you get out on the gig and things don’t work, and you have to find new ways. I can play a major seventh in the baritone range, four, five notes, sometimes I can play even lower than that. I found that technique on a solo concert where I had a bad reed that became thinner and thinner. And I became quite angry and I tried to play roughly, like this dirty effect, and I found I could control the pitch, that it was easier to do with a soft reed, and I worked on it until I could play in that range on my normal reed. And I based a whole piece around this technique, which is ’Loom’ on the Spectral Reflections CD.“ Ultimately, though, it’s not about technique for Gratkowski, it’s about making a connection with the listener. “It’s something I’m very serious about. That’s why when I haven’t played my best, or if I’ve had too much to drink by the second half of the concert, I get mad at myself, I could punch myself in the face!“ ✹

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MEET THE ETERNALS As Sonic Youth continues to develop their marriage of songwriting and unfettered experimentation, Jesse Jarnow goes behind the scenes with the elder statesfolk of modern rock. Photos by Ted Barron.

Sonic Youth at M. Shanghai in Brooklyn, April 2009

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Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore at home in Northampton, MA, April 2009

At first, the kitchen seems like the epicenter. It’s where the big dog, Merzbow, is chilling. Thurston Moore, too. Packing cassettes at a long, sunlit table, the Sonic Youth guitarist removes cases from the box, ten per wide hand. Prepping the newest 100-unit release on his Ecstatic Peace microlabel—a purple tape by Baltimore dada noiseniks Crazy Dreams Band, the letter A scrawled on the top side in sharpie—Moore stuffs cryptic J-cards into the plastic shells.

A mock-up LP for The Eternal, Sonic Youth’s 23rd full-length and first for Matador Records—cover painting by the late John Fahey—lies on the table. “There’s only one company that makes double-gatefold sleeves in the country,” the 50-year-old Moore says offhandedly, packing tapes.

“They’re in California.”

It is also the kind of house where the front door is rarely used. Indeed, finding visitors on the porch—just up the hill from the Smith College campus in Northampton, Massachusetts—Moore looks mildly bewildered to find a few boxes there, too, like it was some remote wing of the house that he wasn’t used to checking. The place is large, 6,000 square feet, built in the warmest kind of mid-century institutional. It is, in fact, the former Clarke School for the Deaf. (Ahem.)

When Kim Gordon—Moore’s wife of 25 years, bandmate for three longer—arrives home a few minutes later, via the back door, she passes through the kitchen first.

“The first box of fruit came,” Moore says.

“I saw,” she says, taking off her coat.

“Oh, there’s an avocado,” he says, opening the box. “Mark Ibold turned us onto this little independent citrus farm in California.

You go to their site, and they send you a box of... their shit.” He looks in the box. “I sort of expected it to be wrapped.”

“Well, that’s the fruit-of-the-month club and that’s lame,” Gordon, 56, says. The two pepper their phrases with ample slackerisms: “I guess.” “Or whatever.”

“There’s no letter or nothing. Here’s some fruit.” Moore considers a pygmy grapefruit thing. “Ibold’s a real food-head,” he says of the former Pavement bassist, who joined Sonic Youth formally with The Eternal after touring with them for several years, the newest epicurean resource in the SY fold.

“He’s got a friend who writes the $25and-under column for the Times,” Gordon notes, before disappearing into another part of the house.

Other clues suggest the kitchen’s centrality in the household’s daily life: overstuffed bulletin boards, dog-walking schedules, school numbers for their 14-year old daughter Coco, teetering piles of CDs (Mingus’s East Coasting in the player). Until one starts to explore.

A lived-in living room has a wall of art books, an abandoned chess game, a small

drum set, baby grand piano (Neil Young songbook and “Stairway to Heaven” on the stand).

Beyond that, Moore’s office. There: walls lined with underground poetry. “Down here it starts getting into small presses that existed,” he points out. “Like Ed Sanders from the Fugs had Fugs Press, and John Sinclair’s Artist’s Workshop Press in the ’60s in Ann Arbor. And Dick Higgins. And all this Canadian stuff, like Blewointment Press.” One of the house’s many turntables is tucked in front of the 11 fireplaces. A demo tape by drummer Steve Shelley’s previous band, Crucifucks, is on the mantle above it. (Gordon declines a look into her workspace, upstairs. “It’s just a mess,” she apologizes.)

And below it all, what has been dubbed the Folk and Cinema basement, site of Ecstatic Peace recordings, Sonic Youth writing sessions for The Eternal, and Moore’s record collection, which takes up more space than many a downtown apartment, cubbies and nooks seeming to wrap around most of the house’s footprint. It cuts through four or five basement rooms, including a wall of cassettes two-deep (six-tape La Monte Young bootlegs on top) and somehow seems to make up the literal foundation of the place.

“You’d have a break and someone would pull out the Jellys’ 7-inch and we’d listen to that and get inspired,” says Shelley, 46.

“It’s like a New York one-off 7-inch from just after the No Wave period. It has one foot in punk and one foot in dance. We had a song named after the 7-inch, originally, but I forget which one it was. There are lots of weird records down in the basement. Some Soft Machine, lots of free jazz.”

Shelley, Ibold, and guitarist Lee Ranaldo roadtripped the 150 miles north, listening to music and talking about bicycles. “We’re all going through a little bit of a bike phase right now,” Shelley says.

“We’d all stay at the house,” he continues. “We would go out to movies, or watch a DVD. I think we all watched The Wrestler one night. It’s all fairly normal. We’ve been around each other for so long that it’s a little bit like an extended family to some degree.”

On weekends, Gordon and Moore headed to Manhattan, where they keep the same Chinatown apartment they’ve had since the early ’80s, for recording sessions.

The band closed up shop at their Murray Street hangout, Echo Canyon, where they’d worked for a decade, in spring 2006; The Eternal marks their first sessions at Echo Canyon West, a split studio space in the same Hoboken warehouse complex where Yo La Tengo make camp.

Compared to its predecessor, where the band’s phalanx of guitars lived in silent harmony in a long, narrow hallway and Patti

Smith posters hung over natty couches, Echo Canyon West is slightly less homey.

But it’s still home, at least for the moment.

Raymond Pettibon’s original silkscreen for Goo hangs above the door. Shelley—a Hoboken resident since 1987—probably spends the most time there, along with Ranaldo.

But, really, if one were a teenager first discovering Sonic Youth (if not actually lucky enough to still be one), and envisioned some kind of fantasy pad where Sonic Youth made their music, Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon’s basement and whole house would look exactly like it. And it would still blow your mind.

It’s not hard to imagine the cover art of The Eternal almost literally falling into place from the walls: a shot of Johnny Thunders by impresario Danny Fields (“that’s really the Eternal right there,” Moore says), a photo Gordon took on the last SY trip to Shanghai, and Fahey’s painting.

“Thurston threw a bunch of images on the kitchen table and we just started digging them out,” Shelley says.

And there it is.

Near the beginning of a protracted Brooklyn spring, on a Wednesday a few months before The Eternal’s release, I bring the highly watermarked CD to a bar across the street. A friend is bartending. She puts it on and turns up the volume.

The traffic continues as normal. A dude bobs his head, though he leaves before “Anti-Orgasm,” the second song, is over.

Down the bar, a guy hits on a girl by asking her what Jim O’Rourke albums she’s heard, though it’s unclear if this was triggered by the Sonic Youth on the speakers.

When somebody figures it out, he listens thoughtfully for a minute before starting to grumble. “It just all sounds the same after a while,” he says. “Always just that same 4/4 beat. Don’t get me wrong, I like them and all, but maybe if they played in another time signature or something, sometime.”

He lingers on this point. He doesn’t seem to like Maureen Tucker either, though, and his argument becomes less convincing.

“Many tracks follow your trademark ‘Expressway to Yr Skull’ verse/chorus/ extended-instrumental-noize-attack formula that may have seemed revolutionary back in 1986, but just sounds predictable 16 years later,” Amy Philips wrote in a Village Voice takedown titled “Sonic Euthanasia,” reviewing 2002’s Murray Street.

“Somebody called me the Benjamin Button of rock,” Moore laughs at his kitchen table. “Somebody else called me the Dick Clark.”

“It’s a compliment!” Gordon says quickly. (“My friend calls him the Michael Caine of indie rock,” the attendant of a sound art gallery

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Steve Shelley and Lee Ranaldo at Echo Canyon West, Hoboken, NJ, April 2009

tells me, unprovoked, a few weeks earlier.)

The issue of Sonic Youth’s continued existence is problematic to some people, no two ways about it. It raises issues of what it means to be into a band, of what one is trying to get out of the whole endeavor.

The basic tools of The Eternal aren't much different than 1989’s classic Daydream Nation (or 1981’s debut Sonic Youth EP). Nor are they in any way debased.

Moore and Ranaldo’s guitars snarl away, joined now on six-string by Gordon. The lyrics are an explosion of sex, politics, and corporeal transcendence.

“Violation!” Moore sings on “AntiOrgasm.” “Of the cosmic body!” Gordon responds.

“Anti-war,” he sings. “Is anti-orgasm!” she exults.

As throughout, Shelley keeps the noise tethered to songcraft via a post-Velvets/ Voidoids/Television pulse that holds firmly to the band’s Manhattan heritage. One can apply various metrics: it’s noisier than Rather Ripped. It’s not as anthemic as Murray Street (which really was great). There are more Moore/Gordon tandem vocals than usual (“Leaky Lifeboat (For Gregory Corso),” about a trip to “the freaky north,” is groovy).

Best of all: two Lee tunes.

So, if one has been listening to Sonic Youth in earnest for even a third of their long career, what does one do? How does one properly assimilate a new album’s lack of newness and still love a band who are clearly still worth loving? Sonic faith, perhaps. If nothing else, history should be good for that.

Birthed from No Wave abandon, Glenn Branca and Rhys Chatham’s guitar walls, well-read underground libraries, the Grateful Dead, and art school, Sonic Youth’s development was more gradual than it seemed in the whirlwind of indie labels, ’zine scenes, drumsticks wedged against fretboards, van tours, punk romance, and (eventually) grunge that surrounded it. The band spent the ’80s building a vocabulary out of modified guitars; songs were birthed whole from their alternately tuned cheapness.

“For [1987’s Sister], and for Daydream right after, we were in the middle of intense investigations of structure,” Ranaldo remembers, sitting with Shelley in Echo Canyon West, the band’s gear having just returned from a trip to Chile.

“There’d be one structure one week, and then we’d rip [it] apart. At one point, we had sections, like A, B, C, D, E, and were shuffling them around until we got something that we liked.”

“Kill Yr Idols,” they famously titled a 1983 tune—“let that shit die and find out the new goal,” Moore sang—but classic rock’s melodic throughlines are what launched

them to Geffen Records in 1990. (At Echo Canyon, Ranaldo and Shelley look forward to the new Neil Young album with enthused skepticism.) After 1995’s Washing Machine, the band set adrift on the diamond sea of psychedelic extrapolation, spawning their still-running series of SYR EPs and LPs. Now that they’re back on the other shore, as they have been since Murray Street, there’s the question of what happens when a radical sound becomes internalized and expected.

The answer, for better or worse, is The Eternal.

“Melodies and different dissonances in the melodies become more important, [as well as] using those tools or vocabulary things within a structure,” says Gordon.

“It’s obvious that we’re not exploring here.

It’s because we’re using them. You spend enough time playing them, and those abstract gestures can be... not abstract.

“I don’t think we’re really trying to do anything new, just writing songs,” she continues. “With a name like that, we’ve never really been trying to find anything new.”

“I don’t really like bands that change the game up from record to record,” Moore declares. “I like bands that you know what they sound like and you can go to them for that, in a way. There’s always a pressure to apply contemporary ideas into your music, even if it’s not yours.”

“We’re the same four people for a long, long time,” Ranaldo offers. “There’s gonna be certain aspects of it that are just our voices. You hear our voices in conversations and it’s always the same voices. It comes through that way in the music, too. You just try to keep moving forward. It’s this very river-like stream in a lot of ways. The albums are like little snapshots. You think about the live sound of the band, it’s much more consistent over a long period of time than the albums are.

“I love groups, and—in a way this is kind of Sonic Youth’s thing—when it’s not about a star and a backing band. Everybody’s contributing, everybody’s really interesting.

I like the group where you know the name of everybody in the group. It’s not like Mick Jagger and a bunch of other guys. That’s Keith and Bill and Charlie back there. That’s John, Paul, and George. That’s Phil, Bob, Jerry, and Billy. I can naturally tell all the groups that I feel that way about, because I just naturally know all their names.”

Certainly, for a lot of people, Sonic Youth has long since achieved that status. A good deal of Sonic Youth is bound into their myth — along with R.E.M., the archetype of the first wave of indie bands to sign with major labels (and, per Rock History, thus signed Nirvana). Since that moment, they have done what nobody else has done before or since: operated and expressed themselves simultaneously in a do-it-yourself capacity

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(see: Ecstatic Peace), through independent but still properly mediated structures (like Matador), and via major corporations.

What allows for Ecstatic Peace’s ease of existence is a unique deal with Universal Records, feeding the label three or four LPs a year (including Moore’s own Trees Outside the Academy, Wooden Wand’s James and the Quiet, and Awesome Color’s self-titled debut), almost all of the non-skronky and actually-kinda-songy variety.

“I give complete equal value to doing a noise cassette for the Nurse Etiquette cassette label that I would a record for Universal,” says Moore. “I really don’t draw an aesthetic line there.”

Gordon, an Artforum columnist during SY’s early years, meanwhile has recently created Mirror/Dash with designer Jeffrey Montiero, a line of clothing for Urban Outfitters, beginning with a $415 Hardy Jacket. (Her mid-’90s line with Daisy von Furth, X-Girl, was sold to Japanese investors in 1997 for over a million dollars.)

“I guess I feel Urban Outfitters tries to make the stores more about an individual shopping experience,” she says, leaning on the island in the Northampton kitchen.

“People kind of make it their own. I have mixed feelings about the branding-of-lifestyle thing. But that’s been going on since the ’70s with youth culture. It’s not a new thing. I’m trying to make things that are a little less trendy, more ageless. We don’t really need more clothes for teenagers. They look good in anything.”

In April, she curated an Urban Outfitters’ Pop-Up Shop in Los Angeles, not as a commentary on the notion of curating commerce so much as just doing it.

“Kind of like an installation,” she says.

“I’m using some elements from installations I’ve done, but I’m a little leery about mixing the art and decoration thing. It’d be really easy to do. They’re taking one of my paintings and using it on a big billboard above the building, which is hard to resist.” She smiles. (A series of Gordon’s paintings— watercolors of platonic audience members’ faces—was on display with dealer Kerry Schuss through the spring.)

And all of this is why one could sometimes think that the band at the center might be secondary. Despite two major biographies last year by Stevie Chick and David Browne (the latter mostly authorized and very well-done), expanded reissues, live concert revivals of Daydream Nation (“it was a bit like doing a Broadway play,” laughs Shelley), Sonic Youth are—at that very center—a real band. What is new, really, on The Eternal is the presence of Mark Ibold, who brings a sweet, friendly pulse to the band’s rhythm section.

“Ibold’s a completely different animal than Jim O’Rourke,” Moore says.

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Says Shelley, the drummer who’s played with Gordon, O’Rourke, and Ibold: “Jim was more... it’s sort of a dirty word, but he was more proggy. Or musical. He’s a very accomplished musician, where the rest of us are very self-taught. Jim’s ideas tended to be of one sort, where they were very well developed.

Playing with Kim, it’s a punkier, more immediate, kind of rhythm section. Mark and I are of the same age. We kind of experienced the same music growing up, and I find that we fit together really well. There are a lot of references that we share, whether it’s post-punk music or whatever.”

Just as much as any jazz unit, Sonic Youth is an exchange of personalities. “Sonic Youth, please break up,” Amy Phillips wrote in her Voice piece, but it’s not that simple. It is almost as if when a band has survived unbroken for 25 years, they become something else. But, even so, it’s sometimes good to get together in the basement.

“I think the best you can hope for is getting across the feeling that you’re making a record for the first time,” Gordon says. “But even that sounds really funny. You can never replace the sound of somebody’s first record, that explosion because you don’t know what you’re doing.”

Moore looks a little wistful—though, as always, plenty bemused—describing one of his daughter’s own ventures in the basement.

“A few years ago, she had a group with these other girls, and they were called Lightbulb, and they were pretty much a noise improv group. But I think their ambition was to be a real group that played songs. And they always thought they sucked because they weren’t that, and I was like, ‘no, you’re actually kinda way better because you aren’t. It’s really good!’

“And then one day she was down here with her girlfriends, they were all like 12 years old, the guitars were feeding back, hitting the drums, and they really enjoyed it. Usually, she thinks we go off into noise jams and is just, like, whatever.

“And she came up and sat down at the table and she said, ‘noise is only really good if you’re the one making it.’ Me and Kim were just, like, ‘oh my Goddddd.’ Kim agreed with her and I was, like, ‘Oh, no! That’s not true at all! Au contraire!’”

Moore begins the set seated. He wears a corduroy blazer, playing a Fender Jazzmaster covered in stickers, as if wrenched from the wall at CBGB. A Mick Jagger caricature spits a long tongue. Moore’s duo partner for the night is No Fun noise mogul Carlos Giffoni, the bill at Brooklyn’s Glasslands celebrating his label’s newest release, an LP by Cleveland ambient trio Emeralds, that group’s 35th or so in the past three years. Not counting side projects. Such are the occasions that noise musicians need.

During the gig, Moore plays behind the guitar’s bridge, then above the nut. He scratches the pick-ups, tapping them gently, then lays the guitar on his lap as it squalls. He moves it up against his torso, cradling it in his long arms like an autoharp. His foot taps spastically to an interior rhythm. He grabs the headstock, like he’s trying to bend the neck.

Finally, Moore stands, bracing the instrument against his amp. A string pops, outlined by the weird light of the performance space.

Always, Moore’s mop of hair obscures his face

and any agelines that may’ve accumulated, occasionally parting to reveal his mouth.

Necklaces dangle. Every movement is sound, a hybrid of performance and technique that Moore and Ranaldo have honed through the years.

“You never wanna be where you’re forcing certain gestures or moves that you know worked previously,” Moore says. “Because it doesn’t ever work the same again. That’s the beauty of this kind of playing. It’s not about recreation, the way the song is. In that respect, I don’t have any ambitions during an improvised music set to do certain things, but there are certain things I do do that can come into play.”

If it is easy to be incredulous about Sonic Youth’s big tent albums, the kind of tunes they can jam at massive rock fests in Chile (where they recently shared a bill with Blondie, Rick Astley, Peter Gabriel, and Kiss), it is just as easy to ignore the band’s constant stream of extracurricular music, simply because there is so much of it.

In the same period of time as 2004’s Sonic Nurse, 2006’s Rather Ripped, and this year’s The Eternal, the band also issued shadow albums — full-length entries in their SYR series, including a set improvising to Stan Brakhage films with percussionist Tim Barnes at New York’s Anthology Film Archives (Koncertas Stan Brakhage Prisminimui), a festival jam (J’Accuse Ted Hughes) and a live set with Jim O’Rourke, Mats Gustafsson, and Masami Akita recorded in Denmark (Andre Sider Af Sonic Youth). They have other sessions with O’Rourke, Gustafsson, veteran noise-jazzers Borbetomagus, and guitarist Nels Cline ready to go. (Plus another dozen Moore, Ranaldo, and Shelley projects.)

“Their body of knowledge, and their ability musically, spans a very wide range,” says Mark Stewart, guitarist for the Bang on a Can All-Stars, who premiered Moore’s “Stroking Piece #1” in 2003 and Ranaldo’s “How Deep Are Rivers? (A Map Is a Good Piece of Paper)” in 2007. “From the most primal of rock music to the most esoteric of the avant-garde art music, and it’s real. Nothing is fake. Nothing is like they’re dabbling in something. They’re whole hog.”

On April 2nd, Ranaldo appears with the All-Stars at Merkin Hall, dragging his guitar across the stage and playing his iPhone voicemail through his pick-ups and delay pedals.

“Sometimes it’s amazing, and you get these vocal chorales,” he notes the next day at Echo Canyon West. “That time, it didn’t work so well and I went on to something else.”

During the course of two months in the spring before The Eternal’s release, Moore also plays at a 1 a.m.-on-a-Tuesday trio gig with Ikue Mori and cellist Okkyung Lee at Santo’s Party House in Chinatown, and an art gallery set in Williamsburg at an exhibit by avant-fashion photographer Mark Borthwick.

At the latter, amid Borthwick’s flower arrangements, incense and candles, Moore propels himself backwards against a wall. During the opening act, a hipster’s hair had caught fire— he’d leaned against some of the art—and was quickly put out, the wretched smell cleansed with ample bushels of burning sage.

In April, the band (minus Ibold) appear with former Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones and composer Takehisa Kosugi for a quartet of shows at the Brooklyn Academy of Music celebrating Merce Cunningham’s

90th birthday. They play inside an elaborate construction by Benedetta Tagliabue that resembles a space station. Looking like refugees from Krypton, Cunningham’s dancers move in front, arranging themselves abstractly. On the second level, Ranaldo and Moore hold their guitars against the structure while— above them—Kosugi rolls screws around in a contact-mic’ed pan. Jones, on occasion, shoots quadraphonic basslines through the back of the hall.

Really, Sonic Youth are onto some other shit, to the point where it almost seems impossible for them to avoid it.

On their mid-March jaunt to Chile, Shelley and Ranaldo duck off for a gig with some of the band’s crew (including Tall Firs’ Aaron Mullan) in the courtyard of a former jail, movies projected behind them. “They had all these political prisoners back in Pinochet’s days,” says Ranaldo. “One of the guys that was in the slammer gave us a tour of the place.”

Moore and Gordon, meanwhile, have an unexpected reunion. “Around ’74,” Moore says, “Kim had this band with Willie Winant and two Chilean guys. One of the Chilean dudes found me on the internet and sent me some pictures of Kim from that era that I’d never seen. We went down there, and he picked us up. Nice guy, interesting cat. He was telling us about record stores, and I said I was looking for some Chilean records from the ’60s and ’70s, and the only one that came to mind was this reissue of this Chilean holy grail record for South American psych collector geeks.” Moore interrupts himself. “Which I am not. But I certainly know what that is. I could easily be one.” Gordon giggles. Moore pulls up the photos on his laptop.

“I just said, off the top of my head, ‘It’d be nice to find an original Blops LP.’ And the guy said, ‘Well, that was my group. I was Blops.’ I called [critic/Northampton bro] Byron [Coley] and said, ‘Y’know, Kim was in an extension of Blops,’ and Byron just lost it. He said they have to rewrite all the Sonic Youth bios.”

Moore and the Sonics, in fact, are a breathing index of the music world. Somehow, a query about the band’s move to Hoboken tangents into a history of downtown record stores. (The segue point: “the whole Pier Platters scene. They were the only record store in New York to get cool records at, like if you wanted to get Sub Pop singles, but they weren’t in New York. Bleecker Bob’s and 99 were the early ’80s places, and then 99 took over as Bleecker Bob’s became so insufferable...”)

In the past half-decade, Moore has also put that knowledge to work in an almost academic fashion, editing mix tape: the art of cassette culture for Universe and organizing No Wave, an oral history of the late ’70s NYC scene with Coley, with whom he also pens a sometimes weekly online column, Bull Tongue, for Arthur magazine. Other books—one a photobook reclamation of the word “grunge,” another (with Coley) an oral history of the Lower East Side poetry scene—are in the works.

“If I had my way, I’d have my own imprint at one of these companies, and my own staff. I could make these fucking amazing books all day and everyday, but it just hasn’t worked out that way yet. There aren’t enough minutes at the time,” Moore says, though he doesn’t think his plate is quite full yet.

At the end of the day (perhaps sitting by a fire) Gordon and Moore live in a totally sweet

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house in Northampton because they’re smart and talented and nice and they deserve it. (And frankly, they might be the only couple on earth with enough stuff to actually fill it.) Sonic Youth started as a band and it turned into this. It is a kind of charmed existence and, what’s more, they’re good at it.

At a photo shoot for this article, they come prepared—some changes of clothes (they’re doing several shoots that afternoon) and a make-up artist. Gordon and Moore are flashes of motion, constantly shifting, making interesting images. Gordon slumps against her husband, looking totally bored. In one of the shots, it is perfect: four men sitting with their backs straight against the wall, and Gordon in a perfect asymmetry, stretched out, at the end of the row.

What is valuable about Sonic Youth is their preternatural understanding of music, from its creation to its manufacture to its marketing, of the relationship between power and personal expression, the type of songwriting that is appropriate for mass broadcast (that is, to their fanbase) and what should stay politely confined to cassettes. They know how to operate a photo shoot.

“I think we’ll sell more records,” Gordon says simply of their move to Matador, ending one of the most unique relationships in major label history.

But inside spiraling networks of collaborations and exchanges—capital, cultural, creative—they’re still a band, four (or five) people, and seem to be holding up that end of the bargain pretty well, too. Despite everything Sonic Youth does, and everybody they’ve worked with, nobody else really matters to their story, not Kurt Cobain or Jim O’Rourke or Glenn Branca or Lydia Lunch.

They are a singular force in music, locally and globally, currently and historically. Plus, it still looks like it’d be pretty fun to be in Sonic Youth when you grow up.

“Hey, Steve, put this on your head,” Moore calls out to the drummer, gesturing at a small bird cage dangling from the ceiling of M. Shanghai, the Williamsburg Chinese restaurant (with killer soup dumplings) where the shoot is taking place. “We’ll totally get it off.”

Getting old doesn’t matter to Sonic Youth.

They insured themselves against that when Moore decided to fuse the names of MC5 guitarist Fred “Sonic” Smith with Jamaican DJ/toaster Big Youth. Major label narrative aside, their models are people who continued to work earnestly as long as they lived: Sun Ra, John Fahey, Derek Bailey, and on down the line. The Eternals. Until then, it’s just every moment for itself.

When the photo shoot is over, and the rest of the band disperses, Moore pops out the front door of the restaurant. “Alright!” he says, clapping his hands together, ready to get into some yet-unnamed something else.

“Let’s do this.” ✹ Jesse Jarnow has written for the London Times, the Village Voice, and elsewhere. He hosts the Frow Show on WFMU and tweets @bourgwick. He wrote about Yo La Tengo in STN#30. Ted Barron's photographs have recently appeared in Yeti magazine and on album covers for Laura Cantrell and Steve Earle.

He edits boogiewoogieflu.blogspot.com and his work can be seen at tedbarron.com.

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THE CITY ON SEVEN HILLS

Fascinated by snippets of Turkish music, Michael Chambelain planned a trip to Istanbul to research the sounds of the city and brought back this report.

Ortakoy Mosque and the Bosphorus Bridge, linking Europe and Asia.

It was late 2007 when I met Elif, a young woman from Turkey who was studying English in Montreal. “You have to go to Istanbul,” she told me emphatically. That same day, I was in a bookstore looking for a copy of Peter Hessler’s Oracle Bones. Next to it on the shelf was a book titled Istanbul: Memories and the City, by Orhan Pamuk, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2006. A couple of days later I turned on the television, and Crossing the Bridge, German/ Turkish director Fatih Akin’s documentary about music in Istanbul, was playing on the documentary channel. I was intrigued by the way the musicians were combining “exotic” eastern sounds with western music and the variety of really good bands: Baba Zula, Mercan Dede, Replikas, the rapper Ceza. But I just knew that there was more to what was happening in Istanbul than Akin could fit into 120 minutes,and I wanted to find out what it might be. Elif burned some CDs of Turkish music for me: Duman, a rock band;

Hüsnü Şenlendirici’s The Joy of Clarinet; Mercan Dede’s trance-inducing Seyahatname. I liked what I heard, especially Mercan Dede.

Over the next couple of months I continued to research the history and the music of Istanbul and Turkey, and by March of 2008, I’d decided that I would go at the end of the year—not necessarily the best time of year to be in Istanbul, weather-wise, but the most convenient time for me. A week later, before I’d told anyone about my plans, an email was forwarded to me from an ex-colleague named Leo. She was living in Istanbul, and she called it “the best fucking city in the world.”

Coincidence? Fate? Whatever, the signs were all pointing in one direction, so I booked a flight for early December.

Turkey is the bellybutton of the world, and Istanbul itself is arguably the most strategically placed city on the planet, straddling the 30-

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Opposite, top: Richard Hamer with Orient Expression.

Middle: Taksim Square, looking toward Istikal Caddesi.

Bottom, left: Umut Caglar, Bottom right: Murat Ertel at the Montreal Bar.

kilometer Bosphorus strait, which connects the Black Sea to the Sea of Marmara and divides Europe from Asia. Further to the southwest, the Sea of Marmara is joined via the Dardanelles to the Aegean Sea, and thus ultimately to the Mediterranean. Human habitations going back 6,500 years have been found on the European side of Istanbul; construction of the city’s subway system must periodically be halted to allow for archaeological investigation as the excavation unearths more evidence of the city’s past.

Over the millennia, Istanbul has been by turns the seat of the Roman, Byzantine, Latin, and Ottoman empires. It's literally in the middle of the road, sitting on geographical, political, and cultural faultlines. Ever since Mustafa Kemal Ataturk created the Republic of Turkey out of the ruins of World War I, there has been a tension between the Ottoman Empire’s cosmopolitanism and the ongoing attempt to forge a single pan-Turkish identity. I’m interested in exploring how these tensions inform the music of Istanbul.

On one level they manifest themselves in an openness to cultural influences. As I was to find out, however, this openness is not an unproblematic issue, raising questions of authenticity and identity in a country that struggles with the legacy of a turbulent, often violent history amid the promises and perils of globalization.

Istanbul is a jumble. The bus ride from the airport passes by poorer neighborhoods as it follows the Marmara coast before turning up into Fatih, crossing the bridge and proceeding up to Taksim Square, the central transportation hub. The air is soft, the weather unseasonably warm—20°C on arrival—and I am a bit surprised to see palm trees. The visual landscape is rich and exotic: minarets and ships, crumbling apartment buildings, billboards for cell phones and the new James Bond movie, and fishermen on the bridge over the Golden Horn.

To the extent that there is a downtown in Istanbul, it is Beyoğlu, which sits on the European side of the Bosphorus; it’s bounded to the north

by Taksim Square and to the south by an inlet of the Bosphorus called the Golden Horn. Across the Horn—via the Galata Bridge—is the older section of the city, Sultanahmet, where tourists flock to see the Grand Bazaar, the Blue Mosque, the Hagia Sofia and the Topkapi Palace. (Not really into the standard tourist routine, I make only one trip to the Grand Bazaar, accompanied

by Elif. When I visit the other buildings on my own, the touts for the leather and carpet shops descend on me and I quickly decide to flee.) The area around the Horn is another story, one of my favorite places in Istanbul: the Spice Market, fish market, boat terminus, and hordes of fishermen on the bridge itself give everything a lively, rough-hewn charm. This middle area, between the entertainment mecca of Beyoğlu and the tourist quarter, is a truer reflection of Istanbul’s soul, I think.

The main street of Beyoğlu is İstiklal Caddesi, a two-kilometer pedestrian thoroughfare that is jammed every day from noon to well past

midnight. It is lined with clothing boutiques, book and music stores, cafés, restaurants, and bars; in the warren of back streets to either side are more bars and clubs. The typical building is five or six storeys with an interior staircase, and a single building might house several different nightspots. It is said that there are 3,000 establishments where one can eat, drink and dance or hear live music within two or three blocks to either side of İstiklal. No one really knows the real number, just as no one knows the population of Istanbul, estimated at around 15 million and growing quickly, for the city is a magnet for people from all over Turkey, not to mention the Balkans and the Caucasus. It is a place where cultures meet—it always has been.

There is music everywhere in Istanbul: bad Turkish pop coming out of taxi windows; Turkish folk pouring out of the Türkü bars in the Beyoğlu backstreets; fasıl, the urban folk of Istanbul, from the meyhane (restaurant/bar) outside the window of Leo’s apartment in Asmalımescit. The theme song from the popular movie Issiz Adam is ubiquitous. Above all, there is the five-times-aday call to prayer of the muezzin from the many mosques.

There has been an explosion in all types of Turkish music since the mid-’90s, when government restrictions on radio station licenses were lifted. Everyone speaks of the chill of the 1980 military coup, which ushered in bans on various ethnic musics—particularly Kurdish music—and worked to drain away Turkish cultural vitality for most of a generation. On the other hand, the concentration of entertainment in Beyoğlu is viewed ambivalently by some Istanbul residents.

Richard Hamer, the saxophonist in the group Orient Expressions, was born in the States and spent much of his childhood on the Canadian prairies (where his father was a professor of anthropology); he has lived in Istanbul for the past twenty years. Orient Expressions combines electronic grooves and effects , saxophones and strings, with elements of Turkish folk and Alevi music. They have released three distinctly different albums on Doublemoon, the latest of which is Record of Broken Hearts, an homage to Turkish film music of the 1960s, and they have also collaborated with the Kurdish singer, Aynur Doğan, who was featured in Crossing the Bridge. The range of music reflects the different interests of Hamer, Can Utkan (aka DJ Yakuza), string player Cem Yildiz and sound engineer Murat Uncoglu.

“We’re all sort of newcomers to the city,” Hamer explains, “and the city is why we’re here.

And we’re all sort of making our interpretation of the city, how we vibe to it, as opposed to some sort of pure interpretation.

“This area, Beyoğlu, or Pera, has always probably been overwhelmed by one thing or another,” he continues, as we sit in a café on İstikal. “I think as I get older, that diversity is much richer, is much saner, is much livelier, than monoculture.” Turning toward the window and gesturing out at the street, he says, “there used

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to be an electrician there, a shirt maker there, a lock repairman there, a small corner store, a bookstore, and so on. And now everything is becoming branded. The same thing, in a way, is happening in terms of the music club thing.

All of this city’s entertainment desires and hopes have been focused right here. There’s 15 or 20 million people in Istanbul, and sometimes on a Saturday night, it seems like the whole city is here. You wish it were more spread out, that there were other places. It’s a function of the development of this city—it’s a function of the politics of the city.”

As an example, Hamer describes what recently happened to one old neighborhood. “Sulukele is the oldest known gypsy neighborhood in this part of the world. They’re known throughout the Balkans among gypsy communities as the motherlode, the conduit of the music of the gypsies. They have the greatest musicians and dancers, the whole culture was thriving and alive there. The sultans used to have gypsy orchestras, and I’m sure they were drawn mostly from that community, so they had this wellspring of culture, and they were even quite respected up until the ’60s. And then that place went into decline. It became more of a cheapie place to watch the dancing girls. About 15 years ago, the mayor of the region decided to clean the place up, and they closed down the dancing houses and even broke the musicians’ instruments.

And then, the latest municipal arrangement has decreed that it’s a nice old part of Istanbul and they should knock down the buildings and build ‘nice’ villas in the Ottoman style. They did, they went in there, but people were trying to resist it. They had outside help: Gogol Bordello went there and had a presentation, people started shooting documentaries about it and this and that, but by the time everybody got there it was half-destroyed. That’s part of the tale of the city.

Pieces of it have been erased, recombined, redone. But that place is literally the longeststanding gypsy community in Europe, so they say, and it comes from Byzantine times, the 10th century, and now it’s basically gone. And that’s that. So I’m not so comfortable when I see everything concentrated in one place.”

I start my musical tour in a meyhane called Adiyomamma, in Asmalımescit, just around the corner from Babylon, the top live music club in Beyoğlu, and the famous Buyuk Londra and Pera Palas hotels. The long, narrow room is crowded, so Leo and I stand at the bar at the back, squeezed between a table of 12 out for a birthday celebration, a grouchy drunk at the bar, the cash register, and the singer, Arbil, a statuesque beauty who has the crowd eating out of her hand with her sentimental renditions of popular Turkish songs. Everyone knows the words to all the songs, or so it seems, and they all sing along. Passionately. For about 60 Turkish lira (about $40 US), everyone eats a fixed menu and drinks unlimited raki, the anise-based liqueur that is one of the national obsessions.

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Orient Expressions: Nese Sen. all others by Michael Chamberlain

(Two others are cigarettes and soccer.) At one point, a gypsy kid comes in with an armful of roses. The table beside me buys the lot and then has the kid dance for them. The threepiece band (clarinet, kanun, darbuka, the standard configuration for a Turkish ensemble) plays a fast melody and the kid dances joyfully, while the table throws money at him and stuffs it down his shirt. Later, a belly dancer arrives.

“She’s one of the best,” Arbil tells me. The dancer has dreadlocks in her blond hair and her voluptuous body is adorned with tattoos, mostly blue line drawings. She dances from table to table, grinding up against the men, bending backwards until the back of her head touches the man’s chest. The audience stuff her top with 20- and 50-lira bills, and she makes around 500 lira in less than an hour. I’ve never seen anything like it, and I am completely enchanted, as much by the spirit of the people as by the music.

Amazing things happen in Istanbul. This is what people tell me. I am amazed by the level of hospitality that I find, from the café owner who serves me tea while I wait for Leo to arrive home on the day I arrive, my bags sitting in the street outside her apartment, to Ergun and Bari, the owner and manager of the Montreal Bar, which becomes my “office” during my 18 days in the city, to Richard Laniepce and Aslı Doğan of the group Kolektif İstanbul, who invite me to their home on Büyükada, the largest of the Princes’ Islands in the Marmara Sea, for a home-cooked meal and some fresh air and conversation.

By far the most incredible thing to happen to me comes a week after my arrival. Returning from an interview, I get off the subway at Taksim and start making my way down Istiklal towards the Montreal Bar. It is early Friday afternoon on a holiday (Kurban Bayram, the Feast of the Sacrifice), and Istiklal is insanely crowded. Suddenly, I feel a tug on my elbow and someone says, “Mike, is that you?”

I turn and immediately recognize Nilgün Aktaş, a young woman who was a student of mine in Montreal in 1999. I can’t believe it, and neither can Nilgün. She lives on the Asian side, and is only in Beyoğlu because she has decided to attend an art exhibition rather than spend the day at home. It is completely by chance that we have met. What are the odds in such a large city? We go for lunch and catch up on the nine years since we last saw one another. The conversation goes well, and for the next ten days, she becomes my guide to the hidden corners of Istanbul, and my road manager of sorts.

I have come prepared to like Istanbul. The communal passion that I see in the meyhane, the hospitality, the sheer kismet of meeting Nilgün, reflect what—a magic in the air, or perhaps feelings aroused in me by the city? I don’t know.

But there’s something special about Istanbul that opens the heart to possibilities.

In the late 1980s, the Uluğ brothers, Mehmet and Ahmet, returned to Turkey from the United States, discouraged by the political and cultural climate of America. They founded Pozitif Productions, started putting on concerts, and staged the first Akbank Jazz Festival in 1990.

Istanbul also has the Istanbul International Jazz Festival, which is more mainstream and presents a variety of non-jazz performances that Akbank, which highlights more adventurous jazz, does not. Pozitif also stages an annual blues festival and the Rock’n Coke festival in the summer.

The brothers started Doublemoon Records in 1998. Doublemoon consistently ranks among 26 | SIGNAL to NOISE #54 WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM

the top independent labels on the world music scene and were consultants to Fatih Akin on Crossing the Bridge.

A number of the artists on Doublemoon, as well as a few who aren’t, fuse regional styles with western popular music in productive ways.

Kolektif İstanbul is led by French saxophonist Richard Laniepce, who came to Istanbul to study Balkan music in 2001 and stayed. The title of the group’s first album, Balkanatolia, tells a tale in itself. Kirika, led by bouzouki player Salih Nazım Peker, combines Greek and Macedonian folk music with a standard rock rhythm section.

There are even latin/Turkish combos, among them Kumbya Turkya, led by the Colombian percussionist Luis Gomez and featuring the Turkish pop singer Gülseren.

I meet Mehmet Uluğ in the Babylon Lounge, the dining area of Babylon, over lunch. I ask him about the way that the music scene has exploded over the past decade.

“It’s just been more open since the last few years, because people are listening to all kinds of music now,” Uluğ says. “When I was growing up in the ’70s and ’80s, people looked down on Turkish music. Now, people like Turkish music and what it has to offer. People experiment with it and combine their music with it, so it’s just been more popular lately within the last ten years. And all that music that you heard in the movie was from the young generation, so they’re open to the dialog.”

Uluğ sees the current explosion in Turkish music as a happy byproduct of globalization and social freedom. “When they force you to stay inside your own country, then you don’t like what’s happening here, and you look outside.

But when they open the doors and you can go anywhere, then you realize what you have in your home. Which is basically what happened to us. We went to America, we studied and worked there, we came back here with the idea of bringing jazz and other forms of music to Turkey. After we did that for about ten years, we decided it’s time to take little by little what we have outside. So now we do both: we both bring it in and take it out.”

Baba Zula are featured in Crossing the Bridge, and have received an enhanced international profile as a result. The group combines Turkish scales with dub rhythms; they have recorded four albums, two produced by Mad Professor (Psychebelly Dance Music and Duble Oryantal).

Their performances, which include belly dancers and a visual artist, are both highly entertaining and slyly subversive. I meet Murat Ertel, Baba Zula’s saz player, in the Montreal Bar one afternoon.

“Istanbul has been a cosmopolitan city,” Ertel tells me, “and I hope it doesn’t lose this. It doesn’t have the cosmopolitan structure that it had in the past. But there is another approach to being cosmopolitan. People coming from Europe, Africa, America, and other countries, now they are forming this cosmopolitan structure, and it is another story. This is very important about Istanbul—lots of cultures, religions and races living together. Even being Turkish, if you say you are Turkish, you are not sure where you are coming from. Even if you say that you are 100 percent Turkish—and this is very rare— you’re a nomad, and you came from elsewhere and you mixed with some people and you don’t know the way you came. This is a good feeling, because it breaks down the barriers built by religion and race.”

Ertel contrasts the current climate with the

more nationalistic tendencies of the period after the creation of the Republic of Turkey in 1923, and especially after the death of Ataturk in 1938, when the generals who constitute the most powerful element in Turkish society occasionally felt the need to assert control, which they did in 1960, 1974, and 1980. This period was also punctuated by incidents like the razing of Greek-owned businesses in Istanbul in 1955, not to mention the ongoing refusal to acknowledge culpability for the deaths of 1.5 million Armenians in 1915. He describes the 1980 coup as the worst of the three.

“It was very effective and very bad. The leftists were the main target. The most important artists were taken away or tortured; some left, and some were banned even from performing. Even today, most of our music with lyrics [is] banned from the radio, even if they would not be censored under European standards. They touch on freedom, women’s rights, religious stuff, but [the authorities] are very paranoid.”

I point out that in his own music, he uses Turkish scales and rhythms, but he's combined that with dub reggae, which has a revolutionary appeal. Is ask him if this is a deliberate association with political resistance, or if I'm making too much of it.

“No, you’re right, you’re right,” he says quickly.

“We learned reggae through Bob Marley. Bob Marley was grasped by the Turkish people as a hero. When you go to Çiçek Bazaar, people are selling posters of Turkish heroes and also of Bob Marley. Marley was like a revolutionary figure, and a man coming from outside of western civilization, like a myth. So because of this posture, we liked the music. Not because of the music we liked this guy,” he laughs, “but the other way around. This is the truth.”

But the Istanbul scene is not all about a Turkish/ western fusion. The jazz and free improvising musicians are in dialog with western music, but that dialog is shaped by the life of the city as much as by a conscious infusion of Turkish musical influence.

Guitarist Önder Focan, 53, has been playing jazz professionally since the early ’80s. Focan started as a rock fan. He always enjoyed shuffle or swing rhythms and regarded rock as an extension of jazz, and figured if he could understand jazz, he could play rock better. But as he got into jazz, he found out that it was another world, and he went more and more into that world. At the time, there was no one to teach him how to play jazz, so Focan studied from the guitar method books of Mickey Baker and others.

Along with saxophonist İlhan Erşahin, singers Özay Fecht and Feyza Eren, and drummer Okay Temiz, Focan is one of the best-known jazz musicians from Turkey, having played throughout Europe and the U.S. and recorded albums with the likes of Bill Stewart, John Nugent, and David Friesen. Nardis, the club that he owns with his wife Zuhal, has been in business at its location near the Galata Tower since 2002, and has hosted musicians such as Paolo Fresu, Tierney Sutton, Benny Golson, and Kurt Elling.

“My approach to jazz music is there is the basic swing and the way of improvising and the interplay of the band, and if you can get something out of the Turkish music under the conditions of the mainframe, that’s OK.” “I play everything. I have an album with a ney,” he says, referring to Swing Alla Turka.

“This is Turkish music, my arrangements of jazz standards. Our improvisations are based not on the modal thing but over the tune, in our own way. We do a lot of 5/8 or 10/8, and I sometimes

compose tunes in 7/8. I also play with a percussionist whose name is Okay Temiz, and he is mostly into Turkish folk music and the mixture of Turkish folk music with jazz. With this guy I play some sort of overdriven guitar, and most of the tunes are in 9/8. I am not so much into 9/8, but if it’s swinging, like you can swing on 5/8, I like to play it.”

Focan sees a clear difference between the North American attitude toward jazz and the European attitude. “When you go to the States, all they want to have is [for you] to play the basic straight-ahead thing. They don’t really care where you’re coming from, if you want to put something different with your own culture.

So, there is a music called jazz, there are some minimums to be fulfilled and you have to do it properly.” He pauses. “When you play jazz in Europe, they expect you—especially Turkish people or people from Eastern Europe—to play something else: to play something Turkish, play odd rhythms, play microtonal color, or play tunes from Turkish music. This is the basic difference of attitudes towards musicians. What I think we really have to do is have all those standards and play with them in other ways.”

The community of improvising musicians is small but energetic. Guitarist Umut Çağlar operates the online record label re:konstrukt and is a member of the free improv group konstrukt, who recorded an album in the fall of 2008 with German multi-reedist Peter Brötzmann, Akustikelektrik, out on the Dutch label WM. Çağlar is also an occasional member of the quintet Islak Köpek, a collective of improvisers. Çağlar and Korhan Erel of Islak Köpek have set themselves the task of bringing together all the musicians they can and documenting the

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Erdem Helvacioglu and his studio. results. The digital revolution has been a critical factor in fostering connections between Turkish musicians and people outside the country.

The proliferation of social networking tools has made dissemination of music possible where traditional distribution channels are not open.

The audience for improvised music is small in Turkey, but Çağlar and Erel are doing their best to get the music out, recording as much as they can and curating a live improv series on Açik Radyo.

Konstrukt began in 2007 when Çağlar began playing with drummer Korhan Argüden. A second percussionist, Özün Usta, began playing with them shortly thereafter, and saxophonist Korhan Futacı is a casual member.

There is a harshness in the sound of konstrukt.

Perhaps this is a reflection of the harshness of urban life. Life is hard for a lot of people in Istanbul. The economic situation is difficult to desperate. Pickpocketing and petty thievery are endemic. While I am in Istanbul, there are riots just next door in Greece sparked by the police shooting of a fifteen-year-old boy.

Everyone is anxious about the financial crisis, and the possibility of unrest, not to mention the ongoing tension between secularism and religion in Turkey.

“I think this music is political, because we have a strong consideration of what is going on around us,” Çağlar says. It’s a warm Sunday afternoon, and he and Argüden have joined me on the terrasse of a café in Kadıköy, on the Asian side of Istanbul. Argüden agrees with him: “If we get into talking about politics, we can’t get out of it until morning.” He talks about the tension in Turkish society between secularists and Islamists, which has become so polarized that civil war is seen as a real possibility.

Before the mid-’80s there were few opportunities to hear free jazz and improvised music from outside. This began to change as the freeze from the 1980 military coup thawed. The Art Ensemble of Chicago has visited Istanbul

three times since 1986, as have important free jazz musicians like Ornette Coleman, Archie Shepp, Albert Mangelsdorff, and Peter Brötzmann.

“Before the mid-’80s I was envying even people who lived in Yugoslavia. They were coming to Yugoslavia but not to Istanbul. But it’s a good place now for jazz and free jazz,” says Argüden. “Albert Mangelsdorff shocked me in 1974. I think that was the first free jazz concert in Istanbul. From then on, classical jazz styles didn’t mean much to me, and I was very much into free jazz.”

The music of konstrukt is western art music, but I wonder how Çağlar and Argüden see their music in relation to the Turkish musical tradition.

“We’re not putting elements of Turkish music in our music directly, but”—Çağlar pauses— “we live here. It’s not like Baba Zula, it’s hard for me to say; but the listener should say that he hears the Turkish influence on the music.”

Argüden disagrees—to a degree. “I think in my music there is no element of Turkish music at all. But still, we are in Istanbul, and when you get in the taxi or the dolmuş, you hear Turkish music. But we are a band—and in Korhan, the saxophone player, in his style I hear deep down the Turkish or oriental influence, which I believe makes him very unique and very interesting, because he’s playing in the free jazz manner, so he’s playing completely western music, but at the same time, deep down, you can hear the Turkish influence, which makes it great.

“The traffic is terrible and violence is increasing all the time, so it’s a mess here,” Argüden says. “So maybe our psychology is influenced by that. They say free jazz is a city music.”

Istanbul is the most sonically rich environment I’ve ever visited. In fact, I’m on sensory overload the whole time I’m in the city. There are the distinct sounds of the city: the music coming out of the shops and bars; the ubiquitous seagulls; the conversations overheard on buses; the sounds of the ferry boats that tra-

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verse the Bosphorus; the call of the simit seller; the jingle of the tram that runs along İstiklal between Tünel and Taksim; the taxis and police cars that one must step aside to avoid as they travel up the narrow side streets of Beyoğlu and Cihangir.

Erdem Helvacioğlu is a world-renowned electro-acoustic composer and improviser who is a product of the Music for Advanced Studies at Istanbul Technical University, a master’s program established in 1999 whose faculty were imported from top universities in the U.S. An industrial engineer with a strong interest in electronic music, Helvacioğlu has done work in sound design and performs live as a solo guitar improviser. His first album, A Walk Through the Bazaar, (Locustland 2003) was based on processed location recordings of a bazaar in Istanbul. His 2006 album, Altered Realities, was chosen jazz album of the year by All About Jazz, and his new album, Wounded Breath, has been released in the U.S. by Aucourant.

He performed with Elliott Sharp at the 2008 Akbank festival and the two recorded an album to be released later this year. Although his work is not obviously rooted within the Turkish musical tradition, Helvacioğlu can be considered a city musician, since his past and current projects incorporate elements of the dense and varied soundscape of Istanbul.

“I also work with traditional instruments, but it doesn’t have to be modal. I make a recording of an improvisation from, let’s say, a bağlama player, then put that through processing based on the idea of creating new timbres based on that instrument. So you’re creating new dimensions to the traditional music. Also, field recording is part of that. First, the base materials should be interesting for me. I try not to do the very touristic stuff, but I might go out with my binaural microphones, you know, the microphones that you put in your ears so that people think you’re listening to your iPod, but you record their conversations, sometimes very intimate, very personal things. Or going on a

boat on the Bosphorus, recording the environment at 5 o’clock in the morning. It’s different, but it’s not the typical exotic things.”

Though I understand little more than formal greetings, I find the Turkish language very melodic. It’s soft and sibilant, with a downward intonation at the end of utterances.

“A lot of foreigners say that,” Helvacioglu tells me. “And also, the sound environment is based on opposites. Like in the traffic, it’s so noisy, like maybe 90–100 db, but when you go on a boat on the Bosphorus in the morning, there’s like no sound—little waves, birds over here, and the rumble of the boats. So the sound environment is based on opposites.

Other places don’t have that, like Belfast or Montreal. And it’s part of my creation, in a way.

It affects me.”

Crossing the Bridge traces Turkish popular music back to pop queen Sezen Aksu, saz icon Orhan Gencebay and psychedelic rock pioneer Erkin Koray, both of whom continue to exert an enormous influence. I hear Aksu’s beautiful 2002 hit, “İstanbul İstanbul Olalı” performed live three times in three wildly different contexts—once in the meyhane, once covered by a rock band in a hole-in-the-wall after hours club on a Beyoğlu backstreet, and once played solo on the clarinet by Hüsnü Şenlendirici’s fourteen-year-old son. Each time, the audience sings along lustily.

In Crossing the Bridge, Alexander Hacke describes Istanbul as a rock town. Like anywhere else, there are a million cover bands, but groups such as Duman, Replikas, Ayyuka, and Nekropsi are doing original material that combines elements of psychedelia, Sonic Youth-influenced post-rock, and electronics, anchored by rock-solid rhythms and an improvisational approach.

I am fortunate enough to catch the legendary underground group Nekropsi at Peyote.

Nekropsi have been around for close to fifteen years but have only recently released their second album. The square concert room is packed. Cevdek Erek, the drummer, takes his place at the kit stage-right and begins an insistent beat on the double kick drum. This goes on for several minutes, the tension building gradually. The bassist, Kerem Tüzïn, comes out stage left and lays down a thunderous riff, ratcheting up the tension even more. Eventually, the two guitarists take their places and play spacey lines over top of the rhythm section.

Cevdek Erek is an amazing drummer, the focal point of the band. Nekropsi play songs, but improvise freely over the pieces’ loose structures.

“Orhan Gencebay is like a father,” Alican Tezer, drummer for Ayyuka tells me. We are sitting in the rooftop bar of Peyote, one of the clubs with a progressive booking policy.

“He is actually a rock star,” Tezer laughs. “Our influences are Orhan Gencebay, Tom Waits, Nick Cave, Fugazi—it’s all mixed, put into one pocket. It’s our music. Because we have no rules for making music. The only rule is empathy. We don’t just play songs, we play the music, and we are always listening and looking for the others. It is like a conversation. Improvisation is a big thing for us.”

One of the problems for these bands, as it is for most artists in Istanbul, is getting their music heard outside Turkey. A few, such as Baba Zula, Burhan Öçal, Mercan Dede, Önder Focan, and Erdem Helvacioğlu, play outside Turkey regularly. But with Turkey not yet a member of the EU (and perhaps they'll never be, given

French and German resistance to the idea), touring logistics can be a nightmare of red tape. Record distribution, especially in North America, is problematic. Fortunately, most artists today have deals with iTunes or CD Baby, and like everyone else, they use MySpace to get the word out.

Eighteen days is not enough to hear and see all the important music that there is to hear and see. And six thousand words is not enough to tell everything I saw and heard in Istanbul.

Among the live music highlights are performances by Kirika, Baba Zula, and Nekropsi.

There is a night with gypsy musicians followed by a late-night meal of işkembe çorbasi, a heavily-garlicked tripe soup. Umut Çağlar and Islak Kopek give me a private 30-minute performance at the Modern Music Academy.

Among the disappointments is not taking advantage of the opportunity to see Feyza Eren sing at Nardis. Also, during Kurban Bayram, which constitutes the first week of my stay, the live music scene is quieter than usual. For instance, clarinetist Selim Sesler normally plays Wednesdays at Badehane, in Tunel, but he is out of town both Wednesdays I am in the city.

And I don’t get to see Orient Expressions or Kolektifistanbul, both of which play in the week after I return to Montreal.

On my final Friday, I catch a performance

by Hüsnü Şenlendirici with saxophonist Ilhan Erşahin and his group Wonderland at Babylon. Şenlendirici is a star in Turkey, his Joy of Clarinet having sold some 150,000 copies. I am not sure how his silky virtuosity will mesh with Erşahin’s raw fire, but the two-and-a-half-hour performance is an exciting fusion of jazz and funk with the odd meters and modal scales of Turkish music. It exemplifies the best of what I find interesting about the Istanbul music scene.

There are so many things I like about Istanbul. But in the end, I think it comes down to the way that the city demands flexibility, how the positions are not fixed, how the tensions remain unresolved, always in flux, and how this is reflected in the music that is made in the city.

One night, I go to hear Kirika at Ghetto, a converted bath house near Çiçek Pasajı, one of my favourite places in Beyoğlu. The band is great, and I want to speak with the musicians. . After their set, they go backstage, and I follow them. I ask the people manning the door if anyone in the band speaks English. The young woman misunderstands, saying that she does. I explain that I am a music journalist from Canada and want to attend other concerts in the next couple of days. So she puts me on the guest list for the next evening.

The next evening happens to be the day that I bump into my ex-student, Nilgün. When I walk through the door with her and Leo, my ex-colleague, the door woman greets me enthusiastically, as if we have been friends for years. I have arranged to bring in one guest, but in the end, they allow me to bring both Leo and Nilgün for free.

Leo looks at me as if to say, “are you kidding me?”

“So, when are you coming back?” she asks.

Not soon enough. ✹ Michael Chamberlain writes about jazz and improvised music for HOUR, a Montreal weekly, and has also written for Downbeat, Coda and Musicworks. He wrote about Jean Derome in STN#45 WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #54 | 29

THE MODERN ANTIQUARIANS

As Sunn O))), Greg Anderson and Stephen O'Malley have made some of the heaviest music around. Phil Freeman talks to the men of Sunn and explains why their new record is their most humanistic, emotionally-naked record yet.

Photos by Caroline Bell

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It seems like it’s been a lifetime since I saw Sunn O))) play at Tonic in New York City, back in January of 2004. They shared the bill with Massachusetts psychedelic improv ensemble Sunburned Hand of the Man and a British group called Chrome Hoof. It was amusing to see Sunn’s Stephen O’Malley and Greg Anderson trudge through the crowd in their heavy, black, monklike garb, after they’d been hanging out at the bar and their merch table for most of the night dressed like ordinary headbangers, but the noise they made silenced any scoffing their appearance might have briefly sparked.

I stood against a wall close to the stage, occupying one of Tonic’s few tables, more or less at stage right. My most distinct impressions of the night are not auditory, but physical: O’Malley and Anderson facing each other, striking downtuned and massively amplified chords and holding their guitars aloft as the waves of distortion and feedback filled the tiny room, occasionally bowing to each other to signal a change of riff. I recall watching empty beer bottles dance slowly toward the table’s edge, accompanied by the plastic wrap I’d peeled from CDs I’d purchased earlier that evening while suffering through Chrome Hoof’s set. I could feel a delicate sprinkling of dust, shaken loose from the club’s rafters, falling gently upon my head and shoulders. My organs vibrated within my torso.

It wasn’t a rock show. It didn’t seem to have much connection at all to the usual music-associal-lubricant club scene. The robes added a false gravity to the performance, but my general feeling was that I was watching, and hearing, sound being created for its own sake.

It was an experience I couldn’t quite catego-

rize to my satisfaction, but it was also some of the most fun I had that concert-going season.

I haven’t always responded with similar exhilaration to Sunn’s recordings. I’m not the kind of guy who shares his favorite music with his neighbors; I tend to listen on headphones.

When I am found playing CDs through speakers, it’s at what even my grandmother would consider a reasonable volume. The members of Sunn would be the first ones to assert that by taking that approach, I’m getting it all wrong. Sunn albums are about immersion; their CDs advise the purchaser, “Maximum Volume Yields Maximum Results.” You’re meant to attempt to approximate the live show in your living room. That’s just not gonna happen; even if I lived alone with no neighbors for miles, it still wouldn’t be my thing.

That’s not to say that a disc like 2000’s ØØ Void—four epic slabs of roaring guitar drone with barely-perceptible tinges of synth buried in the mix—doesn’t work over headphones, or even tiny iPod earbuds. It does, and it makes a great soundtrack to a late-morning walk to the post office or the library. Similarly, despite being another overwhelming slab of industrial-strength sound-as-punishment, 2007’s Oracle EP (one of their finest efforts, and deserving of more attention than it’s received) cries out to be heard with the kind of close focus only headphones and solitude can provide.

Sunn are destined to be misunderstood, it seems. The robes and smoke machines create an impression of ritual; each album features guests whose back catalogs create expectations rarely, if ever, matched by their work with the duo; the track titles are frequently allusions to yet other artists (indeed, the Sunn discography is dotted with cover tunes, but only in

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Stephen O'Malley and Greg Anderson in Brooklyn, NY, April 2009

the broadest possible sense). Each element seems to contradict the others, and yet, when taken as a whole, a kind of coherence, even a mission, emerges.

“You get the feeling from Stephen and Greg that they are both in observance of something greater than any of us, and that’s The Sound in itself,” says Steve Moore, who’s played with both Sunn and their original inspiration, Earth (a Seattle band that helped launch the whole ambient-metal thing in 1991). “This comes out in the ritual and enjoyment present in most of their performances.

Behind the scenes, it manifests as relaxed respect for music and the musicians.”

“We’re interested in creating a relationship with music,” says O’Malley. “Sunn is certainly not simply Greg’s and my music. It’s a culmination of all these personalities to create this presence as Sunn. We’re very lucky and fortunate that we’ve made some really good friends who are fuckin’ geniuses, and generous. They want to have this experience, too.

That’s kinda what the music’s about.”

I spoke to O’Malley and Anderson at some length, in separate conversations at a Brooklyn café shortly after hearing their latest album, Monoliths & Dimensions, for the first time. No promo copies were distributed; instead, small groups of journalists were herded into a Brooklyn mastering studio in early April to sit on a leather couch (or office chairs) and hear the thing from beginning to end—at tooth-rattling volume, of course.

Sunn’s music is related to metal, but it is not metal. At this point, seven or eight studio releases and multiple limited-edition live discs into their career, what they do is very different from what they did when Anderson and O’Malley first began the project in 1999.

At that time, Sunn was the sound of frying amplifiers and riffs so downtuned it seemed like the players might trip over dangling guitar strings if they took a step forward. The three tracks on the duo’s first release, The GrimmRobe Demos, were instrumental and almost entirely made with guitars and bass; “Defeating: Earths’ Gravity,” “Dylan Carlson” (named in tribute to the guitarist and leader of Earth) and “Black Wedding” sounded like giant blackened slabs of steel toppling over on you, then being lifted up by cranes and dropped on you again…and again…and again. On first listen, it’s weirdly suspenseful, because you keep expecting something to happen.

Maybe a drummer will explode your skull with an avalanche of toms, or a vocalist will scream like Judas Priest’s Rob Halford being impaled on a 30-foot-long spike… but none of that ever happens. It just does its one thing, for a solid hour. So the next time you listen to it, it’s soothing. You can just let the riffs wash over you like waves of warm water; indeed, it’s music you could listen to on a Mexican beach, baking in the sun and letting the sound carry you away to a realm of utter relaxation.

For much of its running time, Monoliths & Dimensions has none of that relaxing quality.

The opening track, “Aghartha,” launches you into the Sunn soundworld with no fanfare and no warning. The first five minutes are the by-now-expected massive riffs (played

by O’Malley on guitar, with Anderson on bass and their frequent collaborator Oren Ambarchi providing “guitar effects and oscillator”), drumless but still somehow creating the impression of forward momentum. Then another of the duo’s favored partners, vocalist Attila Csihar, enters. It’s hard to call what he’s reciting “lyrics,” since he’s not singing and there are no breaks between verse and chorus, but the poem (or whatever it is) deals with the mythical “hollow earth” one enters through the poles. Csihar is a true artist, a master of the lower and upper ends of his vocal range; his other main gig is with the black metal band Mayhem, and in that context he mostly shrieks, jabbers and roars.

On Sunn discs and in performance with the group, he focuses more on chanting and growling, frequently sounding like one of the Gyuto monks of Tibet. On “Aghartha,” he seems to be channeling Laibach vocalist Milan Fras, as his guttural recitations nearly blend with the roar of the guitars. Rest assured it’s not all low tones, though. The guitars shriek with feedback behind Csihar, and there’s a high-pitched, harmonium-like drone that’s nearly lost in the mix. (Eyvind Kang and Timb Harris are credited as playing viola and violin, respectively; maybe that’s them.)

Somewhere around the 10-minute mark, additional instruments appear—four upright basses, being slapped and thumped in a way that’s more percussive than chordal.

Way down deep in the bowels of the mix, there’s some piano, and additional drones are heard from horns and conch shells (the latter being played by Julian Priester, an alumnus of Sun Ra’s Arkestra and Herbie Hancock’s Mwandishi band), and at about 13 minutes in, the guitars drop out, allowing the piece to dissipate into a kind of spiritual fog, as though we’re deep within the hollow earth, looking around at a lost world revealed.

The second track, “Big Church (megszentségtelenithetetlenségeskedéseitekért),” takes the first part of its title from the Miles Davis piece “Little Church” (on Live-Evil). The second half is a Hungarian word having to do with deconsecration. It features a female choir that sounds digitally altered and processed; the vocal tones aren’t quite human, but O'Malley insists “that's 100 percent reality.”

It mixes well with the big guitars, and some keyboard accents. After about two and a half minutes, though, a bell rings out, and everything drops away, leaving silence. Then the guitars, only momentarily dissuaded, return at full strength until the six-minute mark, at which point the bell silences them again. The track continues for another three minutes or so, but

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ends suddenly, with the digital equivalent of a tape splice.

The album’s third movement—for it’s clear at this point that Monuments & Dimensions is a suite, not a collection of discrete musical ideas—begins with a staticky, distorted riff that blossoms into another massive roar. Csihar’s vocals are buried in the mix, while gongs and synth blasts reminiscent of the clatter and blare of the Planet of the Apes soundtrack jar the listener off-balance. (When I mention this mental connection to Greg Anderson later, he laughs and recalls that at the first-ever Sunn gig, before the robes and fog machines came into play, they stacked a TV atop the amps and showed Planet of the Apes silently while they performed.) This piece, “Hunting & Gathering (Cydonia),” contains the most rocking riff on the entire album; it really feels like it’s going somewhere. Where it does go is somewhat disappointing. The track ends with a shriek of guitar courtesy of Ambarchi’s whammy bar and a massive, repetitive bass throb that seems like it’s signaling the beginning of a second half, but it’s not—the music just stops. (“When I listen to that, I think of it as the new ‘Raining Blood,’ when the rain is supposed to start coming down…that’s what I hear when I hear it now,” Anderson tells me later, recalling the final track on Slayer’s epochal thrash classic Reign in Blood. “Unfortunately, there isn’t a second part, but maybe we should look into making one.”)

The album’s fourth and final track/section is likely to wind up as one of the most discussed and admired works in Sunn’s recorded catalog. “Alice,” named in tribute to Alice Coltrane, is utterly unlike anything the group has done before, and yet emerges not as a departure, but an evolution—the next rotation in their ever-expanding musical orbit. It’s entirely instrumental, and O'Malley's guitars (and Ambarchi’s guitar effects later in the track) are cleaner, more open and less downtuned than they’ve ever been. They’re more indebted to Caspar Brötzmann than to Dylan Carlson or any previous Sunn recording, and halfway through the 16-minute piece, they begin to give way to an acoustic ensemble that includes three trombones, three upright basses, French horn, oboe, English horn, clarinet, bass clarinet, alto flute, violin, viola and harp. This mini-orchestra surges and swirls like the ocean, rising up not in imitation of Alice Coltrane’s work on albums like World Galaxy and Universal Consciousness, but in admiration and acknowledgement of it. As “Alice” washes away, the last instruments left are harp and Julian Priester’s trombone, the latter of which plays the last note on this, Sunn’s most emotionally naked, humanistic album to date.

“Since [2005’s] Black One Stephen and I have really—I hate to say matured, but we’ve grown,” says Greg Anderson. “Different

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things have happened in our lives that have brought us to this point versus where we were with the last record, [but] I think there’s a lot of regression on this record too. ‘Hunting & Gathering,’ that riff, that’s a total nod to what we started with, being obsessed with Earth…there’s that element in the record, and there’s also stuff we’ve never done before that’s forward-thinking, a more progressive direction.

“I think that the mood of this record, especially the way it ends, it can appear to be happier, but I just think it’s more expanded.

It’s showing the full range of emotions and dynamics. That’s the whole concept of making a record that’s different from the one before. Early on, we made [The GrimmRobe Demos] and ØØ Void, and I’m extremely proud of those records, but I didn’t wanna keep on making the same record over and over and over again.”

They’ve certainly managed to avoid that.

Considering its minimal foundation (two electric guitars and a shitload of amps), Sunn’s music has shown an astonishing capacity for expansion and transformation. The first major sign of growth came with 2002’s Flight of the Behemoth. The first two tracks, “Mocking Solemnity” and “Death Becomes You,” hold to the pattern established on the first two releases, but the album’s second half, the two-part “O)))Bow,” features electronic noise and distorted piano from Masami (Merzbow) Akita. (The Japanese deluxe edition offers a third, longer “O)))Bow” track as a bonus.)

Behemoth ends with “F.W.T.B.T,” a barely recognizable cover of Metallica’s “For Whom the Bell Tolls.”

The roster of guests expanded further on the twinned releases White1 and White2, from 2003 and 2004 respectively. Keyboardist Rex Ritter—who recorded the albums in his home studio—and bassist Joe Preston (of Melvins, Harvey Milk, High on Fire and Thrones) joined the festivities, as did vocalists Julian Cope, Csihar, and Runhild Gammelsaeter, a longtime friend of Anderson and O’Malley since working with them in the short-lived mid-'90s doom band Thorr’s Hammer, when she'd arrived in the US as a 17-year-old Norwegian exchange student.

“The recording of the White records at my house was ‘accidental,’” recalls Ritter.

“Greg had invited me to join the recording in Seattle at a studio. There was not much of a budget for the record, so we just ended up doing it at my house for free. Everyone just stayed at the house and we did it in a few days of tracking.”

“I have had the pleasure of being in the studio with them several times,” recalls Gammelsaeter. “The first time, in Thorr’s Hammer, we recorded some stuff live—the two of them in one room playing guitars while I was in the vocal booth. They do play loud in the studio,

believe me! The whole building will shake when they are in there! The Sunn amp is an important instrument for them. When driving around, I had to sit really uncomfortably in the back seat because Steve’s Sunn T-top had to have most of the seat. I believe he put a seatbelt on it. Next to his bed, he keeps a bowl of amplifier tubes, neatly labeled with where they were used. Just like Coltrane kept his used saxophone reeds, with pencil markings.”

White1 opened with a track that was like a challenge; if you could get through the 25minute “My Wall,” you were open-minded enough to welcome, if not necessarily embrace, anything the group might throw at you. The piece features a lengthy monologue/rant/poem by Julian Cope, the former Teardrop Explodes frontman turned cult rock shaman and self-taught scholar of esoterica, and has the feel of one of those jokes that bases its humor on relentless repetition, until eventually the sheer unendingness forces you to laugh to vent your exasperation. Not something one would expect of metalheads in hooded robes.

“That track challenges people’s sense of seriousness and humor,” agrees O’Malley. “And humor has a huge role in Sunn. It can be totally absurd what we’re doing, sometimes. But that doesn’t mean we don’t take it seriously, it’s just another element. Some people hold their interests so sacred that humor somehow lessens it.”

Cope and O’Malley had shared interests in more than one kind of heavy rock; the vocalist wrote two books, The Modern Antiquarian and The Megalithic European, which charted the sites of Neolithic monuments throughout England and continental Europe. He’d also praised Sunn in lavish terms on his Head Heritage website. So the connection seemed natural to O’Malley and Anderson. “Greg and I were like, should we ask him? He wrote this incredible piece about ØØ Void, we saw it and we were like, this guy’s writing exactly the same way we think about the music.

Using kind of absurd metaphors sometimes, but saying the right things and being very accurate, too. So we had this cool discourse with him, and we asked him, and he was like, ‘Sure, send me the music, I’ll do something.’

He sent his parts over—we did this through the mail, basically—and Greg was at Rex’s studio mixing it. I wasn’t there. Greg called me up and said, ‘You gotta hear this. You’re either gonna love it or hate it. It’s pretty challenging.’

So we decided to go for it.”

The second track on White1, “The Gates of Ballard,” features vocals by Gammelsaeter, recorded at a live performance without her knowledge—she recalls being surprised by its presence on the album, but chalks it up to their everything-into-the-pot, no-idea-out-ofbounds approach to music-making. “I believe they record most of the things they do live

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or otherwise,” she tells me by email. “In this process they pick up the one-offs, the sacred moments that can never be replayed or brought back other than from that tape. They are true artists in knowing what is good. Good being defined in a Sunn way.”

“The Gates of Ballard” is also one of the few Sunn recordings to feature a traditional rhythm (other than that provided by endless chugging guitars); a drum machine thumps out a steady beat throughout much of the piece. “The thing is, with drums, I guess I have to break my thought pattern about how to make music with a drummer, which always involves intense rehearsal and repetition, which is something Sunn doesn’t do,” says O’Malley.

“I mean, we have intense repetition, but there’s no rehearsing. Maybe one rehearsal before a tour.” Since White1’s release, the group has used an actual drummer on a few occasions, most notably Altar, the 2006 album Sunn recorded in collaboration with ultraheavy Japanese power trio Boris, and the Pentemple project (a one-off live show which featured black metal musician Sin-Nanna of Striborg behind the kit).

The Pentemple performance came toward the tail end of Sunn’s flirtation with black metal as an aesthetic and an inspiration, which peaked on 2005’s Black One and the subsequent touring that was documented in part on the limited-edition live album La Mort Noir dans Esch/Alzette. For the studio album, they brought in two of the “biggest” “names” in the U.S. black metal underground, Wrest and Malefic, the sole members of, respectively, Leviathan and Xasthur. (Why would a one-man band need both a band name and a pseudonym? I have no idea.) Wrest performed vocals on “It Took the Night to Believe,” while Malefic shrieked and howled on a reinterpretation—to call it a “cover” seems reductive—of “Cursed Realms (of the Winterdemons),” by Norwegian black metal champions Immortal, as well as playing guitar on “CandleGoat.”

“I’ve been listening to Anderson and O’Malley’s different musics for quite a while,” Wrest recalls by email. “It was a chance to add to expressions that are different than my own, yet still have the same ‘heart.’ I had heard the guitar line for the song I did vocals for a year before I was asked to participate…I merely put the track into my 4-track and began to holler. It was a chance to use the ‘voice’ that comes about when creating [his other ‘band’] Lurker of Chalice for something besides L.O.C.” To my ear, Black One is the least Sunnlike of the band’s releases; by so thoroughly inhabiting the spiritual and aesthetic darkness of black metal, the core duo surrender much of what makes their music unique. “It Took the Night to Believe” is not all that dissimilar to the material Wrest records as Leviathan and Lurker of Chalice, and Malefic’s guitar on “CandleGoat” just sounds like a Xasthur outtake. The usual drones and glacial riffs are present in force, of course, but the album really feels like a side project or a remix album.

Anderson, while obviously disagreeing that Black One is in any way un-Sunn-like, explains the record’s gestation as follows: “Stephen and I both ended up at a peak of being into black metal at the same time. And it was like, ‘OK, it’ll be silly and cheap to make a black metal Sunn record. We don’t want to do that.’

We never want to do, like, a jazz Sunn record,

or a rock ’n’ roll Sunn record, or a death metal Sunn record, ’cause all those influences and genres are very important but we wanna go somewhere different with it. Like [Monoliths & Dimensions] is about trying to play heavy music in a different way. That’s how it is through a lot of our records. But on Black One, we were both at a point together where we wanted to capture the aesthetic and the atmosphere of black metal on that record.” While they certainly did that, and though I like the record a lot, it still somehow feels like they gave away too much of themselves.

Steve Moore explains this porousness and the attendant risk of being taken over by influence: “There seems to be no line between ‘bandmember’ and ‘guest.’ I think that’s because there isn’t really an attitude that the music is owned.” Oren Ambarchi agrees: “I admire Greg and Stephen for being so free, open and fearless with regard to going out on a limb when they record and not being afraid to go into uncharted areas. When I worked on Black One, I was amazed at how open they were to me re-arranging and adding all kinds of ideas to their existing material.

I felt completely unrestricted and free with regard to what I could introduce. By working with people from diverse backgrounds they are allowing their music to continually evolve and mutate.”

Following the tour in support of Black One, the black metal influence on Sunn drifted away like a raincloud, partly because of backstage, personal issues that had infiltrated the music-making, but also because of fundamental differences in artistic temperament. O’Malley understands that not everyone shares his and Anderson’s wide-open generosity of spirit where creation is concerned. “Do you need to define that you’re the leader and the singer of a band, or not? People get past that, the more work they do,” he says. “Someone like Malefic, he had a hard time understanding [that and wound up] feeling like he was a guest. I think he took it in a bad way, feeling like we took advantage of him. Which was certainly not the case and certainly not the intention at all.” Indeed, rumors I haven’t bothered to investigate or substantiate—because hey, life is short—have it that Malefic felt exploited by the release of La Mort Noir dans Esch/Alzette, and subsequently cut ties to Anderson, O’Malley and Southern Lord Records, which had released some of his material. “That’s why he’s a solo artist, probably,” O’Malley continues. “The way he shares his creativity is very limited. He’s got this other value system, which is fine.”

Shortly after Black One was released, Sunn seemed to rise almost aboveground.

O’Malley and Anderson had been doing their thing for six or seven years to little attention outside the metal and avant-garde music communities, but in 2006, the group somehow became…fashionable. Sunn and Boris were profiled in the New York Times, and Sunn embarked on a creative partnership with artist Banks Violette. He cast their equipment in resin and salt, and brought them to a London gallery to perform, out of sight, one floor below where the facsimiles of their equipment stood. Sunn’s performances have struck me as having the quality of installation art anyhow—a world you pay to visit for a short while—but this took that idea to a (somewhat) logical extreme. Inspired by the

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installation, the band (consisting of Anderson, O’Malley, Csihar, ex-Melvins bassist Mark Deutrom and Boris drummer Atsuo) created the Oracle EP, for which Violette’s installation served as cover art. Released in 2007, the EP offered two songs on vinyl and/or CD, with an ultra-limited two-CD set appending an additional 40-minute track, the live medley “HeliO)))sophist.”

Oracle’s first track, “Belürol Puzstít” (“destroying from inside” in Hungarian), is one of the most unique and compelling pieces in Sunn’s entire discography. The guitars are what they are—they rumble and roar—but Atsuo, Deutrom and Csihar are in a whole other space. The drummer rattles cymbals and other percussive devices in a junkyardlike manner, while the vocalist hisses, growls, and shrieks. Deutrom, for his part, lays down his usual bass and picks up a jackhammer instead, rattling and grinding like he’s gonna dig right through the studio floor if somebody doesn’t get that thing away from him. Indeed, if Black One was Sunn’s attempt to co-opt the spirit of Xasthur, Leviathan, and Immortal, Oracle is their attempt to assimilate Einstürzende Neubaten, with Attila Csihar playing the role of Blixa Bargeld.

“I think it’s been downplayed as not-analbum, but it’s 40 minutes,” says O’Malley of Oracle, which he agrees deserves wider attention. “I think that might be because the concept of it had to do with Banks Violette. It was like, we wrote those songs to perform at an opening for one of his installations, which is the artwork in the gatefold—that sculpture of our backline and our gear. For me it was more of a collaboration of Sunn with him. It’s one of our most conceptual works, with the jackhammer and the chanting. That track in particular is a left turn.

“At first we wanted to do a vinyl-only release because of the artwork,” he continues.

“We did a CD version just to finance a tour, basically. I think we made 2000 double CDs or something like that, and the second CD was also a very experimental track, built [out] of five live gigs we’d done with the lineup of Oren, Attila, Greg, me, and Tos [Niewenhuizen], and Oren mixed it. Basically, it’s five gigs from one tour laid on top of each other.

It’s really hallucinatory and weird. I think that release is very strong, but it’s mainly about the conceptualism. The source of it came from the collaboration with Banks. But in retrospect, for me personally and creatively, it’s very important. It brought up a lot of redefinition of our sound as sculpture—these metaphors which we really hadn’t tried to articulate before.”

Of course, the ultra-limited releases, whether they be colored vinyl versions of readily available titles, Japanese editions with bonus discs, or 1000-copy-print-run CDs that are only sold on one leg of a tour like Oracle or La Mort Noir, help burnish the band’s aura and keep their underground cred intact.

“I think they are marketing geniuses on the level of Nikki Sixx from Mötley Crüe,” says Runhild Gammelsaeter. “They know that if you tell all to everyone, the mystery is gone.

And you always want mystery if you want to be interesting. Their music is also not ‘pop’ and perhaps not for the masses, although I would say everyone ought to experience Sunn live or on really good speakers at least once in a lifetime—it’s like a pilgrimage to Mecca. So doing the limited releases for the blood fans, the people who really appreciate

what they do, is a very good thing.”

It should be noted that there will be no expanded edition of Monoliths & Dimensions, not even in Japan. “There’s a version of ‘Alice’ with no guitars, which we initially thought we were going to call ‘John’ as a bonus track, but decided against it because it’s not really an alternate mix,” says O’Malley.

“It’s an incomplete mix, and that song was so meticulously arranged, so much time went into the arrangement and the composition, that it’s a detriment to both sides of the picture, the acoustic instruments and the guitars, to release an incomplete piece.

“We release our records in Japan,” he continues, “and our label guy over there always wants bonus material so he can export it and have a bigger market for his releases, and we went through a big conversation about that with him, saying ‘Well, there really isn’t any relevant material.’ There’s no leftover stuff.

But that’s okay. The album as itself is to me so complete, a really interesting journey in its own way.”

Just as O’Malley and Anderson issue nearly as many limited edition albums and CDs as primary releases, they attempt to make their shows unique whenever possible. There’s been a festival gig performed entirely on Moog synthesizers (no guitars), a Norwegian performance held in a church and featuring the building’s pipe organ, and the aforementioned Pentemple set, among others. The latter two shows were recorded and released, though the Norwegian show, entitled Dømkirke, is vinyl-only.

“There’s a million bands out there, a million clubs, and we all go to ’em, and that’s fine for what it is, but we wanted to make Sunn something different and hopefully special,” says Anderson. “It’s important to make things an event, if possible. That’s a real challenge.

Because we’re a band. Bands are plugged into this system of, ‘Oh, you’re playing San Francisco, you’re gonna play at Slim’s,’ or ‘You’re in L.A., you’re gonna play the Troubadour,’ or ‘You’re in New York, you’re gonna play the Knitting Factory.’ One of the things we’re trying to do with our booking agent or the different promoters in the city is, ‘Hey, got a church we can play at, or something that’s different?’ It’s cool, ’cause some people rise to the challenge and want to do something like that, make something different. And then sometimes it doesn’t work, and you play the Knitting Factory. Nothing against the Knitting Factory, we’ve done some great shows there.

But one of the things we always hope to do is play in alternative venues. We can get away with a lot of that because of the openness of what we do, and it’s attracting different people. It’s not just a bunch of metalheads going into a church. It’s people who are into experimental music, people who are into free jazz, or whatever.”

Whatever, indeed! The men of Sunn O))) may have started with a simple, even reductive idea, but over a decade-plus of collaborations and experiments, they’ve gradually expanded the parameters and potential of their core concepts to the point that the only limits on Sunn’s music are its members’ wills and desires. ✹ Phil Freeman was the editor of Metal Edge magazine and is a frequent contributor to the Village Voice, Jazziz and The Wire. This is his first feature for Signal to Noise.

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

Perspectives 2009 Various Venues, Västerås, Sweden 3/5-7/2009

It’s telling that reedist and programmer Mats Gustafsson considers this sporadically convened event (held in Västerås, about an hour’s drive from Stockholm) more of a meeting than a strict music festival. There’s a remarkably collegial feel to the whole endeavor, and musicians, label owners, festival presenters, and journalists are given ample time to meet, talk, and share ideas.

That doesn’t mean that the atmosphere is unwelcoming to the audience: musicians are accessible, and the performances all took place in intimate spaces. The third installment of the festival—the previous editions happened in 2004 and 2007—was characteristically diverse in its programming, which was pulled together from all corners of the globe and demonstrated Gustafsson’s catholic tastes in free jazz, noise, experimental, and improvised music. What was common to all of the artists was their fierce dedication to experimentation and risk-taking.

Considering the muscular, blasting style of Gustafsson’s own playing—which was limited to a two-minute burst at the event’s opening invocation—it should come as no surprise that there were plenty of iron-lunged blowers on hand. Swedish experimental-music mainstay Dror Feiler and his long-time ensemble Lokomotiv Konkret (with drummer Tommy Björk and guitarist Sören Runolf) turned in a paint-peeling set, swinging wildly through gushes of electronic noise—courtesy of the leader’s jumbo cracklebox—and ferocious sax squalling. The following night, German reedist Peter Brötzmann presented a relatively new assemblage with the great Japanese trumpeter Toshinori Kondo— looking haggard, but sounding great— electric bassist Massimo Pupillo and drummer Paal Nilssen-Love, upping the ante with a bulldozer set of surge-and-withdraw momentum, a kind of organic collectivism where four guys were all plugged into one outlet.

But the best saxophone knockdowns came on the final night. The veteran Japanese reedist Akira Sakata (former sideman with pianist Yosuke Yamashita) made a super-rare appearance fronting the tough trio he’s been working with in his homeland for about five years, which features bassist Darin Gray and drummer Chris Corsano.

Gray, suffering from a nasty flu, bit the bullet and churned out a roiling procession of rumbling grooves and fractured patterns; the drummer meanwhile bashed out his post-Sunny Murray hydroplanes, his metallic sizzle punctuated by round-thekit bombs and surface-dragging clatter.

Borbetomagus, the veteran twin-sax-andguitar behemoth who’ve been pushing hard improvisation into the realm of ear-popping noise for three-and-a-half decades, closed out the whole shebang.

It didn’t take long before saxophonist Don Dietrich blew out his amp—these guys drop mikes into the bells of the horns and feed the output through a couple of effects pedals—and it’s to the festival’s credit that they dutifully found another within minutes. The trio’s thick, viscous spew of high-end shrieks, stomach-punching low-end, and middle-range huzzah can still teach the young punks what sonic catharsis is all about.

Power wasn’t the only thing on display at the festival, however. A slew of solo performances, most of them entirely acoustic, were just as exhilarating. Bassist Clayton Thomas (hailing from Australia and currently based in Berlin) turned in a stunning display: one piece emphasized a kind of bowed resonance that made me think of Arnold Dreyblatt’s hypnotic sawing, except here the music didn’t stick to just one rhythm or approach; another demonstrated his resourcefulness with objects, as he wedged sticks between his strings à la Barry Guy, though his manipulations were all his own. Trumpet virtuoso Peter Evans was on fire, with the most explosive and draining set I’ve ever seen from him. If his moves and ever-shifting attacks didn’t make so much musical sense and energize the listener so consistently, his nonchalant bravura would be irritating. It’s not. Also great: Dutch pianist Cor Fuhler, using a phalanx of super-magnets, e-bows, mallets, and Smurf figurines to coax waves of resonant, drones and

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harmonic thickets from his prepared piano; the French clarinetist Xavier Charles producing a flowing catalog of elegant sounds from his licorice stick, all unconventional pops, finger-play, and pure upper-register tones; and Norwegian French horn player Hild Sofie Tafjord (of Fe-Mail and Spunk) using electronics to expand her brassy puffs into enveloping clouds of dissonance.

Some of the most rewarding music relied on careful listening and sophisticated interaction. The Swedish electronic artist (via Copenhagen) Jakob Riis consistently found thrilling ways to refract, process, and recycle the abstract, real-time output of his partners, the Swedish guitarist Anders Lindsjö and the fantastic Lithuanian saxophonist Liudas Mock_nas. The language they were using may have been slightly familiar, but after getting fed into Riis’s prismatic computer, it all became new. The set-up of the French musique concrète trio Silent Block, which featured Xavier Charles again, was striking—three tables piled with handmade electronic contraptions, unidentifiable objects, rows of effects boxes, and yards of cables—but, more to the point, the group delivered a refreshingly original set demonstrating their ability to make music from unlikely sources. Their invention and love of pure sound infected the curious audience, who huddled closely around the three performers.

There were some duds, particularly a few locals that Gustafsson squeezed onto the bill, but by and large Perspectives 2009 had one of the highest batting averages I’ve encountered at a festival in a long while. There were plenty of surprises—the first-time trio of Clayton Thomas, keyboardist Pat Thomas, and drummer Raymond Strid was a knockout, as were the tight-wire give-and-take of vocalist Sofia Jernberg and cellist Lene Grenager and the extroverted turntable/miniature electronics set-up of dieb13 and Hankil Ryu—which is the kind of thing that keeps people returning to a specific festival.

Unfortunately, this was the final edition with Gustafsson at the helm. A new threeperson creative team has been tapped to organize another version of Perspectives in 2011, and they sure have their work cut out for them. Peter Margasak

Heiko Purnhagen

Top: Akira Sakata with Darin Gray Bottom: Silent Block

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sfSound and guests rehearsing Robert Erickson's Pacific Sirens, l to r: Kjell Nordeson, Alexa Beattie, Kyle Bruckmann, John Ingle, Matt Ingalls, Monica Scott, Marina Peterson, Christopher Jones, Lê Quan Ninh

sfSound microFestival

Tom Djll

various venues, San Francisco CA 2/27-3/1/2009

The sfSound Group was launched around 2001 with the aim of sustaining a professionallevel new music group without the starched collars of academic support. Today, with a track record of residencies and grants , sfSound remains refreshingly un-tuxedoed in its presentations of top-shelf 20th- and 21st-century music, even as the overall standard of performance has embraced the highest levels of professionalism. The group’s co-operative programming has included the thorniest composers (Babbitt, Ferneyhough, Xenakis, Lachenmann), littleheard quasi-improvised gems by the New York School of Wolff, Brown, Cage and Feldman, as well as works by young Bay Area composers.

Clarinetist Matt Ingalls, the instigator of sfSound, has a firm foot in the improvised-music camp as well, and this year sfSound convened a major mashup of composed and improvised musics and invited two international improvising groups of note: the Lê Quan Ninh/Michel Doneda duo, and the trio of Gene Coleman, Marina Petersen, and Domenico Sciajno. The festival’s programming mixed groups and methods thoroughly over three nights of challenging music.

Night one showcased The International Nothing (clarinetists Kai Fagaschinski and Michael Thieke)—not an improvi group, though the players are both members of the improvheavy Berlin Echtzeit scene of minimal means and maximal control. Some of The International Nothing’s compositions are even supplied with lyrics, although none were presented this night. As a clarinet duo, they create dreamy multiphonic phases that recall Feldman’s timelapse tableaux. This music would cease to exist in the hands of other players; and in that sense, it is exactly like improvisation. Without Thieke and Fagaschinski, there’s not much else. Except maybe the motorcycle groaning somewhere in the street below, tossing in an unintentional ball of industrial fuzz.

The two clarinetists joined sfSound for one improvisation, and its ever-fermenting twitters and foofs outshone the Cage composition that followed. In that instance, the assembled Music

for Ten gathered together ten of the seventeen available solo pieces in the set, “any number of which can be performed together, with the chosen number of participants completing the title.” I don’t know if there’s an ensemble around with a greater predisposition to interpret Cage’s later music; that being said, it came out as music more to be admired for its conceptual challenge to classical music tropes than as a sound-object to be listened to. Which wouldn’t displease Cage himself, of course.

More successful was Morton Feldman’s Projection II, presented in the second half of Friday’s program. Poised between The International Nothing’s feathery clarinet clearings, the reading given Feldman’s 1951 “box notation” score was a gently rolling landscape suffused with light and air, played with precision and commitment.

Saturday night’s concert opened with an uninterrupted 38-minute-set by percussionist Lê Quan Ninh and soprano saxophonist Michel Doneda which had the clarity, changing facets, and cutting hardness of a diamond. The percussionist’s apparatus consisted of a paradesize bass drum set horizontally, with a changing menu of objects placed on its head—sticks, small chains, cymbals, gongs, and, unforgettably, a pine cone, which he dragged over it in evolving gestures ranging from guttural to serene. Doneda wandered the stage, sometimes correcting the natural imbalance in their loudness with greater distance. A wonderful set overall, yet Doneda seemed more inventive the weekend before in a scintillating duo at Oakland’s 1510 Studio with percussionist Tatsuya Nakatani.

Robert Erickson’s Pacific Sirens (1969) added a precomposed electronic soundtrack to the sfSound ensemble. It’s a programmatically evocative work, taking recorded sounds of breaking ocean waves and adding them over the ensemble’s “siren” voices. The frankness of its exposition and all-natural conception was charming and brought to mind San Francisco in the late sixties. sfSound gave it a respectful turn, allowing the taped sounds to completely wash out the instruments in thick, crackling waves of white-noise foam. The occasional rudeness reminded one that sometimes the flower power era had thorns, too.

The final entry in Saturday’s triptych was sfSound member Kyle Bruckmann’s Tarpit. You might expect the mordant leader of ensembles like Wrack, EKG and Lozenge to provide an ironic title for his sfSound showpiece, but Tarpit

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was indeed sticky, black, and—inescapable?

“Sticky” in the sense of instrumentalists paired off in furious or sinking duos, each ending with a helter-skelter “false unison.” “Black” in the sense of Bruckmann’s humor and ever-effacing manner: applied to ensemble playing, this spirit turns inside out into a fester of virtuosic extroversion. “Inescapable”—maybe not, but impetuous, eccentric, postpunky and careening, yes. The players bounced off each other in the assigned duos and other nondesignated liaisons, mocking and/or lewdly caressing each other’s lyricisms and declamations.

Out of this motley stew grew a slight return of the Lê Quan Ninh/Doneda voo-duo, overlaid by prerecorded noise and rising feverishly into a cataclysmic, ear-bleeding climax with all instruments joining in, two by two, on a repeating written line that jumped and jiggled and finally wound itself into a hissing death spiral.

The third and final night presented the trio of Gene Coleman, Marina Peterson, and Domenico Sciajno. Coleman dominated his own piece Black in White, for bass clarinet, cello and koto (Monica Scott and Kanoko Nishi provided the latter voices). “Open time” sections of improvised spaciness alternated with “closed time” spastic clusters—the instruments presenting a limited gamut of noises rotating into ever-new juxtapositions in kaleidoscopic fashion. Scaijno’s Korzo for the sfSound ensemble started off with a light touch before crashing into a thicket of reed-biting multiphonics and squawks. A second section brought out more of the ensemble in a drone-based passage that evaporated into bright pointillist flurries. Finally the featured trio improvised a pair of pieces, the first characterized by Scaijno’s patient electronic scrims, Coleman’s nervous clarinet harlequinisms, and Peterson’s scratchy string sounds; the second seemed less episodic and more muscular, the electronics taking over more of the sound-space and driving the thing along. sfSound opened the second set with Elliott Carter’s Triple Duo, an “improvised” score (in the form of a free fantasy) from Carter’s “opening” period in the early 1980s. Having mastered the piece over a number of performances, sfSound can really rip into it with gusto while keeping the requisite precision and finesse. The ensemble is grouped in three dyads: clarinet/flute, violin/cello, and piano/ percussion. “Each of these pairs has its own repertory of ideas and moods... involv[ing] various contrasts, conflicts and reconciliations,” the composer notes. What results is a cut-up

(in multiple senses of the term—Carter likes to characterize Triple Duo as “comic”) of melodic counterpoint, clashing duo counterpoints, and counterpoint derived of sound-production— the ringing piano and percussion passages, the breathy wind interludes, and the groaning double-stops in the strings. sfSound made all this easy to hear and a delight to watch.

As if inspired by Mr. Carter, the final all-hands improv that finished the night was by all measures the most spirited, witty, and colorful of the festival. Opening with a tip-of-the-tongue duo between saxophone and percussion (John Ingle and Kjell Nordeson), the mood simultaneously dipped and opened out into a dark field of electronics, clarinet and piano (Scaijno, Ingalls, and Christopher Jones), sprinkled here and there with Andy Strain’s trombone, Marina Peterson and Monica Scott’s cellos, and Graeme Jennings’ violin. Jones and Ingle stomped all over this, creating an opening for Coleman’s bass clarinet, Alexa Beattie’s viola, Stacey Pelinka’s flute, and Kyle Bruckmann’s oboe. The horns entwined and growled, percussion ping-pronged, strings gasped and feinted; dainty pointillism rubbed shoulders with macho free-jazzisms and electronic pyramids. It’s not easy to get a large ensemble to collectively improvise at these stratospheric levels, and keep it alive and kicking for over fifteen minutes. But doing hard music well has come to be sfSound’s stock-in-trade. Here’s hoping the microfestival becomes a standard issue as well. Tom Djll

Christopher O'Riley

Miller Theater, NYC 3/27, 4/17 & 5/1/2009 Christopher O’Riley is an arts presenter (he hosts the public TV and radio show From the Top) and a virtuoso pianist who has never been content to limit himself to a mainstream concert career. While his repertoire includes masterpieces from the classical canon, O’Riley has branched out, embracing both contemporary composers and popular songwriters. In recent years, he’s explored the latter in a series of albums of his own transcriptions of songs

by Radiohead, Nick Drake, and Elliott Smith.

During O’Riley’s three-recital series at Columbia University’s Miller Theatre, each evening juxtaposed repertoire by a classical composer with selections from a particular pop figure’s oeuvre.

The recitals highlighted certain affinities between the paired composers. Radiohead’s songs were programmed with Preludes and Fugues by Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich. The often stark language of Shostakovich in these strictly contrapuntal yet frequently acerbically dissonant pieces was complemented by the sense of sweep imparted by Radiohead’s dystopian anthems.

In conversation, one of the reasons O’Riley indicated for selecting the pairing was that both Radiohead and Shostakovich were skilful at employing irony in their works. The pianist’s arrangements were adept at highlighting this component of Thom Yorke’s delivery through tart dissonances and veiled, cluster-laden harmonies. He clearly articulated the independent voices in the Shostakovich fugues, underlining their often bleak vistas with powerful tone and commanding presence. This was equally true of rousing renditions of “Paranoid Android”

and “Karma Police.” Some may carp that O’Riley’s transcriptions are really distillations; that the studio magic wrought on Radiohead’s albums is impossible to capture on a concert grand, causing the songs to seem more homogeneous; but one could make a similar claim when comparing Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony and LadyMacbeth to his piano music!

What this reductive critique omits is O’Riley’s musicality, enthusiasm, and careful attention to each songs’ details. Indeed, there’s something thrilling about hearing popular music played so passionately in the intimate setting of a solo recital.

O’Riley’s combination of Drake and Debussy on a single program was clever, taking note of the folksinger’s interest in alternate tunings and imaginative, colorful orchestrations: both aspects which resonated with Debussy’s Impressionist piano works. As with his other transcriptions, it’s clear the pianist did his homework here, ferreting out unusual chord voicings and piecing together aspects of demos, live performances, and studio recordings to attempt a more comprehensive picture of Drake’s musical language.

While it was clear that O’Riley felt just as strongly about this repertoire as he did the other programs, both composers have a tendency toward subtlety that made for a more muted dramatic trajectory. Mirroring the civility of the music on the program, the audience for this recital was a bit more subdued in their reactions—less hooting and hollering—but no less appreciative. Indeed, the conversations in the lobby during the intermission were quite lively, including an animated discussion of alternate tuning resources by Columbia undergrads and wizened hippies and several classical concertgoers engaging in an elevated discourse on approaches to Debussy by various pianists.

A thundery encore of Cobain’s “Heart-shaped Box” suggested that O’Riley’s next LP should be exciting listening.

The final recital in the series presented songs

by Elliott Smith and Schumann’s Arabesque and the cycle for piano Kreisleriana. Of all of the programs, this was the most integrated, both in terms of musical details and biographical resonances. Key relationships were frequently apparent, as were gestural syncronicities; the relationships between “Cupid’s Trick” and the third movement of Kreisleriana, as well as “Not Half Right” and the suite’s last piece, were particularly palpable. O’Riley also delved into intriguing voicings in his Smith arrangements.

For instance, on “Oh Well, Okay” he played the vocal melody in his left hand, evoking a cello solo line, while simultaneously articulating syncopated treble register harmonies.

Both Schumann and Smith struggled with personal demons throughout their lives.

Despite uplifting selections such as “Independence Day” and the Arabesque, much of the music contained a subtle undercurrent of inner anguish that O’Riley eloquently explored.

Indeed his traversal of “I Didn’t Understand” and Kreisleriana’s “Sehr Innig” were both heart-rending. Although projections by artists Stephen Byram and Jonathon Rosen had not ‘clicked’ with the music-making on the preceding recitals, here they did an admirable job of presenting a compelling and complementary visual storyline. When O’Riley finished his (appropriately titled) encore “Bye,” many were no doubt saddened that this creatively conceived and exemplarily performed series had come to its conclusion. Christian Carey WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #54 | 41

Traveling Through Now

New Release!

Joel Futterman: Piano, Soprano Saxophone Alvin Fielder, Drums & Percussion Ike Levin, Tenor Saxophone, Bass Clarinet “This trio is on a quest for enlightenment…truly heavyweight playing.” Cadence “Improvisers with heavy credentials set a new standard and create another powerful volume of work.”

All About Jazz

Live At The Blue Monk Rare Club Date Performance!

Joel Futterman Alvin Fielder Ike Levin

“Incendiary soundscapes blended with delicate melodies that always swing…” Jazz Times “Unbelievably powerful and inspired creativity.”

European Improvised Music Bulletin

Enigma Joel Futterman Ike Levin “Musical fireworks explode in the hands of these two highly capable artists” Village Voice “I salute these talented veterans for unabashedly carrying the free jazz flame into the 21st century.”

Jazz Review

CELEBRATING THE ART OF IMPROVISED MUSIC

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Duane Brant's Sew Organ

Subtropics 20

Luis Olazabal

Various Venues, Miami, FL 2/6-8/2009

With experimental musicians such as Alvin Lucier, Robert Ashley, Phill Niblock, David Dunn, Alison Knowles, George Lewis, and Gustavo Matamoros among its past and present advisors, Miami’s annual Subtropics Festival stacks up well alongside the many events of similar scope on the other coast. Produced by the Interdisciplinary Sound Arts Workshop, the festival’s twentieth anniversary edition offered sound art installations, experimental music performances and outreach events at a variety of venues over the course of five weeks.

The SOUND exhibit at the Bass Museum of Art was the centerpiece of the festival, and included work by all of this year’s featured composers. The innermost room included David Dunn’s recorded micro-environments of bark beetles, bats, freshwater invertebrates, and ants—inaudible except when your ear was inches from the speaker. Gustavo Matamoros’s Small Sounds on a Table Top used hypersonic sound to create the illusion of tiny objects moving on a tabletop. The most isolated of the spaces, an almost hidden exhibit, was the freight elevator. Seventy minutes of silence were recorded there, then processed by both Steve Peters and René Barge. The two resulting recordings were looped out of sequence with one another and played back in the elevator, with results far more active than I could have imagined.

The exhibit was highly interactive, and genuinely engaging. Brenda Hutchinson’s music box used push-pins on a huge turning spool covered

with cork, which triggered a microtonally tuned set of bars. Alison Knowles’ gloves and “bean turner” (made of flax paper and, yes, beans) were meant to be handled and heard. The bean turner, in particular, produced an especially gratifying range of sounds. In Toshi Ichiyanagi’s Music for Piano No. 5, observers were invited to throw darts at the back of an amplified piano. Duane Brant’s Sew Organ was a major attraction. Each vintage sewing machine was attached to a different type of resonator (repurposed from string instruments, organs, radios, etc.). Visitors could “play” the sewing machines using their original pedals, which were stretched out in a keyboardlike row on the floor. When several people played at once the sound was tremendous. I actually found it more interesting to try them one by one, noticing the sonic differences between machines and discovering the subtle control over the sound each pedal made possible.

Phill Niblock’s video, Movement of People Working, documented a wide range of manual labor in Peru. The three accompanying soundworks (which Niblock says are unrelated to the video) were built from sounds made by solo players—Martin Zrost, Arne Deforce, and Seth Josel. Matamoros’s Stone Guitars with Spin Whistle was a steady climb on four electric guitars from bridge to nut with a stone. Joseph Celli’s In the Bag was performed by dancer Heather Maloney, who (true to the title) emerged after a struggle from a huge paper bag. It was as much visual art and dance as it was sound art.

Improvised performances took place throughout the weekend. On Friday, Ikue Mori used her laptop to create both music and visuals, alongside guitarist Davey Williams and trombonist Jim Staley; they traveled together to some bold and innovative soundworlds. Phill Niblock (music) and Katherine Liberovskaya (video) turned in

a vivid, visceral set. The visuals were closeups, involving almost perpetual motion and disorientation; as usual with Niblock, the sounds (and decibel levels) were designed to be not only heard but felt. Brenda Hutchinson vocalized into a long tube, also making use of electronic delay. It took a perceptible amount of time for the sound to get from her mouth through to the other end of the tube. That partial lack of control over the sonic result, juxtaposed with the intimacy of the soundmaking, created a powerful performance dynamic. David Dunn made use of two identical boxes of circuits, set up to interact with each other as well as reacting to his disruptions. (In his words, “They perturb each other and I perturb them.”) The equipment as he described it was dead simple, but the results were wild and unpredictable.

Racquel Castro’s film Soundwalkers (available at iamasoundwalker.blogspot.com) was another key event at the festival, a documentary making compelling use of interviews, historical footage, and representative work in order to discuss issues such as sonic awareness, silence, and an acoustically healthy society. It was received positively at the festival, and I’ve found that also plays well to a more general audience.

More than one of the participants mentioned during panel discussions that they haven’t “written notes down” for a number of years, or that the word “composer” is a poor description of their role. It’s incredibly refreshing to be in a context where the common reaction to either of those statements is a simple smile. This festival provided a new window for me into the sense of community that is not only possible but very much alive among those who are exploring possibilities in sound, however geographically dispersed and aesthetically diverse these individuals are. Jennie Gottschalk

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

Power to the People: Musica Elettronica Viva

Sound Commitments: Avant-Garde Music and the Sixties Robert Adlington, editor Oxford University Press

Flow, Gesture and Spaces in Free Jazz: Towards a Theory of Collaboration

Guerino Mazzola and Paul B. Cherlin Springer

Recent years have seen a growing revaluation of the 1960s, both in the sphere of political theory, where philosophers such as Slavoj Žižek and Alain Badiou have attempted to reclaim and rethink the revolutionary consciousness of that period, and in the arts, where excavation of the work of radical artists in the visual arts, film, literature and music continues.

The “excesses” of the 1960s were disavowed by many in the conservative period that began in the 1980s as a moral, political and artistic failure, but in the wake of the global collapse of financial markets and the neo-liberal ideology of globalization, there is a real urgency in looking at the paths not taken, in order to be able to illuminate possible futures.

Sound Commitments seeks to explore the avant garde in music from the point of view of social, aesthetic and political theory, with a renewed interest in the music and musicians whose work participated

in the broader political movements that strove for a revolutionary change in global society. In particular, as the intro says, the book asks, “how could avantgarde musicians make a meaningful contribution to social change if their music remained the preserve of a tiny initiated clique?” This is an important question, and the book explores, in a variety of situations, what happened when musicians committed to a tradition of aesthetic experimentation growing out of the twentieth-century avant garde, stretching back through Cage and Stockhausen to Satie and Schoenberg, confronted radical mass political movements, which demanded a music that spoke to the people.

In some sense, the avant garde never recovered from this confrontation, despite numerous heroic individual efforts, retreating instead into populist and ultimately commodified forms or a defiant marginality that preserved aesthetic dignity at the price of real engagement with the masses, if that word makes any sense today.

Those moments of encounter include: minimalist fiddler/philosopher Henry Flynt’s affiliation with the communist Workers World Party in the mid-1960s and his famous demonstrations against Stockhausen in New York; the work of improv collective Musica Elettronica Viva in Rome in the late 1960s, bringing experimental music to prisons and various public spaces; a concert in Amsterdam in 1968 held by various young Dutch composers in solidarity with the events of May in France, including Misha Mengelberg; the presentation of Steve Reich’s tape collage

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“Come Out!” at a concert in solidarity with the Harlem Six, a group of African-Americans wrongly arrested in a riot in New York; Luc Ferrari’s tenure as director of a community art center in France in the late 1960s, and his tape work Presque Rien; the ONCE festivals organized in Ann Arbor, whose participants included Robert Ashley and Gordon Mumma; the performances of Japanese avant garde musicians at the Sogetsu Art Center in Tokyo. The book also includes a dryly humorous account of the difficulties faced by the U.S. State Department in sending avant garde composers out as cultural ambassadors to various countries, at a moment when the decidedly For Export high-cultural category of the Classical seemed to dissolve.

Unfortunately, the book, which has its origins in an academic conference, doesn’t rise to being more than the sum of its parts. The material is always interesting, and the authors are adept at pointing to the crisis of the avant garde, but there’s little sense of how that crisis (one we still inhabit) might be resolved, or even what the trajectory of many of the musicians was, beyond the limits of “the long 1960s.” With the exception of Sumanth Gopinath’s excellent musicological/political reading of Reich’s “Come Out!” the writing is not theoretical or “avant garde” enough and feels distant, if respectful. And of course, there’s plenty that doesn’t get talked about: Third World avant gardes, in particular in North Africa and South America; the relation between the avant gardes and rock’n’roll, which saw classically trained musician/

composers from Darmstadt and similar locales forming or joining rock bands at the end of the decade; the commune scenes around the globe and the folk/ avant/rock hybrids that they often produced; drugs, spirituality and sexuality as revolutionary practices co-emergent with avant garde music.

One could draw a number of conclusions from the book. The shift from anarchist or New Left political positions in the late 1960s towards Maoist and other far left positions often forced musicians and composers back into reactionary musical forms with little payoff in terms of engaging the people. On the positive side, it also knocked a few more nails into the coffin of the Western classical tradition, since those who refused to buckle under often ended up making experimental rock rather than “avant garde music.” But rock, along with jazz and contemporary classical, retreated over a period of decades, willingly or not, into being “just music,” presented in reified forms at the endless experimental music festivals which so many European states sponsor today. At the same time, the negotiation with “the audience,” albeit fragmented into a thousand micro-audiences, still continues today. The anarchist ethos of the mid-1960s became punk in the 1970s, with DIY working as a compromise between autonomy and entrepreneurship, and situationism functioning as a rationale for seeking mass market success, but also delivering the occasional shock right to the heart of the society of the spectacle. It is hard to see today how music could in itself start a revolution (except as a disingenuous marketing ploy aimed at jaded consumer palates), yet as Sound Commitments repeatedly points out, this is exactly what many musicians believed in the 1960s, and they acted on it. And the invitation remains open to try it again, differently ...

Mazzola and Cherlin’s Flow, Gesture and Spaces in Free Jazz takes a different approach to the avant garde, proposing “geometric theories of gestures and distributed identities, also known as swarm intelligence.” The book is a real mess, written in poor English, packed with eccentric digressions, unexplained formulas, and a dubious politics that too quickly tries to resituate free jazz away from its African American origins as a part of German romanticism!

Having said that, there are some original ideas here too. Mazzola is a trained mathematician and physicist, as well as a jazz musician, and author of a 1300-page treatise called The Topos of Music that proposes to understand music through the complex geometric science of topology. It all comes down to the problem of how you represent something that appears to be unrepresentable—beyond orthodox musical notation, beyond conventional linguistic description, beyond even mathematical formulas. At its most profound, the book is an attempt to think what music is—notably a music, namely free jazz, that refuses all the structures that Western art music is built around, while possessing a high degree of mastery, purpose and value. What Mazzola and Cherlin (colleagues at the University of Minnesota) come up with is a three-part theory that considers how the collaborations and improvisations of free jazz work: through creating new kinds of spaces; through the concept of the gesture, which is carefully distinguished from a rule, using the work of French philosopher Gilles Chatelet; and through a theory of flow. Despite the poor prose, there is something admirable about Mazzola and Cherlin’s tenacity in keeping true to their own vision of what free jazz is about, in spite of the poverty of official languages in tracking it.

Mazzola and Cherlin would benefit from reading the writers in Sound Commitments, and probably vice versa. By stripping music of its sociality, beyond the immediate circle of those who collaborate in making it, they risk reducing music to a form of computer programming, in spite of their best intentions.

Space, flow and gesture are all historically contingent, as is free jazz—it makes a difference who is listening, where, and when, and there can be no abstract scientific theory of what makes “good jazz” or “successful improvisation.” The audience participates in the creation of meaning and value too, often despite itself. The problem is pointed to in Sound Commitments—the relation of the music to actual listeners is complicated, and the question of idiomatic forms of improvisation like flamenco or raga or other ethnic

musics, which Derek Bailey pointed to in his own writing about improvisation, looms over any notion of the avant garde today. What if “free jazz” meant jazz in a free society? On the other hand, the writers in Sound Commitments could benefit from Mazzola and Cherlin’s commitment to the science and philosophy of sound, and consider the ways in which revolutionary music must be more than a set of radical social propositions, and must at some level be an intervention in the materiality of sound also. Marcus Boon

A Language of Song Samuel Charters Duke University Press

Few scholars of African-American music have worked with the industry of Samuel Charters. He was one of the first writers to look in depth at the varied and interlocking cultures of Mississippi blues, Missouri ragtime and New Orleans jazz, and his efforts as a field recorder and record producer have been as significant as his writings; his 1959 recordings of Lightnin’ Hopkins demonstrated the breadth of Hopkins’ art and helped restore his career. As well as his numerous books on the blues and early jazz, beginning with The Country Blues in 1959, Charters has pursued the origins of the music, resulting in his 1981 book The Roots of the Blues: An African Search, and he’s explored the other permutations of African music in the Caribbean and South America as well.

Rarer still than his perseverance is Charters’ acumen, his ability to find the telling musical detail that will expand into a rich pattern of cultural associations.

Subtitled Journeys in the Musical World of the African Diaspora, A Language of Song is Charters memoir of his journey into the mysteries and interconnections of the African-derived roots musics, tracing his expeditions in Gambia, the Canary Islands, the Georgia Sea Islands, Alabama, Missouri, the Bahamas, Trinidad, Cuba and Brazil. It’s a kind of journal and travelogue, though it spans decades, and it explores Charters’ own discovery with an intense sense of the original encounter, its climate, atmosphere and nuance.

Here he has gathered his experiences of a host of different worlds and assembled them along a rough path from Africa to the Americas, following a geographical and historical path rather than his own intersections with the music. What makes this even more compelling is the way in which Charter constructs each section around a series of avatars, guides who led him through a particular tributary of the diaspora in a path to initiation. In Gambia a young man takes him to meet a griot who agrees to perform a day-long song about the slave trade, passages of which are translated here. In the Canary Islands he pursues the African rhythmic trace that turns up in Gaspar Sanz’s “Canarios” in a late 17th century Spanish guitar suite. He’s guided here by both an older scholar and by a young guitarist.

“Go Down Chariot” explores the gospel music of the Georgia Sea Islands, intermingling texts from Fanny Kemble, the wife of a plantation owner; Lydia Parrish, an early twentieth century connoisseur and regular visitor to the islands; and the Harlem Renaissance writer Zora Neale Hurston, finally encountering first-hand the extraordinary liberation and complexity of the music that lives on in congregations to the present. A chance encounter with a band glimpsed in a doorway from a bus in the early 1950s leads to a journey into the music of the pre-blues Alabama string bands. An early interest in ragtime results in a surprise visit from the elderly composer Joseph Lamb to Charters’ mid-50s Brooklyn basement apartment, this in a chapter on ragtime that’s later illuminated by an ethnomusicology conference in Sweden where an African musician plays an ancient akonting, a banjo ancestor, in duet with a Southern U.S. banjo player. It’s in Sweden, too, which Charters has made a second home, that he meets Bebo Valdés, master pianist and guide to the rhythmic intricacies of Cuban music.

In all, it’s an extraordinary journey, filled with vital, revealing details of cultures and musics. Charters himself emerges as a guide fully worthy of all the guides he’s sought out so diligently and clearly been so blessed to discover. Stuart Broomer WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #54 | 45

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

Anthony Braxton

Burkhard Stangl and Christof Kurzmann play all the hits.

Christof Kurzmann / Burkhard Stangl Neuschnee

Yuko Zama

Erstwhile CD

Erstwhile Records is coming up on its tenth anniversary, and if the label hands out awards at the party, the duo of Burkhard Stangl and Christof Kurzmann has “most transformed” all locked up. Their first effort, Schnee, explored the sound possibilities of pairing acoustic guitar with computer, which was novel enough at the time, but soon became a well-trodden path. Their second effort, recorded live at one of the label’s AMPLIFY festivals, added songs and social activity to sweet surfaces; at one point a couple of mates in the audience joined Kurzmann’s wobbly rendition of a Prince song.

Neuschnee, their third recording, builds upon the possibilities suggested by Schnee_live, making use of both instantly generated and carefully refined material. They worked on it sporadically for four years, in settings as disparate as a raucous bar in Lima and Vienna’s Amann Studios.

Kurzmann and Stangl certainly aren’t the first or only ones to seek to reconcile improv and song; I remember seeing Eugene Chadbourne do just that in the back of an occult bookstore in Chicago nearly a quarter century ago, and

Gastr del Sol did some things very similar to Neuschnee in the mid-’90s. What the Schnee duo has done is make a very personal statement about the place of songs in their own lives and art. Stangl (guitar, vibraphone, piano) has straddled free improv, jazz, and new music; Kurzmann (vocals, clarinet, and computer running lloop software) is a long-time fan of pop and semi-popular music who made the shift from observer to participant when computers opened the doors for contributions from people without conventional instrumental skills.

Here they have put decades of diverse listening, playing, composing, and appreciating on an equal footing, then refracted them through the lens of avant-garde practice.

“Las Hijaz De Nieve” opens things in populist fashion. It’s a rather soused-sounding sing-along of “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” with background chatter nearly overwhelming the singing. Over in less than a minute, it’s a reminder that many more people experience music this way than by sitting and listening closely to an Incus or Erstwhile CD, and also that the folks making those CDs are as likely as anybody to go out and hoist a few with their pals. “In the Global Snow of Things” builds from birdsong to the blend of acoustic harmonics and electronic hum that characterized Schnee, then Kurzmann’s voice drifts in singing a tragic ballad; its origin isn’t given, but it sounds like an English folk tune. He doesn’t have a conventionally strong voice; hesitant and quavering, it’s functional by indie-rock standards but (like most of our voices) hardly

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the sort of thing you hear on the radio. Despite being born in Europe and currently a resident of Argentina, he sings in English, which reflects English-language popular culture’s hegemony: billions of non–English-speakers people hum, sing, and probably dream in English. After the singing is done, Manon Liu-Winter’s prepared piano glides in. Its metallic patter minces upon an increasingly squelchy electronic bed; the similarity of the two entrances and exits puts rustic song and rarefied new music on equal footing, reflecting how different musics blow in and out of one’s space, one’s consciousness, and one’s life. The record’s world-clashing tour de force comes last. On “Song Songs,” Stangl does his best Derek Bailey imitation while Kurzmann holds forth over a looped beat like Ian McCulloch once did over Echo & the Bunnymen’s rocky churn, dropping line after line from his favorite songs. Or at least I assume they are; the first line is “When I was young I listened to the radio, waiting for my favorite songs,” followed by a blast of static. It’s obvious, sure, but still funny. Then he laments, “What have they done to my song, ma?” You chopped it up and made it your own, son, and made mortal enemies like PiL and the Beatles sit side by side. Just like they do in many record collections… Nothing wrong with that. “Song Songs” winds down with a gently swinging rendition of Neil Diamond’s “Song Sung Blue” tied up in a ribbon of Edith Piaf’s voice manipulated into a string of frontwards-backwards syllables. It’s strikingly gorgeous and affecting, just like your favorite song on the radio. Bill Meyer

Tetuzi Akiyama Kevin Corcoran Christian Kiefer

Low Clouds Mean Death Fora Sound 0801 CD

The pairing of guitarist Tetuzi Akiyama and composer/multi-instrumentalist Christian Kiefer is as intriguing as it is difficult to anticipate. Akiyama has been a central figure in the Tokyo minimalist onkyo scene and has also reveled in playing solo boogie-blues rhythms. It’s the latter that would seem to fit best with the lush dustbowl operettas Kiefer has released on Extreme, but there is still some significant yardage between those rich, haunting acoustic records and Akiyama’s pounding rhythm guitar workouts. Where they meet, at least in concept, is in the arena of the improvised sea shanty. An epitaph from Victor Hugo’s The Toilers of the Sea and song titles such as “Drowned Arch” and “The Pressure of the Current” frame the record, giving context to the delicate, acoustic music they make.

With percussionist Kevin Corcoran (Antennas Erupt!), they make a music that is slow, visceral, mournful and quite beautiful. Kiefer plays piano and a little accordion, and did a great job mixing and mastering: the instruments at times become almost tangible (fingers on strings, sticks running along cymbals), then submerge back into the mix. This is not about an ocean storm, not even centrally a ship at sea. This is about vast, dark currents that are home to strange beasts—some that produce their own light, others that change color to blend into their surroundings, and some whose song lures sailors to their doom.

Kurt Gottschalk

Akron/Family

Set 'Em Wild, Set 'Em Free Dead Oceans LP / CD / download

A new label, a new line-up with a key member gone; it’s time for a change.

The album cover, an unabashed rip of Sly & The Family Stone’s There’s A Riot Going On, sets one up to expect something different, and “Everyone Is Guilty” is certainly an audacious opening gambit. With its galloping groove, Afro-beat organ, and swirling strings and horns, it sounds like nothing Akron/ Family has done before, and it works like a charm. This newfound interest in rhythm from a band best known for its extravagant vocal arrangements and wild stylistic leaps sustains for another couple tracks. With its lilting Congolese guitar and bright horns, the ingratiating “River” isn’t too much of a stretch.

“Creatures’” distorted keyboards, robot beats, and dub effects feel more novel, but those elements have a hard time coexisting with more customary ones.

This is Set ‘Em Wild, Set ‘Em Free’s weak point; Akron/Family seems to be having a harder time pulling off those madcap stylistic changes that make their concerts such a joy. And sometimes they simply step wrong; “MBF” starts out feeling like a wild ride, but the way it piles up partway through feels out of control, not exhilarating. Some of the strongest statements are the simplest ones; “Set ‘Em Free’s” rustic country vibe may be something they can do in their sleep, but its conciliatory sentiments are a welcome reassurance nonetheless. Even so, what I like most about Set ‘Em Wild, Set ‘Em Free is the

way it doesn’t follow Sly Stone’s lead.

It would be too easy in these times to lapse into the dissipation and paranoia that made Riot so powerful, yet harrowing. Even when they’re turning up a blind alley, Akron/Family sound like they’re glad to be riding. Bill Meyer

Berger Knutsson Spering with Friends See You in a Minute: Memories of Don Cherry Country & Eastern CD

Bitter Funeral Beer Band Live at Frankfurt 82 Country & Eastern CD

See You in a Minute is a loving tribute to Don Cherry, recorded on the tenth anniversary of his passing by drummer Bengt Berger and other Swedish musicians who worked with the trumpeter or learned from his legacy; it also features Cherry’s children Eagle-Eye and Neneh on guest vocals. Mostly consisting of Cherry’s own compositions and traditional tunes that he adapted, the music lifts the listener from the chair, its spirit familiar to anyone who has followed his post-’60s oeuvre through all his multikulti wanderings. Neneh’s funky take on “Ganesh” brings to mind her father’s own hiphop-inflected delivery on Home Boy (produced by Ramuntcho Matta in 1985). The quartet rendition of “El Corazón” summons the delicacy of Cherry’s duo with drummer Ed Blackwell, while his talent for stirring melodies is echoed in Jonas Knutsson’s solos on soprano. Fittingly, the trumpet chair remains empty (except on “God Is At the Door”), but Cherry’s voice comes through transcendently nonetheless.

In the early 1980s, Berger’s farsighted Bitter Funeral Beer Band made enormous strides in the experimental synthesis that came to be known as “world music.” Drawing on his studies of funeral music in northern Ghana, he cast a full range of horns over a dense, meditative weave of strings and percussion (including African xylophones); the collectivist group dynamic is comparable to New Orleans music or the shifting vamps of the Brotherhood of Breath. The group’s only record, for ECM, featured a guest appearance by Don Cherry, who also appears (along with K. Sridhar on sarod) as part of the 14-piece ensemble on Live in Frankfurt 82, a radio recording now released for the first time. The pieces build in mood and intensity to the “Funeral Dance” itself, lasting nearly half the set, which follows the mournful proceedings past their cathartic turn into animated celebration. This is exhilarating music that reaches for a glimpse of the divine and doesn’t stop until it gets there.

Jason Weiss

Harrison Birtwistle The Minotaur OpusArte DVD

In his latest opera, The Minotaur, British composer Harrison Birtwistle again collaborates with David Harsent, librettist for Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. He also revisits themes found frequently in his music: tales from Greek mythology, labyrinthine structures (both theatrical and musical), theatre-as-ritual, and violence. The latter, even for a composer with a reputation for select-

ing confrontational scenarios, is on an unprecedented scale. Of course, this befits the ancient tale of the Minotaur, a half-man half-beast who murders and cannibalizes Athenian sacrificial victims until vanquished by Theseus (with a little help from Minoan priestess Ariadne).

Abetted by director Stephen Langridge’s visceral production, Birtwistle and Harsent play up the monster’s brutality—as well as the carrion-hunting Furies who appear in the wake of his rampages. While some may shudder at the graphic nature of the action (including a particularly disturbing rape-murder and several simulated eviscerations), The Minotaur also attempts to construct a three-dimensional portrait of its antagonist as a deeply conflicted and isolated individual. Taunted and shunned by humankind, he is an inarticulate monster when awake, but somehow is able to speak when dreaming. John Tomlinson’s poignant, emotionally wracked Minotaur evokes sympathy, despite his seemingly unquenchable brutality. Other members of the cast are compelling as well. Christine Rice sings the lengthy, challenging role of Ariadne beautifully, but deftly underlines the character’s moral ambiguity and capacity for subterfuge. Johan Reuter supplies a well-honed portrayal as well.

Sung with intensity and fearsome brio, his Theseus has few romantic sentiments; he clearly prefers using Ariadne to wooing her. Birtwistle’s score, with its characteristic vocal angularity and imaginative orchestration, captures the subtleties and subterfuge of the characters’ interactions and meditations. It’s also more than up to the task of vividly accompanying the most raucous of the opera’s action sequences. Like Harsent’s Theseus, The Minotaur is not interested in wooing the audience, but it’s certainly a memorable reassessment of a timeless story. Christian Carey

Sir Richard Bishop The Freak of Araby Drag City CD / LP / download

Despite his English-as-cheese surname and Midwestern birthplace, Richard Bishop has Middle Eastern roots; one of his grandfathers came from Lebanon. Most of Bishop’s solo music has a Moorish cast redolent of the western end of the Mediterranean, but the music on the former Sun City Girl’s first all-electric, full-band project under his own name comes from closer to the ancestral home. Half of its ten tracks are covers of classic Egyptian and Lebanese tunes, all decades old; it’s probably just the sort of stuff that Bishop used to hear gramps play when he came home from school in Saginaw, Michigan. Most of Bishop’s originals, with their snaky, reverberant guitar lines and emphatic dumbek grooves, fit right into the covers’ template. Still, this music sounds pretty familiar; an untutored, rock-centric listener would probably listen to this stuff and think of Dick Dale, the Shadows, or Ennio Morricone spaghetti western soundtracks.

No doubt Bishop knows that stuff inside and out, but keep in mind that Dale’s original surname, Monsour, reveals his own Lebanese heritage, and that his breakout hit “Misirlou” is a hot-rodded Eastern Mediterranean melody. Then Google Omar Khorshid, the Egyptian guitarist who stood alongside singer Oum Kalthoum until 1981, and you’ll

hear that Bishop is really staying pretty faithful to the source. Despite the disc’s title, things don’t get freaky until the penultimate tune, “Sidi Mansour,” on which he lets loose some spacy string-scraping. The album closes on its farthest-out note. For “Blood-Stained Sands,” Bishop swaps his guitar for Moroccan double reeds, which he uses to braid bloodcurdling battle cries over the percussionists’ barrage. Bill Meyer

Anthony Braxton Quartet

Standards (Brussels) 2006 Amirani CDx6

Anthony Braxton + Italian Instabile Orchestra Creative Orchestra (Bolzano) 2007 Rai Trade CD

There’s something wonderful about the way Anthony Braxton produces CDs, documenting his work in such detail that it drives him into new territory. These two encounters with Italian musicians provide contrasting views of Braxton’s diverse international practice, one a casual stand in a club playing standards with an unfamiliar rhythm section, the other a festival concert of his own orchestral music played by Italy’s most established improvisers.

While some would be content to cull a single CD from a four-day stand with a new rhythm section, Amirani has released a six-CD set of Braxton’s Brussels meeting with pianist Alessandro Giachero, bassist Antonio Borghini, and drummer Cristiano Calcagnite.

They may not be well-known now, but that may soon change; they play lyrical post-bop jazz in the strong national tradition of Pieranunzi, Battaglia and Bollani. The repertoire ranges broadly through standards, that category expanding to include fairly rare songs (there’s a beautiful treatment of “Alice in Wonderland” from the 1951 Disney film), as well as canonical tunes from modern jazz. There aren’t a host of versions of John Carisi’s “Israel,” Eric Dolphy’s “Out to Lunch” and George Russell’s “Ezz-thetic,” but they’re pieces Braxton manages to engage with on both their terms and his own. Playing Paul Desmond’s delicate bossa nova “Embarcadero,” Braxton interrupts the recapitulation of the theme to insert a manic group improvisation. There are occasional lapses in execution (the head of Wayne Shorter’s “Night Dreamer” is hesitant and out of tune), but Braxton seems more interested in exploring changes and the chance for dialogue than in creating “finished” versions, and it’s that enthusiasm for the new that makes this encounter vital. Many of the pieces get extended treatments, moving through a variety of dimensions. Charles Lloyd’s “Forest Flower” is a lyrical effusion that stretches to nearly 20 minutes; it’s a particularly good vehicle for the ensemble, with Giachero moving from flowing, song-like lines to moments of intense repetition. Few musicians still find ways to engage with this material creatively, and it’s fascinating to hear someone as adventurous as Braxton working with it.

The Italian Instabile Orchestra assembles the cream of Italian free improvisers and presents them in the form of a slightly augmented, traditional big

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Craig Taborn, Lotte Anker and Gerald Cleaver

Lotte Anker Craig Taborn Gerald Cleaver Live at the Loft ILK CD

Gerald Cleaver William Parker Craig Taborn Farmers by Nature AUM Fidelity CD

On Live at the Loft, Danish saxophonist Lotte Anker joins two Americans, pianist Craig Taborn and drummer Gerald Cleaver, on a gig recorded in Cologne in 2005. The three long-form improvisations demonstrate their impressive capacity to combine spontaneity with an ear for structure and motivic coherence. For example, “Magic Carpet” is unified by the pensive interval of a minor third. Anker’s sustained keening unfolds into repeated iambic

gestures, under which Taborn slips misterioso diminished harmonies. Anker casts a progressively wider net, her angular lines picking up pace until, spurred

by Cleaver’s increasingly overt presence at the kit, they build to a blurting fortissimo. After this rapturous climax, each player takes a solo, creating a whorl of intricate subsections. But the piece’s initial angst, and its structuring around the minor third, are never entirely forgotten: the motive remains an idée fixe behind these post-tonal proceedings. “Real Solid” isn’t conventional jazz in its outlines, but it certainly has a bluesy cast. Anker’s tenor is less penetrating here, darting through artful filigrees, deliberately blurring arpeggios, bending thirds. While still keeping the harmony outwards-bound, Taborn imparts a tart postbop flavor to his playing, while Cleaver takes conventionally swinging fills and throws them just off-center. At eight minutes, “Berber” is the most concise track, but it takes some intriguing twists and turns, moving from ad lib expressionism to a balladlike passage—a lush piano-sax duo ruptured by a sudden scalar flurry from Taborn. Once again, the trio keeps a wary distance from inside-the-pocket jazz: each neoromantic gesture is countered by avant-jazz barbs, creating a music that’s piquant, fluid and marvelously wrought.

On Farmers by Nature, a live date recorded in 2008 at the Stone in New York, Cleaver and Taborn

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are joined by bassist William Parker, but they don’t function like your ordinary piano trio. This is an egalitarian collaboration, allowing all three instrumentalists to have their turn at center stage. Often the music focuses on textural exploration, such as the short, meditative “Korteh Khah” or the lengthy “Cranes.”

The latter is a standout: it’s introduced by Parker’s swaths of arco repetitions; Cleaver then matches Taborn’s upper-register lines with a shimmering cascade of bells. Eventually things start to sound less like contemporary chamber music and more like traditional jazz. Taborn’s sharply articulated, thickly stacked chords reestablish a sense of swing, prompting Parker to put down his bow and attack a buoyant walking line with gusto. But a coda returns to avant-garde mysticism: bowed bass harmonics, skittering piano lines, and gentle percussion. “Fieda Mytlie” opens with an extended cadenza from Parker, whose bass takes on multiple, simultaneous roles—percussion, melody, and bass-line—before Cleaver joins him for a supple, polyrhythmic duet. When Taborn enters, his contributions ride this headily intricate groove, building in terraced fashion: melody lines, then bass riffs dovetailing with Parker, then zesty postbop chord progressions. The trio works up to a thrilling climax.

All told, it’s an astounding performance; dare we hope for a follow-up in the recording studio?

Christian Carey

band—brass, winds, a rhythm section with two drummers, and a violin and a cello as a kind of mini-string section.

There’s no question that Braxton’s presence and his music can galvanize an ensemble into dynamic creativity, as evidenced by numerous recordings with university- or community-based orchestras. Sometimes, though, there’s no need for it—they’re already creative—and this is one of them. The results are akin to such Braxton landmarks as Creative Orchestra (Köln) 1978 or his meeting with the London Jazz Composers Orchestra. The Instabile is a genuinely great big band, crowded with strong musical personalities. The reed section alone has Gianluigi Trovesi, Daniele Cavallanti, Eugenio Colombo and Carlo Actis Dato (the performance is dedicated to the late Mario Schiano, originally the fifth member of the section). Each brings a highly developed personal voice, a developed timbre and sense of line that ensures the music belongs as much to them as to the composer. It’s true for other players as well, whether it’s trumpeter Pino Minafra, trombonist Giancarlo Schiaffini or cellist Paolo Damiani. The orchestra presents a series of Braxton’s older pieces, going back to “No. 59” from Creative Orchestra Music 1976, a slow-moving piece that’s at once brooding and luminous.

The sequence is unusual: the orchestra moves back and forth between pieces rather than superimposing them in what is now Braxton’s usual manner.

Thus the densely boppish “Composition No. 92 part 1” is followed by the omni-directional “No. 164 part 1,” then back to “No. 92” for the second part and so on. It’s another fascinating Braxton variation on the expected order of things, and it conjoins with the rich sounds and personalities of the Instabile to create a great performance.

Stuart Broomer

Magnus Broo Paal Nilssen-Love Game

PNL Records CD

Dynamic and varied, drummer Paal Nilssen-Love is well suited to the duo format. He must like it, too, because in addition to horn-and-him encounters with Joe McPhee, Peter Brötzmann, Ken Vandermark, John Butcher, and Mats Gustafsson on various labels, he’s devoted his own imprint to duets. On the first two releases, with organist Nils Henrik Alsheim and electronician Lasse Marhaug, he faced down blizzards of noise and mountains of sound, but the third brings him back to a very specific point on the free jazz continuum. If you’ve heard the group Atomic then you know that trumpeter Magnus Broo, his partner on Game, is a versatile and eloquent stylist. But here, the brassman restricts himself to a cracked, crackly zone mapped out by Don Cherry. It’s a gutsy move; even when he dueted with Ed Blackwell on Mu and El Corazón, Cherry never so limited himself. It falls to Nilssen-Love to keep 51 minutes of coarsely drawn, vaguely Iberian lines from going flat, and he pulls it off by varying his own attack. On “Stomping,” he describes elaborate figures with mallets on toms; on “Cut Loose,” a surge of snare and dissenting hi-hat move the earth beneath Broo; and on “CodA,” Nilssen-Love spins dancing figures around Broo’s clarion call. This is

concentrated music, with nary a wasted sound. Bill Meyer

Collective 4tet In Transition Leo CD

The Collective 4tet is a rarity in free jazz: an international group that has managed to stay together for over 15 years, recording five well-received CDs along the way. Their roots go back to pianist Mark Hennen and trombonist Jeff Hoyer’s studies with Cecil Taylor, Bill Dixon, Milford Graves, and Alan Silva as well as their participation in New York loft sessions with William Parker during the ’70s. The three hooked up with Swiss percussionist Heinz Geisser when he was living in New York in the early ’90s. When Hoyer died in 2006, it seemed like the end of a fruitful collaboration. Geisser, Parker, and Hennen encountered trumpeter Arthur Brooks, who himself had worked with Dixon, including a long residency at Bennington College in the early ’80s, at a memorial for Hoyer, and things clicked. While it’s easy to trace this group’s provenance back to their early studies, their strength is in how they meld propulsive angularity with structured collective interplay.

Over the course of three extended improvisations, the four players assertively display their aptitude for astute listening and thoughtful interaction. Geisser’s fluid sense of time and light touch complement Parker’s muscular free pulse, while Hennen plays off of them with percussive splashes that spill energetically across the keyboard. In Transition is a fitting title for this release, as Brooks finds his way into the group. Like Hoyer, he never simply plays the role of lead horn against the rhythm section.

His understated playing eschews the usual blasts and blats; instead, he mines the shaded middle range of his horn to float burred tones and haunting lines through the churning collective. This release is a worthy homage to Hoyer and marks a new chapter in this unit's history. Michael Rosenstein

Marilyn Crispell Collaborations Leo CD

Pianist Marilyn Crispell’s latest is a superlative document of two visits (in 2004 and 2007) to Västerås, Sweden.

On the earlier date, she played in a muscular quartet alongside reedist Fredrik Ljungkvist, bassist Palle Danielsson, and drummer Paal Nilssen-Love.

It’s bracing music they make, with lovely pert chromaticism from Ljungkvist, an engaging tripping and falling effect from Danielsson, and superb work from the leader. The combination of restraint, imagination, and power that’s characterized Crispell’s recent work is abundant here, her lyrical bent emerging as a kind of Bley-without-the-enigma style rather than the melancholy that surfaces on her other recordings. She can still bring the heat: Nilssen-Love stokes things throughout (at times channeling his inner Lovens), and there’s a ridiculously intense duet with Ljungkvist on the opening number. They move from richly textural sections, where the music swirls with an effervescence and emotionality beyond genre, to probing, intervallic post-bop. One of the best moments, though, comes after a lengthy bass solo, where Danielsson’s

beautiful double-stopping cues up his composition “Aros,” which receives a lush, sensitive reading.

Three years later, Crispell met up with Nilssen-Love once more, and made it a quintet with bassist Per Zanussi, altoist Lars-Göran Ulander, and the magnificent Magnus Broo on trumpet. The results are brasher, less graceful than the quartet music. But this group’s energies are compelling in different ways, specifically in the frequent workouts involving Crispell and Broo (most notably “Quintet Collaboration 2”). It’s pretty slamming throughout, which is no surprise given this personnel; Ulander is a compelling voice, bringing together a gruff Roscoe Mitchell influence and Jackie Mac sweet-and-sour. An absorbing record, one of Crispell’s strongest in recent memory. Jason Bivins

Jason Crumer Walk With Me

Misanthropic Agenda CD

Oakland, CA’s Jason Crumer is a noise ninja, whose compositions sneak up on you, then pounce. One minute, you’re pressing play and waiting for some scrap of sound to float into aural view.

Your attention wanders a bit, and then you realize that Crumer’s electronic rig is kicking your poor cerebellum about like a two-toned Hacky Sack. Relative to the lack of structural logic guiding his other projects—most notably the unfortunately named Facedowninshit— his approach to solo ventures has been almost writing-on-a-grain-of-rice fastidious. Crumer doesn’t shower the underground with oodles of sloppy, poorly mastered CD-Rs; he patiently perfects masterpieces. From What Is Love’s bulldozer yin/psychic-torment yang to Hum of an Imagined Environment’s massaging pressure-scour rinses to Ottoman Black’s cracked peanutbrittle doom, Crumer has more than proven himself an ear-grabbing artisan.

Walk with Me ups the ante, dealing discernable instrumentation and loops into the mix. “Perfect Comfort” begins with what sounds like the soft ppptpppt-pppt of an army of lawn sprinklers, releasing precise jets of water at regular intervals. Soon enough, though, those squirts take on a blurred, distorted cast—it’s as if we focused in too closely on a color snapshot, and the image collapsed into meaninglessness—and a treated clamor of struck-gong clangs takes charge and leads us over the edge. Baroque “Luscious Voluptuous Pregnant” bobs and dips along according to some underlying oceanic logic, dark piano chords heaving, fading, and multiplying endlessly (and eventually) in string-section reverb shallows and jagged, distorted fissures. Elsewhere, “Pining” suggests a dying star collapsing in perpetuity, or a fearsome fireworks display stuck in visual repeat: a formidable complement of horn blats piping in concert and in competition, slowly drawn down into a canyon of the damned that quickly reveals itself as the mouth of an especially aggrieved volcano. Raymond Cummings

Dave Douglas & Brass Ecstasy Spirit Moves Greenleaf CD

Trumpeter Dave Douglas captures the spirit and history of brass ensembles

with Brass Ecstasy, a quintet that features Luis Bonilla on trombone, Vincent Chancey on French horn, Marcus Rojas on tuba, and Nasheet Waits on drums.

The breadth of his vision is apparent from the opener, Rufus Wainwright’s “This Love Affair,” which sounds here like a New Orleans dirge that’s further highlighted by Douglas’s remarkable ability to invoke Louis Armstrong with just a few flourishes. Other trumpet greats receive more direct homage, with Douglas crafting a series of pieces that invoke characteristic moods of Lester Bowie (in particular, the blend of R&B rhythms, free improv and sudden changes in mood), Enrico Rava (Romantic lyricism and dense harmonies), and Fats Navarro (“Fats” is a relative of Tadd Dameron’s numerous bop themes that featured Navarro in their original recordings). There’s also a nod to Dizzy Gillespie in the cadenza to the gospel-tinged “Great Awakening,” otherwise notable for Bonilla’s ability to combine precision with his instrument’s characteristic bluster. The qualities of the ensemble are evident throughout, including the improvised counterpoint of “Orujo,” and each member has fine individual moments—Rojas is spectacular and Chancey subtly brilliant when they emerge briefly from the ensemble, and Waits keeps everything moving.

Hank Williams’ “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” is a marvel of harmonic subtlety and emotional nuance. It’s a fitting conclusion to a distinctive take on American music and the brass band tradition, Douglas creating work that’s both meaningful and accessible.

Stuart Broomer

DRMWPN

Bright Blue Galilee HBSP-2X LP

At various times over the past five years, a loose group of Chicago musicians has gathered around a pulsing lamp. Calling themselves DRMWPN (pronounced “dream weapon”), they improvise a long piece based on a single chord. If you can call what they do a song, then it’s the same song every time, but it never sounds the same. DRMWPN’s live performances are hypnotic and even transcendent, but what is an ephemeral group like this supposed to do when it’s time to put out a record? The musicians (including former members of Town and Country) have apparently been mulling over that conundrum for several years, continuing to do live shows but declining to commit their work to anything more than private concert recordings. Now, DRMWPN finally has an album, but like the group itself, the record is a shadowy entity that’s already proving hard to locate. British label Apollolaan put out just 50 copies of it as a CDR with hand-painted sleeves, while Chicago label HBSP-2X has pressed a vinyl edition of 200. But it’s well worth seeking out. Bright Blue Galilee is an excellent recording of the 36-minute performance DRMWPN gave at Chicago’s Empty Bottle on June 29, 2007, as part of the Fugue State Festival.

For this show, the lineup was Michael Zerang, Adam Vida, Josh Abrams, Liz Payne, Ben Vida, Mahjabeen, Dan Mohr, Sam Wagster, Steve Krakow and Jim Dorling, playing an array of rock, jazz, classical and ethnic instruments in a beautiful, droning jam session that echoes the more abstract side of art

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Savage Energy: Jeffrey HaydenNoise, Shurdut Michael Ray and Marshall Allen Mark Andrushko, AKA Delicate left,with and Robin Storey

Delicate Noise Filmezza Lens CD

The Division Mantras Lens CD

Rapoon

Dark Rivers Lens CD

Robert Scott Thompson Poesis Athesis

Storey: Agnieszka Tracz (alternation.eu)

Davis: Pete Gershon

Lens CD

Chicago-based label Lens Records, like many independent upstarts in what can only be phrased as these “post-electronica” times (when even the idea of fomenting, maintaining and surviving as a hard CD experimental label may be branded as something of a fool’s gesture) has managed to stake out a nice little corner of the universe for itself, mostly by trucking in good old-fashioned diversity. Lens’ artists seem poised to provide the ballast necessary for such a worthy endeavor to remain alive and kicking; on evidence of these four recent releases, there’s enough ideation in the label’s template to keep even the most jaded ears abuzz.

Stirring the stylistic pot, as it were, is fellow Chicagoan independent actor and musician Mark Andrushko, better known to the market at large as Delicate Noise, who no doubt takes his moniker and influences to heart. Filmezza finds him melding many near recognizable elements of electronica glories past and present into a veritable soupçon of atavistic delight. Seventeen tracks throw so much at you that Filmezza sprints across the aural canals almost too fast for your internal processors to catch up. This music has the right to children, literally—Andrushko takes fey Boards of Canada pastoralisms and sets them on edge, lilting lazy autumnal beat structures under sun-dappled electronics one moment (“Butterfly Envy”) before burying them in more

urban blight the next (“Cardiacfelt”). Industrial drum clatter collides with more Manual-like summertime ambience; a sinister undercurrent hints at a Blue Velvet-enshrouded suburbia that keeps the sounds from getting too comfy. Like joyfully messing about the attic after thirty years of clutter has gathered, there’s much here to rummage about in, the kind of disc the repeat button was invented for.

Founding member of industrial outfit Lab Report, horror film soundtracker and occasional Pigface member Matthew Schultz now operates as The Division, ditching the proto-EBM/Ministry-aggro stance of his previous work for an exercise in tense incantatory music. What gives Mantras its extra-special zing is Schultz’s contemporary-wrought sound design (no industrial dance clichés doing their metronomic thang here) that manages to incorporate everything from Psychic TV-like gesticulations and magick-cult phenomena to the techno-tribalisms of gents like Steve Roach or Vidna Obmana. That Schultz also recognizes the measure of Indo-fusion dramatis personae such as Cheb I Sabbah, Talvin Singh and Bill Laswell further contributes to Mantras’ throbbing cred. Mind you, someone well-versed in the above artist’s work won’t have their foundations shaken by Schultz’s take on the subject, but that doesn’t mean they won’t be at least well-stirred. There’s enough preening choirs, thwacking Asian percussions, crashed cymbals, meditative drone technique and buckets of Coil-esque black electronics to keep even the most jaded hipster happy. Better still, Schultz doesn’t give the impression he’s reinventing the wheel here, just working a deep-veined occultist’s mojo for every shamanistic drop it’s worth. Genre music, plain and simple, but unearthed well enough one can snort the incense burning from his studio’s mortar and pestle.

When not busy with his post-Zoviet France project Reformed Faction, Robin Storey finds the time to export additional bidimensional missives from the psyche as the ever-morphing Rapoon. Eclectic in the extreme, never content with glib reiterations of what has long been a dense, regenerative, percussive enterprise, Storey’s Rapoon works seem to only get more and more thematically rich with each successive volume. Inspired by the hauntological environs

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of a particularly remote area of Northern England where he was raised, Storey has realized within the liquid looped aquifers of Dark Rivers one of his spookiest, most disquieting works to date. Where many might take the well-trodden path—usually some ultra-minimal ambient drone pastiche supersoaked in reverb—Storey mirrors the aberrant history and mystery of his “homelands” in spectacular, if subtle, fashion.

Gone are the mutant faux African/Middle Eastern/Arabic labyrinthine loops of works like Raising Earthly Spirits; Storey’s on a different mission here, capturing in aural photograph— using half-glimpsed beat structures, billowing ancestral winds, séance-conjured voices, and rippling, strangely distorted electronics—the twilight zone veneer shadowing his hallucinogenic stomping grounds. Eerie, as on a darkling plain, Dark Rivers is a majestic, uncompromising, under-your-skin sonic fiction utterly arresting in its picturesque ambience.

Robert Scott Thompson is versatile enough to embrace everything from fragile atmospherica to computer-based electroacoustic music, which goes some way to explain how those styles are effortlessly blended into the abject wonder of Poesis Athesis. Created to accompany a series of videos choreographing the Chi Kung exercises of Terrence Dunn, the thirteen pieces here manage to synthesize Kitaro’s inner sanctum musings, David Parson’s rugged Tibetan ethnic pulses, and the sacred space musics of Michael Stearns into one blissfully mesmeric whole. Fear not—Thompson’s too fine an aesthete to offer merely another new age woof in cheap clothing: while this is no doubt a music of unashamed luminescence and discreet charm, Poesis Athesis proves that attractive instrumental agility can coexist within meditative realms. Within the near 11 minutes of “Mystic Pearl,” Thompson permits the total arsenal of his collective strengths to blossom: mournful strings, lightly-dappled tablas, Budd-ing pianos, and the pitterpatter of regal synthesizers effect a sort of spiritualized chamber music that’s completely at ease in its enveloping serenity. Perhaps at odds with its colleagues, but as the unpretentious nature of Poesis Athesis unfolds, its distinctive elements nevertheless sharpen thanks to the wide angle Lens of its imprint. Darren Bergstein

rock as well as minimalist composers, free jazz and Eastern mystical music.

The interplay among the instruments is subtle and intricate. Bright Blue Galilee feels like a living, breathing creature, or maybe a brain passing through the nightly phases of the sleep cycle: meditative lulls that slowly shift into more intense, rapid-eye movements, and then back again—humming, tingling, jangling, shimmering and rumbling as it goes. At moments, the music seems to be staying in one place, hovering over a constant tone, but then before you know it, it’s flown off to a new altitude.

Even without the rotating light that DRMWPN uses at its concerts to create a trippy ambience, the music transports the mind. Robert Loerzel

Ata Ebtekar & the Iranian Orchestra for New Music Ornamental Isounderscore LPx2

This double LP ostensibly features the Iranian Orchestra for New Music performing works by Alireza Mashayekhi, a native of Tehran who pursued his musical education in Vienna and Utrecht. But what it actually contains are recordings of Mashayekhi pieces conducted by Ata Ebtekar, which Ebtekar later reworked using electronics.

Ebtekar pushes all the orchestral sounds way back in the mix, foregrounding his manipulations at the expense of the instrumentalists. Don’t get me wrong: I love electronics. But when you see a list of 82 instrumentalists, and half are playing traditional instruments like santur, tar, setar, tombal, dat, etc., you’d like to be able to hear those instruments and how they are being used. Alas. The artistic misrepresentation wouldn’t matter if the music itself was spectacular and engaging, but the results sound like outtakes from any of the middling computermusic releases WERGO put out in the 1980s. Wiggling a pitch bend wheel is not interesting anymore (if it ever was); the fact that Ebtekar insists on using it to obscure the workings of the orchestra under his leadership is simply frustrating: I’d like to hear the band, please.

Only during the side-length “Meta XY” does Ebtekar’s heavy-handed “synthesis” succeed, and that’s because he finally pushes the electronics and himself into the background, making space for the strings to waft in, thicken and dissipate. Lovely, finally.

Andrew Choate

Elfin Saddle

Ringing for the Begin Again Constellation CD

Ringing for the Begin Again is the second disc from this transplanted Montreal duo of Jordan McKenzie and Emi Honda, who originally met on Vancouver Island. Though the pair has moved to the urban maelstrom of the big city, the rain-soaked boreal forests and mountainous landscapes of Canada’s West Coast continue to fascinate these multi-media artists, whose music is only part of their growing body of visual art, installations and video art. At heart, these partners in life are awed by the magic and enchantment of nature, particularly the natural seasonal cycle of growth, decay, death and regeneration.

Musically, the themes of this song cycle are manifested in their use of folk music forms (waltzes, ballads, musicbox marches), acoustic instrumentation (ukulele, accordion, banjo, guitar and xylophones, singing saws), and lyrical tropes that have clearly been influenced by ’60s U.K. free folkers like the Incredible String Band. It’s like a more demented version of Pentangle, but shot through with ’90s orch-pop, traditional Japanese folk music, Tom Waits’ scrapyard aesthetic, post-rock and drones. This is made all the more delightful by Honda’s sweet vocals, sung in her native Japanese, and McKenzie’s rich, nasal tone. The music’s wistfulness and whimsy could have easily derailed into quaintness, but for all the charming merriment of the melodies and harmonies, they are balanced by an autumnal melancholia. While this may be a backhanded compliment, this is a record to which fans of The Decemberists could really take a shine.

Richard Moule

The Field

Yesterday and Today Anti/Kompakt CD

Alex Willner, who records as The Field, achieved remarkable success with his 2007 release From Here We Go Sublime, winning critical plaudits and the admiration of fellow artists. So much so, that he’s become a remixer to the stars, treating tracks by the likes of Thom Yorke and Battles. Yesterday and Today, his followup album, brings to bear a gradually evolving aesthetic, involving incremental shifts of texture, timbre, and, in some cases, beat pattern. The title track features a guest appearance by Battles drummer John Stanier, playing ear-catching but wellintegrated rhythms behind the ambient IDM soundscape. But whether the drums are live or programmed (as on the appropriately titled “Sequenced”), their thrumming pulsations are counterpointed by supple, subtle shifts. On the trancelike “I Have the Moon, You Have the Internet” Willner seems particularly fascinated with changes of register in pitched and unpitched percussion, gradually retuning repeated notes to create swaths of glissandi. Bell sounds are a frequent presence, but take on a particularly prominent, and quite lovely, role in the extended piece “Leave It.” Vocals are featured on the suavely appointed “Everybody’s Got to Learn Sometime,” but only as one element in a mélange of forces; once again, the closing moments incorporate an insistent tolling. While “The More That I Do” features subwoofer-worthy bass thumps and dance music loops, it’s not your ordinary club fare. Rife with subtly shifting keyboard lines, the track demonstrates The Field’s uncanny ability to juxtapose everyday pop music tropes with unexpected additions. The results, more often than not, are fascinating.

Christian Carey

Flow Trio

Rejuvenation ESP-Disk' CD

Old Dog

By Any Other Name Porter CD

Tenor player Louie Belogenis has been a part of the Downtown NY scene for

the past two decades, most prominently exploring the tradition of Coltrane and Ayler in the band Prima Materia alongside drummer Rashied Ali. Readers may know drummer Charles Downs as Rashid Bakr, the name he used over the last three decades when he played with musicians like Cecil Taylor and Jemeel Moondoc, and as part of the group Other Dimensions in Music. And whether on guitar, or more recently on bass (his instrument on this date), Joe Morris has become an integral part of the free jazz scene. Their trio set starts out with a quiet solo incantation by Belogenis, followed by six collective improvisations. Throughout, Belogenis, Morris, and Downs delve deep into the tradition with a muscular grace that only comes from years of experience. Many players never get past blast and bluster, but these three know how to build tension across the arc of their improvisations. The saxophonist’s plangent tone and unhurried phrasing meld with Morris’s propulsive flow and rooted sense of pulse and Downs’ limber free swing.

The pieces are concise statements that celebrate the rejuvenated ESP label and the vital tradition it embodies.

Belogenis is also a member of Old Dog, another group steeped in free jazz tradition. He is joined here by Karl Berger on vibes and piano, bassist Michael Bisio, and drummer Warren Smith, veterans who understand the dynamics of ensemble playing even as they push toward freedom. Berger’s been at this since the early ’60s as a member of the European free scene and at the helm of the Creative Music Studio in Woodstock in the ’70s. Smith has been honing his orchestral approach to the drums in both large and small ensembles since the late ’50s.

Oddly, Bisio, the youngest member of the group, has probably had a higher profile lately due to his extensive recordings as a leader and with musicians like Joe McPhee and Joe Giardullo.

These nine pieces chart the intersection of freedom and keening melodicism.

Bisio penned half the tunes, creating free-bop heads that the group navigates with sprightly energy. These are balanced by collective pieces that open up structures for compact ensemble explorations. Belogenis’s tenor is crucial to the session, and Berger’s vibes deliver quicksilver thematic extensions and percussive drive. Bisio’s rich tone and lyrical freedom are in evidence throughout, and Smith’s lithe contributions buoy the entire group. These four may be old dogs, but their playing is still fresh and vibrant. Michael Rosenstein

Flower-Corsano Duo The Four Aims VHF CD

When the Flower-Corsano Duo’s The Radiant Mirror was released in 2007, it seemed like the superhero team-up of a psych-improv fanboy’s dreams: uniting Michael Flower, veteran of two of Britain’s heaviest outsider noise troupes, Vibracathedral Orchestra and Sunroof!, with Chris Corsano, the American drummer who graduated from free-folk jams with Sunburned Hand of the Man to scalding fire music alongside maverick saxophonist Paul Flaherty. The CD lived up to its potential, delivering three improvisations of virtuosic blissed-out abandon that matched Corsano’s intense free-form percussion

with Flower’s amplified shahi baaja, or Japan banjo—a stringed instrument (actually Indian) that’s somewhere between a lap steel guitar and a sitar.

Their second release picks up where that debut left off, its opening track “I, Brute Force?” diving right into their signature sound, as Flower’s massively overdriven explorations of hypnotically simple three- or four-note clusters lock into Corsano’s ferociously fast rolls, tumbles, swells and explosions. If anything, the duo’s gotten even tighter and more telepathic, so that they rise and fall, swerve and swoop as one.

But this time around, there’s more than just explosiveness on offer; other tracks reveal an expanded palette and new ways of interacting. “The Drifter’s Miracle” mixes Flower’s tanpura with Corsano’s cello for a deep Eastern/ Celtic drone; while on “The Beginning of the End” Corsano’s melodica sounds like an ancient accordion trapped in the banjo’s heat-haze. But it’s the closing free-raga-rock meltdown, “The Main Ingredient,” that leaves the biggest impression, positioning the listener at the eye of a heavenly storm where intense activity becomes absolute calm. These are some of the most thrilling—and genuinely psychedelic—sounds being made today. Daniel Spicer

Fridge

Early Output 1996-1998 Temporary Residence CD

Kieran Hebden, Adem Ilhan, and Sam Jeffers were teenagers when they signed to Trevor Jackson’s Output Recordings, but judging by this collection of highlights, singles and outtakes from their three years with Output, if their technique was still rough around the edges, the trio’s creativity and musical chemistry proved abundant from the start. Fridge’s first single, “Lojen,” is a real diamond in the rough.

Jeffers’ off-kilter, skittering patterns seem quasi-improvised yet simultaneously organic, intrinsic to the arrangement; meanwhile, Adem lays down a robot-funk bass line. The bass-drums groove on “Anglepoised” is heady stuff too: a bedrock of post-rock over which Hebden layers swaths of playfully exploratory, ebbing and swelling synth chords. “Swerve and Spin” is a “take no prisoners” space rock anthem, with propulsive rhythms and a juggernaut riff. “Astrozero” contains a wonderful counterpoint between ostinato guitar filigrees from Hebden and strummed bass chords from Adem, while Jeffers sets up a powerful rolling groove in the background. “A Slow” creates a more relaxed, slowly evolving ambience, but it still presents some intriguing metric swerves and a multifaceted thematic scheme. Lest one think that this release is a rehash of 1998’s Sevens and Twelves collection, the CD includes cuts from the early LPs as well as a previously unreleased song and several fragments.

Many of these “new” tracks are snippets under a minute in length; but they prove to be fascinating bagatelles of sonic inquiry. The one full-length cut, “Triumphant Homecoming,” more than compensates for the others’ brevity: it’s a richly varied arrangement, veering close to IDM in places only to confuse the rhythm with quick changes of pacing and overlaid synth polyphony.

Would that all trips down memory lane were so pleasant! Christian Carey

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Rob Mazurek

Rob Mazurek Sound Is Delmark CD

Corey Wilkes & Abstrakt Pulse Cries from tha Ghetto Pi Recordings CD

Paul Giallorenzo Get In To Go Out 482 Music CD

Chicago is probably best known in the jazz world as a producer of saxophonists like Johnny Griffin, Von Freeman, and John Gilmore. It’s less well-publicized as a hotbed of activity in the brass realm, though it’s bred trumpeters like Art Hoyle and Ira Sullivan (also a saxophonist), and hosted the AACM’s Wadada Leo Smith and Lester Bowie. In recent years, players like Rob Mazurek, Corey Wilkes and Josh Berman have made a strong mark, and all have worked together in Mazurek’s Exploding Star Orchestra.

Three new discs provide a window into the evolution of these improvising composers, each offering a different angle on creative music in the Windy City.

Rob Mazurek’s artistic imprint comes from diverse sources. He’s a painter, photographer and sound-artist who has worked in Brazil and

France and studied with Bill Dixon and Luc Ferrari. Emerging in the Chicago scene in the 1990s, Mazurek has straddled the line between free-bop and gauzy atmospherics with bands like the Chicago Underground and Isotope 217.

Sound Is joins the trumpeter with vibraphonist Jason Adasiewicz, bassists Josh Abrams and Matt Lux, and drummer John Herndon, on a suite of fourteen original compositions. Mazurek orchestrates this quintet brilliantly, cresting the rhythm section’s waves with fleet, Freddie Hubbard-like runs and rounded, delicate skitter.

He deftly walks around in these layered rhythmic sketches, sometimes becoming ensconced in the field, elsewhere gamely projecting himself in front of the ensemble. Bells and a relaxed pianobass lope provide backing for guttural Dixonesque howls on “The Star Splitter,” while on “Le Baiser” the solemn background pulse provides a canvas for muted, half-buried wisps. Mazurek is an atmospheric artist, and it’s in the music’s cloudiest, sparsest moments that his presence is most keenly felt.

Corey Wilkes is a member of the AACM who has done notable sideman work with Roscoe Mitchell and Kahil El’Zabar, as well as taking the trumpet chair in the Art Ensemble of Chicago after Lester Bowie’s passing. On Cries from tha Ghetto, his second date as a leader, he leads a group that includes tenorman Kevin Nabors, guitarist Scott Hesse, drummer Isaiah Spencer, bassist Junius Paul and—the album’s biggest surprise—tap dancer Juumane Taylor. Wilkes is a less sardonic player than Bowie, developing

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a post-bop language out of crackling, brittle shards. On “Levitation,” his raw, speedball bravura and rhythmic acuity draw the group forward, even as the rhythm section maintains a hovering distance. Wilkes has chosen his mates well: Nabors is an edgy, hungry player with a gravelly sound not unlike Joe Henderson or Ernest Dawkins, while Hesse’s fleet reservation and Taylor’s sharp percussive sallies balance the front line’s steely projection and swagger.

Cornetist Josh Berman has yet to record under his own name, though he’s been a fixture in the Chicago vanguard for the better part of a decade. On Get In to Go Out, Berman is an integral part of a fiery quintet led by pianist Paul Giallorenzo. The group (which also includes saxophonist Dave Rempis, bassist Anton Hatwich and drummer Tim Daisy) performs nine originals that show the influence of Chicago pianists like Andrew Hill and Muhal Richard Abrams. Giallorenzo’s playing tends toward choppy sonic bricks, cruel behind-the-beat ambiguity and flowery post-bop runs, and he feeds the ensemble a range of choices at every turn. Berman is alternately winsome and robust as he rolls over the pianist’s oddly paced chords and breakneck swing on the kaleidoscopic “Fifth Flow.” The dry backbeat of “Ajemian’s Funk” is particularly Hill-esque, and it elicits some of Berman’s most interesting work, as he picks small motifs apart and bends them to his liking with a stately lilt. Giallorenzo is a compositional voice to watch, and clearly a leader of very high caliber.

Clifford Allen

Joel Futterman

Creation, Volume One self-released CD-R

Joel Futterman Alvin Fielder Ike Levin

Traveling Through Now Charles Lester Music CD

Pianist and soprano saxophonist Joel Futterman’s discography extends back to 1980, when he self-released his first solo album. Originally from Chicago, he came up during the 1960s playing bop, but opened up his music after he began working with members of the AACM. Around 1972 he moved to Virginia, honing his style and releasing albums on his own JDF imprint. These recordings revealed a percussive style marked by sweeping, jagged runs that made little reference to thematic material; the all-over density of his approach seemed rooted in Cecil Taylor’s pianism, an impression reinforced by his musical partnership with Taylor’s long-time alto saxophonist Jimmy Lyons. Over the years, his style has become more personal, mixing in a rich harmonic element that really shines in ballads. It’s all on display on his new solo release, Creation, Volume One. Over three lengthy tracks, Futterman revels in the totality of his instrument. Track one sounds completely improvised, with endless sweeps and barrages up and down the keyboard.

It’s an exhausting performance that leaves the listener both energized and drained. Tracks two and three develop out of the same basic material, an untitled bluesy theme. The second, more expansive version (over 32 minutes) takes a lot of detours, including a five-minute inside-the-piano interlude.

But it’s the third track that—at half that length—seems almost perfect, building in intensity and speed until it cuts off abruptly at just the right moment.

Creation Volume One is a fine solo piano set that whets the appetite for future installments.

On Traveling Through Now, Futterman continues the documentation of his trio with saxophonist Ike Levin and drummer Alvin Fielder. This is their third release since 2004. Fielder was one of the founding members of the AACM and Roscoe Mitchell’s Art Ensemble before he moved to New Orleans and became an integral player in the city’s avant-garde. Levin, also originally from Chicago before moving to San Francisco, has worked with Futterman since around 2000. His tenor has a Rollins-esque swagger to it, but with a late-Coltrane intensity. The trio churns up a fierce tempest here, and while there are solo moments that stand out, it’s the trio interplay that really shines, the players speaking with a single voice despite their fierce independence. The program is broken into ten tracks, but they are really two suites. The first suite (tracks 1–4) is particularly strong: it starts with a flurry of notes from Futterman; Fielder comes in quickly, a dialogue ensues, then Levin enters and the three are off on an extended improvisation that builds through several peaks (including a two-saxophone duet). The suite concludes with the gorgeous “Life’s Whisper,” spotlighting Futterman’s ballad style; Levin eventually enters with smoky tenor and Fielder provides

a subtle brush accompaniment, and the result is perhaps the disc’s high point. This trio has all bases covered and has developed into one of the finest working units in jazz today. Robert Iannapollo

Group Bombino

Guitars from Agadez,Vol. 2 Sublime Frequencies LP

A series of LPs released by the Sublime Frequencies label, of which this is the latest, are showing that Ali Farka Toure and Tinariwen weren’t flukes. It turns out there is a well of guitar-slinging talent in the Sahara, albeit talent operating under such duress that all the guitarists in Agadez, Niger, share their instruments, a couple of amps, and one PA. Ghoumour Oumara Moctar, a.k.a. Bombino, is 28 years old, young enough that one of Tinariwen’s founders could be his dad, and while they’re nowhere near ready to lay the torch down, he sounds pretty eager to pick it up. This record splits nicely, as LPs do, into two sides, one acoustic and the other electric. The electric face of this band will sound pretty familiar to anyone who has been listening for a while to the desert blues sound, for their tunes are close kin to their elders’, as is the massed singing. But the rough recording circumstances and presence of an enthusiastically manned trap drum kit give the music a feeling of something moving too fast to be captured. The acoustic side is nearly as propulsive, but with what sounds like handclaps and a cardboard box for a rhythm section, it sounds more spacious, the better to appreciate Bombino’s stinging, economical guitar leads and urgent singing. Bill Meyer

Jon Hassell

Last Night the Moon Came Dropping Its Clothes in the Street ECM CD

An amalgam of different source material, inspirations and reference points, Jon Hassell’s first recording for a major label in 15 years displays remarkable cohesion. Peter Freeman’s dark, dense bass—redolent of Bill Laswell and Michael Henderson—is a constant thread, rumbling through two- or three-note ostinatos that often provide the only forward motion amid gauzy washes and layered samples.

Although taken from live and studio recordings, the 10 pieces form a seamless whole, with players like violinist Keheir-Eddine M’Kachiche, guitarist Rick Cox and principal sampler Jan Bang sliding in and out.

The CD’s sensuous title comes from the Persian poet Rumi, and Middle Eastern tonalities abound here, particularly on the long, twisting “Abu Gil,” which namechecks Gil Evans, whose son Miles is credited for “atmospherics.” Here and elsewhere, Hassell’s trumpet is processed into a breathy whisper that sounds more like a flute, a dreamy counterpoint to Freeman’s insistent burble. “Northline,” taken from a London performance and cowritten by Freeman, stands somewhat apart, the bass more prominent and Eivind Aarset’s guitar a bright contrast.

Hassell’s Fourth World continues to beckon as a lush sonic refuge, and this collaboration with Manfred

Eicher—Hassell’s first since the mid’80s—sounds particularly rich through headphones. James Hale

Hoots and Roots Life and Death Ayler download

Why make music when it’s not for money? It would be an interesting exercise to invite a selection of individuals making non-commercial music to pin down their motivation. And the Hoots and Roots duo would be a good place to start. Over the years, in various contexts, drummer Ken Hyder and singer Maggie Nicols have made music that has often been shaped and strengthened by non-musical concerns. Since the days when she sang with the legendary Spontaneous Music Ensemble, Nicols has explored what she calls “social virtuosity”— seeking out possibilities for creative interaction within a musical community, without sacrifice of personal distinctiveness. For Nicols, music involves getting together with other people in the hope of working magic.

Hyder has toured and recorded with groups of Tibetan Buddhist monks, and understands deeply their sense of music as spiritual practice. His involvement with the shamanic culture of Tuva directly informs the music he makes in the remarkable improvising trio K-Space. And he recalls that when he collaborated back in 1985 on an entirely instrumental album, Fanfare for Tomorrow, with passionately left-wing Scottish folk musician Dick Gaughan, “each note and gesture was informed by politics. The day we were in the studio was the 25th anniversary of the Sharpeville massacre. We spent half an hour arguing about the politics of that struggle, the event, our attitudes to it and what we wanted to convey. It wouldn’t have been the same without that focus, that concentration and finetuning of energy.”

On Life and Death Hyder and Nicols turn their finely tuned energy to exploring their shared heritage—both of them originally hail from Scotland.

It’s a concern they both touched on years ago in Hyder’s Celtic-jazz group Talisker, but with Hoots and Roots that imaginative plunge into the everyday conscious and unconscious life of their formative years is stripped of all distractions. Each note and gesture carries the accents, preoccupations and flavor of their homeland. Any serious anatomy of national character has to deal with parody and stereotypes, and try to distil what’s real. Tender ballads and whisky-fueled snarling, Gaelic exuberance and Calvinistic nay-saying, workers’ complaints and maudlin lamentation, busybody chitchat, robust humor and music-hall caricature— whatever surfaces out of memory or fantasy is woven into Nicols’s stream of song. Hyder adds his voice when the spirit or his sense of drama moves him. On drums he works with telltale Scottish rhythmic patterns, tilts them off-balance and sends them reeling or refines them into atmospheric texture.

The basic material was recorded at the Guelph Festival in Canada in September 2000. Later Hyder mixed, folded and layered it into a 22-minute improvised montage, as concentrated, nuanced, uplifting and delightful as a fine single malt. “That was so fucking

Scottish!”, Nicols chortles in the hilarity that ends the performance. And Hyder responds, “Where’s your Sigmund Freud now, then?” A rhetorical question: Hoots and Roots meet Eros and Thanatos coming thro’ the glen.

Julian Cowley

Abdullah Ibrahim Senzo

WDR / Sunnyside CD

Curtis Clark

Reach, Believe It & Play Nimbus CD

Bradley Parker-Sparrow The Black Romantic Southport CD

Katharina Weber Woven Time Intakt CD

For any instrumentalist, playing solo is a classic tightrope walk, but with a broader harmonic scope than horns or strings, solo pianists have a slightly easier task. Here are four who’ve stepped into the spotlight alone, achieving their goals with varying degrees of success.

Abdullah Ibrahim’s long and illustrious history took him from his native South Africa to Europe in the early 1960s, where he worked with his trio (featuring bassist Johnny Dyani and drummer Makaya Ntshoko) and was discovered by Duke Ellington, who produced his first Western recording for Reprise in 1963. By the time he moved to America around 1970, he’d become remarkably successful, fusing jazz, music from his native country and avant-garde elements into a unique brew. When apartheid was dismantled he moved back to South Africa, and while his output is not as voluminous as it once was, he makes periodic forays to America and Europe to perform and record. Senzo is a solo set beautifully captured in a German radio studio in April of 2008. It’s a 55-minute medley roaming through his catalog of wonderful compositions, some familiar (“Blues for a Hip King,” “For Coltrane,” “Jubalani”), others of a more recent vintage (“Third Line Samba,” “Blue Bolero”), with Ellington’s “In a Sentimental Mood” thrown in for good measure. He reveals each song slowly, unwrapping it with a series of modulations until all at once a melody surfaces. He toys with it, ornamenting it, improvising on it, gradually moving away from it until another tune emerges. It’s the way he’s been doing these solo sets since the late 1960s, and very much like Thelonious Monk, he tends to perform the same tunes in the same manner while continuing to evolve and mature. He has shorn his playing of the crescendoing tremolos that were characteristic of his music at one time and replaced them with peaceful melodic content. This may be a reflection of his 75 years, but it doesn’t necessarily indicate diminished energy, and his harmonies still feature clashing dissonances and unexpected spiraling runs.

Ibrahim definitely seems to be in a calmer place, though, and that comes through beautifully on this set.

Curtis Clark is an excellent pianist who originally came to New York from the fertile Los Angeles scene at

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the tail end of the loft era, working in the groups of David Murray and Billy Bang. In the 1980s, he moved to Amsterdam and worked with some of that city’s finest; more recently he has resettled in the U.S., and is now based in Portland, Maine. Reach, Believe It & Play is a recent solo recording; all tunes were written by Clark and they demonstrate his style beautifully, a mix of traditional and contemporary approaches recalling Dave Burrell.

The disc’s title could well be Clark’s philosophy of music (maybe life?), and it’s wonderfully illustrated in the cover photograph of Clark as a wee lad.

“Play” seems to be a humorous nod to the photo with its initially faltering attempt at stride piano, while “Everlasting Love” emphasizes Clark’s penchant for rapturous melodies couched in richly textured chords (occasionally obliterated by dissonant clusters and splashes). It’s a well-put together program, showing Clark to be one of the better and more unheralded pianists of his generation.

Bradley Parker-Sparrow is a pianist based in Chicago and one of the co-founders (along with singer Joanie Pallatto) of Southport Records. He also runs a recording studio and has been the engineer on records by the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Fred Anderson, Von Freeman and others. It’s a bit hard to pin him down as a player. On his previous effort We Are Not Machines, he played electronic keyboards and samplers in addition to piano. On The Black Romantic, Parker-Sparrow’s piano is center-stage, and he delivers a set of 16 tracks at the quieter end of the musical spectrum—at times rhapsodic, at times bittersweet. Arpeggiated left-hand figures support wistful melodies, while gauzy pedal points provide a base for fleeting right-hand improvisations. At the midway point, Pallatto shows up to sing “Shows of Wonder,” adding an element of cabaret to the music. But then it’s back to the initial strategy. The problem with this disc is that it’s too much of a piece: apart from the vocal track and a track called “Latin for J.P.,” whose main motif suggests the descending phrase from Juan Tizol’s “Caravan,” the pieces tend to blur together. And at more than 70 minutes, the program goes on too long.

Katharina Weber is a Swiss pianist who comes out of the Western classical tradition; her discography includes recordings of the music of Hans Eisler and the obscure early-20th-century composer Albéric Magnard. But she is obviously a musician willing to cross lines, including work with Fred Frith on his recent release The Big Picture.

A further indication of her willingness to cross musical boundaries is Woven Time, a solo disc of 15 improvisations.

Weber’s classical technique is to the fore and that is not a bad thing. If anything, it’s what sets her apart. Her strength lies in an assured touch, which gets a rich, full sound out of her instrument. Harmonically, a lot of what she does sounds like it’s based in Berg and Schoenberg—dense, dissonant and technically demanding. She engages in some effective inside-the-piano work on “Verstrebungen,” and on “Dialog mit dem Hausgeist” the sound of running water filters through. And while there may be a bit of classical austerity to the proceedings, there’s also a nice

visceral charge to her work as well.

Robert Iannapollo

ICP Orchestra

Live at the Bimhuis ICP CD

Mary Oliver Rozemarie Heggen Oh, Ho! ICP CD

Misha Mengelberg’s contrarian ICP Orchestra was in good form during the May 2008 set preserved on Live at the BimHuis. It’s a microcosm of all the things they do so well, from reimaginings of Monk and Herbie Nichols to free improvisation to quirky genre parodies and pastiches.

Throughout, they play with a charged alertness that makes everything lively and bigger than life. Mengelberg’s arrangement of Monk’s “Jackie-ing” sidles casually up to Monk’s melody with an original theme, then quickly erupts into a tenor solo interrupted by anarchic outbreaks from the band and fractured paraphrases of the tunes.

The playfulness gives way to “MET,” an anguished, almost Alban Berg-like string trio for cellist Tristan Honsinger, violist Mary Oliver, and bassist Ernst Glerum that concludes as an acidly ironic dance—Dutch dyspepsia at its best! A borderline comic improvisation for trombonist Wolter Wierbos, alto saxophonist Michael Moore, and drummer Han Bennink (dropping great clomping bombs on everyone) brightens the proceedings for a few minutes before it expires. Then the band inches back in and they lumber into Mengleberg’s “Jaloers? Ik?,” an elephantine Renaissance dance that gives up after it’s stated and refuses to revive, despite a few efforts in that direction, during the surreal wander of a group improvisation that follows. Ab Baars’ “Misha Pass the Donkey” is a vibrantly orchestrated piece with dissonant clarinet-trombone-cello jostled by occasional incursions from piano and drums; its herky-jerky theme provides a crooked lattice for Wierbos and Honsinger solos. A gentle reading of Nichols’ “Change of Season,” sounding as if a tipsy ballroom orchestra were playing it, closes the set.

Throughout their wonderful duet album Oh, Ho!, ICP’s resident violinistviolist Mary Oliver and bassist Rozemarie Heggen cross back and forth over the line between composition and improvisation in much the same way the orchestra does. There’s a feedback loop between the written and the improvised that lets the one inform the other. Cor Fuhler’s “Douchegordijn” requires different tunings for each instrument and employs a system of cues for different “melody modules.”

The result is a little alien music world, strange but not unfriendly, guided by its own rules and laws. Hilary Jeffery’s “Vishnu Stockings” unfolds slowly and deliberately, using natural harmonics to create floating, almost electronicsounding tones. Michael Moore’s “Perla Oscura, Perla Clare” takes a very different approach, offering tightly constructed melodic material with a folk-song quality. Yannis Kyriakides’ “As They Step Into the Same Rivers” sounds medieval in its stillness, and the duo’s sound has extraordinary depth and purity here. The improvisa-

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tions are just as focused, structured, and individual as the compositions.

“Matti’s Song” is a unified set of variations on an improvised theme, while “Motorboot” is built from finely detailed drones and patterns. It’s this ability to balance and contrast musical elements—remaining disciplined during improvisation and at ease while interpreting compositions—that makes this such a delightful and intelligent album. Ed Hazell

Indigo Trio Anaya

RogueArt CD

The Indigo Trio, featuring flute player Nicole Mitchell, bassist Harrison Bankhead, and drummer Hamid Drake, plays jazz that’s satisfying in the most fundamental way. Mitchell and Bankhead each have a strong, clear sense of melody, and rhythm is to Drake what air is to the rest of humanity. “A Child’s Curiosity” is buoyed by Mitchell’s optimistic lyricism, shaded at times by African or Japanese motifs. On “Sho Ya Right,” she attains a nice liquid flow that breaks up into pebbly staccato phrases for contrast. Bankhead’s ridiculously funky vamps provide the pivot point around which “Anaya with the Sunlight” and “Anaya with the Moon” swirl.

And his unaccompanied “Affirmation of the One” is as deep and affecting as a spiritual. All three are in love with the sounds of their instruments. Mitchell can vacillate between fleecy warmth and bee-sting sharpness, and she sometimes musses her pristine tone by vocalizing as she plays. Bankhead’s dark walnut sound has cello-like mellowness at times (indeed, he also plays cello on a few tracks). Drake’s toms and bass drum sound like distant thunder and his cymbals throw off multicolored, prismatic patterns. They embrace the core paradox of jazz improvisation: the more specific and disciplined the playing, the more free and fluid it becomes.

“A Child’s Curiosity” moves through different tempos effortlessly, and “Wheatgrass” unleashes a vital energy that pushes the music to the edge of free pulse then snaps into a killer swinging groove. You never know where the music may be going, but Indigo Trio always makes you think it’s right where it should be. Ed Hazell

Glenn Jones

Barbecue Bob in Fishtown Strange Attractors CD / LP / download

You know you’re doing something right when you earn a backlash. The steelstring guitar revival has gone far enough to draw a chorus of detractors bagging on certain participants for fleecing Fahey and borrowing too much from Basho; the haters’ real complaint, I suppose, is that there’s too much of the stuff around and it’s not so special anymore. Barbecue Bob in Fishtown is the kind of record they might knock, and if they do, shame on them. Glenn Jones’ nigh-on-half-century spent steeping himself in acoustic guitar lore gleams as bright as dimes at the bottom of a fountain pool on a sunny day, only much richer. He not only knows the Takoma crew, he knows about what their inspirations knew, and he’s an elder amongst the disciples. He’s also an expressive player, a splendid composer, just the sort of artist to keep this music alive

after fashion and fancy pass it by—and he’ll do it by making records like this, ones that touch the soul as well as the ears. His picking on six- and ten-string guitar (the latter is a twelve-string with the two top positions single- rather than double-strung) is sure and graceful, his banjo plucking—heard here for the first time—full of promise and mystery. But it’s his tunes that bring you back, telling tales that don’t wear out. Let’s not worry about whether or not Barbecue Bob in Fishtown ends up on any top-ten lists this year; rather, rest assured that like the best works in any genre, you’re likely to still be playing it ten years from now.

Bill Meyer

Kid 606

Shout at the Döner Tigerbeat6 CD

Hard-edged yet multifaceted techno is the stock-in-trade of San Diego’s Kid 606 (a.k.a. Miguel de Pedro). His latest CD, Shout at the Döner, pushes his music even further into polystylistic terrain, augmenting his previous amalgam of thrashtronica and metal with extra glitch-techno elements. Cast in four large sections further subdivided into individual tracks, the album flows with the pacing of an alternative DJ’s set. While much of the fare is suitable for raves, its big, pulsating beats don’t obscure the music’s complexity, not to mention Kid 606’s sense of humor, which is evident in whimsical titles— “Underwear Everywhere,” “Baltimorrow’s Parties,” “Be Monophobic with Me,” “Malcontinental,” “American’s Next Top Modwheel,”—and witty spoken-word samples. The latter are boisterously employed in the fauxrevival of “The Church of 606 Is Now Open for Business”—one imagines its congregants dancing in the aisles! A disturbing phone call from the police turns up in “Mr. Wobble’s Nightmare”; after a spoken intro, the music flirts with glitch and scratching before yielding to the thrumming call of a darkened dance floor, its loops and synths interspersed with voice snippets. Though an underlying pulse is frequently apparent in these tracks, it’s often blurred by deftly overlaid syncopations and polyrhythms, as on the Frankensteinian mixture of “Monsters” or the Reich-like phasing of “Getränke Nasty.” Even the albumclosing “Good Times” is wrapped in enigma, offsetting buoyant reggae rhythms with a quirky bass line and skittering background material. Shout at the Döner trusts the Kid’s devotees to follow him further out. One hopes they

will, as the CD is an excellent addition to his catalog. Christian Carey

Phil Kline

in a double digipak designed to look like a boombox—a nice nod to the composer’s old axe. Kurt Gottschalk

Cantaloupe CD

Charlie Kohlhase's Explorer's Club

Starkland DVD

Boxholder CD

John The Revelator Around the World in a Daze Phil Kline made his mark in New York in the 1980s with works conceived for multiple boomboxes, the works’ shape being dictated by the uncontrolled variables of cassette tape leader length and playing speeds. He has since shown himself to be a remarkable and imaginative composer for more traditional ensembles. His 2004 release Zippo Songs (issued by Cantaloupe Music, the label founded by venerable new music collective Bang on a Can) was a moving set of songs based on inscriptions found on Vietnam soldiers’ lighters; it displayed a capacity to stir profound and genuine feelings that was new to the composer’s work.

John the Revelator is no less surprising or effective in its raw emotion.

And where Zippo Songs dealt with mortality, here Kline faces nothing less than questions of the eternal. The work is essentially a vocal mass in 16 parts, performed by the Lionheart vocal sextet with the string quartet Ethel. (Kline himself appears on only one track, playing organ). It’s a staggering piece of music, both reverent and modern, neither passing as a period piece nor falling into the trappings of “new music.” It feels, if anything, lost in time, but more importantly is a remarkable, beautiful work.

If John the Revelator approaches the eternal, Around the World in a Daze aims at nothing less than covering the globe. Taken as a whole, the ten pieces are dizzying in their scope.

Beginning on New York’s Lower East Side, the audio travelogue moves through New England, Switzerland and the Central African Republic; through Bach, Nancarrow, Wagner; and through a montage of string and vocal compositions (Ethel violinist Todd Reynolds is featured prominently) and field recordings. Released as a DVD (for the surround-sound audio capacity; the photo sequence that accompanies the music is fairly incidental), the set comes with a second DVD which includes an interview with Kline plus his audio/video work Meditation (run as fast as you can), an enjoyable handheld-camera run through lower Manhattan with a pulsing electronic soundtrack. The discs come housed

Adventures

Boston-based reed player Charlie Kohlhase is an inveterate jazz explorer.

Over the course of the last couple of decades, he’s honed a sensibility that combines an encyclopedic take on the tradition, a personal approach to the intersection of post-bop structuralism and boisterous freedom, and a wicked sense of humor. The Explorer’s Club is his newest venture, one that synthesizes and builds on the strengths of his ensembles to date. On board is long-time associate Matt Langley on reeds, whose distinctive melodic approach is perfectly synched with Kohlhase. Trombonist Jeff Galindo’s muted growls, rich smears, and lyrical sense of line fill out the front line. Guitarist Eric Hofbauer, a carryover from Kohlhase’s CK5, brings a ringing, jazzy tone and advanced harmonic sensibility to the ensemble sound.

What really makes this a departure from Kohlhase’s other projects is the pairing of drummers Miki Matsuki and Chris Punis, who kick things along with a constantly evolving sense of time in tandem with bassist Jef Charland’s dark, resonant pulse. The set features seven originals by the leader along with one

by Charland and two by Kohlhase’s occasional playing partner John Tchicai; the pieces’ angularities and quirky counterpoint leave plenty of room for the group to stretch out, and they transform the compositions’ wry complexities into collective freedom, all the while swinging like mad. It’s been a while since Kohlhase has released a recording, but this one shows that he’s still hard at work charting new courses into the musical unknown. Michael Rosenstein

Steve Lacy Best Wishes Labirinti Sonori CD

One of Steve Lacy’s key strengths is the degree of focus he brings to the music, and nowhere is this more apparent than in his solo playing. The program for this CD, which was recorded in 2001 at the Laborinti Sonori Festival, Siracusa, consists of two medleys followed by two tunes that were probably played as an encore. That the first medley consists of Thelonious Monk compositions will surprise no one, as Monk was a major

source of inspiration throughout Lacy’s long career. Here he packs “Shuffle Boil,” “Eronel,” “Evidence,” “Reflections” and “Little Rootie Tootie” into 18 minutes that are tense with concentration. As usual with Lacy’s Monk renditions, the music is stripped of inessentials, and each note of the themes is articulated as though the melody is being revealed for the first time.

What’s remarkable is that Lacy can find such freshness in the material, though he’s played most of these pieces in concert on hundreds of occasions and recorded them a dozen times over. In the last decade of his life, Lacy used less ornamentation of line, fewer growls and extraneous sounds, and less of those delightful bat-flit harmonics that seemed to fly unpredictably off the top of notes. Both his statement of themes and his extemporizations were cleaner and arguably more pure, though no less characterful.

It’s on the second medley, of his own compositions, that things start to open up a bit. “Sands” had long been in Lacy’s solo repertoire, though he only recorded it on a couple of occasions, and I’m not aware that the tripartite series of “Stand,” the appropriately brief “Jump,” and “Fall” has previously been documented. As he works his way through them, and concludes, after a pause, with “Revenue” and “Moms,” Lacy gradually expands the universe of sounds he gets from his horn, and the improvisations often take off at an oblique angle from the thematic point of departure or develop into crabbed and muttered asides. These are fascinating performances, but Lacy’s discography of solo recordings is large; Best Wishes is probably not quite in the first rank, though other Lacy aficionados may beg to differ. Brian Marley

Okkyung Lee Peter Evans Steve Beresford Check for Monsters Emanem CD

This collaboration between cellist Okkyung Lee, trumpeter Peter Evans, and pianist Steve Beresford is a fortuitous matchup. Lee met Beresford when they worked together playing Gershwin tunes to accompany films at a festival in Scotland. When Beresford was in New York, they decided to pull an ad hoc project together with Evans, which resulted in a mini-tour. Luckily, the tapes were rolling at their performances in New York and Philadelphia. Each of the musicians brings prodigious chops

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to the music, along with lightning reflexes and a refined ear. The results are careening, warp-speed improvisations: Lee’s cello bucks and scrapes, divebombing from skittering upperregister lines into dark, low-end groans.

Evans proves yet again that he is one of the most inventive young players on the scene these days, combining breathy smears with spitfire flurries that draw on his jazz roots. Beresford draws on his four decades of experience, tossing off percussive chords, hammered torrents, and angular free counterpoint, and showing off his wry sense of timing and phrasing. It’s an intimate meeting of minds without a safety net, and Lee, Evans, and Beresford prove they are up to the task. Michael Rosenstein

Steve Lehman Octet

Travail, Transformation & Flow Pi Recordings CD

As leader and sideman, alto player Steve Lehman has been involved in some of the most vital post-bop jazz projects going. This octet session takes his music to a new level, combining the sophisticated approach to improvisation he’s explored over the last few years in small-group settings with his studies in compositional forms. Lehman began to explore spectralism—the use of timbre, microtones, and the physical aspects of acoustics as compositional elements—while at Wesleyan, going on to study with the spectralist Tristan Murail. What is immediately striking about this group is its sound, with the metallic resonance of Chris Dingman’s vibes at one end of the spectrum, the dark cushion of Jose Davila’s tuba and Drew Gress’s bass at the other. Filling out the ensemble are Lehman’s alto, Jonathan Finlayson’s trumpet, Mark Shim’s tenor, and Tim Albright’s trombone, along with drummer Tyshawn Sorey. Lehman’s pieces make the most of the expansive sound palette, creating rich harmonies and contrapuntal lines while leaving plenty of room for improvisation, and the octet responds viscerally, investing the music with shimmering timbral colors and spitfire cross-cutting lines.

Lehman closes things with an arrangement of “Living in the World Today,” by Wu Tang Clan member GZA, stretching the original into a dizzyingly interwoven construction. Lehman says that he hopes to capture “the musical legacy of people like Tristan Murail, Anthony Braxton, Jackie McLean, and Andrew Hill, to name a few.” He’s well on his way. Michael Rosenstein

Magik Markers Balf Quarry Drag City CD

SPIN's review of The Natural Bridge—Silver Jews’ second or third full-length, depending on who you ask—described that record as “reading better as a novel than as a record.” Neil Michael Hagerty’s albums also bear that literary, psychic cast—like strings of teeny-tiny goth-lit—and he’s published a few tomes, as well. I’m betting that Magik Markers vocalist/guitarist Elisa Ambrogio has read him closely. “High schoolers and Hagerty know what I know,” she intimates on “Risperdal.”

That’s the first track on Balf Quarry, a snarl-swirl of slackadazical guitar donuts, biker leathers ’tude, and archival Ameri-

can milemarkers. Quarry gets gruffer, rawer, more diffuse, and more equivocally United States as it goes: gamblers forever expectant, punk-rawk sprints that call to mind Pearl Jam’s underheralded post-Ten work, hippies called on their rosy bullshit (“The Lighter Side of...

Hippies,” where Ambrogio and drummer/multi-instrumentalist Pete Nolan essentially pen an acidic riposte to Sonic Youth’s “Teenage Riot”), plangently dark piano ballads, and so on. Flayed illusions accrue (The Catcher in the Rye, Rolling Stones), thematic strands hint at adding up, and the Markers’ undeclared mission continues to clarify itself: if I Trust My Guitar, Etc. and its discordant cousins, with their noisy chordal fugues and anti-pop panic attacks, were early rough drafts, maybe BOSS and Balf Quarry are penultimate versions of the Great American Novel this duo seem to be fumbling their way into, towards, over. They’re onto something elemental—something so quintessentially American and honest that it can be hard not to turn away at moments, something about base urges and ingrained destinies, something Hagerty knows as well as any high schooler— and bearing witness to the crudely affecting blossoms it so gradually bears is an honor that can’t be overstated.

Raymond Cummings

Rudresh Mahanthappa's Indo-Pak Coalition Apti

Innova CD

Alto player Rudresh Mahanthappa has been on a tear lately. After gaining attention with his own releases and as part of Vijay Iyer’s quartet, over the last year he released Kinsmen, his crosscultural blend of South Indian Carnatic and Western jazz traditions, and The Beautiful Enabler, a recording by a collective trio with Mark Dresser and Gerry Hemingway. Mahanthappa’s Indo-Pak Coalition heads further into fusions of South Asian and jazz traditions. While on Kinsmen, he used Kadri Gopalnath, a traditional Carnatic saxophone player, as his foil, this time he uses guitarist Rez Abbasi (who’s of Pakistani descent) and tabla-player Dan Weiss. Mahanthappa’s compositions draw on the cyclical sense of time and melody of South Indian music, and the improvisations develop a hypnotic groove as his alto snakes its way across Abbasi’s gritty, reverb-heavy electric guitar and Weiss’s chattering percussion. The rhythmic and melodic focus never flags for an instant in the blizzard of three-way counterpoint, though at times the technical mastery threatens to overwhelm things. While this CD is not quite up to the intoxicating blend that Mahanthappa found with Gopalnath and the Dakshina Ensemble, it still has plenty to offer.

Michael Rosenstein

Radu Malfatti Taku Unami Kushikushism Slubmusic CD

Goat vs. Donkey Taumaturgia CD

Over the last 15 years, Radu Malfatti has become one of the more polarizing forces in contemporary music. Though he was a pioneer in the European free improvisation scene, he has since

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carved out an aesthetic that uses the core elements of sound, silence, duration, and timbre as building blocks within rigorously formal settings (whether the music is composed or improvised).

For some, his recordings are rewarding studies in austerity; for others, they’re just annoyingly enigmatic. These two recent releases with Japanese musician Taku Unami won’t change skeptics’ minds, but they offer an engrossing experience for the sympathetic listener.

An appreciation of Kushikushism requires immersing oneself in a hyperdetailed mode of listening. It starts out with over a minute of inky silence, before Malfatti’s ultra-quiet tones and Unami’s hushed, stuttering rattles emerge. Over the next 37 minutes, it often seems that silence will subsume the minutely nuanced placement of breathy trombone and sputtering mechanical activity. Malfatti erases any notion of attack, softly placing notes and letting them decay against Unami’s muted clatter. The second piece is even more ethereal: among the long pauses one hears sinewave drones and the near-imperceptible rumble of the trombone.

On the live album Goat vs. Donkey, recorded ten months later, room ambience becomes a major element, as shuffles and squeaks penetrate Malfatti’s cushioned tones and Unami’s percussive sounds. On this occasion Unami makes use of discrete, pointillistic sounds, rather than the flutters that he favored on the previous release. While the single 47-minute piece stays at the same hushed level throughout, the way that the two musicians use time and space is more open and dynamic than before. Michael Rosenstein

Martin & Haynes Freedman Barnyard CD

Blah Blah 666 It's Only Life!

Barnyard CD

Residents of Toronto like to boast that they live in one of the most multicultural cities in North America. Whether or not that’s true, they revel in the poly-ethnic sensibilities of their city, and nowhere is this more evident than in the city’s improvised and world music communities.

This has led to an openness in terms of both sound and instrumentation, an attitude that’s very much to the fore on these latest releases from drummer/ multi-instrumentalist Jean Martin’s label. Barnyard Records has already established itself as a label that is serious about the notion of improvisation as a playful, cross-pollinating endeavor. So that while they’ve issued the austere sax duets of Kyle Brenders and Anthony Braxton, they just as readily offer a release like Freedman, a collection of 17 songs by Toronto composer Myk Freedman that finds Justin Haynes strapping on a ukulele and Martin keeping time on a suitcase. It’s tempting to scoff at the ukulele as the poor man’s mandolin, a kitschy instrument only worthy of Tiny Tim interpretations, but Haynes plays it with dazzling virtuosity, lyricism and fluency. One moment he is swinging like Django Reinhardt, the next he is delicately strumming like a Parisian café guitarist, and then he’ll follow it up with some scrappy notebending and fretboard-rubbing

evoking the wired tanglements of Derek Bailey. Haynes’ impish spirit is perfectly complemented by Martin’s subtle timekeeping.

The pair brings that same playfulness to It’s Only Life!, where they are joined

by Tania Gill on melodica, Ryan Driver on “street sweeper bristle bass” and Nick Fraser on “plastic blow thing.”

Haynes plays b6 defretted guitar, melodica, banjo, and glockenspiel, while Martin pushes aside the suitcase for trumpet, glockenspiel and ukulele.

He and Fraser also double on drums.

Like the Ambiances Magnétiques gang out of Montreal, this group possesses a sense of serious fun as well as a similar approach to cross-cultural genre synthesis. Want a little Tex-Mex, served up Eugene Chadbourne-style? Coming up. Want some whiz-bang carnival music? Our pleasure. Want some warped Latin music? You bet. We have plenty.

A dash of reggae, mon? Irie. Raucous about rocking out? Ok, we can bring the fuzz. And so it goes. This group could be knocked for dilettantism, but they are far too skilled for that. Instead, they embody what makes Toronto such a cultural treat. Round any corner and you never know what you’ll hear next.

Richard Moule

Paul Metzger

Anamnestic Tincture Roaratorio LP

Uncle Woody Sullender

Live at Barkenhoff

Dead CEO/Kunstlerhauser Worpswede CD

“The banjo,” Paul Metzger proclaimed in these pages last year, “needs a lot of stinking help.” The St. Paul, MN string-bender is on a mission, but he’s not going it alone; New York-based Woody Sullender has made it a point to revitalize the banjo. Their routes are different, but the two men have the same ultimate objective; to release the instrument from the bondage of historical expectation.

Metzger has chosen the avenues of physical modification, adding extra strings to his flat plank and retuning it so it sounds somewhat like a sitar. “For Milo” is a side-long performance that documents the 2002 concert where Metzger revealed his solo music to the public for the first time. He winds through a raga-like course, spurring himself on with forceful smacks on the instrument’s surface that serve to remind you how closely the banjo is related to the drum. On the flip there

is a guitar piece, “Dark Green Water,” that has a more orchestral sweep but retains Metzger’s sheer brutal sense of rhythm. A recent performance of “Orans,” which has been in Metzger’s book for a while, shows how his music has grown sharper without losing any of its intensity. Both sides sound like audience recordings: not so great if you want the full range of his sound, but perfect for capturing the bright ring and quick decay of Metzger’s attack.

Live at Barkenhoff represents a change of course and, perhaps, heart for Sullender. Previously he’s made his banjo speak the language of free improvisation, working mostly with Chicago musicians like cellists Kevin Davis and Fred Lonberg-Holm. His new music makes more use of a familiar banjo vernacular, but reframes it by using digitally sustained drones that whip up waves of tones around his tart, stuttering attack. Like side one of Metzger’s LP, this disc contains an entire concert, which makes it especially illustrative of Sullender’s command of his chosen idiom. He moves from shimmering drones to bright tone-bursts to a cloudy abstraction of folk melody. In his hands, the banjo is a vehicle to connect with the past without denying his existence in the present. Bill Meyer

Szilard Mezei Wind Quartet

We Were Watching the Rain Leo CD

For those familiar with the jubilant pounding and vibrant coloration of Hungarian composer Szilard Mezei’s works for larger ensembles, this record could come as a shock. We Were Watching the Rain is almost all slow, somber stuff: the blue and gray end of the spectrum. But if you know his chamber music or his writing for flute and string trio, this album is another welcome permutation of his darker, more introspective side. Kornel Papista plays tuba, Branislav Akson plays trombone and Bogden Rankovic plays bass clarinet, clarinet and alto sax, while Mezei joins in on viola. “Ironrose” is my favorite track here because it attempts to balance skittery improv with abrupt, tight transitions to solemn melodies.

“I Loved You, I Don’t Deny It” features gorgeous clarinet runs from Rankovic, as he gets into that warbly semielectronic territory that’s possible with clarinet multiphonics. The disc begins and ends with “Milos,” a studio version to start and a live version to finish.

Papista’s tuba is so brooding against the

flourishes of viola and clarinet that the two versions give the listener a chance to determine just how low they can go while following the moody textural shifts. I’m a bigger fan of Mezei’s more jazz-inflected work, yet hearing an album like this, which demonstrates another point on the spectrum of his musical interests, brings me back to his other work with fresh ears.

Andrew Choate

Mono

Hymn to the Immortal Wind Temporary Residence CD

Celebrating their tenth anniversary, Japanese post-rock collective Mono convened a chamber orchestra for Hymn to the Immortal Wind. Given the band’s penchant for classical textures, the addition here of acoustic instruments seems a natural step in their musical development. What’s more, the band does a fine job of incorporating the orchestra without de-fanging their music’s rock-imbued heft. Thus, “Ashes in the Snow,” the album’s opener, builds from a gentle introduction which sets up the repeated four-measure harmonic progression on which the whole dozen-minute piece is based, climaxing with a thrilling wall of soaring guitars and strings supported by propulsive bass drums. While building such a large structure out of limited, repetitive materials could easily get tiresome, the constantly shifting instrumentation and dynamic gradations keep “Ashes” a fascinating, slowly evolving tableau.

“Burial at Sea” spotlights an affecting neo-baroque guitar/bass duo which gives way to a sweeping prog-rock anthem. “Follow the Map” combines piano, acoustic guitars, and the occasional bluesy slide against chamber strings in a fetching extended passage; this is followed by a climactic orchestral tutti.

Both compositions go much further than many prog/orch collaborations, using the orchestra with a keen awareness of balance and timbre. “Silent Fight, Sleeping Dawn” features a beautifully mournful tune in the lower strings, set against delicate minor-key piano arpeggiations; the piece is reminiscent of Michael Nyman or Gavin Bryars’ minimalist aesthetic. “Pure as Snow” is similarly conceived, juxtaposing lush high strings against percussion in a portentous funeral march. Once again, the band organizes things around a repeating harmonic ground; while the results are haunting, one occasionally wishes for more rhythmic variety. This concern

is somewhat ameliorated on “The Battle to Heaven,” which incorporates drum kit more prominently. “Everlasting Light” closes the recording with a stirring celestial vision: sustained guitar melodies are haloed by violins, then buoyed to a thrilling finale by a wall of glorious E-major. Christian Carey

Phill Musra / Michael Cosmic Quartet

More Beautiful Vibrations from the Creator self-released CD-R

At Catalina's self-released CD-R

Little-known among even free jazz cognoscenti, the work of saxophonist Phill Musra and multi-instrumentalist Michael Cosmic is a very good example of how the American improvisational underground flourished in the post-Coltrane era. Musra and Cosmic, twin brothers born in Chicago in 1950, studied with the AACM before relocating to the Boston area in the early 1970s. It was in this climate that they were able to combine a weighty free idiom with a proclivity for space and texture. Much of their activity was with a trio with Turkish drummer Huseyin Ertunc, with whom they recorded twice (once each under Musra and Ertunc’s names for Intex), as well as in a sextet under Cosmic’s direction. Musra and Cosmic also recorded as part of bassist John Jamyll Jones’ Worlds Experience Orchestra. But those dates, none of which have been legitimately reissued, are all that remains for their recorded legacy.

However, Musra has been able to fill in the history and expand his discography with these two self-released CD-Rs of his music with Cosmic (who died in 2001), live recordings from Musra’s Los Angeles home base that span the years 1988–1991. Though Cosmic’s reed playing graced the earlier LPs, here he’s on acoustic and electric piano, offering spare backing for Musra’s buzzsaw tenor and sinewy straight horn. These quartet recordings (Paul Merrill and Mike Moward share duties on bass, with Ertunc or Kay Ballard on drums) are a far cry from the trio, as well they should be—over a decade and a half had transpired. More Beautiful Vibrations from the Creator is plugged-in and fusion-y, in the manner of many a 1980s “commercial” jazz group, but its essence clearly belongs on another, more exotic plane. Cosmic’s synthesizer recalls Sun Ra’s jaunty hunt-and-peck, while Musra’s soprano channels the piercing alienation of Wayne Shorter;

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when he’s on tenor, things are considerably fiercer, as he moves from cottony purr to a harrier’s gritty cry in a few scant phrases. At Catalina’s finds the quartet unplugged, with Merrill filling the bass chair and Nick Scarmack on drums. Cosmic’s tune “Creativity” is a corker, its ruminations giving way to loose, infectious Latin rhythms as Musra takes chorus after chorus on tenor, at times reminiscent of Kalaparusha. Let's hope for a proper reissue of Musra and Cosmic’s early work, and a proper label to issue new material. Clifford Allen

MV & EE with The Golden Road Drone Trailer DiChristina CD

Coming hot on the heels of MV & EE’s second Ecstatic Peace! LP, Gettin’ Gone, this new release might be mistaken for mere leftovers. But Matt Valentine and Erika Elder are nothing if not consistent: in the past five years alone, the duo have released over three dozen albums of stoned folk and frazzled psychedelic rock, many featuring live tracks culled from their “taper’s pit,” yet very few of them less than impressive. Drone Trailer strays from the stage, focusing on studio tracks cooked up by MV & EE while backed by rag-tag collective The Golden Road. As with Gettin’ Gone and their 2006 outing Green Blues, this is a rock record, continuing a direction that has alienated some of the group’s more avant fans. Yet Valentine has shaped himself into a commanding songwriter, and he and Elder’s curled harmonies and guitar interplay are as effective here as on their more stretched-out work. Indeed, Drone Trailer might well be the most cohesive item in their bulging catalog. Opening with Crazy Horse-style barnstormer “Anyway,” the record plays out like a long evening, spiraling slowly towards sleep. “The Hungry Stones” is campfire folk kept cool by Valentine’s slapped acoustic guitar and high lonesome harmonica. “Weatherhead Follow” begins thick and warm before stretching out into one of Valentine’s most Garcia-like six-string adventures. On the title track Valentine and Elder harmonize as their guitars drone and twang. “Twitchin’” and “Huna Cosm” provide a fine ease into the end of the album: the first easy livin’ folk, the second sliding even further into spacious, sky-wide canyons of echo. Ethan Covey

Fredrik Nordström Quintet Live in Coimbra Clean Feed CD

Angelica Sanchez Life Between Clean Feed CD

Paul Dunmall Sun Quartet

Ancient and Future Airs Clean Feed CD

Memorize the Sky In Former Times Clean Feed CD

Tetterapedequ And the Missing R Clean Feed CD

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labels, but Clean Feed, the Portuguese label launched in 2001, has been pushing forward with what is likely the most ambitious current release program in the areas of free jazz and improvised music. The label released 36 titles in 2008, and the sheer volume of their output and the prominence of a few of their artists can mask some of the label’s most interesting qualities: its willingness to promote the work of lesser-known musicians and its genuine diversity in both locale and style. Here are five discs that display some of that diversity, ranging from muscular to cerebral.

The Fredrik Nordström Quintet is a tightly-knit Swedish band with immediate affinities to the mid-’60s Blue Note school. On Live in Coimbra, recorded at Clean Feed’s Jazz ao Centro festival in 2005, the tenor saxophonist’s compositions are briskly stimulating platforms for intense group dialogues, with vibraphonist Mattias Ståhl and drummer Fredrik Rundqvist inevitably suggesting Bobby Hutcherson’s spacious, sustained dissonances and Tony Williams’ polymelodic drumming. Trombonist Mats Äleklint is a fine match for Nordström: they’re both hearty, even boisterous players, with big sounds and fine minds, and the conversational component (Äleklint can create engaging dialogues with himself) makes this far more than a revisitation of an older style. That sense of loose conversation shapes “No Longer,” with Nordström joining Äleklint for some rousing collective improvisation before the two cede to a thoughtful solo by bassist Torbjörn Zetterberg.

Including a warmly lyrical cover of Björk’s “Cocoon,” the music gives a sense that it’s being created in the frictions and possibilities of the moment, its pre-ordained patterns functioning as points of discussion.

Angelica Sanchez doesn’t record often, which makes Life Between something of an event. In addition to her usual trio partners—husband and tenor saxophonist Tony Malaby and drummer Tom Rainey—she’s joined here by guitarist Marc Ducret and bassist Drew Gress in a program of Sanchez compositions that are marked by a near-improvisatory fluency, light lines that seem to arise and flow, unfettered by the hard edges of forethought or structure. The group responds with some brilliant playing, Ducret coaxing his electronic sound to dovetail with Malaby’s tenor and Sanchez’s acoustic and electric pianos. So strong is the affinity that identities shift around among the three, Malaby achieving a sustained bee-buzzing on “Black Helicopters” that builds in intensity at the same time that it builds electronic ambiguity.

Whether they’re intense or pastoral, the disc abounds in riveting moments, like the lambent dialogue between Sanchez and Gress on “SF 4” or the four-way pull of rhythms and densities that Ducret, Sanchez, Gress and Rainey achieve on “Blue and Damson.”

Malaby also turns up on Ancient and Future Airs, matching his tenor and soprano with leader Paul Dunmall’s tenor and bagpipes, Mark Helias’s bass and Kevin Norton’s drums and vibraphone. Given the palpable heft of the Dunmall and Malaby tenor sounds, you might expect a blow-me-down free jazz bloodbath; if so, you’ll be redirected. There’s a certain similarity to the sanctified ’60s pairing of John Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders, but it’s usually in

its lyrical form, dovetailing modal lines with flute-like sounds. One passage of extended blowing is contrapuntal in nature, with plenty of close listening.

Some of the most moving moments are at relatively low volume, as in the subtly Eastern pairing of Malaby’s soprano and Dunmall’s bagpipes. You can catch the group’s inner dynamic when the two tenors drift gently into Helias’s bowed harmonics. The 49-minute “Ancient Airs” and the 10-minute “Future Airs” are aptly named, for there’s a certain airiness to the whole performance, from the tenor sounds to the sparkle of Norton’s cymbals and vibraphones.

There’s a marked contrast to the forms and linearity of free jazz in Memorize the Sky, a trio featuring Aaron Siegel on percussion, Matt Bauder on tenor saxophone and clarinet, and Zach Wallace on bass. Together since their student days in Michigan, the three favor a drone-based minimalism more common in Europe than America. It’s a style they explore on In Former Times with fine results, developing dense grain in “I am the founder of this place” with a mix of circular breathing and bowed bass, bells and cymbals. The variety that the three achieve in what might seem like a constricted approach is consistently rewarding, accumulating microscopic evolutions of sound to create transformations before your ear.

Testing rather than jettisoning conventions, Tetterapadequ is a young European band that’s genuinely exploratory, willing to test approaches ranging from a jazz-based rhythmic concentration to solo interludes and even a period of extended silence. It consists of two Italians (tenor saxophonist Daniele Martini and pianist Giovanni

Di Domenico) and two Portuguese (bassist Gonçalo Almeida and drummer João Lobo), but the key geographical point is the Netherlands. The band’s name is a near-anagram of De Patter Quartet, named for a favorite jazz club the quartet attended while students at a Dutch conservatory. Each is a player of substance, with Martini possessing a marked vocal force and rhythmic imagination and Di Domenico showing a classicism that extends to Satie-like reflections. Almeida presses extended techniques into service while Lobo adds consistent interest with alternately dense and sparse sonic fields. Tetterapadequ’s eclectic wit suggests the Dutch scene in which they met, while the textures recall the early work of Giorgio Gaslini, thanks largely to Di Domenico’s ironic classicism.

Stuart Broomer

Nu Band

Lower East Side Blues Porter CD

If any band can claim a case of the Lower East Side Blues, it’s this quartet of free jazz veterans featuring trumpeter Roy Campbell Jr., alto saxophonist Mark Whitecage, bassist Joe Fonda, and drummer Lou Grassi, each of whom have been at it, in one way or another, since the 1970s. The experience shows, too, in their collective mastery of melodic improvising and the personal vision each brings to the tradition of Ornette Coleman and Albert Ayler.

The title track is a compact summary of the band’s strengths. Campbell’s wildly expressive solo varies from abstraction—gusts of burning air that roil and billow—to gentle melody. Whitecage

storms the heavens in similar manner, with wailing sounds and wrenching lyricism. Fonda provides a quiet interlude using a few well-chosen notes, strums, and silence in a gorgeous and cryptic solo. Whitecage’s clarinet opens “In a Whitecage/The Path,” which drifts in on an understated free pulse, opens out into an expertly paced collective improvisation that grows in intensity without anything being forced, then subsides into a peaceful conclusion.

“Last of the Beboppers” establishes a comfortable swinging medium tempo for blues-inflected freebop from everyone. The blues also grounds “Heavenly Ascending,” a lovely free ballad that grows into a joyous explosion of sound and rhythm. This is a free-jazz band that doesn’t need to deploy sonic extremes or pyrotechnics to make its point; it’s musicmaking in touch with the avantgarde’s melodic potential, its roots in the past, and the pleasures and joys in freedom. Ed Hazell

Pan l American White Bird Release Kranky CD

After a dozen years, Mark Nelson’s Pan American project is still with the same label (Kranky) and still creating fascinating ambient soundscapes. But one shouldn’t mistake continuity for stagnation! Indeed, there’s a combination of novelty and comfortable familiarity audible on White Bird Release. Joined by bassists Jim Meyering and William Lowman and percussionist Steven Hess, Nelson pursues a more collaborative sound scheme than on some of his more soloistic recent recordings. Hess’s co-authorship of two of the cuts, as well

as his tasteful vibraphone playing and drumming, lends an organic quality to “For Aiming at the Stars” and “Dr. Robert Goddard in a Letter to H.G. Wells, 1932.” At the same time, there are echoes of Labradford, Nelson’s other outfit, to be found amidst the reverberant soundscapes here. “There Can Be No Thought of Finishing” and “Literally and Figuratively” feature deliciously sepulchral (and ever so well-recorded) bass drones, akin to the bass-lines found on some of Labradford’s most winning work (E Luxo So, Fixed::Content). Indeed, Meyering’s strummed chords provide a beautiful counterpart to Nelson’s treble-register harmonic pads. “Is a Problem to Occupy Generations” demonstrates a capacity to be simultaneously ambient and experimental; its questing melodies are awash in reverb, arching towards an endpoint never quite reached. Conversely, the folk-like pentatonic phrases that inhabit “There Is Always the Thrill of Just Beginning” give the lie to much ambient-inspired “world music,” by eschewing easily palatable background designs in favor of a more enigmatic— and far more interesting—hypnotic blurring. Pan American remains a hardy, worthwhile endeavor, and White Bird Release features some of Nelson’s most beautiful music yet. Christian Carey

Yuwen Peng Sizhukong Silk Road CD

In these days of forced fusions and mass-marketed mergers, musical and otherwise, it’s refreshing to discover an unexpectedly successful combination.

Hailing from Taiwan, Sizhukong is the

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latest project of pianist Yuwen Peng, a Berklee grad who has immersed herself in a strongly transcultural approach to jazz. Sizhukong is a natural outgrowth of these explorations, blending traditional Chinese instruments with jazz’s harmonic and rhythmic innovations.

Peng’s playing here is often indebted to the meditative vein of early-1960s Bill Evans, an influence that pervades the opening of “Waterfront,” as she plays a liquid series of pentatonic phrases in slowly ascending arcs. At the same time, though, a percussion instrument beats a rapid tempo that suggests something from the Beijing opera. The piece floats by in a haze of bass harmonics and spare percussion until a slow undulating piano pattern is joined by Yichien Chen’s pipa.

Chen also plays an integral role in the shifting time signatures and minor/ pentatonic melodies of “Bleak Bird”; Alex Wu’s rolling percussion adds to the composition’s earthy soundworld, though once Peng takes a solo we are in more familiar Western territory, her lines making nods to Chick Corea and Keith Jarrett. Yet the joining-together of these opposite stylistic poles here and elsewhere on the disc is confident and entirely natural in feeling. The vigorously inventive “Bathing in the Stream” has a fresh singing quality, whereas a more static piece such as “Contemplation” is as ascetic as its name. Using no piano at all, it cedes the spotlight to the Chinese instruments, ending the disc on a note of serenity. A bit more harmonic adventure would have been desirable, perhaps, but the richness of the music here suggests that this group’s transcultural explorations have just begun.

Marc Medwin

Alexandre Pierrepoint Mike Ladd Maison Hantée RogueArt CD

Who ever would have thought that Sunburned Hand of the Man’s John Moloney and the Art Ensemble of Chicago’s Roscoe Mitchell would appear on the same project, not to mention Parkers Evan, Jeff and William? When the lineup also includes such luminaries as Joe Morris, Thurston Moore, Rob Mazurek, David Murray and Hamid Drake, something magical should be in the offing. This disc shatters expectations on all fronts; far from a conventional large-ensemble project, we are presented with the merger of poetry and small-combo music under the supervision of noted poet-performers Alexandre Pierrepoint and Mike Ladd.

This is a true union, a long multicolored composition that encompasses a range of historical epochs in a controlled grip.

The musical languages here swerve from hip-swinging 1960s nostalgia to alien landscapes of blissfully swirling sound. For the former, check out “8th Chamber”’s infectious bass-and-drums fervor, as Ladd emotes atop the sparse hypnogroove. For the latter, dig into the mechanical buzzings and whirrings of “20th Chamber,” its multitracked voices reminiscent of Heiner Goebbels’ epic Man in the Elevator. The album is full of such juxtapositions, as can be heard in Ladd’s angry exhortations over David Murray’s heartbreaking solo in “Antechamber,” both invoking the 1960s’ idealistic rage.

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playing, but in its organization, in how each element interacts with others in a magnificently constructed whole. A recurrent frame-drum figure pervades the entire project, fading in at key moments and injecting fresh vigor into the proceedings. Similarly, fragments from Roscoe Mitchell’s first alto solo reappear, looped and truncated, in “20th Chamber.” Recurrence and deconstruction are the project’s methodology, as repeated listening only emphasizes. From the many voices of “Hall” to the weird Disco 3000 reverie on “Corridor,” size and form become relative as pointillistic moments are subsumed in long passages of ur-funk and shards of drone.

Pierrepoint and Ladd’s poetry embraces the abstraction of human experience, making reference to everything from consumerism to supersized city life. As Henry Threadgill’s liners make plain, listeners can only comprehend the words through the prism of their own individual experience. Sometimes the voices are buried in the mix to the point of incomprehensibility. It hardly matters, given the disc’s overwhelming impact. This may very well be one of RogueArt’s most significant releases so far. Marc Medwin

Pimp Paul and Playboy Wolf Be Our Valentine White Label CD

The choice oddities on Prince Paul and Peanut Butter Wolf’s Valentine mix are exactly what you’d expect from their bottomless crates. A 38-track blend of backseat hip hop, solitaire soul and waterbed electro, the songs span the ’80s/’90s and include some bizarre unreleased demos sent to Wolf over the years. The double entendre of a selection like “In Your Ear” gives a good idea of the mix’s direction. A lustful LL freestyle breaks it down further, as he spits seemingly endless rhymes about the ladies starting with the letter “L.” Songs “I Wanna Lust You,” “Jones for Your Body” and “Too Many Girls” help flesh out the story. Numarx classic “I’ll Remember Your Name” runs down the alphabet of female names in hopes of remembering them. “I’m a Ballplayer” is sung from the perspective of a traveling Major Leaguer chasing tail after games. But it’s not all about the hustlers.

A few of the songs favor the loner and his singular quest for love and understanding. Gary Wilson, the resident spokesman for this type of thing, gets the obvious nod with “Cindy.” Folerio comes off like a more direct Jandek—if he was into 808s instead of detuned guitars: “Would you feel OK to sit in silence / in a dimly-lit room with candlelight / as I watch you breathe.” “I’m So Jealous” and “Don’t Be a Playgirl” are concerned with the reverse hustle.

Think Keith Sweat covering Kool Keith.

Not included, Mike D obscurity “Netty’s Girl” would have been a perfect fit.

Prince Paul’s vocal interjections are the comedic high point. Letting his lady know she can have anything in the world, he specifies: “I’ll get diamonds for your toes. I’ll get diamonds for your dog. Look, I’ll even get Diamond D to do a remix for you, girl.” Kenneth Higney’s “Funky Kinky” summates the overriding theme. If “Computer Love” was about porn and produced by Morris Day or Bambaataa, it might sound a

little like this. Jake O'Connell

Michael Pisaro

An Unrhymed Chord Wandelweiser CDx2

The concept for this work is simple.

Only the length of time is specifically delineated: 65 minutes, consisting of two 30-minute blocks separated by a five-minute pause. Each performer is asked to contribute exactly one (pitched) sound, appearing once in each half of the piece, and the score requires that the sound’s dynamic level and length be inversely correlated.

This double disc offers two realizations of this piece, one by California-based percussionist Greg Stuart and one by student composer Joseph Kudirka. As with any text piece, there are a wide range of possible realizations, some more successful than others; in this case, both versions are winners, albeit in strikingly different ways. Stuart’s version makes use of overdubbing rather than multiple performers; its 70 sounds were generated by Stuart himself, and they all involve friction exerted upon miscellaneous household items. The soundworld he evokes is one of stroked metal and glass, its ringing sonorities shifting about in glorious slow fade. It is a world of static beauty, all transitions etched glacially in long crystalline forms. In Kudirka’s version, 35 contributors were asked to send electronic sound-files and instructions for their placement within the piece’s duration; no participant was aware in advance of the others’ contributions. The soundscape here is much less unified, with a raw energy and an almost impulsive power. Pitch-complexes throb with density, welling up

and fading away; and there is a sharp disparity between each soundworld evoked, from low-frequency buzz to the more ambient soundscapes associated with groups such as Filament. Both realizations work extremely well, and the central silences give the senses time to recharge. This is a well-recorded set of some of the most beautifully challenging music I’ve heard in some time, and any devotee of sonic diversity needn’t hesitate. Marc Medwin

POW Ensemble

Homage to Hazard Live, Amsterdam 2008 X-OR Field Recordings CD

The first cut on this disc is a five-minute instrumental of crackly, bubbling electronics and sparse, ambiguous signals, and it sets the unsettling tone for the rest of the performance. In the second track, the first word you hear is “Security,” which repeats with increasing vehemence and digitization. It sounds like it’s coming from a loudspeaker across a courtyard, more a warning than a comfort. Vocalist Hans Buhrs rasps, “Security killed the cat”—a great evocation of how, these days, what is done in the name of “security” is responsible for more deaths than curiosity. A sad state of affairs, and one that this six-person ensemble dramatizes throughout their evening’s performance at Amsterdam’s Bimhuis.

Homage to Hazard is more conceptually coherent than the Pow Ensemble’s previous two albums, and it has fewer catchy numbers because it has a different kind of focus. Whereas Birdsong from Inside the Egg explored creation, this album is a more disconcerting

experience, like waiting in a hospital to find out the status of a friend dropped off at the emergency room. Luc Houtkamp’s singular tenor saxophone is less prominent than his computer-controlled percussion, but when it comes to the fore during “Mood Swings,” accompanied by faux-jazz ride-cymbal and Guy Harries’ organ patch, a delectable carnivalesque cabaret emerges. Trombonist Wolter Wierbos is atypically muted compared to the rest of the band, while Nina Hitz’s gorgeous cello melodies, especially on “This Is to Those,” anchor the disruptions of all the electronic fidgeting. When the group puts music to Shel Silverstein’s “The Loser” it’s a fun, sick highlight, epitomizing the peformance’s social and psychological discomfort. When musicians attempt to directly engage with the zeitgeist or deal with contemporary politics the results can be tiresome, but the Pow Ensemble provides insights, entertainment, inspiration and critique in equal measure. Andrew Choate

Larry Polansky

The Theory of Impossible Melody New World CD

Larry Polansky’s compositions are driven by intelligence and sheer curiosity. In applying science to art (which is a gross simplification of what he does, but for the purposes of a short review it’ll have to suffice), he creates works that are sometimes far removed from traditional models of composition, though their underlying but often discernible structural logic affords the listener vital clues as to how (and potentially why) these compositions were made. There’s

no murk in his method: no opaqueness, obfuscation or attempt at mystification.

When he explores canons, using computer software to tailor the voices and the circumstances under which they operate—as on “Four Voice Canon #3,” “Epitaph (Four Voice Canon #21)” and “Four Voice Canon #23b (freeHorn Canon)”—the outcomes, even within the constraints of canonical form, are hard to predict. The music, however inobvious, is nonetheless obvious, in the sense that it is as it is, plainly and unapologetically ... and always interesting.

Three substantial, highly distinctive compositions take up most of the CD. “Psaltery for Lou Harrison” consists of 51 pitches sampled and manipulated from one of the strings of a hand-held, bowed Appalachian psaltery. The pitches are adjusted through several harmonic series, so that what at first seems to consist of nothing more than a thickly textured drone becomes, several developmental stages later, so light, airy and spacious it can make the listener feel giddy. “Simple Actions/Rules of Compossibility,” composed with Chris Mann, uses Mann’s recitation of his text “Rules of Compossibility” as a means of adjusting, to some degree, the responsive software program that drives “Simple Actions.” Perhaps the most startling piece is “B’rey’sheet (In the Beginning...) (Cantillation Study #1),” in which Jody Diamond sings a cantillation melody from the Torah, to which the live interactive computer responds, initially with a storm of electronic sounds.

As the piece develops, the software adapts itself to the musical aspects of the singer’s material and “invents” rules of response. The initial disorder is gradually brought to order, so that an

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unlikely union is achieved between the voice and the electronic sounds, resulting in several unexpectedly touching chorales. Brian Marley

Paura

The Construction of Fear Creative Sources CD

Dennis González Renegade Spirits Furthermore CD

Dennis González has spent time touring and recording in Portugal in recent years, and The Construction of Fear marks his first effort for Lisbon’s Creative Sources label. It’s nice to hear the trumpeter playing with violist Ernesto Rodrigues and his son Guilherme (cello and radio). Along with tenor/soprano saxophonist Alipio C. Neto and percussionist Mark Sanders, they make up Paura. They play music that is a bracing amalgam of scratchy Euro improv and bright lyrical declamations. Unlike a lot of music in this area, Paura doesn’t play with the kind of obsessive detail-driven retreat from expressionism that often creates tedium. Rather, they combine a feel for the meaningfully small with a feisty energy (a winning fusion that characterizes the opening piece). González can really show his range in such a setting: his soft wheezing and overtones on the spacious opening minutes of “Fear 2” make for a tasty synthesis of AACM genre-gestures and London insect music. Neto and G. Rodrigues provide fine contrast with a series of gutturalisms and insistent groans that glue things together. The album as a whole has a nice suite-like structure, with sweet’n’sour tutti passages that suggest chamber compositions, and lots of sub-groupings (the father/son strings are especially tight in the middle sections), all culminating in the slashing, thudding conclusion.

Renegade Spirits finds González back stateside with some of his favorite playing partners: tenor player Tim Green, drummer/percussionist Famoudou Don Moye, and sons Aaron (bass and percussion) and Stefan (drums, nellophone, and percussion). It’s a glorious record, filled with everything we love about González Music (let’s just call it that from now on, no?). One special delight here is the meaningful use of two percussionists, realized not just in pulse (both abstract and definite) but also in terms of texture. It facilitates what Dennis can do with two horns, where he writes so suggestively in terms of harmony, playing around with tasty intervals that seem to come from a four- or five-piece section, all without compromising the lyrical quality at the heart of his music.

“Quartege” is a bracing standout in this regard. The title track goes it one further, and its intensity ranks up there with the best pieces on Catechism or Hymn for the Perfect Heart of a Pearl. Part of what I find so effective is the contrast between González’s plaintive, at times meditative playing and the biting, compellingly yearning quality of Tim Green, a gritty soloist who loves to bite down hard on particular phrases or ideas, working them out vigorously. In over an hour of ringing praise-song, there are numerous shifting sub-groupings that emerge from the whole. On “In the Blink of a Hat,” bass and trumpet dive into the bottom, with the leader taking a fantastic buzzing brass foray into the 62 | SIGNAL to NOISE #54 WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM

depths. Stefan’s nellophone gives “Skin and Bones” a tart and fulsome quality, like some outtake from a late 1960s BYG blowout (he also sounds terrific playing the balafon on “Mayombe,” several minutes with just Green and Moye on congas). But it’s ultimately the joyous quintet sound that compels return listens. The bouncing groove and poly-percussion on “Evil Elixir” is exceptional, going deep into the AACM’s poly-genre bag. And “Triage” is similarly playful, with the trumpeter in superb form, his patient, barlinespanning phrases a delight to listen to. Dennis is in the middle of a serious purple patch right now. Jason Bivins

Alasdair Roberts Spoils

Drag City CD / LP / download

A fine title, Spoils. This record is rich with plunder that is taken from other times but trades advantageously with contemporary coin. Scotsman Alasdair Roberts delights in anachronistic references and turns of phrases: in a couple of songs he remembers the Goddess Venus’s most peace-loving aspect and Scottish Christendom’s first church, in another he channels legendary technology-hater Ned Ludd. But his antique references illuminate timeless concerns, such as finding purpose in life and death. He loots past and present to come up with arrangements that seem enshrouded in antiquity, then plunks a grimy synth tone right where it counts the most. Too often vintage instrumentation merely adorns; here baroque guitar, viol, and harmonium breathe sweet air into the songs’ lungs, animating them. And too often bad taste in contemporary sounds, thoughtlessly applied, smothers strong material; here acerbic electric guitars and parsimoniously deployed drums steadfastly refuse to cruise on folk-rock autopilot, but pace and drive the narratives.

Each instrumental flourish tells a part of the song’s story, and when its part is done, the instrument disappears. I can’t name another record—even another of Roberts’—with such marvelous and varied arrangements. Roberts spoils us with a work so accomplished, it seems a waste of words to describe it when you could be listening instead. Bill Meyer

Roswell Rudd Trombone Tribe Sunnyside CD

Most recordings featuring performances by five different ensembles have problems with unity of sound and purpose, but Roswell Rudd’s joyous (if occasionally over-the-top) Trombone Tribe comes across like a statement of solidarity. The “tribe” encompasses not just his ’bone-heavy sextet, but also a grouping of six trombonists, Sex Mob, and brass groups from New Orleans and Benin. Trombones are as prominent here as Harleys at a biker run, and just slightly less raucous. A stentorian fanfare featuring Rudd with the sevenpiece Gangbe Brass Band of Benin bookends the recording—the second appearance coming as the conclusion of a five-movement suite that reaches its apex with some affecting call-andresponse between horns and a vocal chorus. These layered instrumental and human voices mirror the effect of Rudd’s muscular trombone summit,

which includes such signature soloists as Ray Anderson, Josh Roseman and Wycliffe Gordon. They combine over Barry Altschul’s rollicking beat on “Astro Slyde,” and continue the party on the exuberant “Hulla Gulla,” Rudd’s interpretation of a ’60s dance groove.

Bonerama—four more trombonists and a rhythm section—pick up the mood and add a second-line feel. By contrast, Rudd’s guest spot with Steve Bernstein’s Sex Mob and the five pieces

by Trombone Tribe are more about texture. On a piece named for British saxophonist Elton Dean, Bob Stewart’s tuba literally crackles, adding brassy percussion to the trombonists’ growls and slurs. Bassist Henry Grimes takes the spotlight on the opening of “No End,” and “Slide and the Family Bone” sends Rudd back to his Dixieland roots via some atmospheric horn polyphony.

All the elements join together for Sex Mob’s interpretation of Herbie Nichols’ “Twelve Bars,” the band shifting deftly from a march to a rumba. This is tribalism at its most inclusive. James Hale

Jamie Saft

Black Shabbis Tzadik CD

All too often heavy metal has been abused by Downtown improvisers as a sort of musical trope: a plug-in app for comic relief within free improv and a cheeky excuse for screaming and ear-piercing volume, ignoring the structural integrity of most metal music. Jamie Saft, however, is as smart as he is versatile. He’s done the screamy improv thing, and he’s done some fine jazz piano work, but he knows his metal too well to use it

for schtick. Black Shabbis is a smart, heavy and devastatingly played slab of charred metal.

The album opens with another Downtown reference point, a brief instrumental with Ennio Morricone leanings played by Saft on keyboards, guitar and bass. It’s a nice track, a prelude to assault of sorts. The rest of the disc features a core band of Trevor Dunn on bass and Mike Pride on drums, with Saft playing moody keyboards and shredding guitar; Bobby Previte, Mr. Dorgon, Vanessa Saft and Dmitry Shnaydman also make appearances. Slayer riffage, lightning drums and screeching vocals dominate the long tracks; Sabbath and ZZ Top lay behind the fuzzed-out blues. But the best bits come when Saft downshifts into lovely pools of sludge built around slow, steady rhythms.

Underlying all of this, and earning its place on Tzadik’s Radical Jewish Culture series, is the cry against antiSemitism (even if it’s more explicit in Saft’s liner notes than the music itself).

Of course, metal has always been a battleground for Christ and Satan, good and evil, a stage for epic themes and indecipherable lyrics. Jewish themes might be unusual in metal, but in the big picture persecution and righteousness are not too far from the norm. Whatever his inspiration, Saft has crafted an album of massive blackened music. Kurt Gottschalk

Elliott Schwartz Hall of Mirrors Innova CD

Born in Brooklyn in 1936, composer, performer, and pianist Elliott Schwartz

has had a prolific career in academia, but might be best known for the live improvisations he recorded with saxophonist Marion Brown in 1973 (available on LP in finer used record stores under the title Duets on Arista/ Freedom). He shares with John Zorn a talent for imaginative musical collages, and he has much of the brittle, harrowing suspense and drama of Bernard Herrmann. “Hall of Mirrors” is a series of six brief vignettes (between one and four minutes apiece) for saxophone quartet (the Radnofsky 4tet) and piano (Schwartz himself).

These recall the works of early 20thcentury Frenchman Darius Milhaud at his most jazz-inspired—elegant albeit in a most wry and tart fashion, almost a burlesque of salon sophistication. It also has moments of pensiveness that are distinctly Ellingtonian. “Crystal: A Cycle of Names and Memories” is a duo/duel for piano and assorted percussion—it crackles and darts with almost cinematic tension and impatience, some of the percussion writing smacking of Zappa’s parts for mallet-mistress Ruth Underwood in the ’70s. The highlight here is “Rainforest with Birds,” performed by the Harvard University Band: it’s a feverishly kaleidoscopic piece with nods to avant-garde jazz, sounding as if Schwartz were scoring the apocalypse scene in the movie The Rapture. Birds chirrup, brass blares, woodwinds sigh and moan, the reverie (or is it “anti-reverie”) is shattered by LOUD, vaguely martial-sounding drumming that kinda-sorta suggests the rock-minimalism of the Heartbreakers’ Jerry Nolan and the Buzzcocks’ John Maher. It’s melodramatic, spooky, and

exhilarating, all in a 15-minute span that sounds longer than it is.

Mark Keresman

Sex Mob

Meets Medeski: Live in Willisau Thirsty Ear CD

There’s a striptease quality to the way that Steve Bernstein and Sex Mob approach a melody—with a nudge, a wink, and a lewd comment or two on the way to the payoff. You know what’s coming, but the fun is in not knowing exactly what’s going to happen before it arrives. Since the band formed in 1995, the Sex Mob has honed a style of playing that is at once exquisitely subtle and reverently irreverent. Take the opening tracks of this 2006 live recording from Willisau with organist John Medeski (who also appeared on the Mob’s debut, Din of Inequity). It starts with an invocation by Kenny Wollesen on tympani and cymbals, bassist Tony Scherr’s arpeggiated runs, and Briggan Krauss and Bernstein squeezing notes from saxophone and slide trumpet (respectively) before Scherr’s bass figure segues into “Mob Rule.” There are Ellingtonian echoes in Bernstein’s line, and sure enough, after “Mob Rule” builds to a frenzy, the band drops out and Scherr’s bass intro is answered by Krauss and Bernstein’s unison statement of “Black and Tan Fantasy.” The tune builds slowly for two minutes before Bernstein’s growl becomes a shriek; Wollesen powers into a loose free jazz groove, and Medeski starts wailing away behind the rest of the band.

The whole thing shudders to a stop at around the six-minute mark before a

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“Salt Peanuts” horn figure announces the second “Mob Rule” segment. The liberties that Sex Mob takes with the material—and they do this throughout the set, on familiar tracks like “Sign O’ the Times” and “Live and Let Die”— are in the manner of the early Ellington orchestra with Bubber Miley and Tricky Sam Nanton: they take pleasure in the sheer joy of interacting with long-time musical mates on material that they love, sharing in the joy of discovery on the bandstand. Mike Chamberlain

Shakers n' Bakers

YFZ (Yearning For Zion) Little (i) Music CD

The Shakers were a religious sect, an offshoot of the Quakers that under the leadership of Mother Ann Lee arrived in America in 1774 and established communes in New York State, Massachusetts and New Hampshire. Innovators in architecture and furniture design, they also practiced trances during which they dictated vision songs, often including glossolalia or speaking in tongues. This is the second CD by Shakers n’ Bakers, a band led by saxophonist Jeff Lederer that takes its core repertoire from the Shakers’ songs and their sometimes startling lyrics (“Mother’s wine is really working”). The band’s style is free jazz, and the strongest apparent influence is another great spiritual original, Albert Ayler. Added to that here are elements of gospel and R&B and pieces that take their inspiration from specific works of John Adams, György Ligeti and Arvo Pärt. The results are amazing—music consistently enlivened by an intense sense of community and commune, too, with forces past and present.

The energy and vitality are palpable from the beginning, with singers Mary LaRose and Miles Griffith picking up on calypso and gospel elements as Shaker texts are layered on “In Me Canoe.”

There’s a soul music insinuation to “Even Shakers Get the Blues,” the line “All evil has to go” laid slyly over Adams’ “Road Movies Part 2.” The vocal animation continues throughout, with LaRose and Griffith finding great expressive potential between song, speech, shout and growl. “Laughing John’s Interrogatory” opens in laughter and chatter before the two voices pick up the question-and-answer format, with handclapping, tenor saxophone and the rest of the band joining in an explosion of joy that’s accomplished in just 2:35, recalling the great compression of mid-’50s R&B. Jamie Saft adds effective organ touches, and turns to electric harpsichord for “Chinese!!!” and “Yearning for Zion,” the latter effectively invoking Call Cobb’s florid ballad performances with Ayler. It’s all ably supported by bassist Chris Lightcap and drummer Allison Miller, with guest shots by violinist Mark Feldman, bass clarinetist and altoist Andrew D’Angelo (combining beautifully with Lederer on “Scour and Scrub”) and drummer Matt Wilson. The combination of inspiration, originality and accessibility make this a significant release. Stuart Broomer

Six Organs of Admittance RTZ

Drag City CD / LP / download

Ben Chasny’s latest release as Six Organs of Admittance is a look back 64 | SIGNAL to NOISE #54 WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM

into some of the darker corners of a career of constant innovation.

Collecting hyper-rare tracks originally released on Time-Lag, Mental Telemetry, Three Lobed and Chasny’s own Pavilion microprint, along with a previously unreleased suite, RTZ is a fine compendium for those fans who were slow on the draw when these originally, briefly, appeared. Making an appearance here are many of the truly classic early Six Organs cuts. The five vignettes that make up “Resignation,” Chasny’s side of the Songs from the Entoptic Garden Volume 2 split LP with Charalambides, lead the listener stepwise through the sound of Six Organs circa the beginning of the century: percussive clatter, serpentine melodies and haunted vocals, the whole thing fogged in a layer of brown liquor and green smoke. The lead-guitar run which announces “Warm Earth Which I’ve Been Told” is anthemic in its silvery scream. As Chasny ladles on vocals, chimes, bells and an organ drone the track heaves from the speakers: it’s folk music that demands high volume and wide windows. The transfixing ambience of the song’s organ-andfeedback section is prime evidence against one of the most baseless Six Organs impressions—that it’s all about the guitar. The album-length Nightly Trembling, originally released on Pavilion in an edition of 33 and reissued on LP by Time-Lag in 2004, takes up the second disc of this collection. Here, Chasny’s sound has grown in both confidence and scope. Throughout the album’s three sections Chasny returns to a few central themes, cloaking them in different shades of beauty and—for one of the first times on a Six Organs recording—violence. Chasny here reaches further into the blackness and Keiji Haino worship that would come to the forefront in his later work.

Ethan Covey

Michael Snow Alan Licht Aki Onda

Five A's, Two C's, One D, One E, Two H's, Three I's, One K, Three L's, One M, Three N's, Two O's, One S, One T, One W Victo CD

Alan Licht YMCA

Family Vineyard LP

Guitarist Alan Licht had already played in duo settings with both Aki Onda, who uses self-recorded cassettes as a means of simultaneously manipulating memory and sound, and Michael Snow, a synthesizer/ radio/piano player whose associations with jazz, film, and sound can’t be simply summed up in a phrase, but the concert that Five A’s, Two C’s... documents was only their second as a trio, though they’ve continued playing in this formation since recording this set at the 2007 Victoriaville festival. It’s not hard to want to tease out each musician’s contributions: a jazz keyboard lick here, some rock noise there, a snatch of song from some muezzin recorded far from the Canadian auditorium in which his voice is now being played back. But it’s much more fun to lose oneself in the maelstrom that transpires when they all resort to electronics to achieve

a sort of considered abandon, palpably thoughtful yet out of any one player’s control. Their blend of sounds feels unfamiliar even when you know all the parts; that’s when you know this is a group that needed to come into existence.

Licht’s put so much energy into writing, curating, and collaborating that YMCA is his first solo album in six years. If things had gone according to plan, it would have come out closer to the release of its predecessor New York Minute than the present day. He originally conceived it as a response to Oren Ambarchi’s Triste and Tetuzi Akiyama’s Don’t Forget to Boogie, both released in vinyl-only editions by Idea Records, but the label’s demise placed it in limbo for half a decade.

That’s some company to keep. Triste is the record where Ambarchi really nailed his personal guitar vocabulary, and Boogie is where Akiyama totally transformed his. Perhaps the wait is for the best, because YMCA lacks those records’ career-defining singularity and might have suffered in comparison.

Heard now, however, it’s a welcome reminder that Licht is, amongst other things, an enormously skilled guitarist who improvises with compositional discipline. The LP comprises two performances edited seamlessly together into a single piece that moves patiently from snaky e-bow explorations to pensive fingerpicking to harsh, pedaldiced abrasions. It’s at once involving and somewhat removed, in a way that reminds me of another of Licht’s collaborators, Loren Connors. Like Connors, Licht seems confident enough of the rightness of his sound that he doesn’t seem too concerned with reaching out

to the listener. Instead the music exists in its own space, available if you want to approach it, unfussed if you don’t.

Bill Meyer

Solidarity Unit, Inc. Red, Black and Green Eremite LP

Sunny Murray Big Chief Eremite LP

There’s nothing quite like the satisfaction of something done right. Vinyl may be in resurgence, but even so bad execution abounds. Perhaps you too have spent your money of late on shitty fold-over sleeves with plenty of white space where you can put your $25 sticker, bowl-shaped and offcenter pressings, and crackly LPs that remind you, if you’re of a certain age, why people were so ready to switch to CDs in the first place. These two Eremite reissues are faith-restorers, the acme of faithful reproduction of free jazz’s nearly forgotten past. Both have sturdy cardboard sleeves faithful to the first issues’ art; Eremite’s added credits are there if you need to find them, but never distract from the original package. And both are pressed on vinyl that is not just heavy, but immaculate; whatever music was on the original is what you get, no more, no less. The only enhancement is a highly detailed mastering job. Other labels should consult with Eremite boss Michael Ehlers on how to do it right before pressing up another LP. And then there’s the music. Both of these records are barely heard artifacts of the post-Coltrane era. Drummer

Charles Bobo Shaw led the Solidarity Unit, Inc., which features ten knowns and unknowns from St. Louis’s BAG stable of players. While Shaw and trumpeter Floyd Le Flore get the writer credits on Red, Black and Green, this is collectively created music, expansive and varied, if ill-served by the murky concert recording. Shaw’s more extroverted interjections seem to signal directions, but then one or another of the players takes the lead. Oliver Lake’s adroit alto sax and flute and Joseph Bowie’s ebullient trombone make their mark. But the strongest presence is guitarist Richard Martin, whose raw lava-rock abrasions carve a place in the densest group tangles. What happened to this guy?

Sunny Murray’s Big Chief was recorded in Paris in 1969, a year before Red, Black and Green, and it’s very much a product of its time. Names familiar from various BYG releases populate his eight-member ensemble, and the studio recording is much more dynamic and detailed than Red, Black and Green’s. Murray was already a veteran of groundbreaking work with Cecil Taylor and Albert Ayler, and had led a couple of his own sessions. His compositions are fairly simple, more in Ayler’s vein of short strong launching points for full-on sound exploration than Taylor’s ultra-detailed elaborations on lucidly imagined structures.

Murray’s drumming is like orchestrated steam, controlled hiss that envelops rather than propels. There are times when the horns seem almost superfluous, so monolithic is the striated wall raised up by Murray, pianist François Tusques, and string players Bernard Guérin and Alan Silva. But

they do make their mark, especially on a tragicomic rendering of Rogers and Hammerstein’s “This Nearly Was Mine.” Bill Meyer

Spectre

Internal Dynasty WordSound CD/LP

King’s County’s WordSound label has been holding it down for more than a decade, releasing seminal records like Prince Paul’s Psychoanalysis: What Is It? and the bulk of Sensational’s catalog. The label’s patron “Ill Saint” goes by Spectre. His seventh album and third of a trilogy (with Psychic Wars and Transcendent) is a blend of cagey instrumentals and tracks form-fitted for MCs. On Internal Dynasty, he keeps his menacing aesthetic intact: unrelenting drum patterns, minimal cyclic accoutrements, sub-level bass and right-field MCs. Spoken monologues from history and film are the other recurring element. Among the guest speakers: an enterprising JFK, The Warriors, Dustin Hoffman, the CIA and Horsemouth from Rockers. He also names a song for Kierkegaard.

MCs bless half the tracks. Over a chop-blocking shuffle, MY Werkz wakes up from a dream where “the spiff burns bright / on the beach in the night” to find himself in a cell, then reminisces about running with Biggie before he got large. Shaolin-fam soldier Solomon Childs sticks cats for their “Brie,” as Spectre ricochets an elastic funk riff off a sponge-worthy low-end. “Trillin’s” strobe-light pulse has Sensational pronouncing “party” “purty” and Black Chameleon chatting up Japanese girls with Wu tattoos on their breasts.

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Cascading between-station reception into a trance-inducing loop, “Let It Grow” (with German native HyPerAktiv) outlines another of Spectre’s motives: moving hip hop beyond “The Planet’s” borders. Internal Dynasty features MCs from Japan (Gebo), Brazil (Mamelo Sound System) and fellow German Plagiat. Spectre also looks abroad compositionally. Deviating furthest on “Catch a Fire,” he flips a flailing zorna loop in the vein of Zadik Zecharia, as Gebo references Humpty Hump.

Of the other instrumentals, the terse electro workout of “Fracture” breaks the mold, as splintering synths and a punctured bassline steer the track into headnod abyss. “Stimmen im Kopf” takes it back to the Bx, with Spectre slightly mutating the drum programming of Scott LaRock’s “Super Hoe.” Digital chimes dangle above Excalibursharp snares on “Unseen Forces.”

Along with the song’s title, that description aurally depicts the peril, mystery and spirituality lurking in the Ill Saint’s phantom sound. Jake O’Connell

Toot Two

Another Timbre CD

The combination of Axel Dörner, Thomas Lehn, and Phil Minton is not a match that springs immediately to mind; yet this trio celebrated their tenth anniversary together last year. Two is a follow-up to their debut on the Sofa label (called—what else?—One). The two long collective improvisations here find the three in fine form, plying their mix of masterful technical control, split-second response, and spattering drollery. Each of these musicians has a readily identifiable voice: Dörner deconstructs his trumpet’s sound into a series of hisses, growls, and sputters; Lehn’s warm analog-synth grit and oscillations are handled with lightning reflexes; and Minton is the man of a thousand voices, groaning and howling, throwing out pinched rasps and explosive exhortations. But the collective subsumes the individuals: Minton’s rambunctious impulses are put in check, Dörner balances his jazz influences with timbral abstraction, and Lehn weaves through the spaces left by the others. These improvisations are models of old-school conversational interaction, moving from hushed flutters to all-out barrage.

Above all, these are musicians who know how to listen, and they’re clearly having a blast here finding a common flow and then pushing off in explosive new directions. Michael Rosenstein

Tortoise

Beacons of Ancestorship Thrill Jockey CD

Close to twenty years after the group’s founding, Tortoise returns with its sixth full-length recording, Beacons of Ancestorship. The band’s first album of new material since 2004’s It’s All Around You, Beacons also follows The Brave and the Bold, an eclectic collaboration with Will Oldham on an eclectic selection of pop covers, and 2006’s lovingly-curated, career-spanning boxed set A Lazarus Taxon. The band has also been busy touring, and the individual members have maintained a plethora of outside projects. Thus, while the five-year wait is understandable, one’s glad to see this project come to fruition. Beacons of An66 | SIGNAL to NOISE #54 WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM

cestorship is a mature effort, mindful of the group’s legacy while simultaneously pushing at their musical boundaries; and it’s a reminder that, however much the music press tries to pin them down with catchphrases—postmodern, postrock, jazz-meets-minimalism—any such descriptions have always fallen short.

After an undulating drum’n’bass duet intro that introduces a killer riff, “High Class Slim Came Floatin’ In” unfolds as a series of fragmentary episodes: IDM club signatures, minimalist reiterations, polymetric rhythmic assemblages, and liberal doses of motoric synth loops, proggy string pads, and rock guitar riffs. The one constant amidst the kaleidoscopic changes is the evolving beat structure, visceral enough to keep your head bobbing throughout. The coda is overtly indebted to Steve Reich, as phase-shifts modulate arpeggios into an incandescent shimmer. “Gigantes” similarly weaves its way through an impressive assortment of polystylistic material, pulled together by a strong rhythmic underpinning. “Yinxianghechengqi” is less successful, the perpetual juxtapositions blunting some of its more powerful buildups, but its thunderous walls of sound are thrilling examples of the group’s affinity for avant exploration.

“Prepare Your Coffin” and “Penumbra” are reminiscent of the outstanding fusion of jazz and progressive rock found on David Sancious’s 1970s albums: riffs doubled by guitar and bass, ornately metered drumming, intriguing chord progressions and soaring guitar solos.

“Northern Something” really pushes the boundaries of Tortoise’s language, as edgy riffs and militaristic drums refrain create a bellicose ambience (perhaps a response to current events?).

“Monument Six One Thousand” adds Middle Eastern rhythms into the equation, pitting their undulating flexibility against brash quarter-note downstrokes of rhythm guitar. “Minors” stands in stark contrast to these two: it’s a carefully shaped and elegantly rendered piece, its funky rhythms sidling up to lyrical solos, affecting harmonies, and the album’s most winning melodies.

Beacons of Ancestorship is well worth the wait, and easily the best material Tortoise has released since 1998’s TNT. Christian Carey

Scott Tuma and Mike Weis Taradiddle Digitalis LP

If you’ve listened to his work with Souled American, Boxhead Ensemble, or Good Stuff House, you already know that guitarist Scott Tuma’s never been about velocity; slow and wobbly, it seems, is his racing strategy. It’s a winning one on Taradiddle, the first recording of his duo with percussionist Mike Weis (Zelienople, Good Stuff House).

Tunes like “On Cox” and “Off Belows” feel like disassembled Appalachian hymns, the acoustic notes ringing out like they got lost in the forest and have to sing their way back through darkness to the safe path. When Tuma switches to pump organ or piano, things get even more deliberate and atmospheric; the decidedly undubby “(dub)” drifts along like a thick fog rolling in off the water. Weis's refusal to do the obvious thing is key to this record’s success. He never resorts to straight timekeeping at all, but instead serves up sparse accents

and looming pure-sound constructions that amplify the otherworldly qualities of Tuma’s patient progressions. Bill Meyer

Charles Tyler

Saga of the Outlaws Nessa CD

Wadada Leo Smith

Procession of the Great Ancestry Nessa CD

Chuck Nessa launched Nessa Records in 1967 with recordings by Roscoe Mitchell and the band that would evolve into the Art Ensemble of Chicago. While the label’s productions were never numerous, they’re distinguished by the uncompromising quality and intensity of the music, characteristics strongly in evidence on these two reissues. Charles Tyler is not well-known today, but he was one of the finest free jazz altoists of his time.

Likely best-known for his membership in some of Albert Ayler’s bands, Tyler and his machine-gun streams of overblown notes were an alto complement to Ayler’s own somehow gentler explosions. Leading his own groups in the 1970s, Tyler would reveal roots in the blues- and bop-tinged lines of Ornette Coleman. On Saga of the Outlaws he moves with ineffable logic between Coleman and Ayler-like densities and between themes and improvisation in a suite-like 1976 piece that uses simple (“Western”) motifs and group improvisation to sustain emotional commitment and lyricism for its 37 minutes. The band has Earl Cross on trumpet (Tyler’s regular foil), drummer Steve Reid, and the basses of Ronnie

Boykins and John Ore, who create pizzicato hives of rhythm and melody through which Tyler and Cross dance.

Tyler here gives us his masterpiece, one of the most beautiful, if not the most heralded, reissues of the year.

While Tyler achieves an extraordinary unity of expression through consistency of method, Leo Smith is working in a very different vein in 1983’s Procession of the Great Ancestry, subtitled “seven mystical poems of jahzz in 17 links.” The long title track is dedicated to Miles Davis and invokes both his intense Harmon-muted voice and the clarion, open-horn long-tones so beautifully etched on Sketches of Spain. The band is at its atmospheric best here, with stunning shimmering counterpoint from vibraphonist Bobby Naughton and apt and varied percussion punctuations from Kahil El’Zabar. Other tracks similarly evoke dedicatees Booker Little, Roy Eldridge and Dizzy Gillespie to varying degrees, though each is transmuted into Smith’s own, highly personal trumpet voice.

As well as the instrumental tracks, there are two songs (the opening “Blues: Jah Jah Is the Perfect Love” and “Who Killed David Walker”) that include strong elements of R&B, with guitarist Louis Myers and bassist Mchaka Uba added to the group and Joe Fonda switching to electric bass. Smith’s relaxed, soulful singing is a marked contrast to the intensity of his trumpet. Procession ends with the through-composed elegy “Nuru Light: The Prince of Peace,” which ultimately gives way to a brief excerpt of Martin Luther King speaking of “the promised land.” It’s a fitting conclusion to a work in which Smith fuses poetry, various

genres and a summoning of the trumpet greats into a moving totality.

Stuart Broomer

Unknown Instructors Funland Smog Veil CD

Unknown Instructors are a veritable supergroup, composed of bassist Mike Watt and drummer George Hurley (Minutemen, fireHOSE), guitarist Joe Baiza (Saccharine Trust, Universal Congress Of), and poet and vocalist Dan McGuire. On Funland, their third album on Smog Veil, they are joined on several tracks by guests David Thomas of Pere Ubu and artist Raymond Pettibon. These dozen pieces are pretty tough going at first—McGuire’s poetry is dense and delivered in a deadpan— but there’s an undeniable groove, with Watt’s rubbery bass and Hurley’s rapidfire punctuations moving things along.

Baiza’s guitar spits out jagged shreds of notes, his lines floating above the rhythm and responding to the vocalists; he also plays a fine, bluesy jazz solo on the 10-minute instrumental “No Chirping.” The tone is primarily dark and brooding: a vein of uneasiness runs through all these words and musical motifs. The carnival midway on the album cover seems just right: sure, there’s fun to be had, but would you really want to live there?

Michael Chamberlain

Sharon Van Etten

Because I Was In Love Language of Stone/Drag City CD

Because I Was in Love is Brooklyn songstress Sharon Van Etten’s proper

debut, following a handful of limitededition and self-released titles. It’s the definition of simplicity—voice and minimal guitar chords, some overdubbed background vocals, some organ, maybe a bit of electric guitar.

Van Etten sings in a fragile, gently plaintive alto, which is not only somewhat haunting but itself haunted, as if her songs came from some dark, subconscious realm. She makes fellow traveler Jana Hunter sound like the Ramones by comparison.

Because I Was in Love would sound quite at home mixed into a playlist with the 1960s folk catalog of the mythic ESP-Disk’ label: Mij, Ed Askew, and Randy Burns, not to mention Tracey Thorn’s pre-Everything But The Girl group, the Marine Girls. Sad feeling made plain, almost uncomfortably so, yet strangely comforting all the same. Someone said of the movie Plan 9 from Outer Space: “No matter what time you watch it, it always feels like it’s 3 o’clock in the morning.”

Whenever I listen to Because I Was in Love, it feels like autumn, when all the clocks have just been turned back an hour. It’s foggy, and a clammy wind is blowing the leaves around.

Mark Keresman

Jozef Van Wissem It Is All That Is Made Important CD

James Blackshaw The Glass Bead Game Young God CD

James Blackshaw and Jozef Van Wissem have followed up their sophomore release as Brethren of the

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Free Spirit, The Wolf Also Shall Dwell with the Lamb, with solo releases that find them pursuing equally satisfying though divergent paths. With instrumentation limited to 13-course Baroque and 10-course Renaissance lute, Van Wissem’s It Is All That Is Made perpetuates the duo’s strippeddown approach, while Blackshaw’s semi-orchestral The Glass Bead Game (the title a nod to the Herman Hesse novel) opts for a dazzlingly kaleidoscopic sound-world.

Though Van Wissem sometimes cuts-and-pastes classical pieces and weaves electronics and processed field recordings into his releases, It Is All That Is Made doesn’t make noticeable use of such strategies; he opts to stay faithful to the lute’s natural timbre and resonance. The release does, however, evidence his propensity for musical palindromes, eschewing traditional dramatic development for even-keeled pieces that remain at a stable level of intensity. These mirrored structures lend Van Wissem’s work an entrancing circularity, an effect intensified by the rising-and-falling step patterns of “It Is All That Is Made” and “In You Dwells the Light Which Never Sets.”

Such sleight-of-hand enables him to bridge two idioms—17th-century lute literature and modern folk music—that would seem only distantly related. The lilting “Darkness Falls Upon the Face of the Deep” and haunting “How Long Will It Go On After You Have Gone” unfold in a slow series of chords, the pregnant pauses as much a part of the pieces as the notes themselves. Words such as “serene,” “austere,” and “timeless” naturally come to mind while listening to It Is All That Is Made.

Blackshaw’s follow-up to last year’s Litany of Echoes transposes his spellbinding guitar playing to expansive arrangements for piano (played by Blackshaw), strings, and vocals. He’s a 12-string virtuoso, yet never succumbs to grandstanding or self-indulgence, and the album’s sequencing is well-considered, moving between guitar, piano, and expanded group settings. In certain moments, The Glass Bead Game suggests he’s been listening to Philip Glass’s early output in his spare time, with the vocals in the opening track, for example, reminiscent of the solfège singing in Einstein on the Beach. Elsewhere, the rolling piano clusters of “Arc” recall Glass’s “Mad Rush,” and traces of Michael Nyman and Terry Riley sometimes emerge too.

Blackshaw’s sparkling acoustic guitar glides gracefully through “Cross,” the textures deepened by John Contreras and Joolie Wood’s strings and Lavinia Blackwall’s wordless vocals—a beautiful and stirring start to a recording that’s never less than mesmerizing. Blackshaw’s 12-string chimes so brightly during “Bled” it resembles a harpsichord, and he digs deep into the meditative opening and closing sections that frame the intricate clusters galloping through the piece’s middle section. The 19-minute “Arc” stands out most of all, however, ascending from a stately intro up to a majestic plane where surging piano waves and strings merge into a cloud-like mass of sonorous beauty; the listener willingly surrenders to the 68 | SIGNAL to NOISE #54 WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM

music’s ecstatic design. The Glass Bead Game is hypnotic, emotionally charged, and ultimately very moving.

Ron Schepper

Various Artists

Jalan Jalan: Traditional Music Recordings by Jerry Lloyd URCK CD

For records of traditional music from the non-Western world, some prefer to go the academic route, carefully presenting the music within its cultural-historical context.

Jalan Jalan, however, isn’t much for ethnomusicology; instead, the disc is more an audio travelogue, compiling recordings made by Jerry Lloyd in nine countries over the course of a decade. Lloyd’s mixture of music from countries from Egypt to Bali is a whirlwind tour of styles, forms, and sound quality that can be both compelling and frustrating. Luckily, for the intrepid listener, there’s enough that’s compelling to make this a worthwhile trip. Commencing with Vietnamese monks and concluding with Balinese gamelan, Jalan Jalan travels, quite literally, halfway around the world. Lloyd captures professional performances, streetside jams, and intimate at-home recording sessions, and he briefly documents the origins of each piece in the liner notes.

Some of the sounds will be familiar to fans of traditional non-Western music, but Jalan Jalan’s highlights are often the more idiosyncratic tracks, like the husband and wife duo Lloyd stayed with on Bunaken Island, the sounds of bamboo flutes attached to pigeons in flight, or the three minutes of downtown Marrakesh, where the music melds with the sounds of the city in the album’s most contextualized bit of musical vérité. It would be impossible for Lloyd to truly capture a decade of travel and recording in the span of 70 minutes, and the disc’s globetrotting nature can be trying, but its imperfections also give it its charm. He recorded everyday citizens in spontaneous performance, even the sound of his sink in a Laotian hotel, and these personal touches are where Jalan Jalan’s strengths lie.

Adam Strohm

Various Artists Source LPs 1-6 Pogus CDx3

Source was a semiannual journal dedicated to avant-garde music published between 1967 and 1973.

Founded by Larry Austin and Stanley Lunetta, the journal was accompanied by six 10" vinyl releases throughout the course of its life. These seminal recordings are now compiled in this three-disc set. It is fitting that the excellent Pogus label would be the home for this historically important reissue. Al Margolis has already reintroduced the work of several significant but neglected composers to the catalog, and this set reconfirms Pogus as a haven for innovative music from several generations.

The original LPs were used as sources, as many of the tape masters have either been lost or deteriorated beyond reparability. Those in the know will most likely have already

heard this material, as it has been readily available online for several years. However, the online versions presented straight dubs of the LPs, while this reissue has been painstakingly refurbished, offering these works in the best possible sound. The improvements are dramatic. Take, for example, the first recording of Alvin Lucier’s classic “I Am Sitting in a Room” (1970). This gem can now be enjoyed with the pops and crackles removed, leaving only the voice and the room to work their magic. Lucier’s 1980 remake on Lovely Music had been desirable because it presented a cleaner realization of the concept, and it is still a wonder to hear; now, though, the original’s timbrally complex conclusion sparkles and hums in a way I had not thought possible.

The compendium is a primer of avant-garde compositional techniques of the period, encompassing found sound manipulation, word experiments and voyages into abstract soundworlds. Annea Lockwood’s hypnotically adventurous “Tiger Balm” (1970) finds art imitating life, with the tiger as focus, amidst a hazy swirl of ebbing and flowing natural and electronic textures. David Behrman’s “Wave Train” (1966) is a wild ride through controlled feedback with piano wires as stimulus, and “English Phonemes” (1971) represents Arrigo Lora-Totino’s dizzying trip through reordered words and their dismantled components. Yet none of my categorizations begins to elucidate each work’s totality. What of the erotic episodes in “Tiger Balm,” and the growling airplane just before the translucent conclusion? What is to be made of the prophetic implications of Larry Austin’s multi-arched and spiked “Caritas” (1971), bristling with the energy and vitality of many “noise” experiments to come later? The set also affords glimpses into the early compositional lives of artists whose styles were still in development, as with Robert Ashley’s 1964 piece for tape and amplified voice, “The Wolfman.” There is a freedom in these sounds that cannot be categorized; the breadth and scope of the soundworlds here make this reissue essential listening for any devotee of adventurous music. Marc Medwin

Various Artists

Spectra: Guitar in the 21st Century Quiet Design CD

It’s still too early to make judgments on the present century of guitar music, but as its first decade draws to a close it’s nevertheless a good time to assess the state of the instrument. Producers Mike Vernusky and Cory Allen have done an admirable job in representing the breadth of current guitar sound-art in just eight tracks. The disc opens with Tetuzi Akiyama’s beautifully fragile “Three Small Pieces.” He may have made a splash playing Canned Heat rhythm riffs, but his delicate acoustic miniatures are wonderful. The record reaches from there across the world and into electric and processed playing, with most tracks previously unreleased. But what is most notable about the disc is the sequencing: like a good mix tape, the disc makes a single arc and a singular argument, complete with a final one-two of summary statement and punchline. Drones and waves from Sebastien Roux, Mike Vernusky and Duane Pitre, along with Allen himself, lead to the haunted calliope of Istanbul-based Erdem Helvacioglu’s “The End of the World.”

The penultimate spot is given to an excerpt from Keith Rowe’s solo realization of Cornelius Cardew’s Treatise; it’s a quiet and appropriate nod to the unspoken basis of the preceding tracks in AMM’s groundbreaking work. But the final piece makes for an unexpected epilogue. The reclusive singer Jandek might not usually find himself in such company, but his bluesy, eight-minute “The World Stops” (from his 2002 record I Threw You Away) neatly ties the album back to some notable guitar music of the previous century. Kurt Gottschalk

Peter Walker

Long Lost Tapes 1970 Tompkins Square CD

It’s somehow surprising that a fullfledged folk-jazz improv scene didn’t really take off in the late 1960s. There are American free-folk-raga one-offs, though, like the Seventh Sons’ 4 A.M. at Frank’s (ESP) and this previously unissued recording by American raga

guitarist Peter Walker. Walker had recorded previously for Vanguard with flutist Jeremy Steig, among others (1967’s excellent Rainy Day Raga). Here he’s joined on six cuts by tabla-player Badal Roy, reedmen Mark Whitecage and Perry Robinson, drummer Maruga Booker and a bassist named Rishi. Compared to the Vanguard dates, this session is much meatier—Walker is plugged in for the most part, and consistently backed with pliant electric bass and Booker’s taut, lickety-split polyrhythms. The guitarist’s attack is extremely direct and while his playing style is filled with fine latticework, there’s a fuzzed-out undertow and metallic edge that gives the recording teeth. It’s not unlike some of Amancio D’Silva’s work with Cosmic Eye, albeit with a less crisp sense of pacing. There’s a cloudy sensibility throughout “Meditation Blues”: Walker wallows in the Big Muddy as cymbals and tabla eddy around him.

Flute and clarinet are mostly used as tonal shading rather than in clear dialog with guitar or rhythm, providing a lighter counterbalance to the guitarist’s woolly musings. “City Pulse” is a show for Maruga’s drums, taking a cue from Robert (Cleve) Pozar’s work with Bill Dixon on Intents and Purposes and superimposing an incredibly fast waltz atop string drone. Walker seems to have overdubbed tambura on “102nd Psalm,” giving it a texture similar to his album Second Poem to Karmela.

Mumbled vocals and wind flourishes drift atop a locked-in 7/8, which provides driving surge to an intensely atmospheric record. Clifford Allen

David S. Ware Shakti

AUM Fidelity CD

Two years after disbanding what can only be called his classic quartet, saxophonist David S. Ware is once again at the helm of an extraordinarily sympathetic and powerful group.

The new band, with guitarist Joe Morris, drummer Warren Smith, and bassist William Parker (the only holdover from the previous group), sounds significantly different from what Ware’s done before, but it still provides plenty of support and inspiration. Morris has a lighter texture

and less dense sound than pianist Matthew Shipp, giving the music an airier feel, and he swings in a rather different way. On “Antidromic” and “Crossing Samsara,” he sails in and around Smith’s bed of rhythm and color, creating his own tension and release that works with and against the underlying pulse. Smith, a more polyrhythmic player than former drum chair occupant Guillermo Brown, fills the canvas of each tune with different colors. As always, Parker’s contrapuntal lines and emotional fervency are key elements: when he and Morris interweave closely on “Nataraj,” they propel the music in ways that the saxophonist has never explored before. Ware, as usual, has a voice of thunder on his instrument, yet there’s great humility in his playing. “Nataraj” and “Namah” are more songs of praise than songs of longing, and the three-part “Shakti” is a devotional offering rather than a sermon. It’s good to hear Ware step out in fresh directions—and this group is capable of going in whatever direction he wants. Ed Hazell

Warsaw Village Band Infinity Barbès CD

As on previous records, Warsaw Village Band continues to play music firmly rooted in Poland’s traditional folk music while adding touches from a bewildering variety of other genres, including hip-hop, blues, klezmer and Swedish polska. The group’s guiding light, Wojtek Krzak, says he called this record Infinity because he’s moving the band’s music into the future.

Truth be told, the music on Warsaw Village Band’s 2004 album Uprooting sounded equally progressive.

Both records make a strong case for the living power of a musical style that might seem antiquated on first glance. When Warsaw Village Band kicks up a storm with its churning fiddles, it has all the power of a rock band at full blast. And whether the vocals are shouted or whispered, they have a penetrating quality reminiscent of Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares.

Most of the attempts here to blend Polish folk with other genres are fairly effective. Tomek Kukurba adds a

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Middle Eastern vocal melody to the enchanting “1.5 h,” while pizzicato strings and a hip-hop turntable merge with surprising results on “Skip Funk.”

Even “Little Baby Blues,” an effort at James Brown-style soul, is not as awkward as one might fear. But all these experiments pale beside the strength of Warsaw Village Band’s core music. The band is proving that the best way to move its music into future is to keep writing vigorous new songs that draw on old traditions.

Robert Loerzel

William Winant Frank Gratkowski Chris Brown Wake

Red Toucan CD

Larry Ochs Miya Masaoka Peggy Lee Spiller Alley RogueArt CD

Over the last three decades, the Bay Area has fostered a particularly open environment for improvisation and collaboration. This is wholly due to the tireless efforts of countless individually-minded explorers: the members of Rova Saxophone Quartet, George Cremaschi, Tim Perkis, John Schott, and Philip Gelb, not to mention the nexus of musicians associated with Mills College, including Gino Robair, John Bischoff, William Winant, and Chris Brown. These two recent releases are excellent examples of the fine music coming out of this scene.

While the trio of percussionist William Winant, reed-player Frank Gratkowski, and pianist Chris Brown is of recent vintage, Gratkowski has been a regular visitor to the Bay Area since 2002. This music has roots that go back to the mid-1980s trio Room, which consisted of Winant, Brown and Larry Ochs (the three were also an integral part of Glenn Spearman’s Double Trio in the ’90s). Gratkowski fits particularly well with Winant and Brown, whether drawing on the rich, woody resonance of bass clarinet or emitting hard-edged sputters and cries on the alto sax. Brown takes a pointillist approach, moving between sharply struck notes and inside-piano activity, and makes use of electronic processing to further expand the timbral range. Winant adds an orchestral array of shimmering textures to the mix, playing vibraphone, tuned drums, cymbals, and gongs. Over the course of this live performance from 2007, the three move through a 25minute extended improvisation and four shorter pieces; each develops a sense of gathering cooperative structure, shifting from spare, quavering skeins of sound to agitated waves of intensity where electronics and piano clusters crash against skirling reeds and crackling percussion.

While Spiller Alley was recorded during a European tour in 2006, the trio of Larry Ochs, koto player Miya Masaoka, and cellist Peggy Lee has its roots in the Bay Area as well. Ochs, of course, is based there and Masaoka lived there for a number of years before relocating to New York. Peggy Lee, hailing from Vancouver, replaces the group’s original third member, Joan Jeanrenaud. The group was

originally created to explore Ochs’ compositions, and its instrumentation offers striking timbral contrasts: the koto’s percussive twang and bent notes, the cello’s tawny arco and walking pizzicato lines, and Ochs’ own rich tenor sax and strident sopranino.

Three compositions are framed by two collective improvisations. The opening “Nobody Knows” builds off of a plaintive theme, the instrumental lines cycling in and out of synch, while on the title-piece, flurries of activity are countered by sections of open calm. This disc is yet another example of the gripping projects Ochs has been putting together outside of Rova. Michael Rosenstein

Nate Wooley Fred Lonberg-Holm Jason Roebke

Throw Down Your Hammer and Sing Porter CD

Nate Wooley Paul Lytton David Grubbs

The Seven Storey Mountain Important CD

Trumpeter Nate Wooley‘s nuanced sound is an integral element of groups with musicians like Daniel Levin, Mary Halvorson, Matt Bauder, Adam Lane, Harris Eisenstadt, and Reuben Radding, just to name a few.

These two releases showcase some of the intriguing directions he’s been exploring lately.

Throw Down Your Hammer and Sing sounds like the title of a backporch folk session. But Wooley, cellist Fred Lonberg-Holm and bassist Jason Roebke have something else in mind.

This is the kind of intimate collective improvisation that freely draws on a broad palette of styles, textures, and timbres. Drones, buzzes, and microtonal detail are woven together, subverting any expected instrumental roles and making the most of the dark coloration of the two string instruments and whispering trumpet. On some pieces, the sounds float, the trio building a slowly coalescing density full of shifts and shimmers. But they’re not averse to more linear interaction: on other pieces Wooley’s clipped breaths, pinched and bent microtones, and fluttered notes sputter against percussive bass, flayed cello harmonics and electronic squiggles.

All of this is framed with a thoughtful sense of arc and form.

The Seven Storey Mountain is altogether different. This is the first installment of Wooley’s project combining graphic and traditionally notated scores, tape, and improvisation. This edition, recorded live at New York’s Festival of New Trumpet in 2006, combines Wooley’s amplified trumpet with Paul Lytton’s percussion and David Grubbs’ harmonium. Any sense of line has been stripped away, leaving fields of drone shot through with gradually modulating timbres and activity. Pure electronic tones combine with whispery trumpet, quavering harmonium, and Lytton’s subtle scuffs and scrapes. The 38-minute piece ebbs and flows, developing an internal sense of movement out of the juxtaposition of floating harmonium and the calligraphic gestures of

trumpet and percussion; it builds up to dense surges of low-end rumble and burred static, then subsides into an atmospheric hum. Wooley is due to record the next installment of the project with C. Spencer Yeh and Chris Corsano, and judging from this release, this will be a series well worth following. Michael Rosenstein

C. Spencer Yeh Paul Flaherty

NewYork Nuts and Boston Beans Important CD

John Wiese & C. Spencer Yeh Cincinnati Drone Disco CD

Though he’s best known for the work he's done under the Burning Star Core moniker, C. Spencer Yeh has lately been making more and more music under his own name. Cincinnati and New York Nuts and Boston Beans find Yeh improvising with musicians with whom he’s previously worked, though the ends and means of the collaborations are distinctly dissimilar. Yeh’s primary partners on each disc, John Wiese and Paul Flaherty, are musicians of rather different species, but each brings a sense of adventure that makes each improvisation an unpredictable, and usually satisfying, ride.

New York Nuts and Boston Beans pairs Yeh and Flaherty in their first duo recording, documenting two shows in the pair’s 2007 Northeast tour. Flaherty mans the tenor and alto saxophones, Yeh violin and voice, his improvisational tools of choice of late.

Neither man is prone to monotony, and the tones and timbres created by the duo are active and alive. The opening two tracks were recorded in Brooklyn. The first finds Yeh’s violin swooping, scraping, and scratching in response to Flaherty, who moves from bluesy bluster to fiery grit. On the second, Yeh gives himself more room, adding his abstract vocal stylings to the mix; the improvisation is perhaps less fluid and conversant, but the added diversity of sound is a plus. The last three tracks are in less impressive fidelity, and the addition of trumpeter Greg Kelley on the last two makes for a soupier mix, though the interplay between the musicians certainly becomes richer.

Cincinnati (the title indicates where it was recorded) finds Yeh with homefield advantage in a face-off with John Wiese. Using electronics, synthesizers, and voice, the pair create a series of highly abstract improvisations, each exploring a specific corner of aural alchemy. It’s decidedly nonlinear, but Cincinnati isn’t the kind of breakneck rollercoaster of hectic assemblage that Wiese in particular often favors.

Instead, the disc concentrates on short-lived glimpses into discrete sonic environments and explorations of particular techniques. What is perhaps most impressive about this oddball assortment of improvisations is the album’s seamless mix of the electronic and organic. “Mr. Northside” features Yeh’s elastic oral expulsions amidst a flurry of accompanying squeaks, bleeps, and whirls, a formula the duo returns to several times throughout

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the disc. At times, human and inhuman mesh almost indistinguishably: “Pink Pyramid’s” chorus of squishy pops and splats coalesces so fluidly one is never quite sure who’s doing what. Yeh and Wiese don’t always create the most sonorous of music, but Cincinnati is as intriguing as it is challenging, consistently idiosyncratic and inventive. Adam Strohm

zeitkratzer volksmusik zeitkratzer CD

Recorded live at the Donaufestival in Krems, Austria, on April 29, 2007, volksmusik (the “people’s music”) finds its inspiration in folk recordings from the Danube region, and as such is conspicuously different from other zeitkratzer releases. Despite its sources, the eleven pieces aren’t arrangements of traditional tunes but rather compositions by pianist/artistic director Reinhold Friedl (including a few co-credited to percussionist Maurice de Martin and violinist Burkhard Schlothauer). Not surprisingly, zeitkratzer treats the folk tradition with audacity, and the material here erupts with energy. “Batuta” opens with the lurch of a funeral march and strings that seem intent on mimicking the wail of tormented souls; but soon the tempo accelerates to breakneck levels, and the band sounds more like a wild pub band than anything else, the horns and strings violently colliding. Trumpets, clarinets, and bagpipes dance through the klezmer-like “Bouchimich” and thunderous “Sirba,” while “Hora” sways drunkenly between 5/4 and 7/8 meters. In “Picior,” de Martin leads a lively call-and-response before Hayden Chisholm’s sinuous bagpipe solo, and Schlothauer violently scrapes and flails his way through the swinging dance piece “Lirica.” More sober though no less extroverted is “Mountain,” where Franz Hautzinger’s trumpet brays against a string-drenched background.

The group also delivers a couple of vocal pieces (“Jodler” and “Holzlerruf”) with untrammeled panache.

It’s tempting to characterize volksmusik as an anomaly within the zeitkratzer discography, but in fact it’s simply another in an ongoing series of audacious recordings. In 2007, the Berlin ensemble successfully took on the seemingly impossible challenge of transcribing Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music into notated form (Asphodel’s definitive CD-DVD package even features Reed briefly sitting in on guitar), and they have also recently issued three electronics-themed collaborations with Carsten Nicolai, Terre Thaemlitz, and Keiji Haino. Nevertheless, anyone hearing volksmusik without some prior familiarity with zeitkratzer could come away with a rather skewed impression of this fearless and chameleonic ensemble. Ron Schepper

CORRECTIONS!

Raymond Ross' photo credit on page 27 of issue #53 should also have given his licensing agency, CST images. On page 77 of the same issue, David Bond's new record is released on the CIMPoL imprint, not CIMP as given. We regret the error and the omission!

SOUNDWATCH

Kurt Gottschalk turns on and tunes in for the season’s blockbuster video releases.

Bang on a Can All-Stars Europeans have generally been far better at documenting American jazz than outlets here at home, and in the digital age we are fortunate enough to see many of these recordings from the past come to market. Two recent surprises feature Coleman Hawkins and Count Basie in filmed concerts from the 1960s. Coleman Hawkins in Europe: London, Paris & Brussels (Disconform) features the tenor great with a band including Harry Edison, Benny Carter, Teddy Wilson, Oscar Peterson and Roy Eldridge. While the announcer’s voice-over introductions and a bit of burn in the old black-and-white video can be seen as either a brief distraction or a bit of period charm, the performances are strong, the audio quite good and the camera work excellent. It’s a treat to see such an all-star band (over two hours of footage) in proper theaters with clearly appreciative (and polite and well-dressed) audiences. Live in Stockholm and Berlin (Impro-Jazz) is less exciting but still a rare document. Basie's big band runs through two standard sets, with a fair bit of repetition, the show-stealer being Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis’s “Cherokee.” The early video stock is worse here by far, and if both artists were seen as past their primes in the ’60s, it’s the Basie band that shows it.

Fortunately, there are filmmakers in Europe documenting native improvisers as well. Christine Baudillon’s Basse Continue (Hors-œil Editions) is an excellent, two-and-ahalf hour documentary about the exceptional French bassist Jöelle Léandre. There is plenty of performance footage, solo and with Fred Frith, Lauren Newton, Barre Phillips, India Cooke, George Lewis and others, as well as a rare composed quartet. There’s an enormous value to seeing Léandre perform, live or on video; the sheer amount of music that emanates from her double bass and her huge singing voice is something to witness. But there is also considerable interview footage (in English) where her improvised ruminations come off as dramatic and intriguing as her music.

The online arts site CultureCatch (www.culturecatch.com) has been filming private salon-style con-

certs and making them available for paid download, and a solo baby grand performance by Matthew Shipp shows a remarkable effort on the part of their production team. The 45-minute Mysterious Principle (in m4v format) is intimate and beautifully recorded, both audio and video, with some shots so strikingly close that the viewer feels intrusive just watching it.

Shipp is at his best as a solo performer, and here he mixes melodious, pastoral passages with his heavy, maddening repetitions and flurries of open exploration, interpolating such standards as “My Funny Valentine,” “Someday My Prince Will Come” and “Summertime” into the wide-ranging mix.

The Bang on a Can All Stars performed their chamber realization of Brian Eno’s classic ambient electronic work Music for Airports at the 1999 Holland Festival with visual accompaniment by filmmaker Frank Scheffer. The music and film are now paired on the Medici Arts release of Airports to beautiful effect.

Scheffer’s extremely out-of-focus scenes of travelers slowly moving through an airport match the music perfectly, depicting mythically non-harried crowds and reflecting Eno’s prescriptive intent for the work.

Also included is Scheffer’s In the Ocean, an hourlong documentary about the interdependent relationships among American and European composers, including interviews with Bang on a Can members, Eno, Louis Andriessen and Steve Reich. Composer Phill Niblock’s films reflect his extended, drone-based music in a very opposite way, and a full three-and-ahalf hours are included on The Movement of People Working (Extreme). Unlike the Eno / Scheffer pairing, the impact of Niblock’s film and soundtrack comes from the unlikely juxtapositions. The 16mm films, shot between 1974 and 1985 in Peru, Mexico, Hong Kong and Hungary, show people toiling at manual labor — farming, fishing, weaving, packing goods — but gradually come to seem like strange dances against the rich, trance-like music, performed on cello, bassoon, clarinet and accordion.

Colorfield Variations (Line) matches minimalist electronic music to digital imagery made in tribute to the Color Field painters of the 1950s. Like those painters, the artists here (almost all providing both audio and video) work with color itself as the subject. As a result, the screen is bathed in slowly evolving schemes of hue through the course of the 90-minute program, which was originally created for the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, curated by sound artist Richard Chartier. Within the concept, however, the 13 pieces vary considerably: Steve Roden’s contribution is warm and sensual, like a nonfigurative figure study; Bas van Koolwuk creates a tense sequence of shifting test patterns; Stephen Mathieu’s rapidly shifting video lines betray the gradual swell of his music; Chris Carter and Cosey Fanni Tutti create a sort of sunset to deep green dreamscape; and Tina Frank and General Magic make a sort of 3-D video game explosion.

All-star charity concerts and unplugged greatest hits have become commonplace, but when Monty Python’s John Cleese teamed up with Amnesty International in 1979 for a benefit show, it was a new model for fundraising. The resulting album, The Secret Policeman’s Ball, was a valued oddity for rock fans coming of age in the late ’70s and early ’80s, with music by Pete Townsend, Tom Robinson and John Williams along with comedy bits by Python, Beyond the Fringe and others. The follow-up, The Secret Policeman’s Other Ball, went a bit bigger scale, with plugged-in performances by Jeff Beck, Eric Clapton, Phil Collins and Sting. The films of those two, and the two increasingly populist concerts that followed, as well as a 1976 Cleese/Amnesty comedy show called Pleasure at Her Majesty’s are all included in the 3 DVD set The Secret Policeman’s Balls (Shout Factory), along with making-of documentaries and a few unused clips (Townsend’s solo version of “Drowned” being the prize bit). While it was the music that initially gained the albums notice, the comedy bits (Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Rowan Atkinson and the Ab-Fab women) overshadow much of the music (Kate Bush, Jackson Browne and Joan Armatrading populate the later installments). All in all there’s plenty worthwhile, and some to skip over.

Two documentaries about pappies of heavy music are seeing DVD release. Lust for Life (ABC Entertainment) was filmed in 1986, when Iggy Pop was enjoying a popular, if not artistic, high with his album Blah Blah Blah and single “Real Wild Child.” Since the reformation of The Stooges and guitarist Ron Asheton’s death, there has been a fair bit of Iggy vid floating around, but it’s always strangely compelling to hear the man talk about himself. The documentary, however, is mostly historic, and features great footage of Asheton giving a tour of the band’s Michigan origins along with bits of vintage Stooges concert footage. It’s not a high-budget production, but it’s a fun watch. There’s nothing fun about watching GG Allin, although those who can stomach the pissing and anal insertions may find it even more compelling than Iggy On Iggy. Todd Phillips’ 1994 Hated: GG Allin and the Murder Junkies is the definitive telling of Allin’s die-young-stay-ugly story. It speaks to Allin’s legacy how little music is actually in the film (although there are some full-song bonus clips on MVD’s new issue of the film). Instead the star is seen hilariously commanding an audience to disrobe and uncomfortably attacking a woman during his “spoken word” appearances. It’s a tough subject, but Phillips (who went on to make such Hollywood comedies as Road Trip, Old School and Starsky & Hutch) turned out a good, if hard to watch, documentary. ✹

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

Unanimated are the metal equivalent of OGs. On In the Light of Darkness (Regain), they nonchalantly show off the style that distinguished them approximately 15 years ago, a blend of the kind of melodic death now so ubiquitous and, on tunes like “The Endless Beyond,” some of the theatrics (both instrumental and, especially, vocal) from black metal. The “blasphemous” lyrics are tiresome (“Serpent’s Curse” may sport the purplest prose), but who listens to the lyrics anyways? The band is good and unpretentious, not simply relying on sheer sonic assault but often—as on “Enemy of the Sun”—downshifting into the kind of “black and roll” grooves beloved by Entombed fans.

Gnaw plays seriously intense noise, blackened, razed, incinerated, choose your adjective. My promo came in a blank white sleeve, with only track titles, but I knew instantly that this was Alan Dubin, whose genuinely anguished howl is familiar to anyone who was affected by Khanate (and how could you not be?). This Face (Conspiracy) is the sound of abjection, forged along with Jamie Sykes of Burning Witch and various vets of New York industrial music and sound collage. Brian Beatrice’s sound environments are key here, giving this already malevolent music—sometimes pulse-driven, more often clouds of noise—a claustrophobic feel, pressing in on you relentlessly. It’s particularly ominous on “Ghosted,” where one feels abandoned in the abyss of space. Elsewhere, things are more pressing and direct. “Feelers” delivers its nasty hissingsteam vocals and sonic miasma atop an onrush of tribal drumming, while “Shard” possesses the frightening squall of early Swans and “BYF (Reprise)” the eerie menace of basement black metal.

Even more versed in the experience of abjection is Pittsburgh duo Human Quena Orchestra, whose The Politics of the Irredeemable (Crucial Blast) is a pretty stunning record.

Their basic sonic elements are huge amp rattle, low-end metallic percussion that recalls Z’ev, and massively growling distorted bass. The hour-long album moves seamlessly through several tracks whose titles—“Progress,” “Mores 1–2,” “Aspiration,” “Denial 1–2”—stand in bitterly ironic contrast to the malevolent feel of the music. The high-end feedback and midrange swells strain from the vertiginous bottom end, and are inevitably pulled back under. The nasty shrieks (very much like Dubin, above) seem to protest this endless cycle, as the sound relentlessly piles on, summoning images of thudding machines drilling into permafrost, endless grind, sheer hellish miasma. It’s brilliant stuff, agonizingly slow and grinding doom—but there’s enormous textural and dynamic range, even as the overall effect is like having your face ground into a brick wall.

Khors is technically a Ukrainian black metal band, but on Mysticism (Paragon) they sound as indebted to Disintegration-era Cure as to Darkthrone. They use keyboards in a slightly less cornball way than one often encounters in this subgenre of ambient gloomy black metal.

But the songs themselves are fairly indistinct, made up of a lot of simple pedal points and

endless riffing, with growled lines like “In the soul of the wolf” and so forth. Some songs like “Winterfall” make effective use of simplicity and repetition (ditto for the title track, with excellent guitar solos). And “Pagan Scars” is moody in just the right sense. But for the real deal in this vein, you’d be better off with Agalloch or Wolves in the Throne Room.

Speaking of Wolves in the Throne Room, whether or not they plowed this particular furrow in new American black metal or whether they simply occupy it, it’s a damn familiar template. Like other pagan black metal bands, and even like reinvented outfits such as Nachtmystium, this Pac NW trio is continually searching for that sweet spot where the sheets of sound/blast beats of the ur-genre shade into neo-psych texture halfway between Growing and kindred spirits Agalloch. On Black Cascade (Southern Lord), they mostly find it. While the demon-mewl vocals wear damn thin at this point in the game, the band can still impress (as much as the Pitchfork celebration of all things Southern Lord makes me gag, this band remains strong). The four tracks are lengthy and insistently immune to variation for the most part, treading willfully in Burzum/Darkthrone territory. When there is a variation in dynamic or structure (or, even more rarely, harmony, as on “Ahrimanic Trance”) it’s all the more effective. And this can happen either in the slow, ponderous, breakdown-y sections or in the big druggy swirls that well up regularly (especially effective at the end of “Ex Cathedra,” which cues up a monster riff). Pretty good.

I don’t know why Orcustus’s eponymous debut (Southern Lord) took over five years to record. That is to say, it’s a more or less by-thenumbers Norwegian black metal album and shouldn’t reasonably have taken so long. Blast beats and repeated shards of noise? Check.

Dingy basement production? Got it. Rasping demon vocals? Singer Taipan has that down.

“Menacing” song titles? Look no further than “Jesus Christ Patricide.” These genre trappings have never interested me, and more often than not have the opposite effect: they remind me of those dudes in high school who proclaimed that they could understand Nietzsche in a way the rest of “the herd” never would. When black metal is good, it’s because of the scope of its orchestral ambitions and its ability to fuse interesting, sickly psychedelia with the rage of metal. And in fairness, this record does have such moments. The band has what might be called real apostolic authority, coming from some of the scene’s most hallowed outfits and championed by tastemakers like Fenriz and Frost. They sound crisp on “Of Sophistry,” creating a cavernous sound wherein the skirling, riffing guitars (courtesy of Tormentor and Infernus from Gorgoroth) sound fantastic. Drummer Dirge Rep (from Enslaved) can play the kind of dense polyrhythms this music requires without overwhelming it, and he delivers a pretty cool grinding breakdown on “JCP.” But something about this feels formulaic and, well, safe.

How refreshing, then, to dig into the latest from moody French metallers Blut Aus Nord.

While they still play music that is probably best

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categorized as black metal, it’s promiscuous in its references (specifically partaking of the romantic melancholy of Paradise Lost or My Dying Bride) and has a robust love of noise.

Both categories are fully audible on the excellent Memoria Vetusta II/Dialogue with the Stars (Candlelight). While for years this band has been pursuing the same kind of avant metal muse that inspires, say, Sigh or Enslaved, their latest offering is the most harmonically rich I’ve heard from them: tunes like “The Cosmic Echoes of Non-Matter” have a real depth because of this, something that puts them on a par with Nile. They reach for the pure texture and ambient style of Cynic on “Translucent Body of Air.” And to my surprise, they sound somewhat nakedly emotional on “The Alcove of Angels,” which has some great harmonic movement. Another top-shelf record from these guys.

Moving away from such reflective climes is Chicago’s Lord Mantis, who—despite the somewhat silly name—play a very serious and intense brand of black metal that owes a lot to Chicago noise like Shellac and also to downtuned sludge metal. Spawning the Nephilim (Seventh Rule) wasn’t really even on my radar, but it grabbed me pretty quickly and might be the best of this column. The music has a seething quality to it that hits some of the same notes as Gnaw or Human Quena Orchestra (above). And it’s got a mean streak akin to Lair of the Minotaur. But for all their ferocity, this band takes care with its orchestration and arrangement in a way that favorably recalls recent High on Fire and lifts a lot of texture from contemporary American black metal (like fellow Chicagoans Nachtmystium, for example). This one’s still in my rotation and is highly recommended.

Finally, Wilmington, North Carolina’s Gollum strengthen the case that some of the best, most experimental American metal comes from the dirty South. On The Core (Rotten), they play with the technical proficiency of a group like Soilent Green but do so while using the sonics of Buzz’oven or Weedeater. They frequently combine quick-changing time sigs with dirty keyboard atmospherics (courtesy of the singer), most effectively on the standout “Blacksmith.” In this, they seem to be taking several cues from recent Kylesa (whose recent Prosthetic Tensions is marvelous) and Mastodon (much beloved, even if Crack the Skye is a bit too ... shiny), influences that are particularly audible on tracks like “Darkhouse.” On other tracks, they show promise of a different kind of ambition and synthesis: on “The Core,” for example, they careen from dirty early-Venom thrashing to spooky contemporary black metal; while on “Carven Bones,” they combine very precise riffing with a harmonically rich use of choral recordings. Every so often the playing is just a bit clunky—on “Schadenfreude,” for example—but it’s a rarity on this otherwise crisp record. RIP to drummer Hunter Holland. ✹

SMOKING THAT ROCK Ray Cummings gets down with messed-up modern rock.

Welcome back to Smoking That Rock. This issue’s edition is for the ladies. Let’s kick things off with a face-off between The Besties (formerly of Florida but now living in Brooklyn, like everyone else) and The Coathangers (Atlanta). Both bands recall the alt-rock 1990s, a time when you couldn’t bungle a drunken karate kick without accidentally taking down a member of an all-she (or mostly-she, anyway) rock band. Some of ’em were formidably dangerous—L7, Bikini Kill, and Hole, we’re pointedly not winking at y’all—but the vast majority were sloppy, just-for-the-Hell-of-it fly-bynighters or cuddlecore twee-popettes.

On Scramble (Suicide Squeeze), the Coathangers channel brats like Emily’s Sassy Lime and the Red Aunts, whose sole aim seemed to be idiocy-as-cuteness, while the Besties’ Home Free (Hugpatch) seems more in the Cub/Go Sailor! line of gushing, heartfelt, sappy twee pop. Neither group comes across as especially proficient or remarkable. In a way, the two bands represent both sides of the same twentysomething coin: trying to make desperate sense of a world they con’t con or mold into what they want it to be.

When, on “Stop Stomp Stompin’,” the Coathangers harangue a heavy-footed upstairs neighbor, they’re railing against the unswayable forces of inevitability and spinning their losing battle into a commodity; when the Besties celebrate the plusses and minuses of a hangout/space (“Lorimer 79”) they’re doing much the same, if in a much less acerbic way.

I’ve developed a theory about Cryptacize: the trio’s unspoken (and maybe unconscious) purpose is to force listeners to reconsider what they really want to get out of an indie-rock song. Where does the journey end; when does the destination begin? Debut Dig That Treasure stranded doily show-tune pop in puddles and puddles of white space, forefronting melodic and conceptual motifs. Sophomore album Mythomania (Asthmatic Kitty) does a more thorough job of coloring in the backgrounds, but—aside from the ravishing title track, essentially frontwoman Nedelle Torrisi’s killer audition tape for the Julie Andrews role in a Sound of Music remake—it still keeps us craning in to find their harmonic money shots; led through a beautifully appointed string of rooms with promises that a satchel of diamonds awaits us in the next.

What becomes clear, after spending a lot of time with Mythomania, is that the princess-cut gems are everywhere: set in the fixtures, the china, the overhead lamps.

The following trio of altered folk records are worth your attention and cash for different reasons. A Camp is the solo project of Nina Persson, who you may remember as the vocalist for ’90s Swedish chart-poppers The Cardigans; their best-known song was probably “Lovefool,” which was featured on the Romeo + Juliet soundtrack. I will now attempt to convey the awesomeness of Colonia (Reveal) by asking a bunch of questions. Who knew that Persson had such a twisted, sardonic sense of humor? Who knew she had a fascination with pre-20th-century mores and practices? Who knew that her instinct for hooks that snake around necks and constrict like boas remained so strong? Who knew that she had a taste for the sort of harsh ’70s reality that mope pop initially repulses but eventually ensnares? Joker’s Daughter, on the other hand, is geared thematically to people who get off on Lord of the Rings novels and Mary Timony records; on The Last Laugh, singer-songwriter Helena Costas and producer Danger Mouse (The Grey Album) weave an alternate universe of skipping stones, talking animals,

and trees that can walk with absolutely no irony or obtrusive studio muckery. It’s just an immersive, quietly charming headtrip. Matricaria (Important)—the debut from Anahita, a duo consisting of Espers’ Helena Espvall and Fursaxa’s Tara Burke—is one of those discs that begin, trail on and clatter about for a good bit like an epileptic man in one of U.S. artist Nick Cave’s Soundsuits, then conclude without undue ceremony.

(This sort of limbo is not uncharacteristic of Burke’s collaborations—Fursaxa recordings hew to loose structures and Espers to lysergically strong ones.) Matricaria is a passively received pleasure, likely improvised into being: operatic ascents and slides, bows meeting strings in jags and streaks, frets strummed insistently, and so on. Alternately, there’s the sense of being present at a Native American pow-wow, attending a séance at the top of hill on an especially blustery day, or wandering into a 3 a.m. avant-garde speakeasy performance. For 43-odd minutes, the very air is changed; when it’s over, something is slightly different.

Minneapolis singer-songwriter Anni Rossi is a curious case. Lyrically and sonically, there’s a half-finished feel to her tunes, as if titles were decided upon, then rough notes for verses jotted off-hand, then the barest of melodic shells fabricated, then off to the studio.

You’re introduced to Rockwell (4AD), and it’s like you’re meeting the idea or outline of a quirk avant-pop record; doesn’t help that the thing flashes by in less time than it takes to read the morning paper. And then it happens, unbidden: Rossi’s skeletal, post-Regina Spektor earworms take up residence in your gray matter, manifesting like jump-cut hiccups at the oddest junctures. Like, say, “Glaciers”; the inaugural lyric, set to the drowsy drawing of violin bows, is “This is about glaciers / This is about glaciers.” Then Rossi plays with it and teases out some decidedly frigid imagery (“I like freezer boxes, I like freezer units”) as the strings accrue steam and purpose, and suddenly we’re en route to something substantially corporeal, something almost accidentally sublime. She does this, with variations, nine more times on Rockwell. Every time, it’s a surprise.

The criterati are all supposed to go along with the har-har backstory joke about Condo Fucks being some sort of underappreciated legendary punk group with a long, storied history instead of just telling the truth—which is that Condo Fucks are Yo La Tengo incognito. The difference between the Condo Fucks and, say, the Foxboro Hot Tubs (Green Day, in actuality) is that the Fucks aren’t making an express point of being something they’re not, whereas the Tubs wrote moldy simulcrums of classic rock songs. Fuckbook (Matador), on the other hand, is basically just Georgia Hubley, Ira Kaplan, and James McNew tearing through a few of their favorite covers; it just sounds like Yo La Tengo screwing around and having fun. Given how carefully crafted (and frankly, boring) the band’s albums have been over the last couple of years, this is a wonderful development; even if one isn’t familiar with any of the songs (and I wasn’t, except for the Beach Boys’ “Shut Down”) the trio’s air of warm, worn intimacy and garage-fume brambling basically transforms them into Yo La Tengo songs anyway. The above probably strikes some of you as a lazy description, but if you and I were good friends, and you wanted me to describe it to you in a convincing way, I’d say something like “Just buy this record, okay? It’s solid, it smokes, and if you do, I will never try to force another indie-rock recommendation on you ever again.”

It was with great pleasure and surprise that I recently received a package from one Emily “Anonymous

Bosch” Collins of Landers, California. Emily is part of two arresting, amusingly-named projects: Brutal Poodle and Acidic Jews. The anti-packaging is refreshingly pre-WWW old school, with the Poodle droppings (two CD-Rs and a cassette) and the Acidic tab (one cassette) unadorned, song titles and minimal personnel scribbled in Sharpie, no contact info, no art whatsoever: back-to-basics, oh yeah.

Brutal Poodle’s 2xCD set Music to Crash Your Car By (no label) more than lives up to its name, dousing us with two-plus hours of experimental miscellany. There’s a little of everything on the menu: blink-and-miss-it scraps of wavelength rot, gratuitous plectrum-enabled abuse, soundchecked-amp assault, drum clinics that morph into hothouse sax solos that in turn fall victim to electronic knob-twiddling stress tests, 3 a.m. practicespace banalities—at one point, for example, someone’s vocal massacre of Dan Hill’s “Sometimes When We Touch” is transmuted into an anemic feedback screech. There are noisy, blinkered D.C. punk-esque sprints. There is a Beats-gone-improv-psychotic exchange about how the players are “laser-sharp, tonight.” There are effects-pedal-crutched guitar solos that flame out in less than a minute. There are sonic snapshots so primordial that the underlying means of creation is irrelevant and totally unguessable (cf. the Dead C, sometimes): the convulsively immobilizing thing itself is the point. There are no song titles. You’re advised to tuck into and cherish Crash’s rhymeless velocity, but maybe not all in one sitting, because doing so may actually cause you to crash your car. If there’s a criticism to be made here, it’s that there’s no sense of an arc, of directional intensity; Crash is determinedly scattershot, which, while it endears it to me on one level, makes it simultaneously difficult to embrace the way one might Yellow Swans’ Bring the Neon War Home or Burning Star Core albums generally.

Luft Waffle (no label) suggests that Brutal Poodle may have arrived at a similar conclusion; on this cassette, they’re definitely building towards something.

The feel here is more restrained, if still kinda random.

Lotsa tape-altered alchemy, spoken-word dreck, icky shuffling drones, and so forth; in spots I’m reminded of the work of the Jewelled Antler collective and the Finnish freak-folk commune-mafioso, though there’s a sinister, decaying tinge and a coherence to this that elevates it well above those points of reference.

Though a few “guest performers” are credited, Acidic Jews is a Collins solo project; her Clean Rites (No Label) cassette may be my favorite entry of the batch. This shit is downright ugly, nasty, and subIndustrial: samples procured honestly (and some less so) and rancid aural crud and splintered-tape sinew fed into a meat grinder, then wrapped and packaged for non-sale with meaningless titles like “Chewing My Teeth” and “Jupiter’s Jackhammer.” I have no idea whether Collins even touched a guitar or amp while making Rites; my guess—though I’m probably wrong—is that she spent a fuck of a lot of time knitting the whole together on a pair of tape decks, denaturing various sound sources into unrecognizable mulch, conjoining them, looping and backmasking various elements, just making a complete Manson Family murders crime-scene mess of an album. It’s like an Eric Copeland album’s snotty, sickening little sibling.

Listening to this is sort of like slowly sliding down a very long, very steep, very twisty slide clogged with cat corpses into a pool of boiling napalm; as such, this may be 2009’s best noise record that no-one will be able to locate. ✹

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THE GLOBAL BEAT

Peter Margasak travels the world in search of subversive sounds.

Daniela Dacorso

Márcio Local

It’s fairly astonishing that the music on Visions of Dawn (Far Out) sat in the can for 33 years, because this intimate session by Brazilian greats Joyce, Nana Vasconcelos, and Mauricio Maestro has “classic” written all over it. Cut in Paris in 1976 at a time when Joyce was just returning to making music (after a few years devoted to raising children), but before she landed in New York and began injecting jazz into her bossa nova, these gorgeous songs hark back to the gentle psych-folk she made in the early ’70s, particularly her eponymous 1972 masterpiece with Nelson Angelo. Maestro delivers gorgeous, sophisticated vocal harmonies with Joyce over the airy percussive patterns of Vasconcelos, and he alternates between bass and acoustic guitar to complement her accomplished, elegant guitar arpeggios; the result is simultaneously pretty, breezy, complex, and trippy.

The ’70s weigh pretty heavily on the impressive debut from Rio’s Márcio Local, Don Day Don Dree Don Don (Luaka Bop), namely in the form of a strong Jorge Ben influence. Around these parts that’s a good thing, and Local still imparts plenty of his own personality into this modern samba-soul jam, which was produced

by Mario Caldato Jr. Highly propulsive riffs on electric guitar and cavaquinho, tight horn charts, funky cuica workouts, and Local’s easy-going voice deliver eleven infectious marvels of polyrhythmic precision, indelible melody, and deeply soulful singing. When Local stretches the word “futebol” out into four or five syllables in the killer opener “Samba Sem Nenhum Problema,” proffering the last few in a magical falsetto, try not getting hooked.

Samba and bossa nova provide the roots in the music by São Paulo’s Romulo Fróes, but on his terrific new double CD No Chão Sem o Chão

(YB Brasil) the inventive, rock-leaning arrangements and the sharp use of distorted electric guitar set his music apart. New breed Samba-soul provocateur Curumin plays drums, a slew of guest singers make cameos (including Mariana Aydar, Nina Becker, and Andreia Dias), there’s some terrific brass arrangements, and Lanny Gordin, the secret weapon guitarist of Tropicalia, adds a few killer solos, but ultimately it’s Fróes who’s behind the lovely, often introspective melodies—delivered in an unassuming, conversational tone—and the ever-shifting instrumentation. Even though it goes down easy, there’s still an awful lot of music to digest here; a single-disc version might’ve been a good idea. But Fróes remains someone to watch.

Speaking of 2-CD sets, the innovative Brazilian producer, bassist, and member of the +2 crew Kassin has written and arranged forty original themes—some lush, some spare—for the Japanese animation program Michiko e Hatchin and Speedstar Records has released them in two separate volumes. A number of strong guest vocalists like rapper BNegão and samba vet Aurea Martins contribute, but most of the material is handled by players from Kassin’s rich, multi-stylistic axis. In fact, it’s almost as if he used the gig as a highly focused exercise in genre exploration: aside from the expected samba and bossa nova, we get surf guitar rock, old-school soul, hip-hop, disco, and slow jams, to say nothing of the salutes to lots of genrespecific soundtrack sounds, from Blaxploitation to Morricone-styled schmaltz. The music transcends its sprawling eclecticism as well as its functionality—which means it’s worth listening to on its own.

The same can be said for the wiggy tunes collected on The Sound of Wonder (Finders

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Keepers), a breathless glimpse into the heyday of Lollywood, Lahore, Pakistan’s overlooked sister to Bollywood. Judging from these 15 tracks and what the liner notes assert, Lollywood was more daring and strange than Bombay during the mid-’70s. While there’s a similar predilection toward wild stylistic mash-ups and mixed languages (Urdu, Punjab, English), this material embraces the future more wholeheartedly, with loads of synthesizers, electric guitar, and harddriving funk grooves. It’s crazy shit that’s seemingly worlds apart from what we see of Pakistan these days, but it’s also eminently listenable.

On Virasat (Sense World Music), his new album with tabla player Sandeep Das, the sitar maestro Shujaat Khan makes clear that his lineage from the Imdad Khan tradition hasn’t been diluted by his work in Ghazal, the excellent cross-cultural project with Iranian kemence player Kayhan Kalhor. Here he delves deep into the Raag Shyam Kalyan, coaxing gorgeous melodies from his instrument, unleashing rapid-fire flurries with a distinctly vocal quality, yet never disrupting the serenity of the performance, even in the high-velocity, syncopated jhor and jhalla sections of the raag.

Ali Ahmad Hussain Khan is one of the greatest living exponents of the shenai, a quadruple-reed instrument with a piercing, nasal tone, and on his excellent recent recording Shenai 2 (Sense World Music) he’s leading an ensemble that features two additional shenai players, providing a density that tempers the sharpness of the instrument; their interplay has a richly conversational quality, whether they’re working in unison or counterpoint. In addition to tabla there’s also a dukkad, another pair of drums rarely heard outside of shenai recitals; the surpeti, a harmonium-like drone producer; and the swar mandal, a harp-like instrument with 36 strings. But ultimately the focal point of the ensemble’s performance of Raag Gorakh Kalyan is Khan’s inspired improvisation, tearing apart each motif with the focus and imagination of Sonny Rollins.

Syria’s Waed Bouhassoun hit a wall during college that might’ve prevented the stunning performance captured on her recent album A Voice for Love (Institut du Monde Arabe) from ever being made. She failed her singing exam at the end of her first year at the Conservatoire of Music in Damascus, suffering from a bad cold and throat infection. The school only taught Western opera, not the Arabic vocal music she grew up with, and so she was forced to choose another instrument or give up. Bouhassoun picked the oud, which she had played as a youngster, and which was one of only two Arabic instruments offered at the school. It wasn’t until several years later, after she graduated, that she sang in public. While doing a musical in 2004 she was asked to sing, and that brief performance set her free. This stunning program of traditional Arabic songs features only her voice and oud on most of the pieces, for a recital of astonishing purity and intensity.

Dioba (Sterns) is the third and final installment in a series of double CD anthologies chronicling the golden era of Mali’s Rail Band, 1970–1983. The bizarre and frustrating problem

with the project is that the music hasn’t been presented chronologically; on each volume the tunes bounce around from era to era. Also, aside from a single page of brief track annotations, the liner notes are the same in each volume. That said, this music is too fantastic to ignore. With singers like Salif Keita and Mory Kante and the guitarist Djelimady Tounkara— who still leads the band today—the Rail Band established itself as one of the country’s genuine treasures, loosely taking their cue from the post-independence explosion of homegrown originality in neighboring Guinea.

Pushing Guinean traditions into the present is Ba Cissoko, although not as much as the hype-makers have suggested. The group’s third album Séno (Sterns) is another keeper, but the judicious use of electric guitar, and even more sparing use of amplified kora, arrive more or less as polite accents rather than paradigm-shifting bombs. The music’s Mandingo roots remain strong, and rightly so. Group leader Kimintan “Ba” Cissoko is a superb vocalist and his lovely songs ripple with sweet vocal harmonies and the fluid, cascading kora patterns of the leader and Sékou Kouyaté, and while the occasional distorted string excursions add some excitement and tension, they wisely avoid upsetting the cart with them.

Outside of Cape Verde it seems like the singer Cesaria Evora launched her career in the early ’90s, but she has been a treasure on the islands for decades, even if she was little more than a local attraction for much of her career. Radio Mindelo (Lusafrica) captures some of her earliest recordings going back to the early ’60s—the extensive liner notes are a little fuzzy on exact dates. These sessions, organized

by Radio Barlavento of the titular city, were conducted at the height of the coladera craze, a lilting dance style. The music is livelier and less melancholy than the mornas that Evora—the Barefoot Diva—has become famous for singing, and her voice reveals a much lighter tone that her modern recordings. On the other hand, I think there’s a depth and richness in her current work that’s missing here. Still, it’s fascinating stuff and the beautiful packaging makes finding a CD copy worth the effort.

The Belgian producer Vincent Kenis seems to have the golden touch for contemporary African music; a few years ago he foisted Konono No. 1 on an unsuspecting world and he’s back with the Congo’s Staff Benda Bilili, a crew of paraplegic street musicians living on the grounds of Kinshasa’s zoological gardens. As heard on their fantastic debut album Très Très Fort (Crammed Discs), their music isn’t all that unconventional, and a track like “Je T’Aime” clearly borrows from the melodic songbook of Franco. There are beautiful harmony vocals, loping grooves, and scrappy guitar work. What makes it all special is an elusive, go-for-broke energy—a kind of irrepressible spirit that misfortune can breed—and the crazy sound of the satonge, an instrument invented and built by 17-year old Roger Landu, from a single guitar string and a tin can. I was a bit skeptical, but the music easily won me over.

I tend toward cynicism when old masters team up with young bucks, but the third installment of Strut’s Inspiration Information series is a stone cold instant classic. The brilliant Ethiopian pianist Mulatu Astatke, a guy who melded pentatonic soul with jazz language back in the ’70s, and England’s heady post-hip-hop instrumental crew The Heliocentrics find unlikely meeting points, jacking up Ethio gems with tough funky breaks and Sun Ra-style keyboard huzzah. A number of UK-based Ethiopian expats contribute and the tight horn charts were arranged by Joel Yennior of Boston’s Either Orchestra—who’ve worked with Astatke, Getatchew Mekuria, and Mahmoud Ahmed in recent years—resulting in otherworldly jams that place familiar themes in a new and wonderfully trippy context. ✹

"I would love to make music that no one has heard before."

Satoko Fujii New from Satoko Fujii, "a virtuoso piano improviser, an original composer and a bandleader who gets the best collaborators to deliver." (The Guardian)

Under the Water Avant keyboard summit with

Satoko Fujii + Myra Melford:

solos + duos.

Summer Suite Satoko Fujii Orchestra New York

Chun Natsuki Tamura and Satoko Fujii

www2s.biglobe.ne.jp/~Libra/ www.myspace.com/satokofujii

In concert and on over 50 albums as a leader or co-leader, the Tokyo resident synthesizes jazz, contemporary classical, avant-rock and Japanese folk music into an innovative music instantly recognizable as hers alone. Satoko Fujii, one of the most original voices in music today.

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BURNERS AND BACK FLIPS

Joel Calahan samples the season’s finest underground hip-hop releases

Brother Ali is a larger-than-life personality, an Autotune-esque organ track, “The Distance,” which is not uncommon in the rap game. But the featuring Tonedeff. That Deacon and Kno are persona of a brawny upper Midwestern Muslim better than most of the cats who put on this albino rapper somehow works as a trump card in mantle does count for something: but if this is as the battle arena, where Ali, né Jason Newman, far as they get, it really makes you wonder where forged his chatty flow. A new EP, The Truth Is they’re going.

Here (Rhymesayers), adds another register and Another virtuoso DJ with a penchant for mood to the Brother Ali repertory: the beats melodrama has dropped a solo record called The concocted by Ant are typically head-nodding, Decalogue (Babygrande). Stoupe the Enemy this time undergirding a pastiche of piano jazz, of Mankind hails from Philly and forms one half soul organ and other assorted smooth tune bites. of Jedi Mind Tricks. His trick is to sew together Many of the nine tracks are summer evening, dark, highly emotive sample loops of classical whiskey-sipping numbers, “Good Lord” and the symphonies, solo guitar or piano and/or foreigncloser “Begin Here” being particularly satisfying language folk music with spoken-word interpolain this respect. Brother Ali can really rip when tions during chorus and breakdown—imagine wants to (cf. “Whatcha Got” for our century’s a Preemo chop in a Michael Nyman soundtrack loudest banger), and “Philistine David” is a good and you’ve got it. The Decalogue is levels better exhibition, though there is a certain calm even than Jedi Mind Tricks, though, because Stoupe to this affair. This short EP points the way to a fall sounds better with a variety of MCs. Joell Ortiz release that will deliver much more. glitters on the salsa-backed “That’s Me” when Cage really became known as one of the he hogs the chorus himself, performing with a specks of dust that Eminem dusted off his shoulrelentlessness that matches Stoupe’s repetition der on The Slim Shady LP; now he plays up the move for move. personal bio angle, replete with drugs, parental Brazilian DJ Amon Tobin and UK producer conflict and a scramble up the indie label ladder, Doubleclick comprise Two Fingers, who join Britand, in his latest trick, a biopic going into producish MC Sway and two other guests for a rousing tion starring Shia LaBeouf. But he has settled dozen dancehall tracks on their self-titled release into a lap pace with the Def Jux crowd, and the (Paper Bag). It’s best to start with favorites on a leadoff track “Nothing Left to Say” on his latest party-pumping record like this: “That Girl” and record in four years, Depart From Me (Definitive “What You Know” are straight dance cuts, “KeJux), shows that he pairs well with El-P. The single man Rhythm” a nuanced folk rhythm track with “I Never Knew You,” though, is sheer bathos, its swaths of synths painted all over the top. Here’s tempo a greasy slowdown to give you just about a record that gives you the same thing twelve all the histrionic kvetching you could ever take. times, but it’s not the kind you want to listen to in “My finger aching for your doorbell like a random one sitting anyway. Or sitting at all. blog / Instead I lurk outside in the cold like an The somber rap record must be in season. abandoned dog” could be the worst lyric written Philly native Scanz, whose production debuted this side of Lil’ Dap. a year ago with the boasting title Prelude to a “The Coolax” is the half-cheesy title of a track Legacy, returns with an online freebie, The Baseon the new Luck-One and Dekk collaborament Chronicle, that holds a dark mood throughtion, Beautiful Music (Architect/Spread), and it out slow, contemplative pieces and solar flares. captures fairly well the tone of this very satisfyHe steals a DJ Kno sample for “Son Rise” and a ing seven-song EP. Electronic production has Black Milk sample for “The Future (Don’t Let It),” become de rigueur in contemporary hip-hop, but both good comparisons for these extremes of the Dekk does his synth-cum-sample work naturally; Scanz sound. Scanz cuts his samples ultra short in the electronic basslines glide in and out, adding Preemo style, and he really nails looped verses, touches of melodic by-play underneath the sprezespecially on “Let You Know,” the Perceptionists’ zatura of “Price Wit a Thousand” and noise wall guest track “The Gauntlet” and a stabbing horn of “When I Forget.” This EP has been labeled cut on “Who Reign Supreme?” feat. Reef the (accused of) retro rehashing, but where many Lost Cauze. There’s good promise. get caught straight jocking old-school tapes Mr. Lif revels in dissonance that would scare (so-called “hipster rap”), Luck One has a distinctly most other rappers away—“Collapse the Walls” of-the-moment flow, Dekk a generic fluidity that from his latest record I Heard It Today (Definitive bears little resemblance to ’80s tropes.

Jux) layers reggae drum tracks with an exaggeratThe CunninLynguists have yet to top their ed reverb effect that drowns out most of his (still 2003 masterpiece SouthernUnderground—two forceful) rhymes. “Gun Fight” is another tough full-lengths in the interim have only offered listen, though its laced police sound-effects over one banger, “Nothing to Give” from A Piece a regular tom-tom beat place it alongside a 7L of Strange—but they have nonetheless trotted production, difficult but with a noisy logic. Lif inout another collection of warmed-up leftovers, tends, he claims, to mimic social chaos with these Strange Journey Vol. 1 (QN5); I guess we can artistic choices, but this kind of political efficacy expect another volume in the near future. Like is tough to pull off, no matter how good you are. all their post-2003 production, the new single “What About Us?” and “The Sun” are worthy “Don’t Leave Me (When Winter Comes)” finds efforts regardless, and show that the sound is Kno in full melancholia, with haunted disembetter when Mr. Lif is pushed to the foreground. bodied vocals over minor-key arrangements The Belgian emcee Veence Hanao raps in and chugging drum fills. There are good tracks, French, and one line of his bio in machine translano doubt: the guest appearance by Slug fits tion reads, “The look of a free electron in its time, right in with Kno’s growing reputation as the lucid disenchantment, which took the gamble to heart-on-sleeve don of emo rap—there’s even go find the man behind the machine.” I agree 76 | SIGNAL to NOISE #54 WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM

with this. The pleasure of his new self-produced record Saint Idesbald (Believe) is its sample use of French chamber pop along with acid jazz, traits I associate with chanteuses like Françoise Hardy.

This is a cliché that reflects limited exposure to French music, but its strangeness is still real, and appealing. “Manège” is the single, and the album’s best song, composed of a toy piano sample and stuttering beat that glides smoothly despite Hanao’s abrupt vocal leaps. Hanao is a deeply personal lyricist, and has crafted an elegant instrumental track to match these colors.

DJ AmpLive created a minor stir when Radiohead’s management took legal action against his release of In Rainbows remixes, and managed to parlay the attention into free publicity for his longtime project with MC Zumbi, Zion I. The TakeOver (Gold Dust Media) is their fifth full-length record release since 2000, not including a sensible 2006 collaboration with fellow Bay Area rapper The Grouch. Lead single “Geek to the Beat” is just a taste of the high-volume energy they bring to the studio, a catchy dancehall-meets-Lil-Wayne beat with grinning vocal manipulations (and one of the year’s better music videos).

With the dedication to J Dilla on the first track of For Corners (Exponential), Diego Bernal attempts to chart his position among the many would-be successors of our dearly departed. His acknowledgement is not a heuristic but merely states what becomes obvious as the mixtape unfolds, that Bernal owes so much to Donuts that there’s little room for speaking with his own voice. But I’m more interested in where Bernal diverges—he smooths out the mix of disparate elements to avoid the lack of cohesiveness that always stuck in my craw with Dilla, and he doesn’t mind choosing similar-sounding samples. He isn’t as brave as J Dilla, but he isn’t as foolish either.

Steven Ellison (aka Flying Lotus) has been making hay over the press for last year’s instant classic Los Angeles. The latest project, Whole Wide World, is a rare MC collaboration with Stones Throw’s Declaime, a slow pair of tracks with shuffling electronic kicks and snare claps.

FlyLo flicks across samples like he’s changing radio stations with a broken tuner—these interpolations are classic crooning, Brazilian marimba and Latin-tinged jazz, a carefully-curated global fusion that expands our horizon of attention, but unfortunately beyond what any emcee, including Declaime, has to offer.

The Grouch and Eligh have by now, with the release of Say G&E! (Legendary Music), reached a creative synergy that seemed distant on their first duo joint in 2000, G & E Music, Vol. 1 & 2. Eligh hit an apex in 2006 with The Brothers Grime, and he brings this momentum to tracks like “Push On (Push Up)” and “I Know What You Feel,” where simple drum taps and spare keyboard riffs form the backdrop for Eligh’s signature monotone double-speed flow. The Grouch has his sing-song counterpoint to add, which stakes some purchase on the indie rock roots of songs like “Say G&E!” and “All In” (the former with a fun Flaming Lips sample). Living Legends has represented well over the past year, and despite the undeniable appeal to some of the posse tracks on group albums, these clique records are where their collective proves its collaborative energies. ✹

WORD MUSIC

Fred Cisterna reviews recent spoken word recordings

Poets and jazz musicians have collaborated on recording projects for at least half a century. At the tail-end of the 1950s, a number of iconic jazzand-poetry LPs were created. Langston Hughes and Charles Mingus got together for Weary Blues in 1958; the following year Jack Kerouac and pianist Steve Allen teamed up for Poetry for the Beat Generation. Shortly afterwards, Kerouac recorded Blues & Haikus with the saxophonists Zoot Sims and Al Cohn (Cohn also played piano on the session). And then there’s Kenneth Patchen Reads with Jazz in Canada, which captures the American proto-beat writer backed by a Vancouver jazz group in 1959. (It was re-released in 2004 by Locust, a Chicago-based label that has put out a number of interesting spoken word discs.)

In more recent years, the late Robert Creeley worked with his old pal, bassist Steve Swallow, and other musicians, to create 2001’s Have We Told You All You’d Thought to Know? and 2002’s The Way Out Is Via the Door. After the poet passed away in 2005, Swallow wrote music to accompany recordings of Creeley reading his work.

The result, 2006’s So There, finds Creeley backed

by Swallow, pianist Steve Kuhn, and the Cikada String Quartet; the album is one of the finest and most thoughtful examples of the genre.

Of course, any discussion of the intersection of jazz and poetry must include the work of poet, critic, and playwright Amiri Baraka. Baraka, formerly known as LeRoi Jones, might be best known for his controversial 1963 play Dutchman; two books of music criticism, Blues People: Negro Music in White America and Black Music; and a significant body of poetry. He was included in the landmark anthology The New American Poetry 1945–1960, edited by Donald Allen, and his jazz-and-poetry recordings include 1982’s New Music New Poetry, 1993’s Real Song, and 2004’s The Shani Project.

For Baraka, political commentary and jazz aesthetics are the same ball of wax. On Akendengue Suite, an album he recorded with the Italian ensemble Dinamitri Jazz Folklore in 2008, he recites (actually that word is way too tame for what Baraka does during his performances) four of his works while the band blows; the disc also includes five instrumentals. The opener, “Kongo Bells,” finds Baraka intoning “Speech,” a poem packed with African-American nomenclature, “nonsense” syllables (“hideehideehidee hee ooooohhhhhhhhhh”), and historical references. It’s a dazzling reading backed by tubular percussion, violin squiggles, and wah-wah guitar interjections. On “Akendengue,” Baraka reads/ shouts/sings “So the King Sold the Farmer” above insistent violin, slow-moving horns, and a steady beat, while the lush sounds of “The Slaves Singing” provide ambience for the poet’s “Why Don’t You Fight?” The album closes with “There Really Was an Africa,” over which Baraka gives voice to “The Stranger.” The band turns out a Fela-style groove to accompany this emotional and poetic history lesson.

Sound poetry, which exists in the gap between music and poetry, seems to be a permanently marginalized form. Much of it is/was released in hard-to-find limited editions that end up forgotten or fetch ridiculously high prices. So the release of Lily Greenham’s Lingual Music is a boon. The double-CD collects the audio work of this important sound poet, composer, performer, and visual artist, who passed away in 2001. (One of her lovely geometric artworks graces the album’s cover.) This excellent collection includes live performances, finished pieces, fragments, and soundtrack material, providing a broad portrait of Greenham’s oeuvre. Music—often Paddy Kingsland’s electronics or the Bob Downes Open Music Trio—frequently accompanies Greenham’s

language and sound adventures.

Born in Vienna, Greenham was obviously an expert interpreter of others’ sound poems: check out her performances of Bob Cobbing’s playful “ABC in Sound,” Elena Asins’s mysterious “Musica,” Vagn Steen’s tongue-twisting “Trykfjel,” and Gerhard Rühm’s chant-like “Gebet.”

But Greenham’s own compositions also impress.

“Relativity,” an electro-acoustic piece for six voices in stereo, was realized at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, a hotbed of creativity that was home to important and underrated figures such as Daphne Oram and Delia Derbyshire.

Words and phonemes inhabit different areas of the sound-space of this piece; Greenham’s deployment of the utterances imbues language with an exciting, almost palpable presence. (The work won an award at an electro-acoustic music contest in 1975 in Bourges.)

On “Seascape,” a tape piece from the late 1970s, the audio sources include water, Chinese gong, mandolin, metal ball, and electric guitar.

And it’s clear that Greenham was interested in animal as well as human vocalizations: she also incorporates the sounds of marine creatures into the composition’s intriguing soundscape. Kudos to Paradigm Discs for releasing these essential discs.

One good online source for listening to sound poetry—as well as music, poetry, and other offerings—is radiOM.org. It’s run by Other Minds, a San Francisco organization headed by composer and sound poet Charles Amirkhanian. (Other Minds also has a label and puts on festivals.) Search radiOM’s archives and you’ll discover work by Amirkhanian, Henri Chopin, Clark Coolidge, Anthony Gnazzo, Lars-Gunnar Bodin, Sten Hansen, and others. There are also a number of informative interviews. ✹

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REISSUE REDUX

Bill Meyer surveys the season’s key reissues.

Red Red Meat

Some records should never, ever be let out of print; their scarcity is evidence of evil forces at work. Or, in the case of The Monks’ Black Monk Time (Light in the Attic), maybe it’s the Good Lord Himself signaling displeasure with the music. He might have taken issue with a band of ex-GIs dressed as holy fathers who not only caroused with hookers on the Reeperbahn, but played in their places of business. But if He objected to what they played, that just proves that the Devil gets all the good tunes, because this record is as good as ’60s rock and roll gets. Other bands might have been more ambitious, trippy, or cute, but the Monks’ debut album perfectly fixes the forces of sexual frustration and anti-authoritarian opposition within a template bounded by insanely catchy melody, raw aggression, and unstoppable rhythm. Despite the past patronage of no less an industry honcho than Rick Rubin, this album has gone in and out of print during the CD age. This new version is splendidly packaged in an oversized gatefold sleeve with a bulky, picture-filled booklet that tells the band’s story. The CD lacks most of the live bonus material that was on the Infinite Zero reissue, but it includes their less agro but more commercially successful singles.

Light in the Attic has also introduced the USA to Serge Gainsbourg’s notorious Histoire de Melody Nelson, just 38 years late. Determined to top the controversy of his worldwide hit with young wife Jane Birkin, “Je t’aime... moi non plus,” he composed a concept album based on the Lolita story. Lacking a single, the album was a flop when it came out in 1971, but its audacious blend of libidinous slow grooves, distorted rock guitar, and massive orchestration turned it into crate-diggers’ gold. There are no bonus tracks, which might seem stingy since the record’s only 28 minutes

long, but anything extra might just disrupt the storyline. The swanky digipak and fat booklet, which will probably take you two spins of the disc to read through, should compensate. While we’re on the subject of lush groove music, let’s collectively tip our hats to the resuscitated Stax Records’ design team. Can’t say I have a lot of love for the music on Isaac Hayes’ Black Moses: two CDs of guilt-ridden I’ve-been-done-wrong slow disco is a lot to slog through. But the package, which folds out into a cross, is a marvelously realized monument to the artist’s self-pity.

Baby, You Can Get Your Gun! is as eager to please as Hayes’ record is self-obsessed. Originally recorded in 1986, it’s testimony to blind Crescent City guitarist Snooks Eaglin’s versatility. Justly renowned as a human jukebox, he tackles blues, gospel, surf, and funk with equal aplomb. It’s all delivered with taking-care-of-business briskness and sharp guitar work that kind of makes you wish he were more of a show-off. The record has been out of the racks long enough for older CDs to trade for $90; this new digipak version from Hepcat will be much easier on your wallet.

England’s Mighty Baby was a quintet of exMod studio rats whose facile jamming established them as a significant live attraction in the early ’70s, but they never broke through to a mass audience. Nowadays they’re barely remembered, if at all, as the guys who converted Richard Thompson to Islam. If he had, in turn, converted them to parsimony, it would have been a fair exchange; there’s no denying their chops on Live at the Attic (Sunbeam), especially on the opening number “Now You See It,” where twined guitars and darting flute bring to mind a jazzier Grateful Dead c. 1971. But they don’t know when to quit.

However, if your taste in ’70s revivalism runs to

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such loquacious fare, you’ll want to get this version rather than the earlier CD-R from Rolled Gold. Also almost forgotten, the Detroit power trio Death has gotten a welcome resurrection courtesy of Drag City. Inspired by the MC5, they played dynamic, pissed-off, high-energy rock that no one in 1974 was ready to see coming from three black guys.

Hearing was another matter; Motor City radio stations played their sole 7" without any payola prompting. This CD, which combines that single with five previously unheard tunes, situates them alongside the Monks in the lineage of undeservedly under-recognized pre-punk punks.

San Francisco’s Flipper has certainly gotten enough recognition—they’ve been toasted as an influence by the Melvins and Nirvana, whose Krist Novocelic has spent time in a latter-day version of the band and penned the notes to this reissue of their 1981 debut Generic Flipper (Water).

Slow as sludge and twice as heavy, they were the anti-hardcore hardcore band that was more adventurous, if no more thoughtful, than the rest of their loud-fast-rules cohort. Towering bass, trashcompactor guitar, ridiculous production touches, and seven-word, seven-minute-long songs; what’s not to love? Water has put out three other ’80s releases, of which Public Flipper Limited deserves special notice. Culled from four years of shows across the country, it’s a grimy document of a slowmotion train wreck in all its inebriated, audiencebaiting, self-destructive glory.

It’s hard to think of a band less like Flipper than the German Krautrock band Cluster. Clean and precise, their synthetic odysseys were as open to possibility as Flipper’s dirges were closed to anything beyond getting wasted and pissing people off. It’s kind of funny that they share a label.

Grosses Wasser (Water) catches Cluster in 1979,

near the end of an intense decade in which the duo evolved from exploratory space merchants to skilled beat scientists, were toasted by David Bowie, and collaborated with Brian Eno and Neu’s Michael Rother, all without losing their fundamental commitment to improvisation. Coming out the other end of the ’70s, they seem more than ever resolved to enact unemphatic but elegant simplicity, then balance it with contemplative drift. This version sounds much crisper than the Gyroscope edition that was released a decade back, and it’s nice to have a booklet instead of one square card.

Balance be damned, pure drift is Stars of the Lid’s thing. They’ve got credibility, an audience, and the resources to access strings and nice pianos now, but I reckon they were never better than in their early years, when they had to make do with guitars and a four-track cassette recorder.

Their first album Music for Nitrous Oxide (Sedimental) has never been out of print, but for the fifteenth anniversary of its release it has been given a sonic and graphic facelift. What sets early SOTL apart from most ambient fare is twofold: the duo’s willingness to introduce a bit of humanizing grit, mostly by dropping quizzical samples of TV dialogue into the mix, and the psychedelic aura that surrounds their music.

Reissues giveth and they taketh away; you get a bit of both with the return of Red Red Meat’s Bunny Gets Paid (Sub Pop). Originally a single CD, the revenant version is a double, fattened with an extra CD of 7" and demo tracks. But disc one, the album proper, is over a minute shorter than the original. Most of that comes from surgery performed on opening track “Carpet of Horses” to remove a slide guitar prologue. It’s not essential, but I miss it anyway. “Idiot Sun,” the record’s single, gets faded out ten seconds early.

Paradoxically, both album versions are shorter than the single version. Excisions aside, this is a record to hear if you’ve cottoned to Califone’s opaque blues poetry, since the two bands have essentially the same personnel. The Sun City Girls do their pruning with a machete on Napoleon & Josephine (Abduction). Rather than simply plunk the Three Fake Female Orgasms double 7" and its contemporary compilation tracks onto a CD, they’ve mixed bits of previously released ephemera with oodles of stuff sprung from the vaults to assemble an hour-long set of Girls Gone Mad. This is a whole record of just what bugged a lot of people about the band; it’s openly antagonistic, brazenly offensive, and not so much a set of music (most of it’s spoken-word anyway) as an extended joke intended to shake the listener out of their sleepy acceptance of consensus reality. You may like it, you may hate it, but you will not leave your encounter with it unchanged.

Schoolmap is a relatively new label co-operated by Italian musician Giuseppe Ielasi. On his old label Fringes he alternately unearthed music dear to him and released new efforts, and Schoolmap seems to be following suit. Cholagogues,

by Nestor Figueras, David Toop, and Paul Burwell, originally came out on Bead Records in 1977, which was not a great year for the visibility of English improv. The original vinyl’s label illustrations were appropriated from Tibetan shamanic and Scandinavian Bronze Age art. Reproduced inside the CD’s booklet, they give clues to the trio’s motives; with its flurries of flute and stark metallic strikes, this feels more like ceremony than performance.

Also on the ceremonial side is Ronnie Boykins’ The Will Come, Is Now (ESP). Ever since ZYX put out a version with one song missing I have to ask of each successive reissue—is it complete? This one is, thank goodness. The main differences between this version and the preceding Abraxas one are cosmetic: paler scanned digipak vs. jewel box, color disc image instead of silver and black. The mastering job is indistinguishable from Abraxas’s.

So the main thing to know is that if you are a fan of ’60s Sun Ra and you haven’t heard this disc, you should check it out. Boykins played bass in the Arkestra from its Chicago beginnings until about 1970, and Ra’s influence on Boykins’ composing

(or is it the other way around?) is palpable. None of the four horn players is a John Gilmore or Marshall Allen, but the Astro-Afro vibe is rich nonetheless.

Now that ESP’s original owner Bernard Stollman is in the driver’s seat, the label is putting out some of the obscurities that the licensees avoided. Records like HAR-YOU Percussion Group’s Sounds of the Ghetto Youth, which is pretty much what the title states—a Harlem community center’s Latin band. The amazing thing is that they’re pretty hot, considering it’s the work of a no-name bunch of kids playing their own stuff.

This set, like a few other recent ESPs, features a recent interview with bandleader Montego Joe—fortunately they planted this one at the end of the record.

For a record with plenty of names, look no farther than Anthony Williams’ Spring (Blue Note).

This is basically the Miles Davis Quintet with Sam Rivers and Gary Peacock instead of Miles and Ron Carter, and with Tony writing all the music. It’s a bit more intentionally on the edge than anything Miles was doing in ’65, but it has the same multidirectional potentiality that band specialized in.

The Rudy Van Gelder remastering tightens and brightens the focus compared to the rather fusty 1987 version.

Williams is but one factor in the success of the rather splendid Jackie McLean album One Step Beyond. It features trombonist Grachan Moncur III matching McLean dodge for dodge and handling half the writing, Bobby Hutcherson comping on vibes like a man with X-ray eyes, and bassist Eddie Khan doing more than just keeping up. This record dates from 1963, a time when McLean was eager to bridge the spirited hard bop of the ’50s with New Thing freedom and compositional rigor. It succeeds.

The one thing better than Moncur writing half the tunes is Moncur writing all the tunes. Weak title aside, Some Other Stuff is top-drawer.

Featuring the same Miles-men as Spring, it takes a different tack; instead of putting the focus on the playing, the players rise to the demands of episodic, evocative compositions that are never just excuses to solo. Which isn’t to say that there aren’t any; I’m especially fond of Wayne Shorter’s poetic blues-on-the-brink turn on “Gnostic.”

The RVG series also has Blue Note’s populist side covered. Grant Green’s Grant’s First Stand and Baby Face Willette’s Stop and Listen each feature the same trio—Green on guitar, Willette on organ, and Ben Dixon on drums—and convey the same feeling of steam coming out from around the pot lid. Green played his share of sleepy sessions, but he sounds alert, hungry, and totally on point on his first session as a leader.

This is the sound of a blues virtually devoid of melancholy. Willette’s set heads even farther in the direction of gospel and r&b. You can hear the handclaps and fingersnaps in your head, even though they aren’t played, on “Stop and Listen” and “Work Song.” But as rooted as Willette was in African-American social music c. 1961, he still hewed to a jazz sound. To hear where the break occurred, tune into Gin and Orange (Dusty Groove) by fellow B3 player Brother Jack McDuff.

One big difference is in the rhythms, which are more muscular and syncopated on the up-tempo numbers. Unlike Willette, McDuff made sure to leave room for an electric bass, and he picked horn players who played like they thought each note might be the one to get them a date. As usual, Dusty Groove has shrunken a scan of a second-hand sleeve on this former Cadet release.

Groovy.

Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue. You’ve probably got the album on its own, in a box, maybe in a couple formats besides the CD; maybe you have the making-of book, too. But you don’t have the two-CD 50th Anniversary Edition, do you?

Whether you need it or not depends on how desperate you are for ten minutes of false starts from the session and a second disc that includes some tunes you already own and a volcanic 18-minute live version of “So What” previously known only to bootleggers. ✹ WWW.SIGNALTONOISEMAGAZINE.COM SIGNAL to NOISE #54 | 79

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CROSSWORD

By puzzlemaster Ben Tausig. This issue's theme: "Pump Up The Volume"

Across

1. "She was into ___ and bible studies ..."

(Belle and Sebastian lyric) 6. Took in one's arms 10. Stereo maker purchased by Sony in 2002 14. Ceasefire 15. Six-Day War leader Weizman 16. Indie currency 17. Pianist/composer Schnabel 18. Underground hip-hop group with "As the World Burns" 20. Wheelchair accessible in the most efficient way?

22. Night prior 23. Sit down for brunch, say 24. Sue Grafton's "___ for Innocent" 25. ___ Ponys (defunct Cincinnati indie band) 28. Line parts, for short 30. Contemporary of Wagner and Verdi 32. "C'mon, scram!"

33. Twitter update 35. Freeze over 36. Design update for the first planet from the sun?

40. Big name in boy bands 41. Tzadik, e.g.

42. Four-time Indy 500 winner A.J. 43. Brazilian songwriter Buarque 45. Common Irish name 49. Malay Peninsula's Isthmus of ___ 50. Cattle call 51. Canon camera 53. Buffalo native DiFranco 54. Overstuff the loaf of plain bread?

57. Mexican rebel 60. Words before a fight 61. "About ___" 62. Signal caller 63. Coronary insert 64. Commander-in-Chief, casually 65. Did 100, say 66. Shopaholic's outing

Down

1. Equilibria 2. Show up 3. Nog topping 4. Lingerie spec 5. "Lonesome Fugitive" Haggard 6. More filling and satisfying 7. "Good" band Better than ___ 8. Tony Award-winning musical, to fans 9. "Robocop" catchphrase 10. ___ Mothers Temple 11. April 15th org.

12. Like some guitar effects 13. Pop-ups, usually 19. 8-bit platform

21. New Haven sch.

25. "I'm talking here ..."

26. Salad go-with 27. Soak (up) 29. Classic Fender, for short 31. DJ's needs 32. Pentatonic, e.g.

34. Loos 35. Hannah Montana's "___ Got Nerve" 36. Othello, for one 37. One-named singer 38. Controversial thing to play 39. Kindle purchase 40. NYC airport 43. Newspaper page 44. Gets high, so to speak

46. Aggressive poker player, perhaps 47. Chant 48. Nothing, in Spain 50. Jazz string-player Maneri 52. Yello, ethnically 54. Famously semi-retired MC 55. To ___ (perfectly) 56. URL letters 57. World music act ___ Mama 58. Shortened, as a dict.

59. "The

for answers, see: signaltonoisemagazine.blogspot.com

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