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dustedmagazine · 7 years ago

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Dust Volume 3, Number 11

Sam Amidon

As late summer wanes and we fret about North Korean nuclear strikes and the eventual end of Game of Thrones (not necessarily in that order), what better way to take the pressure off than good music? Here are ten short reviews of albums we enjoyed, from the free jazz innovations of Albert Ayler to an unexpected clutch of new material from Royal Trux to the folk jazz experiments of Sam Amidon. This time, a skeleton crew of Ian Mathers, Bill Meyer, Jennifer Kelly and Derek Taylor contributed. Everybody else is off at the beach, we think.

Abronia—Obsidian Visions/Shadowed Lands (Water Wings)

Obsidian Visions/Shadowed Lands by Abronia

Obsidian Visions/Shadowed Lands is the first LP by Abronia is a six-piece combo from Portland OR. Judging from the influences on display, these people have awesome taste, but a few priorities come to the fore. The melding of movie soundtrack twang and heavy-hammer power chords shares page space with fellow PDX-ers Alto! And the pounding beat, which is articulated by a parade drum, and the solemn intonations of singer/saxophonist Keelin Mayer and more abandoned vocalizing of guitarist Eric Crespo suggests that they’re aiming for a ceremonial vibe. It definitely feels like a first album, mixing promise with points to improve. The best moments come when they ease back a bit and let the guitars glisten; they could work a bit on vocal presence. But if they made it to my town, I’d be eager to see how it all holds together on stage.

Bill Meyer

Sam Amidon — The Following Mountain (Nonesuch)

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For over a decade, Sam Amidon has produced some of the most simultaneously spellbinding and challenging modern folk albums out there, and he’s done it (he has insisted) without writing any songs. As more time has passed, though, Amidon’s rearrangements and reharmonizings of these songs, to say nothing of more explicitly curatorial decisions in making those albums, have left more and more of his own distinct stamp on them. With The Following Mountain, although Amidon still reveres and refers back to the folk music tradition in its myriad forms, he is more than ever doing his own thing (and writing his own songs). This is also the album that most fully embraces Amidon’s love of musical improv and freedom (jazz or otherwise). He’s assembled an impressive crew to give voice to those impulses, including drummer Milford Graves (most prominently on the extended closer “April”), saxophonist Sam Gendel, Jimi Hendrix percussionist Juma Sultan, and longtime collaborator Shahzad Ismaily, among others. Whether the results are spare, droning and harrowing, like “Ghosts,” or as pastorally beautiful as “Juma Mountain,” the result is Amidon’s boldest effort yet.

Ian Mathers

Albert Ayler Quartet — Copenhagen Live 1964 (Hatology)

James Joyce had to move to the European continent to find the headspace to write about Dublin. One wonders if Albert Ayler found a similar remove in Scandinavia. The liner notes of Copenhagen Live 1964 open with Ayler recalling that at a 1962 concert in Stockholm, he started to play what was in his soul, and the following year he made his first LP in Copenhagen. That may seem ironic given how steeped in African-American spirituality his music was. But when you consider that how singularly he articulated that spirit, an ocean seems like barely enough distance. This CD was recorded 1964 at Copenhagen’s Café Montmartre with bassist Gary Peacock and drummer Sunny Murray, with whom Ayler had made his creative breakthrough Spiritual Unity just two months earlier, and first-generation free jazz pioneer Don Cherry on cornet. Together they distill Ayler’s conception as pure energy and ecstatic melody. This set has been available before, as part of Ayler Records’ The Copenhagen Tapes, so if you have that CD you’re already set. However if you are a fan of Dusted scribe Derek Taylor’s writing, be aware that he wrote the liner notes for this edition.

Bill Meyer

Bourdreuil/Rowden—Hollow cassette (No Rent)

"Hollow" (NRR50) by Bordreuil / Rowden

Improvised and experimental music are often characterized as abstract, but titles don’t get any more concrete than Hollow. Leila Bourdreuil plays cello and Zach Rowden plays double bass, both of which can indelicately but accurately be described as boxes with a hole in the side and strings stretched across that hole. Indelicacy is a hallmark of this music, which revels in the coarse scrapes and ribcage-rattling lows that the duo’s instruments can make. Another is consonance; whatever one player does, the other matches fairly closely, so that the contributions of each player fade into the seething but compressed richness of the sounds they make. The shortness of this tape works in its favor. Since it lasts just 25 minutes, you can get through it twice on a typical urban commute, all the better to get familiar with its woody grain.

Bill Meyer

Cyrus Chestnut – There’s a Sweet, Sweet Spirit (HighNote)

Opting for the aural equivalent of comfort food, Cyrus Chestnut goes for what he knows on There’s a Sweet, Sweet Spirit. Surprises are few – a “Chopin Prelude” and guest appearances by vibraphonist Steve Nelson and a trio of female vocalists – but the pianist is at a point in his career where bold detours and dramatic reinventions are probably off the table for consideration. What is on offer is the dependable sort of jazz-rooted music-making Chestnut’s become known for in the reliable company of heavyweights Buster Williams and Lenny White on bass and drums respectively. A pair of solo pieces zero-in on the leader’s acumen with verdant ballad forms and two of the three Nelson-added numbers are vintage Bobby Hutcherson tunes. Monk (“Rhythm-A-Ning”) and Miles (“Nardis”) also receive laudatory nods and Chestnut has audible fun putting Williams and White through a rigorous set of paces on each, revealing conclusively that age is only a number.

Derek Taylor

King Woman — Created in the Image of Suffering (Relapse)

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No disrespect to the rest of King Woman, who do an excellent job with the heavy, bluesy, Americana-flecked doom of Created in the Image of Suffering, but the most immediately noticeable element of the band’s full-length debut is singer Kristina Esfandiari, from the spectral power of her far-away howl to the set of lyrics here that mostly concern working through a repressive religious upbringing and using the structures and imagery of same to better and more productive ends (including being critical of that upbringing). The songs here are fraught with both power and, well, suffering, but there are few moments as cathartic in music this year as when Esfandiari repeats in a blown-out bellow “you can’t even look at me”, reclaiming the judgment of her oppressors and refashioning it into the kind of angelic radiance the impure can’t bring themselves to gaze upon. That this trim, 39-minute album finds time for moments like that as well as the true faith and sincere longing of the alternatively dense and soaring “Hierophant” make this not just an accomplished debut but one of the best metal records of 2017.

Ian Mathers

Pascal Niggenkemper — Le 7ème Continet: Talking Trash (Clean Feed)

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The so-called Seventh Continent is not made of land, and only specialized maps will show it at all. It’s a massive vortex of garbage located where currents converge in the Pacific Ocean that’s been slowly growing since the 1950s. Reports of this phenomenon inspired bassist and bandleader Pascal Niggenkemper to form a musical ensemble in which a panoply of tonal colors and musical elements come into play. Configured as a set of pairs — Joachim Badenhorst and Joris Ruhl on amplified clarinets, Eve Risser and Philip Zoubek on prepared pianos, and Niggenkemper plus Julián Elvira on pronomos and sub-contrabass flutes — the group’s music is not especially trashy, but it sure is varied, and it does go out of its way to include sounds some might deem broken. Intricate contrapuntal passages butt up against heaving expanses of sound, and slow motion sub-aquatic ballets contrast with stormy squalls.

Bill Meyer

Aurán Oritz – Cub(an)ism (Intakt)

Cub(an)ism by Aruán Ortiz

Cuban born, pianist Aurán Oritz is at once deeply of and decisively apart from the musical loam of his country of origin. Through his hands the instrument’s eighty-eight keys and ancillary mechanisms become a portal that erases the temporal distance between ancient Caribbean polyrhythms and 21st century improvisation and composition. The clave is just as integral to Ortiz’s conceptions as those of his forbearers even as he decontextualizes and even atomizes its malleable forms. His right hand will worry or burrow into a rhythmic figure as the left shapes steep, pedal-swollen currents around it. Chordal shards and sharp angles intermix with delicate and fleeting asides into eloquent melody. Oritz also goes under the hood, strumming the strings in zither-like fashion or dampening them to create menacingly muted washes of echo. The music of Cub(an)ism is imbued with a vibrant sense of logic and purpose, presented in a personalized musical dialect that pulls in everything from Peruchin to Andrew Hill to Picasso while remaining indelibly Ortiz.

Derek Taylor

Heather Trost — Agistri (Living Music Duplication)

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With Agistri, Heather Trost makes the break from Hawk and a Handsaw’s gypsy middle European reels to a breezy Europop soundtrackery. Songs were composed not on the violin she wielded in Neutral Milk Hotel and elsewhere, but on a Hammond chord organ, and they trend towards breathy euphoria rather than world-weary continental lament. She works here with Hawk and a Handsaw bandmate Julian Barnes on bass and drums, John Dieterich from Deerhoof playing guitar, and Drake Hardin and Rosie Hutchinson singing back-up, but they sound like many more musicians, maybe a chamber orchestra, in full-blown, lavishly arranged song that are, nonetheless, as buoyantly weightless as soap bubbles. “Agistri,” named for a Greek island, lilts and wafts and swells in space-age 1960s choruses that could easily soundtrack a Brigitte Bardot movie. Loungey, la-la’d “Abiquiu” slips forward, softly syncopated, with little trills of violin under the wordless choruses. It all brushes with the friction of, say, a silk scarf, giddy tropes of organ, bright iridescent clouds of melody, the barest punch of rock-oriented drums, guitar and bass to keep things moving, so that you might not pick out individual songs at first. A few listen in, a few start to take shape, good natured “Me and My Arrow,” eerily luminous “Bloodmoon,” wistful, chorally layered “Real Me, Real You.” There’s a girl group hook at the bottom of even the most diaphanous cut; they’re like Dum Dum Girls songs reimagined by Stereolab.

Jennifer Kelly

Royal Trux — Platinum Tips + Ice Cream (Drag City)

Platinum Tips + Ice Cream by Royal Trux

The vocals are a slurred snarl, Herrema’s spit and moan turning surprisingly benign lyrics about ice cream and water parks into something diseased and sexual. The guitar wanders in blistered, bombed out disorientation, half Stones homage, half psychotic breakdown. Yup, it’s Royal Trux all right, sounding pretty much like they always sounded, loose to the brink of unstrung, messy, hallucinatory and feverish. These songs, the first new Royal Trux of the 21st century, come after a decade and a half in which Neil Hagerty and Jennifer Herrema didn’t play together, didn’t speak together, didn’t occupy the same room (reportedly right up to the moment they played their first reunion show in 2015). And yet, caught in a couple of live shows in New York and Los Angeles, they catch fire like a pile of oily rags left in a warehouse. “Junkie Nurse” lurches jerkily to life, a roar of feedback flaming and subsiding behind tranced out lyrics, the beat tapped out on snare and cowbell, just enough to keep the thing together. The “Banana Question” moves a little faster, but just as fuzzily, a “Dropout Boogie” for the new millennium. “Waterpark” froths and foams at the mouth in scary abandon, little backing vocals “oohing,” guitar flaring at irregular intervals, Herrema singing way back in her throat about how “the water’s cold but the sun is hot.” “Red Tiger Edit” is, maybe, the trippiest of these songs, a distended blues vamp slowed and stretched to the breaking point, thin enough to let the chaos in.

Jennifer Kelly

Yan Jun and Ben Own—Swimming Salt游泳的盐 (Organized Music from Thessaloniki)

swimming salt 游泳的盐 by Yan Jun and Ben Owen

Next time you need your sentimentality ruptured, this CD will due the trick. Ben Owen, who runs the Winds Measure label, has been fashioning sound from field recordings and electronics for over a decade; Yan Jun is a Chinese artist and cultural critic. You could call this stuff noise, but that doesn’t do justice to the specificity and austerity of the work. Swimming Salt游泳的盐 is a single 38.01 track made from Yan’s feedback and Owen’s electronics, and it boils down to this question; what can you do with sounds that are lancet-sharp and sounds that abrade like a fistful of steel wool? Should the listener be into close distinctions, they will find that the answer is quite a bit. This music anti-psychedelic in the extreme; high-pitched filaments draw attention to how your perception of the room changes depending on how you turn your head, and the rising and subsiding fuzz invites your to reckon with the awareness of space. Where are you? After listening to this CD, you will know.

Bill Meyer

#dust #dusted magazine #abronia #bill meyer #sam amidon #ian mathers #albert ayler #leila bourdreuil #zach rowden #cyrus chestnut #derek taylor #king woman #pascal niggenkemper #auran oritz #heather trost #jennifer kelly #royal trux #yan jun #ben own

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experimentik · 7 years ago

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Dörner - Eastley - Hein

20.09.2017 / 20:00 -

Axel Dörner - trumpet Max Eastley - the arc Nicola L. Hein - guitar The Trio Dörner - Eastley - Hein plays free improvised music. Their music is created in the moment of the performance, without concepts or compositions being made beforehand. But that doesn’t mean that they are not creating an aesthetic concrete musical form in real time. The extension of the traditional vocabulary of their instruments and the language of free improvised music forms a strong basis which they use to create a landscape of sounds in which silence plays an important role and a defined quality of sound.

https://www.facebook.com/events/753807344798600/

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Axel Dörner - Born in Cologne,1964. Studied piano and trumpet (with Malte Burba) at the Musikhochschule, Cologne. Moved to Berlin in 1994. He has worked together with numerous internationally respected figures in the fields of "Improvised Music", "Composed Contemporary Music", "Jazz" and "Electronic Music". He has developed a unique style of trumpet playing based in part on unusual, often self-invented techniques. He has toured in Europe, North and South America, Australia, Japan and Asia (Hongkong) and appeared on numerous CD and record releases.

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Max Eastley is an internationally recognised artist who combines kinetic sculpture and sound into a unique art form. His sculptures exist on the border between the natural environment and human intervention and use the driving forces of electricity, wind, water and ice. He has exhibited both interior and exterior works internationally. His work is represented in the permanent collection of the Centre for Art and Media, Karlsruhe, Germany.

Since 2003 Max has been an artist with the Cape Farewell Climate Change Project (http://www.capefarewell.com), for whom he has created a number of installations, compositions and performances. From 2010 to 2013 he was an Arts and Humanities Research Council Senior Researcher at Oxford Brookes University, investigating Aeolian phenomena through artistic practice and historical research. He is also currently one of the artists involved in a project, Audible Forces, touring festivals in the UK, using the wind as an energy source.

Max's largest solo exhibition in 2013 was at the Water Tower (Wasserturm) in Prenzlauer Berg, Berlin: a cavernous, labyrinthine space inside which he installed ten acoustic sculptures. On the roof of the building he erected 8 Aeolian harps and their live sound was projected into the interior of the building to mix with the acoustic sounds inside. In 2014 he had a solo exhibition at the Teatroinscatola in Rome and took a residency in Bonn as the City Sound Artist, during which he created an Aeolian Installation at the Botanical Gardens.

He is well known as a musician and has played many solo concerts and also played with numerous other musicians such as David Toop, Evan Parker, Steve Beresford, Alex Kolkowski, Rhodri Davies and John Butcher.

http://www.maxeastley.co.uk/

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Nicola L. Hein - guitarist, soundartist, philosopher and composer - is a very active player on the german/international scene of improvised music. He plays the guitar with his hands and plectrum but also with a lot of different objects: screws, rulers, iron wool, violin bow, abrasive paper, magnets and many other objects which are part of his musical vocabulary. The result is his very own world of sounds, which is using the rich potential of the guitar as a creator of sounds. The manual creation is a very important character of this sound world, which never gets distorted by the use of electronic effects. He plays in many different formations, including: ROTOZAZA (w/ Rudi Mahall, Adam Pultz Melbye, Christian Lillinger), Lytton/Hein (w/ Paul Lytton), Muche/Hein (w/ Matthias Muche), ZEHN (w/ Philip Zoubek, Etienne Nillesen, Elisabeth Fügemann), The Honey Pump (w/ Mia Zabelka) and many more.

Moreover soundart (soundinstallations, site specific instruments, conceptual compositions for improvising musicians etc.) and the collaboration in different interdisciplinary settings (dance, installation, video art etc.) are an important focus of his art and form a second emphasis besides the work as a guitarist. Here different ideas from the world of philosophy (especially Wittgenstein, Rorty, Heidegger etc.) come into play with his musical aesthetics and form a discoursive field that opens up artistic possiblities that lie beyond the possibilities of common musical practise.

He has collaborated with musicians like: Evan Parker, Phil Minton, John Russell, Paul Lytton, Frank Gratkwoski, Michael Vorfeld, Rudi Mahall, Christian Lillinger, Tobias Delius, Liz Allbee, Ute Wassermann, John Butcher, Axel Dörner, Thomas Lehn,Tristan Honsinger, Sofia Jernberg, Audrey Chen, Peter Jacquemyn, Alfred Zimmerlin etc.

https://nicolahein.com/

Photo (C) Heinrich Brinkmöller-Becker

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