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Dave Barnes, Richard Kamerman, Graham Stephenson
THREE DUOS
1. Dave and Graham, February 5, 2008, Chicago (18:20)
2. Dave and Richard, October 12, 2008, New York (6:01)
3. Dave and Richard, October 12, 2008, New York (13:56)
4. Graham and Richard, March 7, 2009, New York (20:13)
Dave Barnes - electronics
Richard Kamerman - laptop (track 4), motors, objects
Graham Stephenson - trumpet, microphone
Recorded by Graham in Chicago and Richard in New York
Mixed and Mastered by Richard
Cover photograph and gum printing by Dave
http://www.davequam.blogspot.com/
http://www.richardkamerman.com/
front cover art from this photograph
click here for photos of the print-making process
I managed to get some listening done this evening, spending a fair amount of time with a CDr I began listening to yesterday when just too tired and unable to take anything from it at all. Tonight I enjoyed the experience much more, so I am very glad to have bailed out of trying to write when completely exhausted. The disc in question is named Three Duos, and is by the young American trio of improvisors Dave Barnes, (electronics) Richard Kamerman (laptop on one track, motors and objects on two others) and Graham Stephenson (trumpet and microphone). the release is on Kamerman's Copy For Your records label, and contains four tracks, with each of the possible duos covered, with one of them (Barnes/Kamerman) contributing two tracks.
I have written recently about Kamerman's work, and he remains one of a handful of interesting young American musicians working in improvised music right now. Barnes and Stephenson released a very strong set of debut duets a year or two back on a self released CDr. This new release is the first thing I am aware of on disc from either of the duo since then. The first track here is from the Barnes / Stephenson duo, an eighteen minute piece recorded back in early 2008. After a subdued opening it becomes really quite busy, a feisty to and 'fro of muscular, meaty electronics and gurgling splatters of trumpet played into a very close mic, thus transforming acoustic sounds into something often hard to distinguish from the electronics. Like many of his contemporaries in the US, Barnes' choice of electronics is raw and brittle, the sound of electronics probably originally intended for purposes other than direct sound production being throttled and re-routed into a wild, seemingly only semi-controlled riot of sound. Stephenson seems to mimic this same soundworld, flowing abrasive hisses and fuzzes through the gaps. Good stuff, easy to follow and become involved in.
The second and third tracks come from the Barnes / Kamerman duo and were recorded nine months later in New York. Here a more contemplative approach seems to be taken by Barnes as the second track opens with restrained whistles and fizzes, with Kamerman joining in slowly with the odd little clatter of sound until about half of the way through the six minute piece when a brooding undercurrent of dirty, abrasive electronics cut loose from one, the other or both of the musicians. The nice element here for me is the way that as sounds build into a potentially oppressive wall of noise they are repeatedly cut dead, leaving whatever was there in the first place to remain suspended in mid air until the grunge builds up again.
The third piece is probably the most interesting to me here. It begins with not much happening at all, just little squirts of electronics and the odd little clink of Kamerman's Unami-esque objects, all very patiently done with a sense of anticipation building following the substantial fuzz and bluster of the previous piece. Gradually Kamerman's little metallic systems are set rattling and clattering all over the place in a kind of loosely rhythmic pattern, while Barnes adds restrained bursts of mostly continuous sounds over and underneath. Then as the fourteen minute long piece comes within a couple of minutes of its ending a pulsing electronic signal starts to throb for a few seconds, rapidly building in volume and presence until it breaks Kamerman's lines of jittery metals up and the track slowly falls apart into silence as easily as it began. The overall structure of this piece is quite novel, and the variety and juxtaposition of sounds used within it hold the interest of this listener with ease. Impressive.
The final track, from Stephenson and Kamerman sees the latter add laptop to the jangle of the vibrating objects, but I don't think running any music production software, rather the machine being used as a source of sounds, kinetic and electromagnetic that are probably picked up using microphones of one kind or another. This track is the longest on the disc, weighing in at twenty minutes plus, and it wanders about a bit, sometimes falling into pits of near silence, elsewhere seeking out the exact opposite. Generally speaking, at least until Kamerman allows steady clockwork-like sounds to appear (are these live or played back on the computer? -hard to tell) later in the piece, there is a sense of control and restraint throughout, more a case of little sections of wilder interaction spread apart than any long stream of aggressive interplay. I am reminded of two alleycats circling each other, mewing intensely, hairs bristling, tensions building, and every so often falling into little balls of flying fur, breaking way as suddenly as they began. This final piece is maybe the most unusual and curious of the four here, perhaps not as viscerally engaging as the third track, but and intriguing listen all the same.
Overall this is a nice collection of music that veers around quite a bit, sometimes suggesting good old fashioned call and response improv, albeit on less traditional instruments, but then elsewhere utilising some refreshingly unusual ways of structuring a piece of music. Three fine musicians just beginning to fulfill their considerable potential.
Nice handmade sleeve including a nice looking gum print (whatever one of those is) as well.
- Richard Pinnell, The Watchful Ear
I have written recently about Kamerman's work, and he remains one of a handful of interesting young American musicians working in improvised music right now. Barnes and Stephenson released a very strong set of debut duets a year or two back on a self released CDr. This new release is the first thing I am aware of on disc from either of the duo since then. The first track here is from the Barnes / Stephenson duo, an eighteen minute piece recorded back in early 2008. After a subdued opening it becomes really quite busy, a feisty to and 'fro of muscular, meaty electronics and gurgling splatters of trumpet played into a very close mic, thus transforming acoustic sounds into something often hard to distinguish from the electronics. Like many of his contemporaries in the US, Barnes' choice of electronics is raw and brittle, the sound of electronics probably originally intended for purposes other than direct sound production being throttled and re-routed into a wild, seemingly only semi-controlled riot of sound. Stephenson seems to mimic this same soundworld, flowing abrasive hisses and fuzzes through the gaps. Good stuff, easy to follow and become involved in.
The second and third tracks come from the Barnes / Kamerman duo and were recorded nine months later in New York. Here a more contemplative approach seems to be taken by Barnes as the second track opens with restrained whistles and fizzes, with Kamerman joining in slowly with the odd little clatter of sound until about half of the way through the six minute piece when a brooding undercurrent of dirty, abrasive electronics cut loose from one, the other or both of the musicians. The nice element here for me is the way that as sounds build into a potentially oppressive wall of noise they are repeatedly cut dead, leaving whatever was there in the first place to remain suspended in mid air until the grunge builds up again.
The third piece is probably the most interesting to me here. It begins with not much happening at all, just little squirts of electronics and the odd little clink of Kamerman's Unami-esque objects, all very patiently done with a sense of anticipation building following the substantial fuzz and bluster of the previous piece. Gradually Kamerman's little metallic systems are set rattling and clattering all over the place in a kind of loosely rhythmic pattern, while Barnes adds restrained bursts of mostly continuous sounds over and underneath. Then as the fourteen minute long piece comes within a couple of minutes of its ending a pulsing electronic signal starts to throb for a few seconds, rapidly building in volume and presence until it breaks Kamerman's lines of jittery metals up and the track slowly falls apart into silence as easily as it began. The overall structure of this piece is quite novel, and the variety and juxtaposition of sounds used within it hold the interest of this listener with ease. Impressive.
The final track, from Stephenson and Kamerman sees the latter add laptop to the jangle of the vibrating objects, but I don't think running any music production software, rather the machine being used as a source of sounds, kinetic and electromagnetic that are probably picked up using microphones of one kind or another. This track is the longest on the disc, weighing in at twenty minutes plus, and it wanders about a bit, sometimes falling into pits of near silence, elsewhere seeking out the exact opposite. Generally speaking, at least until Kamerman allows steady clockwork-like sounds to appear (are these live or played back on the computer? -hard to tell) later in the piece, there is a sense of control and restraint throughout, more a case of little sections of wilder interaction spread apart than any long stream of aggressive interplay. I am reminded of two alleycats circling each other, mewing intensely, hairs bristling, tensions building, and every so often falling into little balls of flying fur, breaking way as suddenly as they began. This final piece is maybe the most unusual and curious of the four here, perhaps not as viscerally engaging as the third track, but and intriguing listen all the same.
Overall this is a nice collection of music that veers around quite a bit, sometimes suggesting good old fashioned call and response improv, albeit on less traditional instruments, but then elsewhere utilising some refreshingly unusual ways of structuring a piece of music. Three fine musicians just beginning to fulfill their considerable potential.
Nice handmade sleeve including a nice looking gum print (whatever one of those is) as well.
- Richard Pinnell, The Watchful Ear
Pour une de ses premières publications sur son propre label, Richard Kamerman (à l'ordinateur, aux objets et aux "moteurs") publie trois formes de duo sur quatre pièces: Dave Barnes à l'électronique avec Graham Stephenson à la trompette et au micro sur la première piste, Dave Barnes toujours accompagné de Kamerman sur les pistes 2 et 3, et enfin, Graham Stephenson aux côtés de Kamerman sur la dernière piste.
Durant ces quatres pièces, le dialogue est largement concentré sur des textures aux reliefs escarpés et abstraits, faits d'imperfections, de techniques étendues, de micro-contacts effleurés et éraflés, de bruits silencieux et de souffles, ou de sons stridents et de larsens agressifs. Quatre improvisations qui explorent des territoires hors-normes et aventureux, entre des silences suffoquants et des dialogues surchargés. Entre les instruments (enfin la trompette), l'électronique, les objets acoustiques et les ordinateurs, la palette sonore est très riche et variée et la dynamique d'exploration est constamment maintenue dans les extrêmes: exploration uniquement timbrale des propriétés physiques du son, et de l'interaction entre les sons. Un voyage radical dans un univers très singulier composé de fragments industriels, de déchets numériques, et d'imperfections électro-acoustiques, qui navique en plein dans la physicalité du son et fait pleinement abstraction de toutes les caractéritiques traditionnellement musicales pour ne s'intéresser qu' à la matière sonore en tant que telle.
Une musique tour à tour contemplative, agressive, attentive, individuelle, mais toujours extrême. Quatre pièces tellement abstraites qu'il devient difficile d'en parler: y'a-t-il une structure pré-établie? elle paraît plutôt spontanée et improvisée; des thèmes, des rythmes, des variations? vous voulez rire? Ces trois duos travaillent des textures sonores abstraites comme un peintre pourrait composer une oeuvre concentrée avant tout sur la matière du support. Ces quatre pièces ne composent pas de la musique à proprement parler peut-être, mais sculpte du son à travers différents matériaux, et peu importent lesquels - instrument, ordinateur, marteau-piqueur - du moment qu'ils produisent du son.
Mais ces sculptures abstraites sont toujours fabriquées à deux, et l'entente entre les deux "producteurs de sons", entre les deux artisans-artistes, est toujours profonde et fortement empreinte d'une attention et d'une concentration extrêmes, car le mariage entre les différentes sources sonores est constamment agencé avec un équilibre sensible, malgré l'hétérogénéité des sources. De plus, en dépit de l'aspect froid, abstrait et rebutant des matériaux de base, leur sculpture n'en est pas moins sensible, délicate et attentionnée, et ces quatre pièces ne laissent pas de marbre pour ainsi dire: à condition d'accepter les fondements sonores rebutants, l'intelligence de leur agencement et la sensible délicatesse de leur sculpture nous plongent dans quatre univers intriguant et envoutant, sensible et même parfois intense.
- Julien Heraud, Improv Sphere
This one ... finds three players in three duos, recorded between February of 2008 and March of 2009. Presented in chronological order, the four track also just happen (?) to build in effectiveness very nicely. The first (Barnes/Stephenson) is some rough going, feedback electronics squeaking up against errant trumpetry like two cars scraping sides at 10 mph. Later, a few minutes from its close, it begins to gel quite beautifully, all wind-through-holes-sounding, portending good things to come. The first of two Barnes/Kamerman cuts, at a concise six minutes, is a tight storm of open circuitry and...motors (?), a chunky knot of sound with above average nutritional value (and zero calories from fat). Their second piece, though, really takes off, a very strong, dense mix of Kamerman's objects, a seeming horde of them, and strident electronics, whirling into a fine spiral, a wonderful piece. The final work, a 20-minute duo of Stephenson and Kamerman, rather sums up the disc, beginning raggedly and probing--breath and crackle--before the vibrating objects creep in, arraying themselves amidst the gusts and sputter. There's a stasis, several harsh shards. It builds and is upon you almost before you know it's coming, then abruptly collapses, gorgeously, the final couple of minutes spent in a daze, gasping for air.
Fine recording.
- Brian Olewnick, Just Outside
Durant ces quatres pièces, le dialogue est largement concentré sur des textures aux reliefs escarpés et abstraits, faits d'imperfections, de techniques étendues, de micro-contacts effleurés et éraflés, de bruits silencieux et de souffles, ou de sons stridents et de larsens agressifs. Quatre improvisations qui explorent des territoires hors-normes et aventureux, entre des silences suffoquants et des dialogues surchargés. Entre les instruments (enfin la trompette), l'électronique, les objets acoustiques et les ordinateurs, la palette sonore est très riche et variée et la dynamique d'exploration est constamment maintenue dans les extrêmes: exploration uniquement timbrale des propriétés physiques du son, et de l'interaction entre les sons. Un voyage radical dans un univers très singulier composé de fragments industriels, de déchets numériques, et d'imperfections électro-acoustiques, qui navique en plein dans la physicalité du son et fait pleinement abstraction de toutes les caractéritiques traditionnellement musicales pour ne s'intéresser qu' à la matière sonore en tant que telle.
Une musique tour à tour contemplative, agressive, attentive, individuelle, mais toujours extrême. Quatre pièces tellement abstraites qu'il devient difficile d'en parler: y'a-t-il une structure pré-établie? elle paraît plutôt spontanée et improvisée; des thèmes, des rythmes, des variations? vous voulez rire? Ces trois duos travaillent des textures sonores abstraites comme un peintre pourrait composer une oeuvre concentrée avant tout sur la matière du support. Ces quatre pièces ne composent pas de la musique à proprement parler peut-être, mais sculpte du son à travers différents matériaux, et peu importent lesquels - instrument, ordinateur, marteau-piqueur - du moment qu'ils produisent du son.
Mais ces sculptures abstraites sont toujours fabriquées à deux, et l'entente entre les deux "producteurs de sons", entre les deux artisans-artistes, est toujours profonde et fortement empreinte d'une attention et d'une concentration extrêmes, car le mariage entre les différentes sources sonores est constamment agencé avec un équilibre sensible, malgré l'hétérogénéité des sources. De plus, en dépit de l'aspect froid, abstrait et rebutant des matériaux de base, leur sculpture n'en est pas moins sensible, délicate et attentionnée, et ces quatre pièces ne laissent pas de marbre pour ainsi dire: à condition d'accepter les fondements sonores rebutants, l'intelligence de leur agencement et la sensible délicatesse de leur sculpture nous plongent dans quatre univers intriguant et envoutant, sensible et même parfois intense.
- Julien Heraud, Improv Sphere
This one ... finds three players in three duos, recorded between February of 2008 and March of 2009. Presented in chronological order, the four track also just happen (?) to build in effectiveness very nicely. The first (Barnes/Stephenson) is some rough going, feedback electronics squeaking up against errant trumpetry like two cars scraping sides at 10 mph. Later, a few minutes from its close, it begins to gel quite beautifully, all wind-through-holes-sounding, portending good things to come. The first of two Barnes/Kamerman cuts, at a concise six minutes, is a tight storm of open circuitry and...motors (?), a chunky knot of sound with above average nutritional value (and zero calories from fat). Their second piece, though, really takes off, a very strong, dense mix of Kamerman's objects, a seeming horde of them, and strident electronics, whirling into a fine spiral, a wonderful piece. The final work, a 20-minute duo of Stephenson and Kamerman, rather sums up the disc, beginning raggedly and probing--breath and crackle--before the vibrating objects creep in, arraying themselves amidst the gusts and sputter. There's a stasis, several harsh shards. It builds and is upon you almost before you know it's coming, then abruptly collapses, gorgeously, the final couple of minutes spent in a daze, gasping for air.
Fine recording.
- Brian Olewnick, Just Outside
I have no idea why this is called 'Three Duos', since in each of the four pieces, only two people play? Oh, I see, Dave/Graham, Graham/Richard and twice Dave/Richard. Ok, gottit. The music is all improvised, low on the threshold of hearing with the rattling of small objects, air into the trumpet and the crackle of contact microphones. Silent improvisation, with a great emphasis on space. Only in the four piece things are a bit louder with the sound of a bell spinning on a table, evolving slowly into feedback. Nice one, even without many surprises in this particular musical genre.
- Frans de Waard, Vital Weekly
The Three Duos release partners up Kamerman with Dave Barnes and Graham Stephenson in assorted combinations, where they give each other the time and space to extemporise in highly abstracted ways with their electronics, laptops, trumpet and microphone - and the amplified objects and motors once again. This particular release nudges me one step closer to getting a handle on the defining aesthetic of this label. One prominent feature is the determination to make musical instruments (and all objects, by extension) sound completely unfamiliar. Yet nothing alienating about the strange sounds that rattle and slide buzzingly forth from the surface of this record; on the contrary, it feels more like we're being re-introduced to the way things naturally sound in real life. Not since The Shadow Ring opted to use mic-ed up ashtrays as percussion instruments have I met with such unaffected simplicity and directness.
- Ed Pinsent, The Sound Projector
- Frans de Waard, Vital Weekly
The Three Duos release partners up Kamerman with Dave Barnes and Graham Stephenson in assorted combinations, where they give each other the time and space to extemporise in highly abstracted ways with their electronics, laptops, trumpet and microphone - and the amplified objects and motors once again. This particular release nudges me one step closer to getting a handle on the defining aesthetic of this label. One prominent feature is the determination to make musical instruments (and all objects, by extension) sound completely unfamiliar. Yet nothing alienating about the strange sounds that rattle and slide buzzingly forth from the surface of this record; on the contrary, it feels more like we're being re-introduced to the way things naturally sound in real life. Not since The Shadow Ring opted to use mic-ed up ashtrays as percussion instruments have I met with such unaffected simplicity and directness.
- Ed Pinsent, The Sound Projector
hand-stamped CDrs,
laser printed sleeves with white-out hand embellishment.
edition closed, copies unavailable.
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delicate sen
billy gomberg - synthesizer
anne guthrie - french horn
richard kamerman - motors, objects
recorded march 13, 2009 at the rebakery
http://www.fraufraulein.com
http://www.richardkamerman.com
Today I listened to one of three new releases on a new label from New York named Copy For Your Records (yes it really is named that!) The CDr is by a trio named Delicate Sen, who are Billy Gomberg (synthesiser) Anne Guthrie (French Horn) and Richard Kamerman (motors, objects). Kamerman is also behind the label. The album does not appear to have a title, though perhaps it did at one time, as where a title should be on the sleeve there is a streak of Tipp-Ex, as if a title had been printed there and then erased. Maybe the group changed their minds after the printing was done, or maybe its a clever comment on the music. Either way someone needs to get some thinners for their Tipp-Ex.
The album contains one forty-or-so minute long track recorded somewhere called The Rebakery, which I am guessing is in a relatively noisy part of New York. I am guessing this because there is a very nice background hum on the recording, a muffled, distant sound probably coming from continuous traffic, or maybe its just an air con unit down the corridor. Either way, the gentle rumble, coupled with a slight hiss of mic gain provides an excellent bed for the music that the trio place on top of it. The piece uses a lot of space. Although silences are not left to run for any long period of time they are frequent, and the sounds we hear have a lot of room between them. Until the last few minutes it is rare that all three musicians make sounds at the same time, and quite often we just hear one of the trio with slight overlaps here and there. The overall style of the music reminds me of what we might have expected from the Off-Site space in Tokyo around the turn of the decade- quiet, disjointed, seemingly unconnected sounds appearing and then disappearing one after the other, while the hum of the city sits in the background.
The track was recorded in March this year, with Kamerman using his Unami-esque set-up of bits of broken motors and metallic sounding objects to create little bursts of chaotic rattling and drilling on a small scale. Gomberg keeps his synth to mainly low extended notes, sometimes allowing them to rise up in volume and fill the room, sometimes letting them flit past almost unnoticed. Guthrie's horn works in a similar manner, shortish bursts of one note or brief little non-melodic excursions that seem to be repeated here and there, but all done very cleanly and precisely. For the most part, there is considerable restraint placed upon the playing, as if the stepping stone-like structure was decided in advance somehow, or developed through several playing sessions leading up to this one. After half an hour or so the music seems to pick up a very steady momentum and the silences give way to more extended sounds and repeating sounds that grow in intensity. Then everything but an odd little repeated gasp of synth cuts out, and this section of tiny squirts of sound continues for a while with what I take to be the noise of the city continuing. Twenty seconds from the end though this dull roar I like so much suddenly fades out, leaving just the synth for the last few seconds and causing me to wonder if it had perhaps not been part of the music rather than external sounds I was hearing all along.
This is a decent album, complete with a little bit of mystery. It won't be everyone's cup of tea but I like it. I suspect that if I had been in the room when it was recorded my understanding of the music and what I am hearing on this CDr would be different, whether for better or worse I'm not sure. As it is it is a nice piece of patient, angular improvisation that quite often sounds composed. It has an odd, edgy feel to it that I can't quite explain, and the additional elements in the recording add to the curiosity value. Good stuff, and great sleeve design as well.
- Richard Pinnell, The Watchful Ear
The album contains one forty-or-so minute long track recorded somewhere called The Rebakery, which I am guessing is in a relatively noisy part of New York. I am guessing this because there is a very nice background hum on the recording, a muffled, distant sound probably coming from continuous traffic, or maybe its just an air con unit down the corridor. Either way, the gentle rumble, coupled with a slight hiss of mic gain provides an excellent bed for the music that the trio place on top of it. The piece uses a lot of space. Although silences are not left to run for any long period of time they are frequent, and the sounds we hear have a lot of room between them. Until the last few minutes it is rare that all three musicians make sounds at the same time, and quite often we just hear one of the trio with slight overlaps here and there. The overall style of the music reminds me of what we might have expected from the Off-Site space in Tokyo around the turn of the decade- quiet, disjointed, seemingly unconnected sounds appearing and then disappearing one after the other, while the hum of the city sits in the background.
The track was recorded in March this year, with Kamerman using his Unami-esque set-up of bits of broken motors and metallic sounding objects to create little bursts of chaotic rattling and drilling on a small scale. Gomberg keeps his synth to mainly low extended notes, sometimes allowing them to rise up in volume and fill the room, sometimes letting them flit past almost unnoticed. Guthrie's horn works in a similar manner, shortish bursts of one note or brief little non-melodic excursions that seem to be repeated here and there, but all done very cleanly and precisely. For the most part, there is considerable restraint placed upon the playing, as if the stepping stone-like structure was decided in advance somehow, or developed through several playing sessions leading up to this one. After half an hour or so the music seems to pick up a very steady momentum and the silences give way to more extended sounds and repeating sounds that grow in intensity. Then everything but an odd little repeated gasp of synth cuts out, and this section of tiny squirts of sound continues for a while with what I take to be the noise of the city continuing. Twenty seconds from the end though this dull roar I like so much suddenly fades out, leaving just the synth for the last few seconds and causing me to wonder if it had perhaps not been part of the music rather than external sounds I was hearing all along.
This is a decent album, complete with a little bit of mystery. It won't be everyone's cup of tea but I like it. I suspect that if I had been in the room when it was recorded my understanding of the music and what I am hearing on this CDr would be different, whether for better or worse I'm not sure. As it is it is a nice piece of patient, angular improvisation that quite often sounds composed. It has an odd, edgy feel to it that I can't quite explain, and the additional elements in the recording add to the curiosity value. Good stuff, and great sleeve design as well.
- Richard Pinnell, The Watchful Ear
This is just a really good, varied and strong live set by the trio of Billy Gomberg (synthesizer), Anne Guthrie (french horn) and Richard Kamerman (motors, objects), recorded in March of this year. I think they have a leg up with the delicious instrumental blend here: Kamerman tends toward the harsh and metallic while Gomberg has a refreshing tendency, when I've heard him, to linger in tonal byways. Add to this the all too rare, in this music, timbre of the french horn, beautifully deployed here by Guthrie, and you have a delicious prospect from the get-go. And then they construct this utterly captivating performance that wends its way through numerous neighborhoods, each of interest, almost never flagging over its 40 minutes. There's a point about halfway through where Gomberg adopts an almost church-organ kind of sound opposite Kamerman's jangling metal that's fantastic and when Guthrie plants long, burred tones in the midst, transcendent. Fine work. [from chatting with Gomberg a few nights back, I learned that there was in fact a loose kind of system employed to structure the performance, not one, I daresay, that any at-home listener is likely to discern]
Brian Olewnick, Just Outside
Low-key. Rarely are all three participants active at the same time. Prolonged tones set against sharp, short and whirring plink-plonking. The french horn is rare in this sort of music, very welcome. Humanity in moments of quiet delicacy. Everyone tiptoes around sound, oblique.
- sunken, Rate Your Music
Delicate Sen is a group existing since 2006, but this is their first release. Recorded as a rehearsal for a concert in Albany, New york. Kamerman plays motors and objects here, while Billy Gomberg plays synthesizer and Anne Guthrie french horn. Apparently they sometimes use additional electronics and selected percussion, but not on this recording. Here its (apparently again) more acoustic. Alike the previous disc [THREE DUOS], this is another disc of many silence with occasional sound. Its a great disc, again without too many surprises, but one hears the love of playing their instruments. Great exploration of the diverse qualities of the various instruments, interacting with eachother. The synthesizer is used very sparsely, the objects rattle modestly around and the horn is used as an object as well as an instrument. Music that demands quite a lot from the listener, but its a most rewarding release. Great improvise music.
- Frans de Waard, Vital Weekly
Kamerman appears playing motors and objects as part of Delicate Sen, along with Billy Gomberg on the synth and Anne Guthrie on the French horn, playing some highly restrained and delicate work inside a room where the air conditioner threatens to dominate the proceedings. That's how quiet they are, folks...I kind of like hearing this to compare it with some of the Onkyo music I've heard from the Japanese schools, and while these New Yorkers may appear to lack the stern-faced rigid discipline we've come to expect from the orientals, they do come across as somewhat more willing to explore and experiment. The title of this release is represented by a streak of Tipp-Ex or white-out fluid brushed by hand onto the spine and back cover. I thought this was to cover up an error, but it's deliberate - that's the title!
- Ed Pinsent, The Sound Projector
Brian Olewnick, Just Outside
Low-key. Rarely are all three participants active at the same time. Prolonged tones set against sharp, short and whirring plink-plonking. The french horn is rare in this sort of music, very welcome. Humanity in moments of quiet delicacy. Everyone tiptoes around sound, oblique.
- sunken, Rate Your Music
Delicate Sen is a group existing since 2006, but this is their first release. Recorded as a rehearsal for a concert in Albany, New york. Kamerman plays motors and objects here, while Billy Gomberg plays synthesizer and Anne Guthrie french horn. Apparently they sometimes use additional electronics and selected percussion, but not on this recording. Here its (apparently again) more acoustic. Alike the previous disc [THREE DUOS], this is another disc of many silence with occasional sound. Its a great disc, again without too many surprises, but one hears the love of playing their instruments. Great exploration of the diverse qualities of the various instruments, interacting with eachother. The synthesizer is used very sparsely, the objects rattle modestly around and the horn is used as an object as well as an instrument. Music that demands quite a lot from the listener, but its a most rewarding release. Great improvise music.
- Frans de Waard, Vital Weekly
Kamerman appears playing motors and objects as part of Delicate Sen, along with Billy Gomberg on the synth and Anne Guthrie on the French horn, playing some highly restrained and delicate work inside a room where the air conditioner threatens to dominate the proceedings. That's how quiet they are, folks...I kind of like hearing this to compare it with some of the Onkyo music I've heard from the Japanese schools, and while these New Yorkers may appear to lack the stern-faced rigid discipline we've come to expect from the orientals, they do come across as somewhat more willing to explore and experiment. The title of this release is represented by a streak of Tipp-Ex or white-out fluid brushed by hand onto the spine and back cover. I thought this was to cover up an error, but it's deliberate - that's the title!
- Ed Pinsent, The Sound Projector
hand-stamped CDrs,
laser printed sleeves
edition closed, copies unavailable.
may still be available from the erstdist
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Richard Kamerman
And She Sat Up In the Street In the Sun
duration: 39'29"
recorded: February 2009
mechanical parts, found objects, amplification devices
http://www.richardkamerman.com
Music that really challenges the listener, confronts them even, will often be the music that survives with them for a long time. This is certainly often the case for me. Richard Kamerman's solo disc on the Copy for your records label came out late last year, but I have been tussling with the recording on and off for quite some time, as Richard had kindly (and stupidly considering my renowned unreliability with such things) sent me a copy of the recording long beforehand to ask my opinion. I should publicly offer my sincere apologies here to Richard simply because I never really got back to him about the recording, primarily because I didn't know what to say about it for some time. (I'm still not sure I do now) Anyway, sorry Richard. I've got around to it now anyway...
The CD is titled And she sat up in the street in the sun and consists of one long forty minute piece recorded with mechanical parts, found objects and amplification devices. The reason I find it difficult is in the way it jumps around from one extreme volume to another, and utilises a set of ugly, dirty sounds throughout. The thing is, for much of the time, this piece of music touches all of the easy buttons for me. Kamerman's mechanical objects rattling about, coupled with gentle hums and little glimpses of the room around him all work very nicely indeed. The first five minutes or so of the album works in this way, generally quiet, but constantly shifting and changing, often with dramatic clicks and cuts from one set of sounds to another. At this point, and also at later times, including the extended fuzzy silence in the middle of the album all the right boxes are ticked for me and I feel very comfortable with the music presented. The thing is, there are sudden moments scattered about, some of them just seconds long, other extended periods of several minutes, when the calm is broken (actually calm is the wrong word, there is a sense of tense anticipation right throughout the recording). Not only do we get disruptively loud sounds appearing, but they are also quite difficult to listen to sounds, often grating, distressed metallic sounds, far from naturally musical, usually it seems, the result of something electrical being abused in some way that was not really meant to happen.
So listening to, and coping with the Jekyll and Hyde nature of this piece of music is something of a challenge for me. As most regular readers here will know I prefer music to be on the quieter side, so the sudden spikes of volume are hard enough to cope with by themselves. When they arrive though the potential for personal discomfort os amplified by the unmusical nature of the sounds themselves. Clearly this is very intelligent and carefully considered music though, and the challenge it presents is one I welcome with open arms. While I say that the music is considered, I am not so sure that each sound is fully thought through and prepared for in advance, as I suspect this piece is entirely improvised in one sitting, but certainly the disruptive nature of the music, the definite will on behalf of Kamerman to produce something other than run-of-the-mill improvisation is a fully considered approach. Whether the music is deliberately confrontational is hard to tell. Whether anyone other than myself finds the music a welcome challenge as I do remains to be seen as well come to think of it.
There is certainly a lot of concentration and control involved here. There are very delicate shifts in volume in places, either the slightest adjustments to almost silent buzzes or tiny changes in loud drilling abrasions. This is not a case of someone setting up a loose structure and then randomly turning knobs up to eleven every so often. The music is structured very well, with the balance between "ugly" and "acceptable" or loud and quiet always hovering on the brink of collapse one way or the other. This is not really a noise music / improvisation crossover as such, as the music generally stays within the kind of structure we might expect from a lowercase improv solo setting, the only differences coming with the sudden dynamic spikes and the use of some rather harsh sounds here and there. but they never really stay around for long enough for the usual comparisons with noise music to be of any use here.
And she sat up in the street in the sun is a rewarding listen then, but the rewards only come if you put in the time and effort and allow your expectations to be constantly undermined. Some of the sudden shifts from one sound to another really do sound great, the contrasts from one section to the next really working well, but it is the overall impact of the piece, the journey it takes you along, never allowing you to rest as a listener, never fulfilling the expectations it sets as it goes along that makes this a rewarding, if exhausting trip. Like the Oscillation Vacillation disc I reviewed a few days ago, beauty doesn't really come into the equation here, but still the music is rewarding if you are able to follow it through. Forget sensuality and expect to be picked up and shaken, dunked in icy cold water and then hung up to dry until its time to start again. Perhaps this may not sound like the most enticing of experiences, but I can only state that it is in fact a thoroughly rewarding and inspiring one. Very highly recommended.
- Richard Pinnell, The Watchful Ear
The CD is titled And she sat up in the street in the sun and consists of one long forty minute piece recorded with mechanical parts, found objects and amplification devices. The reason I find it difficult is in the way it jumps around from one extreme volume to another, and utilises a set of ugly, dirty sounds throughout. The thing is, for much of the time, this piece of music touches all of the easy buttons for me. Kamerman's mechanical objects rattling about, coupled with gentle hums and little glimpses of the room around him all work very nicely indeed. The first five minutes or so of the album works in this way, generally quiet, but constantly shifting and changing, often with dramatic clicks and cuts from one set of sounds to another. At this point, and also at later times, including the extended fuzzy silence in the middle of the album all the right boxes are ticked for me and I feel very comfortable with the music presented. The thing is, there are sudden moments scattered about, some of them just seconds long, other extended periods of several minutes, when the calm is broken (actually calm is the wrong word, there is a sense of tense anticipation right throughout the recording). Not only do we get disruptively loud sounds appearing, but they are also quite difficult to listen to sounds, often grating, distressed metallic sounds, far from naturally musical, usually it seems, the result of something electrical being abused in some way that was not really meant to happen.
So listening to, and coping with the Jekyll and Hyde nature of this piece of music is something of a challenge for me. As most regular readers here will know I prefer music to be on the quieter side, so the sudden spikes of volume are hard enough to cope with by themselves. When they arrive though the potential for personal discomfort os amplified by the unmusical nature of the sounds themselves. Clearly this is very intelligent and carefully considered music though, and the challenge it presents is one I welcome with open arms. While I say that the music is considered, I am not so sure that each sound is fully thought through and prepared for in advance, as I suspect this piece is entirely improvised in one sitting, but certainly the disruptive nature of the music, the definite will on behalf of Kamerman to produce something other than run-of-the-mill improvisation is a fully considered approach. Whether the music is deliberately confrontational is hard to tell. Whether anyone other than myself finds the music a welcome challenge as I do remains to be seen as well come to think of it.
There is certainly a lot of concentration and control involved here. There are very delicate shifts in volume in places, either the slightest adjustments to almost silent buzzes or tiny changes in loud drilling abrasions. This is not a case of someone setting up a loose structure and then randomly turning knobs up to eleven every so often. The music is structured very well, with the balance between "ugly" and "acceptable" or loud and quiet always hovering on the brink of collapse one way or the other. This is not really a noise music / improvisation crossover as such, as the music generally stays within the kind of structure we might expect from a lowercase improv solo setting, the only differences coming with the sudden dynamic spikes and the use of some rather harsh sounds here and there. but they never really stay around for long enough for the usual comparisons with noise music to be of any use here.
And she sat up in the street in the sun is a rewarding listen then, but the rewards only come if you put in the time and effort and allow your expectations to be constantly undermined. Some of the sudden shifts from one sound to another really do sound great, the contrasts from one section to the next really working well, but it is the overall impact of the piece, the journey it takes you along, never allowing you to rest as a listener, never fulfilling the expectations it sets as it goes along that makes this a rewarding, if exhausting trip. Like the Oscillation Vacillation disc I reviewed a few days ago, beauty doesn't really come into the equation here, but still the music is rewarding if you are able to follow it through. Forget sensuality and expect to be picked up and shaken, dunked in icy cold water and then hung up to dry until its time to start again. Perhaps this may not sound like the most enticing of experiences, but I can only state that it is in fact a thoroughly rewarding and inspiring one. Very highly recommended.
- Richard Pinnell, The Watchful Ear
Kamerman's latest solo release is, not surprisingly, quite difficult to grasp in its entirety. It's very unwieldy in the sense of being almost impossible to have any idea what direction it's going to take though, those directions turn out to be generally both enticing and knotty. It begins fairly quietly, with hums, tumbled light metal, ratchety sounds for the first 15 or more minutes. Very attractive. Suddenly, there's a sequence of brutal, loud and "ugly" feedback-like tones that usher in a much more random and barren section, more open circuitry sounding with a fetchingly awkward sound placement. Kamerman, when I've seen him perform, often displays this attribute, which I enjoy very much. Similar to Annette Krebs, he manages to balance grace and imbalance, a tricky thing. Even so, he gets moving onto some wonderfully corroded terrain toward the back end of the set; it almost rocks. As said above, it's tough to put one's aural arms around the whole performance, but if you get over that (and why shouldn't you?) , it's a challenging, rewarding disc.
- Brian Olewnick, Just Outside
Not at all what I anticipated. Words like "mechanical parts, found objects, amplification devices" often predict tedium (when misused). Fortunately, this is not forty minutes of low end rumbling. Electronic fizzle and tiny clinking noises proliferate to be sure, but there is more going on than that alone. Sudden feedback spikes and jolts of noise are peppered here and there, keeping the listener from lingering in gray puddles along the border of audibility. The second half enters an even more polarized area where long stretches of silence are disrupted by semi-automatic typewriter blasts. All of this culminates in a stuttering jackhammer climax. Psychic machinery - real industrial music for people who enjoy construction site din.
- sunken, Rate Your Music
[Kamerman's] solo work is very dynamic: it can be very soft and quiet, with scratchy sounds at the threshold of hearing, but then he is also using at other times loud feedback and computer malfunctions, which scream you of your contemplation. Microsound meets noise. From minus 80db to plus 12db. I must say I am not blown away by this work. It comes across as a bit too thought out. "Let's do some really soft bits and some really loud", but somehow I fail to see the connection (or rather, I guess, the composition) behind it. A bit too much haphazard put together with perhaps too limited means of sound. Certainly one with room for improvement.
- Frans de Waard, Vital Weekly
And She Sat Up in the Street in the Sun is Kamerman's solo release, put together using a Dada-esque array of mechanical parts and found objects, electronically amplified in intimate ways. This extremely enigmatic 39-minute piece was recorded in a single take, slightly edited, and framed to allow the inclusion of certain imperfections that resulted from the misbehaviour of his equipments and his computer. It would not be overstating the case to say that this is a record of very extreme dynamics, with most of its "unapologetically unpleasant" stretches of mechanical near-noise lurking in wait at the end. Yet Kamerman doesn't strike me as one of those nihilistic noise-blasting types, and in spite of the apparent initial "blankness" to this record I am persuaded that he has made a very "personal" record, as he claims. As to what the twists and turns of that personality may be, I leave the curious listener to discover for themselves.
- Ed Pinsent, The Sound Projector
- Brian Olewnick, Just Outside
Not at all what I anticipated. Words like "mechanical parts, found objects, amplification devices" often predict tedium (when misused). Fortunately, this is not forty minutes of low end rumbling. Electronic fizzle and tiny clinking noises proliferate to be sure, but there is more going on than that alone. Sudden feedback spikes and jolts of noise are peppered here and there, keeping the listener from lingering in gray puddles along the border of audibility. The second half enters an even more polarized area where long stretches of silence are disrupted by semi-automatic typewriter blasts. All of this culminates in a stuttering jackhammer climax. Psychic machinery - real industrial music for people who enjoy construction site din.
- sunken, Rate Your Music
[Kamerman's] solo work is very dynamic: it can be very soft and quiet, with scratchy sounds at the threshold of hearing, but then he is also using at other times loud feedback and computer malfunctions, which scream you of your contemplation. Microsound meets noise. From minus 80db to plus 12db. I must say I am not blown away by this work. It comes across as a bit too thought out. "Let's do some really soft bits and some really loud", but somehow I fail to see the connection (or rather, I guess, the composition) behind it. A bit too much haphazard put together with perhaps too limited means of sound. Certainly one with room for improvement.
- Frans de Waard, Vital Weekly
And She Sat Up in the Street in the Sun is Kamerman's solo release, put together using a Dada-esque array of mechanical parts and found objects, electronically amplified in intimate ways. This extremely enigmatic 39-minute piece was recorded in a single take, slightly edited, and framed to allow the inclusion of certain imperfections that resulted from the misbehaviour of his equipments and his computer. It would not be overstating the case to say that this is a record of very extreme dynamics, with most of its "unapologetically unpleasant" stretches of mechanical near-noise lurking in wait at the end. Yet Kamerman doesn't strike me as one of those nihilistic noise-blasting types, and in spite of the apparent initial "blankness" to this record I am persuaded that he has made a very "personal" record, as he claims. As to what the twists and turns of that personality may be, I leave the curious listener to discover for themselves.
- Ed Pinsent, The Sound Projector
cardstock sleeves stamped in gold paint
numbered edition of 50 copies
Other Vultures describe their aesthetic as "proudly-inept noisecore" and the work that emerges aptly seems a continual failure of aggression: wavering intensity, relenting beats, and lyrics more likely to be about going out dancing than beating people up. For lack of practice, endurance, and technical skill, live performances are often cut short when Freddie's hands blister or Arthur's fingertips start to bleed. But they try. They try really hard. And it's difficult not to love them for it.
Forced onto hiatus in June 2009 (for reasons they prefer not to discuss), these recordings are from their final sessions before the break - Other Vultures at their simultaneous best and worst. Like performers of a high wire act without training, rehearsal, or a net; but in sync as they fall, repeatedly reaching terminal velocity together, only moments before they hit the deck.
OTHER VULTURES
THE GUILT GROUPE EP
-------------------
_01_ROUGH
_02_QUICK
_03_GOING_CUT
_04_QUICKER
_05_END
FREDERICK BUTLER: DRUMS
ARTHUR SEDGWICK: BASS, VOX
total duration: 32:53
Other Vultures are a noisy duo who play bass guitar and drums and occasionally sqwawk mad vocalese into a microphone, producing a lively melee of 'proudly-inept noisecore' on The Guilt Groupe EP (CFYR004). Nothing inept about it lads, and you shouldn't apologise to anyone when you can produce a floor-clearing blast like this - 32 minutes of loopy formless punk racket. Unlike a lot of other groups in this area, Butler and Sedgwick don't rely on too much distortion to project an image of nasty urban alienation, and while these recordings have oodles of oomph and overamped noise, you can hear every cymbal clash as sharply as being stung by a gigantic nettle. I'd imagine this team, very strong on performative skills, must be a real dynamo 8-ball when let loose in a public arena.
- Ed Pinsent, The Sound Projector
How does one measure something like effort? As in, the total amount of effort exerted by a group when they create their music. Perhaps in a unit like Lumins, and we would hook up the band members to electrodes and transfer that energy into a sole light bulb afixed to a table in the center of the room. The lightbulb would be the only source of light in the entire space, and the flesh of the onlookers would undulate and become pimpled like a basketball as the light slowly gained in intensity as the band began to pick up the pace; sweat began to leak from their brows. Many acts, in my opinion, would be able to put on quite a spectacle: creating rhythmic patterns of light. Sheer, intense brightness would be followed by a graceful dimming. Think of Explosions in The Sky. Or maybe a steady pulse, bobbing like a fishing lure a la Lee Noble.
Other Vultures, a duo of Frederick Butler on drums and Arthur Sedgwick handling bass and “vox”, have crafted an EP which in their eyes probably tips the scales in terms of luminosity. In fact, the record is a little more scatterbrained. They call it “proudly-inept noisecore”, and its premise is music created “Like performers of a high wire act without training, rehearsal, or a net”. Cool, right? But throughout Guilt Groupe it seems as if Bulter and Sedgwick grow bored of their own vociferous display of heart. The music has little structure, and while its strong points are Sedgwick’s use of looping bass noise and vocals coupled with the relentless pounding of drums, its when the two begin to crash off of their sugar high that their music becomes less intriguing and more of an exercise in patience. One second Other Vultures are their namesake; vicious. Other times they are tired children in a pediatric waiting room. The lightbulb flickers and dims quickly. And then the listener begins to wonder: “Why do I need to listen to two men beat their hearts out on instruments they refuse to play capably?” Other Vultures needs to sell their product better. Its probably unfair to judge them though, as this is their first and final release. (4/10)
- Ross Devlin, Foxy Digitalis
- Ed Pinsent, The Sound Projector
How does one measure something like effort? As in, the total amount of effort exerted by a group when they create their music. Perhaps in a unit like Lumins, and we would hook up the band members to electrodes and transfer that energy into a sole light bulb afixed to a table in the center of the room. The lightbulb would be the only source of light in the entire space, and the flesh of the onlookers would undulate and become pimpled like a basketball as the light slowly gained in intensity as the band began to pick up the pace; sweat began to leak from their brows. Many acts, in my opinion, would be able to put on quite a spectacle: creating rhythmic patterns of light. Sheer, intense brightness would be followed by a graceful dimming. Think of Explosions in The Sky. Or maybe a steady pulse, bobbing like a fishing lure a la Lee Noble.
Other Vultures, a duo of Frederick Butler on drums and Arthur Sedgwick handling bass and “vox”, have crafted an EP which in their eyes probably tips the scales in terms of luminosity. In fact, the record is a little more scatterbrained. They call it “proudly-inept noisecore”, and its premise is music created “Like performers of a high wire act without training, rehearsal, or a net”. Cool, right? But throughout Guilt Groupe it seems as if Bulter and Sedgwick grow bored of their own vociferous display of heart. The music has little structure, and while its strong points are Sedgwick’s use of looping bass noise and vocals coupled with the relentless pounding of drums, its when the two begin to crash off of their sugar high that their music becomes less intriguing and more of an exercise in patience. One second Other Vultures are their namesake; vicious. Other times they are tired children in a pediatric waiting room. The lightbulb flickers and dims quickly. And then the listener begins to wonder: “Why do I need to listen to two men beat their hearts out on instruments they refuse to play capably?” Other Vultures needs to sell their product better. Its probably unfair to judge them though, as this is their first and final release. (4/10)
- Ross Devlin, Foxy Digitalis
glass-mastered CDs in full color digipacks
edition of 150 copies
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Anne Guthrie
Perhaps A Favorable Organic Moment
1. Bach Cello Suite No. 2, Prelude (i) (10:15)
2. Bach Cello Suite No. 2, Prelude (ii) (8:51)
3. Times Center, NYC 2010 (9:14)
4. Annie Laurie (i) (12:55)
5. Annie Laurie (ii) (2:40)
mastered by Billy Gomberg
sweater knit by Anne Guthrie
http://www.fraufraulein.com/harmellum.html
Within the first few minutes of Perhaps a Favorable Organic Moment, the listener is treated to an engrossing intimacy, an interlocutory field recording between Anne Guthrie's sources and herself. The opening track, "Bach Cello Suite No. 2, Prelude I," commences with minutes of the sounds of sparse traffic, maybe from Guthrie's open window. It is in these introductory moments that Perhaps constructs Guthrie's sound world, the environment in which the remainder of the album confides.
Just shy of five minutes into this track, Guthrie's french horn appears out of the airy ambiance (the french horn isn't credited on the album, but the instrument's regal timbres are unmistakeable), playing a transcribed version of Bach's titular Cello Suite No. 2, Prelude. The mic'ing is distant and unfocused, capturing the room's hiss, the clatter of the horn's keys against its brass, and Guthrie's breaths, all alongside the suite. Notes are often just off; Guthrie frequently restarts mistaken passages. "Bach Cello Suite No. 2, Prelude I" could easily be an extempore sight reading, presenting Guthrie and her space, its view and all. The playing isn't perfect, yet the recording is; the track is refreshingly relatable, as opposed to the virtuosity of Fournier or Rostropovich.
If the first part's earnest nature was arresting, the second is utterly naked in comparison. In and of itself, "Bach Cello Suite No. 2, Prelude II" is a warped, glass-rubbed piece with flickers of recognizable sounds. And, when played beside "Bach Cello Suite No. 2, Prelude I," it becomes immediately apparent that "Bach Cello Suite No. 2, Prelude II's" source is in fact "Bach Cello Suite No. 2, Prelude I." This candor is devastatingly affecting, once again allowing the listener to hear a part of Perhaps from Guthrie's perspective — a gorgeous one, I might add.
"Times Center, NYC 2010" is an intermission from the above narrative, presenting a more conventional, though nonetheless beautiful, field recording. Presumably capturing the titular space, the track builds into the everyday squalor of New York City. The space sounds claustrophobic, full of traffic, the subway, and children's yells. As the piece progresses, Guthrie injects a tonal drone, which dominates by the track's end.
In a delightful symmetry, Perhaps is concluded by "Annie Laurie I" and "Annie Laurie II." As the names suggest, the relationship between the two is akin to that of "Prelude I" and "Prelude II." However, on this side of "Times Center, NYC 2010," we're first given the finished, treated piece. "Annie Laurie I" begins with hums heard in "Times Center, NYC 2010," a modulated tunnel of traffic, perhaps. A few minutes in, an unsure female voice enters, singing a familiar but obfuscated tune. Throughout the piece, this voice (presumably Guthrie's) enters for seconds, all the while submissive to its surroundings. For the duration of "Annie Laurie I," the origin of the sung melody is forever on the tip of your tongue, mocking your inability to place it.
Luckily Perhaps can't keep a secret for too long, revealing the melody in its conventional performance on "Annie Laurie II," the titular, traditional Scottish song. Completing the portrayal of the reverse side of the input/output dynamic in musique concrète, "Annie Laurie II" is a fitting end to one of the most honest and intimate albums I've heard in quite a while.
- Matthew Horne, Tiny Mix Tapes
The windows have been well and truly thrown open between the closed space of "music" and the world outside – maybe with time the misleading phrase "field recordings" will disappear along with other inanities like "drone" (who knows, perhaps one day the word "music" itself won't mean much any more, but I don't think we're quite there yet) – and this fine album by French horn player / sound artist Anne Guthrie enjoys the fresh air in style.
On the opening track she pointed a Sony PCM 50 out of her bedroom window and hit RECORD while she practised Wendell Hoss's transcription of the "Prelude" from J.S.Bach's second Suite for Unaccompanied Cello, complete with the gentle clicks from the valves of the horn itself and the sound of passing traffic. She then played the tape back on a "tiny Radio Shack speaker" placed in a large bell jar, and re-recorded the results Alvin Lucier style to create a rich cloud of subtly delayed sustained frequencies and glistening feedback, from which fragments of Bach (not to mention the odd car horn and various inscrutable jingling sounds) shoot out like shafts of sunlight from time to time.
The central track was recorded in the lobby of Renzo Piano's snazzy New York Times Center in Midtown Manhattan, in which sounds both recognisable – snatches of guitar, echoing footsteps and voices near and far – and mysterious (where do those lovely steely drones that close the track come from?) combine to form a beautifully complex sound environment. It should come as no surprise to learn that Guthrie is currently a doctoral student in Architectural Acoustics at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. On the strength of this track alone I'd give her the degree right away.
On track four Guthrie took her mics out to Fort Tilden Beach ("the city's best-kept secret", according to the New York Summer Guide) and recorded the sounds of a metal grid bridge, which she processed and combined with herself singing of "Annie Laurie" recorded "under a stone arch in Prospect Park." The unadorned rendition of an old Scottish folk song makes for a touching conclusion to an excellent album, one that's as intriguing and thought-provoking as it is fun to listen to.
- Dan Warburton, Paris Transatlantic
Just shy of five minutes into this track, Guthrie's french horn appears out of the airy ambiance (the french horn isn't credited on the album, but the instrument's regal timbres are unmistakeable), playing a transcribed version of Bach's titular Cello Suite No. 2, Prelude. The mic'ing is distant and unfocused, capturing the room's hiss, the clatter of the horn's keys against its brass, and Guthrie's breaths, all alongside the suite. Notes are often just off; Guthrie frequently restarts mistaken passages. "Bach Cello Suite No. 2, Prelude I" could easily be an extempore sight reading, presenting Guthrie and her space, its view and all. The playing isn't perfect, yet the recording is; the track is refreshingly relatable, as opposed to the virtuosity of Fournier or Rostropovich.
If the first part's earnest nature was arresting, the second is utterly naked in comparison. In and of itself, "Bach Cello Suite No. 2, Prelude II" is a warped, glass-rubbed piece with flickers of recognizable sounds. And, when played beside "Bach Cello Suite No. 2, Prelude I," it becomes immediately apparent that "Bach Cello Suite No. 2, Prelude II's" source is in fact "Bach Cello Suite No. 2, Prelude I." This candor is devastatingly affecting, once again allowing the listener to hear a part of Perhaps from Guthrie's perspective — a gorgeous one, I might add.
"Times Center, NYC 2010" is an intermission from the above narrative, presenting a more conventional, though nonetheless beautiful, field recording. Presumably capturing the titular space, the track builds into the everyday squalor of New York City. The space sounds claustrophobic, full of traffic, the subway, and children's yells. As the piece progresses, Guthrie injects a tonal drone, which dominates by the track's end.
In a delightful symmetry, Perhaps is concluded by "Annie Laurie I" and "Annie Laurie II." As the names suggest, the relationship between the two is akin to that of "Prelude I" and "Prelude II." However, on this side of "Times Center, NYC 2010," we're first given the finished, treated piece. "Annie Laurie I" begins with hums heard in "Times Center, NYC 2010," a modulated tunnel of traffic, perhaps. A few minutes in, an unsure female voice enters, singing a familiar but obfuscated tune. Throughout the piece, this voice (presumably Guthrie's) enters for seconds, all the while submissive to its surroundings. For the duration of "Annie Laurie I," the origin of the sung melody is forever on the tip of your tongue, mocking your inability to place it.
Luckily Perhaps can't keep a secret for too long, revealing the melody in its conventional performance on "Annie Laurie II," the titular, traditional Scottish song. Completing the portrayal of the reverse side of the input/output dynamic in musique concrète, "Annie Laurie II" is a fitting end to one of the most honest and intimate albums I've heard in quite a while.
- Matthew Horne, Tiny Mix Tapes
The windows have been well and truly thrown open between the closed space of "music" and the world outside – maybe with time the misleading phrase "field recordings" will disappear along with other inanities like "drone" (who knows, perhaps one day the word "music" itself won't mean much any more, but I don't think we're quite there yet) – and this fine album by French horn player / sound artist Anne Guthrie enjoys the fresh air in style.
On the opening track she pointed a Sony PCM 50 out of her bedroom window and hit RECORD while she practised Wendell Hoss's transcription of the "Prelude" from J.S.Bach's second Suite for Unaccompanied Cello, complete with the gentle clicks from the valves of the horn itself and the sound of passing traffic. She then played the tape back on a "tiny Radio Shack speaker" placed in a large bell jar, and re-recorded the results Alvin Lucier style to create a rich cloud of subtly delayed sustained frequencies and glistening feedback, from which fragments of Bach (not to mention the odd car horn and various inscrutable jingling sounds) shoot out like shafts of sunlight from time to time.
The central track was recorded in the lobby of Renzo Piano's snazzy New York Times Center in Midtown Manhattan, in which sounds both recognisable – snatches of guitar, echoing footsteps and voices near and far – and mysterious (where do those lovely steely drones that close the track come from?) combine to form a beautifully complex sound environment. It should come as no surprise to learn that Guthrie is currently a doctoral student in Architectural Acoustics at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. On the strength of this track alone I'd give her the degree right away.
On track four Guthrie took her mics out to Fort Tilden Beach ("the city's best-kept secret", according to the New York Summer Guide) and recorded the sounds of a metal grid bridge, which she processed and combined with herself singing of "Annie Laurie" recorded "under a stone arch in Prospect Park." The unadorned rendition of an old Scottish folk song makes for a touching conclusion to an excellent album, one that's as intriguing and thought-provoking as it is fun to listen to.
- Dan Warburton, Paris Transatlantic
Anne Guthrie est une musicienne américaine mieux connue pour ses installations électroacoustiques que pour ses improvisations au cor d'harmonie, parallèlement elle compose aussi des pièces pour orchestre de chambre et écrit un peu de poésie. "Perhaps a favorable organic moment", sa dernière œuvre en date, est une pure merveille qui réunit presque toutes ces facettes, une oeuvre si riche et qui pose tellement de questions tout en évoquant une infinité de notions, qu'il sera impossible pour moi de tout énumérer: de ce que l'on peut ressentir ou penser à l'écoute de ce disque, mais même de ce que j'ai pensé et ressenti moi-même durant ces trois mouvements.
Autant le dire tout de suite, la première pièce, "Bach Cello Suite N. 2, Prelude", de cet ensemble de trois mouvements électroacoustiques, constitue le véritable sommet de ce disque, et elle suffit elle-seule à qualifier ce disque de chef d’œuvre. Autant par son originalité, son assurance, son intelligence que par sa sensibilité. Cette œuvre prodigieuse qui interroge la perception arrive à concrétiser le point de vue d’espaces tampons, d’espaces de transition, d’opposition et de médiation. Matériellement, Anne Guthrie semble avoir placé son micro dans l’encadrement d’une fenêtre ouverte : nous pouvons ainsi entendre voitures, klaxons, et différents bruits urbains durant les premières minutes, jusqu’à ce qu’Anne Guthrie s’installe dans la pièce pour venir y travailler, imparfaitement mais avec amour, une suite de Bach pour violoncelle, interprétée ici au cor d’harmonie – plus le fonds sonores extérieur toujours présent. La première partie de ce mouvement matérialise l’opposition et la transition entre l’extérieur et l’intérieur (ce qui permet de véritablement matérialiser un espace, par le seul biais d’outils sonores), entre l’environnement ambiant et l’intimité, entre l’espace privé et l’espace public, entre l’hostilité urbaine et la sensibilité intime, entre l’objectivité et la subjectivité en somme. Quant à la seconde partie, le travail de modification de ces mêmes sources sonores permet d’unir ou de réunir ces oppositions qui font partie intégrante de la personnalité et de l’environnement de la jeune compositrice américaine. La puissance émotionnelle de la suite de Bach, accompagnée de l’abstraction froide des "field-recordings" réunissent passé et futur, résurgence baroque et expérimentations électroacoustiques, en une œuvre absolument merveilleuse, intelligente, subtile, délicate et belle.
J’en ai déjà beaucoup dit sur ce premier mouvement et il faudra bien mettre un terme à cette chronique (d’un disque que je voudrais pourtant interminable et qui a du mal à sortir de ma platine). Venons-en donc au mouvement central : "Times Center, NYC 2010," basé uniquement sur des enregistrements de terrain à l’intérieur du hall des locaux du célèbre journal américain. Comme dans son précédent album, "Standing Sitting" (chroniqué ici), Anne Guthrie utilise un matériau simple et réaliste qui interroge surtout les liens entre l’espace et le son. Par le biais de quelques modifications simples et réduites (réverbération, réduction ou augmentation de la vitesse de quelques fréquences), Guthrie arrive prodigieusement et magiquement à restituer le cadre spatial de l’enregistrement, uniquement à partir d’évènements sonores, et non par la médiation de l’imagination ou de la psychologie. Cependant, ces dernières caractéristiques ne sont pas absentes de ce mouvement pour autant, mais ce sont l’imagination et l’état émotionnel et perceptif d’Anne Guthrie seulement que nous pouvons ressentir à travers les manipulations électroacoustiques, ces modifications qui pointent l’individualité même de Guthrie (son idipsum...). Une pièce puissante qui, comme dans le précédent album de Guthrie, arrive de manière hallucinante, précise et virtuose, à restituer un espace concret par le seul biais de ses caractéristiques et de ses propriétés sonores.
Comme on l’a déjà noté, cette pièce forme l’axe central de ces trois mouvements, l’axe symétrique plus précisément. Il s’ensuit donc que le troisième mouvement, "Annie Laurie," reprend forcément des éléments conceptuels inversés de "Bach Cello Suite N. 2, Prelude." La première partie est une lecture ralentie d’enregistrements intimes encore une fois, le point de vue assourdi d’une fenêtre (le son est si sourd qu’on a l’impression d’être comme à l’intérieur du verre) qui médiatise le chant et l’environnement urbain duquel le premier surgit. La tradition est encore rappelée, cette fois par le bourdon, quelquefois très proche du bourdonnement d’un essaim de guêpes d’ailleurs, créé par les bruits environnants et citadins. Comme on pouvait s’y attendre, la seconde partie se compose de "field-recordings" non-manipulés, d’où émerge le mélancolique et sensuel "Annie Laurie." Et malgré la démarche expérimentale quelque peu jusqu’au-boutiste et systématique de cette pièce, il y a toujours des réminiscences de musique populaire, notamment à travers l’utilisation de l’hymne ancestral et sentimental "Annie Laurie," interprétée toujours par la compositrice.
"Perhaps a favorable organic moment" est une formidable suite de trois mouvements symétriques qui nous entrainent au plus près d’une réalité concrète et complexe d’une part, mais également au cœur de la sensibilité, de l’intimité et de l’individualité d’Anne Guthrie, une immersion intime et sensible au plus profond de la perception et des sentiments de la compositrice. Une démarche expérimentale assez simple et quelque peu extrême, mais qui ne manque ni de chaleur, ni de délicatesse et d’attention. Un chef d’œuvre hautement sensible, original et radical : une œuvre formidable, merveilleuse et prodigieuse, etc. A écouter absolument !
- Julien Heraud, Improv Sphere
Autant le dire tout de suite, la première pièce, "Bach Cello Suite N. 2, Prelude", de cet ensemble de trois mouvements électroacoustiques, constitue le véritable sommet de ce disque, et elle suffit elle-seule à qualifier ce disque de chef d’œuvre. Autant par son originalité, son assurance, son intelligence que par sa sensibilité. Cette œuvre prodigieuse qui interroge la perception arrive à concrétiser le point de vue d’espaces tampons, d’espaces de transition, d’opposition et de médiation. Matériellement, Anne Guthrie semble avoir placé son micro dans l’encadrement d’une fenêtre ouverte : nous pouvons ainsi entendre voitures, klaxons, et différents bruits urbains durant les premières minutes, jusqu’à ce qu’Anne Guthrie s’installe dans la pièce pour venir y travailler, imparfaitement mais avec amour, une suite de Bach pour violoncelle, interprétée ici au cor d’harmonie – plus le fonds sonores extérieur toujours présent. La première partie de ce mouvement matérialise l’opposition et la transition entre l’extérieur et l’intérieur (ce qui permet de véritablement matérialiser un espace, par le seul biais d’outils sonores), entre l’environnement ambiant et l’intimité, entre l’espace privé et l’espace public, entre l’hostilité urbaine et la sensibilité intime, entre l’objectivité et la subjectivité en somme. Quant à la seconde partie, le travail de modification de ces mêmes sources sonores permet d’unir ou de réunir ces oppositions qui font partie intégrante de la personnalité et de l’environnement de la jeune compositrice américaine. La puissance émotionnelle de la suite de Bach, accompagnée de l’abstraction froide des "field-recordings" réunissent passé et futur, résurgence baroque et expérimentations électroacoustiques, en une œuvre absolument merveilleuse, intelligente, subtile, délicate et belle.
J’en ai déjà beaucoup dit sur ce premier mouvement et il faudra bien mettre un terme à cette chronique (d’un disque que je voudrais pourtant interminable et qui a du mal à sortir de ma platine). Venons-en donc au mouvement central : "Times Center, NYC 2010," basé uniquement sur des enregistrements de terrain à l’intérieur du hall des locaux du célèbre journal américain. Comme dans son précédent album, "Standing Sitting" (chroniqué ici), Anne Guthrie utilise un matériau simple et réaliste qui interroge surtout les liens entre l’espace et le son. Par le biais de quelques modifications simples et réduites (réverbération, réduction ou augmentation de la vitesse de quelques fréquences), Guthrie arrive prodigieusement et magiquement à restituer le cadre spatial de l’enregistrement, uniquement à partir d’évènements sonores, et non par la médiation de l’imagination ou de la psychologie. Cependant, ces dernières caractéristiques ne sont pas absentes de ce mouvement pour autant, mais ce sont l’imagination et l’état émotionnel et perceptif d’Anne Guthrie seulement que nous pouvons ressentir à travers les manipulations électroacoustiques, ces modifications qui pointent l’individualité même de Guthrie (son idipsum...). Une pièce puissante qui, comme dans le précédent album de Guthrie, arrive de manière hallucinante, précise et virtuose, à restituer un espace concret par le seul biais de ses caractéristiques et de ses propriétés sonores.
Comme on l’a déjà noté, cette pièce forme l’axe central de ces trois mouvements, l’axe symétrique plus précisément. Il s’ensuit donc que le troisième mouvement, "Annie Laurie," reprend forcément des éléments conceptuels inversés de "Bach Cello Suite N. 2, Prelude." La première partie est une lecture ralentie d’enregistrements intimes encore une fois, le point de vue assourdi d’une fenêtre (le son est si sourd qu’on a l’impression d’être comme à l’intérieur du verre) qui médiatise le chant et l’environnement urbain duquel le premier surgit. La tradition est encore rappelée, cette fois par le bourdon, quelquefois très proche du bourdonnement d’un essaim de guêpes d’ailleurs, créé par les bruits environnants et citadins. Comme on pouvait s’y attendre, la seconde partie se compose de "field-recordings" non-manipulés, d’où émerge le mélancolique et sensuel "Annie Laurie." Et malgré la démarche expérimentale quelque peu jusqu’au-boutiste et systématique de cette pièce, il y a toujours des réminiscences de musique populaire, notamment à travers l’utilisation de l’hymne ancestral et sentimental "Annie Laurie," interprétée toujours par la compositrice.
"Perhaps a favorable organic moment" est une formidable suite de trois mouvements symétriques qui nous entrainent au plus près d’une réalité concrète et complexe d’une part, mais également au cœur de la sensibilité, de l’intimité et de l’individualité d’Anne Guthrie, une immersion intime et sensible au plus profond de la perception et des sentiments de la compositrice. Une démarche expérimentale assez simple et quelque peu extrême, mais qui ne manque ni de chaleur, ni de délicatesse et d’attention. Un chef d’œuvre hautement sensible, original et radical : une œuvre formidable, merveilleuse et prodigieuse, etc. A écouter absolument !
- Julien Heraud, Improv Sphere
I didn’t feel remotely like writing about music tonight. Its really hot and humid here, I slept for much of the early evening after being at work in the early hours, bad news seems to be coming to me every ten minutes (RIP Cy Twombly) and in between the bad news comes current events in the news that just makes me angry. Trying to focus and then gather my thoughts together enough to write anything coherent isn’t easy, so apologies in advance if the following review says nothing of interest at all…
Anne Guthrie is a name I didn’t know a couple of years back but is now producing music in New York that is consistently of interest. As I have been listening to her recent new solo album on the Copy for your Records label over recent days a further cassette sits unplayed to my side, and opening a jiffy bag a few moments ago revealed another CD she is involved with on the Ilse label. I also wrote about her last solo here more than a year ago now. The new release is named Perhaps a favorable organic moment and is the first release on the CFYR label to arrive in a handsome digipack. It features five tracks, grouped into three sections, with the third, central track standing alone. Tracks one and two then are each named Bach Cello Suite No.2, Prelude. When the first track begins, the seemingly odd title makes little sense as we hear a vaguely distant urban environment, busy roads, the hum of city life etc, perhaps through an open window as other sounds here and there seem closer to hand and more contained, though I may well be wrong here. The sounds are somehow quite soothing, not aggressive, but perhaps what we might expect them to be, and for a while I began to wonder if this album was just to be field recordings played straight, but then, after almost exactly five minutes of this stillness, with just the odd small sound near the microphone here and there we suddenly get a loud, completely foregrounded brass instrument appear, playing the familiar Bach prelude, or something close to it. I’m not sure exactly what the instrument is, and no credit is listed, but given that Guthrie plays the French horn in other groups I think its a fair guess to assume she is playing here. Now I imagine that it isn’t easy to play a cello piece on a French horn, but this isn’t a virtuoso performance by any means, rather it sounds like Guthrie practicing by herself, almost as if she didn’t know the recorder was on, though that scenario is obviously unlikely. The horn goes on for quite a while then, and completely owns the track, distracting you completely from the grey hum of the city which remains in the background. At the ten minute mark the track just ends, and the second piece, the second half of the two tracks labelled with the Bach title begins.
Here its sounds as if the same recording has been used as source material for this track. We hear a kind of hazy, underwater rendition of what I think are elements of the same recording, with the city dissolving into a darker, featureless hum, the horn warping and twisting as if it had been blown apart by a strong wind, and some nice little tinkling metallic sounds appearing. This piece is beautiful, and its even more rewarding to realise that it has been extracted somehow from the piece that preceded it. Its a calm, though slightly off centred track, a blurred shadow of the original piece. The two work very well hand in hand.
The third and central piece is named Times Center, NYC 2010 and seems to be a nine minute long straight-up field recording of a busy urban place. I’m not sure what the Times Center is, but we seem to hear an indoor recording but in a vast space, so sounds, (many of them human, children shouting, massed chatter etc…) reverberate around the space, and also the recording. There is also a kind of shimmering drone-like sound added to the track, that initially sounds like it is just part of the original site recording, perhaps music playing or some kind of industrial whirring, but as the track nears its end the field recording element drops away to reveal that this sound is added on top, perhaps an entirely synthetic sound, perhaps a filtering of the original recording again, but the interesting thing for me is how when you first listen this extra layer feels part of the natural sounds, and only when Guthrie pulls back and reveals all do we notice it didn’t belong int he first place.
The final two pieces then form a final suite named Annie Laurie, which is an old traditional Scottish folk song, and sure enough the song appears in the work. The first of the two pieces sounds like a heavily treated field recording of some kind. A formless, ghostly cloud of sound, (perhaps more city noises filtered somehow?) can be heard, slowly building into a more intense swarm-like sound that resembles insects flying past a microphone. Over this though, stopping and starting often we hear a murky recording of a female voice (maybe Guthrie again?) singing the folk song, or little bits of it. This track is actually a little disturbing in its feeling of darkly intriguing mystery, but when when the final track, and second half of this suite appears we hear the voice singing more clearly, but in an empty, resonant space, with the city heard again in the background, and a reverberating passing aircraft playing the insect part. Clearly as the first suite of the album, the Bach recordings, saw the opening field recording as the first half and a treated version for the second, so this final Annie Laurie suite mirrors it, with the final three minute long field recording used to create the longer thirteen minute construction that preceded it.
This is fascinating stuff and a really hearteningly interesting use of field recording as a creative tool. Presenting a disc full of the original recordings would have been nice enough, as there is enough originality and curiosity to be found surrounding them to make them interesting enough, on top of the beauty contained in them as well (the final vocals on the folk song are very beautiful) the way the pieces have been treated and reconfigured to form new works again that complement the originals so well is excellent. Fine stuff then, certainly a CD I would heartily recommend to those like me that are a little jaded by so many field recordings based releases that all sound very similar and looking for something subtly but intelligently different.
- Richard Pinnell, The Watchful Ear
Anne Guthrie is a name I didn’t know a couple of years back but is now producing music in New York that is consistently of interest. As I have been listening to her recent new solo album on the Copy for your Records label over recent days a further cassette sits unplayed to my side, and opening a jiffy bag a few moments ago revealed another CD she is involved with on the Ilse label. I also wrote about her last solo here more than a year ago now. The new release is named Perhaps a favorable organic moment and is the first release on the CFYR label to arrive in a handsome digipack. It features five tracks, grouped into three sections, with the third, central track standing alone. Tracks one and two then are each named Bach Cello Suite No.2, Prelude. When the first track begins, the seemingly odd title makes little sense as we hear a vaguely distant urban environment, busy roads, the hum of city life etc, perhaps through an open window as other sounds here and there seem closer to hand and more contained, though I may well be wrong here. The sounds are somehow quite soothing, not aggressive, but perhaps what we might expect them to be, and for a while I began to wonder if this album was just to be field recordings played straight, but then, after almost exactly five minutes of this stillness, with just the odd small sound near the microphone here and there we suddenly get a loud, completely foregrounded brass instrument appear, playing the familiar Bach prelude, or something close to it. I’m not sure exactly what the instrument is, and no credit is listed, but given that Guthrie plays the French horn in other groups I think its a fair guess to assume she is playing here. Now I imagine that it isn’t easy to play a cello piece on a French horn, but this isn’t a virtuoso performance by any means, rather it sounds like Guthrie practicing by herself, almost as if she didn’t know the recorder was on, though that scenario is obviously unlikely. The horn goes on for quite a while then, and completely owns the track, distracting you completely from the grey hum of the city which remains in the background. At the ten minute mark the track just ends, and the second piece, the second half of the two tracks labelled with the Bach title begins.
Here its sounds as if the same recording has been used as source material for this track. We hear a kind of hazy, underwater rendition of what I think are elements of the same recording, with the city dissolving into a darker, featureless hum, the horn warping and twisting as if it had been blown apart by a strong wind, and some nice little tinkling metallic sounds appearing. This piece is beautiful, and its even more rewarding to realise that it has been extracted somehow from the piece that preceded it. Its a calm, though slightly off centred track, a blurred shadow of the original piece. The two work very well hand in hand.
The third and central piece is named Times Center, NYC 2010 and seems to be a nine minute long straight-up field recording of a busy urban place. I’m not sure what the Times Center is, but we seem to hear an indoor recording but in a vast space, so sounds, (many of them human, children shouting, massed chatter etc…) reverberate around the space, and also the recording. There is also a kind of shimmering drone-like sound added to the track, that initially sounds like it is just part of the original site recording, perhaps music playing or some kind of industrial whirring, but as the track nears its end the field recording element drops away to reveal that this sound is added on top, perhaps an entirely synthetic sound, perhaps a filtering of the original recording again, but the interesting thing for me is how when you first listen this extra layer feels part of the natural sounds, and only when Guthrie pulls back and reveals all do we notice it didn’t belong int he first place.
The final two pieces then form a final suite named Annie Laurie, which is an old traditional Scottish folk song, and sure enough the song appears in the work. The first of the two pieces sounds like a heavily treated field recording of some kind. A formless, ghostly cloud of sound, (perhaps more city noises filtered somehow?) can be heard, slowly building into a more intense swarm-like sound that resembles insects flying past a microphone. Over this though, stopping and starting often we hear a murky recording of a female voice (maybe Guthrie again?) singing the folk song, or little bits of it. This track is actually a little disturbing in its feeling of darkly intriguing mystery, but when when the final track, and second half of this suite appears we hear the voice singing more clearly, but in an empty, resonant space, with the city heard again in the background, and a reverberating passing aircraft playing the insect part. Clearly as the first suite of the album, the Bach recordings, saw the opening field recording as the first half and a treated version for the second, so this final Annie Laurie suite mirrors it, with the final three minute long field recording used to create the longer thirteen minute construction that preceded it.
This is fascinating stuff and a really hearteningly interesting use of field recording as a creative tool. Presenting a disc full of the original recordings would have been nice enough, as there is enough originality and curiosity to be found surrounding them to make them interesting enough, on top of the beauty contained in them as well (the final vocals on the folk song are very beautiful) the way the pieces have been treated and reconfigured to form new works again that complement the originals so well is excellent. Fine stuff then, certainly a CD I would heartily recommend to those like me that are a little jaded by so many field recordings based releases that all sound very similar and looking for something subtly but intelligently different.
- Richard Pinnell, The Watchful Ear
I was already a fan of Anne Guthrie through her Fraufraulein recordings with Billy Gomberg on the excellent Homophoni netlabel, so I was pretty excited to receive this solo record through the post. Perhaps a Favorable Organic Moment is made up of three pieces, the first and third of which are each split into two movements. Guthrie is a French horn player as well as a collector of field recordings, and the first piece utilises both. “Bach Cello Suite No. 2, Prelude” begins with around five minutes of untreated, slightly distant-sounding street noises, as if heard through the open window of an apartment. Slowly, the tentative first strains of the titular cello suite are heard, played by Guthrie on French horn, as if you are hearing a practice session in the room next door. The street sounds fade and the horn becomes the focal point. Guthrie’s rendition is halting and imperfect, slightly awkward but sweet all the same, drifting up to you like Holly Golightly’s guitar in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Part II of the cello suite features less horn and more field recording, but the sound is processed so heavily as to become an ominous whir, like that coming from an air conditioning unit. You can just hear the French horn but this time it’s like you’re hearing it from within an elevator shaft and it feels claustrophobic rather then bright and airy like the first recording. Two perspectives on the same piece of music: one from the gutter, one from the stars.
The central piece, titled “Times Centre, NYC 2010″ is for the most part a straight-forward field recording of an inside space filled with people going about their business. The voices of children echo, feet squeak on the shiny floors and, as the track progresses over its nine minutes, a drone emerges out of the hustle and bustle and eventually becomes the most noticeable element. It’s a familiar technique, but an effective one nonetheless.
"Annie Laurie," again split in two, completes the disc and this time begins in the doldrums. Here Guthrie sings a version of a Scottish folk ballad, first from underneath what sounds like a busy road bridge and then from out in the open, where you can hear aeroplanes in the sky and other signs of recognizable human life. The first section processes the buzz of fast-moving traffic so that it starts off sounding like a cloud of flies. When Guthrie’s voice emerges it is muffled and choked by the humming but dawdles on intermittently, barely audible for the most part. The effect is really spooky; it is as if the ballad is being sung by a lonely ghost who’s trapped beneath the bridge. When the microphone rises and we can hear the traffic more clearly I find it strangely heartbreaking, like the ghost has climbed the banking to look at a world it’s is no longer possible for her to inhabit. Soon enough she descends again into the netherworld.
Relief is short but sweet; the second part of "Annie Laurie" is less than three minutes long but feels like a long, cool shower. Again, this brought to mind Holly Golightly out on the fire escape, singing her sad songs that "[make] you wonder where she learned them". "Annie Laurie," taken as a whole, is a real stand-out for me. Two sides of the same coin but so radically different in sound and effect, and as such one of my favorite pieces of work this year. (7/10)
- Steve Dewhurst, Foxy Digitalis
Noua lucrare a Annei Guthrie își propune să fie cât mai neobișnuită cu putință – și ușor contradictorie, aspirând cu un scenariu ”meta” și totuși în limitele evocativului redării, de nu și cu câteva poticniri calitative care coboară la voia întâmplării. Explorând subtilități de field recording sau avansând dincolo de asemenea simple imprimări, jucându-se cu o aparentă simetrie a pieselor de pe album și opoziție a momentelor din cadrul pieselor, profilând o gramadă de niveluri ale înconjurătorului și intimului deopotrivă – în timp ce pentru toate astea Perhaps a Favorable Organic Moment primește o grămadă de laude, reverența mea este pusă la încercare de câteva idei sau exprimări care nu se pricep.
În afară de ”Times Center, NYC 2010”, dorit un interludiu convențional (pesemne o captare a freamătului din spațiul galeriei), oricum cu o frumusețe proprie, ambele două piese importante ale albumului au ca sursă o anume atmosferă și trec pe parcurs într-un complet diferită, ceva ce eu gândesc a fi un inside-out (sau, de multe ori, inversul) între ambiant și proxim, între divers și particular.
Nicicând primul nivel de percepție nu este categoric. Prima parte a ”Preludiului” de Bach se instalează pe sunete nu foarte frecvente din trafic, cu un zumzet constant de fond; aceeași atmosferă potolită poate fi, de fapt, distantă, auzită de pe verandă sau de la geam, ceea ce impune deja o perspectivă nouă; totul se resoarbe odată cu intervenția instrumentală, o ciudată redare a piesei de suită la corn francez în loc de violoncel. Calitatea muzicală nu mai pare importantă, în fond fragilitatea și stângăcia acestei bucăți fiind apreciată în alte recenzii, văzând în ea o ”primă citire” sau o redare cu dificultăți, multe opriri, chixuri, aer tras în piept după fiecare frază. În partea a doua, îmi place deja foarte mult ce aud; ai zice că totul se mută în altă ”cameră”, într-o atmosferă mai înfundată sau bruiată, dar schimbarea acustică este pentru mine un revers, un ”negativ”, procesat chiar electronic, cu unde dronale, cu frânturi din preludiu într-un ecou difuz, dar în special cu tentativa de a atinge rezonanțele interioare ale tuturor fenomenelor.
Asta este, zic eu, esențial: descripticul e garantat pe parcursul întregului album, dar e totodată destul de brut. Nu să recunosc claxoane, dangătul clopoțeilor agățați la fereastră sau timbrul înfoiat de corn mă mulțumește, ci esențe sau o transpoziție ireală, plăsmuită.
“Annie Laurie” reface traseul în sens opus, deși ”A.L. I” ar fi în sine doar un darc-ambient intens (sau cel puțin o distorsiune într-atât de înecăcioasă a sunetelor, încât devin faux-drone), cu o ușoară hârșâire spectrală și un refren de cântec îngânat lălâu și nazal, dacă ultimele minute ale sale n-ar reveni în exterior, în forfota de bulevard, iar în ”A.L. II” am reauzi cântecul în întregime, o baladă irlandeză cântată natural și dulce, într-un spațiu deschis.
- Viktor Bach, Messianesque
The central piece, titled “Times Centre, NYC 2010″ is for the most part a straight-forward field recording of an inside space filled with people going about their business. The voices of children echo, feet squeak on the shiny floors and, as the track progresses over its nine minutes, a drone emerges out of the hustle and bustle and eventually becomes the most noticeable element. It’s a familiar technique, but an effective one nonetheless.
"Annie Laurie," again split in two, completes the disc and this time begins in the doldrums. Here Guthrie sings a version of a Scottish folk ballad, first from underneath what sounds like a busy road bridge and then from out in the open, where you can hear aeroplanes in the sky and other signs of recognizable human life. The first section processes the buzz of fast-moving traffic so that it starts off sounding like a cloud of flies. When Guthrie’s voice emerges it is muffled and choked by the humming but dawdles on intermittently, barely audible for the most part. The effect is really spooky; it is as if the ballad is being sung by a lonely ghost who’s trapped beneath the bridge. When the microphone rises and we can hear the traffic more clearly I find it strangely heartbreaking, like the ghost has climbed the banking to look at a world it’s is no longer possible for her to inhabit. Soon enough she descends again into the netherworld.
Relief is short but sweet; the second part of "Annie Laurie" is less than three minutes long but feels like a long, cool shower. Again, this brought to mind Holly Golightly out on the fire escape, singing her sad songs that "[make] you wonder where she learned them". "Annie Laurie," taken as a whole, is a real stand-out for me. Two sides of the same coin but so radically different in sound and effect, and as such one of my favorite pieces of work this year. (7/10)
- Steve Dewhurst, Foxy Digitalis
Noua lucrare a Annei Guthrie își propune să fie cât mai neobișnuită cu putință – și ușor contradictorie, aspirând cu un scenariu ”meta” și totuși în limitele evocativului redării, de nu și cu câteva poticniri calitative care coboară la voia întâmplării. Explorând subtilități de field recording sau avansând dincolo de asemenea simple imprimări, jucându-se cu o aparentă simetrie a pieselor de pe album și opoziție a momentelor din cadrul pieselor, profilând o gramadă de niveluri ale înconjurătorului și intimului deopotrivă – în timp ce pentru toate astea Perhaps a Favorable Organic Moment primește o grămadă de laude, reverența mea este pusă la încercare de câteva idei sau exprimări care nu se pricep.
În afară de ”Times Center, NYC 2010”, dorit un interludiu convențional (pesemne o captare a freamătului din spațiul galeriei), oricum cu o frumusețe proprie, ambele două piese importante ale albumului au ca sursă o anume atmosferă și trec pe parcurs într-un complet diferită, ceva ce eu gândesc a fi un inside-out (sau, de multe ori, inversul) între ambiant și proxim, între divers și particular.
Nicicând primul nivel de percepție nu este categoric. Prima parte a ”Preludiului” de Bach se instalează pe sunete nu foarte frecvente din trafic, cu un zumzet constant de fond; aceeași atmosferă potolită poate fi, de fapt, distantă, auzită de pe verandă sau de la geam, ceea ce impune deja o perspectivă nouă; totul se resoarbe odată cu intervenția instrumentală, o ciudată redare a piesei de suită la corn francez în loc de violoncel. Calitatea muzicală nu mai pare importantă, în fond fragilitatea și stângăcia acestei bucăți fiind apreciată în alte recenzii, văzând în ea o ”primă citire” sau o redare cu dificultăți, multe opriri, chixuri, aer tras în piept după fiecare frază. În partea a doua, îmi place deja foarte mult ce aud; ai zice că totul se mută în altă ”cameră”, într-o atmosferă mai înfundată sau bruiată, dar schimbarea acustică este pentru mine un revers, un ”negativ”, procesat chiar electronic, cu unde dronale, cu frânturi din preludiu într-un ecou difuz, dar în special cu tentativa de a atinge rezonanțele interioare ale tuturor fenomenelor.
Asta este, zic eu, esențial: descripticul e garantat pe parcursul întregului album, dar e totodată destul de brut. Nu să recunosc claxoane, dangătul clopoțeilor agățați la fereastră sau timbrul înfoiat de corn mă mulțumește, ci esențe sau o transpoziție ireală, plăsmuită.
“Annie Laurie” reface traseul în sens opus, deși ”A.L. I” ar fi în sine doar un darc-ambient intens (sau cel puțin o distorsiune într-atât de înecăcioasă a sunetelor, încât devin faux-drone), cu o ușoară hârșâire spectrală și un refren de cântec îngânat lălâu și nazal, dacă ultimele minute ale sale n-ar reveni în exterior, în forfota de bulevard, iar în ”A.L. II” am reauzi cântecul în întregime, o baladă irlandeză cântată natural și dulce, într-un spațiu deschis.
- Viktor Bach, Messianesque
I didn’t feel remotely like writing about music tonight. Its really hot and humid here, I slept for much of the early evening after being at work in the early hours, bad news seems to be coming to me every ten minutes (RIP Cy Twombly) and in between the bad news comes current events in the news that just makes me angry. Trying to focus and then gather my thoughts together enough to write anything coherent isn’t easy, so apologies in advance if the following review says nothing of interest at all…
Quite a wonderful very different kind of recording. Guthrie's taken a field recording concept and extended it into unexpected and moving areas. Several people have written on this release already, and written well, often noting how the album is quasi-symmetrically structured which, indeed, is interesting. The first two pieces are variations on Bach's "Cello Suite No. 2, Prelude" which Guthrie performs on her standard instrument of choice, the French horn. As Richard noted, it sounds as though she's playing for her own enjoyment in her studio, the window open allowing the sounds of the street to be clearly heard. The performance itself is rough, as though she's only begun to negotiate the undoubtedly difficult transferal from cello to horn. But one gets the sense that her ears were perhaps as much attuned to those exterior sounds as her horn and that the idea for the subsequent piece percolated at that time. In any case, that's the narrative I get as listener as in track two, the environmental sounds become wooly and richly blurred (offset with some metallic clinking), the horn compressed and kneaded into a sound reminiscent of a Terry Riley electronically enhanced soprano (though better). It's a wonderful piece, made even more so by the connection to its forebear.
The middle cut, "Times Center, NYC 2010" for quite a good portion of it's 9 minutes plus seems to be just that, the harshly limned sounds of people in a large interior space (one can almost see the fluorescent lighting). But there's a soft ringing thrum that subtly emerges every so often, casting a warm glow on matters. That glow morphs into a more insistent, higher pitched thrum, begins to establish a more equal footing with the screeching children and that odd, indecipherable vocal din you hear in such spaces; ultimately it's all you hear. In some ways, the piece is a variation on ideas found in Pisaro's "Transparent City" compositions, and a very lovely one.
The last two reverse, in a way, the approach of the initial pair, the first being a diffusion of the second. We hear what sounds like a treated recording of traffic whizzing by, possibly overhead (I was very much reminded of a favorite concert, Sean Meehan, Greg Kelley and Zach Wallace, playing very quietly beneath the FDR Drive overpass at 38th St. as cars roared above). It's a ghostly enough sound and when Guthrie enters, softly keening the Scottish ballad, "Annie Laurie", that spectral feeling is redoubled, like a spirit on the wind. As the piece enters its final minutes, the automotive volume is pushed, the machines achieving a sound like enormous hornets, the plaintive voice still peeking through--wonderful work. Guthrie then closes with a simple, but utterly beautiful, rendition of the song, sounding as though singing inside a park tunnel, the sounds of the city in the near distance.
An exceptional recording, one of my favorites of this year.
- Brian Olewnick, Just Outside
Guthrie defines herself as an "acoustician", a stimulating term potentially encompassing lots of different things. This 150-copy limited edition CD focuses instead on very few elements, the most important being the perception of the surroundings. The bulk of the matter is in fact defined by the incidence of metropolitan activity, close or in the background; the rest is left to expert processing, with a definite tendency to the choice of wrapping resonances that for long minutes escort the listener with head-congesting hums and lingering echoes. These spells comprise the album's finest facets, shaped as they are from the manipulation and/or expansion of less momentous fragments in which the protagonist practices Bach on her French horn or sings a folk lullaby, in both occasions with appreciable humanity bathed in inadequate intonation. The latter episodes would like to be considered as soulful sketches of warts-and-all audio verité in a way, but the opening track in particular results quite tedious after repeated listens. On the other hand, the inscrutable mix of vocal currents and zooming cars defining "Annie Laurie (I)‚" recalls, to some extent, Akira Rabelais' Spellewauerynsherde. An involuntary substantiation of this young woman's conscientious ears.
- Massimo Ricci, Touching Extremes
For the second time this year I get to draw your attention to the fine imprint Copy For Your Records, on which Anne Guthrie's work, Perhaps A Favorable Organic Moment, came out earlier this year. A strange brew of Scottish balladry, a warts-and-all essaying of a Bach cello suite on her battered French horn, and Guthrie's remarkable synthesis of traffic, room tones, pedestrian cacophony, and beautifully limned sine tones, this one eludes words as much as anything I have written about. Guthrie's work in this area [do yourself a favor, and locate a copy of her standing sitting, released in 2010 on Engraved Glass, another gift of treated field recordings] is highly intuitive, with a finely developed capacity for fitting together disparate sonic elements in a way I find disarming-somehow Guthrie gets right to the heart of the matter in her solo works, no dross or superfluities. She has, and this is my highest praise, whatever sound area is under discussion, very big ears; and, like the aforementioned McLaughlin, a big heartedness to her music.
- Jesse Goin, Crow With No Mouth
Quite a wonderful very different kind of recording. Guthrie's taken a field recording concept and extended it into unexpected and moving areas. Several people have written on this release already, and written well, often noting how the album is quasi-symmetrically structured which, indeed, is interesting. The first two pieces are variations on Bach's "Cello Suite No. 2, Prelude" which Guthrie performs on her standard instrument of choice, the French horn. As Richard noted, it sounds as though she's playing for her own enjoyment in her studio, the window open allowing the sounds of the street to be clearly heard. The performance itself is rough, as though she's only begun to negotiate the undoubtedly difficult transferal from cello to horn. But one gets the sense that her ears were perhaps as much attuned to those exterior sounds as her horn and that the idea for the subsequent piece percolated at that time. In any case, that's the narrative I get as listener as in track two, the environmental sounds become wooly and richly blurred (offset with some metallic clinking), the horn compressed and kneaded into a sound reminiscent of a Terry Riley electronically enhanced soprano (though better). It's a wonderful piece, made even more so by the connection to its forebear.
The middle cut, "Times Center, NYC 2010" for quite a good portion of it's 9 minutes plus seems to be just that, the harshly limned sounds of people in a large interior space (one can almost see the fluorescent lighting). But there's a soft ringing thrum that subtly emerges every so often, casting a warm glow on matters. That glow morphs into a more insistent, higher pitched thrum, begins to establish a more equal footing with the screeching children and that odd, indecipherable vocal din you hear in such spaces; ultimately it's all you hear. In some ways, the piece is a variation on ideas found in Pisaro's "Transparent City" compositions, and a very lovely one.
The last two reverse, in a way, the approach of the initial pair, the first being a diffusion of the second. We hear what sounds like a treated recording of traffic whizzing by, possibly overhead (I was very much reminded of a favorite concert, Sean Meehan, Greg Kelley and Zach Wallace, playing very quietly beneath the FDR Drive overpass at 38th St. as cars roared above). It's a ghostly enough sound and when Guthrie enters, softly keening the Scottish ballad, "Annie Laurie", that spectral feeling is redoubled, like a spirit on the wind. As the piece enters its final minutes, the automotive volume is pushed, the machines achieving a sound like enormous hornets, the plaintive voice still peeking through--wonderful work. Guthrie then closes with a simple, but utterly beautiful, rendition of the song, sounding as though singing inside a park tunnel, the sounds of the city in the near distance.
An exceptional recording, one of my favorites of this year.
- Brian Olewnick, Just Outside
Guthrie defines herself as an "acoustician", a stimulating term potentially encompassing lots of different things. This 150-copy limited edition CD focuses instead on very few elements, the most important being the perception of the surroundings. The bulk of the matter is in fact defined by the incidence of metropolitan activity, close or in the background; the rest is left to expert processing, with a definite tendency to the choice of wrapping resonances that for long minutes escort the listener with head-congesting hums and lingering echoes. These spells comprise the album's finest facets, shaped as they are from the manipulation and/or expansion of less momentous fragments in which the protagonist practices Bach on her French horn or sings a folk lullaby, in both occasions with appreciable humanity bathed in inadequate intonation. The latter episodes would like to be considered as soulful sketches of warts-and-all audio verité in a way, but the opening track in particular results quite tedious after repeated listens. On the other hand, the inscrutable mix of vocal currents and zooming cars defining "Annie Laurie (I)‚" recalls, to some extent, Akira Rabelais' Spellewauerynsherde. An involuntary substantiation of this young woman's conscientious ears.
- Massimo Ricci, Touching Extremes
For the second time this year I get to draw your attention to the fine imprint Copy For Your Records, on which Anne Guthrie's work, Perhaps A Favorable Organic Moment, came out earlier this year. A strange brew of Scottish balladry, a warts-and-all essaying of a Bach cello suite on her battered French horn, and Guthrie's remarkable synthesis of traffic, room tones, pedestrian cacophony, and beautifully limned sine tones, this one eludes words as much as anything I have written about. Guthrie's work in this area [do yourself a favor, and locate a copy of her standing sitting, released in 2010 on Engraved Glass, another gift of treated field recordings] is highly intuitive, with a finely developed capacity for fitting together disparate sonic elements in a way I find disarming-somehow Guthrie gets right to the heart of the matter in her solo works, no dross or superfluities. She has, and this is my highest praise, whatever sound area is under discussion, very big ears; and, like the aforementioned McLaughlin, a big heartedness to her music.
- Jesse Goin, Crow With No Mouth
This record is, unsurprisingly really, very good. One of the best things I've heard this year. There's a beautiful arc to the whole thing, five pieces, bookended with two tracks of straightforward simplicity, the middle exploring ranges of abstraction and manipulation. In some ways the most affecting parts are the first and last. In both cases, so intimate-feeling, even if they're recorded in obviously public settings. Beautiful, and it just all makes so much sense, it all fits together so perfectly.
- BW Diederich, Everything in Generalities
More thoughts on Anne Guthrie's "Perhaps a Favorable Organic Moment". In particular the first two tracks, Bach Cello Suite No. 2, Prelude (i) and Bach Cello Suite No. 2, Prelude (ii). I've been listening to this quite a bit of late, and am finding a lot to enjoy and a lot to think about. Not sure if I'll give the other tracks the same treatment, which isn't to say they're less interesting or less enjoyable just that I lack follow-through. Also worth noting, this isn't really a review, more an attempt to capture in writing some of what I find so interesting in this music.
That first track starts off so unassuming. A field recording, room tone, voices passing, steps, cars or trains in the distance, and it just sits, stays. Until that french horn comes in. It's loud. Not jarring, but loud. The foreground suddenly becomes the background, and what at a first pass comes off as simple french horn playing, reveals a whole intimate world of secondary sound. Weaving in and out of her playing are these very intimate noises, making it seem like you're right next to her. Her breath between phrases, her fingers on the valves, and later, missteps, notes slightly off, phrases repeated in a way that is obviously not written. That's not to malign her playing, as I think it's beautiful, and works perfectly. But you get a sense of voyeurism, or less weirdly perhaps, of being invited to watch a practice. But through it all is still the environment, making itself known occasionally with a noise obviously not from Guthrie. It's somehow private and public, and on headphones especially, startlingly intimate.
As soon as the second track starts you can hear the similarities, but there's a distance, a remove, and what sounds almost like a doubling. The room tone of the field recording becomes a bit ominous. The natural resonance affected into a deeper hum, and soon enough you hear the french horn, but this time it's not natural at all. Not intimate, but alien. A weird doubling again, sounding like multiple french horns all playing snippets out of sync, bent, refracted. And the environment becomes alien as well, car horns repeating themselves, public space divided into chiming overtones, crystalline, unnatural. And it's frankly beautiful. A slow crawl, the hum growing and growing, the doubled french horn fading in and out of focus, at times stretched, at times clipped, always alien.
I love the relationship between these two pieces. They're both somewhat unsettling, but in very different ways. On the one hand there's that mix of intensely close, intimate recording and the cavernous sounding field recording in a public place. And in the second track we know the source material, have in fact just listened to it, but now it's both recognizable and alien all at the same time. What was almost sweet in a way becomes something a bit more forbidding (foreboding?). We can recognize it as coming from something familiar, but the result is unfamiliar.
There's an element of the magician revealing her tricks to this record that I appreciate. Or more accurately, of an artist sharing her source material. And that, I think, gets at what I like so much. I've (over)-used the word intimate when talking about this record because it feels so accurate. It's both intimate and inviting, even when sounding ominous and alien. Guthrie shares both source and result, and presents them on equal ground, making it clear that the first track is as much a work, complete and ready for other ears as the second track. I want to talk about honesty, but that feels cliched, but maybe not inaccurate.
Still highly recommend you buy this, if it's not clear.
- BW Diederich, Everything in Generalities
- BW Diederich, Everything in Generalities
More thoughts on Anne Guthrie's "Perhaps a Favorable Organic Moment". In particular the first two tracks, Bach Cello Suite No. 2, Prelude (i) and Bach Cello Suite No. 2, Prelude (ii). I've been listening to this quite a bit of late, and am finding a lot to enjoy and a lot to think about. Not sure if I'll give the other tracks the same treatment, which isn't to say they're less interesting or less enjoyable just that I lack follow-through. Also worth noting, this isn't really a review, more an attempt to capture in writing some of what I find so interesting in this music.
That first track starts off so unassuming. A field recording, room tone, voices passing, steps, cars or trains in the distance, and it just sits, stays. Until that french horn comes in. It's loud. Not jarring, but loud. The foreground suddenly becomes the background, and what at a first pass comes off as simple french horn playing, reveals a whole intimate world of secondary sound. Weaving in and out of her playing are these very intimate noises, making it seem like you're right next to her. Her breath between phrases, her fingers on the valves, and later, missteps, notes slightly off, phrases repeated in a way that is obviously not written. That's not to malign her playing, as I think it's beautiful, and works perfectly. But you get a sense of voyeurism, or less weirdly perhaps, of being invited to watch a practice. But through it all is still the environment, making itself known occasionally with a noise obviously not from Guthrie. It's somehow private and public, and on headphones especially, startlingly intimate.
As soon as the second track starts you can hear the similarities, but there's a distance, a remove, and what sounds almost like a doubling. The room tone of the field recording becomes a bit ominous. The natural resonance affected into a deeper hum, and soon enough you hear the french horn, but this time it's not natural at all. Not intimate, but alien. A weird doubling again, sounding like multiple french horns all playing snippets out of sync, bent, refracted. And the environment becomes alien as well, car horns repeating themselves, public space divided into chiming overtones, crystalline, unnatural. And it's frankly beautiful. A slow crawl, the hum growing and growing, the doubled french horn fading in and out of focus, at times stretched, at times clipped, always alien.
I love the relationship between these two pieces. They're both somewhat unsettling, but in very different ways. On the one hand there's that mix of intensely close, intimate recording and the cavernous sounding field recording in a public place. And in the second track we know the source material, have in fact just listened to it, but now it's both recognizable and alien all at the same time. What was almost sweet in a way becomes something a bit more forbidding (foreboding?). We can recognize it as coming from something familiar, but the result is unfamiliar.
There's an element of the magician revealing her tricks to this record that I appreciate. Or more accurately, of an artist sharing her source material. And that, I think, gets at what I like so much. I've (over)-used the word intimate when talking about this record because it feels so accurate. It's both intimate and inviting, even when sounding ominous and alien. Guthrie shares both source and result, and presents them on equal ground, making it clear that the first track is as much a work, complete and ready for other ears as the second track. I want to talk about honesty, but that feels cliched, but maybe not inaccurate.
Still highly recommend you buy this, if it's not clear.
- BW Diederich, Everything in Generalities
The release by Anne Guthrie is surely one of the stranger discs of this week. Guthrie is an 'acoustician, composer, French horn player and writer' from Brooklyn. She studies right now at Rensselaer Polytechnic (where Pauline Oliveros teaches) and she is interested in exploring non-musical sounds and acoustic phenomena. Nothing out of the ordinary for Vital Weekly, you might think. There are three pieces on this CD, of which the first and the last are separated into two parts. In the first we hear field recordings, humming quite low in part one and ventilator sounds in part two, over which Guthrie improvises with the French horn Bach's cello suite No. 2 (the prelude to be precise). The final piece repeats this but with Guthrie singing a folk song. Sandwiched between these two is a recording from Times Center in New York, which seems to be a pure field recordings piece. Its a bit unclear, but perhaps that's the great thing about music, if she is singing these pieces, or playing the horn, on location or wether she uses various recordings mixed together to create her pieces. Is she in a tunnel, like in the final piece suggests, or on the street in the piece before? Guthrie seems to be interested in creating audio illusions with her music - raising questions as to where and how things were made, if there was any subsequent treatments (which I doubt, but in her Times Center piece also difficult to ignore thinking about) and obviously what it all means. A most curious disc indeed. At first a bit annoying ('french horn trying to play Bach, what is that all about?'), but the more it is played - and use some more volume here - the better it gets.
- Frans de Waard, Vital Weekly
Picked up on a little buzz surrounding this young sound artist lately, particularly from a rather favourable review in the Wire's Outer Limits section. I don't remember that review giving any mention of Guthrie as a French Horn player, and although it says so right there in her bio, I wasn't expecting it to make an appearance (at least not such a recognizable appearance) here. However, about four minutes into the opening recording of one of Guthrie's urban spaces, the French Horn makes its presence known, transforming the subtle sonic space into something much more overt. The horn emits a lackadaisical tune for five minutes or so, as if played by a busker in the late afternoon on some sunny European boulevard. I'm still scratching my head about this first piece, and ultimately I think the album would have probably faired better without the horn passage.
The rest of the album shines brightly, the second track seeing a much subtler processed approach to the horn, along with layered-in bells and varying harmonics. The third track, entitled Times Center, NYC 2010, is a field recording that remarkably captures the depth of the recorded space. Hundreds of overlapping voices and an array of electronic bleeps and sputters present themselves in numerous depth ranges, so as combined, they sound as if occupying the entire field. Annie Laurie, parts i & ii, conclude the album, the former is a haunting piece for windswept drone and ghostly voice while the latter is an a cappella version of Annie Laurie (I presume), being sung in another of Guthrie's "unique" acoustical spaces.
- Adrian Dziewanski, Scrapyard Forecast
- Frans de Waard, Vital Weekly
Picked up on a little buzz surrounding this young sound artist lately, particularly from a rather favourable review in the Wire's Outer Limits section. I don't remember that review giving any mention of Guthrie as a French Horn player, and although it says so right there in her bio, I wasn't expecting it to make an appearance (at least not such a recognizable appearance) here. However, about four minutes into the opening recording of one of Guthrie's urban spaces, the French Horn makes its presence known, transforming the subtle sonic space into something much more overt. The horn emits a lackadaisical tune for five minutes or so, as if played by a busker in the late afternoon on some sunny European boulevard. I'm still scratching my head about this first piece, and ultimately I think the album would have probably faired better without the horn passage.
The rest of the album shines brightly, the second track seeing a much subtler processed approach to the horn, along with layered-in bells and varying harmonics. The third track, entitled Times Center, NYC 2010, is a field recording that remarkably captures the depth of the recorded space. Hundreds of overlapping voices and an array of electronic bleeps and sputters present themselves in numerous depth ranges, so as combined, they sound as if occupying the entire field. Annie Laurie, parts i & ii, conclude the album, the former is a haunting piece for windswept drone and ghostly voice while the latter is an a cappella version of Annie Laurie (I presume), being sung in another of Guthrie's "unique" acoustical spaces.
- Adrian Dziewanski, Scrapyard Forecast
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Joe Panzner
Clearing, Polluted
1. Young Theorist (17:19)
2. Hindsight Is 50/50 (17:40)
3. Less Than A Feeling (11:05)
For Stephen Lionel Caynon
Not Without: Wendy, Joseph, Richard, Mike, Larry
This summer I was reading Multitude: War & Democracy In the Age of Empire [Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Penguin Press, 2004], and came across an intriguing descriptor that I copied for my records, thinking I might find a home for it in a future music review. In a passage describing the political concept of swarms, almost always used as a pejorative [think sheeple], the authors note, admiringly, that Rimbaud flipped the word, making of it an encomium. In his 1871 hymns to the Paris Commune, the poet sang of the communards' anarchistic spirit as the "music of the swarm". Critic Kristin Ross, writing of Rimbaud's Illuminations, observes a sound-quality in his mad prosody she calls "insect verse", and elaborates, "...[Rimbaud's poetry] is a force field of unassigned frequencies, ominous or lulling, depending on the context."
In the maelstrom and transitory lulls of Joe Panzner's Clearing, Polluted, a three-part work he developed over the past two years in fits and starts [necessitated in no small part by dint of becoming a father, while persevering through a doctoral dissertation in musicology], I hear a force field of unassigned, sometimes ineffable frequencies. They are indeed alternately ominous [the extreme low-end frequencies that roil and gather force midway through the first section, Young Theorist], and lulling [the oscillating, consonant drone that concludes this section]. There is insect verse as well, sections of furtive clicks and rattling reminiscent of the scurrying and scattering guitar abuse heard on Kevin Drumm's first few releases. The ferocious second section, Hindsight Is 50/50, might in fact be reductively referred to as the sonic love-child of Drumm's Sheer Hellish Miasma, and Julien Ottavi's Nervure Magnetique, raised in the nursery of Francisco Lopez.
These little passes at clever referents help convey a sound area, but also compel me to say I do not hear Clearing. Polluted as being derivative; on the contrary, I consider this surprising release, alongside the current work of folks like Jason Lescalleet, Mike Shiflet and some of Daniel Menche's stuff, to be nearly redemptive in an area of music as stagnant and surfeit with shoddy releases as can be found in any genre. Panzner brings an acute attention to detail and precision to what his playing partner Mike Shiflet once dubbed "excess audio" spatial detail, clearly obsessive levels of sonic-sifting for the most organic [read, not contrived or precious] elements of tension and release, and an improbably mature grasp on the possibilities of the entire frequency range. If your ears are high or low-end aversive, wait a while; the scope of Clearing, Polluted yields rich, if occasionally pummeling, sounds from across the dynamic range. While it is not as crucial that you listen with your fingers affixed to the volume control as, say, listening to Julien Ottavi or Giya Kancheli [the latter's work rivals any noisenik's for jolting the lulled listener out of their seat with his self-described "battle scene" passages], have a care if playing Clearing, Polluted around sonic tourists, or dogs with a high startle response.
I called this a surprising release, as I think even a reasonably seasoned listener to this area of music would not expect a work of such impressive structure and range to come in the trickle of releases Panzner has issued over the past five years - a couple of CDRs in 2006, a few stellar documents from Scenic Railroads, Panzner's duo project with Shiflet, between 2004-2006. Panzner's mastering of Shiflet's essential, self-released 2010 work, Llanos, was a clue for attentive listeners that he has mad skills in that area of production. Nonetheless, I wasn't prepared for this jolt of beauty. Clearing, Polluted enters the field of similar releases with assured blasts of gravitas and fury, and never treads water nor falters. Much of its 46 minutes is comprised of swarms of meticulously assembled noise that reminds me, oh yeah, Panzner-the-composer makes of swarms of noise what other composers construct with blocks, or sheets, or notated measures of sound.
I have listened through Clearing, Polluted many times; easily annoyed, and quick to bail from the extreme areas of the noise continuum, I am happy to report we have one more musician who brings both viscera and intelligence to the squall, both density and fine detail, and hits the pavement with a clutch of ideas in his fists. Massive, but also deft and brisk, and at times grippingly melancholic, Clearing, Polluted is the happy surprise for this listener of 2011. I am hard-pressed to imagine anything being released in the balance of this year that would dislodge it from my few, favorite releases of 2011. I am pleased to see it come out on Richard Kamerman's Copy For Your Records imprint. May it not get lost in the ridiculous deluge of releases this year, as is, of course, the fate of any music with guts and ideas issuing from similarly small imprints.
The swarm metaphor was swiped from Kristin Ross, The Emergence of Social Space: Rimbaud and the Paris Commune, Verso, 2008
- Jesse Goin, Crow With No Mouth
In the maelstrom and transitory lulls of Joe Panzner's Clearing, Polluted, a three-part work he developed over the past two years in fits and starts [necessitated in no small part by dint of becoming a father, while persevering through a doctoral dissertation in musicology], I hear a force field of unassigned, sometimes ineffable frequencies. They are indeed alternately ominous [the extreme low-end frequencies that roil and gather force midway through the first section, Young Theorist], and lulling [the oscillating, consonant drone that concludes this section]. There is insect verse as well, sections of furtive clicks and rattling reminiscent of the scurrying and scattering guitar abuse heard on Kevin Drumm's first few releases. The ferocious second section, Hindsight Is 50/50, might in fact be reductively referred to as the sonic love-child of Drumm's Sheer Hellish Miasma, and Julien Ottavi's Nervure Magnetique, raised in the nursery of Francisco Lopez.
These little passes at clever referents help convey a sound area, but also compel me to say I do not hear Clearing. Polluted as being derivative; on the contrary, I consider this surprising release, alongside the current work of folks like Jason Lescalleet, Mike Shiflet and some of Daniel Menche's stuff, to be nearly redemptive in an area of music as stagnant and surfeit with shoddy releases as can be found in any genre. Panzner brings an acute attention to detail and precision to what his playing partner Mike Shiflet once dubbed "excess audio" spatial detail, clearly obsessive levels of sonic-sifting for the most organic [read, not contrived or precious] elements of tension and release, and an improbably mature grasp on the possibilities of the entire frequency range. If your ears are high or low-end aversive, wait a while; the scope of Clearing, Polluted yields rich, if occasionally pummeling, sounds from across the dynamic range. While it is not as crucial that you listen with your fingers affixed to the volume control as, say, listening to Julien Ottavi or Giya Kancheli [the latter's work rivals any noisenik's for jolting the lulled listener out of their seat with his self-described "battle scene" passages], have a care if playing Clearing, Polluted around sonic tourists, or dogs with a high startle response.
I called this a surprising release, as I think even a reasonably seasoned listener to this area of music would not expect a work of such impressive structure and range to come in the trickle of releases Panzner has issued over the past five years - a couple of CDRs in 2006, a few stellar documents from Scenic Railroads, Panzner's duo project with Shiflet, between 2004-2006. Panzner's mastering of Shiflet's essential, self-released 2010 work, Llanos, was a clue for attentive listeners that he has mad skills in that area of production. Nonetheless, I wasn't prepared for this jolt of beauty. Clearing, Polluted enters the field of similar releases with assured blasts of gravitas and fury, and never treads water nor falters. Much of its 46 minutes is comprised of swarms of meticulously assembled noise that reminds me, oh yeah, Panzner-the-composer makes of swarms of noise what other composers construct with blocks, or sheets, or notated measures of sound.
I have listened through Clearing, Polluted many times; easily annoyed, and quick to bail from the extreme areas of the noise continuum, I am happy to report we have one more musician who brings both viscera and intelligence to the squall, both density and fine detail, and hits the pavement with a clutch of ideas in his fists. Massive, but also deft and brisk, and at times grippingly melancholic, Clearing, Polluted is the happy surprise for this listener of 2011. I am hard-pressed to imagine anything being released in the balance of this year that would dislodge it from my few, favorite releases of 2011. I am pleased to see it come out on Richard Kamerman's Copy For Your Records imprint. May it not get lost in the ridiculous deluge of releases this year, as is, of course, the fate of any music with guts and ideas issuing from similarly small imprints.
The swarm metaphor was swiped from Kristin Ross, The Emergence of Social Space: Rimbaud and the Paris Commune, Verso, 2008
- Jesse Goin, Crow With No Mouth
One of the more pleasing examples of synchronicity the final quarter of 2011 served up was breakthrough, above-ground solo albums from not one but both members of Scenic Railroads. First Mike Shiflet's Sufferers on Type, and now Joe Panzner's Clearing, Polluted. The album's centerpiece is "Hindsight is 50/50", a fierce Noise blast worthy of peak-era Kevin Drumm, which fires out jagged fragments in expressionist splurges, gradually coalescing into a scything power-drone. It's bookended by two intelligently tense pieces. "Less Than A Feeling" slips past elegantly, mutating in form from delicate tones to crackling frequencies. The 17 minute opening track "Young Theorist" is the standout, an exercise in textural stress taking in some surprising structural detours
- Nick Cain, Wire Magazine, Issue #335, January 2012
Ah, so satisfying. I remember stumbling across an unusually well-written review of "The Hands of Caravaggio" back when, by a young 'un somewhere out in Ohio, impressive enough that I wrote him and complimented his work. Well, he's done a good bit since then, both written and aural but "Clearing, Polluted" is a real high water mark.
Descriptives here are going to be a bit of a problem as I think it'll be tough to do justice to how this actually sounds. Jesse did a fine job; consult him as well. All electronics, yes, and one gets the impression that the devices are fairly lo-fi in nature.It begins quite harshly with blistered sounds; in truth, I was anticipating something along these lines. But Panzner very quickly moves into subtler areas--not routine quiet patches but mysterious stretches with soft but disturbing stria wafting over the surface, interrupted here and there by what seem to be brushes on drums. That gaseous sound becomes more and more embodied, revealing a startling richness and, eventually, an organ-like beauty. This tumbles into the second track which again, begins in scattered, abrupt fashion, a burble of bumps, hisses, gurgles and crackles. It then explodes into a fine cacophony, the most raucous portion of the disc, but music that somehow seems expertly reined, bucking but not swirling off into a muddy morass, hypersensitive to detail and sonic weight. This too coalesces into a surprising form some seven minutes in, a kind of grinding, chiming mass that contains the feel of something rockish--like the best moments of Branca, only much better. Seriously strong stuff.
But the last track, the excellently titled, "Less Than a Feeling", is perhaps the most fully realized, solid piece. Again the detail combined with the billowy structure utterly wins me over. It's as though you're hearing sounds from inside the mantle of the Earth, miles below the surface, deep and resonant like you'd expect but with needle-thin, unexpected sparks flying. Soon, other sounds make themselves felt, many, each inserted with fine grace and timing before ending, perfectly, with a grating plug pull that brings us, nearly full circle, back to the beginning.
Great recording, do check it out.
- Brian Olewnick, Just Outside
A name that I vaguely remembered, but indeed: Joe Panzer is a member of Scenic Railroads along Gameboy Mike Shiflet. One of those noise bands I actually quite like as it happens. I am not sure right now, but I don't think I heard much of his solo music before. I have no idea what kind of instruments he uses, if any at all of course. The opening piece, 'Young Theorist' is quite an interesting piece of glitchy electronics, bouncing back and forth in the piece, left and right, all along with some vague acoustic rumble and occasionally very deep bass sounds. 'Hindsight Is 50/50', the next piece is crashing cascade of noise, which exactly didn't do much for me. 'Less Than A Feeling' (maybe a cover of 'More Than A Feeling'? - to speak of dreadful ghosts from the past), the closing piece, however is quite an interesting low humming bass affair, with some higher pitched frequencies going along and sounds a bit like the opening piece, but has its own character. References made by the label include Kevin Drumm, Julien Ottavi and Zbigniew Karkowski, and I think that's indeed quite correct: Panzner plays his own version of radical computer music. Once its derails and in the other two instances its actually very good. Good noise!
- Frans de Waard, Vital Weekly
- Nick Cain, Wire Magazine, Issue #335, January 2012
Ah, so satisfying. I remember stumbling across an unusually well-written review of "The Hands of Caravaggio" back when, by a young 'un somewhere out in Ohio, impressive enough that I wrote him and complimented his work. Well, he's done a good bit since then, both written and aural but "Clearing, Polluted" is a real high water mark.
Descriptives here are going to be a bit of a problem as I think it'll be tough to do justice to how this actually sounds. Jesse did a fine job; consult him as well. All electronics, yes, and one gets the impression that the devices are fairly lo-fi in nature.It begins quite harshly with blistered sounds; in truth, I was anticipating something along these lines. But Panzner very quickly moves into subtler areas--not routine quiet patches but mysterious stretches with soft but disturbing stria wafting over the surface, interrupted here and there by what seem to be brushes on drums. That gaseous sound becomes more and more embodied, revealing a startling richness and, eventually, an organ-like beauty. This tumbles into the second track which again, begins in scattered, abrupt fashion, a burble of bumps, hisses, gurgles and crackles. It then explodes into a fine cacophony, the most raucous portion of the disc, but music that somehow seems expertly reined, bucking but not swirling off into a muddy morass, hypersensitive to detail and sonic weight. This too coalesces into a surprising form some seven minutes in, a kind of grinding, chiming mass that contains the feel of something rockish--like the best moments of Branca, only much better. Seriously strong stuff.
But the last track, the excellently titled, "Less Than a Feeling", is perhaps the most fully realized, solid piece. Again the detail combined with the billowy structure utterly wins me over. It's as though you're hearing sounds from inside the mantle of the Earth, miles below the surface, deep and resonant like you'd expect but with needle-thin, unexpected sparks flying. Soon, other sounds make themselves felt, many, each inserted with fine grace and timing before ending, perfectly, with a grating plug pull that brings us, nearly full circle, back to the beginning.
Great recording, do check it out.
- Brian Olewnick, Just Outside
A name that I vaguely remembered, but indeed: Joe Panzer is a member of Scenic Railroads along Gameboy Mike Shiflet. One of those noise bands I actually quite like as it happens. I am not sure right now, but I don't think I heard much of his solo music before. I have no idea what kind of instruments he uses, if any at all of course. The opening piece, 'Young Theorist' is quite an interesting piece of glitchy electronics, bouncing back and forth in the piece, left and right, all along with some vague acoustic rumble and occasionally very deep bass sounds. 'Hindsight Is 50/50', the next piece is crashing cascade of noise, which exactly didn't do much for me. 'Less Than A Feeling' (maybe a cover of 'More Than A Feeling'? - to speak of dreadful ghosts from the past), the closing piece, however is quite an interesting low humming bass affair, with some higher pitched frequencies going along and sounds a bit like the opening piece, but has its own character. References made by the label include Kevin Drumm, Julien Ottavi and Zbigniew Karkowski, and I think that's indeed quite correct: Panzner plays his own version of radical computer music. Once its derails and in the other two instances its actually very good. Good noise!
- Frans de Waard, Vital Weekly
I was just thinking the other day that the art of constructing a CDs of purely ‘abstract’ sounds, not field recordings, or obviously instrumental samples is a bit of a dying art. I of course am not talking about improvisation here, but the taking of more unidentifiable material and, using a computer, sculpting it into a coherent work. These days when I listen to something of this kind I usually seem to hear something identifiable in there somewhere, be it the ubiquitous hydrophone recording, or traffic, or birdsong, or maybe something more unusual that isn’t on the usual checklist but can be identified. The likes of John Wall, meshing together raw, nameless material into something less amorphous are probably still all out there, but it does seem their paths cross less frequently with mine than they used to.
So it has been really pleasing to listen to Joe Panzner’s Clearing, Polluted disc over the past couple of weeks. Pieced together on a computer over three years from (I am guessing) bits and pieces of improvised electroacoustic matter into something of a three-part epic composition, there is something refreshingly simple, yet darkly emotive about this new release. Panzner first came to my attention as one half of the Scenic Railroads duo a good few years ago now. Releasing a handful of strong CDs that crossed between modern electroacoustic improv and the noise end of the spectrum, the American duo stopped working so regularly together when geographic and familial matters took precedence. Assuming is a dangerous thing to do, but I will guess that as he became a father for the first time, Panzner retreated to working slowly on less immediate, more considered music when time allowed. In this case in particular, I would say that this was a good move, necessary or not, as Clearing, Polluted sounds like a thoroughly considered, fully realised work by a much matured musician.
This said, the album does not sound like a studio construction. The danger of working in this manner will always be that the immediacy and ineffable energy of improvised music will be lost to the slippery slope of precision and dilemma. Nothing like that has taken place here, and the three tracks each seethe with a raw vitality, be it the quiet, restrained fidgeting and tremor of the first and last pieces, or the blistering mass of confused noise that forms much of the centrepiece. Panzner manages to get a fair amount of passion and power into the work. This doesn’t sound like a series of layered improvisations or a cut and paste collage, but a thoroughly organic, living entity. To create something that sounds so alive and vibrant over such a long duration of time is quite an achievement.
The opening Young Theorist shudders into life like an old engine begin started for the first time in years, brittle bits of rough electronics spark intermittently into life before settling into a faintly digital shimmer for a while before the first of several eruptions of electronic magma fuse the process and force the music to start again. Throughout the album there is a beautiful balance between the bassy hums, drifting swathes and clicking chatter that sit in the background and the more violent activities that come and go above them. The very slowly intensifying layers that form the base of the music gradually seem to increase the heat before the sudden inflammations rip the music open. If becoming a parent is supposed to mellow a musician then Panzner seems immune to such remodelling. While Clearing, Polluted feels a thoroughly evolved, mature work, it also bares a lot of anger and emotion. The frustrations of youth haven’t gone away, they have just been neatly arranged.
As Young Theorist resolves itself to a soothing, almost ambient wash for its closing minutes, the following Hindsight is 50/50 stumbles its way through a darkened room full of shards of broken circuits until the light is suddenly switched on and we are assaulted by a stream of occasionally thunderous, digitally twisted noise that leaps around rapidly from one set of dynamics to another, sounds carefully selected, precisely placed maybe, and yet giving the impression of catastrophic collapse, elements crashing around our ears however we turn our heads. As a listener I find myself thrown headfirst into this music, lost in its intense mazes, a stream of metaphors and poetic extremes falling into my head to describe its claustrophobic enclosures and the hive of activity flying about inside before the track flatlines into a grey, industrially textured impasse that eventually gives way to the softest of quiet recoveries. The closing Less Than a Feeling continues at low volume, and much to its credit, refuses to go the same way as the preceding piece. Instead the track folds together incredibly delicate, barely audible tones, shimmering pinpricks of digital detritus, looming clouds and smaller, seemingly stray particles into a work that feels pregnant with anticipation, and keeps you wondering where it will go until you realise it has already taken you to some quite lovely places. Brian used the word grace to describe the impact of this closing track, and I struggle to come up with anything better- after the histrionics of the album’s central track the closing piece has a dignity about it, a calm repose littered with fascinating small happenings that almost makes its own statement about the rest of the album. There is one sudden little digital abrasion in this final piece, and its intrusion signals the end of the album, a brief raw malfunctioning in the calm that brings everything to a sudden, somehow fitting halt.
I don’t usually get on well with really noisy music, but I have always made it clear that what I don’t like is the sense of reckless abandon that is a feature of so much of the genre, the feeling that the details no longer matter. Clearing, Polluted, despite its forays into quite harsh, loud sections never feels like it loses control and always feels considered and purposefully arranged. When extremes of volume are used in this way they are highly affecting and bring immediate comparisons to human emotions, anger, tension and fear. Listening to this album is as troublingly difficult as it is joyfully pleasurable. I hope it takes Joe Panzner another three years to make his next album.
Available from the increasingly strong Copy for your Records.
- Richard Pinnell, The Watchful Ear
So it has been really pleasing to listen to Joe Panzner’s Clearing, Polluted disc over the past couple of weeks. Pieced together on a computer over three years from (I am guessing) bits and pieces of improvised electroacoustic matter into something of a three-part epic composition, there is something refreshingly simple, yet darkly emotive about this new release. Panzner first came to my attention as one half of the Scenic Railroads duo a good few years ago now. Releasing a handful of strong CDs that crossed between modern electroacoustic improv and the noise end of the spectrum, the American duo stopped working so regularly together when geographic and familial matters took precedence. Assuming is a dangerous thing to do, but I will guess that as he became a father for the first time, Panzner retreated to working slowly on less immediate, more considered music when time allowed. In this case in particular, I would say that this was a good move, necessary or not, as Clearing, Polluted sounds like a thoroughly considered, fully realised work by a much matured musician.
This said, the album does not sound like a studio construction. The danger of working in this manner will always be that the immediacy and ineffable energy of improvised music will be lost to the slippery slope of precision and dilemma. Nothing like that has taken place here, and the three tracks each seethe with a raw vitality, be it the quiet, restrained fidgeting and tremor of the first and last pieces, or the blistering mass of confused noise that forms much of the centrepiece. Panzner manages to get a fair amount of passion and power into the work. This doesn’t sound like a series of layered improvisations or a cut and paste collage, but a thoroughly organic, living entity. To create something that sounds so alive and vibrant over such a long duration of time is quite an achievement.
The opening Young Theorist shudders into life like an old engine begin started for the first time in years, brittle bits of rough electronics spark intermittently into life before settling into a faintly digital shimmer for a while before the first of several eruptions of electronic magma fuse the process and force the music to start again. Throughout the album there is a beautiful balance between the bassy hums, drifting swathes and clicking chatter that sit in the background and the more violent activities that come and go above them. The very slowly intensifying layers that form the base of the music gradually seem to increase the heat before the sudden inflammations rip the music open. If becoming a parent is supposed to mellow a musician then Panzner seems immune to such remodelling. While Clearing, Polluted feels a thoroughly evolved, mature work, it also bares a lot of anger and emotion. The frustrations of youth haven’t gone away, they have just been neatly arranged.
As Young Theorist resolves itself to a soothing, almost ambient wash for its closing minutes, the following Hindsight is 50/50 stumbles its way through a darkened room full of shards of broken circuits until the light is suddenly switched on and we are assaulted by a stream of occasionally thunderous, digitally twisted noise that leaps around rapidly from one set of dynamics to another, sounds carefully selected, precisely placed maybe, and yet giving the impression of catastrophic collapse, elements crashing around our ears however we turn our heads. As a listener I find myself thrown headfirst into this music, lost in its intense mazes, a stream of metaphors and poetic extremes falling into my head to describe its claustrophobic enclosures and the hive of activity flying about inside before the track flatlines into a grey, industrially textured impasse that eventually gives way to the softest of quiet recoveries. The closing Less Than a Feeling continues at low volume, and much to its credit, refuses to go the same way as the preceding piece. Instead the track folds together incredibly delicate, barely audible tones, shimmering pinpricks of digital detritus, looming clouds and smaller, seemingly stray particles into a work that feels pregnant with anticipation, and keeps you wondering where it will go until you realise it has already taken you to some quite lovely places. Brian used the word grace to describe the impact of this closing track, and I struggle to come up with anything better- after the histrionics of the album’s central track the closing piece has a dignity about it, a calm repose littered with fascinating small happenings that almost makes its own statement about the rest of the album. There is one sudden little digital abrasion in this final piece, and its intrusion signals the end of the album, a brief raw malfunctioning in the calm that brings everything to a sudden, somehow fitting halt.
I don’t usually get on well with really noisy music, but I have always made it clear that what I don’t like is the sense of reckless abandon that is a feature of so much of the genre, the feeling that the details no longer matter. Clearing, Polluted, despite its forays into quite harsh, loud sections never feels like it loses control and always feels considered and purposefully arranged. When extremes of volume are used in this way they are highly affecting and bring immediate comparisons to human emotions, anger, tension and fear. Listening to this album is as troublingly difficult as it is joyfully pleasurable. I hope it takes Joe Panzner another three years to make his next album.
Available from the increasingly strong Copy for your Records.
- Richard Pinnell, The Watchful Ear
glass-mastered CDs in full color digipacks
edition of 150 copies
Antoine Beuger
'un lieu pour être deux'
(pages 1-23 // 47:02)
recorded Saturday April 9, 2011 in Brooklyn, NY
Barry Chabala (guitar)
Ben Owen (synthesized tones, field recordings)
Recorded by Richard Kamerman
Mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi
Thanks to Billy Gomberg
glass-mastered CDs in full color digipacks
edition of 200 copies
Wade Matthews/Alfredo Costa Monteiro
Winter
1. Aconite (8:43)
2. Crookneck (14:10)
3. Flouder (10:10)
4. Haven (6:39)
5. Savory (8:56)
Wade Matthews - digital synthesis, manipulated field recordings
Alfredo Costa Monteiro - amplified springs, electric motors, radio
Recorded january 20-23, 2011 at Smiling Cow Studio, Madrid
hand-cut and stamped railroad board sleeves, fastened with brass eyelets
available for purchase in person or by special request.
copies no longer available.
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Delicate Sen - 20090829
Betalevel, Los Angeles, CA
Billy Gomberg - synthesizers, laptop
Anne Guthrie - french horn
Richard Kamerman - motors, objects, electronics
This evening, since getting home I have been trying to find a cool spot in the house where I could still hear the stereo and listen to tonight's CD, which has been a live disc by the new York based Delicate Sen trio. The group consist of Anne Guthrie, (french horn) Billy Gomberg (laptop) and Richard Kamerman (motors, objects, electronics). The group released their debut album last year on Kamerman's Copy For Your Records label, which I wrote about here.
I'm not all that sure how readily available this CDr is actually. titled Betalevel, Los Angeles, CA, its a live recording wrapped up in a handmade card sleeve, but it doesn't appear at the CFYR website. It may be that Richard K is just circulating the disc around friends and acquaintances, but as Brian wrote, albeit briefly about it (back in June, but as Brian doesn't add titles to his posts it makes them hard to link to directly) I figured it would be OK to review it. Richard can be contacted via the CFYR site, but I am sure he can chime in in the comments here and let us know if its not available to order!
Similar to their first album, the music here is a kind of nervous, tetchy affair that balances quite extreme ends of the aural spectrum, from the really very harsh clatter of Kamerman's motored devices through to the acoustic warmth of Guthrie's french horn, with Gomberg habiting an area somewhere between. The issue I have with this CD but I can't quite decide if its a positive or negative issue, is the somewhat murky recording quality, which actually makes it quite hard to be sure which sounds are coming from the musicians and which from the room. There is certainly a "live" feel to the recording. At one point six or seven minutes in, after Kamerman interrupts proceedings with his loudest and most abrasive burst of clattering mechanics there comes a distant gaggle of spoken voices, as if in a crowd can be heard. Do these sounds come from the room or from Gomberg's laptop? My first thoughts, given the raucous nature of the voices, and the way they flow straight out of the loud interruption is that they are in the room, bu tthen they hang around a little too long and suddenly disappear, so maybe they are a carefully, and cleverly placed sample.
Although all three musicians contribute equally here, it feels as if, and in particlar in the early stages of the recording, that Guthrie is the most present, her languorous tones rolling out one after the other, with the other two thirds of the duo placing sounds in between them. As the set progresses so they begin to direct traffic more, and it becomes hard to tell Gomberg's computer from Kamerman's synth from the hum of the room, with Guthrie's interjections feeling less dominant. The early parts of the disc sound quite cagey, (small c) as if the musicians are feeling out the space, finding a way into the music, but given that this recording was made at the last date of a West coast USA tour (this is announced over the applause at the end of the disc) then this probably wasn't the case. Moreover, the vaguely dislocated, slow start to the set was probably carefully choreographed in real time by the trio, a curiously broken up, non-flowing style of improvisation that gradually seems to come together over time.
Delicate Sen are a group that intrigue me quite a bit. This CD, along with their first release hint at potentially great things, but then leave me hanging slightly, placing all of the right ingredients into the mix, a great blend of sounds, a strong sense of tension in the air, but then somehow don't follow through into the music I really expect to hear. The recording quality may be partly to blame here, but I don't quite manage to enjoy the interplay between the electronic and acoustic here as I suspect I might, and the music passes by full of potential and full of great moments that promise to lead into other things but never quite get there. Betalevel, Los Angeles, CA only really serves to extend my curiosity in this trio from their first disc. I sense there is much to connect with, but I'm not quite there yet, and so far my enjoyment of this music revolves around the blend of instrumentation and the unusual structures within the composition. I don't think I have made an eyes closed, physical connection with the music yet, but perhaps that will come. I suspect seeing the trio live would be of big benefit to my understanding the music's dynamics, but geography would seem to be making that a little difficult at present. Still, thoughtful creative music that is begging for me to listen to it plenty more. I'll do my best.
- Richard Pinnell, The Watchful Ear
I'm not all that sure how readily available this CDr is actually. titled Betalevel, Los Angeles, CA, its a live recording wrapped up in a handmade card sleeve, but it doesn't appear at the CFYR website. It may be that Richard K is just circulating the disc around friends and acquaintances, but as Brian wrote, albeit briefly about it (back in June, but as Brian doesn't add titles to his posts it makes them hard to link to directly) I figured it would be OK to review it. Richard can be contacted via the CFYR site, but I am sure he can chime in in the comments here and let us know if its not available to order!
Similar to their first album, the music here is a kind of nervous, tetchy affair that balances quite extreme ends of the aural spectrum, from the really very harsh clatter of Kamerman's motored devices through to the acoustic warmth of Guthrie's french horn, with Gomberg habiting an area somewhere between. The issue I have with this CD but I can't quite decide if its a positive or negative issue, is the somewhat murky recording quality, which actually makes it quite hard to be sure which sounds are coming from the musicians and which from the room. There is certainly a "live" feel to the recording. At one point six or seven minutes in, after Kamerman interrupts proceedings with his loudest and most abrasive burst of clattering mechanics there comes a distant gaggle of spoken voices, as if in a crowd can be heard. Do these sounds come from the room or from Gomberg's laptop? My first thoughts, given the raucous nature of the voices, and the way they flow straight out of the loud interruption is that they are in the room, bu tthen they hang around a little too long and suddenly disappear, so maybe they are a carefully, and cleverly placed sample.
Although all three musicians contribute equally here, it feels as if, and in particlar in the early stages of the recording, that Guthrie is the most present, her languorous tones rolling out one after the other, with the other two thirds of the duo placing sounds in between them. As the set progresses so they begin to direct traffic more, and it becomes hard to tell Gomberg's computer from Kamerman's synth from the hum of the room, with Guthrie's interjections feeling less dominant. The early parts of the disc sound quite cagey, (small c) as if the musicians are feeling out the space, finding a way into the music, but given that this recording was made at the last date of a West coast USA tour (this is announced over the applause at the end of the disc) then this probably wasn't the case. Moreover, the vaguely dislocated, slow start to the set was probably carefully choreographed in real time by the trio, a curiously broken up, non-flowing style of improvisation that gradually seems to come together over time.
Delicate Sen are a group that intrigue me quite a bit. This CD, along with their first release hint at potentially great things, but then leave me hanging slightly, placing all of the right ingredients into the mix, a great blend of sounds, a strong sense of tension in the air, but then somehow don't follow through into the music I really expect to hear. The recording quality may be partly to blame here, but I don't quite manage to enjoy the interplay between the electronic and acoustic here as I suspect I might, and the music passes by full of potential and full of great moments that promise to lead into other things but never quite get there. Betalevel, Los Angeles, CA only really serves to extend my curiosity in this trio from their first disc. I sense there is much to connect with, but I'm not quite there yet, and so far my enjoyment of this music revolves around the blend of instrumentation and the unusual structures within the composition. I don't think I have made an eyes closed, physical connection with the music yet, but perhaps that will come. I suspect seeing the trio live would be of big benefit to my understanding the music's dynamics, but geography would seem to be making that a little difficult at present. Still, thoughtful creative music that is begging for me to listen to it plenty more. I'll do my best.
- Richard Pinnell, The Watchful Ear
Anne Guthrie (french horn), Billy Gomberg (synthesizer) and Richard Kamerman (motors, objects, electronics) with another very fine effort. As before, on their self-titled disc from last year, there's a simple deliciousness in this combination of sounds, especially the slightly forlorn quality of the horn. But more, it's in the pacing, the willingness to turn toward calmer, even soothing areas when that makes sense and the feeling of completeness, of a full set of music that lingers exactly as long as it has to, in this case about 1/2 hour.
- Brian Olewnick, Just Outside
- Brian Olewnick, Just Outside
hand-cut and stamped railroad board sleeves, fastened with brass eyelets
available for purchase in person or by special request.
copies no longer available.
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Tandem Electrics - 20091119
@ Mike Rosen's, Oberlin, OH
Richard Kamerman and Reed Evan Rosenberg
Tonight, another only semi-official release on the Copy for your Records label run by New Yorker Richard Kamerman. This disc, a CDr sent out by Kamerman to those that showed an interest features a short, (just twenty-two minutes) live recording from November 2009 of Tandem Electrics, Kamerman's raw electronics duo with Reed Rosenberg, whose first album I wrote about way back here. The set here is best described as rough and ready from many different perspectives. The electronics we hear sound on the edge of breakdown, all twisted, faltering circuitry and perhaps some elemental computerised synths, plus small chattering percussive sounds, probably the result of Kamerman amplifying the small motors and electric engines he likes to work with.
The sounds have a gritty, earthy edge to them. Even the silences here are undercut by gentle monitor hum, and so much of what is presented as music might easily be mistaken for the sounds of musicians setting up for a soundcheck, plugs being put in and out, blasts of feedback etc, but it is this raw energy that gives this music its edge. It feels as if there are no frills, no unnecessary aesthetic niceties, just the barren, simple elements required to make electronic music, using instruments discovered and adapted rather than bought for the purpose in hand. There are samples in there as well, voices open the set, and a strange looping guitar-like dirge, lost in the muddy exterior of the recording ends the set, and at the halfway point there is a strange computerised little tune, just a couple of seconds long and a bit like the start up chimes of a computer running an operating system I've never heard of before. Much of the second half of the recording is also forced down under a constant, somewhat oppressively piercing and whining tone that rises and falls in intensity, and at its loudest and most intense had me reaching for the volume dial.
Somehow though, all of these seemingly chaotic parts hang together into something that sounds controlled and deliberate. The recording quality of the music isn't up to much, being a live set captured (I suspect) using relatively simple recording equipment, but this factor seems to just add to the glue holding it all together. The overriding sensation is not one of instrumental skill or finely executed precision, but of a brutally direct, very simple and yet multifaceted form of improvisation. Both musicians have a history playing various forms of noise music, and the highly physical, direct way that noise music connects with its audience is also present here, but on the whole while high volume is passed over here, the unadorned ugliness of the sounds used on 20091119 (as this disc is titled) reflect those found in much modern noise music.
There are better recordings out there of this end of the improvised music scene, many of them involving Kamerman. For a more solid, cohesive listening experience I would recommend Intaglio, the Tandem Electrics album I mentioned earlier before this new live CD, but as a snapshot of a duo working within a style that I rather like this is a listenable and worthwhile brief CD. It is what it is, a rough recording of a short live concert caught somewhere amidst a long tour. It makes me wish I could have been at the concert so as to understand the mysteries of the sounds a lot better, but its ultimately probably a CDr that will now go on a shelf and not be thought of again until the duo next release something more. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, the CDr has been issued by Kamerman to those interested in the music currently being produced by the Tandem Electrics duo. It probably wasn't even meant to be reviewed like this. I suspect that it isn't designed to be any kind of definitive statement beyond a live document of a good gig, and so it works very well within the given parameters. I'm not sure how available this disc really is, but those with an interest in these musicians would be advised to seek a copy out.
- Richard Pinnell, The Watchful Ear
The sounds have a gritty, earthy edge to them. Even the silences here are undercut by gentle monitor hum, and so much of what is presented as music might easily be mistaken for the sounds of musicians setting up for a soundcheck, plugs being put in and out, blasts of feedback etc, but it is this raw energy that gives this music its edge. It feels as if there are no frills, no unnecessary aesthetic niceties, just the barren, simple elements required to make electronic music, using instruments discovered and adapted rather than bought for the purpose in hand. There are samples in there as well, voices open the set, and a strange looping guitar-like dirge, lost in the muddy exterior of the recording ends the set, and at the halfway point there is a strange computerised little tune, just a couple of seconds long and a bit like the start up chimes of a computer running an operating system I've never heard of before. Much of the second half of the recording is also forced down under a constant, somewhat oppressively piercing and whining tone that rises and falls in intensity, and at its loudest and most intense had me reaching for the volume dial.
Somehow though, all of these seemingly chaotic parts hang together into something that sounds controlled and deliberate. The recording quality of the music isn't up to much, being a live set captured (I suspect) using relatively simple recording equipment, but this factor seems to just add to the glue holding it all together. The overriding sensation is not one of instrumental skill or finely executed precision, but of a brutally direct, very simple and yet multifaceted form of improvisation. Both musicians have a history playing various forms of noise music, and the highly physical, direct way that noise music connects with its audience is also present here, but on the whole while high volume is passed over here, the unadorned ugliness of the sounds used on 20091119 (as this disc is titled) reflect those found in much modern noise music.
There are better recordings out there of this end of the improvised music scene, many of them involving Kamerman. For a more solid, cohesive listening experience I would recommend Intaglio, the Tandem Electrics album I mentioned earlier before this new live CD, but as a snapshot of a duo working within a style that I rather like this is a listenable and worthwhile brief CD. It is what it is, a rough recording of a short live concert caught somewhere amidst a long tour. It makes me wish I could have been at the concert so as to understand the mysteries of the sounds a lot better, but its ultimately probably a CDr that will now go on a shelf and not be thought of again until the duo next release something more. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, the CDr has been issued by Kamerman to those interested in the music currently being produced by the Tandem Electrics duo. It probably wasn't even meant to be reviewed like this. I suspect that it isn't designed to be any kind of definitive statement beyond a live document of a good gig, and so it works very well within the given parameters. I'm not sure how available this disc really is, but those with an interest in these musicians would be advised to seek a copy out.
- Richard Pinnell, The Watchful Ear
Kamerman with Reed Evan Rosenberg (electronics). Only similar to the previous disc [Delicate Sen - 20090829] in how well it scans how ably it tiles the audio space. The elements are harsher, though not without ameliorating portions, concentrating on buzzes, whines, rumbles, scrapes. But as in their earlier releases, the ply is satisfyingly thick, the ideas smoothly flowing. It actually ends with a surprising veer into quasi-Fennesz territory. Again, a short (less that 22 minutes), very satisfying performance, well worth hearing.
- Brian Olewnick, Just Outside
- Brian Olewnick, Just Outside
hand-cut and stamped railroad board sleeves, fastened with brass eyelets
laser-printed inserts
3xCD-R set, edition of 18.
SOLD OUT
The piece is also available in its entirety as a .flac format download.
Click each card to the right of this panel in order to download the four movements.
And click here to download a .pdf of the complete score.
If you download the recordings and would like to kick in a donation, just click the button below to contribute. Include your address and I can mail you some CFYRecords-branded stickers and pins or something.
It Is Too Late Now, Your Life Is No Longer Beautiful
Composed by Richard Kamerman
Performed by Frogwell
Sunrise, 5:51 am
Saturday, July 31st 2010
Lighthouse Park, Roosevelt Island
Composed by Richard Kamerman
Performed by Frogwell
| Robert Hardin | Shruti Box, Text |
| Richard Kamerman | Shruti Box, Text |
| Bob Lukomski | Shruti Box, Text |
| Jeremy Slater | Acoustic Guitar |
| Tamara Yadao | Acoustic Guitar |
Sunrise, 5:51 am
Saturday, July 31st 2010
Lighthouse Park, Roosevelt Island
|
Part I (77:00) 3 shruti boxes, 2 acoustic guitars Part III (46:00) 3 shruti boxes, 2 acoustic guitars |
Part II (77:00) 3 shruti boxes Part IV (24:00) 2 acoustic guitars, 3 speakers |
hand-cut and stamped railroad board sleeves, fastened with brass eyelets
available for purchase in person or by special request.
limited copies available.
Miguel A. Garcia & Richard Kamerman - 20110921
HOMOPHONI, HOMOPHEST showcase, NYC
Miguel A. Garcia - electronics
Richard Kamerman - mechanical parts, found objects
hand-stamped fan cd-rs
clear poly slim cases, labeled with clear stickers
Corey Larkin
Raw Data Studies
first: Source/ .pdf (00:34)
second: Dissipative Music/Mu Law Algorithm (14:59)
_____________________
These raw data studies are artifacts from my attempts to get at the bedrock of self-iterated compositional procedures - exploring possible tensions between methodology and perception, determinacy and indeterminacy.
I would like to thank Steve Flato for directing me to the medium of raw data.
____________________
Corey Larkin has a history of making intense & not so easily accessible electronic music. As I'm sure you might expect from the title, Raw Data Studies is more of those wonderful sound experiments.
There's only 2 tracks, the first is a mere 35 seconds long. It's a quick brittle static blast sourced from a PDF file. The second, titled "Dissipative Music/ µũ Law Algorithm," is wayy longer, clocking in at 15 minutes. This is some HARSH shit. Abrasive squelches, piercing glass & blade tornadoes, lo-fi robot blurts, and ghostly electronic chatter, this runs the gamut on cold, inhumane, & antiseptic noise. It's like dipping your amputated limbs in Clorox.
I'm not entirely sure how these sounds are made. They're primitive & digital and my guess is Larkin is using some traditionally non-audio data to make noise, similar to Steven Flato's transformation of "An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge" .txt to an .aif (Larkin even thanks Flato for "directing me to the medium of raw data" on the disc). This isn't easy listening, this isn't even pleasurable listening, it's startling & painful but goddamn if I'm not still drawn to it. It's not just the intrigue of the creation, it's actually a varied & compelling experience, one that I probably won't listen to on a daily basis but will no doubt peel away at its layers and get more out of it with every listen.
This is the first of four releases in Copy For Your Records' Fan CD-R Series. They'll all be a 3? inside a 5? CD-R, limited to "no less than 100 copies, and cumulatively, as a complete series, totalling an edition of 500." Strange, but whatever. This is totally fucking rad, major props to CFYR for getting brilliant future-noise glitch in the physical hands of those who care.
- Justin Snow, Anti-Gravity Bunny
Noise of a quite different nature emanates from Corey Larkin and his Raw Data Studies (CFYRF01), a mini-CD on which I assume he is enacting numerous grisly and painful experiments on source data inside a computer. While the process-based approach to computer music has been a real turn-off for me in the past, Larkin allows for much more randomness and occasional violence in his non-musical buzzes and white-noise plosives. It represents his "attempts to get at the bedrock of ... compositional procedures", and indeed a sense of exploration and discovery is evident in these scant 15 minutes, a scenario where the creator doesn't have all the glib answers already prepared in a nearby text file. This release is the first in the "Fan CD-R" series.
- Ed Pinsent, The Sound Projector
There's only 2 tracks, the first is a mere 35 seconds long. It's a quick brittle static blast sourced from a PDF file. The second, titled "Dissipative Music/ µũ Law Algorithm," is wayy longer, clocking in at 15 minutes. This is some HARSH shit. Abrasive squelches, piercing glass & blade tornadoes, lo-fi robot blurts, and ghostly electronic chatter, this runs the gamut on cold, inhumane, & antiseptic noise. It's like dipping your amputated limbs in Clorox.
I'm not entirely sure how these sounds are made. They're primitive & digital and my guess is Larkin is using some traditionally non-audio data to make noise, similar to Steven Flato's transformation of "An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge" .txt to an .aif (Larkin even thanks Flato for "directing me to the medium of raw data" on the disc). This isn't easy listening, this isn't even pleasurable listening, it's startling & painful but goddamn if I'm not still drawn to it. It's not just the intrigue of the creation, it's actually a varied & compelling experience, one that I probably won't listen to on a daily basis but will no doubt peel away at its layers and get more out of it with every listen.
This is the first of four releases in Copy For Your Records' Fan CD-R Series. They'll all be a 3? inside a 5? CD-R, limited to "no less than 100 copies, and cumulatively, as a complete series, totalling an edition of 500." Strange, but whatever. This is totally fucking rad, major props to CFYR for getting brilliant future-noise glitch in the physical hands of those who care.
- Justin Snow, Anti-Gravity Bunny
Noise of a quite different nature emanates from Corey Larkin and his Raw Data Studies (CFYRF01), a mini-CD on which I assume he is enacting numerous grisly and painful experiments on source data inside a computer. While the process-based approach to computer music has been a real turn-off for me in the past, Larkin allows for much more randomness and occasional violence in his non-musical buzzes and white-noise plosives. It represents his "attempts to get at the bedrock of ... compositional procedures", and indeed a sense of exploration and discovery is evident in these scant 15 minutes, a scenario where the creator doesn't have all the glib answers already prepared in a nearby text file. This release is the first in the "Fan CD-R" series.
- Ed Pinsent, The Sound Projector
I took a break from the writing tonight, and went for a late cup of tea and caterpillar cake in Oxford after work. Its late now, but I have been listening to a 3" CD for the past few days so I think I can just squeeze a quick review in before bed.
Actually I'm not sure it is a 3" CD, it is actually something called a 'fan' CD, which appears to be a three inch disc surrounded by clear plastic that effectively makes it the same size as a 5" disc. The last time I saw one of these was about 1990, when they seemed to be being proposed as the CD medium's answer to the seven inch EP. Its a nice little thing though, with hand drawn decoration around the clear plastic bit. The disc is named Raw Data Studies and is a release by the (I think) New York based young American musician Corey Larkin in a run of a hundred copies on the frequently interesting Copy for your Records label.
From what I can tell, to create the music here, Larkin seems to have taken raw computer data and in some way transformed this into sound, which is then presented here as music. What isn't clear to me is either how you actually go about doing this, and to what degree the resulting sounds have been altered, edited or composed into the two works we have here on this little disc. In his brief notes at the CFYR website Larkin states that his intention with the music was to "exploring possible tensions between methodology and perception, determinacy and indeterminacy.", so suggesting that to at least some degree the sounds heard here were generated, or maybe positioned using processes not under Larkin's control.
So its interesting to think that the systems used to create this music might be somewhat uncommon, and indeed it makes it difficult to review a CD like this without knowing for sure to what degree we are listening to the result of a process, and to what degree compositional decisions made by the composer. If a part sounds great, do we congratulate Larkin for arranging sounds in a particular way, or do we just marvel at what chance systems can throw up at times. I'm inclined to think (with no reason to suspect this other than the music feels composed to some degree) that the second track here, titled Dissipative Music/Mu Law Algorithm has some degree of thought applied to the placement of sounds and the use of silence between them, but I may well also be very wrong. So I find myself only really able to listen to the music as a piece of music left to stand on its own, without knowledge of exactly how it was made getting in the way.
So one thing we do know for sure is that this is harsh, impenetrably severe music. The first of the two tracks here, named Source/ .pdf, which of course suggests that a transformed pdf file provided the sounds we hear, lasts just thirty-six seconds and consists mostly of white noise broken up every so often by flashes of digital chatter. If Larkin arranged any of the sounds in this brief piece I'd be amazed. I suspect that the pdf file was processed using whatever software one uses for this kind of thing, and the piece here is the result. Its a harsh, almost unlistenably alienating sound that shows no compromise at all.
The second track is much longer at fifteen minutes and is essentially a series of equally abrasive digital sounds, white noise, fiercely raw buzzes and brittle, abrupt computer babble. These outbursts though are spaced apart quite wildly, and it certainly feels as if the track was put together in post production somehow, as the way the sounds vary from each other, all raw and confrontational but often leaping about from one sound to the next. Whether this was the case though I have no idea. If the music here was recorded straight from some transformation process without the composer arranging elements to his satisfaction then I'm somewhat stunned. It certainly feels like the sounds were randomly generated, but their positioning the result of composition. Who knows though.
Speaking purely as a fan of nice sounds, this is a hard CD to spend much time with. The bursts of noise are nearly all very aggressive and in places physically hard to listen to. The disc is mastered quite high so the abrasive parts really blast out. This isn't peaceful music, neither is it remotely beautiful. I'm pretty sure that was never the intention though. It is in fact downright ugly and confrontational to the listener. This may well have been the intention... I can't say I'm a fan of how it sounds, its a bit to harsh for my taste, and it isn't a CD I will be playing again all that soon, but its certainly an interesting release, if only because the analysis of how it was made is intriguing. Not exactly bedtime listening then, but a bit of a curio with a tale behind it that probably does need telling.
- Richard Pinnell, The Watchful Ear
Actually I'm not sure it is a 3" CD, it is actually something called a 'fan' CD, which appears to be a three inch disc surrounded by clear plastic that effectively makes it the same size as a 5" disc. The last time I saw one of these was about 1990, when they seemed to be being proposed as the CD medium's answer to the seven inch EP. Its a nice little thing though, with hand drawn decoration around the clear plastic bit. The disc is named Raw Data Studies and is a release by the (I think) New York based young American musician Corey Larkin in a run of a hundred copies on the frequently interesting Copy for your Records label.
From what I can tell, to create the music here, Larkin seems to have taken raw computer data and in some way transformed this into sound, which is then presented here as music. What isn't clear to me is either how you actually go about doing this, and to what degree the resulting sounds have been altered, edited or composed into the two works we have here on this little disc. In his brief notes at the CFYR website Larkin states that his intention with the music was to "exploring possible tensions between methodology and perception, determinacy and indeterminacy.", so suggesting that to at least some degree the sounds heard here were generated, or maybe positioned using processes not under Larkin's control.
So its interesting to think that the systems used to create this music might be somewhat uncommon, and indeed it makes it difficult to review a CD like this without knowing for sure to what degree we are listening to the result of a process, and to what degree compositional decisions made by the composer. If a part sounds great, do we congratulate Larkin for arranging sounds in a particular way, or do we just marvel at what chance systems can throw up at times. I'm inclined to think (with no reason to suspect this other than the music feels composed to some degree) that the second track here, titled Dissipative Music/Mu Law Algorithm has some degree of thought applied to the placement of sounds and the use of silence between them, but I may well also be very wrong. So I find myself only really able to listen to the music as a piece of music left to stand on its own, without knowledge of exactly how it was made getting in the way.
So one thing we do know for sure is that this is harsh, impenetrably severe music. The first of the two tracks here, named Source/ .pdf, which of course suggests that a transformed pdf file provided the sounds we hear, lasts just thirty-six seconds and consists mostly of white noise broken up every so often by flashes of digital chatter. If Larkin arranged any of the sounds in this brief piece I'd be amazed. I suspect that the pdf file was processed using whatever software one uses for this kind of thing, and the piece here is the result. Its a harsh, almost unlistenably alienating sound that shows no compromise at all.
The second track is much longer at fifteen minutes and is essentially a series of equally abrasive digital sounds, white noise, fiercely raw buzzes and brittle, abrupt computer babble. These outbursts though are spaced apart quite wildly, and it certainly feels as if the track was put together in post production somehow, as the way the sounds vary from each other, all raw and confrontational but often leaping about from one sound to the next. Whether this was the case though I have no idea. If the music here was recorded straight from some transformation process without the composer arranging elements to his satisfaction then I'm somewhat stunned. It certainly feels like the sounds were randomly generated, but their positioning the result of composition. Who knows though.
Speaking purely as a fan of nice sounds, this is a hard CD to spend much time with. The bursts of noise are nearly all very aggressive and in places physically hard to listen to. The disc is mastered quite high so the abrasive parts really blast out. This isn't peaceful music, neither is it remotely beautiful. I'm pretty sure that was never the intention though. It is in fact downright ugly and confrontational to the listener. This may well have been the intention... I can't say I'm a fan of how it sounds, its a bit to harsh for my taste, and it isn't a CD I will be playing again all that soon, but its certainly an interesting release, if only because the analysis of how it was made is intriguing. Not exactly bedtime listening then, but a bit of a curio with a tale behind it that probably does need telling.
- Richard Pinnell, The Watchful Ear
hand-stamped fan cd-rs
clear poly slim cases, labeled with clear stickers
Richard Kamerman
I Stayed In The Apartment For Thirty-Two Days Without Leaving
(excerpt; 00:00:00-00:20:00, of 02:49:27)
_____________________
Further excerpts of this work have been released as follows
00:20:00-00:30:00 (TBA)
00:30:00-00:39:30 (Silence=Death compilation, Bored Bear Recordings/BTNR )
00:39:30-01:01:00 (In The Tenth Month Of The Second Year cassette, CFYC001)
01:01:00-01:10:00 (TBR: I Hate Music 5 web-compilation)
01:10:00-01:20:00 (Owleater 5, HEX compilation)
01:10:00-01:40:00 (dictafawn)
01:50:00-01:55:00 (TBR: Welcome To Our Decayed Factory, Abandonment)
01:55:00-02:00:00 (The Noise From Ridgewood Compilation For The Silent Barn)
02:00:00-02:02:00 (live at Vox Populi, Philadelphia, PA, August 20, 2011)
02:02:00-02:04:00 (live at Roup House, Pittsburgh, PA, August 26, 2011)
02:04:00-02:06:00 (live at Smiles For Miles, Dayton, OH, August 27, 2011)
02:06:00-02:13:00 (TBA)
02:13:00-02:15:00 (Gauss PDF)
02:15:00-02:20:00 (TBA)
02:20:00-02:40:00 (TBA)
02:40:00-02:49:27 (TBA)
____________________
A swift kick in the junk. Less than 20 minutes on a mini CD-R of abrasive as fuck electronic glitch. Like a hundred cats scratching at your microphone while it’s hailing outside. Scratch pop scar city with what sounds like a completely distorted and incomprehensible growling. It could actually be vocals or it might just be an homage to power violence. And it’s fucking relentless. It kicks in immediately and it’s in the red the whole goddamn time. The especially difficult part is the millisecond (and multi-second) pauses dispersed throughout that act like reset buttons. You can’t just zone out to this and ignore the caustic static. He’s a tabula rasa master.
The title of this makes me like to imagine Kamerman going all sorts of insane in his 32 day homebound stint. It’s fuckin raw as hell and beautifully destructive. Plus, it’s only 20 minutes so even those with the most delicate of eardrums don’t have an excuse not to cop this.
Apparently these 20 minutes are an excerpt from a 2+ hour long piece Kamerman made that will be released in differing formats on varying labels. A very strange approach but I kinda dig it.
- Justin Snow, Anti-Gravity Bunny
The proud boast of Richard Kamerman is I Stayed in the Apartment for Thirty-Two Days without Leaving (COPY FOR YOUR RECORDS CFYRF02). To express the degrees of cabin fever, loneliness and internalised urban angst that transpired across his frame, he delivers himself of precisely twenty minutes of digital white-noise rubble on this special 3″ CDR printed with artwork on the non-data area, a presentation which some refer to as the MiniMax format. None but the brave will survive to the end of this extreme, heavily-distorted session of aural torture, a near-blank wall of non-information which is extremely unpleasant, and wherein it’s possible almost instantly to start discerning imaginary voices, music, and other streams of data that simply are not there. If twenty minutes of this brutalism isn’t enough for you, then you’ll be pleased to learn that further extracts from this long-form work (nearly three hours in toto) have been released in other formats on other micro-labels, with further portions planned for the future. A grisly, testing piece of work with no concessions made whatsoever for your listening enjoyment; never has the simple act of staying indoors seemed so desolate, so unappealing.
- Ed Pinsent, The Sound Projector
The title of this makes me like to imagine Kamerman going all sorts of insane in his 32 day homebound stint. It’s fuckin raw as hell and beautifully destructive. Plus, it’s only 20 minutes so even those with the most delicate of eardrums don’t have an excuse not to cop this.
Apparently these 20 minutes are an excerpt from a 2+ hour long piece Kamerman made that will be released in differing formats on varying labels. A very strange approach but I kinda dig it.
- Justin Snow, Anti-Gravity Bunny
The proud boast of Richard Kamerman is I Stayed in the Apartment for Thirty-Two Days without Leaving (COPY FOR YOUR RECORDS CFYRF02). To express the degrees of cabin fever, loneliness and internalised urban angst that transpired across his frame, he delivers himself of precisely twenty minutes of digital white-noise rubble on this special 3″ CDR printed with artwork on the non-data area, a presentation which some refer to as the MiniMax format. None but the brave will survive to the end of this extreme, heavily-distorted session of aural torture, a near-blank wall of non-information which is extremely unpleasant, and wherein it’s possible almost instantly to start discerning imaginary voices, music, and other streams of data that simply are not there. If twenty minutes of this brutalism isn’t enough for you, then you’ll be pleased to learn that further extracts from this long-form work (nearly three hours in toto) have been released in other formats on other micro-labels, with further portions planned for the future. A grisly, testing piece of work with no concessions made whatsoever for your listening enjoyment; never has the simple act of staying indoors seemed so desolate, so unappealing.
- Ed Pinsent, The Sound Projector
Tonight a very loud, harsh CD by Richard Kamerman. Now, the last time I wrote or said something derogatory about noise music within Richard K’s earshot his next CD release got named Open your windows and play this loudly (You’re exempt Mr Pinnell), or something similar to that. Given that clearly my musical tastes tend to lean away from the noisy end of things, and given that Richard didn’t send me this disc, I bought it, knowing it would be at the louder end of the spectrum- it would be somewhat disingenuous for me to write a bad review of it here now. Instead I will attempt to write something about my experiences with listening to the disc, which, with a bit of luck will highlight my own failings rather than any the disc might hold.
The release in question is the second in the “Fan” series on Richard’s Copy for your Records label, a solo by Kamerman named, intriguingly; I stayed in the apartment for thirty-two days without leaving. I reviewed the first disc in this series, a piece by Corey Larkin a little while back here. A Fan CDr seems to be a 3″ disc set inside a clear, 5″ diameter piece of plastic, that in the case of this series has been hand stamped. The disc contains precisely twenty minutes of music, in fact the first twenty minutes excerpted from a long piece that apparently lasts nearly three hours. Further excerpts have then been released on various other compilation albums and the like. The music is apparently created from the sound of computer glitching. Its a rough, crunchy stream of distortion, similar to the sound we hear when on a mobile phone in high winds, a jagged edged blur of white noise slowed down slightly with the volume turned up. I imagine if you attached a contact mic to a roll of cellotape and then unwound it steadily for twenty minutes, stopping abruptly every so often it may sound something like this.
So anyone that reads these pages regularly might guess that this CD isn’t really my cup of tea, but I wanted to try and understand why I find this kind of music so difficult to connect to. In general I enjoy music that pushes at the edges. I can remain completely focused during very long, very quiet music, and am happy working out the puzzles posed by some of the most highly conceptual music around today. So what is it about very loud music that I struggle with? Subconsciously there are a number of things that probably get in the way. I generally speaking have always hated the imagery that is often associated with noise, some of it borrowed from the industrial music scenes I knew as a younger man. The aggressive imagery and /or attempt to shock that is often seen in relation to this end of music has always annoyed me a great deal, but here there is none of that to be found, and the curious title, (perhaps borrowed from an Annette Krebs anecdote?!) contains no allusions to pain or suffering, humorous or otherwise. I’ve never been much of a fan of music that relies so heavily on adrenalin either, but while there is a severely intense feel to this music it doesn’t feel like it is dripping in testosterone.
In fact this disc from Kamerman is a highly detailed dense stream of computerised distortion that continually thickens and thins, with new elements added and subtracted, shifting and reshaping itself continually, and frequently crashing into sudden glitching silences for momentary seconds, though one silent chasm a little more than half way into the disc manages to stay silent for a good five or six seconds, which end sup being a strange, pregnant few moments as we wait for the assault to restart. The actual sounds are quite interesting. I’m not sure precisely how they are made, whether we are hearing the mechanical, working parts of the computer here or if the raging sounds are computer generated. I also don’t know if the twenty minutes we hear here are directly ‘played’ by Kamerman or if we are hearing some kind of haphazard discovery of malfunctioning software, but this probably doesn’t matter.
So I quite like the sounds, and I like the sudden gaps in the barrage very enticing. I took little from the actual act of listening though, primarily because of the volume levels. Once I did that sacriligieous thing and turned the volume right down however I found the music easier to follow. The problem though, is this just isn’t how the composer intended for the music to be heard. Ultimately I think I just need to focus carefully and pay attention to the details of music, and listening to the driving, pummelling wall of sound here saw me struggle to obtain the usual sensation of close contact with the music. It feels like a barrier is being thrown up between myself and the material that nmakes up the music. Listening carefully at volume, as I have tried to do several times this evening feels a stressful and agitated experience. This music doesn’t feel welcoming.
Perhaps then it isn’t necessarily meant to be. Perhaps the sensation of disorientation that comes with any attempted close appraisal of this music is deliberate. Perhaps the composer doesn’t want the music to be pulled apart, each section dissected, with some pretentiously floral description applied to each segment. Maybe the music is meant to be experienced partly physically. Maybe it is meant to disorientate, maybe it isn’t meant to be aesthetically appealing. Just because of who it is that has released this disc, a musician that has made a lot of much quieter, often very good music I suspect there is plenty here of value that I, for all my failings just cannot connect with. Maybe I am just hardwired to struggle with noise music, (this sounds like a joke but I’m deadly serious) perhaps I will never understand how a piece of detailed music becomes better with the volume turned up so high it distorts what is there int he first place. The truth is, many people will enjoy this music greatly, and as I have suggested this noisier end of the music isn’t the side of Richard Kamerman’s multi-faceted musical personality I enjoy the most, but his work elsewhere will keep me investigating this other end of the spectrum each time he releases something new.
- Richard Pinnell, The Watchful Ear
The release in question is the second in the “Fan” series on Richard’s Copy for your Records label, a solo by Kamerman named, intriguingly; I stayed in the apartment for thirty-two days without leaving. I reviewed the first disc in this series, a piece by Corey Larkin a little while back here. A Fan CDr seems to be a 3″ disc set inside a clear, 5″ diameter piece of plastic, that in the case of this series has been hand stamped. The disc contains precisely twenty minutes of music, in fact the first twenty minutes excerpted from a long piece that apparently lasts nearly three hours. Further excerpts have then been released on various other compilation albums and the like. The music is apparently created from the sound of computer glitching. Its a rough, crunchy stream of distortion, similar to the sound we hear when on a mobile phone in high winds, a jagged edged blur of white noise slowed down slightly with the volume turned up. I imagine if you attached a contact mic to a roll of cellotape and then unwound it steadily for twenty minutes, stopping abruptly every so often it may sound something like this.
So anyone that reads these pages regularly might guess that this CD isn’t really my cup of tea, but I wanted to try and understand why I find this kind of music so difficult to connect to. In general I enjoy music that pushes at the edges. I can remain completely focused during very long, very quiet music, and am happy working out the puzzles posed by some of the most highly conceptual music around today. So what is it about very loud music that I struggle with? Subconsciously there are a number of things that probably get in the way. I generally speaking have always hated the imagery that is often associated with noise, some of it borrowed from the industrial music scenes I knew as a younger man. The aggressive imagery and /or attempt to shock that is often seen in relation to this end of music has always annoyed me a great deal, but here there is none of that to be found, and the curious title, (perhaps borrowed from an Annette Krebs anecdote?!) contains no allusions to pain or suffering, humorous or otherwise. I’ve never been much of a fan of music that relies so heavily on adrenalin either, but while there is a severely intense feel to this music it doesn’t feel like it is dripping in testosterone.
In fact this disc from Kamerman is a highly detailed dense stream of computerised distortion that continually thickens and thins, with new elements added and subtracted, shifting and reshaping itself continually, and frequently crashing into sudden glitching silences for momentary seconds, though one silent chasm a little more than half way into the disc manages to stay silent for a good five or six seconds, which end sup being a strange, pregnant few moments as we wait for the assault to restart. The actual sounds are quite interesting. I’m not sure precisely how they are made, whether we are hearing the mechanical, working parts of the computer here or if the raging sounds are computer generated. I also don’t know if the twenty minutes we hear here are directly ‘played’ by Kamerman or if we are hearing some kind of haphazard discovery of malfunctioning software, but this probably doesn’t matter.
So I quite like the sounds, and I like the sudden gaps in the barrage very enticing. I took little from the actual act of listening though, primarily because of the volume levels. Once I did that sacriligieous thing and turned the volume right down however I found the music easier to follow. The problem though, is this just isn’t how the composer intended for the music to be heard. Ultimately I think I just need to focus carefully and pay attention to the details of music, and listening to the driving, pummelling wall of sound here saw me struggle to obtain the usual sensation of close contact with the music. It feels like a barrier is being thrown up between myself and the material that nmakes up the music. Listening carefully at volume, as I have tried to do several times this evening feels a stressful and agitated experience. This music doesn’t feel welcoming.
Perhaps then it isn’t necessarily meant to be. Perhaps the sensation of disorientation that comes with any attempted close appraisal of this music is deliberate. Perhaps the composer doesn’t want the music to be pulled apart, each section dissected, with some pretentiously floral description applied to each segment. Maybe the music is meant to be experienced partly physically. Maybe it is meant to disorientate, maybe it isn’t meant to be aesthetically appealing. Just because of who it is that has released this disc, a musician that has made a lot of much quieter, often very good music I suspect there is plenty here of value that I, for all my failings just cannot connect with. Maybe I am just hardwired to struggle with noise music, (this sounds like a joke but I’m deadly serious) perhaps I will never understand how a piece of detailed music becomes better with the volume turned up so high it distorts what is there int he first place. The truth is, many people will enjoy this music greatly, and as I have suggested this noisier end of the music isn’t the side of Richard Kamerman’s multi-faceted musical personality I enjoy the most, but his work elsewhere will keep me investigating this other end of the spectrum each time he releases something new.
- Richard Pinnell, The Watchful Ear
hand-stamped fan cd-rs
clear poly slim cases, labeled with clear stickers
Keroaän
Daunting In Its Variousness:
First In A Suite Of An Indeterminate Number of Pieces
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Other Vultures Carrion/Campbeltown 2xc30 Obsolete Units |
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Gomberg/Guthrie/Kamerman Blue & Gold, Delicate Sen CDr Ilse |
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Richard Kamerman The Passing of Mr. Good 3" CDr rar |
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Richard Kamerman I Stayed In The Apartment For Thirty Two Days Without Leaving microcassette dictafawn |
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Various Artists Silence=Death c100 Bored Bear Recordings / BTNR (featuring Richard Kamerman, Richard Ramirez, Violent Pink, Xiu Xiu, fire island AK, +more) |
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Caledonian Lauging Bags Recycled Music cassette RRRecords |
Copy For Your Records is
Frederick Butler: Operations, Motivation
Richard Kamerman: Curator, Shipping Department
with inapplicable thanks to
Dan Reynolds; brilliant ideas, hi-concept/lo-brow
contact Freddy:
orders{[at]}cfyrecords{[dot]]}com
