Konrad BOEHMER: “Acousmatrix – History of Electronic Music V” ***

Recorded 1966-68, 1977-78, 1984

 

Originally from Berlin, Konrad Boehmer honed his compositional skills with the likes of Gottfried Michael Koenig, Pierre Boulez, Henri Pousseur, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Bruno Maderna.  At least half a generation younger than the above-mentioned composers, Boehmer debuted in the early 1960s and has since deployed his professorial talents in the Netherlands and in the US. 

 

His very detailed approach to composition, however ‘electric’, eschews many of the trappings that defined the canon of processing in vintage electronic music – reliance on generators, sonic masses, echoes.  When Boehmer incorporated pre-recorded tape material, he did so with a fully semantic approach – a far cry from Stockhausen’s intuitive cut-ups. 

 

Despite the wealth of external inputs, Boehmer’s electro-acoustic creations sound introspective and concentrated.  The structural complexity of his work does not invalidate their seamless and pristine, entirely legible character.  In addition to his ‘electric’ and electro-acoustic works, Boehmer has been also composing for more traditional media, including piano, percussion ensembles, chamber ensembles, choirs and symphony orchestras. 

 

It is astounding that Boehmer’s talent has remained so underexposed outside the (hermetic) circles of European academia and concert halls.  There is much more in his oeuvre that could and should be appreciated among the fans of Nurse with Wound, Operating Theatre, Hafler Trio or Un Drame Musical Instantané.  The recording presented here should also appeal to those to follow the careers of Dagmar Krause, Phil Minton and Frederic Rzewski. 

 

 

 

Aspekt

This early composition opens by infusing space with an oppressive sonic register: gurglings, chuckling buzzes, non-resonant mechanistic clashes all bite our earlobes with irregular dynamic assaults.  Crescendo of liquid bubbles, staccato cricket buzz and crackling feedback come and go, obstructing our auditory access to swooshing glissando blankets.  The reigning effect here is liquidity, with some extra sibilance on topmost layers.  But the composer refuses to apply insecticide; as another liquid cascade ebbs away, buzzing arthropoda buzz by in gyrating duets and trios.  When gigawatt electronic thunder interrupts this litany of naturalistic associations, windy gusts of grey noise soon follow.  The initial impetus drops off and a fairly slow-paced sequence ensues at various textural levels.  Much space is devoted to flicker noise, but the proceeding seems subtractive, rather than additive.  On one occasion, a reverberating machinery rumble kicks in.  After a short recess, submarine bubbles reinvent the context.  Contrasts are now distributed in a balanced fashion, with much energy still channeled through some liquid medium.  Most of these sensory structures are knit together in a sequential fashion with little, if any overlap.  Stockhausen’s influence is definitely perceptible.  In the last subsection, a sputtering motor sound is being embraced by micro-bubbles and a low-range torrent.  There is some enforced stationarity in the illusions generated by the structural stasis here.  The composition does really not advance, but rather like engines circling on a race track, it alternates in energy levels and frequency.  Boehmer avoids both excessive accumulation and obvious splicing of material.  Overall cohesion relies on atemporal functions, many of which are elicited within a pre-defined range of (mostly liquid) effects.

 

Cry of This Earth

This composition – part of a trilogy composed in the early 1970s – relies largely on Christopher Shultis’s deeply-pitched percussion – cymbalic overtones, fast tympani rolls – and interjected voice-overs.  The distant mix generates a sense of a stage-like detachment.  Electronics floods the space, but throttles back, slipping down the gutter of nothingness.  When the xylophone comes to the fore, we hear the first declamation – first female, then male, punctuated by a drum roll.  Tympani and stratospheric electronics spice it up with (frustrated) melodic spices.  Finally a soprano joins (Thea van der Putten), colored by a friendly vibraphone.  The delivery is dramatic, somewhat oblivious to the continuing (also female) narration.  Tympani, xylophone and the two voices compete for influence, reminding me of the disorienting operatic effects on U Totem’s first record.  Sequences appear, only to be closed by non-resonant percussions tracks.  The ‘song’ proper is now entirely supported by abstract percussion and xylophone.  Small hand drum prepares the atmosphere for the spoken text in French.  Damning, high-pitched sounds sprout into the short breaks, bruscamente.  Then a spoken male voice in Spanish takes over – to a more defined percussive (xylophone, large cymbals and gongs) accompaniment.  Boehmer’s whispers his own part (in German) – gliding over smeared out notes teased from the vibraphone and electric organ.  Wooden percussion clucking disturbs the emerging order and so does the electronic interjection.  One can’t dispel the sensation that the drummer part requires a lot of attention in this section of the composition.  The other two voices soon return, with more conviction, making a point among the swishing electronic flyovers.  Spanish recitation (male) and French a-melodious chant (female) appear endorsed not only by the avalanches of electro-bubbles, but also by the electric organ’s condescending harmonizing and some graphic accents from the percussion.  A long dying note from a cymbal closes the trilogy.

 

Apocalipsis cum figures

Dagmar Krause’s voice scares us with cataclysmic scenes of fire and hail, as dantesque and horrifying as Bosch’s nightmarish vistas.  Petrified by agony and horror, the voices also come off as sardonic.  Krause’s voice is sometimes transposed through a chorus treatment and is surrounded not only by an anguished jumble of ghastly slurps, gargles and guzzles, but also a suitably apocalyptic and very metallic piano (Frederic Rzewski).  A refrain of male voices goes almost doo-woop (Jan Hendriks, Ernst Jansz, Henny Vrienten), when a French narrator announces arrival of other creatures.  Overall, a sense of uncertainty reigns, as in the highly improper duet of piano tremolos and unhelpful belching.  German sentences (from Hölderlin) can occasionally terminate a phrase and plunge us into a silence, but it never lasts.  The French text, on the other hand, is delirious, exorcising the images of “semen”, “angels”, the Virgin and God, all surrounded by barking dogs as if hijacked form a Psychic TV or Dali-Wakhevitch recording.  Dagmar Krause picks up some of the more deranged passages from Karl Marx and its juxtaposition with Marquis de Sade does not grate here.  Phil Minton’s plaintive crooning proclaims “I am free”.  Howling monkeys, stately Eislerian piano and a hunched German text operate between a mechanic dynamo and robotic voices – in a dense, crowded underworld where dissonance is order and tonality is hell.  A whole treasure of interjections swamps the listener – simian creatures, pianistic salvos, animalistic glorps, bird calls, French expressions of indignation and blasphemy.  Intimidating, monstrous voice growls as others attempt a conversation above this unsettling canvas.  The piano is punctual and aggressive, but it is the Hague Percussion Ensemble that occupies center stage here: chimes, closing gates, multi-voice ‘Erinnerungen an Prophets’, fast drum runs.  The French recitation is defaced, clipped at the top, molested by devilish shouts of panic, eerily contrasted with doo-woop sing-alongs (apparently a piece by Skriabin).  In this sonic mayhem, growling beasts meet oral hygiene and female scolding mocks male despair.  Some electro-percussive effects are repetitive, wrapped around fragments from an English song.  When a measure of piano-voice order returns the percussive layer reorganizes the texture with march-like snare drum and tom-tom preparation.  Many voices in French are so critically slowed that they are barely comprehensible.  Some voices are muffled, other strangled, other suffocated or vivisected into ingressive-sounding, and that despite a strong bass buttressing that annoys us so much in Hollywood action movies.  That bass phrasing contrasts here with either vibraphone or high piano notes, just when we are to hear about the last hope: “I am god I am god”.  The sacrilegious text is first spoken, then chanted, then exclaimed.  After a male recitation in French, sweeping electronics ushers us into the sinister underworld of growling, braying and vomiting.  And this menace means business: “the night, so deep that you won’t see the way, you won’t hear your own voice”.  Then, the tortured, damned voices reveal, unexpectedly, a tepid bourgeois song, sung in English with a piano accompaniment amid the spiky cacti of electronic swirl, piano arpeggios and all THAT howl. If this really is the end of the world, then this is quite fascinating and worthy living through, sonically. 

 

***

 

Konrad BOEHMER: “Acousmatrix – History of Electronic Music V” (1966-68, 1977-78, 1984)

 

Several other recordings are available, but they are not necessarily electronic or electro-acoustic works. 

Published in: on October 5, 2008 at 9:37 pm  Comments (1)  
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VERDE: “Vuoronumero” ****

Recorded 2003

 

 

Tampere-based Nokia’s engineer Mika Rintala debuted in mid-1990s, but for years remained an unsung hero of DIY circuit electronics.  But recognition finally came.  His preference for often bulky analog devices set him apart from the generation of digital manipulators and yielded unusually temperate, alluringly corpuscular auralscapes. 

 

Elements of his compositions appear modular.  Under moniker Verde, Rintala frequently incorporated inspiring field recordings.  His injections of such material are unusually mellifluous, eschewing the pitfalls of the familiar extrema: the dogmatic lessons of musique concrète and the showy interjections so typical of sound expansions in contemporary pop music. 

 

The utilization of self-made devices and hybrid instruments led him to experimentation with sonic capabilities of home appliances.  And yet, the results are invariably warm and well-rounded – unlike anything achieved by Anglo Saxon post-industrial combos of the early 1980s. 

 

Rintala has been active in other Finnish formations, not least the neo-kraut apostles Circle and post-funk amalgam Ektroverde. 

 

 

Paskaralla kolmen metrin kulmakarvat

The opening guitar chords hang loosely in a somewhat Gallic manner.  This unassuming introduction dusts off the memory of Ilitch’s and Philippe Doray’s classics, but it’s the hoarse trombone solo that refocuses our attention.  Handled with grace by Markku Veijonsuo, the valve pace is steady, unhurried, relaxed.  A throaty electric guitar instantly broadens the increasingly spacious limits, with effects evoking the Fripp and Eno’s operations.  Close to the top of its natural range, the trombone assumes a secondary role, snaking with agility among the ever denser guitar oscillations, probably courtesy Jyrki Laiho.

 

Veron saa maksaa ensimmäisenä arkipäivänä

Birds chirp and chickens cluck in this, somewhat tentative, juxtaposition of sequenced ‘cosmic’ glissandos and natural sounds.  Another layer of electronics unconvincingly saturates the images of bucolic muck with children’s voices.  A resolution comes with deformed scat intervention, masterfully morphed into the sound of muted cornet.  Recurring buzz keeps us company, ensuring continuity and the unsettling cornet/scat transmutations reverse seamlessly.  The sequenced reliability of the electronic bleeps ushers in lithe, serene notes from a crisp acoustic guitar.  Were it not for the ‘scat’ and ‘zibilant’ woozing, the sequence could be even categorized as dreamlike.  Somewhere, lurking in the shadow, a grippy fraction of electric guitar is lying at the ready, never to be utilized. 

 

Plusssakortti

More forest warble and playground din fuse with ethereally distant folk songs.  Summertime furikin chimes successfully sustain the atmosphere of sun-drenched ‘farniente’.  But all too soon a gusty rhythm machine and tube-emulated guitar crash in on this premature ode to relaxation.  A brilliant chromatic harmonica (Yrjänä Sauros) enhances the game of contrasts, aided by a liquid guitar solo of quasi-Rypdalian quality.  The oral manipulation of harmonica’s edges leads to disturbing pitch bending.  The tempo is hasty, propelled by the pulsing rhythm machine. 

 

Vuoronumero

The title track begins with a scale testing on an unidentified string instrument (a high-resonance zither? Or is it a harp?).  After an intermezzo of environmental sounds (crockery and a meowing feline), a sequenced sweeping sound offers plush surrounding to whispered recitation.  Delicately brushed cymbals, zither strings, electronic shuffling and occasional electric organ ensure that we never tire of the ever-changing tapestry.  Throughout, a muffled trumpet brings back a definitively ‘retro’ ambience.  The organization of the composition and its calligraphic motif carefully balance between illustration and abstraction, reminding me of Area’s “Citazione de George L. Jackson”, even though Verde’s voice treatment is less invasive.  Prepared piano keys and impromptu woodpecking close the passage on a high note.

 

Kalvosinnapeilla voi tehdä vaitukutsen

Preparative checks on some rudimentary machinery elicit little more than jingle-like inanity.  Luckily, a colossal arsenal of martial drums brings a shift in the mood, connoting a sense of solemn determination.  Short excerpts of spoken phrases cut into this fabric, as shreds from the intro are being revisited in ever fading loops.  The fleet drumming is parched and – despite some time modulation – never overwhelming.  The guitar lines endure, ribboned together with downy electronic softness.  The author mutters something almost word by word, depriving the message of regular speech rhythm.  The result is painfully human. 

 

Pintamuoti

Exploratory guitar hesitations interact gently with electronic blanketing.  Somewhere, a door opens; an abandoned house?  Groping for clues, we identify broad reflection of heeled footsteps.  Rintala’s rain stick and disciplined Latin shakers await the walking figure.  The acoustic guitar/electric organ “duo” develops a circulating, directionless theme comfortable in its autumnal languor. 

 

EU

After an accumulation of captured effects (chicken, flapping wings, phone dialing) the terrain is hijacked by sequenced rhythms.  Additional elements confuse the expected order in mid-beat. 

 

Epätasaisia helmoja

Fluid, sensual keyboard intro gives way to acoustic guitar advances.  Note by note, the guitar overlays scanty forms, unhurriedly, despite some snuffing and sniffing around.  Against the background of rustling textile, the guitar noodling gradually betrays its goal – the attainment of a quintessential Appalachian moment.  Bolstered by an unlikely electro-beat, the guitar finally pronounces its first micro-twang.  Then, in spite of the intensifying sequencing, the rural folk-blues comes out in full color.  Uninvited, a somewhat hooliganish electric guitar descends on-beat, as if to disperse the youthful crowd which somehow manages to intersperse its noisy games.  Setting the scolding and altercation aside, the guitarist remains true to his geographic aspiration. 

 

Ultrakapeat hippahousut

A reverberating voice and empty clapping would, in other circumstances, smack of artistic desperation.  Instead, this solo ‘performance’ is but a joke, completely detached from the core of a track that attempts to demythologize circuit electronics.  It is difficult to dispel here the images of Tom Dockstader or Ruth White.  A hypnotically disorienting rhythm drives up, gearing up the tempo runs.  But, as it gets denser, its defining rhythmic role is lost within a dispersed pandemic of sputtering effects.  Rintala does not dwell in abstraction for too long.  His toolkit delivers watery gulps and birch clipping, each of varying frequency, as if determined by the physical distance.  The track ends with a dose of early 1980s’ post-industrialism. 

 

External global error

A cantata-like piece owes its archetypical character to the venerable Hammond Organ. As cosmic blankets shift in and out, Rintala gives a proof of good taste by avoiding clutter and overbuilding of layers.  Sibilant values oscillate, occasionally muscling up the volume.  When short frequency ‘aviary’ singing turns out to be electronically generated, the familiarity of ring modulators is striking.  Not surprisingly, the entire track has a feel of long lost experimental sci-fi ventures from the late 1950s to early 1960.  Thankfully, no direct clichés surface. 

 

Laakkosella takaluukun maalaus 900 euroa

What begins as bass-électronique stomping with instant electro-percussive responses is completely transformed by Sauros’ sculptural harmonica playing.  This time, he conjures up Morricone-style poetic parables.  Such contextualism is unavoidable in this masterful counterpoint of the hermetically recurrent bass and the bereaved harmonica mood.  Sputtering meta-recordings are interwoven, but their representative function is either accidentally blurred in the ubiquitous crackles or was never intended in the first place.  When the harmonica is gone, a progression worthy of Richard H. Kirk ploughs on without interrogation. 

 

Arvokas kamelinkarvatakki lämmittää pakkasella

An elderly-sounding recitation adopts here a quasi-percussive form.  Accompanying metals and woods tinkle, fart, whistle, resonate, grumble and rattle.  Only after a while does an identifiably musical instrument appear – an electric piano.  The exchange of views between the oft-absent narrator and silence-enamored pianist generates non-sequiturs and impasses adorned by bells, cymbals and flutter.

 

Timanttikiiltouulet

In a manner foreshadowing collaborative CD “Tower”, three pillars of band Circle join Rintala in this prime example of Finish neo-kraut folk.  Jyrki Laiho, Jussi Lehtisalo and Mika Rättö begin with deceptively aimless, ‘hippy’ drumming.  Soon the guitar figure becomes resolutely mantric, letting the second guitar lay over hypnotic shreds.  Shaking, drumming and hummed vocalizing all add up to the image of an old hippie commune.  And yet the workshop is highly professional.  Lehtisalo’s dizzying agility slides over the elliptic infrastructure in what is probably the most instantly recognizable melodic element on this album.  By the time a second guitar chisels (and then dismantles) these basic structural elements, listeners may revel in their most mesmerizing of space rock recollections.  Naïve shakers and plastic boxes add some extra charm to this well executed collection. 

 

 

***

 

VERDE: “Musical For Cats” (1997)

VERDE: “Traffic Light” (1999)

VERDE: “Modern Electronic Circuits” (1999)

VERDE: “Acib” (1997-2000)

VERDE: “Asill” (2000)

VERDE: “Lokki” (2001)

VERDE: “Karhun epäillään paskantaneen golfkentälle“ (2002)

VERDE: “Live“ (2003)

VERDE: “Vuoronumero” (2003)

VERDE & CLAY FIGURE: “Kalliopora“ (2003-04)

VERDE: “Kato internetist” 2CD (2005)

VERDE: “Legenda“ (2005-06)

CIRCLE feat. VERDE: “Tower“ (2006)

 

The positions listed prior to “Vuoronumero” are mentioned here for documentary purposes – I have not heard any of them.  Of the last 5 recordings, “Kato Internetist” is probably the most accomplished, if a little sprawling affair. 

 

 

Published in: on October 2, 2008 at 9:41 pm  Leave a Comment  
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BROTHERS OF THE OCCULT SISTERHOOD: “Run from Your Honey Mind” ****

Recorded 2005

 

The Australian band appeared on the internet screens around 2004, proposing a refreshing, antipodean twist on the increasingly tired format of underground free bio-folk occult improvisation cum tribal noise (no kidding!), or drone-folk (now kidding).  What sets apart the impossibly named BOTOS from its English, American and Finnish predecessors is an uncanny ability to bathe overlapping frequencies in forms balancing with ease between realism and abstraction.  Their drones, whenever used, are diverging and oscillating, rather than doctrinal and static. 

 

BOTOS are a duo of Michael Donnelly and Kristina Donnelly.  Churning out new material on a quarterly basis as if they were trying to live up to analysts’ earnings expectations, the siblings invite the willing listeners to their seemingly effortless collective ritualism and smooth, quasi-trantric interactionism.

 

Over the last decade, many followers of the drone-folk and improvised outsider psych scenes have noted the apparent (and if anything numerical) superiority of the free-flowing Kiwi productions over the Australian output.  But the artistic success of BOTOS refutes the thesis that in order to meaningfully contribute to the development of this genre you have to trample the twigs of the forests of Kuopio, Kahurangi or Redwoods, sine qua non. 

 

 

Our Minds Blow Like Prayers in the Wind

And then there was chaos.  From the first bars, the combination of drum pummeling and droning is subjected to a singularly oval wah-wah treatment.  Yet the reigning ambience never leaves the ozone layer of shakers, cymbals, wheeze, and a room-level (linear) reverb.  Dry, tensile, firm drumming undergoes slow organization around the echoing reflectiveness, conjugated around mid-term cycles of demise and rebirth.  This is followed by high-frequency amp feedback, but the development (if there is any) is obviously devoid of any sense of tempo or harmony.  Instead, the duo masterfully optimizes a sense of spatial perspective.  Sonic reflections and the varying speed of diffusion define the aural limits of the output.  By contrast, the a-metric drumming and non-pitched percussive effects (mostly shakers) operate without any reflection.  These effects crowd the space nearby, slowly reasserting themselves through increased familiarity.  Meanwhile, the electro-echo sucks in the droning sources, displacing them into the background, irrespectively of the incessantly jerky percussive skitter.  The track remains stuck between these two planes – busy upfront acoustic percussiveness and quasi-choral, alien, surreal echo. 

 

Temple of the Sloth

The band reappears on a gamelan stage.  This is akin to the sweeter (semar pegulingan) version of Balinese music, sparse, serene and intimate.  But the Donnellys are not here to lull us to sleep.  Simmering vocal, clanging guitar, space drums and wheezing engine cycles distract us from the soothing hypnotism of the declamatory bronze metallophones.  The electric guitar catalyzes Kluster-like amp effects and deranged voices inject nonsensical phonemic material.  As if hidden behind an iconostasis, haunted male baritone behind evokes a dark, stern figure of an Orthodox priest.  The voice sources are deformed, reproduced on a tape running at twice the speed limit.  The resulting whining is entirely contingent on the ‘gamelan’ mood, which by now sounds like a very domestic xylophone.  It still has to compete for our active attention not only with voice tapes, but also with guitar condensations and a regular tenor drum beat.  Surprisingly, the a priori simplistic speed manipulations of the voice track make this a highly rewarding aural experience.  Another vocal track (1940s? in French?) is ground to a halt and choral stimuli are non-sequitur, very much in Stockhausen (“Hymnen”) style.  The gamelan scale returns to prominence briefly at higher speed, and with the pelagic company of Hawaiian guitar. 

 

The Flesh Shall Hang from Your Bones

The composition opens with another exercise in timbral contrast – the guitar reverb is being juxtaposed against instantly-dampened cymbals.  Guitars scuttle, skittle, swaddle and sweep, always adorned with short-lived reverb.  There are at least three overlapping, phased guitar tracks here, with some order meted out by the bass guitar.  This is where the rhythm becomes more regularized, leaving just enough room for a guitar tremolo and an occasional bronze clang.  The accumulation of echo guitar oscillations brings back the memories of Achim Reichel or Günter Schickert.  Then guitars and drums begin to crash, sock and snap with abandon.  The bass (or rather baritone) guitar loyally plucks on, underpinning the sparsely populated range, crowned with xylophone/triangles.  When a cascade of gutter guitar à la Glenn Branca descends on us, it does so in a perfunctory, almost arbitrary manner, never generating the regularity of rhythmic cracking.  Even that motif sinks within the percussive/echo guitar swelling of sonic anti-matter.  Shortly before the end, the dispersed sources of string-plucking and drum-flaying do their best to revamp the marginalized echo device. 

 

Run from Your Honey Mind

The 21-minute track opens with a droney whizz and a mallet-treated drum.  Sizzling drone oozes in and out, burring in uncomfortable, brown frequency.  Doubled in a drone chorus, it adopts a dubious quality of cosmic dust radiation, saved by alternatively glassy and metallic percussive effects and some electro-alloyed overtones.  Three or four separate strata shift loosely like in a vintage recording of synthesizer rock.  Slowly, a selection of drumming thuds builds up a periodic tapestry, initially distant and vague, but eventually decisive enough to frame the slow burning frizzle of various low-drone frequencies.  When the hovering drones ebb away, the drumming echoes back.  Metallic scraping shares this reverberating quality, but remains ambiguous, enigmatic and reluctantly multiplicative.  Haunting organ-sounds and occasional tam-tam clank amortize somewhat the a-rhythmic pounding, while the ‘motor’ guzzle contests for aural space with an extrusive echo, tribal drum rolls and converter ricochets.  The track gains on meditative quality as the drumming reverb and drone become completely detached from the non-realistic, echoing chorus.  The echoing factor eventually recedes, yielding to uneasy sibilance and recognizable, because hand-operated tools: shakers, clappers and gourds.  Electric guitar tremors define the final descent, concelebrated by self-reflective nylon string plucking and lukewarm gong overtones. 

 

 

***

 

The discography below has been arranged according to the information included on the available CDs and CDRs, but the recording dates are sometimes dubious.  The material described above stands out as a masterpiece and some of the more recent recordings raise the question of the artistic sustainability of such prolific output, but I reserve judgment on positions 10 -12, with which I am not (yet) familiar.

 

 

1. BOTOS: “Animal Speak” (2004)

2. BOTOS: “Goodbye” (2004-05)

3. BOTOS: “Lucifer’s Bride” (2005)

4. BOTOS: “Run from Your Honey Mind” (2005)

5. BOTOS: “Canisanubis” (2005)

6. BOTOS: “Odalisque at Secret Vortex” (2005)

7. BOTOS: “Suppress (Detached) Orchestra” LP (2004, 2006)

8. BOTOS: “Preying in Circles” (2004-06)

9. BOTOS: “States from Space” (2006)

10. BOTOS: “Mutact” MC (2006)

11. BOTOS: “Enter the Cult” 2CD (2006?)

12. BOTOS: “Temicxoch” (2007)

13. BOTOS: “Bill Burrowing Under the Moon’s Aerial High Above” (2007)

14. BOTOS: “The World Is at War” (2008)

 

BOTOS also appears on cross-cooperative CD “Chimes Against Reality” and a split CDR with Golden Oaks as well as several other compilations. 

 

Published in: on September 17, 2008 at 9:17 pm  Leave a Comment  
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Conrad SCHNITZLER: “Control” *****

Recorded 1978-81

 

Originally from Düsseldorf, Conrad Schnitzler debuted as a sound artist around 1967.  After studying with Joseph Beuys he moved to Berlin, when he was often associated with the local school of electronic rock even though his soundscapes were never “rock” and his aesthetic was always too idiosyncratic to be pigeonholed.

 

In his most successful recordings, Schnitzler showed predilection for range compression that was unusual in the early days of analog synthesizers.  It is as if he had done a careful scoping study before each session, imposing restraints on the adopted textures and energy levels.  Nor did he seem to be tempted by excessive multi-layering of additive effects.  His strength lied in poised tone colorings and controlled mood explorations.  His forays into illustration were quickly abandoned and throughout most of his career his music remained subconceptual and non-ascriptive.

 

Schnitzler’s creations went through several stages.  Beginning with Berlin-based trios Kluster (with Joachim Roedelius and Dieter Moebius) and Eruption (with Wolfgang Seidel and Klaus Freudigmann), his spacious, psychotropic work relied as much on musical instruments as on amplifiers and echoes.  He then moved on to explore in depth the modulatory capabilities of analog synthesizers, achieving much more groundbreaking and lasting results than many of his compatriots.  An artistic hiatus befell him in the second half of the 1970s, when several misguided attempts at electronic rock introduced him to accidental audiences in Germany and abroad.  But unlike the synthesized disciples of the Berlin school, he returned triumphantly in the early 1980s, penning some of the most intriguing and abstract oeuvres yet.  Ever open to experimentation, he engaged in collaborations with new generations of German musicians and then moved onto the digital age, still occasionally leaving recordings which testified his undying tonal curiosity and penchant for deft sound organization. 

 

 

Control A

Each side of the original LP is divided into several, untitled sections.  Schnitzler welcomes the listener with atonal kernels of creamy, electronic vibrato, bleeping at varying dynamic levels.  The only order in this disorder is that higher frequency chords are louder, leaving the muddier, brown frequency sounds partly concealed.  At least three layers of these independently originated, expressionist tides collate, but never coagulate.

 

In the second fragment, foggy synthesizer folds are sustained and then slowly pitch-modulated.  Unlike in the previous track, the very act of modulation generates melodic expectations.  At some subliminal level, there does seem to lurk a barely tangible theme, but it fails to appear de iure; it remains ill-defined and then re-defined by its own shadows – the multiple variations.  Each of the variation ends with longer notes, leaving behind the mood of a desolate, cloudy, open space. 

 

Electric clangs fall like raindrops hitting window panes curiously intent on rejecting the liquid particles at various frequencies.  This evanescent texture is sparse and the pitches are arranged to accentuate the mutual contrast.  Still, the overall timbral effect is almost childlike.

 

Another exercise in modulation and phase shifting.  The leading middle layer individuates both the bass line and the crisply sibilant accompaniment, each germinating with a different delay.

 

A more “industrial”-sounding track based on blender glissandos with controlled sustain.  Tone colors permutate between the illusions of take-off, landing and taxing.  Although the context harks back to the ideas first developed on LP “Con”, the selection of effects is more balanced.  Discrete pitch bending occurs around the usually avoided parts of the frequency spectrum. 

 

Rotating flywheels send out waveforms which recur in epicycles.  A less prominent sub-theme explores a frail, rounded melodic theme, as if clutching at wavecrest. 

 

Fast ‘grasshopper’ tremolo is drowned out by an alternating dynamics in doomed quest of nebulous, dormant realm.  The dominant velocity would outpace any other track on the record, but the gesticulation is imperfectly robotic.  Another stratum of glissandos brings a dose of painfully sullied nostalgia. 

 

Control B

This is an even more atmospheric exploration of chalky textures.  Sheaths of organ give rise to a rare moment of loose harmonic consonance.

 

Another electronic landscape for stagnating sheets of lengthy notes, modulated in mid-flight.  They all fade away, substituted instantly by clones whose energy dissipates in like manner.  Simultaneous sizzling and rumbling epitomizes the hypnotic character of procyclical, compressed electronics.

 

Echoey, glassy clocking and pianistic electro-chords flow through a dialogue which explores attention, dis-habituation, expectation, clearing of remorse and doubt about it all.  This is a rare, modal achievement, particularly impressive given the limited toolkit involved in its creation. 

 

An essing, oscillatory web is delicately overlaid above the leading theme-building.  The focus is on an eventless space, wide open terrain and visibility constrained only by atmospheric phenomena. 

 

The record closes as it opened – with abstract, a-melodic clusters, collected almost sequentially in search of the right nocturnal mood.  A vague sense of solitude permeates the departures towards to the top of the staff, into ever shorter notes.  Mid-range synthesizer provides some harmonic solution, but the track is cut abruptly.  Did the Revox reel run out or is it another attempt to leave us pensive?

 

***

 

The discography below encompasses Schnitzler’s output from the first 15 (analog) years of his career and does not list numerous cassettes, the material from which was later reissued on LP or CD.  Positions 1, 2, 5, 10 and 11 remain my favorites.

 

1. Konrad SCHNITZLER: “Schwarz“ (1971)

2. Konrad SCHNITZLER: “Rot“ (1972)

3. Conrad SCHNITZLER: “Con’72“ (1972)

4. Conrad SCHNITZLER: “Zug“ (1973)

5. Konrad SCHNITZLER: “Blau“ (1973)

6. Konrad SCHNITZLER: “Gelb“ (1974)

7. Conrad SCHNITZLER: “Live Action 1977“ (1977)

8. Conrad SCHNITZLER: “Con“ (1978)

9. Conrad SCHNITZLER: “Grün“ (1976, 1980)

10. Conrad SCHNITZLER: “Control“ (1978-81)

11. Conrad SCHNITZLER: “Conal“ (1981)

12. Conrad SCHNITZLER: “Conrad & Sohn“ (1981)

13. Conrad SCHNITZLER: “Contempora“ (1981)

14. Conrad SCHNITZLER: “Con 3“ (1981)

15. Conrad SCHNITZLER: “Consequenz“ (1982)

16. Conrad SCHNITZLER: “Context“ (1982)

17. Conrad SCHNITZLER: “Convex“ (1982)

18. Conrad SCHNITZLER: “3.3.83“ (1983)

19. Conrad SCHNITZLER: “1.7.84“ (1984)

 

His recordings can also be found on several compilations, such as “Three Minute Symphony“ and “Hayfever“ (in the 1990s).  There are countless other cassette, film and gallery materials from the era.

 

Conrad Schnitzler’s early (1970-72) recordings overlap with his activity in bands Kluster and Eruption.  Indeed, his first “solo” album can be considered a Kluster/Eruption record.  The recordings of these bands are highly recommended for all the fans of vintage kraut electronics.  His appearance on Tangerine Dream’s best LP was the only time Schnitzler played someone else’s music.  Although the recently unearthed positions 5 and 6 are credited to Kluster, they are actually Eruption’s recordings. 

 

1. TANGERINE DREAM: “Electronic Meditation” (1970)

2. KLUSTER: “Klopfzeichen” (1970)

3. KLUSTER: “Zwei Osterei” (1970)

4. ERUPTION: “Eruption” (1970)

5. KLUSTER: “Vulcano” (1971)

6. KLUSTER: “Admira” (1971)

7. ERUPTION: “Live Action 1972.  Wuppertal” (1972)

Published in: on September 12, 2008 at 6:32 am  Comments (1)  
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KONSTRUKTIVISTS: “Black December” ***

Recorded 1983

 

 

It is difficult to pinpoint the exact reasons for the explosion of post-industrial culture in Thatcherian Britain.  This was the time when Sheffield had already become a moribund shadow of “the steel city on the move”.  And within several years Arthur Scargill’s coal unions would be hoisted out of the shaft and shelved onto rarely visited shelves of communal libraries.  Only the Falkland War distracted from the monochrome character of the pre-reform UK.

 

But it was precisely during this period of the reluctant social and economic transformation that a whole generation of British musicians launched their projects emboldened, rather than hampered by the punk revolution several years before.  Among the styles which benefited from the flourishing of independent labels, post-industrialism created the most lasting of musical documents. 

 

Glenn Michael Wallis was an active member of the scene, associated with such luminaries as Whitehouse and Throbbing Gristle.  Between 1982-85, under the moniker Konstruktivists, he created dark electronic visions that somehow reconciled the technical and stylistic limits of the era with excellent sense of sonic perspective.  David Kenny who engineered Konstruktivists’ early records also deserves the credit for a healthy, selective approach to analog and tape effects.

 

Using a limited armature of tools, Wallis successfully generated illusion (but illusion only) of depth and complexity.  His manipulation of reverb density was always tasteful and his novel, particulate textures prefigured later recordings of esoteric underground.  On several occasions, he also betrayed familiarity with electronic rock of the previous decade, a potentially dangerous faux pas in the proud years of post-industrial nihilism. 

 

Miles away from the harsh experiments that dominated the center stage of post-industrialism, Konstruktivists’ records are a charming, though never infantile, testimony to the style of an era that is rarely celebrated these days. 

 

 

Nostalgia

Initially monolithic, semi-stationary waves of analog synthesizer expand their mildly polyphonic reach.  The static plane is construed entirely from high frequency sounds, nearly emulating the unnerving tension that György Ligeti had achieved in his multi-strings compositions.  Although Wallis eschews such direct quotations, the resulting tension is a far scream from the “Nostalgia” alluded to in the title.  Yes, some light-bodied melody does roam somewhere, but it is buried deeply in the downmix.  The synthesizer screen slowly begins to flow in and out.  When it ebbs away, no residuals are left behind. 

 

The Crimson Path

Dressed in short reverb, a surf guitar (Nick Clark) promenades to the passé grin of a simple rhythm box.  A second guitar, specializing in nickel-clear tremolos, is strongly reminiscent of contemporaneous DDAA.  So is the post-partum wailing of cross-breeding “feminine” voices.  The track zigzags in a directionless fashion with vocal tracks treated by varying doses of delay and contrasted against the tremolo guitar.  Sunnily independent, the surf guitar improvises freely. 

 

Shadows of White Sand

Synthesizer shales give way to deeply atmospheric, underdefined ill-bience, indirectly evocative of Attrition’s best LP and the less spacey Zoviet France.  Subterranean, larval echoes emerge slowly in waveforms determined at source by no more than three chords.  Woozy matte is spilling out gently.  There is no sense of ominous imminence here, but rather an aura of mystery and irrealization.  What could be dismissed as a case of mere illustrative electronics, bestows on the willing listener just enough freedom to fill this aural framework with liberating numinosum. 

 

In Kabul

This repetitive rhythm-box and guitar motif, so stiffly grounded within the aesthetic of the early 1980s, is worthy of an early Cabaret Voltaire or Clock DVA record.  But instead of saxophones, the simple set of guitar figures is coupled here with oud-sounding string tunings and addictive vocal echoes (Pilar Pinillos and Elena Colvée).  The tempo is leisurely, despite the notional fill-ins programmed in the rhythm machine. 

 

Extasie

The sequencer flies into the limelight with an amplitude of a machine-gun.  There is a competition between the several synthesizer sources.  On the one hand, we distinguish classicizing arpeggios, on the other, repetitive chord renewals, chiming in with the rotor-aping sequencer.  The overall climate is closer to Richard Pinhas’ work than to his German contemporaries. 

 

Decadence

Simple repetitive electro-glorping, suffused with bleeps and destabilized by processed male vocal.  Indeterminate organ clusters, metronomic machine drumming and guitar hooks determined by the simplistic structure of electro-beat recall the simplicity of the long-forgotten artists of the era – Eric Random and Bill Nelson.  

 

Red October Black September

The most memorable moment on the record is the track built around a pulsing, yet melodic bass skeleton.  Throughout this passacaglia après la lettre, illusory verbalizations adopt an almost ingressive mantle due to ingeniously mixed synthesized hyperplanes.  The voices are slotted in with dynamic jumps, and alarmingly so.  They recede at various stages of decomposure – fading, wilting or transmogrifying into metallic reverberation.  A patchy cobweb of guitars and synthesizers embroiders a denitrified tapestry, underscoring the critical role of the electric bass ostinato.  The effect is intoxicating.  It all ends too soon. 

 

 

***

 

For those willing to explore the dark corners of analog atmospherics, any of the first three recordings are recommended.  There were also many cassette issues. 

 

KONSTRUKTIVISTS: “A Dissembly” (1982)

KONSTRUKTIVISTS: “Psycho-Genetika” (1983)

KONSTRUKTIVISTS: “Black December” (1983)

KONSTRUKTIVISTS: “Glennascaul” (1985)

 

Many unique pieces can also be found on compilations, e.g. “The Elephant Table Album” and “Four Years in 30 Seconds”.  We owe the latter to the fact that Wallis resuscitated Konstruktivists in the 1990s. 

Published in: on September 9, 2008 at 9:05 pm  Comments (1)  
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Keiji HAINO & Tatsuya YOSHIDA: “Mizu ga honô wo tsukamu made” ****

Recorded 2000

 

 

The earliest sign of recorded collaboration between these two giants of Japanese avant-garde go back to Keiji Haino’s guest appearance on Musica Transonic’s “Gashô keshin”, also known as “Incubation”.  This was in 1997, and little at that time indicated that the shock of titans, mediated by Makoto Kawabata and Asahito Nanjo was anything more than accidental. 

 

Instinctively, Yoshida’s topological drumming technique should not sit comfortably with radical mood swings that Haino had been infusing with quanta of kinetic energy for nearly three decades.  And yet, when the legends met again in 2000, sparks flew. 

 

Whereas in other duet formats, Yoshida tends to dominate the proceedings thanks to his intuitively mathematical memory, in his collaboration with Haino, the distribution of outcomes suggests equal repartition of rights and duties.  Despite moments of premeditated asynchrony, the musicians achieve a measure of multi-climactic exaltation.  They never seek full symbiosis, but nor are they content with mere cohabitation.  Instead, we witness metathesis and occasional cross-mutation of ideas.  And what does bring these very different souls together is the essentially haptic nature of their musical practice. 

 

In the trio format, their collaborations are more than the sum of the three.  Haino’s gitara picaresca transfers the center of gravity, turning the polymetric Gordian knots into veritable jewels of avant-rock.  As Knead, they were joined by bassist Hisashi Sasaki, formerly of Ruins.  On Sanhedolin, Sasaki was replaced by Mitsuru Nasuno. 

 

As a duo, Haino and Yoshida often go beyond the electric assault and roam unplugged, bringing back the memories of itinerant troubadours, equipped with acoustic string and membrane instruments from Hindustani, Bengali and Berber traditions.

 

Please note that the record described here, originally published in Hong Kong, is also known under English and Cantonese titles: “Until Water Grasps Flame” and “Deng shui zhua dao huo wei zhi”, respectively.

 

Yoi sareru wa seishinbunseki no chimayoi

Thunderclaps of blitz guitar crash in before Yoshida’s multi-directional impetus disturbs the distant discharges and drag the guitar distortion much closer into an echo-less, closed space.  Haino’s axe transforms his a-melodic shrapnels into heavily infused, compressed, pyroxenic seams.  It is Yoshida’s feet that rule here, jabbing the low-pitched drums with determined rolls.  His busy cymbal work is disactivated whenever the guitar fizz evaporates.

 

Nadaraka na shiyôgo no ketsui

A very different duo of the same pair of hands.  Haino appears first on a wonderfully sentimental Mughal sarod.  Yoshida joins the misty sunset scene on darbouka.  Haino’s irreverent glissandos turn his sarod into a mantric oasis of short cycles, but his hedonistic style will take a while before accelerating.  Yoshida handles a multi-effect Korg X5D, here in liquid bass role, but with a trousseau full of other percussive sounds: glockenspiels, cog rattles and flexatones.  As the effects accumulate, the atmosphere becomes very dense.  The clamor of the electro-bass has almost distracted us from Haino’s riffing race to nirvana. 

 

Yokka to yutta to tan

A more familiar setting of chuckling jazz guitar and brushed percussion.  Haino, who had played with Derek Bailey four years before, hesitates here between the master’s non-speculative anti-documentarism and a peculiar stutter perfected by Davey Williams.  Although Haino does sound less angular and more rounded than either, he does not fall into the full-bodied, leathery nostalgia of his duets with Loren Mazzacane Connors.  Or perhaps, Yoshida just would not allow him to.  The track progresses by fits and starts, with aptly mobile drumwork evolving in parallel, and never in competition with the guitar.  This is rock improvisation for jazz sounds.  In the dry, clipped “rock” context, Haino’s sound is closer to Sonny Sharrock’s than Eddy Marron’s.  After another swell of nonmetric drum patterns, Haino desists again, contenting himself to punctuating Yoshida’s most defining beats.  Eventually, an eruption does arrive, embodied in higher riffing gear and more constructive buttressing from the drumkit. 

 

5Hz e no kansha no in

Here Haino picks up guembri, a three string lute of Berber origin.  He will exploit the instrument’s vascular, hollow sound with restrained, kindly pentatonic plucking.  Yoshida’s skin rumble is perfectly adjusted, color-wise.  The duo achieves a tribal asabiyya even before Haino hurls his first howl.  Yoshida’s bass drum rejoins, balancing the contributions adequately.  Soft drum rolls coarsen whenever Haino’s howling masks the delicate articulation on guembri.

 

Setten wo yowayowashiku shite shimau itteki

High pitched, wailing notes from Haino’s guitar are quickly corrected by Yoshida’s multiplicative drumming.  Henceforth, Haino is reduced to playing some combinations of quarter notes and 8ths, with irregularly interposed rests.  Their junctures create unexpected filling effects. 

 

Tokku ni kanatte iru hazu no LHNZ to iu kekka na no ni

Haino is credited here as playing “gothan”, a low-resonance string instrument of unusual tuning.  His strikes (probably plectrum) recall false, additive raga accelerations.  Yoshida operates mostly on brushes, mixed deep, but with very short reverb, and a clearly audible large tomtom on the right.  When silence falls, Haino intones an East Asian-sounding “melody” from his instrument – a slowly flourishing dance with bizarre dragon interjections and shouts.

 

‘Mochiron kare dake no tame’ to iiwake wo suru

Deep, tunnel-like echo buries the unlikely duo of bowed esraj and Korg X5D.  The esraj, a fretted Bengali instrument related to sarangi, gives off an eerie, heterotropic image.  No temple possesses such long-decay acoustics as applied here, but the atmosphere certainly is one of meditative concentration.  Yoshida’s clicking electro-rhythm does not distract, but the gesture of his rhythm-keeping differs radically from his physical drumming.  This is a novelty and a plus.  Later, the Korg’s bass function is switched off.  Scrapers, graters and microtonal rattling correlate nicely with an angrier accumulation of distorted meend from the esraj.  When Yoshida elicits vitruous effects from the low-end rumble, memories of classic Jon Hassell flow back. 

 

Owatta shôko misetagaru seimon

Although the track begins with Haino’s stammering guitar technique, so perfectly displayed on his first Aihiyô recording, it later settles into a more familiar, almost ‘jazzy’ mode.  At various intervals, the narrative sequence recurs: presentation, silence, resolution and release.

 

Kioku wo tadotta toki ni nankai ka atama ni ukabu akarasama to no sôiten

This is mostly Yoshida’s show.  He opens with his cocky vocal retributions, strongly in the improvised Zamla tradition, not nasal enough to be truly ‘tongue in cheek’.  The guitar sound is warm, welcoming, running scraps of medieval scales.  The drumming is unabashedly aperiodic.  When Yoshida defaults into his falsetto, Haino’s guitar veers off into a herbal, fruity terrain.  Quite unexpectedly, we are confronted with one of the more intriguing moments on this record.  From the fragrant orchard emerges an attempt at ‘melody’.  Granted, it is a mere “attempt”, but sustained as a perennial promise, not frustrated by an abstract collapse or a cacophonic break-out.  Instead, the promise is being subsidized with a conclusive dialogue between the two musicians, each caressing his miraculously sonic object.

 

Sabetsu to mitomerareta anna fun’inki

A duo of two darboukas.  Haino does well by not trying to compete with the world’s best drummer, but nor does he fall into non-pitched melodism of his percussion solos.  Rather his fingers nimbly send hurricanes across the darbouka’s membrane, keeping up with the vertiginous pace posited by the master.  Yoshida’s excitement is noticeable when his trademark vocalizing fuses with nonsensical glossolalia.  They rush through these minutes, barely touching the ground. 

 

‘Masaka’ to omotta toki no naka ni fukumareru  natsukashisa wa nan paasento?

The record culminates here with over 12 minutes of determined guitar and drum mayhem, not unlike Fushitsusha’s mid-period volcanism.  Chord progressions repeat but each time at different length.  Some guitar incisions sound almost groovy (or is Haino poking fun at Kurihara?).  The drumming is also more obviously ‘rock’: Yoshida’s avalanches of irreversible tremors are nothing short of impressive.  He perfects his craft whenever Haino’s riffing goes free.  And when Haino returns to his staccatos, Yoshida’s drumming suddenly becomes regularized.  It is Yoshida who takes the lead to pull the duo each time off the edge of repetition.  Haino’s anthemic moments are short-lived.  His guitar suffocates with a mere droplet of fuzzing pathos.  Then a brief, abstract section follows, filled by drumming in search of perfect architecture.  But it is a riff galore that will end the track.

 

Kiete yuku kono yôna kanashimi hô

Haino meows surreptitiously to Yoshida’s Korg and an astonishingly simple meter.  As if unaware, a detuned string instrument (banjo?) rambles on with a corrugated effect.  There are surprises – the Korg imitates tabla’s left-hand drum with a deeper, variable pitch.  The ‘banjo’ melodically shadows the polyrhythm.  Haino swoons into monosyllabic chanting, peaking mid-phrase (here’s the regularity) and varying the release (here’s lack thereof).  

 

***

 

For a bold listener in search of avant-rock improvisation, there are excellent moments on each of the recordings listed below.  My favorites remain 1 and 2.  I have never heard position 4.  Material on 7 and 8 partly overlaps. 

 

1. Keiji HAINO & Tatsuya YOSHIDA: “Mizu ga honô wo tsukamu made” (2000)

2. KNEAD: “Tokete shimaeru shiyawase mo.  Melting Happiness” (2001)

3. KNEAD: “Knead” (2002)

4. Keiji HAINO, Tatsuya YOSHIDA, Mitsuru NATSUNO, BUS RATCH: “Live at Cafe Independants” (2004)

5. Keiji HAINO & Tatsuya YOSHIDA: “New Rap” (2005)

6. SANHEDOLIN: “Majoicchi wa mukô” (2005)

7. Keiji HAINO & Tatsuya YOSHIDA: “Uhrfasudhasdd” (2007)

8. Keiji HAINO & Tatsuya YOSHIDA: “Hauenfiomiume” (2008)

Published in: on September 7, 2008 at 3:14 pm  Leave a Comment  
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HELLEBORE: “Il y a des jours” *****

Recorded 1983-84

 

 

Hellebore were initially a quartet of Jean Caël (bass), Antoine Gindt (guitar), Daniel Koskowitz (drums) and Denis Tagu (keyboards).  Initially equipped with Rhodes piano, the band expanded the sound considerably by co-opting Alain Casari on saxophones and clarinet and purchasing a popular crumar synthesizer.  This is the line-up on their only LP, decorated with art work prepared by Colorado’s Mnemonists/Biota.

 

By the early 1980s, these young French musicians were among the most talented epigones of Rock in Opposition style.  Certainly, they were too young to compete with the British luminaries of the movement.  And yet, the ex-post criticism of their output, often meted out by some of the members themselves, was probably a mite too harsh.  Even today, three decades after Henry Cow’s demise, the musical world is still receiving the dividends from that artistic investment.  There was clearly nothing wrong with this 25 years ago.

 

Soon after Hellebore folded, Jean Caël launched Szentendre, a short-lived band guided by similar searchlights.  Koskowitz and Tagu initially joined, but soon left.  Four musicians of the quintet also appeared on Look de Bouk’s first LP.  Koskowitz soon rejoined Gindt and Casari in Neo Museum – a logical continuation of Hellebore, if a little more saxophone-fronted.  But that incarnation did not last either.  Koskowitz disavowed the entire scene and made a radical stylistic move towards more pugnacious forms of modern French rock, most prominently with Soixante étages.  Denis Tagu and Jean Caël have continued to charm old and new audiences in the surviving DIY projects Toupidek and Look de Bouk. 

 

 

Introduction végétarienne

“There are those days, there are such hours”, proclaims a Reichian voice loop.  Rather than cutting up formants, Hellebore allows the entire phrases to be reproduced, and repeated.  And so, we learn about “the weight of responsibility” and the concerns regarding the financial future.  Still, “vegetarian” it is not.  The tape material is prodded by an emulsion of drums, assorted noise and vinyl crackle.  Slowly harmonic hints are being diffused by Denis Tagu’s electric organ, stiff cowbells, a Cartesian rhythm box, triste piano and leaden-footed electro-beat.  Against this pile-up of orchestration, the melody had to come in higher notes, and come it does, in the form of Antoine Gindt’s surf guitar.  He marinates the emergent theme with delicate, broadly optimistic gestures.  It all happens with a velocity of tired hoofs, allowing Alain Casari’s clarinet to entwine within the constraints of the inelastic tempo and densifying texture, rather than ad libitum.  Jingling cowbells free their partials, carried with non-descript electrified veneer.  A variation on this theme is then performed on piano, clarinet and organ.  Unimpressed, Daniel Koskowitz’s cymbals announce a new movement for a solo guitar, punctured by the axle of a piano playing exactly the same notes.  The effect is warm, and softening, which could be surprising given the difference in prefix characteristics between these two instruments.  The 25-note theme returns with avuncular clarinet.  It is up to the pianist to bring it all down to the stop line. 

 

Tetraktys

Two, lengthy ‘harmonium’ tones are quickly tamed by the cymbals and a guitar introducing another slo-mo, lazy, numbing theme borrowed from late summer.  Jean Caël’s bass is unobtrusive in its solidifying role.  When it speeds up, alto saxophone alternates with (almost forgotten) crumar synthesizer.  An electronic drapery lunges forward in short chunks, allowing the drummer to lose the metronomic precision of the opening.  Stylistically, Casari’s sax merely shadows the synthi-led staccato, even after an obligatory change of time signature.  The harmonic agreement between the saxophone and the keyboard is finally broken by prominence-reordering whispers and dry skin drumming from Koskowitz.  The final subsection is aperiodic, with a clean resolution from the synthesizer, bass and clangorous cymbals. 

 

Artefact

A bleak, plaintive intro temporizes through the plasticity of bass-organ-saxophone triad.  The eventual conflagration is sparked by the drums, a capriciously low-tuned guitar and a sandblasting alto sax.  The band zigzags through multi-guitar progressions and saxophone-led interrogations.  But this trendline soon collapses, giving way to keyboard-led blanket morosity.  It is here that an in-your-face box rattling hijacks the spotlight from the predictably a-metric drumming, lumbering bass and a mid-flight saxophone line.  Denis Tagu accelerates on his piano, faithfully traced by Gindt’s guitar mutualism. 

 

Film di Ripratoria

Fast, if commonsensical saxophone melody interrelates here with a fatalistically joyful guitar.  By comparison, satirical piano arpeggios sound as if collected from another dimension.  When heraldical drums and cymbals join in, the band can no longer fend off the accusation of Henry Cow fanaticism.  A jangly guitar gains prominence over the academically pointillist band, destabilized by arbitrary repression from saxophone blow-outs.  This is almost as good as the Muffins’ take on the British original.  Clapping, skitter, dilapidated drumming, intrusions into piano’s underbelly…  Strings are hammered, powders shaken, hands clapped, surfaces scraped until the guitar and saxophone return with a neutral variant of the opening head. 

 

Warme Wasser mit Grass

Drum and bass drive in, seemingly with little idea where the theme would lead them.  When Caël’s bass and an entire balustrade of glassy and metallic flickering finally embark on a rhythmic journey, a This Heat-type hairpin takes them down the slope through a blackened, well-oiled connubium of guitar and drums.  At each life-saving turn, a fair amount of repetition resurfaces.  The guitar meows on its own account.  Then it gets dirty, cocky, squawky, occasionally punctured by the reeds.  A drum salvo will close this rockiest of Hellebore’s cuts.

 

Umanak – Marquis de Saint Circq

Despite Koskowitz’s intelligent space drum presence, this is little more than a smoky piano solo, a lyrical nocturne, a contemplative poem.  A smiling guitar line looks on, a box ticks with soldierly regularity, and Casari’s clarinet knits its windy napkins with inscriptions from 1001 nights.  The structure tends to shift – piano and bass exchange their respective roles with the guitar.  But then a drastic wake-up call clarions: a mountain howl from the Northern Carpathians, powered by an organ squeak.  This apparent tribute to Plastic People of the Universe acts like a shock therapy to overconfident listeners.  The chunks of organ scatter around, oblivious to the saxophone and crumar in overdrive.  Only Caël’s bass still retains the ominous beat calqued from the Jan Hus’ worshippers.  The saxophone, synthesizer and multiplex percussion drizzle off till the very end.

 

Debout

Anachronistic electro-beat and acoustic piano slowly lurk out to witness perky hiking hum.  A romantic juxtaposition of piano and clarinet injects a static ornament.  A keyboard duo of organ and crumar sizzles aimlessly, with bass overdrive piercing through with abstract splashes of color.  The organization around some eternally renewable energy pays off.  When piano chords die out, the rhythm box and keyboard march out on the stepping stones to dynamic resolution.  The drum machine, synthesizer and cowbells re-anchor on the closing theme.  Tagu improvises on the modal piano, compressing the range focus.  But the moods revert.  On the back of a fatuous nursery rhyme clanked out by the piano and clarinet, a martial rhythm of drums, piano and guitar trundles through, prompted by Casari’s war calls on alto.  It is precisely the lone saxophone that survives on the battlefield. 

 

Ce sont des choses qui arrivent

What happens when a pianist, a saxophone player and a percussion virtuoso meet?  Nothing.  You need a guitarist to lead them from their abstract maze.  When that happens, the saxophone runs may be brief, epigrammatic and self-limiting but they remain structurally decisive nonetheless.  The track concludes with a sumptuous piano fragment captured in a space whose acoustics brings back the childhood memories of intimidating concert halls.

 

Eclaté / 3ème / après

Saxophones second an infantile, rhyming beat.  The organ slices chunk after chunk.  For a logical solution to the set, the ‘chalk against the whiteboard’ scrape is coming a little late.  Hoofsteps clock along.  And then, at long last, a Grande Finale is ushered by the band in full glory and in a rather melodious mood: the saxophones, mandolin, bass, and piano. 

 

(On side B, the track description on the insert differs from the one provided on the label; consequently, the comments above may not adequately correspond to musicians’ original intentions).

 

***

 

 

HELLEBORE: “Il y a des jours” (1983-84)

SZENTENDRE: “Un tour gratuit” (1985)

NEO MUSEUM: “Volume 1. Nouvelles ethnologiques de l’obscure museum” (1985-86)

 

Hellebore’s tracks also appeared on compilations: “Douze pour un” (1982), “Voices Notes and Noise” (1983).  Szentendre can be found on “Douze pour un vol.2” (1986), and Neo Museum on “Rencontres du premier type.  Strasbourg, Vandoeuvre, Reims” (1985) as well as “Douze pour un vol.2” (1986).

 

Fans of Hellebore should also seek out Look de Bouk’s debut LP:

 

LOOK DE BOUK: “Lacrimae rerum” (1985)

Published in: on September 1, 2008 at 7:56 pm  Leave a Comment  
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P16D4: “Distruct” ***

Recorded 1982-84

 

 

Ralf Wehowsky is sonic artist originally from Mainz in Germany.  From the very beginning of his recording career, he was enamored with tape manipulation.  At a time when most no-wave bands in Hessen indulged in spitting out their nihilistic messages, Wehowsky’s first band PD chopped, stewed, grilled and mixed contrasting input sources from various group improvisations.  Having mutated into P16D4 with Ewald Weber and Roger Schönhauer, Wehowsky plunged in careful research into the tonality of the source material.  Combined with in-house improvisations, the inputs would undergo speed transpositions, unusual oscillations and re-modeling of both macro- and micro-structure of the material. 

 

At least half of P16D4’s material fused sonic inputs contributed by other artists.  Wehowsky et al would habitually rework the original material beyond recognition.  The manipulated arrangements were deemed successful whenever the corresponding parts of the source material and their contiguous sections became correlated.  Whenever the inputs were overlaid in a relatively “raw” form, the results ranged from free form abstraction to noisy, chaotic forms with very little, if any, repetition. 

 

If P16D4 constituted an a-melodic revolution, they were never programmatically anti-melodic.  Despite the apparent balance between the use of electronic and acoustic tools, it does seem that P16D4 privileged brutal contrasts in the former and rather subtle, organic shifts in the latter.  Elements of untreated (or less treated) noise were often drowned in an illusion of surrounding space.  This was a lesson of multidimensional abstract expressionism. 

 

The record presented here summarizes well the way “mid-period” P16D4 organized its work.  The source material was provided by a number of sonic artists from the early 1980s post-industrial and noise scenes (Nocturnal Emissions, Bladder Flask, Philip Johnson, Die Tödliche Doris, Onnyk, DDAA, Frederik Nilson, The Haters, Nurse With Wound, Hiroki Kocha, Harold Schellinx, Vortex Campaign, Merzbow, De Fabriek).  However, this is not a compilation.  Rather, it is a sequence of compositions using bared building elements of the original sources.  It is pointless to try to detect the threads leading back to the artists enumerated above. 

 

The band, as such, was active only for about two years, between 1981-83.  Between 1983-88 the moniker P16D4 was used for recordings realized by Ralf Wehowsky’s social circle. 

 

 

Kultstudien zu Anselm Weinberg

Flat slabs of ferritic steel respond with muzzled, chinked sound.  Burring guitar and wowing bass introduce us to semi-paralyzed, dilatory pace of AMM-like exploration.  The big difference is in the guitar treatment – not nearly half as dense as Keith Rowe’s.  Ewald Weber’s anvils, clanky plates and empty metal boxes speak with a short, tinny grin.  Drumsticks are trying to force some resonance from metallic, wooden and polymer surfaces, to no avail.  The guitar wahs numbly, note by note.  Steven Stapleton’s deeply treated voice is being played backwards as if in memory of yesterday’s slaughter.  The treatment of source material imparts a sensation of intense concentration.  Brought to reluctant prominence, some pangy, earthy cymbals choke dryly.  Canisters shake and wobbly bass scoops the notes, clipping the release.  A modicum of rhythm is unveiled when the metal box hitting is multiplied by skin drumming and distant temple shimmer.  The sonic landscape is becoming crowded: shuffling sounds, backward voices, highly-pitched feedback, a sandy cascade repeated over and over again.  This last component will become more “rhythmic”, organizing tangential intrusion from jackhammer and obnoxiously pink noise.  At its tail-end, a violin attempts a lyrical theme, all too soon lost to jackhammer’s violence. 

 

Meere Giganten und Berge

If the previous track instilled an expectation of reserve, here P16D4 are endeavoring to demolish it outright.  Skitter, rustle, footsteps, running, wooden boxes – all these sounds meet, but never mix, inside a large, resonant hall.  Electronic microtones squeeze here and there, slurring the effects of abstract percussionism and irregular metallic bangs.  Then we hear an unwelcome rhythm box (courtesy Nigel Ayers of Nocturnal Emissions), quickly undermined by another, even faster electro-beat and electric piano arpeggios.  A political speech in Russian (apparently V.I. Lenin’s harangue) interferes with references to England and France (how timely!).  It is juxtaposed against deep, hollow grey noise and voices sent through by the members of Tödliche Doris.  The beat has now long disappeared, but when it does come back, it appears as fragile, orphaned, “pure” drum exhibitionism.  A longer note from a poorly identifiable object (a horn?) closes the section.

 

Extended Symbols

A wheezing sound is dragged across the range at a breathy tempo.  The angelic vocalize barely palpable, while sequenced post-industrial tapestry juts in and out of audible spectrum.  A male chorus, a sledgehammer and jackrigs are all layered together with a disorienting simultaneity.  Onnyk’s Hedorah-like vibrating noise platonifies a standard guttural growl.  Finally, a lonesome saxophone solo dismisses the company of a skittery, a-metric drumming.  Both are dying out in a large, “factory-like” space. 

 

Aufmarsch, heimlich

Unlike on the first side of the LP, here Ralf Wehowsky’s gestures are determined, his accents are forceful and prefixes abrupt.  The snippets, he uses (Soviet marching songs and Peter Lambert’s alto saxophone) are treated with Stockhausen-like non-linear decontextuatlization.  The unnerving chop-up slowly gives way to multi-tracked saxophone lines, whose soaring runs are instantly undercut – either by the recurring snippets of the marching song, or by another sax layer, alternatively by a loose crankshaft wheel.  The alto sax finally oxygenates the atmosphere in the direction of Anthony Braxton’s intense graphism, albeit with longer notes than the master’s.  The higher range is allowed to echo and the treated stacattisimo nearly transforms the reed into an ersatz guitar.  All along, electronics bubbles and rumbles behind this frontal complexity. 

 

Svenska Förtäring

In this tiny miniature provided by DDAA, Wehowsky demolishes a tape with the lesson of Swedish.  You can (almost) hum along.

 

Kryptogramme 7-11

Although several sources are listed here (notably Bladder Flast and Onnyk), the opening does seem to be overreliant on Wehowsky’s strident cello scraping and sadistic pizzicato assaults, which, by comparison, would turn Tom Cora’s games into tender caress.  Unexpected guitar fuzz, and NWW-type retroactive electro-dust complicate the envelope.  Saxophones multiply in a most abstract manner, despite attempts to limit the thrusts to 2-3 notes each.  Although this is Wehowsky on the piano – its cold, frozen, repetitive stalactites are reminiscent as much of his Permutative Distortion as of Robert Haigh’s Sema.  Meanwhile, noisy crowds ooze in and out.  The plaintive wheeze is forced into a higher life form, further sacrificed for a prominent, monster-movie guitar in shameful overdrive. 

 

Upset Twilight

No meter and no beat here.  Just metallic skitter, hammering, clanks and such like timbral explorations.  Although some electro-buzz appears to underlie the clatter, the sequence is entirely devoted to empty metal boxes and accompanying metallic rustle. 

 

Les honteuses alliances

Phil Johnson’s voice tapes do the trick – processed, vocoder-ed, electro-beaten.  Another warmer, inviting voice in British English beckons from the other side of the universe.  High pitched sound (Bladder Flask here) goes almost hissy as the space gets populated with wobbly sources.  Masami Akita’s flute is inaudible.  Instead, it is noise distribution stuck in a rut, repeating on and on, locked in a groove, Asmus Tietchens-style.  The entire routine is repeated once again, with the noisy rut getting even more oppressive.

 

Martello Tower

Peter Lambert’s alto sax and Nigel Ayers’s rhythm box do their pentatonic thing in P16D4’s laboratory. 

 

Luxus & Mehrwert

Roger Schönhauer is responsible for this collage-like accumulation of contributions from De Fabriek, Vortex Campaign and Hiroki Kocha.  It begins with a charming, old vinyl record crackle reproducing a pre-War orchestra.  The turntable arm skips, skips, skips – like Philip Jeck’s or Pierre Bastien’s modern-day machines do.  This is followed by a frattage of environmental noises, field recordings, electronic processing, machine-type rhythms, Yasujiro Ozu-style black and white moods, circus melodies, hammering, and then back to the old, Pierre Henry-type cortical take-off.  Upon which, the vinyl record skips again.  Schönhauer’s art meets here Nurse With Wound circa “Sylvie and Babs”. 

 

 

***

 

P16D4 was strongly rooted in the early 1980s cassette culture and many of these recordings have resurfaced in recent years on vinyl or CD.  They contain some of the very best recordings from the “transitional” era, capturing the shift from PD’s post-punk electro-experimentalism to more sophisticated abstract forms.  Luckily, Wehowsky et al dwelled on that thin edge long enough to bequeath several high-quality sonic documents of their morose enthusiasm.  Most of the material recorded between 1980-82 is highly recommended, with 4, 8 and 13 being my favorites.  6, 7 and 12 include recordings of various members of PD.  Recordings made after 1982 are best explored by the lovers of musique concrète and electro-acoustic traditions (to which P16D4 does not directly belong). 

 

1. PD: “Inweglos” (1980)

2. PD: “Alltag” EP (1980)

3. Ralf WEHOWSKY: “eaRLy W one” (1980)

4. Ralf WEHOWSKY: “early Two.  Nur die Tiere blieben übrig” (1980)

5. Ralf WEHOWSKY: “early W 4.  Ajatollah Carter“ (1980)

6. ERTRINKEN VAKUUM/KURZSCHLUSS: “Ladunter / Kurzschluss” (1980)

7. PERMUTATIVE DISTORSION / LLL: “Brückenkopf / Schlagt sie tot!“ (1980-81)

8. P16D4: “Wer nicht arbeiten will, will auch nicht essen” (1980-81)

9. P16D4: “Von Rechts nach Links“ (1980-81)

10. Ralf WEHOWSKY: “Early W – Three.  Neue Deutsche Peinlichkeit” (1981)

11. PD: “Startrack / Freiheitsgeschmack” (1981)

12. P16D4 / Der APATISCHE ALPTRAUM: “Tödliche Schweigen / Der Apatische Alptraum“ (1981)

13. PERMUTATIVE DISTORSION: “Brückenkopf in Niemandsland“ SP (1981)

14. P16D4: “Kühe in ½ Trauer” (1980-83)

15. P16D4: “Distruct” (1982-84)

16. P16D4: “Tionchor“ (1982-86)

17. P16D4 / SBOTHI: “Nicht niemand niergends nie!“ 2LP (1986)

18. P16D4 / ETANT DONNES / ESPLENDOR GEOMETRICO / VIVENZA: “Bruitiste“ 2LP (1986-87)

19. P16D4 / Asmus TIETCHENS / SBOTHI / NACHTLUFT: “Captured Music“ (1987)

20. P16D4: “Acrid Acme” (1981, 1987)

21. P16D4 / MERZBOW / SBOTHI: “Fifty” (1989)

22. SLP: “SLP” (1989-90)

 

Naturally, Ralf Wehowsky has continued to record prolifically throughout the last two decades, but digitalization and sampling transformed his work since the early 1990s. 

 

Among P16D4’s recordings included on various compilations, the following ones can be considered the most significant.  Indeed, position 2 belongs to the most important monuments of monochrome post-industrial collage culture of the early 1980s. 

 

1.“Schau hör, Main Herz ist Rhein” (1981)

2. “Masse Mensch“ (1982)

3. “Sensationnel Journal no.1“ MC (1982)

4. “Ohrenschrauben” (1982)

5. “Bad Alchemy Nr 5“ MC (1983)

6. “Ohrensausen“ (1984)

7. “Strength“ (1984)

8. “Devastate to Liberate” (1985)

9. “A Gnomean Haigonaimean“ (1987)

10. “Ciguri” (1988)

 

Published in: on August 31, 2008 at 6:27 pm  Leave a Comment  
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Michael LYTLE, Will PARSONS et al: “Iowa Ear Music” *****

Recorded 1967-1976

 

 

Many Europeans, and indeed some coastal Americans, tend to believe that little of artistic value has been produced between Lower East Side and Haight Ashbury.  But the country is too large, people too well educated and communications too easy for the hinterland to remain perennially barren.  Still, you would not be too far off the mark to assume that the consonant-less State of Iowa has made fewer musical contributions than, say, Colorado.

 

And yet, jewels do crop up if you plough the cornfield before the blister phase.  This compilation of recordings collected by Michael Lytle, Will Parsons, Jon English and several others seriously questions the aforementioned “coastal” dogmatism.  The material ranges from cacophonous free form improvisations to vintage synthesizer excursions.  At their most intriguing, the musicians experimented with aleatoric forms, forcing the participants to limit their musical communication during the recording session. 

 

One of the interesting features on this record is that often the pieces quiet down, masked by louder sections presented as separate tracks.  However, the preceding composition does continue underneath, drowned by the successor bolstered with higher decibel content.  Instruments whose projection is stronger in an orchestral setting – both acoustic and electronic – sometimes betray this ingenious proceeding.  The stratiform treatment never disturbs, on the contrary. 

 

Little else has been heard from these musicians.  I suppose that some of them ended up in academic circles.  Michael Lytle moved to New York, just in time, and caught up with George Cartwright and Mark Dresser.  He deserves his share of the fame and respect lavished over the years on Doctor Nerve.  His clarinet contributions made Didkovsky’s project sound like a hyperspeed big band. 

 

 

 

Pete’s Beet

In what is essentially a solo track, Will Parsons combines his penchant for percussive skitter, hand drum snaps and disoriented shakers with pulsating plastic clicks from moog sequencer.

 

Anton’s Chickenyard

The first group piece based on atonal recipes for dampened prepared piano sounds (Parsons), lowly trombone (Jon English), shredded guitar chords (John Leake) and electronically processed cello (Eric Jensen).  Tom Wilcox’s trumpet gets lost somewhere in the abstract cross-pollination of timbres.

 

Basschurn

The amalgam of talents turns its attention to color and value formations, through random organization of unusual contrasts – Gary Gray’s mbira may be given a key part to play, but never too far away from temporizing steel drums and tender cello pizzicato.  As many as three bass players (Paul Berner, Jon English and Don Roach) paint a poetic sunset of musing polychroma.  Circumspect trumpet legatos sweep around in a show of restraint.

 

Degroot #13

A piece captured live opens with spry piccolo intrusions by Pat Purswell.  The delicate tapestry of electronics (Peter Lewis) and marimba (Parsons) barely distract from the spotlight on the Ornettish horn but delivered on… trombone (Jon English).  This intuition will later be rewarded on side B…

 

Unseen Walls (waltz?)

Michael Lytle appears for the first time here on his signature clarinet.  He is seconded by Eric Roalson whose deep, midnight piano clusters sound almost as wooly as Permutative Distortion…  Bruce Wirwin’s violin crowds the space before we recess into…

 

The World’s Most Impossible Silence

…nothing.  This is vinyl time, so such moments of ‘silence’ are much more expensive than the frequent oases of silent self-indulgence that mass producers of CDRs are flooding us with these days.  Luckily, it does not last long. 

 

Crusader

Michael Lytle dishes out a modernist pop song, cooked up in the moog, but terrestrial in nature.  It is naively ‘complete’ with a pre-determined bass throb and pointlessly groovy solos compressed to high register.  But he deserves to be absolved.  This is 1971.

 

Phase Leake

Leake does appear and it is a phase-guitar piece, flanked by two basses – one acoustic and one electric (Parsons’s favorite trick?).  The rhythm section imparts an ethnic jazz feel, but the shifting guitar phases splash land from another world.  Despite an orchard full of shakers, the moog from the previous track can still be distinguished from the guitar-fronted jazzy mass.

 

Bent End

In what appears as the continuation of the previous cut, a guitar sustain and double bass tremolos seek correlations with ultra-fast cymbal runs.  The braying guitar is of no help for the bass, lost in painful search of the right chord. 

 

The Sands of the Time Reborn

An archival recording, apparently from 1967.  Vintage electronics mingle with swoozing “voices”.  The drummer (Parsons) is content with punctuating selected beats, leaving the remaining auralspace to phantom effects and the bass player (John Wilmet).  Half-present Ken Cohea offers a few half-blows on his sax. 

 

Bull Elewhale

Eight years on and Lytle rejoins on a very earthy clarinet in perpetual overblows.  Eager to fly right into the top of the range he often loses projection and clarity.  Roalson “helps” by scraping cymbals.

 

… Now Deceased

One of the more memorable moments on the record is shaped unhurriedly through the otherworldly juxtaposition of woodenly-resonating mbira and chromatic harmonica.  In this meeting between the cattle rangers from the wild West and the civilized West Africa, the dépaysement is complete.  Pat Hazell’s tonguings on harmonica twiddle, scan and reproduce the images of parched spaciousness.  Parsons adds a sparse marimba touch, in support of the mbira (Gary Gray).  They are accompanied by a cello drone (Jensen) and an unlikely third idiophone – (Michael Meyers on vibraphone).  The band lapses into an elegant tremolo and disappears.  It was too short.

 

The Leo Trio

A viola and marimba duo with some help from harp (Motter Forman).  William Hibbard operates his viola with a slurred staccato.  At the end of each slice, the marimba (Parsons) throws in a pithy commentary.

 

Iowa Night’s Bloom

This is the first of two or three fragments that bear an eerie resemblance to the loft-jazz masterpieces from Rivbea…  The guitar-bass-drums trio of Leake-Paul Berner and Parsons is joined here by two saxophonists (Larry Easter and Don Edelbrock) and two pianists (Pat Hazell on acoustic piano and Lynn Willard on electric piano).  Beautifully fostered by piano tremolos the two soprano saxophones constitute a svelte duo – self-replicating between the left and right channel.  The electric aura gives this fragment a “free-jazz-rock” character, aptly constrained by the musicians’ good taste: delicate hi-hat, cloudy guitar, softly arpeggiated electric piano.  There is some timbral cross-dressing here.  The guitar plays the electric piano part and the soprano squeezes into the guitar’s pants.  This abstract canvas could extend over an entire LP side, but it does not. 

 

Waiting for Grace

This is apparently Parsons on vibraphone, but little, if anything can be heard.  This sure ain’t Robert Wood.

 

Back to the Playground

A group noise piece opened by scattered piano sounds, voices, a wand patting on a piece of furniture.  Lytle’s bass clarinet gropes for intonation.  Mike Brawner adds extra noise on rubber hose.  Clarinet, voice and piano are settling down within this makeshift, purposefully directionless amalgamate.

 

Freedom’s Not Something Someone Tells (the Way to Live)

A short song featuring Candace Natveig’s nice voice, trombone and vibraphone.

 

Falsestart, Falsestart, Falsestart

A rehearsal snippet – one piano chord returns over and over again.  Cymbal overtones are multi-layered beyond measure and drown it all out.

 

An Infinite Regression

A multi-tracked racket for electric bass, organ, voice, trombone, trumpet, percussion and drums – all looped around and thrown into the bucket.  This apparent output of many sessions (1972-76) is not shaken, but rather carefully rotated in analog manner, as it were. 

 

First Rites, Before

John Patterson’s guitar solo vies for our attention, but it’s a foregone conclusion that our ears will rather collude with the cellulosic warmth of Parsons’s mbira.  Monosyllabic vocal and gummy, wavering flute (Grace Bell) add little extra texture.

 

Solomon’s Mines, Birth

Hot on the heels of some uncredited bowed strings, multiple vocal polyphonies sound rather accidental.  Mark Solomon’s flute yanks and zigzags away when the drummer picks up speed, with Lynn Willard’s piano emulating the effort. 

 

Peace Like a Football Growth

This accumulation of sources spanning four years begins with long notes on tenor sax (Jon Monick) interbreeding with some bowing on acoustic bass and articulate cymbal work from Parsons.  The saxophone’s improvisational scampering is mostly dissonant and it invites a whole bag of background racket. 

 

Moment of First Choice, Freedom

Here’s a contest – who will blow/bow higher – Charles West on his clarinet or Bruce Erwin on his violin?  The assistants are at the ready to help.  The violin does sound folksy, yet the clarinet steers away confidently from any klezmerite connotations.  Not uninteresting.

 

Choice Abandoned, Get a Job!

Will Parsons joins the line-up in a Steve Miller-type piano accompaniment.  The trouble is, Lol Coxhill’s role has been usurped by a rather traditional Dixie clarinet playing by Charles West.  In one lyrical violin solo Bruce Erwin appears to relish his short E-string detachés.  The piano shuts down the nostalgia, brusquely.

 

Where Karma Curdles & Hurts, Dharma

A surreptitious Jon English on trombone and Carolyn Berdahl on cello roam in the presence of listless bass and cymbal ostinato.

 

With Sun Inside, Maturity

After an Arkestra-style expressionist tutti of soprano saxophone, trombone, tenor, flute and fluegelhorn, Will Parsons impersonates Don Moye – savoring the slow, grand buildup of percussive microtones.  Don Edelbrock’s soprano sax appears the most agile in the pack and departs from the increasingly riffing surge.  Gary Gray’s mbira appears in a more structural role here than previously.  Tom Wilcox’s fluegelhorn goes solo, polished, mezzotint, creamy, cup- or harmon-muted.  There is a sense of polyrhythmic relaxation is there.  Linda Dillon’s flute and the saxophones converse with dignity.  The atmosphere of “Wildeflowers” is with us again. 

 

Clarabelle Interlude, Self Explanatory

The same, extended line-up but different music: liturgical clucking, rubbery preachings, synthesized bubbles.  The random distribution of outcomes leaves one perplexed. 

 

Last Wrongs, Death

A collection of excerpts from Parsons’s library of pieces for voice and “impakt percussion synthesizer”.  What we get here is a dense swirl of cricket shimmer and some assorted percussion.  Buzzing dragonflies, bumble bees, orthoptera and other airborne anthropods have all conspired to crap their sizzle in three or four simultaneous, multiplex layers.  Bells, cymbals and triangles initially keep this concert almost “human”, but even these are later subjected to tape speed processing. 

 

The Knight of Swords, Comes & Cuts Away One By One All the Things You Cling to, Until You’re Left with Only One

These tape compositions by Lytle (1968-70) and Parsons (1976) are interesting in their use of vintage Buchla, Synthi and Moog Mark II synthesizers which were available in various academic institutions at that time. 

 

Lonely Woman, Ornette Coleman

In a complete change of mood, Jon English invites us to adjust our set of expectations to his echoed trombone performing one of the 20th century musical monuments.  Some sequenced “piano” sound peeps from a synthesizer, manned here by Peter Lewis.  He peppers his keyboard with shortlived echo-arpeggios.  Finally, perpendicular transgressions modulate the classic climate with dissonant dirt.  Only the repetitive electronic throb stays on.  This 1973 version is well worth investigating by all Ornette Coleman’s fans.  And just about anyone else.

 

Decay of Mayamusic

A barely audible ditto for violin, clarinet and flute. 

 

Decay of Shivadrone

Michael Lytle closes the record with a line on Moog Mark III.

 

 

***

 

This record is unique and there is little else that compares favorably.  Lytle’s small format recordings from the New York period are, by comparison, pedestrian. 

 

LYTLE, PARSONS, ENGLISH, ROACH, GRAY, LEAKE:“Iowa Ear Music” (1967-76)

 

LYTLE-CARTWRIGHT-MOSS: “Meltable Snaps It” (1980)

Published in: on August 28, 2008 at 9:52 pm  Comments (7)  
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ARBETE OCH FRITID: “Se upp! för livet” *****

Recorded 1976

 

The long-running Swedish ensemble was founded in 1968 by saxophone player Roland Keijser and trumpeter Torsten Eckerman.  During the early years, the leaders searched the perfect modus operandi between their emotional attachment to Nordic melodiousness and their talent for folk-jazz thematic developments.  The departures of key personnel after the first two records pushed the band even further into straddling these strongly divergent musical pathways.  The results were, most of time, satisfactory, especially in live format.  During concerts, the band often indulged in longer forms, ingeniously stringing familiar themes together and interspersing them with tentative improvisational departures.  At the same time, the utilization of traditional folk motifs expanded into other cultures – the Balkans, the Baltics and Asia Minor. 

 

The radical transformation came after the founders’ departure in 1975.  A+F were then joined by two veterans anointed with Sweden’s most celebrated “psychedelic” pedigree – Torbjörn Abelli and Thomas Mera Gartz.  Both had previously been involved in a continuously evolving jamming vehicle known under a variety of monikers: Pärson Sound, International Harvester, Harvester and, last but not least, Träd Gräs och Stenar.  Their arrival critically affected Arbete och Fritid’s sound and pushed the band towards a bolder form of rock jam. 

 

Although the two records created by this line-up are among Sweden’s most accomplished experimental rock statements from the era, they do show signs of stylistic strain.  The psych-jam format proved largely incompatible with the lingering affection for Scandinavian folk. 

 

Roland Keijser’s and Kjell Westling’s subsequent ‘return’ resulted in the recording of a deeply sentimental, charming acoustic document that remained in stark contrast to the wild A+F of the late 1970s. 

 

Multi-instrumentalist Ove Karlsson was the only member of A+F who played with the band throughout its entire existence.  Only his direct testimony could reveal the compromises behind the band’s double life.

 

 

Födelsemusik

From deep silence, Ove Karlsson’s furtive cello adsorbs airy, sustained notes on the C-string.  Thomas Gartz’s indifferent mallets stumble on the large tom-tom.  One by one, spacey guitars lurk from their dens, howling like a pack of orphaned wolves.  True to this pictorial metaphor, Tord Bengtsson’s and Ove Karlsson’s strings recede in tremolos, but advance in glissandos.  Meanwhile, the mallets progression remains frail and ineffectual, affecting the overall atmosphere of this lazy jam.  Whenever the energy does swell up, it dies down almost instantly, taking the joule content to negligible levels.  Finally, the multiple guitar barking becomes more intrusive, densifying the texture with echo, fuzz and wah-wah.  Although the drummer maintains the simplistic meter, the tempo picks up, and the shadow of Träd Gräs och Stenar’s is upon us.  Supported by bass and guitar tremolos, Bengtsson construes an irradiant, magnetic ascension.  The pace stays languorously laid-back, à la Grateful Dead, and dangerously epigonic by 1976.  The utopistic pathos of guitar-led anthem is, however, dense enough to escape the pretentiousness of the 1970s’ rock.  When the volume increases a flute saves the band from too conventional a climax (Who is this?  The mysterious Jan Zetterquist credited on the cover?  We know that neither Keijser nor Westling appear in this session).  Transparent flute runs subjugate mallet-drum rolls and a guitar drone.  The ensemble slowly climbs down the dynamic slope, leaving the cumulonimbus of feedback behind them.  The final fade-out is as slow as the fade-in was.  It is down to Ove Karlsson on the cello again…

 

Fantasins lov

a.Väldernärså stor

b.Skogen

c.Ljugerivisan

This time, an Indian-sounding flute intones a morning tune to reckless banjo strumming and hollow sounds on clay pots.  When someone (Ove Karlsson?  Ulf Lauthers?) begins a puja-styled incantation, the memory of Don Cherry returns to Stockholm’s NMW Studios.  Having dodged familiar tuning, shimmering strings join the thumb piano to sublimate the oddly transgressive harmonics.  As the kalimba prances around, the leader whistles and then commences an emotional recitation in Swedish.  In fact, the droning voices evoke more likely a carefree bonfire sing-along than a concentrated Tibetan throat singing or Mongolian khoomei.  A percussive vocabulary apportions additional splashes of color.

 

Dansa i ring

Bells and Tord Bengtsson’s fiddle jolt around in an upbeat Nordic dance.  Years later, the gammaldans stomping does force armchair listener’s feet off the ground.

 

Jag vet inte så noga

Chunky organ and a rather pedestrian hi-hat do not augur well for something that sounds like a 1970s’ TV commercial.  It soon turns out to be a very terrestrial pop song for two, untrained tenors.  If it’s a parody, then it does not quite work, despite their incessant repetition: “Not so exactly”.   Today, Karlsson’s ballroom-styled organ trivia would qualify for a retro jewel and land on the special shelf along Aavikko.  And if karaoke had existed back in 1976, then “Jag vet inte så noga” would have ruled in deep north’s KTV parlors.  In effect, it is achieves neither.

 

Jag bär min smärta

As much as we would wish the pristine guitar and piano hymn intro to guide us into a Popol Vuh pilgrimage, the vocal soon ruins it, turning the song into a Dylan-type grumble.  Gartz’s violin joins the crooner’s ode to “pain”.  It lingers rather conventionally, with a dose of harmonica making it even more rural.

 

Knoga och knega (Framtid)

For the first time on this record, a heavy vibrato makes an appearance.  Jews harp?  Hard-boiled guitar?  A tone generator’s husky hum?  Here again, Gartz’s skins are subjected to soft, felted treatment.  A chanted phrase is repeated ad nauseam to some low-pitched rumble and non-resonant bells.   The result is rather spooky as the low-end, speculative ultrasound seems to be generated by something more ominous than Torbjörn Abelli’s bass.  The chant is unhurried, though audibly tired by the oppressive jungle filled with animal fracas. 

 

Porrpaketet

Cheap organ looms in the back of some country barn party.  A master of ceremonies half-sings to the inconsequential chords from Karlsson’s weary keyboard.  Someway between a Scandinavian Fred Lane and an antediluvian version of Bad Statistics, he preaches something about the depravity of sex and drugs.  The logorrheic, garrulous performance sounds like an undesirable, drunken lecture.  But it does seem to constitute one of Ulf Lauthers’s key elements in the overall concept of the record – a meta-commentary on societal changes in the confusing decade of 1970s.

 

Jag är inte som andra (kaos eller ordning)

Cosmic guitars swirl in helical fashion with Abelli’s pulsating bass, captured occasionally by clutches from petulant cowbells.  Karlsson obsesses about one specific key on his organ, but when one of the guitars begins to howl again in the distance, an eerie half-whisper startles us right in front of us.  Only the organ survives the shock.

 

Jag vägrar va’ me’

Another of those bonfire songs with just acoustic guitar strumming and a tambourine.  It is folksy.  It is elementary.  It is secular.  It is primitive.  The band members clearly cannot sing, but they do insist.  Despite some attempts to orchestrate the piece (a deeply underadjusted violin) the song was clearly penned with guitar in the hand.   Instead of a refrain, the song is stuffed with infantile echolalia. 

 

Lev hårt – dö ung!

A working class, grungey festival number delivered with a hoarse, angry, anti-musical voice and all of the guitars in a proto-punk rhythmic role.  The effect is not unlike Mighty Baby or Pink Fairies further West.

 

Avdelnig – indelning (giv akt!)

In one of the more intriguing moments on the record, a multi-xylophone and ‘clockwork cuckoo’ galore pollutes vulnerable horror movie buildups.  Jan Zetterquist must have had a hand in this intense, bulimic, invariant assault on the top register.  It is up to the listener to establish any metric sense in this.  Half-way through, some sloganeering kicks in and the piece distills into a haughty lecture against social control.  It is refined into an engaged Radiospiel and closes with quasi-military commands. 

 

Nu måste jag välja!

Mellow 1960s pop guitar arpeggios spangle the spectrum almost like the Ventures.  Only shadowy glissandos remind us that this was taped 15 years later, in a completely different era.  Several singers deliver the text in their untrained unison: “I choose”…   But rather than evoking a protest, it all sounds rather polite and non-confrontational. 

 

Spel i soluppgången

Second significant jam on the record.  This time, Gartz employs his cymbals extensively, while guitars’ wah-wah quacks from a distance.  It seems that some of the guitars are treated with the bow (or it could be Karlsson’s electrically processed cello).  With just enough echo applied to the bowed and sawed guitar/cello, the rhythm section does a great job by keeping it focused and on-target.  Bengtsson’s bass is perfectly aligned with Gartz and disciplined enough to allow for the two guitarists to enjoy their freedom.  The cello repetition gets an almost systemic regularity – not unlike Arthur Russell’s recordings some 6 years later.  Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the jam surges in volume.  The cymbals crash, and the violin goes fiddly, almost bluegrassy.  From this inflection point, the whole band accelerates to the point where one would not expect any psych jam to go – at devilish, bluegrass speed.  Either Gartz or Bengtsson steals the show on Charlie Daniels.  A highly original and successful marriage of unlikely inputs. 

 

Kärlekssång

On this slow-paced, violin-based ballad, the fiddle allocates some voluble rudiments.  This is perfectly justified by the title (Love Song).  But in the higher register the repetitions make its brief cycles almost Karnatic. 

 

Gotlandsmusik

An affable Jerry Garcia-like guitar lead spins and traipses, letting the other guitarist operate the isometric, almost metronomic rhythm.  The lead guitar hikes up and solos freely without showing off.  During this exquisite passage, Arbete och Fritid sound like a compressed slurry from Heldon, Spacecraft, Verto or Peter Green’s first solo – an organized set of guitar solos perfectly enveloped within rhythmic multidividers.  There are no superfluous fireworks, no swagger, just an exhibit of classy guitar vorticism.  The pace remains tight and disciplined throughout.  If this is truly music of Gotland, then why did we not hear more?

 

Älskade barn (tiller alla)

Double violin drone and regular zither arpeggios tee it off for a verbal litany.  One violin soars into the photosphere.  The other stays earthbound, buried in vascular drone.

 

Brudmarsch från Vågå i Norge

This form of a plaintive, but auspicious mazurka would later fill most of LP “Sen dansar vi ut”.  It could be the reason why the heroic theme sounds familiar its anecdotal delinquency.  Violins, drums and guitars dredge a languid, rustic motif as if overheard at a large, provincial get-together.  It would fit the forged innocence of pre-1968 Czech movie.  And that is not the only cinematic reminiscence…

 

Berget

When a soliloquy in Swedish gets wrapped in bird chirping, I can’t help thinking about the contemplative visions of Isak Borg in Bergman’s 1957 classic “Wild Strawberries“…  Plagued by the prominence of unrelated, black-and-white images, I barely notice the drifting infusion of psych jam.  Against the reverberating wails, birds warble, violins oxidize and drums flagellate with cold regularity.  The band reconfigures these sources into loosely hanging tassels of accidental counterpoints.  At the repugnantly caustic edge of our perceptual apparatus, a wild bird whistles in full-blown contrast with the “rock” side of the band, latent inside a deep, narrowing tunnel.  There is no guitar fronting, just the obsessive violin systemism and haunted wailing from deep in the valley.  When the smelting guitars finally emerge, the jam is over and we are freed into an immobility of an aviary saturated with twitter, warble and tweet.  Great listen for long northern winters. 

 

Stora David Bagare

This is an old traditional rondo, arranged by the band for acoustic guitar, violin and multiple voices.  After the heady jamming apex, this acts as a seductive, joyful refrain.  Scurrilous yodeling, offbeat chorus, polyphonic multi-voices, and plain ludic shouting follow incoherently.

 

Nu är det dax

The record closes with this drunken waltz led by the violins of Tord Bengtsson and Thomas Mera Gartz. 

 

 

***

 

 

Positions 7 and 9 are most highly recommended, but 4 and 5 include many excellent moments as well. 

 

1. ARBETE OCH FRITID: “Arbete och fritid” (1970)

2. ARBETE OCH FRITID: “Andra LP” (1971)

3. ARBETE OCH FRITID & Rolf LUNDQVIST: “Slottsbergets hambo & andra valser“ (1972)

4. ARBETE OCH FRITID / KUNSTBANDET “Club Jazz 6” (1972)

5. ARBETE OCH FRITID: “Arbete och fritid” (1973)

6. ARBETE OCH FRITID: “Ur spår” (1974)

7. ARBETE OCH FRITID: “Se upp! för livet” 2LP (1976)

8. ARBETE OCH FRITID: “Sen dansar vi ut” 2LP (1977)

9. ARBETE OCH FRITID: “Hallandan” (1978-79)

 

The band also made a record with Margareta Söderberg, which I have never heard:

 

Margareta SÖDERBERG & ARBETE OCH FRITID: “Käringstand” (1976)

 

Shortly after A+F’s closing chapter, Ove Karlsson’s next band recorded a legendary LP – a highly successful relay between the musical sensibilities of the two – very different – decades:

 

NYA LJUDBOLAGET: “Nya Ljudbolaget“ (1980)

 

Published in: on August 26, 2008 at 8:04 pm  Comments (1)  
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