#punkt.vrt.plastik

[musicollage]

Kaja Draksler – Punkt.Vrt.Plastik. 2018 ~ Intakt.

[dustedmagazine]

Punkt. Vrt. Plastik— Punkt. Vrt. Plastik (Intakt)

Zurich Concert by PUNKT.VRT.PLASTIK Kaja Draklser - Petter Eldh - Christian Lillinger

In the music of Punkt. Vrt. Plastik, chemistry and concept collide like electrons fired by a microscope. The conditions are highly calculated, the initiatives deeply thought-out, and yet, unpredictable events are an inevitable result of the bombardment of materials by ideas. They wouldn’t have it any other way.

Bassist Pettr Eldh and drummer Christian Lillinger, both Berlin residents, have a long-standing concord, which is an important aspect of Punkt. Vrt. Plastik’s mechanics. They can execute fearsomely difficult rhythmic changes on the fly, and they share a readiness to embrace contemporary beats, but not at the expense of oversimplification. A baby born in 2000 is old enough to drive, marry and join the army anyplace around the globe; Lillinger and Eldh aren’t willing to be bound by 20th century ideas of how a drum or a double bass should sound. On “Body Decline—Natt Raum,” a medley of Eldh compositions, one can hear hints of sped-up techno and hip-hop stomp slotted into a sequence of rhythmic changes, and the recording gives the low frequencies plenty of room to boom. Kaja Draksler is all in, completing the performance’s universe-convergence with her some virtuoso shifts between density and oddly-dimensioned pauses. The pianist who currently resides in Copenhagen, brings a breadth of possibilities. “Morgon Morfin” attests to her capacity to wax richly romantic; “Axon” to her astonishing skill at playing with sparse precision at high speed. 

The trio first convened during an improvised festival set in 2016, so free music is part of their origin. But in this group and their separate endeavors, all three musicians devote considerable attention to composition. While the trio’s two previous albums were recorded in the studio, this concert recording is an especially direct opportunity to see how these methods work like beams and braces to make their exceedingly high-tension music hold together. Listen to “Zug,” a Lillinger composition that makes its first appearance on this record. The way that ascending bass lines, fractal drumming, and totally keyboard-inclusive piano phrases first together requires serious attention to matters of micro-fit. And yet, there are quick elaborations and spontaneous vocalizations that evidence the thrill of in-the-moment creation. And when they slip into a quick, swinging straightaway, it’s evident that the trio has not come to break the sound of the classic, piano-bass-drums trio, but to open it up. 

Bill Meyer

[solocontenido]

Listen/purchase: Zurich Concert by PUNKT.VRT.PLASTIK Kaja Draklser - Petter Eldh - Christian Lillinger

[opsikpro]

Petter Eldh - Presents Koma Saxo (We Jazz, 2019) ****

Petter Eldh – Presents Koma Saxo (We Jazz, 2019) ****

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By Martin Schray

Up to now Petter Eldh has mainly been known as a sideman in projects like Christian Lillinger’s Open Form For Society and Gard Nilssen’s Acoustic Unity or he has played as one among equals in ensembles like Amok Amor and Punkt.Vrt.Plastik (just to name a few). Koma…

[diyeipetea]

JazzX5#001. Kaja Draksler - Petter Eldh - Christian Lillinger: Nuremberg Amok [Minipodcast]

JazzX5#001. Kaja Draksler – Petter Eldh – Christian Lillinger: Nuremberg Amok [Minipodcast]

Por Pachi Tapiz.

  “Nuremberg Amok”. Kaja Draksler – Petter Eldh – Christian Lillinger: Punkt.Vrt.Plastik (Intakt Records, 2019)

© Pachi Tapiz, 2019

JazzX5 es un minipodcast de HDO de la Factoría Tomajazz presentado, editado y producido por Pachi Tapiz. JazzX5 comenzó su andadura el 24 de junio de 2019.

[chez-mimich]

PUNKT.VRT.PLASTIK

Tra i tanti dischi che ricevo dal mio amico e “istigatore a delinquere”, James Cook, ho scelto di scrivere di questo magnifico “Zurich Concert” dei Punkt.Vrt.Plastik. pubblicato dall’etichetta Intakt Records. Mi ha colpito, ad un primo ascolto, la qualità dell’improvvisazione sperimentale, lenta, non forzata, non estrema, ma raffinata (voce del verbo raffinare), dove gli accordi e le note del pianoforte di Kaja Draskler, sembrano essere una materia in via di levigazione e di consunzione, come accade alla materia scultorea in Alberto Giacometti. Ma poi c’è anche un motivo per così dire esterno alla musica ovvero le appassionate note del grande pianista Alexander Hawkins che ne accompagnano la sua uscita, note illuminanti di chi del piano ha fatto un laboratorio di esperienze e di ricerche senza fine. È fuori discussione che anche in questo concerto zurighese, il protagonista quasi assoluto sia il piano e, se dobbiamo accennare ad una chiave di lettura per accostarsi a questo lavoro, potremmo dire che si tratti della “ripetizione” e della variazione sul tema. In tutti i brani è presente una costante, una piccola frase musicale che viene ripetuta, leggermente modificata, distorta, torturata e infine trasformata, dalla incredibile bravura di Kaja Draskler e dei suoi sodali, ovvero Petter Eldh al contrabbasso e Christian Lillinger alla batteria. Ma oltre alla “ripetizione variata”, alberga nel disco anche una vivacissima dialettica tra le componenti strumentali. Come sottolinea Alexander Hawkins nelle note a cui accennavo in precedenza, le composizioni mettono in evidenza l'intera gamma di permutazioni possibili all'interno del trio: unità totale tra gli strumenti oppure disaccordo totale tra di essi. Apre le danze “Nuremberg Amok” con una batteria apparentemente scombinata, un piano e un contrabbasso che sembrano sempre in cerca di punti di contatto difficili da trovare, un discorso che sembra proseguire con “Axon” più compatto e assestato. “Trboje” presenta un pianoforte “puntillista”, disarticolato e tormentato dalle percussioni e dal contrabbasso, mentre il successivo “Vrvica I” è un pezzo per piano solo, seguito da “Morban” ricco ed articolato dove nell’esecuzione dal vivo entrano anche, a tratti, le esortazioni vocali dei musicisti. Molto sperimentale “Body decline & Natt Raum”, con le dita di Kaja Draskler che si cimentano in un corpo a corpo con la tastiera del pianoforte. Secondo Alexander Hawkins, sempre nelle note che accompagnano il disco, “Morgon Morfin” sembra essere “il cuore pulsante” di tutto il lavoro. Ed effettivamente qui che il pianoforte di Kaja sembra aver raggiunto una piena maturazione, o meglio, sembra aver trovato la sua strada, ricercata fino a questo punto nel disco: cinque minuti di estasi , come scrive Hawkins che fanno riemergere dalla memoria indicibili pagine di Scriabin o Messiens. Anche “Vrvirca II” ha un suo tono elegiaco tutto contenuto in una ripetizione, una perdita e un ritrovamento di una piccola melodia nata sulla tastiera. “Membran” ancora una ricerca sul materiale sonoro, “Trace of Veins”, solo di percussioni di Christian Lillinger” alla batteria e poi “Zug” e “Agan” che chiudono un concerto che sembra una esplorazione dentro una selva di materiali sonori dati da pochi strumenti, ma condotta con una foga combinatoria da lasciare allibiti. Una ricerca libera, di quella libertà che come diceva Paul Valery, non può che derivare dal massimo rigore.

[dustedmagazine]

Dust Volume 5, Number 5

PUP

Home fi, gnawa-pop fusion, mariachi cowpunk, classically minded jazz, shout-y punk-pop and finger picked acoustic blues—as appropriate for spring, Dust lets a thousand flowers bloom.This edition of short, mostly positive reviews, draws contributions from Isaac Olson, Bill Meyer, Jennifer Kelly and Justin Cober-Lake. We hope you find something to blast from open windows on the first warm, sunny opportunity.  

Ahmed Ag Kaedy — Akaline Kidal (Sahel Sounds)

Akaline Kidal by Ahmed Ag Kaedy

This acoustic, solo release by Malian guitarist in exile Ahmed Ag Kaedy is a beaut. Like a lot of so-called desert blues, this is only chill out music until you read the lyrics, for example, “The Tuareg people must know/you can consider France an enemy/no better than Algeria who stands in our path.” Even if militant nationalism, no matter who’s calling for it, isn’t your thing, Ahmed Ag Kaedy’s weathered, throaty voice and plangent, monophonic guitar flights which are as evocative, bitter, and seemingly ephemeral as campfire smoke, make Akaline Kidal well worth hearing. And like campfire smoke, they’ll stick with you well into the next day.  

Isaac Olson

  Astralingua — Safe Passage (Midnight Lamp)

Safe Passage by Astralingua

Quietly, precisely odd, this elaborately instrumented, baroquely arranged folk experiment shrouds whispery threads of poetry in eerie landscapes of stringed instruments, pennywhistles and gently massed harmony. The music, mostly the work of composer Joseph Andrew Thompson but aided by singer Anne Rose Thompson, runs much in line with goth folk outfits like Gravenhurst and Boduf Songs, in the way that dread seeps up from the floorboards and beauty has a spectral, semi-transparent air; you could make a case for an Elliott Smith singing in front of Clogs comparison in a couple of the songs. Yet the music faces forward, not back into misty folklorics. “Space Blues” takes a turn towards proggy Pink Floyd-ish visions of interstellar travel on “Space Blues” and while “Poison Tree” heads off into to tremulous orchestral confessionalism, a la Sufjan Stevens. It is all very pretty and a little disturbing.

Jennifer Kelly

 Kaja Draksler / Petter Eldh / Christian Lillinger—Punkt.Vrt.Plastik (Intakt)

Punkt.Vrt.Plastik by Kaja Draksler, Petter Eldh, Christian Lillinger

This pan-Euopean combo rethinks one of the most cobweb-festooned configurations in jazz. To overcome the piano trio’s over-familiarity, they combine idiosyncratic personal techniques with a disciplined collective approach. Swedish bassist Petter Eldh and German drummer Christian Lillinger have forged their concord in a couple other groups; the former is assertively melodic and big-toned, the latter quick and ubiquitous. With so much happening in the engine room, they need a partner who values balance, and they have found one in Slovenian pianist Kaja Draksler. Her playing is fleet and articulate, and her ideas feel complete in themselves, but they also leave ample space between the root notes for her partners to exercise their formidable muscles without banging into any harmonic walls.

Bill Meyer

 Maxine Funke — Home Fi (Feeding Tube)

home fi by maxine funke

Keep your lo fi, hi fi, and wifi; Home Fi is where it’s at. Really, how come no one characterized their music thusly before? Maxine Funke’s songs flesh out the conceit with lyrical details that relate not just home life, but a state of at-homeness on the grounds around the house. “February” doles out images of late summer foliage (Funke lives in New Zealand) and foraged taste treats; “Waving the Tea Rose” finds spiritual riches in the neighbors’ trash. Funke’s accompanies her slightly sleepy croon with spare finger-picking, captured up close enough that you can hear a chair creak while a strategically dissonant organ or fiddle pipes up in the background. This record, which was originally sold as a tape on an Australian tour, lasts just 22 minutes, but it feels as complete as an afternoon nap.

Bill Meyer

  Houssam Gania — Mosawi Swiri (Hive Mind Records)

Mosawi Swiri by Houssam Gania

Houssam Gania, son of guimbri master Maalem Mahmoud Gania, opens Mosawi Swiri, his debut, with an act of cheerful patricidal aggression. Rather than launching into the traditional Gnawa music — solid and sparse as a mudbrick house, deep and dark as a well and groovy as ripples in a dune — that his father mastered, Gania’s traditional guimbri and qraqabs are joined on the first track, “Moulay Lhacham,” by a guitar/drums/keys band that sounds not unlike Brent Mydland-era Dead. It’s sunshiny, a little corny and perfectly delightful. Ok, ok, so Gania Sr. was no purist himself, having collaborated with, among others, Pharoah Sanders and Peter Brotzmann, but Gania Jr’s opening gambit is pure pop delight. Luckily for armchair ethnographers everywhere, the rest of Mosawi Swiri sticks to traditional Gnawa music, which in Gania’s capable hands, really is as hypnotic and potentially curative as both locals and marshmallow-eared world music fans claim. That first track is a hoot though, and while I’m not sure Gania could sustain a whole album of gnawa-pop fusion, I’d love to see him try.

Isaac Olson

 A.F. Jones — Bourdon du Kinzie (Unfathomless)

Bourdon du Kinzie by A.F. Jones

Sound ecologist, submarine acoustician, mastering engineer, musician; if it manifests within the ears, A.F. Jones is tuned into it. This CD echoes an order that David Thomas, a man who has never been shy about telling other people what to do, once barked. “Insist on more than the truth.” This album began with a field recording expedition to a disused bunker in Port Washington, WA. The space is simultaneously absorbent and reverberant, luring external sounds into its cavernous interior and transforming them with its long decay times. You could probably get some cool sounds by simply stamping your foot or dropping the change in your pockets and hearing what the space does to it. But sound collection is just the first step for Jones. He’s used audio analysis software to isolate and enhance the space’s dominant tones, and then further seasoned the reduction with dancing sine tones. The result is a sort of sonic centrifuge in which essences are extracted so that some sounds become more ephemeral and others more vivid. Give it a spin.  

Bill Meyer  

 Patio—Essentials (Fire Talk)

Essentials by Patio

All clanks and spikes and spatter, this Brooklyn-based trio constructs a jag-edged punk with lots of space. It jangles like a bag of rusty nails. The vocals—sung sometimes by bassist Loren DiBlasi and other times by Lindsey-Paige McCloy, the guitarist (but not by Alice Suh, the drummer) —are a soothing counterpoint, unless you listen to the words, which are sharp despite the cool, distanced delivery. The band mixes late-1980s post-punk jitter with intriguing intervals of chanted poetry and pop self-revelation. “Open,” the longest cut, threads an antic, literate narrative atop a bassline so crackling with electricity that you could get a shock. “Boy Scout,” the single, bounds ahead then collapses in a heap, surges and stops in sudden uncertainty. The music exactly mirrors the confusing, conflicting emotions sketched in lyrics like, “Never have the chance to choose, naturally I always lose, I went shopping the other day, this week I can afford to feel better.” Patio makes inward-facing music that jerks and spasms in an approximation of hedonism, but maintains its quiet, difficult core.

Jennifer Kelly

  PUP — Morbid Stuff (Little Dipper/Rise/BMG)

Morbid Stuff by PUP

It’s been a minute since shout-along punk rattled cages like this second outing from Toronto’s PUP. Here in 11 teeth-rattling blasts, the band radiates bratty intelligence and dashed hopes, amid slamming guitars and kit battering drums. The tension between nerdy, needy erudition and beer bro riffs is palpable. When singer Stefan Babcock confesses, “Just like the kids/I've been navigating my way through the mind-numbing reality of a godless existence/Which, at this point in my hollow and vapid life, has erased what little ambition I've got left,” at the beginning of the single “Kids” you kind of expect the guy to get beat up by his own song. Obvious references include the Hold Steady, Green Day, Japandroids, that is, pretty much any punk that smart kids can memorize and dumb kids can punch the air to without really understanding. The trick is to stomp with triumphant, hobnail-studded aggression all over the relentlessly depressing lyrical content. Pretty soon, we are all singing along that, “Just because you’re sad, doesn’t make you special.”

Jennifer Kelly

 Joshua Redman Quartet — Come What May (Nonesuch)

Saxophonist Joshua Redman has been one of the defining voices of mainstream jazz for a quarter century, his clear tone and lyrical sensibilities a steady source of pleasure in various configurations. For Come What May, Redman reassembles his quartet from the early 2000s (pianist Aaron Goldberg, bassist Reuben Rogers and drummer Gregory Hutchinson) for seven original compositions. The group stays locked in across a variety of sounds, with Goldberg particularly getting some time to shine. Bookending the album with meditative numbers “Circle of Life” and “Vast” makes for a nice closed structure to the disc, letting the livelier numbers pulse and swing. On “DGAF” the musicians' comfort with each other allows Hutchinson to guide a jerky momentum, one that works best when he reclaims it near the end of the song.

The ensemble doesn't push any obvious boundaries here, despite a few demanding interactions. Redman and his group are locked into standard sounds, with the challenge simply being how well they can do it. Not surprisingly, they're quite good at it, and the fact that Redman's conversations sound so easy shouldn't distract from the high level of play here. The quartet sticks to its tradition with clear sound, strong melodies and smart interplay, playing to its strengths for another expressive release.

Justin Cober-Lake

 Vandoliers—Forever (Bloodshot)

Forever by Vandoliers

Vandoliers, out of Dallas, make punk rock with country fiddles, hoarse-voiced stomp-alongs with Mexicali flourishes of trumpet. “Sixteen Years,” which commemorates how long these urban cowboys have been on the job, sports bruise-y r ‘n r defiance, with its chugging beat, its cigarette-and-whiskey-vocals, but leavens the mix with brash folkloric bursts of brass. A rougher “Troublemaker” amps up the one-two shuffle and slides the cow-punk meter over towards the punk side, while contemplative “Cigarettes in the Rain,” smoulders and smokes much like its subject matter, but with a noticeable twang. Forever reminds you that the Rolling Stones were, on occasion, a country band, and the Replacements once made songs like “Waitress in the Sky.” The line is permeable, the fence has a nice place to sit on, and the Vandoliers are neither punk nor country but both.

Jennifer Kelly

 Eli Winter — Time to Come (Blue Hole Recordings)

The Time To Come by Eli Winter

With The Time to Come, college student Eli Winter makes his entry into the solo guitar scene. Winter cites Jack Rose as a prominent influence, but he doesn't have the thickness or the pulse of Rose's sound. His sensibility, especially when playing acoustic, lies closer to Glenn Jones in his creation of atmosphere, brightness and storytelling. “Sunrise Over the Flood” starts with a simple, pretty pattern before turning dark, an evocative moment of lightness used to reveal something heavy. On the poppier side, “Oranges and Holly” builds around a riff close to the intro from “Here Comes the Sun,” but it never quite distinguishes itself. The title track unfurls over 15 minutes, Winter's structured thought allowing for linear but engaging progression. Winter's debut makes the case that we should be paying attention to him; he certainly has things to say and has the right vehicle for his expression. At the same time, it feels like a debut. Winter's restraint keeps everything in its right place, but it would be nice to see him challenge himself technically. Taking a few more risks would help him find his own niche the field, a spot he's likely to earn with a little more seasoning, given his smart songcraft and thoughtful aesthetics.  

Justin Cober-Lake

 Michael Zerang—THE SHUDDERING CHERUB (Pink Palace Records)

THE SHUDDERING CHERUB - for solo piano with vibrating elements by Michael Zerang

If you’re wondering how Chicago’s improvised music company made the march from the AACM’s rejection of commercial and racial marginalization in the 1960s to the current polymorphous scene, train your antennae on Michael Zerang. He’s one of the people who did the hard work of not just playing but organizing during the long dry 1980s. His polyvalence extends to his musicality; he’s played unamplified and electro-acoustic improvisation, ecstatic drone, indie rock, free jazz and pan-global percussion. It might seem a bit perverse that his first solo recording is on piano, but listen and your befuddlement will pass. Zerang spends precious little time on the keys. Instead he plunges into the instrument’s interior, liberally preparing its strings and then plucking, scraping and vibrating with sure hands and some trusty vibrators. The music morphs like a chameleon’s coloration, shifting from coarse texture to crystalline drizzle.

Bill Meyer