Author: S. Fruitman

Seldom has constructed emptiness felt so chill, its chill penetrated the marrow with such real immediacy. Cambridge, Mass.-based Helen Mirra, artist, writer and walker, created the installation Declining Interval Lands for New York´s Whitney Museum in 2002, together with acoustic guitarist Ernst Karel. The “home stereo version” Maps and Parallels 41°N and 49°N at a Scale Of Ten Seconds to One Degree is an eco-ambient horror story. The latitudes mark the strip of North America where deforestation and poorly planned monoculture ravaged the land where the elm tree once grew.

For an earlier film on the subject, Mirra paced out this space, exposing one foot of film for each degree. Describing the consequences of the “need for land”, instead of producing a “conventional” field recording, Mirra represents the land with Karel´s slowly strummed guitar, the railway with rewind cranking of a 16mm camera (emptied of film), the unrelenting wind with analogue noise generators and filters and the rivers with – silence. Despite its weightless transparency, it is a ruthlessly unsentimental, sobering memorial.

http://shhpuma.com/shh013cd-helen-mirra-and-ernst-karel-maps-of-parallels-41on-and-49on/

Stephen Fruitman

Antony Maubert (b. 1974) is a French sound artist currently living in Spain, whose music studies ran parallel to his classes in physics. Teacher of computer music, composer, organizer and theorist, he describes his creative acts as “analysis and deconstruction of contemporary society”, chiefly its downside, it would appear – crowds and power, violence, the destruction we wrought on / brought upon ourselves.

On Panorama SO2 (as in the chemical formula for sulfur dioxide), Maubert sculpts toxic exhaust into a revolting cinema of the atmosphere under machine torture. Brand-new, shining, and well oiled, it runs fast, smooth and slick. An unwelcome atonal pitch works itself out of ear range. But the engine gets grittier and sputters. As it strains, it actually sings its own swan song. It weakens, entropy craving its tribute. Breaking down, miscarrying, a new jolt of energy keeps it kinetic. We are such skilled mechanics. A reboot, a terrible sputum of impurities, the air a miasma. Then quiet, but for an ominous seeping. The engine is ancient now, like a Model T, its rattling muffler pitted and rubbed raw with age, finally fizzling out.

Now imagine breathing all this in.

http://www.luscinia.org/panoramaso2.htm

Stephen Fruitman

William Burroughs, the Beat Generation author, proto-post modernist (co-creator of the cut-up technique with Brion Gysin) and outlaw satirist, who outlived almost all of his contemporaries despite nearly life-long heroin addiction, hung around long enough to collaborate with admirers as diverse as Laurie Anderson, U2, Bill Laswell, Tom Waits, sci-fi innovator William Gibson and Gus Van Sant.

In celebration of the hundredth anniversary of his birth in 2014, Bionulor (Sebastian Banaszczyk) presented the multimedia show Stary Pistarz (“The Old Writer”), a forty-minute long sound sculpture at a literary festival in Częstochowa, based on selected works. Void of samples of the author´s distinctive, lemon-sucking sour Edward G. Robinson snarl, the music (“100% sound recycling”) largely reflects Burroughs´ lengthy sojourn in Tangiers with Moroccan-flavored pastiches, but also bears ambient traces of his Midwestern birth place and the industrial, purple-assed baboonery of his critical, paranoid view of life. A worthy tribute and strong, stand alone listening experience.

Stephen Fruitman

Objects in the mirror of the mind may be closer than they appear. For his debut, Glasgow´s Timedog (Pete Burton) has created an ambient suite of ten pieces that, rather than spirit you away from this world on rainbow clouds of synth, ground you in its all its admirable grittiness. Like a new kind of urbanity of indeterminate demography, Objects of Mind is a thing of shreds and patches, a North African souk on Park Avenue close by a Bohemian circus, often rhythm-driven but more like the rhythm of pedestrian traffic than musical meter. The impressive variety of events conjured across the course of sixty-five minutes demonstrates a darting quality of mind, though Burton is in no rush, he patiently lets each “object” unfold, examines it from every angle, offering an experience of beauty with only minimal support from nature, although it shares with her certain rough edges and appealing asymmetries. A unique and deep vision of what ambient can be.

http://diametricmusic.limitedrun.com/products/530449-21-diam-timedog-objects-of-mind-cd

Stephen Fruitman

“Would you recognize the Rhine by its sound?” asks Lasse-Marc Riek. The river, that ever-flowing, every-changing artery, the thoroughfare of our landscapes, is a popular subject for field recordists. Perhaps because no two sound alike. Each breeds its own flora, fauna and civilization.

Cédric Peyronnet curated a whole series of recordings along the River Taurion by various artists in three-inch format, Flaming Pines its own from artists and rivers around the world. Annea Lockwood´s superb triple CD set A Sound Map of the Danube was painstakingly constructed after previously doing the same thing closer to home, along New York´s Hudson River. And those, excuse the near-pun, are merely a drop in the bucket.

As the title Von der Rheinquelle bis Hafen Karlsruhe makes clear, this stretch begins at 2,052 m elevation, literally at the source of the Rhine, and stops at selected locations scouted out and photographed by Thomas M. Siefert, all the way to Karlsruhe, capturing flow, burble, trickle, bird and machine song, and the chatter of the riverside dwellers and their children. The air grows cool and darkles, The Rhine flows calmly on (Heinrich Heine). The next installment will take us all the way to Rotterdam.

Riek further wonders if we can still foster a creative, indeed mutually beneficial relationship “without lapsing back into modes of romanticism, when witnessing its remaining beauty in some rare places; without turning away in frustration and disillusionment, when confronted with the irreparable interventions it has undergone.” Though your present reviewer does not recognize the Rhine by its sound, he does know a good, mutually beneficial thing when he hears it.

http://www.gruenrekorder.de/?page_id=14747

Stephen Fruitman

Soon there will be no more survivors. Soon there will be no witnesses left, either. As artist Edmund de Waal wrote, millions were “erased from the texture of life” by the Holocaust. Soon all that will remain is the historical record and our determination to preserve and protect it.

There is already a rather vast library of work composed during the Holocaust, but For You the Sun Will Shine is something quite new, different and essential. Charlette Shulamit Ottolenghi was born and raised in Milan and now lives in Jerusalem. She has been performing these songs written by female prisoners for some ten years now, originally brought to light by the research of Francesco Lo Toro, founder and director of the Musica Judaica Institute in Barletta. It has been suggested that both before and during incarceration, women coped differently than their male counterparts, steeling themselves by sharing imaginary meal preparation and recipes and doing household chores. “(The) men don’t go out… She stands on the long line (for bread)… When there is need to go to the Gestapo, the daughter or wife goes… The women are everywhere… (Women) who never thought of working are now performing the most difficult physical work.” Evidently there were also many who had enough energy to pursue their artistic interests, as well.

Ilse Weber´s songs were hidden under the dirt of Theresienstadt, dug up by her husband at the end of the war. Ludmilla Pešcařová memorized hers. Another is even gone from the paper record, anonymous forever. Czechs, Germans, Poles, Jews, Gentiles. Nothing can vitiate the obscenity of the Holocaust, but each and every piece of art discovered fulfils the so-called 614th commandment, the moral obligation to negate Hitler´s determination to obliterate Jewish life and creativity. “True respect to these women artists is to treat them as artists,” insists Shulamit, and to sing their songs, not only on Holocaust Memorial Day.

For this recording, Shulamit assembled a tiny ensemble, with the indefatigable Frank London, pianist Shai Bachar and percussionist Yuval Lion. The smallness of it defies the enormity of the subject, while allowing the band to be silly-puttied in arrangement. She sings lullabyes, kaddishes, Brecht-Weillian cabaret, parodies, anthems with a Socialist sway, prayers and death march waltzes, bitter, longing, enraged, despairing. Healing broken music, arrangers London and Bachar are by turns taciturn and elegant, stirring and experimental, trumpeter London especially the vigorous tummler, Bachar constant and nourishing as the rain.

One Holocaust historian cites the words of an anti-Nazi cleric, who quoted Luke 19:40 as his testament – “If they keep quiet, the stones will cry out.” As the number of Holocaust deniers and relativists outnumber its historical victims, witnesses and perpetrators, our existential duty is to listen – otherwise the texture of our life becomes ever more threadbare.

http://www.rockpaperscissors.biz/artists/8967

Stephen Fruitman

String orchestra score for the troupe Gandini Juggling’s ballet “4×4 Ephemeral Architectures”, this is the world premiere recording of Nimrod Borenstein´s Suspended Opus 69, by das freie orchester Berlin (founded by Solaire label chief Dirk Fischer) under the baton of Laércio Diniz. Borenstein (b. 1969), who began his musical training at the tender age of three, originates from Tel Aviv, grew up in Paris and eventually moved to London. He is currently an Associate of the Royal Academy of Music and has dozens of works to his name.

Clad in green-shifting-red tattersall (designed by brother Alec), the disc in its sturdy slip case is accompanied by an Alice Munrovian compilation of texts, all of which this reviewer chooses to enjoy with a glass of wine after having absorbed this new voice (to him at least) with fresh ears and a mind untainted by insight or preconceived notions gleaned from the booklet.

The nine movements (plus a mood-setting violin prelude, moving from on high down to the bass) of this forty-minute work comprise a picnic celebration of post-sacred music, excited strings a paean to enlightenment, to the light (and a little dark) entertainment – tango, waltz – of a world of harmony still within reach, as easy to pluck as the long-stemmed roses of the violas. Borenstein clutches eighteenth-century fulsomeness and various modernists and contemporaries (Grieg, Stravinsky, Pärt) in the same warm embrace. Shapely and sophisticated, kinetically optimistic (though briefly “Annoyed” – ants at the picnic?) and ambiently contemplative, Suspended Opus 69 is swirling, epicurean, delightful. In its well-structured accessibility, it would also serve perfectly as any young person´s introduction to the orchestra.

Nimrod Borenstein: Suspended opus 69

Stephen Fruitman

One of this era´s finest cellists, Erik Friedlander was commissioned by the Jewish Museum in New York to compose a work celebrating an exhibit of ancient, illuminated manuscripts in Latin, Arabic, but mostly Hebrew, on loan from the Bodleian in Oxford. Performing due diligence before setting to work, “I found myself in this darkened room surrounded by these gorgeous books and manuscripts that seemed to be talking to me. They were telling me a story of patience and craft, ritual and dedication that was inspiring.”

Since study of the Talmud is always done in pairs, and this is a solo work, not a duet (recorded in a single April day in Brooklyn), this is davening – meditative recital, not chavruta (fellowship), the individual alone with the Book. Friedlander composed ten pieces as distinctive as the letters of the Hebrew alphabet, black fire upon white fire. The letters become animated – the candelabrum of the shin, each of its three fingertips aflame, the smooth, tabletop plateau of the tav, the maze of the tzadi, the monkey tail of the qof grasping hold of the monkey bars of the lamed, each crafted like a sofer agonizing over all 304,805 letters of the Torah scroll.

Illuminations is anything but parochial. Taking his lead from Bach (whose suites for cello are still among the world´s most frequently played), his life-long spirit guide, Friedlander´s prelude crosses the threshold of the “Scriptorium” – “a serious place where work gets done” – before spiraling off in search of ten lost tribes of sound evoking not only the Jewish world and the Jewish worlds within the Muslim and Christian ones – as in those precious books – but also southern and eastern Asia and uptown and downtown Manhattan. His “Cham – Hypnotique” is Tibetan in name and inspiration but recalls some of his most innovatory Jewish modalities, such as can be heard when he works with John Zorn´s Masada songbook. Fingers on fretboard, bow raining down on strings, he declaims, dervishes, frenzies a discombobulating tarantella, spins the wheel of the heavens above the star calculators of Babylon (“Fantasia – Zodiac”), indulges the noble with the courtly “Madrigal – The Virgin and the Unicorn” – and sinks into the mourner´s Kaddish before closing with “Pavan”, dedicated to Hildegard of Bingen.

Itself a library, as real and redolent with the smell of parchment as the Bodleian or mythopoeic as Borges´, Illuminations contains magnificent decorations, marginalia, cross-references, books speaking to each other across millennia of thought. Hardly was solo instrumental music ever so talkative.

http://music.erikfriedlander.com/album/illuminations

Stephen Fruitman

Like listening to a painter attack the canvas while drinking absinthe in the other room, Altered States is a two-disc, ninety-minute collection of solo guitar vignettes by Ascanio Borga, his first on new label Sonic Boundaries. Track titles hang off the same, great chain of roiling, evolving being – “Magma”, “Acid Landscape”, “Harsh Ground”, “Raw Science Loops” – and Borga works quickly but methodically. Altered States is formalist in the sense that no heed is paid historic, political and cultural context, all attention instead focused on the materiality of the art.

Disc one was recorded one day in January 2010, disc two also a single day, one year and one month later. Dark green outside, vital-organ pink inside. Played and treated live, no additional fiddling or overdubbing, a dozen states of mind (even grace) passionately expressed. The cumulative effect is volcanic, droning, sputtering worlds being formed, others being pulverized down to cellular level, ancient in gut feel, ablating all other thoughts. You can´t help but concentrate. Raw indulgence, visceral gratification.

https://ascanioborga.bandcamp.com/album/altered-states

Stephen Fruitman

The Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media celebrated ten years of being and doing in 2013. Among the celebrants were Ryuichi Sakamoto, Illuha (the duo of Tomoyoshi Date and Corey Fuller) and that most eminent small sound handler, Taylor Deupree (12k is his label). An ostensibly informal entertainment improvised on piano, guitar, pump organ, and synthesizers made enough of a “third mind” impression, that the four of them decided to preserve it for grateful listeners across the world.

A lesson in listening. Despite the fact that comparisons to Eno and Budd lie close at hand – Sakamoto is of course such a pianist – it is Eno´s Neroli that Perpetual calls most often to mind (that is, when it isn´t calling Thursday Afternoon to mind) on “Movement, 1”. As if it were used as a template…

Exquisite ambience threatens to float you blissfully away, but microscopic, almost transparent, amniotic things are happening and they crave your attention. Children are at play in “Movement, 1,” and someone, not the children I suspect, is playing with blocks. Not ordinary blocks. Detail is of the essence to this quartet. A guitar is picked up by a signal receiver and scrambles its message. Static turns into a rain of hobnails.

“Movement, 2” begins with movement inside the piano, notes being nipped in their respective buds, before further mechanical adjustments are made to the internal braces of its engine. Butterfingers drop a tool, a coin falls out of his breast pocket. A nectarous, wavering tone hovers, biding its time. Shards of frozen tears, fabric rustles impatiently. The wavering tone resolves itself back into Enoness.

Final, third movement, slides down Sakamoto´s sweet axis, at its root excavations are being conducted. It gets sweaty. Birds are more than a little annoyed, field workers scribble notes assiduously. The odd sour note says, Put a ring around its tiny leg and release it back into the wild.

http://www.12k.com/index.php/site/releases/perpetual/

Stephen Fruitman