★Erstwhile Records
Live at the LU
Recorded in May of 2002, almost a year after Fennesz' surprisingly successful (commercially) release, Endless Summer, one might have expected that this pairing would produce an intriguing collision of opposing forces. On the one hand you have all the pop-influenced, steamily melodic and erotic explorations that Fennesz had developed in the prior years. Countering that, one could readily imagine Keith Rowe as saboteur, finding rifts in the smooth mass to deviously penetrate and deflate. This does…
A view from the window
A couple years before this session, Rowe recorded with two soprano saxophonists, Michel Doneda and Urs Leimgruber (The Difference Between a Fish on Potlatch), a session that, while providing some interesting music, had its share of problems. Central to these was the difficulty many saxophonists have in shedding the "baggage" accumulated while playing in jazz bands as opposed to working in non-idiomatic, free improvisatory forms. For whatever reason, possibly having to do with the ability to abst…
s/t
ErstLive 005 is from the quartet of Keith Rowe, Sachiko M, Toshimaru Nakamura, and Otomo Yoshihide, the centerpiece show of AMPLIFY 2004: addition, the "four hour quartet". ErstLive 005 contains three individually packaged slimline CDs in a slipcase with original artwork by Keith Rowe, which wraps around the entire box, front, side, and back, as well as liner notes from all four musicians and numerous pictures from Yuko Zama. ErstLive 005 documents only the second performance of this quartet, a…
The room
"This was one of the first occasions on which I worked with Keith Rowe, who bore more or less the same relation to the electric guitar as David Tudor did to the piano (I put that in the past tense because by no stretch of the imagination could you now call them guitarist or pianist respectively)."-Cornelius Cardew, 1966 More than forty years later, Keith Rowe is still adding to his remarkable legacy of sound and color. This latest release, The Room, marks the third full-length solo recording of …
Misenlian
Julien Ottavi and Dion Workman are two of the most extreme of the younger wave of sonic explorers, pushing the boundaries of sound and art. Ottavi hails from Nantes, France and Workman from New Zealand, but their overlapping concerns and aesthetics have drawn them together, and misenlian contains the results of their initial collaborations. Julien Ottavi studied sound and photography at the art school of Nantes. He is a founding member of Formanex, an electroacoustic quartet performing graphic s…
Requests and antisongs
Saxophonist John Butcher and violinist Phil Durrant had been playing together on the English improv scene in various formations for 14 years when they decided to start a live electroacoustic project in 1997, a project not unlike Evan Parker's own unit at the same time. The Butcher/Durrant duo released a first CD, Secret Measures, on Wobbly Rail, recorded live at the beginning of the experiment. Requests and Antisongs is a studio performance taped in January and February 2000, over two years late…
What a wonderful world
Despite the title of the album and several of the selections, listeners who approach this disc expecting something in the vein of Louis Armstrong will likely be disappointed. Then again maybe not, if it's originality that's prized. Jérôme Noetinger and Erik M had, by the late '90s, established themselves as driving forces in contemporary electronic improvisation, performing and recording with virtually anyone of note in the field. For this album, they at least partially venture out into di…
Up in Flames
Haunted House is Loren MazzaCane Connors's much anticipated group, featuring Suzanne Langille on vocals, Andrew Burnes on second guitar, and Neel Murgai on percussion. Langille wrote two of the three monstrous tracks, the third being a cover of Lonnie Johnson's 'Blue Ghost Blues." They all permit MazzaCane plenty of space to roam. The 23 minute "Been So Long" is dominated by his solo 'dialogue' between two separate voicings, where he alternates slow, surging and quivering downstrokes with frail,…
Time Travel
Recorded on October 17th, 2002 at Gok Sound, Tokyo.
Forlorn green
The press release is disingenuous in describing "Forlorn Green" as "lo-fi": even if Jason Lescalleet's work involves tapeloops using cheap recording gear and "trashed" speakers, his digital reworking and mastering is painstakingly perfectionist and perfect. Recorded in four different locations in the Boston area (a church, a gallery, an art school and the local Twisted Village record store) and crafted in Lescalleet's studio with what can only be described as loving care, the sonic alchemy of …
Right after
Right After is a remarkably subtle album of duo electronics by two relatively young Italians with roots in avant-garde improvisation. While Giuseppe Ielasi began his career as a guitarist and Domenico Sciajno was an improvising bassist of note, both gradually moved into the area of pure electronics and sound manipulation. A fine balance of pristine, crystalline sounds and earthy scrabbling noises is shown from the first track, ²at a greater distance² which offsets pinging, high pitched tones tha…
Chaos club
eRikm and dieb13 are two of the most prominent and well-respected experimental turntablists in the world, both working in a wide range of contexts, from the classical world to club DJing. Over the last two years, they have begun frequently working as a duo, and chaos club marks their first duo recording together. eRikm, from Marseille, burst onto the scene in the mid-'90s as a virtuoso turntablist. Since then, he has gradually shifted his output into a more abstract vein, often abandoning the tu…
Fire Song
Maybe the words of the author of our 'record of the year 1999' (Dean Roberts) will not be enough for you to try to obtain this cd. Maybe also because it's so difficult to obtain, and also because no other magazine will speak about it here in Italy, because it arrives on a small -- but already extraordinary --label without distribution in our country. What a shame! Earl Howard (he's played with Derek Bailey, Han Bennink, Takehisa Kosugi, George Lewis and Richard Teitelbaum, but has rarely recorde…
Dach
"Living," wrote John Cage in 1952, "takes place each instant and that instant is always changing. The wisest thing to do is to open one's ears immediately and hear a sound suddenly before one's thinking has a chance to turn it into something logical, abstract or symbolical." Many improvising musicians today pay lip-service to Cage, but very few perform music which really lets sounds be themselves. Since 1993, trombonist and composer Radu Malfatti has been exploring "the lull in the storm", craft…
Aluminium
It's onward, ever onward for New Zealand's foremost guitar experimentalist, Dean Roberts. Before you know it, he'll be as ubiquitous as Thurston Moore, a New Music gadfly gatecrashing every weird feast going. The latest outpost in a transition from lo-fi humstrum to Destination Unknown sees Roberts shacked up with avant-Austrian Werner Dafeldecker bassist in Improv group Polwechsel.Expect: grinchy crackling, like the amplified sound of grit disintegrating. Imagine: bric-a-brac, debris, splinters…
Tears
Sachiko M and Ami Yoshida, both from Tokyo, met in 1997 and formed the duo of Cosmos the following year. Sachiko M has developed a unique style utilizing a memory-free sampler, creating pure, piercing sine waves with the device's built-in test tones and noise. She has also recently begun exploring the use of contact microphones, as documented on the second track of Tears. Sachiko has worked extensively as a solo artist, in groups such as Filament, I.S.O., and Hoahio, and in duo with Toshimaru Na…
The Flirts
As wonderful is his duo with compatriot Cor Fuhler, who, like Prins, has gradually progressed from Bimhuis improv into electronic experimentation. This is a quite befuddling duo (as on Live, Prins utilises electronics, FM modulations and radio; Fuhler employs EMS Synthi AKS, turntables and mbiras), whose interaction is in a constant state of flux, and one whose ideas flow so liberally and create music which is at times so disorientating that it feels as though one is listening to it through some…
Schnee live
ErstLive 003 is from the duo of Burkhard Stangl and Christof Kurzmann, titled 'schnee_live', the final show on the last night of AMPLIFY 2004: addition. Stangl and Kurzmann began working as a duo in late 1999, releasing Schnee in 2000, and playing numerous concerts over the past four years throughout Europe, the US, and Asia. schnee_live documents how much their duo has changed since the initial recording of Schnee, which was the first time they ever played together as a duo.
eh
One of the central aesthetics of the Erstwhile label is the counterpositioning of electronic and acoustic improvisers. Rarely has that been more starkly, and beautifully, achieved than on the opening and closing tracks of eh by guitarist Stangl and turntablist/electronicist Dieb13 (Dieter Kovacic). Stangl is one of a handful of contemporary free improv musicians who happily forays into tonal, even melodic spheres, conjuring up a reduced version of John Fahey, perhaps. On "eeeh", his delicate str…
Schnee
The first domestic release from these two youngish Austrian improvisers. Guitarist Stangl (Polwechsel, Ton Art, etc.) and Powerbook player Kurzmann (co-leader of Orchester 33 1/3) improvised tributes to four of their favorite films (from Barbara Albert, Fassbinder, Chris Marker & Godard). Rather than simulate a vertical narrative to showcase plot development or the buildup of tension in the films, "Schnee" is concerned with the actual sensory non-cerebral experience: the relationship between col…