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AMN Reviews

AMN Reviews: Hélène Breschand & Elliott Sharp – Chansons du Crépuscule [Public Eyesore PE139]

Chansons du Crépuscule—“songs of dusk”—is a collection of original songs and interpretations recorded in Paris by New York guitarist/composer Elliott Sharp and French harpist and vocalist Hélène Breschand. The music on the disc was inspired by the music of Jane Birkin and Serge Gainsbourg—presumably including their classic 1969 recording Je t’aime…moi non plus, whose title, if not its period pop sound, finds an oblique echo in Sharp and Breschand’s Je t’aime Tant. Chansons du Crépuscule tends more toward an angular, hard-edged expressionism carrying the strong imprint of Sharp’s sonic alchemy and Breschand’s Dadaesque vocals. But they can switch registers at will, as the softly melancholy Le Dernier Mot shows; diverseness is the other side of their virtuosity.

http://www.publiceyesore.com

Daniel Barbiero

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Reviews

The Squid’s Ear Reivews

From the Squid’s Ear:

Peter Evans:
nature / culture
(psi)

Archetti, Luigi / Bo Wiget:
Low Tide Digitals III
(Rune Grammofon)

Charity Chan:
Somewhere the sea and salt
(Ambiances Magnetiques)

Sun Ra and His Intergalactic Solar Research Arkestra:
Helsinki 1971 – The Complete Concert & Interview (2 CDs & DVD)
(Transparency)

Savoldelli, Boris & Elliott Sharp:
Protoplasmic
(MoonJune Records)

Blast 4tet:
Sift
(ReR Megacorp)

Cancura / Morris / Nazary:
Fine Objects
(Not Two)

Pansonic / Haino Keiji:
Shall I Download A Blackhole And Offer It To You
(Blast First Petite)

Fred Anderson:
Staying in the Game
(Engine)

Francois Carrier and Michel Lambert:
Nada
(Creative Sources)

Honsinger, Tristan & Massimo Simonini:
Call Me Us
(I Dischi de )

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Performances

September at the IBeam

From Brooklyn’s IBeam:

IBEAM MUSIC
September Music Listings 2009
168 7th Street, Brooklyn, NY 11215
http://www.ibeambrooklyn.com

Sept 4th
9 pm – $10 Suggested Donation
Franck Vigroux (electronics)
Michel Blanc (drums, electronics )
Ben Miller (voice)
Elliott Sharp (reeds, guitar) + guests
Franck VIGROUX, Composer, guitarist, turntablist, videoartist and producer, Franck Vigroux works in various media electronic music, new media, composition and improvisation. He leads many bands and projects featuring musicians such as Bruno Chevillon, Elliott Sharp, Marc Ducret, Hélène Breschand, Joey Baron, Michel Blanc, Stéphane Payen, Matthew Bourne, Kenji Siratori , Mariano Equizzi, Scorpene Horrible. http://www.myspace.com/franckvigroux

Sept. 5th
9pm (Two Sets) $15 donation
Roberta Piket – “Improvised Chamber Music”
Perry Robinson – clarinet
Roberta Piket – piano
Lisle Ellis – bass
Peter Nilson – drums

Roberta Piket has played professionally as a sidewoman with David Liebman, Rufus Reid, Benny Golson, Michael Formanek, Lionel Hampton and the BMI/New York Jazz Orchestra and has twice been a featured guest on Marian McPartland’s Piano Jazz, on National Public Radio. http://www.robertajazz.com

September 11th
9pm – $10 Suggested Donation
The Landon Knoblock/Phil Doyle Duo
Landon Knoblock – Piano
Phil Doyle – Saxophone

The Stacken/Knuffke Duo
Jesse Stacken – Piano
Kirk Knuffke – Trumpet

Phil Doyle and Landon Knoblock began their collaboration at the University of Miami, 9 years ago.Their focus has always been on improvisation, and playing in the moment. “The pianist Landon Knoblock, from Miami by way of Brooklyn, has quietly been making waves for his reflective and lyrical style.” (NY Times) http://www.LandonKnoblock.com

Sept 12th and 13th
8pm – $10 Suggested Donation
The Nightingale and the Rose
A new opera by Benjamin Scheuer
http://www.BenjaminScheuer.com

Sept 18
$10 Donation
8pm Russ Lossing Trio
Russ Lossing – Piano
Masa Kamaguchi- bass
Billy Mintz- drums
9:30 The Two Bass Band
featuring Rock Ciccerone ( bn), Bryan Drye (bn), Clay Jenkins (tpt), Dave Scott (tpt), John O’Gallerger (alto sx), Loren Stillman (alto sx), Adam Kohker (tn sx), Masa Kamaguchi (bs), Johannes Weidenmueller (bs), Billy Mintz (drms)
http://www.billymintz.com

Telluric Currents, Series 2
Curated by Jeremiah Cymerman
Featuring some of the very best young talents working within the realms of compositional & improvised music in Brooklyn, NY, the Telluric Currents series features 3 sets per night.

Friday, September 25th – $10 Donation
8p Jessica Pavone Solo
9p Anthony Coleman/Jeremiah Cymerman/Christopher Hoffman
10p Matthew Welch’s “Looking at Mondrian” performed by Shawn Onsgard
Saturday September 26th – $10 Donation
8p Mario Diaz de Leon/Doron Sadja
9p Ches Smith Solo
10p Jon Irabagon/Mike Pride Duo

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Reviews

Bagatellen Reviews

From Bagatellen:

Joe McPhee — Angels, Devils & Haints (CjR)

In the many years that I’ve known Craig Johnson, his appetite for music — the kind one would expect to find among college students, debating the merits or lineage of any particular artist into the wee hours — remains insatiable, relieved perhaps by an expansive and steadily growing music and film collections, a neatly […]

Pavel Borodin – Speak Easy: The Loft Concert (DVD)

Cologne’s Loft has become a hunting reserve for Pavel Borodin’s shooting of improvising artists (pun intended). After last year’s excellent documentary on Elliott Sharp, The Velocity Of Hue (for which, reports the director, no willing label was found for distribution – a shame, given the quality of that particular work), we’re now able to watch […]

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Releases

New Releases From Ambiances Magnetiques

Jean Derome performing with Jandek, Loren Robe...
Image via Wikipedia

Out recently on Ambiances Magnetiques:

John Geggie – Geggie Project / Ambiances Jazz | AM 179 | 2008
Using John Geggie’s compositions as a point of departure, this creative trio covers much terrain with its lyrical and sonic landscapes. …

Normand Guilbeault Ensemble Mingus – Live at Upstairs 2008 / Ambiances Jazz | AM 185 | 2009

Mingus’s music is controversial, politically engaged, generous, warm, and passionate. It is not for the lukewarm and the undecisive. …

Antoine Berthiaume, Elliott Sharp – BASE / Ambiances Magnétiques | AM 178 | 2008

Matt Brubeck, Nick Fraser, Marilyn Lerner – Ugly Beauties / Ambiances Magnétiques | AM 187 | 2009

Isaiah Ceccarelli, Michel F Côté – Vulgarités / Ambiances Magnétiques | AM 180 | 2008

This meeting is the audible result of being overworked. What comes out of it is a sullen form of grace, an elegy for the destruction of things.This CD features the sound of a plethora of objects being struck and stroked. …

Charity Chan – Somewhere the Sea and Salt / Ambiances Magnétiques | AM 188 | 2009

Sébastien Cirotteau, Brigitte Lacasse, Catherine S Massicotte, Éric Normand – Face à la dérive / Ambiances Magnétiques | AM 183 | 2008

Instrumental documentary: a travel along the St Lawrence river. Winds, animals and peoples becoming instrument too… …

Ensemble SuperMusique – Y’a du bruit dans ma cabane / Ambiances Magnétiques | AM 182 | 2008

All its instrumentalists are exceptional soloists highly regarded for their unique playing style. These six performers are musique actuelle masters with a huge palette of sounds. …

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Performances

Roulette in June

From New York‘s Roulette:

6/9: Angie Eng w/ Thierry Madiot: Rite Ways, Every Intentional Act is a Magical Act (work in progress)
6/10: Joseph Hannan: Varieties of Canine Experience
6/11: Urs Leimgruber meets Peter Evans & Okkyung Lee
6/12: Yvonne Meier: Gogolorez+
6/13: Paula Matthusen
6/16: Joel Kennedy & Ensemble
6/18: Matana Roberts‘ ILLUMINATION
6/19: ROULETE BENEFIT: DJ Olive, Okkyung Lee, Satoshi Takeishi, Elliot Sharp, Shoko Nagai + MORE. Curated by Shoko Nagai $20
6/20: David Means w/ Cyrus Pireh and Anthony Ptak: Tumbleweed

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Performances

Avant Post New Music Venue in NY

Avant Post is opening its doors for weird music. Here’s the scoop from Tonino Miano:

It’s called TEMPLE M (555W 141st street (& Broadway) New York, NY 10031.

Me and violist Frantz Loriot are running a monthly series (first sunday of the month) dedicated to avant garde / improv. Each performance is followed by an open session of free improvisation. The event is called THE AVANT POST.

May 3rd we’ll feature Michael Attias and Sean Conly in a new project (Think Shadow)

June 7th will be Franck Vigroux and Elliot Sharp

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Performances

Mixology Festival Coming to Roulette in May

From Roulette:

HARVESTWORKS INSIDE: Pamela Z / Elliot Sharp
Thu May 14 – 8:30 PM
The 2009 edition of Harvestworks’ Spring performance series ‚”Harvestworks Inside” with three exceptional programs exploring gesture and physical computing in live performance. Pamela Z will present new work for voice, electronics, video, and gesture controllers. Elliott Sharp will perform new works as part of his ongoing Tectonics project.

HARVESTWORKS INSIDE: Zach Layton / Sawako
Fri May 15 – 8:30 PM
Zach Layton performing new works exploring synaesthesia, geometric forms and minimal surfaces, kinetic visual patterns and sonic gestures. Sawako: a signal alchemist in the urban life environment who explores the virtual and actual world through sound.

HARVESTWORKS INSIDE: Bill Hsu & James Fei / Sha Xin Wei
Sat May 16 – 8:30 PM
Bill Hsu and James Fei perform a new work for reed instruments and electronics, using an interactive system that tracks timbral and gestural information. Sha Xin Wei: “Ouija, New York” an open rehearsal event that explores movement and collective intentionality experiments with dancers in responsive media.

MIKEY IQ JONES
Wed May 20 – 8:30 PM
Vocalist/percussionist/composer Mikey IQ Jones (of Brown Wing Overdrive) presents an evening of new songforms, improvisations, and compositions centered around Jones’s bodily & technological manhandling. His kitchen-sink collusionist aesthetics will center around the real-time manipulation and structuring of raw vocal, idiophonic, membranophonic, and domestic materials into thickets of rhythm and harmony via an assortment of samplers. In English: He’ll be singing, banging on an assortment of drums, percussion, and household junk, sampling (and sometimes looping) the elements live, and in essence performing new pieces which are to be released sometime in late 2009. There will also be costumes and props, because it’s Mixology time, and that’s just the way he rolls.

MATTHEW OSTROWSKI
Thu May 21 – 8:30 PM
New York based Matthew Ostrowski has been active since the early 1980s, working in improvised music, music theater, electroacoustic composition, and audio installations. An unreconstructed formalist with a continuing interest in density of microevents and rapid change, he has wasted much of the last ten years developing interfaces for real-time musical performance, attempting to emulate the multidimensionality and flexiblity of acoustical instruments in the electronic domain. Tonight Ostrowski will perform a new multichannel work, “Patterns of Changing Light”, in which he will try to come to terms with various poles of electronic music: texture and gesture, sampling and synthesis, acousmatics and diegesis. In addition, he will play some old chestnuts, and special guests are definitely possible.

HAHN ROWE
Fri May 22 – 8:30 PM
Drawing from his background in a wide field of genres including rock, classical, film, theater, improvised, and electronic music – composer, producer, multi-instrumentalist Hahn Rowe has developed a uniquely personal sonic language, creating atmospheric, sensual, and polymorphic soundscapes. He has shown a keen ability to bridge and meld acoustic sounds with the infinite textures available through analog and digital processing into a strangely organic and emotional sonic realms. Hahn has performed and/or worked with artists such as Hugo Largo, Glenn Branca, David Byrne, Hassan Hakmoun, Foetus, Mimi, and Antony and the Johnsons among many others. Tonight’s performance will feature solo, digitally de/re-constructed violin – fluidly transforming from sensual-textural microsonics to the lush and quasi-symphonic.

EVIDENCE WITH BENTON-C BAINBRIDGE: LOSPERUS
Sat May 23 – 8:30 PM
Losperus is a new performance paradigm for sound artists Stephan Moore and Scott Smallwood’s duo, Evidence, in which they leave behind their laptops and software – placing commonplace electrical devices and found objects into unstable relationships with each other, and using friction and gravity to build humming, whirring, rattling contraptions on the fly. Tonight they are joined by visual artist Benton-C Bainbridge who will be making live visuals in much the same spirit, taking an ‘acoustic’ approach to visuals and spatially amplifying the Losperus devices through light and shadow with hacked slide and film projectors.

BERANGERE MAXIMIN plays ‘Stuck In a Nasty Little Film’
Tue May 26 – 8:30 PM
French composer/performer Berangere Maximin presents ‘Stuck in a Nasty Little Film’, a new piece for laptop, spoken word, and various objects with video by Anton Yakutovych. Performing first as a singer, Maximin later studied electroacoustic music with the composer Denis Dufour at the Perpignan Conservatoire. Interested in preserving the spirit of live music in the studio, she works out of her own Home Sweet Home Studio, shooting sounds in a dark silent room, recording soundscapes and acoustic sounds, using sampling, digital effects, and performing on a variety of objects.

JARRYD LOWDER & JULIE FOTHERINGHAM: “Stress Positions”
Wed May 27 – 8:30 PM
“Stress Positions”, the newest of a series of short performances by the duo of Julie Fotheringham (dance/movement) and Jarryd Lowder (video/music/sound) evokes, conflates and confuses motifs of torture for the purpose of extracting information (as in the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation techniques”) and torture for the purpose of extracting pleasure/pain (a la BDSM). Jarryd Lowder is an artist working with electronic audiovisual media and is an instructor at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. Julie Fotheringham performed as a dancer/acrobat in Cirque du Soleil before coming to New York to make her own work in contemporary dance/performance art.

o.blaat (Keiko Uenishi): “A Large Gap at the Level of My Head”
Thu May 28 – 8:30 PM
“A Large Gap at the Level of My Head” is an experiment in composing with a series of specific cues to attendants. The original sound event won’t yield, nor aim at a single common experience, but rather impose an unique auditory event to each listener. The piece is also a study of listening: not about the source of the sound, but about phenomena of perceived. o.blaat (Keiko Uenishi) is a Brooklyn based sound artist, social composer, and a core member of SHARE (http://share.dj) known for her works formed through experiments in restructuring and analyzing one’s relationship with sounds in sociological, cultural, and/or psychological environments.

AARON SIEGEL ENSEMBLE
Fri May 29 – 8:30 PM
The Aaron Siegel Ensemble will be premiering two movements of a work for percussion and pianos entitled, “Preparing the Past.” Drawing on tangled narratives of memory and anticipation, “Preparing the Past,” juxtaposes the moment of observation with the trail of its reflections. Also on the program will be selections from Siegel’s “Book of Notions,” for piano and vibraphone. Aaron Siegel writes experimental music that lies at the intersection of abstraction and intuition. His work ranges from solo compositions and chamber music to improvised ensembles and collaborative theater pieces. He has been hailed as an “evocative composer,” with “meditative ease and grace” working at the “frontiers of sound research. The premiere recording by the Aaron Siegel Ensemble, “Every Morning, A History” was praised by Signal to Noise as being representative of the flowering DIY chamber music scene in Brooklyn.

DAVID ROSENBLOOM: Sound and Light I
Sat May 30 – 8:30 PM
Sound and Light I is an integration of sound and light: live music and recorded video, with the video image manipulated in real time, particularly in relation to color and saturation, and in turn acting as a score element for the musicians, David Rosenbloom, guitar; David Hofstra, bass; and Stephen Moses, drums. David Rosenbloom has been active as a musician, composer, and painter in New York since the late 70’s no wave period. His projects have included the Electric Chorus & Orchestra, Chinese Puzzle, The Experimental Chorus, and the Outlanders; he performed, toured and recorded with Glenn Branca, and was a member of Rhys Chatham’s early band Meltdown. His work tends to focus on sonic and structural experimentation with an emphasis on dense, melodic textures.

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Reviews

Squid’s Ear Reviews

From the Squid’s Ear

Joe McPhee/ Paal Nilssen-Love – Tomorrow Came Today
(Smalltown Superjazz)
– Dave Madden

Magda Mayas / Tony Buck – Gold
(Creative Sources)
– Kurt Gottschalk

Conrad Bauer / Thomas Lehn / Jon Rose – Futch
(Jazwerkstatt)
– Kurt Gottschalk

Peter Kowald – Open Secrets
(FMP)
– Kurt Gottschalk

Michael Snow / Alan Licht / Aki Onda – Five A’s, Two C’s, One D, One E, Two H’s, Three I’s, One K, Three L’s, One M, Three N’s, Two O’s, One S, One T, One W
(Victo)
– Kurt Gottschalk

Jacques Fochia, Mike Goyvaerts, Christoph Irmer, George Wessel – Canaries on the Pole #2
(Creative Sources)
– Wyman Brantley

Nels Cline – Coward
(Cryptogramophone)
– Darren Bergstein

Luca Mauri – Between Love and Hate
(Creative Sources)
– Darren Bergstein

Jos Smolders – Gaussian Transient (Megaphone)
(NVO)
– Darren Bergstein

Joelle Leandre & Quentin SirJacq – Out of Nowhere
– Max Schaefer

Tony Dryer, Jacob Heule, Jacob Lindsay – Idea of West
(Creative Sources)
– Max Schaefer

Giampaolo Verga – Fadensonnen
(Creative Sources)
– Max Schaefer

Neumatica – Alud
(Creative Sources)
– Darren Bergstein

Pomassl – Spare Parts
(Raster-Noton)
– Darren Bergstein

Elliot Sharp / Tectonics – Errata
(Neos)
– Darren Bergstein

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Performances

DOWNTOWNMUSIC.NET Photos

Raoul Bjorkenheim at Moers Festival 2006, Germany
Image via Wikipedia

From DOWNTOWNMUSIC.NET:

March 04, 2009
Raoul Bjorkenheim & Lukas Ligeti Duo, The Stone
Raoul Bjorkenheim, Lukas Ligeti

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