★Erstwhile Records
Cloud
restocked: The four gentlemen of the guitar are: Keith Rowe guitar, electronics. Oren Ambarchi guitar, electronics. Christian Fennesz guitar, computer. Toshimaru Nakamura no-input mixing board. 'Keith Rowe, Oren Ambarchi, Christian Fennesz and Toshimaru Nakamura are four of the most prominent and influential musicians in experimental music today, each with extensive discographies and distinctive styles. In mid-2004, they formed the Four Gentlemen of the Guitar (4g), and played a series of shows …
One (Snow Mud Rain)
Peter Rehberg (Pita) and Marcus Schmickler have been two of the leaders in the electronic revolution of the last fifteen years, both on their own and in collaboration with others. One (Snow Mud Rain) is the first duo CD from these two long-time friends and associates.Rehberg co-founded the massively influential Mego label in 1994, and soon after began recording under the name Pita. His first solo release, Seven Tons For Free, came out in 1996 and was a kick in the teeth to all those who heard it…
Bits, bots and signs
Ever since Otomo got into his minimal misuse of stereo equipment phase, a collaboration with Swiss toaster torturers Voice Crack was on the cards. Although Otomo's refraction of high end sinewaves around cranial interiors may not seem like an ideal partner for Norbert Mšslang and Andy Guhl's usual industrial clang, attempts have obviously been made to find a common ground. There's an intense focus upon the fine detail of the unfolding electronic fields, with the Swiss duo providing a constantly …
Extracts
The first word that came to mind on playing Extracts was understatement, with an almost oriental minimalism and profundity on display. At times I was forced to check whether sounds were coming from the speakers or from outside. However, this is a far cry from the Radu Malfatti school of implied music since it is very much about close group interplay. Simon H. Fell's sonorous bass is of particular note, underpinning, colouring and giving the proceedings a kind of still, stately authority. Likewis…
do
A groundbreaking release from two youngish Japanese improvisers. Sachiko M plays sample-less sampler, and Nakamura uses the no-input mixing board--both instruments which conceptually produce no sound, yet these two conjure it out, somehow."Do" was recorded live in Europe and Tokyo last summer, and features three improvisations varying in length from just over two minutes to slightly under 40. While the shorter tracks are worthwhile and hold moments of greatness, it is the first, very long track …
Points and Slashes
Over the past decade, Swiss-based Günter Müller has collaborated with many of the most prominent Tokyo-based musicians, recording CDs with Otomo Yoshihide, Taku Sugimoto, Sachiko M, Masahiko Okura, and Toshimaru Nakamura. Points and Slashes is the latest of these, a duo collaboration with guitar wizard Tetuzi Akiyama.It's impossible to pin down Akiyama, a musician of diverse interests and activities, with a brief description. He has been playing electric guitar since he was 13, and formed his fi…
We are everyone in the room
"Two improvising laptop trios, Stilluppsteypa hailing from Iceland and Chicago's TV Pow, met for the first time in the fall of 2000 and embarked on a week-long tour, captured in part on this recording. As in most successful examples of this genre, the musicians mesh into a whole wherein individual accomplishments are impossible to quantify. The range of sounds and depth of detail produced by this sextet are remarkable, from the quietest clicks and rattles to deeply sonorous hums and ratchetings,…
Good Morning / Good Night
Well, 'Holy Good Night!' seems an appropriate reaction when faced with a substantial double-disc offering from the 'holy triumvirate' of Japanese reduced improvisation and minimal electronics, ie Otomo Yoshihide, Sachiko Matsubara and Toshimaru Nakamura. In August 2003, they quietly entered a studio in Tokyo and laid down the basis for this music in only two days. The following month saw a final mixdown issue from their hands. Amazingly, the roof did not fall in on the musical world as a result.…
Wrapped islands
The predominantly Viennese quartet Polwechsel have exhaustively explored the grey areas between composition and improvisation, electronic and acoustic, jazz and classical for much of the past decade. Austrian Christian Fennesz, while initially a guitarist, is primarily known for his abrasive yet melodic laptop explorations on labels such as Mego and Touch. Wrapped Islands documents the much-anticipated first meeting of these two driving forces of contemporary music.
Bassist Werner Dafeldecker an…
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The saying goes that, given typewriters and an infinite amount of time, a roomful of monkeys could write the complete works of Shakespeare. By that logic, if the same chimps were given a table-full of consumer electronics and a couple of hours, they would likely produce a decent album of electronic, improvised music. I feel safe in guaranteeing, however, that it wouldn't be anywhere as compelling and listenable as the new recording by this quartet of highly developed mammals known as poire_z. Ov…
The hands of Caravaggio
A staggering achievement, one is tempted to call The Hands of Caravaggio the first great piano concerto of the 21st century. The work is the brainchild of Keith Rowe, eminence grise of MIMEO and co-founder of AMM who, inspired by the recently discovered painting The Taking of Christ by Caravaggio, imagined a piece combining the mighty forces of MIMEO's electronics with the pure, gorgeous sound of John Tilbury's piano. Technically, therefore, the work is not really freely improvised, as the music…
Open
Mark Wastell and Matt Davis met and first played together in a workshop led by Eddie Prévost in London during the spring of 1996. Soon after, Wastell was invited to join Chris Burn's Ensemble, in which he played with Phil Durrant for the first time. Subsequently, Phil and Mark worked together in the quartets Assumed Possibilities and Quatuor Accorde, documented on Rossbin and Emanem CDs, respectively.
The debut trio concert by Davis/Durrant/Wastell took longer to organise than any of the partici…
Too beautiful to burn
Martin Siewert and Martin Brandlmayr are two of the most active musicians in the ever-evolving Viennese music scene, in both improvised and composed settings. They have been performing together in various groupings since the summer of 2000, but Too Beautiful to Burn marks their initial meetings as a duo. Siewert has been quite prolific recently, in projects such as Efzeg (Grob, Durian), SSSD (Grob), and the seminal all-star collaborative orange CD on Charhizma, along with Werner Dafeldecke…
Particles and smears
Grainy flickering, strangulated buzzing, blurred sonic shadows and harsh stridulations. Chicagoan Drumm continues to rethink the electric guitar in terms that suggest the microscopic life of ponds, and he deploys electronics along similar lines. Canadian turntablist Tètreault scatters clicks and blips as he skates the meniscus. Tiny events, inconsequential in themselves, taken together form a viable acoustic ecosystem. (The Wire, Julian Cowley)3
s/t
ErstLive is a new series of releases from Erstwhile Records, documenting notable live sets associated with the label. The discs are designed to simulate a concert experience, each in the same template design using two colors chosen by the musicians involved, with a photo of the concert on the back cover. Each will be in an edition of 800 CDs and not reprinted. The initial releases will be chosen from the AMPLIFY 2004 festival which took place in Cologne and Berlin in May 2004. ErstLive …
Between
"between", for me is about the tension and space between objects, and how we might occupy this area, to reside if you like between the conventions, to locate the flexibility that comes from de-theorizing the dogmas. It seemed to me as if Toshi and I were navigating a route through a familiar part of town, where each of the buildings stood for and represented expectations, styles, outcomes and histories. We wanted to resist entering the buildings and to stay between. The cover art and photo attem…
Weather sky
That said, "Weather Sky" is another thing altogether. Bruno Meillier invited Toshi to play a duo concert in St Etienne with AMM's no-concessions table guitar master Keith Rowe, and took them into the studio the day after to record for Erstwhile. Sensitivity to pitch is less important here (Rowe, remember, hasn't tuned his guitar since the early 1960s): the album's three tracks are real slow-burners. Rowe can be agile and aggressive when he wants to, but his preferred working method is to lay dow…
Rabbit Run
Keith Rowe: tabletop guitar, electronics Thomas Lehn: analogue synthesizer Marcus Schmickler: digital synthesizer, computer
Duos for Doris
This word - improvisation - no longer seems adequate to describe the forms that emerge from playing without a score or pre-determined structure. These categories are invidious anyway, but improvised music history, or that part has its roots in communality and spontaneity, raises certain expectations in the listener that may have become anachronistic or simply naive. Take Duos For Doris, dedicated to Tilbury's mother, who died two days before this recording was made. A double CD containing three …
The world turned upside down
A document of a performance last autumn at Parisian Improv spot Instants Chavires, in which Günter Müller is flanked by two very different but distinctive users of the electric guitar. On one side of the stage is Keith Rowe, who's worked for half a lifetime to unsettle the boundaries between music and noise. On the other is the restrained presence of Taku Sugimoto, whose crabbed phrases waft above the shifting timbral networks laid down by the other two. The trio's music is dominated by rasps an…