Author: dbarbiero

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AMN Reviews

AMN Reviews: Andrew Raffo Dewar, John Hughes, Chad Popple – Reflejos IV-VII [Waveform Alphabet WA002]

Reflejos IV-VII is the second release from the transatlantic trio of soprano saxophonist Andrew Raffo Dewar, double bassist John Hughes, and percussionist Chad Popple. Like 2018’s Reflejo, the work on which this release continues and extends, Reflejos IV-VII was recorded in Hamburg, Germany, where Hughes and Popple are currently based.

The four Reflejos are compositions by Dewar. They are members of a series of thematically organized pieces that employ forms based on inversions (mirror images or “reflections,” as Dewar’s titles have it) and related structures, as well as looped motifs. At one extreme is Reflejos V, the motif to which is a single note played by all three (with Popple on vibes, as he is on all of the Reflejos and Trizas) across staggered rhythms that produce variations in color and density. The piece eventually settles into a seven-beat pulse carried on a bass ostinato. Reflejos VII features slightly off-kilter, contrapuntally played motifs, while Reflejos VI moves from an opening featuring a reflective line on vibes floating over a gently undulating, bowed bass, to a gritty bass solo that highlights the sound of the instrument as brute material fact. In contrast to the longer and more developed Reflejos, the brief Trizas strip the music down to isolate and reveal the brief, repeated phrases that make up its conceptual core.

The melodically-organized Reflejos and Trizas are accompanied by two improvisations that explore more abstract territory notable for the salience of textures produced by extended techniques and unpitched percussion.

https://reflejoswa.bandcamp.com/

Daniel Barbiero

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AMN Reviews

AMN Reviews: Nicola Hein & Nicolas Souchal: Fier tel tonne [NUNC 034]

If I’ve read the liner note correctly, Fier tel tonne documents the first musical meeting of Nicola Hein and Nicolas Souchal in this improvised session recorded in a studio in Berlin in August 2021. Hein, a guitarist and sound artist with a particular interest in cybernetics and the human-technology interface, here plays the Buchla synthesizer as well as the guitar; Souchal, whose background is in contemporary jazz and improvised music, plays trumpet. The combination of these two fairly different voices makes for an interesting collective sound that moves between the abstract and the lyrical. Souchal’s sparsely melodic, muted trumpet lines and pitchless-yet-somatically-indicative extended techniques complement the electronically thick contributions from Hein’s guitar and Buchla. Fier tel tonne is an auspicious start to a collaboration that points to promising future developments.

Daniel Barbiero

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AMN Reviews

AMN Reviews: Bad Groupy – The Last Piece of Graphite [Zeromoon zero210]; Guro Skumsnes Moe & Philippe Petit – s/t [Public Eyesore PE151]

Twenty twenty-three begins with the releases of two transnational collaborations of textural sound art featuring electronics and basses of diverse sorts.

Bad Groupy, a new transatlantic duo, appears to be the fruit of Washington, DC experimental musician Jeff Surak’s residence in Berlin this past summer. (Another product of that stay, a duet recording with the superb violinist Biliana Voutchkova, was reviewed recently in these pages.) The other half of Bad Groupy is Hamburg-based Estonian Kris Kuldkepp, who plays electric bass, double bass, and electronics. This is their second release; their first, the EP Check-in Ko, came out this past September. The Last Piece of Graphite was recorded in autumn, 2022 in different locations indoors and out in Hamburg and Washington with analogue electronics, double bass, electric bass, guitar, objects, and tapes. The four tracks on the album highlight the duo’s predilection for a timbrally-based sound art of layered electronic or quasi-electronic abstraction. Elevator Talk superimposes undulating sounds over danceable beats; Archive of Generic Legs stacks high-frequency beeps—like morse code from another planet—atop an undertow of rough-surfaced, arco double bass; History Does Not Repeat Its Stuck is a drone piece of variable density running through a wide range of frequencies. Surak and Kuldkepp bring their multilayered texturality to its acme in the concluding twenty-minute-long Black Magic of Audio Seduction.

Guro Skumsnes Moe and Philippe Petit’s self-titled release features the French analogue synthesizer master with Norwegian Moe, who in addition to electric bass and vocals is represented here on the Octobass, a rare, enormous, three-string double bass that sounds in a rumblingly low register. The instrument is a strong presence on the release’s two long tracks—its strings vibrate at such a low frequency one can almost see them as they underscore the sonic kaleidoscope thrown out by Petit’s EMI synth and turntables. The third track, a two-minute interlude between the two longer pieces, offers an economical distillation of the duo’s collective sound.

Daniel Barbiero

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AMN Reviews

AMN Reviews: Eren Gümrükçüoglu – Pareidolia [New Focus Recordings fcr343]

“Pareidolia” describes the condition of seeing meaningful patterns—in, e.g., the grain of a wood panel or the shape of a cloud formation—where none have been put there. It’s a well-chosen title for a collection of music by the Turkish-born, Florida-based composer Eren Gümrükçüoglu, whose music tends toward the assembly of rapidly changing yet cohesive patterns from seemingly random sounds and gestures. Fittingly, the album’s twenty-three minute long title track epitomizes the approach. The piece is scored for string quartet, fixed media, and performers doubling on clarinet and tenor saxophone, piano and synthesizer, and percussion and drumkit. The basic material is made up of fragmentary surges and abrupt bursts of sound coalescing and dispersing in an unpredictable series of instrumental combinations. A low-density middle section for piano, electronics, and vibraphone falls on the pointillistic side of Gümrükçüoglu’s pattern creation, while the concluding passages embrace denser textures and more assertive dynamics. The two string quartets Bozkir and Xanthos, both performed by the Mivos Quartet, bring two variations to the basic schema. Bozkir is organized around a focal tone and rhythmically-charged shards of melody that are passed around the four strings, while Xanthos features a textural and startling timbral diversity balancing on the fulcrum of a long, purely pizzicato passage.

Pareidolia also includes Lattice Scattering for piano, flute, and fixed media; Ordinary Things for fixed media and small chamber ensemble, and opening and closing tracks for fixed media generated by a computer program improvising sound structures from an input of recordings made of an elevator.

Daniel Barbiero

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AMN Reviews

AMN Reviews: Biliana Voutchkova & Jeff Surak – The Truth About the Key [Relative Pitch Records]

The Truth About the Key is the sixth installation in violinist Biliana Voutchkova’s DUOS2022 series of duets with musicians of various backgrounds. Voutchkova, who resides half the year in Berlin and the other half on the Black Sea coast of Bulgaria, recorded these duets with American experimental musician Jeff Surak in Berlin, where Surak spent much of this past summer. It was a two-day session, the first day of which was spent recording musical and other activities at different places—location-based “guerilla” interventions, something of a specialty for Surak–followed by a studio session the next day. Surak, who’s credited with playing tape recorder and amplified objects, subsequently took the recordings and composed them into the three sound collages appearing on the album.

Safely Uncivilized captures an outdoor ambience pervaded by the sound of a police siren, the thrum of traffic, and snatches of conversation, which provide background for jangling metal in a four-beat rhythm and tremolo bowing on the violin. Unraveled Over Time combines the hiss and scuff of an imaginary untuned radio with Voutchkova’s pizzicato violin, followed by a charming personal travelogue/reminiscence narrated by Voutchkova. At twenty-six minutes long the title track is an abstract sound mass of variable densities bringing together sounds recalling a gamelan, crisply recorded pizzicato and lo-fi arco violin, colliding objects awash in echo, and a phone conversation—culminating in an abrupt halt.

Voutchkova’s repertoire of extended techniques complements the unpredictable and sometimes messy ambient sounds surrounding her as well as Surak’s noise-based sensibilities. They are an unconventional, and yet dissonantly harmonious, match.

Daniel Barbiero

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AMN Reviews

AMN Reviews: Lars Bröndum & Per Gärdin: Fractal Symmetry, Hum and Toot [Bandcamp]

Fractal Symmetry, Hum and Toot is a set of three long improvisations combining the organic and the synthetic, recorded live in the studio from the duo of Swedes Lars Bröndum & Per Gärdin. Although made by only two musicians, Bröndum and Gärdin’s sound contains multitudes, largely thanks to Bröndum’s array of modular synthesizers, Theremin, Buchla Music Easel, Sidrax organ, and miscellaneous electronics, over which Gärdin contributes contrasting, convoluted lines on soprano and alto saxophone.

Fractal Symmetry, the opening performance, begins with an electronic hum and saxophone harmonics before developing into a fluttering of soprano saxophone over a rhythmic synth pulse whose regularity is kept just beyond the reach of easy counting. The overall architecture of the piece, and of the duo’s collaboration generally, is of slowly shifting synthesized soundscapes overlaid with flurries of notes from the saxophone. Hum and Honk is notable for setting Gärdin’s extended technique on alto sax over a burbling synth background that evolves into an encroaching drone. The final track, Toot and Crackle, moves from an understated beginning of twittering synth into a more thickly textured yet still laconic electronic background over which the soprano saxophone conducts a rapidly voiced soliloquy, the conclusion to which is a harsh, synthetic mass of sound culminating in a scaled-down, dirge-like drone.

Daniel Barbiero

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AMN Reviews

AMN Reviews: Gussoni Northover Magliocchi – A Castle of Ghosts [Plus Timbre PT135]

Recorded just this past March in Genoa’s Castello d’Albertis, A Castle of Ghosts is a performance featuring two improvisations from the trio of Bruno Gussoni (C flute and shakuhachi); Adrian Northover (soprano saxophone) and Marcello Magliocchi (percussion). It’s easy to imagine the ghosts of the title in the ethereal sounds of the flutes and the sharper-edged, yet still wind-borne, sound of the soprano saxophone. Holding a musically proper balance between these two unevenly matched winds is crucial; given its timbre and volume, the saxophone is capable of washing away either of the flutes. Fortunately, Northover and Gussoni are able to work out a relationship of symmetry based on an intuitive sense of their instruments’ complementarity of range and tone. All of that would be for naught if not for Magliocchi’s sensitivity as a percussionist; his well-judged selection of sounds from a palette of metal, wood, and membrane is a vital part of this music, which particularly on the first improvisation pivots on the delicate interplay of the two wind instruments. The second improvisation finds the trio prone to explore less conventional, unpitched sounds

Daniel Barbiero

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AMN Reviews

AMN Reviews: Milton Babbitt – Works for Treble Voice & Piano [New Focus Recordings fcr349]

The vocal compositions of Milton Babbitt (1916-2011) probably are not as well-known as his instrumental work, particularly classic early serial pieces like All Set or Composition for Twelve Instruments. But they reflect Babbitt’s deep engagement with the systemic possibilities and expressive potential of dodecaphonic music, as well as his interest in language as a medium of expression made up of sounds. On Works for Treble Voice and Piano soprano Nina Berman and pianist Steve Beck show the range of Babbitt’s writing for voice by presenting a chronologically arranged survey of his published work for piano and soprano or contralto, spanning the years 1950-2002.

The set begins on a somber note, with Babbitt’s 1950 setting of William Carlos Williams’ poem The Widow’s Lament. The music follows the flow of Williams’ words and creates a mood appropriate to the words, the setting for which, like Williams’ poetry, is plain and direct even while maintaining its atonality. The following year Babbitt set German Expressionist poet August Stramm’s text Du to seven short movements. The music is exuberantly atonal; Babbitt’s setting of the text brings out the consonant-driven musicality of the German text. Sounds and Words (1960) and 1969’s Phonemena—the title of the latter reflecting Babbitt’s love of wordplay–take the musicality of language to its logical conclusion by breaking it into phonemes and setting those as texts. The music features extreme leaps, as if it had been liberated by the text’s freedom from conventional meaning. In an exception to the voice-and-piano program, Phonemena appears here as well in its second iteration for soprano and tape (1975). The six-movement A Solo Requiem (1977), which like Phonemena is from Babbitt’s second compositional period, is a setting of texts from several different poets for soprano and two pianos, Beck here being joined by pianist Eric Huebner. This composition, a memorial to Babbitt’s student Godfrey Winham, again shows how Babbitt’s sensitivity to language allowed him to elicit affecting moods from the ostensibly cerebral angularity of atonal music. From Babbitt’s third and final period are In His Own Words, a spoken word tribute to composer and jazz pianist Mel Powell with texts taken from Powell’s writings on music, and Virginal Book, a setting of a John Hollander poem for contralto, both from 1988; Pantun (2000), featuring Hollander’s translations of Malay poetry; and 2002’s Now Evening after Evening, an atonal pastoral setting for an eclogue by Derek Walcott.

This is a fine recording of an aspect of Babbitt’s work that deserves to be better known.

Daniel Barbiero

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AMN Reviews

AMN Reviews: Gebhard Ullmann / Steve Swell / Hilliard Greene / Barry Altschul – We’re Playing in Here? [No Business Records NBLP 149]; Kirk Knuffke & Michael Bisio – For You I Don’t Want to Go [No Business Records NBCD 158]

“We’re playing in here?” is something every improvising or experimental musician must’ve said at some point, given the all-too-often unavoidably shoestring-run venues that tend to host the music. It’s also the name of an album of impeccable contemporary acoustic jazz by the quartet of saxophonist/bass clarinetist Gebhard Ullman, trombonist Steve Swell, double bassist Hilliard Greene, and drummer Barry Altschul.

The album’s five tracks, all but one of them written by Swell, strike a balance between free flights of solo improvisation and tightly scored melodies for ensemble. The post-bop swing of the opener Planet Hopping on a Thursday Afternoon leads to La Mariposa, a feature for Ullmann’s vocal-like acrobatics on bass clarinet. Like Ullmann, Hilliard on this track reaches into his own instrument’s upper register, which he plays with a beautifully clear articulation. Sketch #4, the third track, is like the first track driven by Altschul’s propulsive swing, but at a higher velocity. The title track moves from an opening gambit of extended technique for trombone—air notes and other unpitched noises—into a loosely structured, collective polyphonic improvisation that culminates in an unexpected unison melody. The final piece, Ullmann’s Kleine Figuren #1, is a high-energy piece that includes a long-lined melody and a solo for Altschul. Superb music from four superb musicians.

No Business has another release of high-quality acoustic jazz with For You I Don’t Want to Go, a duet of cornetist Kirk Knuffke and double bassist Michael Bisio. The recording consists of a single 37 minute-long track that flows seamlessly from a free improvisation to Knuffe’s composition For You I Don’t Want to Go, back to a free improvisation and then into Bisio’s composition Sea Vamp. The playing is energetic and thoughtful, moving the music along with a momentum that never lags. Knuffke and Bisio complement each other well over the course of the performance’s many evolutions, with Bisio’s rapid pizzicato put on particularly prominent display.

http://nobusinessrecords.com/

Daniel Barbiero

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AMN Reviews

AMN Reviews: Departure Duo – Immensity Of [New Focus Recordings fcr329]

The four works appearing on the Departure Duo’s album Immensity Of represent a sampling of the repertoire the two—soprano Nina Guo and double bassist Edward Kass—have been assembling for double bass and soprano. What they hope to show is that this pairing, though unusual, is also unusually musical. This sparse yet exquisitely beautiful recording proves them right.

Guo and Kass’ focus is on contemporary work, much of it which they’ve commissioned. Hence three of the four compositions on the album, spanning 2017-2019, were written for the two. The fourth, by Hungarian composer György Kurtág, is from 1999. The Kurtág piece consists of short, outburst-like settings of twenty-two witty, aphoristic selections from 18th physicist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg’s scrapbooks (or “book of scribblings”). In keeping with some of Lichtenberg’s observations, Kurtág’s writing is often astringent, featuring leaping, expressionistic vocal lines underpinned by basslines that emphasize the opposition between the ranges and timbres of soprano voice and low strings. Katherine Balch’s Phrases, which sets fragments from Rimbaud’s poem Illuminations, closes the gap between double bass and soprano through generous use of extended technique for double bass, which pulls it up into an approximation of the soprano’s register. John Aylward’s three-movement Tiergarten (“zoo”) undergirds Guo’s delivery of Rilke’s poems about swan, panther, and unicorn with arpeggiated harmonics, thickly bowed chords, and staccato bowed and pizzicato lines, respectively. Immensity Of by Emily Praetorius is a quiet, slowly moving microtonal piece that sets Guo’s wordless voice against Kass’ bass as each produces long notes gliding downward and upward, away from and toward each other.

Daniel Barbiero