#Keith Denley | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

daveolivetti · 5 years ago

Text

What is Music Festival By David Olivetti Published - Drum Media 2000

"As a guitarist, I'm interested in expanding what a guitar can do and what a guitar is meant to sound like," says Oren Ambarchi. "There's a lot of different aspects that you'll just pull together and it becomes a language. Your language."

The idea of defining or categorising music has infected sound throughout centuries. People have been traveling from the rainforests of the Amazon to virtual Las Vegas in search of an answer. Some cultures fail to understand such a question. "There are many languages," wrote musicologist Kofi Agawu, "that do not have a single word for what in English is meant by the word music."

Which brings us to the What is Music? festival. Celebrating its sixth year, Australia's premier avant garde and experimental music festival is underway, returning from a run of shows at the Big Day Out. The festival organisers do not claim to have the answer of what music is. "When we named it, it was more a joke off-the-cuff,” admits Ambarchi. However, upon close inspection the list of players to have performed at this annual 'meet' offers light to such spheres of debate.

Ambarchi and Robbie Avenaim have been the festival's organisers since its inception. As musicians, their relationship stretches back to Australian terrorist noise outfit, Phlegm. They have continued to work together and seperately; Ambarchi reeasing impressive solo records, making sufficient impact to tour with Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore and The No Neck Blues Band.

"It's music that's vital and it's happening," says Ambarchi, translating the music the festival promotes as a living, breathing organism.

"It's music that's constantly evolving. We do it and we're also fans. We're into it. The first line-up was basically all local - Jon Rose, The Machines for Making Sense, Phlegm, The Mumesons... It was like this weird cross-section. Four nights and only one act a night in those days. It's much bigger than it used to be and it's more well-known."

Indeed, what started as a one-off has blossomed into a full-fledged world class event. This year's festival is shaping up to be the most exciting yet, featuring artists from all over the globe including artists from the Mego label roster, avant garde guitar legend Keith Rowe, English improviser Simon Wickham-Smith, American funnyman Neil Hamburger, Melbourne quartet Dworzec and saxophonist Jim Denley.

The festival brings together a dynamic mix of artists exploring a soundworld through acoustic improvisation, digital technology, free music and far-out collaborations. It's sure to raise the hairs on the back of one's neck, fire the senses and offer insight into a mysterious music world. The line-up suggests a retreat from the terrifying wall of noise characteristic of previous What is Music? festivals. However, the chance of a surprise attack is never out of the question.

"Well you never know with those guys from Mego," Ambarchi smiles, suggesting artists suc as these are in a constant state of metamorphosis and impossible to pin down. "In the beginning those Mego guys were connected to the techno community and minimalism. Since they've taken off, all their new releases are really noisy. Mego has inadvertently become a focal point for this year's festival. The label's most accomplished artists - Peter Rehberg, Simon Bauer, the acclaimed Fennesz and video band Skot - are all performing.

An Austrian label, Mego works across the field of electronic media choosing digital technology as it's chief source of musical mischief. However, Mego reflects a new music state, where sound created through software packages, computers, modulated synthesisers and effects units have become the modus operandi, inventing a new computerised language.

"I'm happy about the Mego label coming here because I think it's something happening right now. It's not something that happened two years ago and then it comes to Australia."

Peter Rehberg and Simon Bauer are two artists at the forefront of the digital music scene. They write and perform their own compositions as well as running the Mego offices. "I've always been interested in the latest developments of music," says Rehberg, discussing his movement from an ambient/experimental DJ to digital innovator. "It developed from the wider availability of software. Prices coming down in computer hardware made it an easier thing to do. You can make sounds now on a computer, which you couldn't make on an analogue machine 10 years ago. I think that interests me more."

On the other side of the spectrum, Keith Rowe is arguably the festival's biggest name. Best known for his ground-breaking work with British group AMM - a post-John Cage improvisation collective than began in the sixties and still perform today. He continues to astound audiences as a one-man sound laboratory. His role as a 'tabletop' guitarist sees him exploring and extending the possibilities of the guitar. Often, he places the guitar flat on a table and with a clear mind and a box of preparations (nails, screws, electric motors, rulers) he begins his compositions as you see it. Much like a painter in the studio. He is very much looking forward to the festival.

"One thing I've realised is that 30 years ago, the freely improvised music that we developed in Europe and North America was particular to a few towns and a few cities whereas now it's across the world," says Rowe. "That music spread everywhere. I'm looking forward to seeing that development happening on the other side of the globe. It’s fantastic."

As a senior member of the avant garde movement, who has been performing for close to 40 years, Rowe finds working alongside the current crop of artists propose new challenges and offer insightful collaborations. "I find it really invigorating because they have a completely different agenda to us older guys in the sense that when we started to make tis freely abstract kind of music without a repertoire we were really fighting against the established giants like [John] Coltrane. We were trying to develop our own music, our own agenda, our own aesthetic. Of course, the young guys have got something completely different. They are much more with computers and technology. I'm a primitive in that respect."

The What is Music? festival is essentially grounded in its enthusiasm, but like the music it promotes the festival itself is evolving. The very act of the festival finds itself (sub)consciously peeling open the systems of established states of performance for both the performer and listener, and offers space for new spheres of thought. Its alive both as a free music enterprise and an ideas factory.

On what influences his current playing, Rowe says, "I think challenging new ways of assembling material. The way a performance is shaped, you know, what happens in a performance. What is a performance?".

4 notes · View notes

dustedmagazine · 4 years ago

Text

Michael Rosenstein 2020: Seeking Sojourn

What was I doing in 2010? What was I listening to? Honestly, without doing some digging, nothing springs immediately to mind. I’m guessing that ten years from now, thinking back on 2020, that won’t be the case. In mid-March, my wife and I took off on our annual winter/early spring sojourn to Provincetown, Cape Cod. When we headed out, the state of the world was tenuous. But over the course of four days, we split our time between idyllic, cold walks on the Outer Cape beaches and tracking the pandemic slide into lockdown and mayhem. We came back home to an entirely different world which has continued to spiral and swirl. This was a year where I spent far more time walking in a woods near my house, searching out a pair of barred owls and their four fledglings than I did listening to music. Focus for listening has waxed and waned and online video streams just haven’t resonated with me. But still, music has brought me some sense of solace over the course of the last year.

AMPLIFY 2020: quarantine

Without a doubt, most of my listening over the year was spent following the AMPLIFY 2020: quarantine festival. Organized by Jon Abbey, who runs the Erstwhile record label along with musicians Vanessa Rossetto and Matthew Revert, the online festival kicked off on March 20 and ran through September 20, presenting 240 newly-recorded pieces and 80 hours of music by musicians from across the globe. Most were solo contributions, with seven “blind overdubs” where two musicians with established working relationships chose track lengths in advance and submitted their recordings which were superimposed with some light mixing by Taku Unami. While the pieces are all available as free downloads on Bandcamp, that only reveals part of the story. Over the course of six months, the Facebook group grew to 3000 members, acting as a virtual gathering place for online conversations and musings with countless posts a day. Additionally, Abbey tirelessly posted an ongoing playlist which he dubbed ��atmosphere” with cuts that ran the gamut from Albert Ayler to Funkadelic to Keith Hudson to Al Green with an extra-heavy helping of DJ Screw. Just tuning in to those choices and jumping on conversations was enough to save some days.

While anyone following the Erstwhile label caught some memorable submissions by expected participants, the organizers and some guest curators had more in mind than that and sub-threads developed early on. Yan Jun recruited fantastic submissions from little-known musicians from China while also contributing two pieces of his own. In addition to delivering three strong pieces, Revert brought in an Australian contingent. Rossetto delivered a festival highlight with her piece “perhaps at some time you have acted in a play, even if it was when you were a child” while also inviting a wide network of sound explorers constructing intimate sonic investigations. Abbey himself cast a wide net, probing for both established and little known musicians who had caught his attention over the years. (I’ve known Jon for a long time and was honored to be amongst those invited, contributing a piece assembled from field recordings from my Cape Cod trip.)

A number of musicians who hadn’t put out solo recordings in years, some who hadn’t had any recent releases at all, were lured back, with highlights by Greg Kelley, David Kirby, Joe Panzner, Annette Krebs and Sean Meehan. There was also a somber thread of homages to musicians who died over the last year, starting with a dedication of the entire festival to Australian percussionist Sean Baxter as well as a stirring tribute to bassist Simon H. Fell by Rhodri Davies, a dedication to Keith Tippett by Mark Wastell, and pieces commemorating Cor Fuhler by Dale Gorfinkel, Marcus Schmickler, Jim Denley, Nick Ashwood (recorded with Fuhler shortly before his death), Clare Cooper and Reinier van Houdt (whose six monthly missives delivered throughout the duration of the festival are all well worth spending time with.)

I find myself still catching up on the overwhelming array of contributions but here are a small sampling that caught my ear, though if I were to assemble this list a week from now, the choices would certainly be different.

Zhao Cong – “Homework”

homework by Zhao Cong

Yan Jun’s choice of musicians from China was uniformly superb and all are worth checking out. But Beijing-based Zhao Cong’s entry, in particular, has continued to hang with me. Her piece, constructed from two bass guitars and objects with its scrabbled detail of electronic hum, grit and glitch shot through with ringing bass strings popped out on first listen and continues to deliver.

Rie Nakajima – “carpet”

carpet by Rie Nakajima

Nakajima’s approach to sound-making, utilizing motors, mechanical devices and found objects proved the perfect tonic for pandemic listening. Her piece for AMPLIFY was recorded in her home in London “with all familiar objects I have been using at home.” The percussive piece is shot through with timbral depth, clattering along with a barely-contained momentum. Her release Karu Karu for Café Oto’s digital Takuroku lockdown series is also well worth checking out. And while I tended not to connect with online video over the course of the year, I found myself returning to Nakajima’s seven days bird songs which unfolded over the course of a week, multiple times.

Ivan Palacký – “Sanctuary”

Sanctuary by Ivan Palacký

Czech-based Ivan Palacký’s “Sanctuary” hit early on in the fest and remained a favorite. Palacký spent the first day of quarantine exploring his flat with an electromagnetic sensor, capturing the buzzes and tremors of everyday electronic devices. A few weeks later, he pulled out three knitting machines which he contact mic’d and used to improvise with the electromagnetic recordings. Palacký deftly interleaved percussive patter with wafts of static, grit and crackles, creaks and sputters and resonant thrums into an immersive piece.

Martin Kay – “Bath Time (2nd Edit)

Bath Time (2nd Edit) by Martin Kay

Through the festival, a thread developed of the pieces constructed as sonic response to the physical surroundings of isolation. Moniek Darge's gutting “Quarantine Child,” assembled from interior recordings and the desperate wail of a child, Mark Vernon's “The Dominion of Din,” woven together from field recordings from outside his Glasgow flat, cataloging exterior sounds that have annoyed him over the years and Kate Carr’s haunting “on every stair another stairway is set in negative” recorded using an old reel to reel tape and instrument recordings captured in her bathroom are three. Martin Kay’s four-part “Bath Time” delves in to that personal, interior realm, composed from recordings made in and around his bathroom during the routine that developed with his daughter’s nightly bath. The use of shifting focus, natural resonances of the room, the tub and underwater recordings transform the private, domestic activity into an increasingly abstracted aural study.

Distant Duos

The Distant Duos project that Mary Staubitz and Russ Waterhouse embarked on was also instigated by a sense of lost community. But here, the strategies employed were markedly different. The two are immersed in the DIY noise/improv New England community, spearheading shows in basements, bars, galleries and ad hoc venues and collaborating with musicians from New Haven to Portland, Maine, with all stops in between. They’ve also been instrumental in developing a network of like-minded musicians and bringing travelers through, some who have become frequent visitors. Unlike the duos in AMPLIFY, Staubitz and Waterhouse curated the 78 sessions, inviting pairs of musicians with a simple strategy. “Two remote artists record five minutes of sound while thinking about the other artist, unable to hear each other. The two tracks are combined into one.”

Released in sets of five on Bandcamp, the first on April 30 and the last on December 9, these bursts served as vital postcards. For those of us based in New England, these were both bittersweet reminders of the pre-COVID world we frequented and exultant celebrations. As someone who organized shows with the two and often played on the same bills, these really connected. (I was asked to participate, paired with Worcester-based Abdul Sherzai.) Some of the duos were longstanding partnerships (Greg Kelley and Vic Rawlings have been working together for over a decade). Some were pairings of musicians who knew each other but had likely never played together. Some participants were drawn from the deep field of regional musicians while others were recruited from across the US and Europe. With only five minutes at play, these served as sketches, vignettes or rough drafts. But keen curation and Waterhouse’s astute mixing and mastering made these hold together. Like AMPLIFY, these periodic missives kept me going through the last year.

Flip through any of the contributions and you’ll find plenty to encourage further listening. This batch, culled from the October 28th releases, provides a glimpse into the broad crew of musicians pulled in and the diverse strategies they came up with.

Adam Kohl and Mickey O’Hara

Adam Kohl and Mickey O'Hara by Distant Duos

Western Massachusetts-based Kohl (better known musically as Arkm Foam) and Worcester-based O’Hara have been performing together for a while now, and experiencing their mix of low-fi cassette manipulation and laptop generated deconstructed clatter and glitch inhabit a performance space is enthralling. This brief snapshot serves as a succinct snapshot of one of their sets.

J.P.A. Falzone and Hali Palombo

J.P.A. Falzone and Hali Palombo by Distant Duos

This mashup between J.P.A. Falzone (part of the ensemble Ordinary Affects) and composer and visual artist Hali Palombo comes across as quavering pulsations dialed in from some ethereal transmission. Listening feels like one is tuning in to an hours-long broadcast of hovering tones and fluttering waves which fuse together into shuddering oscillations.

Henry Birdsey and Mary Staubitz

Henry Birdsey and Mary Staubitz by Distant Duos

Birdsey has been developing his micro-tonal musings as part of the duo Tongue Depressor as well as his solo releases under his own name and as S.T.L.A. while Staubitz jumps from the solo sonic onslaughts of Donna Parker to a wide-ranging array of ongoing and one-off collaborations. Here field recordings of rippling water and electric pops and crackles mix with shuddering overtones of bowed metal for an engulfing sonic snapshot.

Lexie Mountain and Angela Sawyer

Lexie Mountain and Angela Sawyer by Distant Duos

Baltimore’s Lexie Mountain and Boston’s Angela Sawyer have known each other for years, so it’s no surprise that their distant connection of broken electronics and found objects clicks so well. Here, everyday detritus is elevated to a compact improvisation imbued with skittering percussive tumult, whirrs and clatter.

New Releases

When I did carve out time to listen, here’s a few that stuck with me through the year.

Toshiya Tsunoda & Taku Unami – Wovenland 2 (Erstwhile)

Wovenland 2 by Toshiya Tsunoda/Taku Unami

Working from basic field recordings, Tsunoda and Unami use the studio as an alchemical laboratory, delving into mixing and mastering tools to explore, process and transform environmental sound. In their hands, the digital artifacts of that process are as intrinsic to the results as the source material they have deconstructed. They sum it up succinctly. “Our goal is to focus on acoustic experiments. No more and no less.”

Here are some more that stuck with me in no particular order:

Rhodri Davies – Telyn Rawn (Amgen Records)

Judith Wegmann – Le Souffle Du Temps II - Reflexion (ezz-thetics)

Clara de Asís & Mara Winter – Repetition of the same dream (Another Timbre)

Takuji Naka/Tim Olive – Minouragatake (Notice Recordings)

Magnus Granberg – Come Down to Earth Where Sorrow Dwelleth –Revised version for sho, koto, prepared piano and electronics (Ftarri)

Tasting Menu – Mueller Tunnel (Full Spectrum Records)

Simon H. Fell & Mark Wastell – Virtual Company (Confront)

Xavier Charles & Bertrand Gauguet – Spectre (akousis)

Pierre-Antoine Badaroux, Seymour Wright, Jean-Luc Guionnet – Solos (Remote Resonator)

Archival Releases and Reissues

Reissues continued to pour out from record labels. Some applied studio wizardry to revive and restore previously issued material and others dug out material from the vaults that rightfully deserves to be heard. But with touring opportunities gone, the ability to collaborate in person evaporated and the monthly boon of Bandcamp Fridays, many artists also took the opportunity to dig in to their personal vaults.

Gentle Fire – Explorations (1970-1973) (Paradigm Discs)

Explorations (1970 - 1973) by Gentle Fire

This one just hit in December but quickly shot to the top of my listening pile. Working in London in the early 70s, this little-known quintet of electro-acoustic pioneers worked at the edges of composition and improvisation, putting out a single, now impossible-to-find, LP performing graphic scores of by John Cage, Earle Brown and Christian Wolff (which, in itself deserves a reissue.) If they hit listeners’ radar at all, it was due to the fact that Hugh Davies was part of the group. This 3-CD box of previously unissued material is comprised of one disc of works by Wolff, Stockhausen, Brown, Cage and Ichiyanagi, another of their own compositions and a final disc capturing an extended improvisation. Five decades later, this stuff is still essential listening.

Rhodri Davies – Archif Series (self-released)

Archif #13: BMIC 17/09/1997 by IST

Currently at number 28 and counting, Davies dug in to his archives and unearthed a passel of gems, documenting live performances and studio experiments from 1995 through 2000. From solos to various group sessions, this is all music well worth spending time with. Particularly welcome are two releases by IST (Davies, Mark Wastell, and Simon H. Fell) and one by Assumed Possibilities (Davies, Wastell, Chris Burn and Phil Durrant). One hopes there is more to be unearthed.

Cor Fuhler Conundrom label

SLEE by Cor Fuhler

The sudden passing of Cor Fuhler was a tough one in a tough year. Whether as a pianist, instrument inventor or ensemble leader, Fuhler was always bristling with ideas. As part of a group effort, the discography of his Conundrom label is now available on Bandcamp with proceeds going to his estate.

Here are some others of note in no particular order:

Albert Ayler reissue series (ezz-thetics)

Phillip Wachsmann – Writing In Water (Corbett vs. Dempsey)

Charles Mingus – @ Bremen 1964 & 1975 (Sunnyside)

Voice Crack – Glasgow 20/11/1999 (scatter)

John Butcher – On Being Observed (Weight of Wax)

Derek Bailey and Mototeru Takagi – Live at FarOut, Atsugi 1987 (NoBusiness Records)

Cecil Taylor and Tony Oxley – Birdland, Neuburg 2011 (Fundacja Słuchaj)