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


hand-stamped CDrs, laser printed sleeves


edition closed, copies unavailable.


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



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