Below are the ten releases the struck me the most in 2009. Most of these received many plays, all of these pieces revealing greater depth the more you listen. Several of these pieces deserve an essay in and of themselves and that perhaps is the greatest tragedy of the lack of criticism in this area. For the most recognition these albums will get in our time is perhaps a short review, little more then a gilded thumbs up/thumbs down. Perhaps in the future there will be scholars who will examine some of these pieces as they deserve (and honestly the classical pieces are quite likely to receive such attention sooner rather then later) but for now placement on a “best-of” list and perhaps a few words will have to do.
Releases of Note 2009 (part 2/2)
Morton Feldman/Howard Skempton Triadic Memories – Notti Stellate a Vagli performed by John Tilbury (Atopos)
John Tilbury’s set of Morton Feldman piano pieces All Piano, released on the LondonHALL label has been in my opinion the definitive recordings of the later piano pieces. Since recording these pieces in the late 1990s Tilbury has been called on to perform these pieces on numerous occasions culminating with this release of Triadic Memories from October 2008. Freed from the constraints of recording for compact disc and masterfully fitting this music to the space at hand this recording is a leisurely 103 minutes. This allows the notes to float in the space, their natural decay seeming to linger for longer than possible. Tilbury’s unrivaled touch at the piano, played with the sustain pedal partially depressed (a trick he learned from Cornelius Cardrew), gives the individual notes and chords an almost buttery feel with the occasional dissonances seeming to almost resolve themselves in the lingering overtones. Absolutely sublime music and nothing else released this year received more spins in my player.
Along with this definitive version of Triadic Memories is the sublime Howard Skempton piece Notti Stellate a Vagli in which the mostly single notes are perfectly placed among pools of silence. After the Feldman piece it almost feels hurried, but it’s a spare piece in which the sounds are allowed plenty room to to breathe. The icing on the cake, this is a beautiful compliment to the epic Triadic Memories.
Cornelius Cardew Treatise performed by Keith Rowe and Oren Ambarchi (Planam)
I don’t buy a lot of LPs but recordings of Treatise by Keith Rowe was definitely cause for me to pre-order this one and dust off the table. Treatise, Cornelius Cardew’s epic graphic score has of course been a favorite piece of mine for half a decade now and Keith Rowe is easily the most significant interpreter of the piece. He had worked with the piece as Cardew was working on it, sometimes playing from the hand drawn pages. He was involved in the first performance of the piece in the UK and in AMM who performed the piece with Cardew many times. Since those days it has remained a constant companion and it is doubtful there is anyone who has worked through the score as thoroughly or as rigorously. Oren Ambarchi has been a stalwart of the experimental music scene for the last decade and has been involved in what I think are two of the most successful recordings of Treatise to date. The first being the fantastic Seven Guitars performances released as part of the Amplify 2002 boxed set on the Erstwhile label which again also involved Rowe. The other is of course this release. Each side of the record includes two pages of Treatise from what seems to be a contiguous performance of pages 53, 58, 168 & 169 on February 8th 2009 in Amsterdam (of which you can watch ten minutes of here).
Oren Ambarchi leans toward the drone, though a rich one made up of fractal like elements that reward close attention more then as a background sound. If one takes him to be playing the lifeline and the divergent parallel lines it is an excellent interpretation of the pages played. Page 53 can be seen in the little picture above and you can see how the lifeline runs through it with an line angling off of that which fits very well with Ambarchi’s drone that seems to open up as that secondary line does. Rowe in contrast plays in a spikier style, working each of the distinct elements on the score with a long defined set of actions. While these have been worked out over a long time as Rowe has constantly updated his setup and aspects of his approach his renditions of Treatise, while usually quite recognizable, have always remained fresh and vital. The first side of the record is page 53 and 58 over the course of about 14 minutes recognizable treating each element with care and consideration. On the flip side of the platter are pages 168 and 169 which are the final pages in the score. These pages contain just the lifeline (and IIRC a gap in the line on the beginning of page 168) as a sort of dénouement of the piece. Ambarchi’s drone rustles in all buzzes rising and falling with dead silence for the gap. Rowe’s sound is equally subdued but instead of just working with continuous sound he works with small events, scrapes, little wirrs and rubbing on the pickups. These pages to me have a much slower feel then those on the other side and it is no surprise to me that they spend more time on them. It is a beautiful rendition of the final pages of the score and the conclusion of what is in my opinion the best available performance of a section of Treatise (at least until Keith Rowe’s A Response to Treatise which hopefully is coming soon from the Cathnor label) .
Toshimaru Nakamura/Ami Yoshida Soba to Bara (Erstwhile Records)
No other album of improvised music was more surprising, challenging and ultimately rewarding then this first recording between Toshimaru Nakamura and Ami Yoshida. I’ve been writing an essay in which this disc features and it is something that I’d still like to finish but for now I’ve extracted from it just this short review of this album with a bit of additional framing, which will have to suffice for now. The existing “reviews” of Soba to Bara apart from limiting themselves primarily to the superficial were sure to include as an aside that this album is constructed from two performances recorded separately then layered together by Nakamura. These reviews (if positive) were sure to mention that the album worked despite this whereas the thrust of my essay is that the album works because of this (I should note that Dan Warburton in his Paris Transatlantic “review” seems to take a similar stance). I came to this realization from playing music with the Seattle Improv Meeting when I found that the more I concentrated on playing the music at hand (we mostly played graphic scores) and the less I “listened” directly to my compatriots the more successful my participation was. Listening has an exalted status in improvisation and to musicians of that stripe it means more then the word implies. It’s kind of like “swing” or “porn” in that it is indescribable but a musician knows it when he hears it. Now of course this doesn’t at all preclude listening to the gestalt, the room, as Keith Rowe would put it. The room contains the sounds that the other musicians are generating, as well as the audience, ambient sounds and its own ineffable character.
Soba to Bara in contrast with some of the earlier expressions of the use of independent recordings does not set out to directly express these experimental notions. Jon Abbey, the man behind Erstwhile Records, greatest talent is his ability to put improvisers together in new units that push each other in such a way to yield unexpected results. This really is a talent and one which seems to be severely lacking in so many people that attempt to do this. On finding out that Ami Yoshida and Toshimaru Nakamura (two Erstwhile mainstays) had not performed as a duo he immediately set out to bring these two together. In the course of preparing for performing and/or recording the two decided to record separately a track that Toshi would then layer together so as to get a feel for the duo. Clearly they would try to record with their partner in mind creating a Sight like collaboration of memory. But it seems that the two participants remembered parts of their compatriots performances that the other chose not to focus so much upon. Ami’s vocal performance on this disc is harrowing, painful strangulations, gasps for breaths, a disturbing heavy breathing section, wrung out utterances and the like. Toshi seems to have determined that he’d work more in accompaniment mode here and perhaps thinking of Cosmos, Ami’s duo with Sachiko M where Sachiko’s sinewaves are like a line drawn through Ami’s scattered pointillisms, his sounds form an uneasy background, one where he seems he is trying to allow space for what can be Ami’s very soft sounds. The nature of his instrument, its barely controlled feedback makes this a difficult task and in contrast with Ami’s strangulated sounds it has a straining effect, that falls back into little reprieves of jittering static. The combination of all these elements is as if something absolutely unknown and perhaps monstrous is being given birth. This is just the beginning as the piece develops Toshi’s wrestles his meandering static and juddering feedback into an uneasy background that Ami seems to try claw her way through. Perhaps considering how unsettling Cosmos can be at their most intense (2002’s Tears on the Erstwhile label for instance) Toshi’s contributions become increasingly fragmented, ripping the fabric of that background in increasingly dramatic bursts. The way that one of these outbursts of feedback obliterate what can be a soft, or aggressive vocalization almost seems scored at times but never has that effect of following on, that “listening” in improv so often has. I’m reminded of an example also involving Ami Yoshida, her 2006 collaboration with Christof Kurzmann (a s o, Erstwhile Records) where she does this odd little rising tone whose pattern Kurzmann immediately emulates with his software synthesizer. No single gesture has ever encapsulated the separation of old styles of improvisation and the new directions that are being explored.
Among EAI records in 2009 none I think captured its experimental basis as successfully as Soba to Bara and none challenged its listeners so directly. It was the most exciting album of the year, a year in which so much of the music had become incredibly predictable if of high quality. The cult of pure improvisation took some issue with it, but in the main minimized this aspect due to it’s incredible success. It is a testament to the musicians that they pushed themselves so far out in what was essentially a warm-up, a tool as a form of practice. Indeed when I saw them perform live in the fall of 2008 at the Amplify festival in Tokyo, it did not reach the heights of this album (which I hadn’t heard yet). The direct situation allowed perhaps too much to be heard, or perhaps it was the demands of having to perform multiple times in a number of days, but for whatever reason it was a good solid performance but not the boundary stretching tour de force of this recording. It is also to the credit of Jon Abbey, who has publicly stated his dislike for projects of this nature, that he put this out. But the music is amazing and powerful and he certainly recognizes that transcends any such notions of construction and conceptualism.
Keith Rowe/Sachiko M Contact (Erstwhile Records)
When I said above that many of these releases deserve whole essays written about them I was thinking primarily of my unfinished essay that my Soba to Bara comments were taken from and this incredible, epic double album from Keith Rowe and Sachiko M. Keith and Sachiko have been involved in some of the most powerful, complicated and difficult music of the last decade and it is appropriate the decade end with their first recording as a duo. There is always something of the times in contemporary music and I think it is no coincidence that the aughts gave birth to what came to be known as EAI. AMM had been applying experimental techniques to improvisation for decades, what was it about this decade that brought so many disparate elements together in quite this way? Alas exploring this is beyond the scope of this post, but I hope that someday someone takes up that challenge.
Oval, Track 2 on the first disc was from Keith and Sachiko’s initial meeting at the Amplify 2002 festival in Tokyo and thus is part of the documentation of those four shows. One of the best shows of the festival and one that surprised me at the tack that Keith and Sachiko chose, both working in a hyper-restrained pointillistic vein. Over the course of the two hours of this set, we get most of the rest of the possible combinations from these two, though Keith seems to have permanently moved on from the so called “drone” produced by his guitars pickups, electronics and amp. The long first track sounds the most like one would expect, Sachiko using a single tone for the bulk of its duration. For the next couple she works with the twittery sine effect as well as the dirtier electronic sound of the switches on her devices. The final track has her utilizing her contact mics, a tool she has used in the past but has begun re-exploring (to mixed effect) in recent years. All of the music on this set is incredible, easily the greatest bit of collaborative improv done this year. It is interesting to contrast this a little with Soba to Bara, which personally I found a bit more exciting, most likely due to having seen this duo live last year (plus the initial long track here, but more on that in a bit). Toshi and Ami were less interesting in the live show then on that disc which as I alluded to above was perhaps due to the unavoidability of listening. Keith on the other hand I think can focus directly on what he is doing while only paying attention to the room. This I think is a real skill that he has cultivated over the years and that arose from serious thought and decades of experience. Sachiko in contrast is simply unyielding which in one with such a refined touch leads to a similar effect.
Oval and Rectangle (d1t2 and d2t1 respectively) are the two most amazing tracks on this disc and the real achievements here. What is particularly amazing about Oval as I mentioned above is that it was their first time meeting. The opening track, Square, is much more like what someone who was familiar with the two musicians would expect. It is great music, epic in scope and rich in detail and yet it starts out safe, as if the two are feeling each other out, which is strange on the face of it, as their first meeting was days before. Thus this track feels a bit regressive, included only for completeness sake. In a way I feel that this set captures the entire range of Sachiko M – all of the ways she uses her sinewaves lie within. Keith on the other hand works with merely a subset of his toolkit and in the main sticks with this subset for all four tracks. Sachiko’s incredible taste and touch are her real strengths and why her minimal toolkit suffices. At her best she works as a colorist in these pieces as if she and Keith are collaborating on a painting made up of dots in which each has a shared set of paints that she applies with a fine knife while Keith uses several little brushes. The space and silences, especially in Rectangle are far more effective then most of the heavy handed conceptual uses of late using that space to complete a whole. The final track where Sachiko uses contact mics and Keith responds in kind is a beautiful exploration of texture an excellent way to complete the album.
So much more needs to be said about this album, I have touched on so little of its depths here and probably in a most incoherent way. It’ll have to do though for now, like I said this album requires an essay and all the research that that entitles. It is a fitting close to the decade though, one of the most powerful statements of EAI to date and incredibly fitting at this point of time when things are ossifying.
Christian Wolff Long Piano (Peace March 11) performed by Thomas Schultz (New World)
As I’ve intimated in the past I find it difficult to write convincingly about Christian Wolff’s music. There really is little more embarrassing then uniformed writing about classical music and rather then add too much to that unfortunate tradition I tend to demure. Wolff is difficult to write about because there is so much that has gone into the music, to make it what it is, that to ignore or gloss over that really does the music a disservice. Fortunately for you dear reader, New World has made the liner notes for this wonderful new disc available online so you can read John Tilbury’s insightful notes on Wolff’s music and this piece in specific. Along with that it contains a bit from Wolff himself explaining about the piece’s composition and Thomas Schultz writing about playing the piece.
“[Long Piano] seems to me like a kind of geological agglomeration. My hope is that it forms a possible landscape on one extended canvas. At first I just started writing and kept going. My tendency is to work in smaller patches. After the piece was finished I saw Jennifer Bartlett’s wonderfully engaging and cheerful work Rhapsody, first shown in 1976. It’s a 154-foot sequence of an arrangement of 988 one-foot-square silk-screened and painted enamel plates running around at least three walls of a gallery space. An extreme instance of what I’ve got in mind.” – Christian Wolff from the Liner notes
The prelude to the piece is the titular peace march which once again works in Wolffs deep commitment to humanity and social justice. TIlbury elegantly outlines this history in his essay in the liner notes and makes the essential point that Wolff, unlike his friend Cornelius Cardew, never gave up his commitment to the music in pursuit of these notions. Of course this works out better in some pieces then in others and in this piece, Wolff’s political statements are pretty oblique, fully at the service of the music it seems to me. Quoting again from the liner notes:
Long Piano begins unequivocally with a political “statement,” and yet in response to the question about the peace march from Long Piano, Wolff was equivocal. He simply replied, inscrutably, that “maybe it’s just to remind oneself. In my more recent work that content a number of times relates to a political mood, assertive, resistant, commemorative, celebrative, for instance. The connection may be fairly tenuous or subterranean; it is often discontinuous. “
It is a shame really that Wolff’s music is so unknown as much of it really is so appealing and not just to new music fans. Wolff worked a lot with interesting rhythmic devices, indeterminacy of composition and performance, empowering of the performer, but he never eschewed melody and his pieces are often quite charming as well as fully engaging on multiple levels. It is this dual aspect that again makes reviews that focus on the surface elements so useless as in many cases the magic lies beneath. And yet, Wolff always made those surface elements so compelling that the music can appeal to all really. As he wrote:
“But my notion is that music can function better socially if it is more clearly identified with what most people recognize as music, which is not a question of liking or disliking, but of social identity. By function better socially I mean help to focus social energies that are collective not individualistic, and that may therefore be revolutionary politically.”
The music herein may not appeal to many of those who read this site, but they are well worth a listen. The dissonance of some of the chords, the spaces between the sounds, the occasionally driving melodies, the odd rhythmic patterns all mixed together may seem inexplicable, maybe even a mess, but it all hangs together. The initial Peace March is perhaps the most incongruous, the “patches” that make up the primary piece contain all that I’ve ever loved in Wolff’s piano music and more, showing that his program is endlessly developing and always changing. At times beautiful in a way that evokes Feldman, yet owns nothing to him at other times beautiful in a way that brings Cage’s Number Pieces to mind and still at other times almost having that rigorously random sensation that Webern can inspire, while still others makes me think of Cecil Taylor! It evokes these, but never seems derivative of them always sounding to me like Wolff. Finally the performance of the piece by Thomas Schultz, who commissioned it is really quite a nice, a pianist I was previously unfamiliar with, but one I will keep my ears open for.
Finally Wolff’s music is a perfect example of the notion that I’ve long espoused that music based on ideas is richer because of it. Wolff puts this in the liner notes more succinctly then I ever have, so let me close this piece with another quote from him:
“Every piece, I think, has, in addition to the abstract arrangement of its sounds . . . what I would call a content, something that it suggests, which is not the same as its sounds, though such a content may deeply affect those sounds, how they are arranged and how they appear to us.” – Christian Wolff, quoted in the liner notes
Andrea Neumann Pappelallee 5 (Absinth)
It’s been a long time since Andrea Numann put out a solo release (Innenklavier in 2002, plus a self-released cd-r in 2007, Wohkrad, that I never heard) and really even her collaborations have never been that frequent. Perhaps this has contributed somewhat to her mystique, there is none of that tendency for over documentation you sometimes see. Whatever the case may be, she remains my favorite of the Berlin improvisers and one whose new releases I am always anticipating. Of course there is a bit of a connection between Andrea’s music and my own; I play the wire strung harp, and the guts of a piano are referred to as the “harp” for good reason and are likewise strung with metal (though at far greater tension and with a lot more strings) not to mention the use of contact mics and the like. This was a bit of a shock for me the first time I saw her perform, at which point I immediately acquired what solo material I could find. As I listened more to her, I found a lot more differences then similarities and in the process she became a favorite. In addition her collaborative works, ATØN with Toshimaru Nakamura, In Case Of Fire Take The Stairs with Kaffe Matthew and Sachiko M and Lidingö with Burkhard Beins are among the strongest releases of the last decade.
This gem of an album was recording in this apartment building that she shares with a number of other musicians and the sounds of this environment permeate the album. It also features several artificial gaps between the various segments, which in themselves were not necessarily recorded in the order herein. This construction creates an image of a place, of a musician at work, of restless creativity and as a whole is a remarkable piece of music. Listening on headphones you can hear some of the neighbors at play, practicing instruments or in day to day living. The silences allow the same categories of sounds from your own domicile to contribute likewise. An application of Cage’s work in silence that I find more sophisticated and successful then many, not only acknowledging such sounds as equal participants but working with them in a multitude of ways as the very fabric of the piece. The sounds that Neumann makes directly from her inside piano instrument aren’t too far from what those who have heard from her before would expect. But there does seem to be iteration in her overall sound, perhaps due to additional tools, or specific preparations but most of all from their collaboration with the space. Lots of sounds of strings: objects rubbed up against them, whirrs of rotating objects against them, brushes or steel wool interacting with string and pickup, objects vibrating against them, wonderful sounds, perfectly placed as always. A favorite section has a very distant conventionally played piano from one of her neighbors far in the background as Neumann works with these various techniques creating quite mechanical sounds in the foreground.
There was another album from Andrea this year ,a duo with Ivan Palacky playing amplified knitting machine (!) that was quite well reviewed in the couple I read. However I never saw it turn up for sale anywhere and thus never got a copy. But great to see strong new statements from this most elusive of the Berlin musicians.
Various Relay: Archive 2007-2008 (The Manual)
“The first RELAY meeting was on 18 March 2005. We had two things in out mind; aesthetically speaking, we wanted a monthly improvisation concert more concentrated on making music (I still call it music) out of non-musical sound/noise, or even interaction with something extra-aural, the visual; regarding our artistic lives, RELAY’s main goal was to build a sustaining network among improvisers and experimental musicians domestic and abroad.” -Hong Chulki, from the liner notes
As I stated in the previous post of all of the various “scenes” in contemporary improv none seem as vital and bursting with creativity as the small group of musicians clustered around Seoul in South Korea. This compilation documenting two years of this scene gives a compelling little glimpse into it for those of us far away. The RELAY series ran for four years and this double set documents the final years of the series when they had the funds from government grants to bring in a diverse array of guests musicians. RELAY seems to have been fully hooked into and facilitated by the internet and the documentation of the series can be found on the Manual site covering all of the events including listing the participants, scans of the flyer’s, pictures of various shows and mp3’s of a bunch of the sets. My kind of series. This set documents the concert series warts and all: Mats Gustafsson not fitting in at all with Choi Joonyong and Jin Sangtae (I’d like to hear the story behind this rather unlikely collaboration), Taku Sugimoto’s self-indulgent composition performed by an all star tentet at Nabi, as well meetings that feel like long established working groups: Toshimaru Nakamura with Park Seungjun, Choi Joonyong/ dieb13/Joe Foster as well as local groupings such as Choi Joonyong/Joe Foster/Hong Chulki/Jin Sangtae/Ryu Hankil. Plus a delicious slice of English adding another piece to their small discography. Really all of the pieces are worth hearing barring the Mats track, though of course some work better then others.
2009 perhaps might have led to a slight over-documentation of aspects of the vital Seoul scene, all of the releases featuring Ryu Hankil rather spring to mind. Most of these have been good, but oversaturation can breed discontentment. This set came out in February 2009 and was like a breath of fresh air, something different from what we’d been hearing so far and infectious in its riot of energy and commitment to exploration. Being a compilation it would require a track by track writeup to really go into the music contained, so this will have to suffice. I’ve kept up pretty well with the Seoul scene (though not exhaustively) and based on the recorded material (definitely not to be confused with being there) this is a fine overview, but even more importantly it contains some great music. Their idea of fostering a network of musicians appeals to me greatly as I think it does to all who live in an out of the way corner with only a small number of fellow travelers. This music is truly international and all of the vital regions have embraced that. Tokyo, London, Berlin and now Seoul, this aspect has kept things pushing ahead all the time. I look forward to hearing the further developments from Seoul and where ever else the music breeds.
Radu Malfatti/Klaus Filip imaoto (Erstwhile Records)
I’ve found Malfatti’s work over the last decade to be pretty mixed from fantastic early improvisations with Phil Durrant and Thomas Lehn, to astringent compositions that seem to lack, well a lot. It is with this album though that I made the realization that all of his compositions, his inflexibility and extremism have bascailly honed him into being able to make this kind of music. Performing a composition that requires you to sit there doing nothing (while your collaborators – if any – may or may not do nothing as well) is perfect training to be able to do nothing in a live improvisation where seconds of inactivity can seem like minutes. It also forces one to really focus on the sounds used, a lesson that I myself learned in some pieces that I worked on that used some long spaces. That really was my complaint on many of Malfatti’s compositions, the sounds seemed to be ignored and the structure wasn’t so interesting to sustain that. Any ideas that may have been there were never elucidate clearly enough leaving it up to the listeners to draw their own. Those ideas definitely didn’t sustain the paucity of the structures or the disinterest in the sounds. But it seems that along the way Malfatti honed his sounds and in a studio context his dry hisses, simple taps and echoy exhalations have become rich and resonant.
I’ve never felt that Malfatti really works with silence in a Cagean fashion, that it’s not about ceding the music to the surroundings for him. Instead it always seemed more like an exercise perhaps related to the questions of memory somewhat poised by the quotations included on some of his albums, perhaps though simply as a parameter that can be pushed as some would push volume. This year I had a realization that if the silence in music is simply a space to allow other music to breathe then one can capture an aspect of this musically. To illustrate this consider Malfatti playing one of his spare compositions next to a babbling brook. His few sounds will come and go as the brook merrily babbles on the whole time. Now what if a recording of this brook was brought into the studio and allowed to play throughout the session? It is only one more step then to imagine a musician playing music in the manner of this babbling brook giving you a piece that captures the same essence of Malfatti playing with big “silences”. This revelation turned around my thinking on a lot of things and I began working on a series of pieces exploring this notion (The Grey Sequence, so far unreleased).
When Imaoto was released in autumn 2009 it immediately struck me as an instance of this notion, intentional or not. Klaus Filip’s sinewaves, always shifting and yet always present are just like that babbling brook. Malfatti’s playing, as I mentioned in the first ‘graph, is meticulous here, etherial and perfectly honed. The week I received this album I also bought Jonathan Lethem’s new novel Chronic Town and I incesently played this album each night for several hours as I’d read. I didn’t want to listen to anything else, the floating nature of this album somehow fit this book so well, creating the eternal fog that NYC lies under in the book or the haze of that other chronic that is burned so frequently within its pages. Pausing to contemplate what I’d read the music would always be there, rewarding close attention, with gentle tapping or an astringent hiss against the endlessly shifting tones. It fills a space like that babbling brook does when you walk next to it in the woods, a snap of a twig or a rustle in the underbrush substituting for Malfatti’s ‘bone. I always listen to this softly and never on headphones, even when I’m not reading and it is like an open window. This is easily Malfatti’s best album since dach and if it required all that unrewarding hard work to arrive at this, it was well worth it.
Kevin Parks/Joe Foster Prince Rupert Drops (homophoni)
There pretty much is just too damn much music out there and now that we have endless amounts of music freely available to download well there is just that much more. One of the most reliable curators of downloadable music is David Kirby’s homophoni label and this piece from Kevin Parks and Joe Foster was the highlight of his few releases this year (full disclosure, I’ve put out a piece on Kirby’s label, but don’t let that dissuade you from his otherwise impeccable taste). Kevin and Joe put out a disc a couple of years ago Ipsi Sibi Somnia Fingunt that while filled with many great moments had not ever quite done it for me, but this piece transcends all of the issues I had with that disc. This was another release from early in the year (Jan 31st) that I listened to countless times throughout the year and it constantly engaged me.
It begins with shifting tones that come in and fade out, a sample from Parks? Foster’s trumpet through some effects? Hard to say, but in a way it almost feels like the sax from Ground-Zero‘s Consume Red, though it comes and goes it only plays for a few repeats when does and at a totally different level of intensity. The rest of the sounds seem more like they come from Foster’s damaged pedals and Park’s computer. A rumble that gives one’s low end a good work-out persists for a while, crackles and little metallic bits add color here and there, squeeks and hiss that could be electronic, could be acoustic drift around. The use of such disparate materials really works in this piece, keeping your attention and never feeling superfluous. Toward the end of the piece there is this haunting tone, heavily effected that comes in, as this hesitant series of taps on a drum gently contrasts with it. It is as if the consume red-ish bit has come back mutated into a different beast. Things pick up a bit from here, bringing a feeling of finality to close out the piece, not in any sort of cliched way, but just right for all that has come before.
This is genuinely great music and shows that the download is not in any way a second class citizen. Kevin is back in Korea and at least occaisonally playing with Joe, let’s hope for many more fruitful collaborations between these ex-pats. Anyway give it a listen, it is freely available after all.
Radu Malfatti/Taku Unami Goat Vs Donkey (Taumaturgia)
This release finds Malfatti and Unami in high conceptual mode and while I’ve been known to express my contempt for that at times, in this instance it works (I tend to almost always go along if it works. It just doesn’t most of the time). There were actually two Radu Malfatti, Taku Unami releases this year (the other being Kushikushism on Slub) and fans were rather divided on the relative merits between the two. For me there was no contest, the noisey atmosphere of the venue was the unheralded third performer on this disc and the gauzy nature of this room recording really gave life to this space. Malfatti brings his hisses and a nice rather rattly tone at times, as usual coming and going with long gaps. The sound of the room, Taku clapping, moving around it, evening playing some sounds occasionally pluse the audience and room noise, these all fill the gaps. Three Backgrounds, my favorite of Malfatti’s B-Boim releases, works in the same way, the sounds of the background filling in the spaces and making the whole affair decidedly more interesting then the sounds the musicians choose to use. I really like musicians improvising within a space, letting whatever sounds that are there add to the precedings, I always have. I recorded a series myself, Out of Doors, where I would deliberately play outside recording open air. Never quite worked out how I wanted but its the same impetus. The flow in this piece works as well, shifting in densities, though always quite soft and finally ending in mostly empty space with just the tapping on Malfatti’s trombone and what sounds like the shifting of objects continuing for a while and then just stopping.
This recording has been on my list pretty much since it came out but re-listening to it as I write it up, perhaps I’d shift it lower down on the list. The much later released Imaoto covers much of this ground in a way (as I write above) and far more successfully. Still this album stuck with me all year and received many a play. Well worth hearing and probably the most interesting of the Unami projects released this year.
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So that’s it, 2009 in music. Well at least the music that I really liked. Yeah there was a bunch more things worth hearing this year, some of which just didn’t grab me quite enough, some of which I just have yet to hear and yeah there was a bunch of things I was highly anticipating that let me down. So mentally place whatever you feel is missing on either of those lists and call it good. All of my rambling at the end of this year can be read by clicking here. This also is it for this type of posts on this blog, or anywhere else from me. In the main I’ve enjoyed it, its been a lot of work but it makes me think more about the things I listen to and that is always a good thing. Thanks for reading along now and in the past. I’ve always done this for you and hope it has served at least some purpose. Happy New Year all and remember to keep looking up.
John Cage used star charts as a source of randomness most famously in Atlas Eclipcalis, Etudes Australes, the Freeman Etudes and Etudes Boreales. This is in my mind an interesting technique for achieving a goal of integrating nature into ones composition. Cage of course most famously used the I Ching as his source of randomness, which is effect but basically he was using it to pick the numbers 1-64. You generate each line on its own and there are four states: solid, open, solid changing to open or open changing to solid. After you work out each line you generally end up with two hexagrams, the starting one and the one you end up with after you have calculated the changing lines. From there if you are practicing the divination, or are simply looking for a randomly selected philosophical message you consult the text and the various commentaries. Now how you apply this to composition is up to the composer and Cage used many different methods to do so. This really was Cage’s art and genius; he set up systems that could take a known range of randomness and produce highly successful results.
The final day of the the Christian Wolff festival at NEC was one of the days I was anticipating the most. The afternoon concert was entirely dedicated to Burdocks (1970-71) which is a fantastic score that I’ve heard a number of quality realizations of. The score calls for one or more groupings of players and for this concert they had organized many groups, virtually everyone we had seen perform to date and more. They tended to be in groups of about four and they had a whole program of how they’d come in and play, how they’d move around various “stations” in the hall and so on. As you’d imagine the sounds were highly varied with virtually every instrumentation you’d imagine (though only a bit of electronics). There was some bad actors (a particularly terrible bit from a professor on the piano springs to mind) but in general there was so much going on that’d they couldn’t act as a spoiler. I can’t deny that there was a couple of times where I had to resist the temptation to stand up and shout “This isn’t Christian Wolff” ala Morton Feldman at a Scratch Orchestra performance of this piece. Toward the end of the piece there is a melodic section that is repeated a number of times. Given the amount of performers here and the length of the event this went on and on, coming first from one part of the room and later another part of the room. In the end there was just one group left, with a pianist, guitar and violin (IIRC) and they’d just play this melodic bit in various ways. Very charming.
A Spiral Cage 
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