RAN BLAKE & ANTHONY BRAXTON – A Memory Of Vienna

HatOLOGY

Born from a single session occurred November 19, 1988 at Haus der Begegnung Mariahilf in Vienna, this music is finally released after 21 years. The tapes were left unattended for almost a decade, retrieved in 1997 and apparently forgotten again until this deserved publication. In the liners, producer Art Lange vividly recalls the enthusiastic fervour with which favourite standards and “agreed-upon songs” were being hastily written on a piece of cardboard before heading to the studio, a multi-purpose room located in an obscure district of the Austrian capital. Both virtuosos were there to participate in Cool Noir, a festival organized by the Wiener Musik Galerie. The sudden decision to have Blake and Braxton recording a series of evergreens represents one of those turns of events that frequently engender works that are destined to be remembered. If there’s a jazz album that doesn’t reflect the short time at disposal of the artists and the urgency connected with such an immediate project this must be it, the musicians performing with inspiring authority, care of detail and brilliant management of the emotions, the impression that of a two-week recording stint.

It is tremendously difficult today, for this writer, to listen to tunes like “Round Midnight”, “Alone Together” or “I’m Getting Sentimental Over You” without manifest symptoms of aural exhaustion, mostly derived by the swallowing of an incalculable number of pedestrian versions by dozens of nobodies (and a few “names”, too). This can’t possibly be told of these particular actors, who literally disinfect the wounds of those faded bodies, bringing them back to life thanks to the untarnished transparency of their intentions. Blake plays articulated trickles, hammers clusters and re-harmonizes selected passages, obeying to a sense of adventurousness that is only limited by the perfect geometry of his figurations. Braxton tends to respect the basic fundament of the thematic materials yet, once the right moment comes, designs extraordinarily coherent phrases that, fused with not-exactly-docile atonal flurries, miraculously fit the structure of the original better than ever. The result is a lesson in style, masterfully delivered a couple of decades ago but sounding as if it was taped last month.

RHODRI DAVIES / MICHEL DONEDA / LOUISA MARTIN / PHIL MINTON / LEE PATTERSON - Midhopestones

Another Timbre

Recorded at the church of St. James The Lesser in the namesake village near Sheffield, Midhopestones is characterized by a type of gestural gravity which thrives in the realm of whispered uneasiness, an apparently inviolable stillness perturbed by flimsy timbral substances. The record’s enormous value was immediately established after the reaction to the opening “Strines”. Contrarily to what usually happens with any improvisation I happen to analyze, it didn’t take long for this writer to be reduced to a state of partial catalepsy, still responsive to the ongoing sonic activities while subjected to a series of infinitesimal, if clearly perceived nervous shocks. This looked like a recurring incitement to remain awake in order to avoid a tumble into some kind of black hole. A spine-chilling vibe - but also a necessary component of an intensely intimate experience - arising when we really decide to listen, letting the sounds break through our wholeness and relinquishing linguistic demarcations.

The participants – working with harps, soprano sax, laptop, voice and amplified objects – sound utterly deprived of personal ambition, entirely taken by the construction of a comfortless enthrallment rendered even more compelling by a somewhat disembodied restraint. No metaphors, symbols or incoherent representations, just a constant quest for this invisible communion, human instincts tending to the achievement of a condition that is both incontrovertibly corporeal and unpremeditatedly spiritual. To do this, they privilege the starkest aspects of a tremulous instrumental organism – Minton pertinently counterpointing Doneda’s frail undertones and undernourished pitches with his own choice of multiphonic guttural emissions, Patterson and Martin settling on a speckled diversity sheltered by pulsing murmur and gentle percussiveness, Davies’ involvement barely audible at times, tremendously effective when the harp’s strings produce extraordinary subsonic hums that put the woofers at risk, setting the room’s loose parts in rattle mode.

This results in incomparably splendid music, a pre-orgasmic, unexploded intensity informed by the erosive traits of hardly manageable anxiety. Visceral sensations that are pretty strange to find in such a context, all the more startling given the evident logic at work: the artists in full control of the procedures, never trespassing the borders of aural congruity, yet eliciting a matchless transcendence. Every additional spin introduces new factors: what at first seems impenetrable becomes perfectly clear the second time around, whereas the firm memories of certain combinations get instead sabotaged by subsequent listens. The naked truth, according to what the rational mind suggests, is that I’m trying to come to terms with this album’s weight, unsure about the implications hiding under the manifest impression. The gut feeling says that we’re in presence of a landmark recording.

WILLIAM BASINSKI – Vivian & Ondine

2062

William Basinski’s newest creature consists of a main loop, restated for approximately 45 minutes and subjected (this time just slightly) to the consumption process that defines his well-known glories. The fragment is, as expected, heartbreaking: an orchestral sample repeated ad infinitum, perhaps taken from a slowed-down segment of muzak. The composer owns a conspicuous collection of recordings of that genre, whose shreds are utilized to give birth to these immaterial spells, helping us to look at an altered kind of perpetuity.

What for this writer remains fundamental is to stress how this artist has managed to achieve an accurate symbolization of infinity through something that instead is corroded, tarnished, progressively losing bits and pieces in a complete disfiguration of the original meaning. The beauty deriving from the tussle between the idea of a reiterative sequence and the decay of material things is absolutely inexplicable, alone worth of hours of reflection. The fact that the Los Angeles-based Texan manages, each and every time, to strike gold by choosing the perfect cycle, the ideal tonality, the ultimate intensity for his nebulous arias, is just one of the many mysteries surrounding another timeless question: what separates those who break new grounds (and everyone’s heart) via the turning round of a single figure from the Lexicon-endowed wannabes producing massive outputs of pitiful waste?

A correct answer might be “the heart itself”. This gentleman is a luminous character who never gave a damn about placing himself distant from what he actually comes from and is always open to any discussion, willing to explore different ambits. However, Basinski refuses to change for the sake of it, remaining anchored to basic principles which, in art and especially in life, define a human being’s overall value. Vivian & Ondine - dedicated to two infant nieces of his, who came to this earth almost simultaneously while the music was being conceived – is in that sense another splendid contradiction, a homage to youth and potential development – and the hope for a brighter future - pictured by an amassment of grey clouds symbolizing a past that doesn’t want to know of going away, still burdening the deepest consciousness, intensely affecting our memories until the very end.

JOHN CAGE – Sculptures Musicales / Twenty-Six With Twenty-Nine / Twenty-Six With Twenty-Eight And Twenty-Nine / Eighty

OgreOgress

The label from Grand Rapids, Michigan presents the latest superb collection of previously unrecorded John Cage compositions, their rendition graced by the customary commitment and technical mastery of violinist Christina Fong and percussionist Glenn Freeman (here doubling on bowed piano). Other instrumental entities involved in these recordings are Prague Winds and The Chance Operations Collective Of Kalamazoo, cellist Karen Krummel and bassist Michael Crawford.

“Sculptures Musicales”, originally destined to Merce Cunningham’s choreography “Inventions” and inspired by Marcel Duchamp’s suggestion, is a disquieting piece where silence and relatively authoritative, factory-smelling drones interspersed with essential percussive fragments are intertwined, a little bit in the David Jackman/Organum mode but with less godly rage. Lots of metallic resonances and a few violent amassments, static clangour from two/three different points, then extensive periods of complete hush. Remarkable, however not as imposing as the subsequent “Twenty-Six With Twenty-Nine” and “Twenty-Six With Twenty-Eight And Twenty Nine”, perhaps the closest that Cage has ever sounded to Phill Niblock in his creative life. If possible, these tracks are even more distressing than the sonic automations, the accumulations of clusters and timbres pushing the overall sonority on the edge of disintegration, never letting the tension go. Music that moves endlessly without actually changing its timbral complexion; shifts that, although clearly perceived, let us helpless in our tentative quest for a categorization overcoming the rudimentary concept of “dissonant mass” (it remains to be seen for whom this is “dissonant”, as your reporter finds such a kind of inert inharmoniousness quite blissful).

In a way, “Eighty” fuses the preceding conceptions, presenting again a reciprocation of absolute quietness and (this time) rather undernourished accretions of adjacent pitches characterized by a larger use of somewhat stressed unisons. It’s another striking example of the most interesting material written by this composer, which OgreOgress has the unquestionable merit of releasing and making snoopier people aware of. In fact, this stuff goes well beyond the commonplaces often related to Cage and, especially, to the human mushrooms – who have the nerve of defining themselves “artists” - popped up from the damp ground under his shadow. An abundant half of these scores sound almost intimidating: a usually invisible trait of this man which is much refreshing to these ears.

EVAN PARKER – Saxophone Solos

Psi

A definition that could never be used for Evan Parker’s playing is “mealy-mouthed”. Whatever the means of expression utilized, the impressions gathered while listening to his unyielding spontaneous discourses mingle in a righteous harmony where distinguishing infinitesimal variations and minute details becomes both useless, a mere exercise of individuation amidst deeper meanings and intuitions, and fundamental as the best ear-training available. For there’s no doubt that every concept expressed by this unrepentant virtuoso must be listened attentively: only by doing so the preternatural qualities of that improvisational combustion are finally disclosed.

Recorded June 1975 at London’s Unity Theatre and, a couple of months later, at Jost Gebers’ FMP Studio in Berlin, the thirteen tracks constitute – unbelievably, given their undamaged modernity – the first attempts by Parker to extirpate the commonplaces of traditional jazz idioms from the instrument (although he’s ready to recognize influences which include, as per his own admission, Albert Ayler, Pharoah Sanders and John Tchicai as far as certain technical instances are concerned). The control applied to the soprano’s tones is fearsome, the ability of interlocking nastily squealing pitches in the over-acute register with ingeniously impolitic, mercilessly discrepant flurries an incessant source of wonderment. Clearly the man had a vision, and – to quote from him – “you either have a personal voice or you don’t”. This stuff is miraculous in its capacity of letting the listener accept the grace and the ugliness of a timbre, and one knows that a genius is present when the initial unattractiveness turns into something that is essential, necessary in understanding a revelation.

As hard as bearing almost 80 minutes of procedural difficulties is, Parker’s mastery transforms the intricacy in a meditation of sorts. To answer Francesco Martinelli’s question in the liners, Saxophone Solos does contain music that can still speak to today’s listeners, at least those who aren’t yearning for iPods. Actually, the idea here is that the nickname “Bird” has been attributed to the wrong Parker. Save some valuable time to sit on the couch and spend your rational energies to wander across the acerbic spirals drawn by this path-opening creative thinker three decades and a half ago.

FRANK ROTHKAMM – Ghost Of New York

Flux

“The music of ghosts is located here, in the movement from one pitch to the next, in the ambivalence of notes when one note has been left and the next one is not quite yet reached”. Frank Rothkamm - a Los Angeles resident who still remembers the nocturnal shadows of his Manhattan apartment - is a man of clear ideas, even when the images he tries to conjure up through his studio productions are not exactly explicable. There lies the fascination evoked by Ghost Of New York, first instalment of the 3-CD + DVD “Tetralogy”. If this is the inauguration, we’re in for a delightfully misplacing trip.

A limited edition of 333 copies, the duration set at 33’33” (numbers that recall the theoretically universal numerical perfection with which low-cost spiritual leaders usually lecture the aurally impeded, dressing all that wittering with recurrent grammar errors in escalating mnemonic earthquakes) the album consists of five tracks of erratically nonrepresentational music containing the most evident exemplifications of a street man’s failure to realize that Do-Re-Mi-Fa-Sol-La-Si is not the centre of the cosmos. Contrarily to the artist’s habit the sources are not made known to the mortal consumer, though I’m surmising that analogue synthesis and a computerized system might be held responsible for this hymn to the insufficient definition of a liquefied polymorphism.

The waves reach for our attention, constantly enticing, teasing us through intangible shapes, irreparable damages already done to that mechanism of reduction to basic constituents which the mind is prone to utilize when unable to recognize what’s happening. Complex draperies replete with bubbling fluids and swirling radiations are alternated with moments of uneasy stagnancy or dawdling levitation (I swear that this term was chosen before realizing that a track is called “Self Levitation Science”). Adjacent ephemeral circumstances fuse in a huge blotch as we drowsily connect the dots of a depressingly plumbeous day and the rerun of a vintage Azumah Nelson fight (whose picture’s colours are also extremely blurred). Does this lethargy mean we’re being hit in the head by these momentous synthetic protuberances? Have African boxers ever pondered about the inadequacy of a common illusionary stereophonic projection? Is the beginning of “The Bethroted Of Wyoming” a mutilated robotic quote of the incipit to Igor Stravinski’s Sacre Du Printemps? Why does this writer always ask questions in Rothkamm-related reviews? Unsolved mysteries, at least for now.

Although never antagonistic to the ears, this is not a choice soundtrack for dinner at home with your potential new fiancée, unless she’s a Conehead. This chef exclusively cooks food for thought (well, this is not really true – check this blog), accomplishing the goal via singular accentuations of the aspects of life (translated: “of sound”) that are vaguely readable between the lines, which – as he himself seems to admit in the inner leaflet’s observations – remains a major artistic interest. This is the only type of truth-seeker accepted in my house.

JASON KAHN / ASHER - Planes

Mikroton

The overall depth and the level of interior summoning-up typical of Kahn and Asher's work – recently savoured thanks to their Vista on And/OAR - is confirmed by this CD. The fruit of a September 2008 performance at Boston’s Axiom Gallery, Planes rewards abundantly, highlighting the respective personalities throughout a soundscape where nothing sounds blissful, the sun is persistently obscured but nevertheless life continues one way or another, as demonstrated by the recurring voices of children at play appearing like miniature ghosts amidst menacingly clattering drones and insidious diffusions of breath-hindering substances, generated by Kahn’s analogue synthesizer and (mostly) bowed and scraped percussion. Asher, credited with “recording and playback devices”, is in all probability responsible for the patina of hiss and just perceivable underground noise, fusing his own research – which as always moves around the coordinates of metropolitan unrest – with Kahn’s eliciting of encrusted upper partials in measured crescendos smoothed by soft cymbal touches and elusive percussive strokes.

Certain artists try to constantly surprise - at the risk of repeated slip-ups - to offer something “new” to the listener. This diligent pair belongs to the opposite category: explorers so confident in what they’re doing, eager to exploit the whole extent of the field of action down to the tiniest component, that individuating alien elements in the music becomes an impossible task. And, as every human knows, we feel better when the likelihood of a satisfying outcome is there, a sure thing when these gentlemen are involved.