AMN Reviews: Patrick Farmer – Like falling out of trees into collectors’ albums

February 14, 2012 — dbarbiero

Patrick Farmer: Like falling out of trees into collectors’ albums [consumer waste 04]

“Like falling out of trees into collectors’ albums” is a full-length release of largely unaltered field recordings taken by percussionist and sound artist Patrick Farmer in 2009 and 2010. The title seems to be a wry comment on the phenomenon of field recordings: Like leaves falling directly from the tree into the botanist’s album, these encountered sounds come straight from the environments in which they occurred to be gathered into the recordist’s collection.

This comes through on the first track, “Stood for thirty minutes, before the picture without moving,” which presents nearly half an hour of the sound of a frozen pond or brook melting. The predominant sound here is of moving water. This track, like the event it documents, is a slow unfolding; listening is like watching changes in the angle and intensity of sunlight over the course of a day. The outdoor setting is made explicit by the passing through of two airplanes, the echoes of their jet and piston engines painting a sonic portrait of open skies. One can imagine the bite of cold air on exposed skin.

The denser “Still this is not, of air and hours” follows. Farmer’s source is the hum given off by power lines, which here sound like deliberate electronic music. Subtle changes in overtones and dynamics provide an unexpected variety in the middle of the drone’s overall sameness.

By contrast the final cut, “You through all the things I hear, the kindness of chance,” is a very quiet and sparse soundtrack of vague scratching noises and buzzes. These strange sounds were produced by a wasp hollowing out bamboo – this is eavesdropping taken to a microcosmic level.

Field recordings like these often seem to demand a particular type of listening. In reproducing and re-presenting ambient sounds and making them the objects of attention, the artist invites us to listen in, to borrow a conceit from Salome Voegelin. The kinds of sounds we ordinarily listen through or ignore altogether we now encounter as events in themselves, though still with the flavor of things overheard. By virtue of focusing our attention on the sound alone, field recording lifts one dimension—the aural–from an integrated perceptual gestalt encompassing the visual and tactile modalities as well. With these other modalities neutralized, we can seem to become a transparent ear.

In an impressionistic essay accompanying the CD, Farmer writes about the place of field recording in his own sensibilities. It would seem that field recordings represent excerpts selected from an ongoing infinitude of sounds, the way a line segment represents a finite section of points extending indefinitely in either direction. This is where the artist’s intention reveals itself, in the setting off of some sounds from others, and in capturing a slice of overheard time that can recur with every replay of the disc.

http://consumerwaste.org.uk/

Posted in AMN Reviews. Tags: . Leave a Comment »

AMN Reviews: Velveljin – “Nostalghia” (Noble)

February 11, 2012 — nepets

Velveljin is an occasional electronic duo, formed in Kyoto three years ago by Mana Haraguchi and Yohei Yamakado, currently relocated to Paris where the latter attends film school. “Nostalghia” was inspired by the Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky´s eponymous Italian film, which also served as the basis of a string ensemble composed by Toru Takemitsu in 1987.

All three share a perfect pitch for the arrangement of sound and image and the sense of incompleteness – of memory, of time, of ever having enough time, of ever remembering enough. Although hardly in thrall to the plot of the movie, the track “Xoanon”, with its dripping water and footsteps, is an eerie recreation of The Author´s famous, fatal walk across the length of a drained swimming pool, trying to keep a candle alight.

Velveljin are sensitive keepers of rhythm displaying such variation as to keep it as colourful as the looped melodies are sepia in tone. This puts them in bold relief, but does not hinder the fascinating subtleties unfolding in the near background from etching images on the imagination.

http://velveljin.com/

Stephen Fruitman

Posted in AMN Reviews. 1 Comment »

AMN Reviews: Quentin Sirjacq – La Chambre Claire (Schole Recordings)

January 31, 2012 — nepets

Quentin Sirjacq, “La Chambre Claire” (Schole Recordings)

Japanese label Schole has a big old soft spot for European Romanticism, as a number of the solo piano outings by founder Akira Kosemura sweetly testify. In reissuing “La Chambre Claire” by Quentin Sirjacq, previously only available in France, it has re-opened a window on the fresh, head-clearing tones of a promising solo debutant. Born in 1978 and educated in France, the Netherlands and the United States, Sirjacq has played with Fred Frith and Joëlle Léander, performed works by Steve Reich, James Tenney and Frederic Rzewski and composed for film and dance.

This ostensibly one-man recital has been lifted skyward by exquisite production, like the tiny-bell echoes on just the right notes of “Car je cherche le vide,” and judiciously leavened with violin, guitar or vibraphone by a handful of guest musicians. In a few instances, electronics are used to just graze the edges of the piano a bit.

Sirjacq´s compositions are as deceptively complex as the short stories of Guy de Maupassant, afternoon strolls under parasols on the boulevards of Paris in the 1870s, quietly vivid narratives which, like “Mais les ténèbres sont elles-mêmes” – but they themselves are blackness – speak of and to the quaking heart and soul. Listing Philip Glass among his many sources of inspiration, “Jaillisant de mon Oeil” is a bald tribute to the former´s much-admired “Solo Piano” pieces. To mention Satie is almost embarrassingly obvious (but “Par Milliers”).

Two bonus tracks – one in which he also moves inside the piano, the other an ambient remix of the track “Obsession” – round off a wise reissue. The elegant, new cover graphics are far more suitable than the original, frankly ugly, French edition, calling to mind the logo of a Park Avenue jeweller, a worthy package for the string of gems within.

http://schole.shop-pro.jp/?pid=36615768

Stephen Fruitman

Posted in AMN Reviews. Leave a Comment »

AMN Review: Daniel Levin – Inner Landscape

January 27, 2012 — dbarbiero

Daniel Levin: Inner Landscape (Clean Feed 224)

Inner Landscape is the first solo release from Daniel Levin, a cellist whose work forcefully inhabits the territory between jazz and avant garde art music. The six improvisations collected here, recorded over the course of two sessions in 2009, represent a comprehensive description of the sonic landscape of the contemporary cello.

The six landscapes encompass a broad range of techniques and genre-crossing sounds, creating a complex atmosphere of mixed moods. Landscape 1, for instance, features sound clusters of dissonant tones along with abrupt phrasing and simultaneously struck and plucked notes. The third landscape creates an unstable tension through the judicious use of tritones – this is a landscape viewed from a precarious standpoint. A different kind of tension builds in Landscape 4, with its brusque chords, strings struck with the wood of the bow, and rapid tremolo. Closing out the recording, Landscape 6 moves in and out of a kind of frantic falsetto voice as Levin swoops across the cello’s upper and lower registers.

Inner Landscape is a fine showcase for Levin’s technical and emotional versatility and an important document of adventurous solo string improvisation.

http://www.cleanfeed-records.com

Posted in AMN Reviews. Tags: . 1 Comment »

AMN Review: Koji Asano – Polar Parliament

January 26, 2012 — nepets

Koji Asano, “Polar Parliament” (Solstice)

Koji Asano (b. 1974) is a wildly prolific, self-publishing, stubbornly single-minded composer. Born in Japan, he spent a handful of fruitful years in Barcelona before recently returning home. He has composed for dance, video and various small ensembles but mostly records solo works, releasing forty-six albums on his own imprint in the past fifteen years, following an idiosyncratic lodestar only he can see.

He first came to this reviewer´s attention with “Preparing for April”, solo piano recorded in mono, compressed and tinny, melodiousness teetering dangerously close to the edge of dissonace without ever quite falling off. This is the liminal region in which he feels most comfortable and the listener most discomfited; his “instrument” of preference is feedback.

Asano has never failed to bemuse, though not necessarily beguile. His music is challenging, to say the least, and aimed at sophisticated, if not downright jaded, noise afficianados. The two extended, untitled tracks on “Polar Parliament” are as close to his “signature sound” one might get. The first rotates in elliptical cycles, a violinist trying to rub the laquer off his instrument with his thumb, while the second starts off like an overloaded washing machine trying to morph into a radio. While the first is both literally and figuratively abrasive, the second has an uncanny way of drawing in the listener. Somehow, the apparatus acquires a personality, and you find yourself rooting for it to succeed. At whatever it is attempting.

www.kojiasano.com

Stephen Fruitman

Related articles
Posted in AMN Reviews. Leave a Comment »

AMN Reviews: Trio Caveat: Introspective Athletics split w Josh Sinton: Pine Barron

January 5, 2012 — dbarbiero

Trio Caveat: Introspective Athletics split w Josh Sinton: Pine Barron (Engine 044)

This release is a well-balanced split of nine tracks by Trio Caveat followed by ten tracks from multireed player Josh Sinton.

Trio Caveat is a free improv ensemble composed of James Ilgenfritz on double bass, Chris Welcome on guitar, and Jonathan Moritz on tenor and soprano saxophones. The group create cerebral chamber improvisations integrating pitch and textures into a web of sound woven over the course of shorter, atmospheric pieces rather than one or two extended pieces. Each piece seems to be weighted toward the elaboration of a given quality of sound, as reflected in the wryly literal titles. Even so, the music’s root in more conventional forms of improvisation is never too far below the surface. The title track, for example, with its languid soprano saxophone and pizzicato bass, is an expansive take on the jazz ballad. Extended techniques are more to the fore in tracks like Fluttering Clicks, Fractured Hisses, while Granulated Nuance and Fluttering Beeps, Mumbling provide excursions into a more reductive sound. Dramatic Flare, featuring pizzicato bass and single note guitar lines in an open counterpoint, even hints at swing.

More overtly jazz-oriented is the split’s second half, Josh Sinton’s Pine Barren. The Brooklyn-based Sinton is best known as a baritone saxophonist, but here is featured on bass clarinet and contrabass clarinet as well as on the baritone. Like Trio Caveat’s collective improvisations, Sinton’s solo pieces are concise and varied, reflecting the diversity of influences he brings to his music. Although there are some harsh passages, particularly on the saxophone pieces, the overall mood is reflective, bordering at times on the nostalgic. Sinton is a lyrical player, often constructing his lines around brief motifs or phrases that accumulate into longer lines of increased melodic complexity. His bass clarinet is especially warm-toned, with a resonant lower register. Interestingly, the austerity of these explorations for solo horn is broken by the last track, a pulse piece for overdubbed reed section.

http://jamesilgenfritz.com

http://joshsinton.com

Posted in AMN Reviews, Reviews. Tags: . 1 Comment »

AMN Reviews: Mural – Live at the Rothko Chapel

December 6, 2011 — dbarbiero

Mural: Live at the Rothko Chapel (Rothko Chapel Publications)

The Rothko Chapel in Houston, TX, is a space dedicated to nondenominational reflection with a hermetic ambience all its own. Standing in muted light, the visitor is situated in a largely empty and plain octagonal room defined on all sides by fourteen of painter Mark Rothko’s large, late-period paintings of dark earth-tones and purple-blacks. The sound on this release by Mural—guitarist/zitherist Kim Myhr, wind instrumentalist Jim Denley, and percussionist Ingar Zach—recorded at the Rothko Chapel in March 2010, is the perfect complement to the architecture and artwork that surrounded and inspired it.

In their day, Rothko’s paintings were often interpreted in terms of the then-fashionable existentialism of Sartre, Camus and Kierkegaard—that is, as depicting an inner grappling with the radical freedom arising from the necessity of one’s having to exist in the absence of a pre-given essence. Forty years after the artist’s death it is possible to see them as emptinesses the viewer has to fill—as invitations to introspection with no predetermined content. (In a sense they always were Rorschach tests of a sort.) The Rothko Chapel is conducive to this more recent view, and Myhr seems to see its paintings this way when he describes them as being “like resonant chambers… [or] pulsating spaces you can be in.” This is the starting point for Mural’s work as captured on this disc.

The CD contains one long track of finely nuanced sound. The timbres produced by the ensemble create contrasting colors which, much like the prototypical Rothko painting, are layered in varying tones and saturations. Pitch functions largely as a supplement to color rather than as an independent factor existing in its own right. All three musicians draw on a broad palette that, with the exception of an ebow on the zither, is entirely acoustic.

Zach’s gran cassa—a low-tuned drum–provides a dark undertone that serves as the foundation for the brighter colors of the winds and strings. Myhr’s guitar and zither provide a spectrum of effects ranging from percussive strikes to indeterminate chords strummed on open strings. Denley’s flute is often more revealing of the breath at the heart of it than of pitch, although at times it can sound thick with rounded tones. Sometimes a deep silence usurps the anchoring function of the gran cassa, offering a cleared ground out of which pitched percussion, strings and winds can emerge. The musicians’ work is subtle, creating an apt sonic portrait of the Rothko Chapel’s intimate, meditative atmosphere.

http://www.kimmyhr.com

Posted in AMN Reviews. Tags: . 1 Comment »

AMN Reviews: Surrealestate – Lacunae

November 28, 2011 — dbarbiero

Surrealestate: Lacunae (Acoustic Levitation)

Surrealestate is a Los Angeles-based improv collective that has been around in one form or another since 1977. In its current incarnation it includes the six musicians hear on its latest release, Lacunae, which provides a generous sample of group improvisations taken from two nights of performances recorded in 2009.

The most striking quality of this recording is the sheer variety of colors the group can summon from its ever-shifting constellation of instruments. In this regard, multi-instrumentalists Ken Luey on various winds and reeds and Charles Sharp on winds, percussion and small instruments are particularly crucial for defining the group’s overall sound. The ensemble is just as diverse in terms of its influences and backgrounds, its members having been active in jazz, western art music composition and performance, and Asian and Middle Eastern musics.

CD standouts include “Amalgam,” which begins with a lyrically floating melody on the flute that gives way to the sharper-edged sounds of David Martinelli’s cymbals and Jonathon Grasse’s electric guitar, which in turn bring the music back to the flute. “I Still Dream of Nana” is a spacious piece, emphasizing percussion and small instruments; by contrast, “When Cassavetes Hit Reagan” and “Foreign Hand Knot” put to the fore Bruce Friedman’s trumpet and Luey and Sharp on tenor and alto saxophones, respectively, to create densely interwoven polyphonies that at times approach the sound and feel of mid-’60s free jazz. “Full Body Scan” is a dirge-like track featuring the dark tones of Luey’s bass clarinet and Jeff Schwartz’s arco bass, which gradually cede the foreground to the brighter colors of electric guitar, drumkit, and clarinet.

In sum, this is a recording that fruitfully combines musicians who can cross stylistic borders and create an improvisational music that goes beyond genre.

http://www.myspace.com/surrealestatela

Posted in AMN Reviews. Tags: . Leave a Comment »

AMN Reviews: Bruce Friedman – Motoko Honda: Edge Study

November 15, 2011 — dbarbiero

Bruce Friedman – Motoko Honda: Edge Study (AnalogArts)

Edge Study is an experiment in tones and textures featuring West Coast composer/trumpeter Bruce Friedman and sound artist Motoko Honda. Friedman is perhaps best known as the creator of the OPTIONS system of graphic notation, a set of combinable symbols defining parameters to guide improvisation. Here he takes up the role of improvising instrumentalist working without a score, while Honda accompanies him on the Nord Lead Synthesizer.

As Friedman describes it, the purpose of this experiment is to come up with a way to reconfigure melody for the twenty-first century—in a way that is freed from functional harmony or pre-established cadences. One approach is to reconsider the basic elements of sound and phrasing underlying melody, and that is what happens here.

The three pieces contained on the CD represent a variety of minimalism grounded in the raw material of tone. Each improvisation follows the same basic template. Friedman creates a series of events consisting of clusters of a few long-held notes, which are followed by silence. Honda’s occasional interventions supply timbral variety and, when chance meetings of trumpet and synthesizer occur, accidental chords. Friedman’s selection of tones is firmly centered on the trumpet’s middle register, while the dynamic range is kept at an even level. The result is an open atmosphere of low density, as sound disperses before it can accumulate into a thickening mass. Any illusion of functional development is avoided through the deliberate use of tone sequences that are structured more by a sense of discovery than by scalar or harmonic development. Reimagined in this way, melody is returned to the ground of its own possibility. In the process, Friedman and Honda offer a kind of analytical decomposition that breaks the basic melodic unit of the phrase into an exchange between tone and silence, and the expansion and contraction of time.

http://www.brucefriedmanmusic.com

Posted in AMN Reviews. Tags: . Leave a Comment »

AMN Reviews: Michael Pisaro & Taku Sugimoto: 2 seconds/b minor/wave

November 8, 2011 — dbarbiero

Michael Pisaro & Taku Sugimoto: 2 seconds/b minor/wave (Erstwhile 061)

This recent addition to Erstwhile Records’ fine catalogue consists of three duets between guitarist/composers Michael Pisaro and Taku Sugimoto. Each duet is based on a compositional concept reflected in the title: 2 seconds is built around a unit of pulse; b minor is in the key for which it is named; and wave calls for the musicians to interpret the notion of a wave in any way they see fit. The collaboration took place virtually, with the two participants agreeing on each piece’s underlying concept, and then independently composing and recording their specific interpretations. Each finished track brings together both musicians’ contributions.

With each track measuring 20 minutes, the CD has a symmetry that seems consistent with the conceptualism on which the music is founded. Whether or not this symmetry was deliberate, it does allow each piece to feel as if it had been composed as a long-period durational frame. And there are frames within the frames: the music here is very sparse, each sound seemingly set off within parentheses of silences.

The first track, 2 seconds, is structured around a unit of pulse. The predominant sounds are electronic tones of various pitches and lengths, pulsing at one beat every two seconds. These tones are joined sporadically by sounds that resemble metronomic fragments, also with a two second pulse. The contiguous and overlapping pulses give the track a strongly rhythmic feel. B minor has Sugimoto playing slow chord sequences in the key of B minor, while Pisaro supplies melodies of slow, well-spaced notes. This harmonically consonant piece unfolds at a time scale that allows the two to reimagine the relationship between rhythm and lead guitar; rather than having the latter function as a contrasting figure to the former’s field, each serves instead as an equal voice in an ongoing modal counterpoint. The title of the final track—wave–serves as a kind of ur-score preceding and in a sense producing the compositions Pisaro and Sugimoto perform in response. Here a drone meets the sound of what seems to be a field recording of waves at the seashore.

As with Minimalist sculpture and painting, this music has a tendency to move the focus of reception from one exclusively concerned with relationships within the work itself (of, for example, tones to rhythms, tones to timbres, tones to themselves) to one now including the relationship of the work to its context—in this case, to duration as it is experienced by the listener. Though this relationship is external to the composition and playing of the work, paradoxically through the act of listening it becomes internal to the work as it is heard in real time.

http://www.erstwhilerecords.com

Posted in AMN Reviews. Tags: . Leave a Comment »
« Older posts