Avant Music News

New chamber music played lyrically by this fun New York sextet, featuring Hideaki Aomori on clarinets, CJ Camerieri on trumpet, Clarice Jensen on cello, Rob Moose on violins and guitar, Nadia Sirota on viola and Alex Sopp on flute and piccolo.

Though featuring mainly the work of young, indie artists, most every piece has something of that Gershwinian Manhattan boogie-woogie about it, trains and taxis and caffeinated pedestrians swiftly weaving in and out of each other, trying to get somewhere on time. The tone is set with multi-boundary jumper Son Lux with his nervy title track, while “Proven Badlands” by Annie Clark (best known as St. Vincent) feels like a jaunt through the park, never quite far away from the traffic. Shara Wordon´s “A Whistle, A Tune, A Macaroon” is just a little thing, three minutes long, breathy and diaphanous as a New York butterfly, just long enough and just so.

The ensemble absolutely crests on “Daughter of the Waves” by by label co-founder Sarah Kirkland Snider, a gentle sightseeing tour that even the locals can enjoy. Wordon´s second entry “A Paper, A Pen, A Note to a Friend” is an even littler thing, two minutes long, and serves mostly to sluice us into Judd Greenstein´s ambitious “Clearing, Dawn, Dance”, horns and woodwinds bouncing like beach balls over a crowd of strings, a sunshiny day at a Coney Island of the mind. “Song” by Gabriel Kahane, with its moonlit cornet-electric guitar duets, draws the curtain and puts the collection gently to bed.

http://www.newamsterdamrecords.com/?portfolio=ymusic-beautiful-mechanical

Stephen Fruitman

Sometimes sociologists speak of “quasi-objects”, objects that are neither entirely natural nor entirely social, but rather serve as “operators” that draw people together in specific relationships as well as into relationships with non-human objects. Which sort of turns them into subjects, too. This is exactly what Yann Novak´s works are. As installation pieces, they are agents that exist to be related to – in situ in the gallery, surrounded by other visitors, with whom you might share the experience, or at home, in the form of a record, for a more private encounter.

At the beginning of 2012, Yann Novak deactivated his label Dragon´s Eye Recordings to concentrate on installation work. Rather than stem the flow of new records, Novak´s release schedule has been more crowded than ever, but now on a variety of different imprints. Of the three recent albums here, “Blue.Hour” is the most inventively designed, though all three are handsomely packaged. “Blue.Hour” is a twenty-one minute piece, housed in a soft, opaque plastic case with a short, horizontal line affixed to the front, on a clear plastic CD with a blue dot in the middle, on which the music is stored. In other words, it is a mini-CD hidden in the plain sight of a five-inch disc. His intent is to capture the twilight, that liminal moment which is not quite daylight, not yet darkness. Novak captures this attractive indirectness with a soft aerosol spray, the tiniest particles dancing their way beyond the curve of the earth. Its background is the gentle swell and recession of the sky.

Similarly aerated and atomized, “Paradise & Winchester” portrays another margin, a stretch of the Las Vegas Strip that technically lies outside the city limits and is the only spot on the map designated as a scenic route – but only at night. Novak made ten field recordings over three days attempting to capture quiet moments in the loudest place on earth. Raw and treated material are fused together blurring the boundary between real and imaginary. The voices of passersby and shoe leather scuffing sidewalks echo somewhere off in a narcotic haze and the oil-stain rainbow drone squirms and lifts off the pavement with a kind of slow ecstasy. A unique and not at all quite as alienated a portrayal of the town as one might expect.

Novak has released numerous collaborations, but “Undefined” is his first with kindred spirit Richard Chartier. Rather than focus on specific times or places, the duo concentrate of the act of listening itself, with Chartier sending Novak an unfinished piece for him to “finish” as he liked. The results were returned to Chartier for approval or rejection. Dedicated to “the uncertainties of Los Angeles”, Novak´s home of several years now, it appears to comprise three movements, sounding like someone deeply weighing his options. It long maintains a minimal but brassy, metallic ring that hints at impenetrability, an inability to warmly embrace the place, until a decidedly softer but brighter tone begins to melt down resistance and a decision, however apprehensively, is made. A coda – humming hydroelectric transmitters or singing crickets – hints at the promise of a comfy bed with cool sheets on a warm but not necessarily restful night.

http://www.farmacia901.com/site/editions/cat09

http://www.unfathomless.net/

http://www.farmacia901.com/site/editions/cat10

Stephen Fruitman

Underground England is a remarkable place, especially in the north, expansive with post-post-Thatcherite defiance even as it moans with longing for bygone hurly-burly and a legitimate union wage. A new, Leeds-based “occasional” CDR label, Kirkstall Dark Matter, joins a bundle of mini-labels devoted to small, deviant acts, one of which was surveyed here not so very long ago. And Hairdryer Excommunication, purveyors of “emancipatory nothingness” since 2011, just released a marvellous sheet of art, two 3″ CDRs mounted on flimsy cardboard, one each by Karl MV Waugh and Petals.

If you could record fog it would probably sound like the opening to Waugh´s “Self Pity”. But his planktonian particles proceed to become agitated, gather force, pick up a viola and molest it. As it rolls on, its momentum catches up and swallows it whole. But beautifully. A distant, booming bell tower chime is muted by fog on “Lost, Found and Buried in a Tree” by Petals, caught in a web of creepily capillaring radio static. A music box gets caught in the wheels of a bike as it travels over wet cobblestones. The air buzzes but keeps a still upper lip as the radio begins to zero in on its station. Curiously stately.

New father Rob Hayler is planning on spending more time at home and less making Midwich music and charting the scene (although with new staff on board, his Radio Free Midwich blog is a vital as ever). As a kind of auf wiedersehn, brand-new label Kirkstall Dark Matter has released a fine live recording called “Single Figures”. Beginning by stirring an empty pot, “Penny Dropped” simmers sweetly without coming to a boil. “Seasonal Adjustment” lets in the sound of passing traffic as simple, lovely, paisley-patterned synth notes waft out the window. Appropriately, each copy of the CDR comes wrapped in a page torn from John Wyndham´s novel, “The Midwich Cuckoos”.

Each comes in small, limited editions but are infinitely available for your listening pleasure at Bandcamp.

http://hairdryerexcommunication.bandcamp.com/album/karl-mv-waugh-petals-split-2×3

http://kirkstalldarkmatter.blogspot.co.uk/

http://kirkstalldarkmatter.bandcamp.com/album/midwich-single-figures

Stephen Fruitman

By Dan Coffey

If you’re a committed seeker of music that is as exciting as it is unclassifiable, you can only hope to be able to stumble across a band like the Chinese Cookie Poets maybe a dozen times in your life, if you’re lucky. I had plenty of reservations going into this listening experience, as I tend to recoil when told “you’re gonna love this,” (it’s part of the same coding in my DNA that makes me seek out this kind of music in the first place). These reservations were unfounded, as it turns out. I’m happy to have gone into the short CCP discography and come out the other end a changed listener.

So, what’s the big deal? When discussing any kind of art that’s as different as this is, it’s forgivable to grasp for comparisons as reference points. And indeed, on the surface, they do bear a resemblance to certain rock trios that lie in the avant-garde end of the spectrum: Massacre comes to mind, as does the group the (EC) Nudes.  To compare them to any number of “post-rock” bands would do them a disservice – there is just so much more going on.

The bass player often has a sound reminiscent of John Wetton during his stint in King Crimson, but it’s as if he was under the spell of Derek Bailey instead of Robert Fripp, and the guitarist intersects in a musical Venn diagram with Fripp, Bailey, and Fred Frith, but is completely unique. I don’t have words to describe the drummer. It’s not all “Rock in Opposition” or out-improv, though. The noise aesthetic plays a huge role in the CCP sound – you can hear The Boredoms and Melt-Banana, and there are the (relatively) quieter moments that might remind one of the Minutemen.

Chinese Cookie Poets hail from Rio de Janeiro, and consist of Marcos Campello on electric guitar, Felipe Zenícola on electric bass, and Renato Godoy on drums.  Their first recording was a self-titled EP released in 2010, which consists of edited pieces that are mixtures of composition and improvisation. Their second release, Dragonfly Catchers and Yellow Dog, was also an EP, this time of live performances, slightly more brutal in the attack, and with somewhat longer songs.

CCP released a “full-length” (23 minutes!) album in 2012 titled Worm Love on the Sinewave Records label, and it is by far the most engaging, confounding, and harrowing release I’ve heard by anybody in quite some time. The rhythm section is relentless, teasing the listener into thinking they’re about to settle into a familiar rock groove before taking a sharp turn into the unexpected. They’ve upped the effects on this album, too: lots of “glitches” and juddering stop/start edits color the already dense canvas, especially in the “Three Worms” trilogy. Oh, and some guy named Arto Lindsay adds his DNA to one of the tracks.

So, I’ve told you all that to tell you this: the brand new Chinese Cookie Poets album is excellent, in a spacious and sublime way that marks quite a departure from their earlier albums, if only in their decision to let silence play a much larger part In their songs. The unabashed experimentalism is still there, but it’s not as rampant. Doubtless this is because they’ve included a fourth musician on their latest album, Danza Cava, out this month on Mansarda Records: Nicolau Lafetá on trumpet.(In their live performances, they frequently play alongside a fourth musician, so this is nothing terribly new to the band.)  Lafetá drives the band into territory they don’t seem to be used to going to (on the song “Tiao Yue,” guitarist Campello’s playing is comparatively gentle. For all the comparisons above, AMM can be added to this one. CCP do bring the noise, to be sure, but they are generous with the space, allowing Lafetá to shine in his own way, a sort of mixture of Steve Lacy “freak register” skronking as well as less outré playing. The guitar, and the effects thrust upon it, makes it a delicious companion to Lafetá’s blowing, and while Zenícola and Godoy never let you forget the mayhem they’re capable of, they opt for a more serene backdrop.

(See http://chinesecookiepoets.bandcamp.com/ for samples of their previous recordings)

The Secret Society’s 2009 release, Infernal Machines, surprised many including bandleader and composer Argue, by appearing on over 100 “best of” lists that year, and being nominated for a Grammy and a Juno. Even here on AMN, where we tend to focus on far left-of-center music, this big band recording was honored as the second best album of the year. And it was a very close second.

This month, the Secret Society and their leader are back with another offering. The eighteen-piece lineup is mostly the same, as is the overall sound and feel of the music. Ok, there are a few short diversions into marching band and latin spaces.  Yet, rich textures, catchy and complex melodies, and lush harmonization abound.

Brooklyn Babylon replaces the occasional all-out ass-kicking of its predecessor with a more restrained and introspective approach. Instead of hitting the boiling point with a guitar, horn, and drum attack, this time around the Society keeps it at a cerebral simmer.  That’s not to say the music isn’t aggressive - just that the aggression herein is tempered with a spaciousness and assiduous reserve.

While not your grandparent’s big band, Argue has done more for the genre in the last five years than anyone has since Ellington. This is, compelling, intelligent music worthy of the accolades that Infernal Machines received. My only request: less than a four-year wait for another release.