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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CARE OF THE COW: “I Still Don’t Know Your Style” *****

Recorded 1981

 

 

This long forgotten Chicago band was formed in mid-1970s as a quartet of Christine Baczewska, Sher Doruff, Victor Sanders and Kevin Clark.  The first three survived long enough to leave this highly original item to posterity. 

 

The band relied largely on the combination of Baczewska’s vocal talents and Sanders’s imaginative engineering, with more than a dollop of Doruff’s compositional and multi-instrumentalist skills.  Relying on vocal polyphonies and very transparent instrumentation, the band’s relationship with melody often seemed entirely accidental. 

 

Baczewska’s and Doruff’s voices are the leading instruments here, benefiting from ingenious multi-tracking.  The vocalscapes accelerate and decelerate at will, confronting the listener with dizzying transformations of pitch, volume and energy.  This is achieved without abrupt cut-ups, which would have probably dominated had this recording been made in the sampling era…

 

Breezy female vocal polyphonies sometimes brought comparisons with more widely known Raincoats, but even at “Odyshape” the London girls were more straightforwardly ‘rock’.

 

Care of the Cow folded in 1983, and the artists’ recording activity has been rather sparse since then.

 

 

Conversation Piece

We first hear a tape recording of a child singing the 1957 evergreen “Just Walking in the Rain”.  From a swirling electronic loop gradually surfaces a vocal part, instantly subjected to dynamic swells and accelerations.  Doubled up by a second alto and a breezy guitar, the feeling is almost Lusitanian, but suffused with faulty intonation, split notes and recurrent hysteresis.  The moods, the scales and the volumes keep sliding, exposing sudden pitch changes.  The melody will advance only when the rhythm guitar and bells steady its progression, prefiguring Seattle’s Tone Dogs by several years.  Sher Doruff’s rustling twelve-string guitar is resplendescent here.  After another taped intermission (a children’s party) the voice-as-instrument treatments return.  The ascensions are portamento, but the gear shifts are so prevalent that you can’t help checking if the speedometer on your turntable does not reveal any problems with the equipment.  It is remarkable how polyrhythmic the band can get with only Victor Sanders’s acoustic guitar as the only explicitly rhythm instrument.

 

Eternally at Work

An a capella intro is delivered in Anglo-Celtic style.  Witty multi-tracking superimposes lyrical polyphony.  Still, the disturbed hierarchy between the first and second voice destroys any tonal expectations.  The chest voice belches out: “And after all these years – I Still Don’t Your Style”.  Despite all the obsessive pitch manipulation, the logocentric structure avoids melismas.  The instruments struggle with this unusual velocity distribution: a naïve, belated clarinet, bass clarinet, pennywhistle and tattered percussion are never on time.  The fractured melodism of polyphonic vocals dominates and more organized drums and guitar passages do not make this venture any more style-bound. 

 

Christinatron

Christine Baczewska’s solo recording for multiple vocal strata.  The smooth overlapping of frequencies yields a quasi-electronic, spacious feel.  The range is somewhat compressed, yet legible: the higher notes are shorter, the lower melismas are longer.  Between them, the notes circulate, rotate.  It ends naturally, projecting an elegant, stylistic challis that would define Mauve Sideshow’s sound several years later. 

 

Qué sera, Sarah

So here we go – Ray Evans and Jay Livingston’s 1956 pop classic mangled and regurgitated in a completely disfigured fashion, with droning guitar and female yodeling immersed in spacey echoes.  The drumming is isometric, crisp and elastic, the electric guitar flourishings are distinct but mellow.  Neither the waves of vocalizing, nor the space jam – style drumming prepare us for the familiar lines: “Will I be pretty, will I be rich?”, only to be blotted out by ponderous guitar thunders.  Credible space whisper and the lengthy drone, not Doris Day’s caprices, determine the plasticity of this track. 

 

The Slope of her Nose

The pivotal track on the record mixes the avant-garde structuring with satiny pop vocal mannerism.  It opens with chatting, laughter and a metallic voice reciting a poem: “I’d love to ski sometime – I’d never been skiing”, we hear.  Volume swells on the vocal parts are extreme but come in discrete packets, isorhythmically (pitch and rhythm patterns do not coincide).  Then we move into a waltz, with some electronics, bells and slide whistle, close to Klimperei’s domain.  The second voice is fine-grained and more rational.  They eventually take off – in unison first, and then burst into a totally abstract section teeming with unstable chordal textures, percussion and bells.  When it turns into a guitar hymn, harp-like articulation filters through the steel guitar’s frets.  The band’s melodic indifference is remarkable.  The continued parity violation raises a question if they had not recorded the input material first and then manipulated it by slowing and speeding the tape at will… However, the avoidance of vibrato and the softening presence of angelic chorus mask this quasiperiodic operation.

 

Downstream

A slow-decay tam-tam brings us into a Harry Partchian idiophonic intro, which is instantly discontinued.  Baczewska’s voice is produced in an echo-pop fashion, but the bizarrely tuned, energetic xylophones overreact to the melancholic vocal line.  It requires considerable ambiguity tolerance: the twain shall not meet.  Dry recitation of Bertold Brecht’s text, tepid, consolatory guitar and bass are purely contiguous with the angularity of the percussive assaults.  The twin vocals go polyphonic without any pretense of melodic goal-seeking, leaving two guitars to build a crescendo.  The inconsequential rhythm acoustic guitar operates in close-ups.  The distorted electric guitar is more distant, but too evocative of the conventional rock idiom.

 

Clippings

C.W.Vrtacek-styled guitar handled by Victor Sanders takes us back to the deceptively “Brazilian” mood of the first piece, undercut pitch jumps and vocal manipulation.  The guitars accentuate the building drama in the narrative.  The hesitating melodic line seems to be determined by, rather than accommodate, the syllabic count in the lyrics – the more vowels are there, the longer the passage.  The heaviest moment on this record follows – with chopped rhythms and punchy guitar riffs. 

 

Strophe

Music boxes bring a variety of associations.  Plush shops facing Lake Geneva.  Cute little dolls dancing.  Hat Shoes’ memorable “Saddest Train Ride”…  Care of the Cow expose us to articulatory suppression and subsequent retrieval: a whispering voice, lap steel guitar in lieu of a piano in low register and electric guitar in high register.  Delicately undulating multi-vocal texture gets some percussive help, but unobtrusive echo treatment ensures a relative immobility of the piece. 

 

 

***

 

I have vicarious knowledge of only one more recording by the band.  Apparently several years ago they taped several pieces, none of which has been published as yet. 

 

CARE OF THE COW: “I Still Don’t Know Your Style” (1981)

CARE OF THE COW: “Dogs Ears Are Stupid” MC (1983)

 

Christine Baczewska has continued to record occasionally, and I am yet to hear the music. 

 

Christine BACZEWSKA: “Tribe of One” (1993)

Christine BACZEWSKA: “X Factor” (2001)

 

Published in: on August 23, 2008 at 9:53 am  Comments (6)  
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Toshi ICHIYANAGI: “Opera Yokoo Tadanori wo utau” ******

Recorded 1968-1969

 

 

In the 1950s and 1960s, several Japanese composers developed strong connections with American avant-garde scene.  It is during these years that Toshi Ichiyanagi studied in the US with John Cage, participated in dada-inspired Fluxus movement and got involved with contemporary theater music.  Although Ichiyanagi initially focused on composing chamber music and scores with Japanese traditional instruments, the interface with the messiah of indeterminacy fertilized his budding taste for experimentation. 

 

Married to multimedia artist and fellow Flexus member Yoko Ono, Ichiyanagi experienced a creative breakthrough after his return to Japan.  He soon ventured into vintage live electronics and physicalism – performances in which sounds were activated by musicians’ movements.  Not all of these forays were entirely self-induced.  Already in 1961, his path had crossed with improvising pioneers Group Ongaku, led by Shiomi Mizuno, Yasunao Tone and Takehisa Kosugi. 

 

Yet contacts with US academic institutions continued.  This was the period when an entire generation of youthful musicians shuttled between America and Japan: Takehisa Kosugi, Masahiko Satoh and Stomu Yamashita among others.  In 1967, Ichiyanagi returned to New York to perfect his skills in electronic sound creation.  He experimented with tape manipulation and ring modulators.  As his sonic ventures coincided with the second wave of Japonism, his work attracted considerable attention in the West. 

 

Upon return to Japan, Ichiyanagi plunged into the country’s nascent psychedelic scene, combining the inchoate acid rock with musique concrète.  These experiments were unabashedly greedy; Ichiyanagi utilized a posse of theoretically incompatible sources – enka songs, kayookyoku popsike jingles, archival recordings, and indeterminate radio manipulation.  The “Opera” dedicated to Tadanori Yokoo’s visual art stems from this fertile period of bold syncretism.

 

Drawing from Japanese modernism and Roy Liechtenstein’s brand of Pop Art, Tadanori Yokoo’s posters gained recognition for his proto-psychedelic mysticism.  Although not directly portraying the music scene, Yokoo’s striking visuals were to Japan’s rediscovery of fully bloodied color contrasts what Hapshash and the Coloured Hat were to London’s LSD scene (in fact, his work for rock artists dates only from the 1970s).  Since the mid-1960s, Yokoo had been obsessed with the traditional red sun ray motif, by then disgorged from Japanese symbolism and considered highly risqué internationally.  It could be that Yokoo was influenced by Mishima’s nationalistic stance prior to the latter’s suicide in 1970.

 

The “Opera” was a multi-media affair, well ahead of its time.  The importance attached to the visual side of the production was unprecedented – years before picture discs and multiple gatefold LPs became commonplace.  The attention to detail in both the sonic and visual side of the undertaking was as meticulous as only Japanese traditional arts and crafts can be.  This was also Ichiyanagi’s last large scale composition before his contributions to Expo’70 in Osaka. 

 

 

The “Opera” is a monument of 20th century avant-garde.  Ichiyanagi’s self-declared objective was to achieve multiplicity that is so characteristic of nature, rather than bequeath fruits of human concentration.  If there was ever one such record in the history of rock avant-garde, “Opera” fulfills this task. 

 

 

 

Side A:

1.Aria ichi. Aria: 1 – Japanese Ballad

An aura of melancholy emanates from the opening “aria”, which is little more than a traditional Japanese ballad performed by a subdued female voice.  This opening is highly misleading.  Such intimate nostalgia will return on this record, but never again in this form… 

 

2.Erektrikku chanto. Electric Chant.

Electric hiss, rather than chant, grows oppressive and passionately synthetic.  The second, echoplexed tone disrupts prominence ordering and almost instantly affects the dynamic variety.  With the accumulation of decibels, the electronic squall becomes strident, but when it recedes, the effect is spacious and planar.  From this abiotic slurry there emerges a figurative, yet barely recognizable form – a marching brass band of a bygone era.  Its chorus is patriotic, fanfaric, enraptured in its pre-war swagger.  The tragic hindsight corrodes our unconscious as soon as the magic words emerge – “Tenno Heika” (the Emperor)…  This documentary character of this chorus is treated with exemplary irreverence – snubbed by sadistic electro-glissandi…  Yet the overall effect remains confusingly nostalgic…

 

3.Otoko no junjô. Man’s Pure Heart.

A story of incompleteness begins with distant noises, sound of footsteps and archetypal girlish laughter.  Up front, a man sings to gauche piano intonation.  Despite encouragements, the singer appears troubled by the keys.  All along, children’s voices are still audible, as if the piano were placed within a short distance of a gymnastics hall.  Against such skeletal accompaniment, the singer’s quavering voice tries hard to continue: “the golden stars passing, shimmering…”.  We are perplexed.  Is it for real?  Is it an offtake?  Whenever we are beguiled into believing that the final version of the increasingly jarring song eventually materializes, it all collapses again.  The two insidious characters burst into suppressed laughter…  The singer stammers on the quasi-liturgical melody, stressing the syllabic quality of the nasal sound, à la japonaise.  They complain about the piano when they realize the environing silence.  “Everybody’s gone – nobody is watching, but should we continue when there is no one?”  Finally, devoid of any background noise, the song is delivered in full. 

 

Ichiyanagi once compared music to Japanese garden design – meticulous and painfully orderly, yet always interacting with indeterminate elements: moisture, light and wind.  Were the children’s voices an unplanned accident?  And more generally, how much of this “Opera” was captured, rather than pre-conceived? 

 

This side ends with demented screams, contrasted with a woman’s frightened whisper.  The fury of huffing and puffing is unnerving – as if someone was breaking through the barricades.  She is sobbing in fear.  Finally the ‘siege’ is over.  A low-flying aircraft passes above Haneda airport…    

 

 

Side B:

4.Uchida Yûya to za furawaazu. The Flowers. 

 

Next to Le Stelle di Mario Schiffano (1967), Citizens for Interplanetary Activity (1967) and Red Crayola’s “The Parable of Arable Land” (1967), this 27-minute long track qualifies as one of the earliest psychedelic freak out forms.  It is performed by the Flowers, a predecessor of Flower Travellin’ Band – a solid hard rock act active in the early 1970s.  The Flowers here were Susumu Oku on guitar, Katsuhiko Kobayashi on pedal steel guitar, Ken Hashimoto on bass, Joji Wada on drums Hideki Ishima on guitar and leader Yuya Uchida.  The original plans to juxtapose the Flowers with a symphony orchestra were, fortunately, abandoned and Ichiyanagi gave them free hand.  Amazingly, the NHK studio engineers (Shigeyuki Okuyama?) let the recording tape run at half-speed.  The resulting shock wave of guitar-led dissonant turmoil was the official Big Bang for Japanese rock avant-garde. 

 

It all starts with an oversize riff berthed in perennial slap-echo.  Hashimoto’s bass bubbles with quasi-Turkic flips and a rapid-fire cymbal rattles (at double speed, as most of the band here).  This intro is stately, premonitory, narcissistic and wrenching.  The use of Hawaiian guitar is destabilizing, rather than purely decorative.  In these introductory chords the band remains purely abstract, way ahead of its time.  With its indolent, lateral moves, the bass makes the first pre-announcements of what is to come.  The accents from the Hawaiian guitar become garbled.  The cymbal and hi-hat work is highly tensile, taut and suspenseful.  Finally, the scalding fuzz guitar invites the drums, but the acoustic piano calls off the alarm and allows for some meter-planning by the drummer.  It lasts way longer than any drummer’s typical crowd-pleaser.  The drumsticks hit, and hit, and hit and nothing much happens.  This metronomic intro finally instantiates a French-style, tightly cropped wah-wah guitar (Mahjun, Komintern, Red Noise).  The full spaceship is now taking off – Ishima’s highly pitched, combustible guitar blasts at speed of light, later copied by Kimio Mizutani on Hiro  Yanagida’s second LP.  The bass remains very loyal, despite the freedom bestowed by Kobayashi’s rhythmic mantle (his Hawaiian guitar etches accents at every second beat).  There is nothing analytic in the instinctive interplay between the Hendrixy wah-fuzz, the piano and overload guitar injections.  The cooperation is certainly enflaming, vicious, bristling, stentorian, but never stereotyped. 

 

After a short lapse, the bass clutches on the colorful configurations planted by the Hawaiian guitar.  Then the second guitar (Oku?) crossdresses as a mining jackleg drill.  When it defects, the basic components are back – the bass, drums played with Nick Mason-ish mallets, a stately, hymn-building guitar, and ever-squirming Ishima with his scalpel-sharp axe incisions.  Uchida’s vocal interjections further coarsen the mayhem of guitars in total overdrive.  This manic superposition of grimy guitar walls leads to another climax, but piano arpeggios steer away (again) from any conclusion.  The beat is determined by quasi-looped wah-wah, with the pungent lead guitar meandering pointlessly.  Occasional voices make their holophrastic observations with the band in a supersonic flight, not unlike the electronic zooms crafted by maestro Ichiyanagi himself. 

 

The cut is so sudden, that it leaves us half-deaf.

 

 

Side C:

5.Uchida Yûya to za furawaazu. The Flowers.

 

The cut was necessary.  In the 1960s, few vinyl record grooves extended beyond 25 minutes.  We are, therefore, back with the Flowers and their totalistic skullduggery.  Several cowbell clinks later the bass will again host the melodic development.  The band turns into a 12-handed percussion machine.  There is tapping, patting and clacking of anything with everything – spoons, sticks, pens.  The wah-wah guitar descends into obscurity, ever less distinct, in a long goodbye.  There will be one more return of the wild guitar drill sound, enveloped in acoustic piano, indifferent coughing and electronic twitch.  

 

These 27 minutes of absolute bedlam remain a grand classic of psychedelic avant-garde rock.  The legendary rock freak-out re-appeared later under the title “I’m Dead”, in reference to Tadanori Yokoo’s famous painting reproduced on the back of the gatefold LP sleeve. 

 

6.Nyûuyôku no uta. Song of New York.

 

A Chinese-sounding intonation introduces a poem recited in Edo-jidai Japanese.  But then, a very contemporary dialogue ensues.  An actor impersonates two roles – in a tantalizing exchange facing human destiny:

“ (…) will I recover?

–         sure you will.

–         But mother died of the same disease…

–         No.  You are in good shape.  You are still young.

–         Will I get better?

–         Sure you will. 

–         But why does a human need to die?  I want to live.  Even 1000 years.  Even 10’000 years.  (…)”

Even without the sinuous violin legato, I find this existentialist dialogue chilling, desperate in its message of protest. 

 

A short monogatari follows, couched in vernacular shamisen chords.  This is soon replaced by a frivolous dance as if calqued from some absurdist, drunken matsuri.  A crowded festival should be the right place to obliterate from memory that Kierkegaardian dialogue…

 

7.Kayo myuzhikare. Kayo Musicale

 

This absolutely hilarious medley of radio snippets, commercials, random commentaries, and not so random musique concrète reappraisals is one of the highlights of the “Opera”.  Although no sub-sections are indicated on the original, there are several distinctive parts here.

 

It begins with a nonsensical, goofy and farcical jingle halfway between popsike bubble bee sounds and advertising clips from “Tonmontagen”, collected by Peter Roehr barely two years earlier. 

 

Next comes what is audibly an excerpt from a film (I do not have the CD version of the “Opera”, where the exact sources are probably made explicit).  An adult scolds an initially recalcitrant, but ultimately pliant young woman for accepting something from a stranger.  The scene develops close to the beach, as we infer from the dialogue and from the sound of waves lapping against the shore. 

 

And then the notorious jingle: “chokoreeto – chokoreeto“ – a well known 1960s Group Sounds-era commercial, still remembered in Japan today.  Its cheesy organ colluding with piano, drum and bass were probably the product of Kyotoite band Tigers, led by androgynous Julie Sawada.  As illustrated on the diagram above, such juxtaposition of extremes – saccharine inanity next to brazen stress induction – leaves the listener emotionally drained.  Evidently, coexistence in diversity was Ichiyanagi’s recipe for unity.

 

This is followed by the halting regularity of church bells – slow, but double-time, ineluctable like cloudy skies.  When a stratum of subterranean bass blends in to compete with the increasingly inarticulate bell sequence, the section begins to recall Current 93, rather than Don Wherry’s church bell recordings. 

 

In the next section, we hear harpsichord in J.S.Bach’s repertoire, but deconstructed, scrubbed, overlaid, looped, echoed.  The sound quality shifts, suggesting unsuccessful tuning to a radio station.  Church bells then return, morose, somber and poorly additive.  The bass figure swells, oblivious to these European accents. 

 

For all his admittedly aleatoric proceedings, Ichiyanagi is also an accidental emotionalist.  In this last section of “Kayo Musicale”, he welcomes the listener with a smudged, sweeping drapery of electronic whirr.  Then we hear explosions; they are too close and too crisp to be merely (familiar) thunderstorms.  These explosions are manmade.  And the whirr, as we slowly and reluctantly begin to understand, is the sound of bombers turning Tokyo into a fireball of charred civilian bodies.  This realism is unbearable. 

 

The animality of xenocide is universal.  I do not recommend this record to anyone for whom war is a personal memory, rather than sofa entertainment.

 

 

Side D:

8.Uta 1969. Love Blinded Ballad (Enka 1969).

 

The concluding side of “Opera” makes the transitions, co-occurrences, juxtapositions and articulations even denser than the sequential conveyor belt of inputs lumped together but permitted to breathe each with its own material. 

 

In the first section, we hear a Chinese-tinged melody, a mandolin, bluegrass, archival announcements, patriotic songs, marching fanfares, speeches, choruses, classical violin, Chinese erhu, and military songs.  All this appears and reappears intermixing in curvilinear fashion with neutering glissandos.  As a review of Japan’s tragic history 80 years ago it is at least as powerful as Georg Katzer’s testimony to 1930’s Germany. 

 

From the public space, we then step into the private sphere.  It is like walking away from Tokyo’s main thoroughfares into back alleys singularly resilient to the centuries of modernization, earthquakes, typhoons and bombings.  Early Showa-era songs compete here for auralscape with the sounds of a noisy market.  An insistent hawker tries to attract customers, distracting us from the leading ballad.  All of these elements are equally alluring and play an equal – and equally disorienting – role.  Their ebbing and flowing is, however, highly frustrating for their siren-like beauty beckons, only to push us away. 

 

Another of those marching songs romps through with accordion and trumpets.  Some fragments sound distinctly archival, others seem modern.  Orchestral tuning, operatic female voices, several choruses, comical elements – all bring back memories of the calamitous 1930s and 1940s, but the resurgent dynamic is too explosive to detect specifics. 

 

Frogs croak and waterfowl cackles amidst fluttering rivulets.  Echoes of patriotic choruses are eerily distant, pushed into the fading memory and only unearthed by misfits squatting around isolated bonfires.  Sepulchral crows crow.  Japan has long understood.  Will China ever do?

 

Within each of these subsections, the various layers seem to advance independently of each other.  If this is musique concrète, then we are light years ahead of “Variations pour la porte et le soupir”.  Light years, not four years. 

 

9.Uta 1969. Spite Song (Onka 1969)

 

Tchaikovsky’s “Swan Lake” is being subjected to discordant squeaking.  As it turns out – this is again the AM radio tuning, in and out of the romantic cliché…  At its most climactic, the hissing and burring is becoming indigestible.  The drama is augmented by the ear-bending chaos and distortion of the higher notes…  A siren – bomb alert! 

 

10.Takakura Ken, Tadanori Yokoo wo utau. Ken Takakura sings on Tadanori Yokoo.

 

In 1969, Ken Takakura was still virtually unknown outside Japan but had already attracted cult following among the shufu for his roles in multiple yakuza movies.  In this closing moment of the “Opera”, Takakura sings a traditional bossa nova uta, arranged by Masao Yagi, with lyrics by Juro Tô and Kazuro Mizugi.  The choice of Takakura – portrayed on the fourth side of the double LP – was not accidental.  Tadanori Yokoo had been employed to provide commercial posters for several of Takakura’s gangster movies.  The actor’s dry, virile style contrasts with Yagi’s sweet guitar, ‘chicken’ organ and an overtly polite 1960s vibe.  Not surprisingly, the idyllic pastels are trampled by the schizophrenic gloom of the verses:

 

“the dream burns in deep red,

I am watching myself

I will make this name dance through the world”

 

***

 

I usually do not dwell on the visual side of musical products.  Since the advent of CDs, cover art has been not only miniaturized, it has been marginalized.  The mp3 phenomenon has now made music simply intangible, a step too far in my opinion. 

 

It was all different in the late 1960s.  After a decade of sterile LP cover productions in pop, jazz and contemporary music, the kaleidoscopic rendition of hallucinogenic illusions indelibly stamped the visual canon aimed at enhancing the appeal of adventurous, innovative music.  As last year’s exhibition at New York’s Whitney Museum testified in its celebration of 40 years since ‘the summer of love’, some of these artifacts have how grown to become the classics of 20th century visual art.  Tadanori Yokoo’s posters and Ichiyanagi’s “Opera” LP belong to this shortlist.  Without permission, I reproduce here the palpable beauty of this historical object. 

 

 

 

 

***

 

Ichiyanagi is a highly prolific composer and the list below is by no means exhaustive.  In addition to the sessions described here, I particularly recommend the lengthy “Improvisation” from September 1975 – an achievement on a par with the intense documents of Takehisa Kosugi’s Taj Mahal Travellers and Michael Ranta’s Wired.

 

Toshi ICHIYANAGI: “Music for Tinguely” (1963, 1967, 1969)

Toshi ICHIYANAGI: “Opera Yokoo Tadanori wo utau” 2LP (1968-69)

Toshi ICHIYANAGI / Maki ISHII: “Music for Living Process / Cho-etsu” (1973)

Toshi ICHIYANAGI-Michael RANTA-Takehisa KOSUGI: “Improvisation Sep 75” (1975)

Toshi ICHIYANAGI: “Cosmos” (1984)

 

Ichiyanagi’s early compositions from 1967-1969 can also be found on compilations “Extended Voices” and “Oto no hajimari wo motomete – Shigeru Sato Work”.  On this last CD, the composition entitled “Tokyo 1969” seems to have been recorded soon after the “Opera” sessions.  It exemplifies a very similar collage style and is a perfect companion to the classic album.

 

Flowers’ contribution on sides B and C was later made available on a separate LP which also featured a number of their (inferior) cover tracks from LP “Challenge”:

 

FLOWER TRAVELLIN’ BAND: “From Pussies to Death in 10’000 Years of Freak Out!” (1968)

 

 

Published in: on August 21, 2008 at 9:26 pm  Comments (1)  
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WIZARD PRISON: “II” ****

Recorded 2005

 

Wizard Prison is a Seattle-based multimedia duo consisting of recording experts Scott Colburn and Ben McAllister. A self-declared ‘audio-wizard’ Scott Colburn is a musical institution in Seattle, with much of his fame owed to the productions of Sun City Girls’ and Climax Golden Twins’ records. He finally gained well deserved recognition after recording what probably was Animal Collective’s best album.

 

 

Inventor Ben McAllister is a computer music graduate with a career divided into (and united by) ventures into film composition, sound design and audio engineering.

 

Although Colburn’s recording style has arguably been focused on capturing live aesthetic, Wizard Prison sounds uniquely refined, if not overdecorative. Whenever it falls into the clichés of electronic rock, it is instantly rescued by the authors’ highly developed sense of space and considerable experience with a wide variety of approaches to both electronic and acoustic (microphones) media.

 

 

A mystical fable accompanies this record. There seems to be a Daevid Allenish mischief to it – at least for those who bother to read the story. And it is pleasant to think of this record as a ‘concept album’.

 

 

 

Gogon’s Family Conference

This is studio wizardry at its most unhurried, liquid and glowing. Warm guitar tones, appeasing organ and looped bass all benefit from stylized electronic misplacement. The thematic focus comes from an unexpected source. A Chinese kid declaims affectively verses by Wang Anshi, a poet from Northern Song period. The qiyenjueju phrases celebrate the coming of Spring and the radiance of the sun. Wang was a political figure and a failed revolutionary, and somewhat of a political tone continues as a recording from Communist China’s radio spews some venom against the reforms of Taiwanese parliamentary system. This is followed by snippets in Cantonese. I am not entirely sure if Colburn and McAllister were aware of the semantic content of the excerpt. Western avant-garde musicians have been using tapes with Chinese speech since at least the times of Paul Boisselet’s “Symphonie rouge” (1947), but the proceeding usually reflected little more than the fascination with Mandarin’s quadritonal form. Colburn and McAllister overlay scratchy, processed voices, with the kid repeating the Chinese line. But it remains drowned deep inside the dense, nocturnal atmosphere, not unlike Jah Wobble’s “Bedroom Album”. Colburn once admitted that he despises fronting vocal parts in pop mix.

 

Sao Palo

Despite being more uptempo, this track is sill mudded with those ill-defined Czukay-esque bass and drums loops, punctured here and there by an extra guitar chord. Parading snare drums and woofy organ portend none of the heavy metal guitar blast, which riffs out confidently with its bass underbelly. The structure becomes heavily fractured – electronically rich, but interspersed with anthemic choruses (most likely Asian female voices, but I can’t identify the language, buried in the racket). Tight, dry drumwork distracts from the groove, but the sustained guitar chords usher in a quasi-mantric mood. The distressed female chorus gets re-sampled, re-mixed and re-mingled within the guitar riff and intensifying glitches that wean an entire miasma of bleeps in the style of Yoshihide Otomo’s solo works. As a final accent, acoustic piano takes over, surrounded by cymbals and distant scuttling guitars, all served in a soup of drones. It fades away through the guitar reverb into an echo of nothingness.

 

The Word of the Imaginary Vision

A 1980s indie rock guitar theme is tamed here by some amateur choral work (sports fans?). This sub-theme crosses the riff line, destabilizing the dominant meter.

 

Tea Dreams

The drum-and-hi-hat work is so metric that one could suspect a frayed metaphor of an old-time chug-chug locomotive, with a siren. Clinically insulated Fender Rhodes note is being repeated ad nauseam, but without the grace that the Necks have accustomed us to over the last decade. This repetition imparts an illusion of ascendance but only because the rock trio core breaks it every 8th note. If there is variety in this track, then it is provided by some wailing voices in the distance, and then by the return of China International Radio Station, which re-appears pompous as ever.

 

Gugon’s Visionary Plan

Cosmic keyboard pulses meet spectral guitar, padded bass and innocuous drumming that turn this to little more than stargazing from a nighttime beach. An unexpected trumpet call intones a wavering “shakuhachi” song. Acoustic guitars turn up in purely supportive, rhythmic role.

 

Sunn Kill Moon

This longer (21min) track opens with pulsating, blobbing electronics and a throbbing bass line. Wizard Prison shifts scales effortlessly, as the largely discredited 1970s’ sequencer music would do. But the sense of space is limited and so is the range – none of the tempting extremes of high and low register that sequencer-based classics accustomed us to. Only tiny bells accentuate the cleaner side of well-rounded, doughy ambience. The bass throb does not seem to be entirely in synch with the sequenced line of the higher register, but the asynchrony fails to generate any vertiginous sensations that, for example, Deuter’s first LP did. Then the throb is left alone to fend for itself, and is progressively demoted to the nether regions of an electric motor. The interactions between mid-range and lower pulses become quite abstract and never adopt explicitly melodious mantle. Admittedly, 40 years after Morton Subotnick’s seminal bubbly electronics, this passage does appear a mite too derivative. Finally, a dirty guitar fuzz is thrown in and reverberates with a long sustain. In an appendix, a Michael Karoli-styled second guitar washes in repeated frames, pushing away the electronic canvas into the deep background, out of the auditory reach. We are left with towering guitar sound, not unlike on Steven R. Smith’s or Steven R. Lobdell’s solo outings. A slow guitar theme emerges from inside the blizzard of electronic effects. It turns evidently illustrative, with chromatic effects, alien bubbles, mysterious ostinatos, and sharp fuzz incisions. A sense of foreboding prevails throughout. Bass outcrops will suffer injections of intrusive guitar until the end.

 

***

 

 

WIZARD PRISON: “The Early Years 1972-2005” (1974-2002)

WIZARD PRISON: “II” (2005)

 

The “Early Years” document Ben McAllister’s experiments and film soundtracks.

 

Published in: on August 18, 2008 at 9:23 pm  Comments (1)  
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BOGUS BLIMP: Men-Mic ****

Recorded 1997-98

 

A Norwegian sextet formed near Oslo in 1996 has pursued pointillistic experimental rock collages saturated with electronic illustrations uncomfortably perched between smeared abstraction and documentary realism. 

 

Over and above the dilution provided by the electro-dispersion of ubiquitous samples and glitches, the core instrumentalists typically engage in polynomial exercises ranging from weary pop tunes to black metallic backfill.  Remarkably, it is the electro-sampled glue that has successfully welded the band’s sound.  All their collections, each several years in the making, owe a lot to Ingar Hunskaar’s painstaking engineering work.  

 

Although their output has been housed on a label famous for post-black metal scaremongering, Bogus Blimp are as far away from this hyperformalism as Spitzbergen is from Weddell Sea.  Some of their electro-phantasmagorias stir a nostalgic vein, others finesse the disturbing side of 1980s’ geri reig, yet others stalk perilously close to futuristic ciné noir.  This story is not yet over.

 

 

Jazz/Speech

Against a toy motor burr, a very fast guitar tremolo intermingles with a seemingly prelapsarian, slightly out-of-tune piano recording.  As a mythomaniac politician delivers a public harangue, the piano flips up a carnavalesque groove.  In a grotesque twist, Hilmar Larsen crotchets on his mandolin with wicked abandon.  The initially clownish atmosphere undergoes grotesque, even macabresque mutations.  As the pulpit-thumping tirade harps on, a Zamla-style piano and guitar duo delights everyone, parading to Bjørn Larsen’s phatic signals of glitchy static.

 

Sweets & Love

It is unclear if Kyrre Bjørkås’s rhythmic thud adumbrates a heartbeat or a stomping leviathan.  Christian Mona’s half-whispered, hoarse voice interbreeds with organ, piano and drums.  Soon, the pregnant, vampiric menace explodes.  Mona’s vocal performance is funereal, unnerving and pathological.  Absence of fuzz guitar will forever alienate black metal fanatics, but when the theatrical, life-beaten protagonist spews the “Sugar Daddy” story, his anguish chills the spine.  The band reaches the climax of agonizing, creepy drama and then, unnecessarily, rehashes the entire stanza.  By then, Mona turns into a self-parodic crooner.

 

Hush Now

In windswept desolation, cymbals rummage through mellow guitar notes.  Hushed lyrics of this “lullaby” intensify along sustained ‘mellotron’ samples drawn out by Aslak Larsen, evoking latter-day Cassiber’s phantasms.  “The countdown has begun”, we hear, underlain by a leaden rumble milled by Kyrre Bjørkås’s bass.  Some guitar chords thrown in major scale brighten the entrained mood.  The “wind” sample turns synthetic and flies away, reduced to inconsequential hiss.

 

In/Exhale

A ‘cello’ riff and black metal vocal impersonate the ‘inhale-exhale’ sloganeering.  When the expected upwelling eventually comes, the riff becomes felsic, metallic, yearning for a missing fuzz component and comforted by the grueling, morbid, pathogenic vocal.  Many listeners of experimental music find the ‘black metal’ advances expletive, yet admittedly the cross-pollination of adventurous music and cadaveric sonic horror has taken root on both sides of the Atlantic.  While this misalliance has not quite yet given birth to any self-sustaining musical genre, the bastardly sub-genres have been aplenty – from Stolen Babies to Unexpect, from Dead Raven Choir to Special Defects, from Equimanthorn to Abruptum.  Interestingly enough, this debut was Bogus Blimp’s first and last flirtation with this questionable approach.  The vocal treatment on the later records preferably drew from public speech mockery to arch-drama familiar from STPO’s neo-futuristic ventures.  And “In/Exhale”?  The band’s endeavors to sustain the atmosphere with harmonium-like moan and sputter lead us squeaky Visigothic caravan axles – a theme atavistically familiar and previously exploited on such diverse recordings as Lindsay Cooper’s “Pictures at an Exhibition” and Boris Kovac’s “Ritual Nova”.  Finally, the merry-go-round returns, stuck in eternal rotation.

 

Brains

Right after a short intonation on tubas, an entire symphony orchestra is tuning in.  In a lovely moment, the strings impersonate Felliniesque ‘Prova d’orchestra’.  But whispers distract again.  This soon becomes a hymnal song, full of strained vocals, zooming on a swirling Hammond organ, but with a forged sensitivity of 1990s neo-pop.  Sudden key signature changes relativize these data and uneven meters complicate things further.  Henceforth, the track develops on several plans.  There is the mock-vampiric layer (Mona’s vocal), a nostalgic one (Larsen’s organ), an experimental one (Aslak Larsen’s samples), a rock one (Roger Jacobsen’s ever-shifting meters).  A sampled coda brings back the looped electro-haze and a posh accent from the British Isles about some futuristic science program. 

 

Even More

Bass-based figure, bass drum and ungainly lip smacking dominate the faltering organ and pliant hi-hats.  The placing of the bass growl is emotionally draining, and when it eventually explodes, it does so predictably.  The dusky, circus theme is also inconsequential, eventually lost in the samples collected from old English lessons on 33rpm vinyl: “you’re are listening to the record.  When I speak slowly you understand me”, reveals the narrator.  Spooky stuff. 

 

891

AM radio noise, static, Simen Grankel on the saw, distant rhythms, organ pop tunes, much distortion, or are these Soviets trying to buzz Radio Luxembourg out of the range?  The struggling pop tune survives, but barely.

 

Inside Here

Another manège moment, a carnival waltz, led by an apathetic, triste harmonium and a solemn, inconsolable melodica.  In between, the disconsolate voice whispers uncannily: “I don’t really know you”.  Subtextual cymbals finally give way to a more prominent rhythm, before it’s too late. 

 

 

***

 

BOGUS BLIMP: “Men-Mic” (1997-1998)

BOGUS BLIMP: “Cords. Wires” (1999-2000)

BOGUS BLIMP: “Rdtr” (2000-2004)

 

As stated above, the “metal” moments still present on the first recording did not resurface on the next two.  Between the follow-ups, “Rdtr” is probably the mellower of the two. 

 

Published in: on August 16, 2008 at 8:57 am  Leave a Comment  
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CLIMAX GOLDEN TWINS: “Climax Golden Twins (Rock Album)” ****

Recorded 1993-2000

 

The Seattle-based duo of Robert Millis and Jeffery Taylor began to record their initially lo-fi avant-rock sketches around 1993.  They quickly developed penchant for studio improvisations, often produced by Scott Colburn and manned by several regular collaborators, among them drummer John Vallier, sonic explorer Jeph Jerman and visual artist Jesse Paul Miller.

 

Despite their post-hardcore sensitivity, several of their explorations ventured deep into sound documentary.  At its most esoteric, Climax Golden Twins celebrated the form pioneered by Luc Ferrari’s revolutionary field recordings.  On the other hand, the band’s studio avatar alternated between avant-rock collections and dreamy compendia of loops, drones and sinewaves.  It is the latter incarnation that has contributed auditory haze to countless art exhibitions, radio, theater, film and dance performances.

 

More recently, the duo reappeared under the Climax Golden Twins moniker in a more cohesive, orientalist rock format, officiating as a promising substitute the now defunct co-locals Sun City Girls.  This is more than a coincidence.  Robert Millis had for years collected field recordings in South East Asia, some of which have now appeared on Sublime Frequeuncies’ series. 

 

Climax Golden Twins are also behind Victriola Favorites – a highly enjoyable collection of deeply obscure 78rpm singles from first decades of the 20th century, a treasure imported from most exotic destinations including Japan, Turkey, Burma, China etc.  Charming acetate documents occasionally make an appearance in the band’s multi-layered textures. 

 

 

 

Does Your Mother Know I’m Here?

After a brief phonemic cluster of unknown origin, acoustic guitars begin to strum lazily, carrying us through a stagnant, slumbering environment, laced with glasslike chimes.  Aimless infant vocals vanish somewhere in the backyard.  The informal atmosphere is breezy, summerlike. 

 

German

The beguine accents turn this primitivist guitar piece into a quasi dance.  It is as if the guitars surreptitiously spied on something, lurking and poking around in a comical fashion.  A self-replicating piano chord obsesses deliriously with little effect.  Unenthusiastically, drums, bells and some non-resonant guitar plucking fill the space.  More abstract cymbal and piano missive finish this off.  It is the “dance” character of this piece that drew references to Fred Frith’s Ralph-label period.

 

Ballroom

This begins with heavy tympani pounding.  Animist Orchestra’s Jeph Jerman rolls around some round or spherical objects, placing us in the middle of the installation.  The skeletal melodic component is sourced from an ostentatiously purposeless, clacking guitar/bass/drum trio of Mills, Taylor and Vallier.  Despite the radicality of metallic scraping behind them, the sustained bass line makes the band’s outing almost spacey.  In turn, the fuzz guitar erupts violently in short, scalding bursts.  All along, the mysterious round objects keep rolling.  The track wanes when a more prudent guitar peels away gentle notes along with respectful clinking from little bells.

 

To Float

This (longer) track wastes about a minute before audible elements can be captured.  These “elements” unfold into a tardily progressing rock trio with simple tempo runs on bongos.  Rhythmically pedant, the beat is unmasked as purely accidental when a screeching guitar unfurls a dirty fuzz carpet, eventually spreading over the pounded drum, rather monothematic bass and some insulated piano keys.  This pattern of tortuous progress is reiterated after each fuzz relapse.  An acoustic guitar closes the piece.

 

Choked Up

Under a prominent bass ostinato and a trickle of cymbals, oval effects pile up, mutating into a rocking behemoth when the bass drum joins to pinpoint the offensive ostinato.  Almost instantly, a choking vocal deprives this “rock” number of any semblance of commercial potential.  The sound is processed through folding, faulting, caving effects. As usual, the piece ends with a contrasting accent – this time from skittery percussion.

 

Heavy Hippie Shit

Here the bass falls even lower – to a threatening register as perfected by Boris.  But the palette is more diverse: detuned acoustic guitar, grimy, coarse guitar fuzz hijacked from the densest of metals, organ’s vitreous resonance and marimba. 

 

My Peppy Loins

A strangely tuned “Asian” string instrument (cha’pei?) cackles, followed by a speed punk suprematism in search of something to loathe. 

 

Cough…  Sniff…

Satanic growl is being smothered by a heavy tornado of several electric guitars, and curiously inept drumming.  Harsh electro-core production places this excursion somewhere between the realms of Orthrelm and Psychic Paramount.  Overall, it is a sonically repulsive experience, unless you’re in the mood for discord.

 

Composed

Sticks, toy xylophone and acoustic guitar strum, pluck, click and crackle.  There is something Art Bears-ian in the ascendant, skeletal harmonies of this anti-professionally delivered track.

 

Microspace Patrol II

Non-metric drumming evades any responsibility for rhythmic structure, allowing the fuzz guitar to play with feedback.  The band wakes up into a solid avant-rock number.  Were it more rhythmically complex, it could be categorized alongside Canada’s Fat. 

 

Theme from Climax Golden Twins

Southwestern atmospheric heavy rock – melodically one of the most promising moments on this record, plunges into discordance and is cut off way too early.

 

Telephone Call from the 70s

Billy Cox-like bass could be considered an anachronism.  But Climax Golden Twins insists on jabbing the listener with colliding messages – a phoned “hello”, high-end feedback, annoying organ, itinerant, stop-go beats. 

 

Frankly

If you remember pre-industrial bass utilized by Joachim Stender in German band PD, then the Twins get pretty close.  It migrates through pre-recorded dance tunes, vocal tapes playing backwards, various voices, engine-prepping guitar.  Despite non-rational sawing and scratching, occasional piano tremolo and some dramatic vocal interjections, there are unfortunately not enough ideas to keep it continually interesting. 

 

You Drove Me, Nearly Drove Me

Groovy Hammond organ teletransported from 1950s small-town pre-rockandroll dance party could have remembered Vivien Leigh’s first steps.  Yet no saccharine allowed here.  Tweeting and twittering juts out from a tape run within a reading range recording head.  The effect is simple, but ingenious; it does chirp and occasionally sings.  And then, an eerie crooner at half-speed does, indeed, loop in a line from the title. 

 

Swan

Probably the strongest moment on the disc.  This Heat-like guitar symphony with rambunctious drums, simple electronics and tapes thrown into the sonic whirlwind.  It plods on ponderously, toxified further by stammering bray.  The lead guitar crafts a solo and a scream resonates inauspiciously.  The hoarse voice later returns, if only to incinerate the gates of hell. 

 

A Door A Fish Your Head

Clarinets and Gene Krupa-like archaic 12-bar drumming accompany a failed recitation of “Poems for a Dead Man”.  Amplified, jazzy guitar softly points to the verse ends, with the warm clarinet pouring in additional color.  Later, the clarinet pierces in Ornette Coleman’s style.

 

Pop

Here’s the basic trio falls into a groove.  Structurally, this is a dialogue between two simple themes: one tense and suspenseful, one joyful enough to resolve the suspense.  After some to-and-fro, a Jon Hassell-like windblown effect quells the dispute.

 

1, 2, 3, 4

Voice snippets are followed by a cut-up punk charge.  Black metal vocal hurls lethal syllables whenever the charge stops to take a breather. 

 

Lampshade Market

A relaxed tabla, field recordings and exoticist guitars à la Sir Richard Bishop, crowd in a market full of children’s voices. 

 

Drink Me

Back to the beginning.  A sizzle sneaks through a rather random mapping of acoustic guitar strumming, melodica blowing and crystalline intonation.  The guitar cradles slowly, effective and swinging, but relatively uneventful.  Then it attempts to impersonate poor-man’s Appalachia plucking style, despite the geographic and cultural gulf that separates the coal miners from Seattle’s coffee shops… Isn’t it closer to Thailand?

 

 

***

 

1. CLIMAX GOLDEN TWINS: “Climax Golden Twins” 2EP (1994)

2. CLIMAX GOLDEN TWINS: “Three Inch” MCD (1995)

3. CLIMAX GOLDEN TWINS: “Imperial Household Orchestra” (1996)

4. CLIMAX GOLDEN TWINS: “Lovely” (1997)

5. CLIMAX GOLDEN TWINS: “Climax Golden Twins (Locations)” (1998)

6. CLIMAX GOLDEN TWINS: “Dreams Cut Short in the Mysterious Clouds” (1999)

7. CLIMAX GOLDEN TWINS: “Climax Golden Twins (Rock Album)” (1993, 2000)

8. CLIMAX GOLDEN TWINS: “Session 9” (1995, 2000)

9. CLIMAX GOLDEN TWINS: “Highly Bred and Strictly Tempered” (2004)

10. CLIMAX GOLDEN TWINS: “Climax Golden Twins” (2006)

11. CLIMAX GOLDEN TWINS: “Five Cents a Piece” (2007) 

 

The band has also issued plenty of cassettes and I am yet to hear several of their early recordings.  Position 8 is a soundtrack using some material from 2 and 6 and I do not recommend it.  5, 7, 10 and 11 would offer a range wide enough for anyone willing to explore the band’s variegated approaches.

Published in: on August 13, 2008 at 8:47 pm  Comments (2)  
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Jiří STIVÍN: “Zvěrokruh” ******

Recorded 1976

 

 

The decade of 1970s was replete with various fusion styles.  Jazz was illegally married with rock.  Rock flirted with symphonies and suites.  And analog electronics pervaded all styles of music.  Much of the surge in creativity actually reflected the ferment of the 1960s, and by 1974 the thrill was gone.

 

But there are exceptions.  Prague flutist Jiří Stivín made rare inroads into syncretic forms virtually untested elsewhere.  His cogent approach to classical, experimental and free jazz music facilitated his exposure to London’s improvised scene, including Scratch Orchestra and Cornelius Cardew. 

 

In an era when many Czech and Slovak jazz musicians faced significant obstruction by the Communist regime, Stivín’s cross-border activity may be surprising, but the results were nonetheless spectacular.  His Jazz Q quartet recorded a trailblazing session with Radim Hladik’s Blue Effect.  Later collaboration with guitarist Rudolf Dašek also gained notoriety on the continent.

 

By mid-1970s, Stivín achieved a remarkable level of synthesis between electric jazz and baroque music.  He used his versatility to create a poetic idiom of the highest standard.  For many, such shameful heterodoxy would amount to little more than an artistic cul de sac.  Yet Stivín’s luxurious arrangements are not only cosmopolitan and multifarious, but often entirely counterintuitive.  It is therefore not surprising that in later years Stivín specialized in Vivaldi’s and Telemann’s repertoire. 

 

 

Oheň

The first four sections are iconophonic illustrations of the four elements.  Beginning with “Fire”, after a brief anaphora from the chorus (Kühnův Smíšený Sbor), the saxophone flirts with a swift upward run.  The mixed gender chorus part is enunciatory and lofty.  Against this non-formulaic, befuddling introduction, Slovakian pianist Gabriel Jonàš’s entry is comfortably jazzy – recurrent bass figure serving right hand improvisation.  Stivín occupies himself with cymbals and delivers elegant, discrete drumwork.  Then he picks up his alto sax, turning the concept into a virtual trio of modal, very European (Namysłowski?) character.  The tonal organization of the chorus owes a lot to George Russell’s achievements, with a strong emphasis on modern chromatic harmonies placed in a quasi-medieval context.  The tenors keep repeating the original phrase, while the sopranos enjoy more freedom.  A gong overtone and sopranos stringendo close this first eavesdrop into Stivín’s vision.

 

Voda

Water – “acqua, fluves, fluvia”, or so echoes the sprightly dialogue between male and female members of the Kühn chorus.  Gabriel Jonàš’s piano emerges from this celebratory atmosphere in a more Jarrettian mode (in particular his pedal work).  The chorus vanishes slowly, leaving the pianist to twirl solo, but soon resuming its haunting, watery line.  The multifunctionality of the pianistic contribution is remarkable.  Jonàš provides a repetitive figure for Stivín’s flute, and then, brighter and blither, his keyboard prances around, occasionally inviting the chorus to return with its acquatic message.  The flute’s solo is smooth, classical, well-rounded and never overly florid.  Whenever the chorus’s call and response reappears, Jonàš confines himself to courteously hand out a reliable bass line.  Stivín’s circular blowing ends on a high note, not unlike in Corea’s Andalusian themes.

 

Vzduch

“Air” commences with breathy, melismatic vocal.  Cosmic panpipes (actually a syrinx) and mixed male/female Sprechgesang unfold in a multi-layered, jaunty argument.  The panpipes are used here in a neo-classic, rather than folksy (Andean or Carpathian) mode, but the overall mood is bacchanal, even zestful.  Stivín exploits velvety, mushy melismas to warble and tweet on his piccolo.  The simple two-chord configuration suffices to make the composition swing like a school break see-saw on a windy day.  It imparts a sense of mirth, despite, or rather because of the meticulous scoring for strained voices, guttural and plosive effects, scat, clicks and water bottles.  Some of these effects express relief, others – ecstasy.  The looped syrinx recurs with the regularity of a suburban maneige.  We leave the composer, his piccolo soloing and his gasping on alto flute.

 

Země

“Earth” deceives.  From a madrigal-like polyphonic carol exuding declamatory pathos there snakes out Stivín’s alto flute.  Unexpectedly, hand drums and a very mechanical sounding drum crop up (one could almost believe it is a rhythm machine, but is this possible in Czechoslovakia barely 4 years after Kingdom Come’s LP “Journey”?).  The piano part is conservatively syncopated, with the accents perfectly positioned for the rushing flute solo.  By now the chorus is long gone – and “Earth” becomes a mere ‘fusion’ trio of flute, piano and fast motion (Stivín is actually quite impressive on the bongos).  An enigmatic piano window shuts all too soon and “Earth” wins hands down as the most mundane of the four elements.  The final choral rentrée does not alter this impression.

 

Flegmatici

The second quadruple set of compositions features a String quartet (Talichovo Kvarteto).  The cellist intones a romantic line, only sparsely actualized by the partners.  Jonàš’s electric piano is a living testimony to the most commonly usurped sound of the decade.  The strings’ phrasing is beguiling, but entirely predictable, allowing Jonàš to fill in all the available space.  Deservedly or not, an avant-garde jazz rock combo set against a neo-classical string quartet will forever bring back the memories of Quoatuor Margand on Yochk’o Seffer’s trilogy ‘Neffesh Music’. 

 

Sanvinici

This is a busier, nervy track staged for a duet between jolly piano and nonchalant piccolo, piqued against a stately (albeit brief) string quartet intro.  Its plucked meter suggests a ragtime substructure, but one with inbuilt classical commentaries by the Talich Quartet.  Stivín’s piccolo frolics with apelike agility, even though it sends us back 60 years in the history of jazz. 

 

Melancholici

Imagine a deeply melancholic flute, misanthropic electric piano and pastoral strings – bundled together, all this sounds, looks, tastes and smells like a 1970s’ soundtrack.  The key ingredients are all present: the track is downtempo, decorated with an interminable legato and a lonely, mellow melodic line hung loosely above it.  To be fair, there are actually two flute lines multitracked by Stivín, but this is only made apparent when the prolonged complaint forlornly laid out by the romantic strings eventually perishes.  How come Lelouch or Chabrol never made use of such highly lachrymatory commercial potential?

 

Cholerici

In a stunning aboutface, the Talich Quartet sprouts like Soldier String Quartet in Elliott Sharp’s strident hands.  Realism descends only when Stivín’s reeds and Jonàš’s arpeggiated cembalo begin to coruscate like Pierrot Lunaire’s classic masterpiece.  Undisturbed, the quartet keeps sawing as if obeying marching orders.  This groundbreaking experiment would be entirely satisfactory even without the multilayered saxophone finish.

 

Zvěrokruh

This longer track crowns the proceedings.  This is also the only occasion to hear simultaneously the chorus and the string quartet.  The ever lyrical violins rise, immediately doubled up by the chorus.  Once again, Stivín exposes his predilection for seeking out unique tone colors – here on marimba juxtaposed with cembalo tremolos.  The chromospheric flute governs the melodic content; the harmony emanates from the acoustic piano.  With tense string backdrop, tenors and sopranos alternate, pronouncing the Latin names of the zodiac.  This is much more effective than the spoken word on Cosmic Sounds’ LP “Zodiac” (1967) and it is doubtful whether Stivín was familiar with that record.  A rather domesticated saxophone returns in a solo, dragging back the piano from obscurity.   The obsessive tremolo on clavicembalo, in and out of auralscape, never tires.  If there is anything remotely ‘jazzy’ on this unclassifiable piece, then it stems from the piano part and will still fall short of purists’ expectations.  The two players swap roles whenever Stivín’s marimba infuses just enough harmonic support for a pianistic solo.  When the watershed moment finally comes, the entire “band” is at the ready – the flutes, the saxophone, vocal snippets, piano, cembalo, marimba and the strings – peaking in ecstasy redolent of Keith Tippett’s large ensembles.  For a moment, Stivín’s saxophone turns torrid, his phrasing gets shorter.  The apotheosis ends when the Andean piccolo flutters away in complete solitude.  Spectacular. 

 

 

***

 

 

BLUE EFFECT & JAZZ Q: “Coniunctio” (1970)

STIVÍN-DAŠEK-PHILLIPS-SEIFERT-VITOCH-VEJVODA: “5 ran do cepice” (1972)

Jiří STIVÍN – Rudolf DAŠEK: “Our System Tandem” (1974)

Jiří STIVÍN – Rudolf DAŠEK: “System Tandem” (1975)

SYSTEM TANDEM: “Koncert v Lublani” (1976)

Jiří STIVÍN: “Zvěrokruh” (1976)

 

Jiri Stivín’s discography is much more extensive.  Note, however, that he does not feature on any of the Jazz Q records that followed the revolutionary “Coniunctio”.  Although “Coniunctio” and “Zvěrokruh” are in a class of their own, the remaining recordings listed above are also of interest for those who have developed a taste for European borderline avant-jazz of the 1970s.  His later sessions with Pierre Favre were reputedly of equally high quality.

 

Published in: on August 11, 2008 at 9:50 pm  Leave a Comment  
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Mat MANERI: “Pentagon” ******

Recorded 2004

 

 

New York-born, but Boston-raised violinist will forever be introduced as “the son of jazz sax player Joe Maneri”.  Classically-trained, he opted to explore multi-string variations of electric violin and electric viola.  His first recordings date from the mid-1990s and the plethora of labels that housed his early output – from ECM to Leo Records to Hat Hut – illustrate as much early-stage eclecticism as genuine artistic hesitation.

 

Jazz violin had been for years dominated by European musicians and American players, if they opted for the instrument at all, tended to pretend that nothing much had happened in music over the last 50 years.  Maneri’s formula proved revolutionary – his preference for low registers invited timbric juxtaposition of unusual tunings in non-traditional orchestral contexts. 

 

If some of his early recordings maneuvered somewhat languorously, by the time Maneri sat down to record “Pentagon”, his introspective style had transcended all stylistic limitations.  Often in duo with trombonist Ben Gerstein, a multi-faceted Maneri careers swiftly, surrounded by a plurality of contributions from triadic keyboards and punctiform percussion.

 

 

 

Ava

The record is enframed in two painful etudes for multitracked acoustic and electric violins.  Slowly expanding waves of glissandos wash romantically, subverted only by subcognitive laptop gurgling.  Without a shade of supercilious pathos, the track is undone with a quasi-Mahlerian finish.

 

WWP

Freeze frame and we are up against an ultra-modern combo progressing at a most slothful of paces.  The palette is impressive – an “electric Miles” piano, organ panels, unglazed trombone and skittery drumming.  Ben Gerstein on sullied trombone dominates here, keeping the ensemble in an unhurried, tepid mode.  This inviolable, insoluble order rewards with incredibly rich textures.  Keyboards and electric violin occupy parts that in other formations would be scored for guitar.  The track is perennially expansive – always broadening the spectrum and disappointing those who could expect a melodic or rhythmic conclusion.  It remains conceptual, rather than inferential, and advances amoebically, if it “advances” at all.  Jamie Saft’s organ interacts with muted cymbals and splices of other keyboards occasionally step into the fray.  Saft’s and Gerstein’s soloing achieve an unlikely intensity, oblivious to the free form structure nurtured by the rest of the band. 

 

Inslut

A determined funky rhythm greets us with that ultra-modern, cybernotched derivative matrix familiar from Date Course Pentagon Royal Garden’s recordings (something about 5-angled forms here?).  Craig Taborn spews from his laptop a nice ‘vinyl’ crackle and a pre-recorded, Larry Young-ish organ is being continually reprocessed – slowed up and sped down throughout the solo exposé.  This unexpected impromptu is urbane and astute, but a tad too short.

 

Irena

Muted trombone explores various orifices in the multi-percussive, non-metric soundscape.  There are two drummers here – John McLellan and Tom Rainey, both engaged in highly chromatic, delicate, almost furtive research.  Electric piano parts are suggestive of a distant stylistic kinship with Miles’s cohort Cedric Lawson.  Meanwhile, Maneri’s bizarrely amplified electric viola swaddles nicely in a spaced-out dialogue with the trombone.  Astonishingly, the trombone is perched higher than the viola, which makes these dialogues so unique.  Gerstein’s lyrical tone quality would indicate that he plays an alto trombone here (?).  And throughout, very discrete harmonics is being masticated by Taborn’s laptop. 

 

Third Hand- the Fallen

T.K. Ramakrishnan’s mridangam awakens, contrasted here with a multi-violin passage as mournful as Terje Rypdal’s early orchestral works.  Nuances abound, as string processing slows things up like in Gavin Bryars’ classic “Sinking of the Titanic”.  Mridangam scuttles around and between channels like inebriated dragonfly.  The close proximity of the fatalistic, sorrowful string portamentos and the snakehipped, agitated Indian barrel drum is highly successful in its destruction of context sensitivity. 

 

Witches Woo

The two drummers appear here in a more directly rhythmic role, but their playing remains very lateral and textural, with more stress on cymbal work than on previous tracks.  Craig Taborn’s Fender Rhodes tilts towards solos, and so does the trombone.  John Herbert’s bass is pitched thunderously low but acts almost surreptitiously.  It does proffer a semblance of structure, though, for an attentive ear at least.  Otherwise, one can’t really tell where the overall coherence comes from as the frontloaded solos extend spectrally and fail to provide a reliable sense of direction.  Maneri’s role is more limited – short commentaries, purely polemic, as if triggered by the trombone. 

 

Wound

A circumspect, brooding forest of percussive substrates engulfs Joe Maneri’s acoustic piano.  Papa Joe brings here an aura of mystery, sometimes underpinned with the trombone in a quasi-harmonic mode.  Then Maneri’s violin injects some Seifert-an moments and Saft’s organ spews a barbarous hiss.  The drummers crowd in false interjections and we are plunged deeply into the mystic world of violinistic lament, fast drumstick hatching, and eerie, hiccupped bisbigliandos on the piano.  Somewhere far away another source of harmonics (pre-recorded violin?) resonates, magnifying the illusion of depth.  Surprisingly, just as we expect the formless mass to muddle through with an ease of Escherichia coli, there is a sudden, dramatic climax.  The violin weeps gently, comforted by a friendly trombone.  Joe Maneri’s piano is now reduced to an almost idiophonic role.  Feder Rhodes re-appears, in a knot with the continued percussive frottage and Mat Maneri returns on electric viola.  The production is extraordinarily mellifluous and well-defined.  The fluency of Jamie Saft’s engineering must be applauded. 

 

Howl in My Head / Motherless Child

Heavy avant-funk piece led by Joe Maneri’s saxophone, acid-leached with turntable scratches, woopy bass and superspeed Jon Rose-like violin squeaks.  All this stockpile of riches is suddenly abducted to serve a songform.  Although Sonja Maneri’s nasal vocal is firmly anchored in jazz tradition, it operates here against the atonal subtexts of prepared piano spurts, booming funk bass, sparse, dampened cymbals and regular hi-hats.  An excellent edition to your library of avant-songs. 

 

An Angel Passes By

Muted trombone, percussion and Feder Rhodes prepare the ground for the now familiar electric viola’s lowland soundscape, with Gerstein’s trombone usually more agile than the Maneri’s amplified instrument.  Between the two drummers, one is rooted in the tradition of impressionistic mosaics, the other epitomizes neo-harmolodic idiom.  The interspace between them is plastered with the organ and synthetic frizzle.  The whole construction generates an illusion of false indeterminacy.  One of the keyboards even re-creates a mellotron-like chorus.

 

Pentagon

Short intermezzo populated with an unlikely trio of old male vocal, sampled mellotron and mridangam.  The lisping voice is heavily argumentative and emotes in a tragicomical fashion.

 

The War Room

This is an organ-based symphony of altered chords and ornaments from the full orchestra of sampled mellotron, rich rhythm section, and distinctly guitar-sounding fuzz violin.  In other words, a bizarre heavy-metal jazz moment for avant-garde ears.  Craig Taborn’s electric piano sounds impulsive and gritty.  Soon enough, the impetus collapses into a mesmerizing inquadratura painted by the trombone, electric violin and skittish drums.  Intentionally or not, the ‘mellotron’ part begins to evoke King Crimson’s LP “Lizard”.  The full ensemble is now anti-melodic and recombined mayhem rules.  Self-styled fuzz violin makes a comeback, but the way Maneri sustains the notes makes you believe that the instrument is plucked and processed, rather than bowed. 

 

America

The record turns the full circle now, back to the romantic opening.  Despite the hissing keyboard, this is a romanticizing, tranquil violin soliloquy: temperate and affective, but also multi-form and undecidable.  Electronic sizzles intrude upon the lyrical bliss, but do not durably distract. 

 

***

 

I was charmed by “Pentagon”, but my knowledge of Mat Maneri’s other recordings is spotty at best, and I am aware that many other positions exist.  Should you be aware of anything remotely similar to the chef d’oeuvre described above, Sonic Asymmetry would follow-up with glee.

 

Mat MANERI: “Accident” (1998)

Mat MANERI: “Pentagon” (2004)

 

Published in: on August 10, 2008 at 10:00 am  Comments (1)  
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ARANIS: “Aranis II” ******

Recorded 2007

 

Over the last three decades, Belgian musicians have filled an impressive library of frequently engrossing attempts to decontextualize chamber music from its canonical constraints.  Two generations of composers and classically trained instrumentalists have crafted a cornucopia of par excellence ‘Euro-centric’ recordings covering the whole spectrum of syncretic endeavors.  Those who forged a groundbreaking neoclassic tenebrism have been more likely to gaine international fame (Univers Zéro, Présent, Julverne).  Others opted for a genre-bending fusion of humoristic, jazz and neo-classical elements (X-Legged Sally, Cro-Magnon, DAAU).  Occasionally, Belgian neo-classicism drew on systemic vocabulary of American and British predecessors (Soft Verdict, Maximalist).

 

Since the 1990s, Belgium has literally flooded the market with Kammermusik for rock audience.  Still, the productions of Joris Vanvickenroye’s septet Aranis have soared above any expectations.  His compositions are tense and dramatic, exuberantly orchestrated for violins, flute, accordion, acoustic guitar, piano and bass.  The harmonically and contrapuntally sophisticated fantasias are cogently structured, alternating fast and slow sections and indulging in urgent shifts in dynamic (sometimes even too urgent). 

 

Even though some of themes are catchy, the band eschews the simplicity of the groove; either the keys are modulated or the motif is soon juxtaposed with unexpected nuances, ornaments or transitions that often force the hitherto leading instrument to play the proverbial “second fiddle”.

 

For a drum-less, acoustic band, Aranis exudes an astonishing sensation of power, without ever compromising its stylistic trajectory.  The band has now assumed a prominent rank in the premier league of chamber rock.

 

 

 

Kitano

The record commences with an intrepid acoustic bass ostinato, platonified by bird-like strings.  We are instantly thrown into an atmosphere of breathless drama.  Frenetic flute, sharp piano chords and hooked bowing on violins are interlocked in premature variations on the still-evolving theme.  All too soon, a trio of juicy bass, lyrical accordion and domesticated piano offers yet another twist in this complex capriccio.  After several seconds in the limelight, the accordion cedes to a reprise of the intro on flutes and a more rhythmic piano.  The accumulation of ornaments brings a rich potpourri of reminiscences.  An energetic staccato, courtesy violins of Linde de Groof and Liesbeth Lambrecht, brings back the memories of Chick Corea’s orchestrations in “the Mad Hatter”.  Then Marjolein Cools follows on her wistful accordion – never too far away from Astor Piazzolla’s Tango Nuevo style.  The violin duo becomes virtuosic, in turn subsumed by piano and flute interventions and by accordion-dominated refrains.  Throughout, the dynamic swells and ebbs, clearly conducted by the bassist.  The septet delivers this complex piece with extraordinary panache.

 

Vala

An introspective violin theme develops slowly through systemic blankets woven by surging strings and a repetitive piano figure.  Jana Arns’ flute glides romantically in search of violin fermatas.  In an aura of classicizing melodiousness, the string legatos conquer the ideal of sonic purity with agile legatos, but the quest is abandoned in the higher register, leaving us with a semi-arid détaché.  The second round belongs to the accordion, mimicked by the flute.  Joris Vanvickenroye on bass and Axelle Kennis on piano conjugate a fluent rhythmic artery.  The intensity of the thematic tail captures the entire ensemble, with the violins dramatizing over and above the holistic tutti. 

 

Looking Glass

Acoustic bass and acoustic guitar (Steyn Denys) intone a congenial malagueña.  The accordion enriches further the joyful, dancelike tune.  Violins repeat the theme, taking it barely one verse further.  A very fruity piano and effervescent flute invite the entire band to a transition and loudly reprise the motif.  One by one, the instruments fall off the cliff – leaving only the piano to pick up the scattered notes in an offbeat solo, adroitly inlaid by the metronomic bass.  The composer defaults to pizzicato and col legno, which, unexpectedly makes the piece rock.  In a sweep, the violins and flute scoop up short licks con brio, making other chamber rock competitors blush. 

 

Gona

Bass arcato introduces the piano and the flute.  This is not the first time that these instruments are scored in an emphatic, yet consonant interplay.  Eventually, the violins follow, and their ostentatious portatos suit the herringbone structure of these fantasias.  In the second part of the composition, one of the violinists paints a lyrical aquarelle with harmonic easel set up by accordion and a dazzling light cone shed by the arpeggiated piano.  The tonal pilgrimage finally reaches its destination, augmented by the second violin and rustling flute.  

 

Walk in One’s Sleep

This time the grainy arcato on bass is malevolent, obsessive and ominous.  Repelled, the slices of violin and tangential flute seek their own pathway.  Cools’s accordion is less academic and more streetwise here, keen to shake the bellows.  After a miniclimax, violins take the lead descrescendo until the dynamic craters.  Then like the Pied Piper, the strings will guide the ensemble onto the Olympian summit.  The guitar crowns some quieter passages, and the idyllic flute reveals its bipolar tendencies.  The texture becomes increasingly polyphonic – the violins return, an uncredited oboe (?) makes an appearance next to a flute vibrato, and a very determined left hand strides on the piano. 

 

Moja

A songlike track is introduced by the piano and acoustic guitar, with some brief commentaries from the accordion.  As usual, the band wastes no time to densify the structure – a duo or a solo are instantly followed by a richer, more condensed (yet still legible) orchestration.  On “Moja”, the plaintive swells evoke an old Art Zoyd motif from its classic period.  Tone color patterning operates pairwise – violin and flute to convey drama; guitar and piano to strike an Iberian nuance and accordion substratum laying the veneer of bolero-like accumulation of successive tonal strata.  Although the repetitive tendency does owe its pedigree to Steve Reich, the reiterations never last longer than several seconds.  The turns are too fast and too potent for Aranis to be labeled “minimalist”.

 

Waris

An acoustic bass figure, in harmonic consonance with the accordion and violins takes longer than in the other compositions to develop a recognizable motif.  But what sets this track apart is trumpet, courtesy Bart Maris.  His instrument, sometimes muted, has a warm, intimate, almost fluegelhorn-like surface.  In more misty, subdued moments, Maris’s playing brings back the memories of Butch Morris’s ‘breathing’, nasal style, which the American composer perfected in small formats.  Here, tense, alarmist piano part prepares the ground for another threatening swell in decibels.  Eventually, violins quiet things down. 

 

Turbulentie

A South-Eastern European dance (a gopak? A furiant?) lashes out pizzicato with vertiginous swings and a Bartokian piano.  But Aranis does not dwell on this hugely fertile ground, previously exploited by Iva Bittova, Boris Kovac or Martya Sebestien.  This is the septet at its most “rock”, with the heavy beat on piano and bass that is as sweeping and awe-inspiring as Daniel Denis’s legendary thrusts.  After a strident interlude from the violins and the flute, a different mood appears.  A slow bass walk and, two radical signature changes later, a voluble melody follows on accordion and flute, adorned with putatively Ukrainian stylisms. 

 

Trog

The only piece composed by Peter Verdonck commences with a facetious, burping vibrato on bowed bass, guitar and accordion.  After some vacillating alternance from the violins and accordion, the piano and guitar duo chisels away an unusual intro and unfolds into a jocular dance, swirling like the unforgettable Cro Magnon’s tunes in the 1990s.  Occasionally, the guitar digresses away from the piano and the bass-based ostinato.  With verve, bowed bass instigates a polymetric motif full of hilarious, uplifiting twists and jigs. 

 

Lovey-Dovey

A piano-based theme, followed by strings and a painfully lonesome accordion.  The composition is more stationary, its structure is more fractured and it develops more hesitantly than the other tracks.  In the second half, the guitar makes an attempt to resume the theme, followed by the piano. 

 

Mythra

A leisurely-paced morceau for acoustic guitar and eerily familiar violin phrasings of the Nyman-Mertens-Glass heritage.  Although the repetitive component reasserts itself, additional variety is apportioned with violin duels – dirty shreds versus pristine loftiness.  Along with piano, the strings build (unintentional?) Nymanian quotes.  Still, the track never aspires to minimalist unity and towards the end assumes the rocking potency from bass and piano, capturing the effect achieved by Far Corner not so long ago. 

 

 

***

 

 

Aranis: “Aranis” (2005)

Aranis: “Aranis II” (2006)

Published in: on August 6, 2008 at 10:21 pm  Leave a Comment  
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