Recent Live Reports.

[negative potential]

Conclusion to the Charhizma fest last night.

The two best sets, I think, were the duo of Axel Dörner and Henry Grimes (in the first half before the pause), and the trio of Christof Kurzmann, Axel Dörner, and Toshimaru Nakamura (opening the second half). I think the latter was the best set of the night. Quite beautiful.

The trio of Ken Vandermark, Clayton Thomas, and Toshimaru Nakamura had some moments, but in the end I think the contrast between the playing styles was just a little too jarring. But as I like the "try again, fail better" ethic, this one deserves points for effort. True improvisation is about leaving comfort zones, right?

The closer was a three-bass trio of Josh Abrams, Clayton Thomas, and Henry Grimes, and as Clayton Thomas noted, "during the course of that set it became Henry's birthday", and so a cake was presented to Grimes as the house sang happy birthday.

I should note that all three nights of the festival were *packed*, and Ausland is not exactly a very large space. I overheard quite a few people each night marveling at the number of attendees, and the fact that the shows all sold out so quickly.

[faster]

Played at After Hours in Apgujeong, Seoul on Saturday night, for Jin Sangtae's solo cd release.

First was Choi Joonyong and Ryu Hankil duo--very good, actually the best I've heard Choi in a while, and Hankil's music has become increasingly harsh and feedback-oriented, with the addition of a contact mic/speaker cone combo to his usual mechanical clockworks. Not sure how I feel about it, but together it was quite a tense, confident performance.

Second was Jin Sangtae and a kid who rarely plays and calls himself "Doldoli" (Dordori?), which is a pretty annoying nickname (explained to me as "kind of cute and smart--like 'nerd' but cute"), but nobody seems to know his real name. He used a laptop. Surprisingly, this set was phenomenal--best live show I've heard this year outside of a few of the Amplify sets. I don't know exactly why, either--Doldoli was just doing sine tones on the laptop afaik, and Sangtae was playing hard drives. Just really superb. Very, very good choices, and a tremendous amount of variety. Totally captivated me from start to finish.

After a break I played with Park Seungjun (who's usually pretty out of control but was very understated except a few vicious outbursts), then Sangtae played solo. His solo was also great--he's playing better right now than I've ever heard him. I got his solo cd but haven't heard it yet, but if it's anything like what he did Saturday it should be good.


Jin Sangtae's stuff (from a different day, but same idea)

[Gerardo A]

Corrupted was amazing last Friday at SF. They basically played 4 sections of El Mundo Frio: the ambient intro (but with less acoustic guitar plucking, more like Saucerful of Secrets than Hex), the second riff with distortion (the one at around 25' of El Mundo Frio), then another ambient-ish interlude, and finally another distorted meltdown, which was terribly powerful. At the end the drummer was just crashing cymbals, the bass player was using a bow, and both guitar players were creating feedback/dense textures. Their vocalist was just impressive, he looked terribly possessed by the metal gods. It was a great metal concert, I'm seriously thinking about catching them again this weekend in Berkeley.

Next day I saw several Bay Area improvisers in an Oakland space called 1510, and Mario Diaz de Leon played a very interesting solo, basically laptop noise but with techno/dub elements, which in some moments made it sound like Merzbeat or late 80's industrial.

[surfer]

Corrupted was amazing last Friday at SF. They basically played 4 sections of El Mundo Frio: the ambient intro (but with less acoustic guitar plucking, more like Saucerful of Secrets than Hex), the second riff with distortion (the one at around 25' of El Mundo Frio), then another ambient-ish interlude, and finally another distorted meltdown, which was terribly powerful. At the end the drummer was just crashing cymbals, the bass player was using a bow, and both guitar players were creating feedback/dense textures. Their vocalist was just impressive, he looked terribly possessed by the metal gods. It was a great metal concert, I'm seriously thinking about catching them again this weekend in Berkeley.

Next day I saw several Bay Area improvisers in an Oakland space called 1510, and Mario Diaz de Leon played a very interesting solo, basically laptop noise but with techno/dub elements, which in some moments made it sound like Merzbeat or late 80's industrial.

Do you spend any time at all in Monterey?

BTW, we need to talk logistics for Rowe on Sat night, call me when you get a chance.

[kcorcoran]

damn.. that set sounds great.
having missed corrupted in SF, v. and i are considering trying to catch them at gilman after keith calls it a night at mills...

[J.F.]

Jin Sangtae's stuff (from a different day, but same idea)

How are these played? The fingerprints suggest some "scratching" being involved?

[faster]

Jin Sangtae's stuff (from a different day, but same idea)

How are these played? The fingerprints suggest some "scratching" being involved?

There are contact mics on copper wires attached to the drives which feed back through a computer speaker used as an amp which then makes the drives into speakers, there are also two guitar pickups used as mics. He does touch and manipulate the discs, but that's not the main source of the sound most of the time.

[david papapostolou]

Joe, what about these wires/connectors in the lower right corner, looks like the extremities are placed so that they touch each other: is there any signal going through that or does it just happen to be there? I am very intrigued about that, probably opens quite a few possibilities in terms of control (or rather lack of) and ways of making small, brief sounds...

[jkudler]

just saw on the "upcoming" thread that leif elggren was in new york. anyone? did you make it, jon?

thanks,
jesse

[jon abbey]

nope, didn't make it.

[kp*]

Second was Jin Sangtae and a kid who rarely plays and calls himself "Doldoli" (Dordori?)

That's the guy we saw at Yogiga right? If so i think he calls himself Dotori (acorn). I remember the set I saw was pretty good and he brought all these young kids with him to the show, the girls in the back who came to see his set were all trying to eat 뻥튀기 (bbongt'wiggi, howeverthefuck you romanize that), which is just impossible to eat quietly. It was pretty funny actually.

Anyway, if Seoul absolutely must have an improviser with a gimmicky name, i'd prefer it be Dotori.

[diederich]

Saw Keith Rowe at Mills College tonight. Just got back in fact. I don't ever talk about music anymore, and never write about it, so forgive me if this is unsatisfying. I think a few people were planning on coming and I meant to make an IHM meetup thread but today got away from me. All that to say, if others were there they should chime in, please!

It was billed as Rowe solo and with Mills students and what do you know, that's what it was.

They played a piece by Cardew if the program notes are to be believed, "Sextet - The Tiger's Mind (1967). If I understood the excerpt from Tilbury's Cardew bio correctly, the piece was originally two portions, Daypiece and Nightpiece. The score consists of a paragraph of text for each section, poetic and somewhat incomprehensible text in fact, with roles such as the tiger, the mind, the circle, the wind, etc. Tonight they added a third section, Twilightpiece, in the middle which was Rowe solo.

The two group sections were interesting if not especially successful imho. Daypiece especially was incredibly hesitant, lots of pregnant pauses and then flurries of activity once someone was brave enough to make the first move. Rowe sat out for the first couple minutes and then when he did start it was somewhat sublime. In general the students seemed afraid to play, with a few exceptions, the saxophonist, the lady on the upright piano. Daypiece moved in waves, small skittering sounds and then a wave of voice and bowed strings and scrapes, then near silence, then a wave of similar sounds. It wasn't bad exactly, but both Daypiece and Nightpiece never gelled for me. There were a couple moments in both that were memorable though. In Daypiece at one point the trumpet player picked up a second mouthpiece and for a few minutes used it to tap or scrape or rub the outside of his trumpet, I don't know why, but somehow the simplicity of his sound and his movements really worked well for me at that moment. That said, there was a ton of needless repetition. Finding a particular sound or technique and just repeating it a few times, then moving on to another and so on. Other good moments, the guitarist was good throughout I thought, holding his own well next to Rowe. There was a cellist doing a lot of vocal work that I found pleasing, lots of stressed breathing and strangled vocalizations. Really though, it was 16 people on stage, I'm just glad they tended towards slight sounds with space as opposed to a rushing, muddy mess. Nightpiece started to wear on me near the end, similar movement as Daypiece, a little less hesitant, but after hearing the middle portion with Rowe solo I would have been very happy to have them all leave the stage.

The middle section, Rowe solo, was the real reason I payed my 12 dollars. I've been listening to a lot of Rowe of late, The Room most recently, to refresh my memory and give me a better way to compare the new Rowe I've been reading about to the old Rowe. He started with no bed, no static-y undercurrent, just discrete, dry (for lack of a better descriptor) sounds. Think the brillo pad, what looked like a cat brush, pressed hard on the strings. He continued in this vein for a bit, again, no underlying bed of noise, just the sounds themselves hanging in the air. And then he brought out the fan, oh the fan. At this point I feel like the tone was set, harsh, aggressive noises dominated, the fan both on the strings and near the strings, up front. The real moment of beauty though was when snaking in and out of the fan noise came what sounded like shortwave sounds, but slowed way down. So you had the fan going on top, not as a bed of noise but as the focus and in and amongst it all snippets of music, of voice, but difficult to make out, and perhaps I just made it all up and it was in fact simply noise from something else. At this point I decided to turn off the analytic part of my head and just revel. So the rest isn't too clear to me. He stuck with the above for a while, varying the fan and eventually bringing the voices and snippets of music up in the mix until he started using something, maybe a bluetooth-y something? in his right hand, starting it far away from the table and slowly bringing it in close, turning what started as an innocuous buzz into something approaching harsh territory. It reminded me quite a bit of the Room in fact, but condensed. The range of sounds and the aggressiveness of some of the moments of the Room. It was incredible, and obviously my words are failing me mightily.

There are holes, and this is in no way living up to my enthusiasm and enjoyment of the night, but there it is.

[kcorcoran]

Keith Rowe at Mills College tonight...

With all due respect to the students involved in the two prose pieces of Tiger's Mind, it is apparent that not just anyone should be thrown on stage with Keith. While about half of the students observed a very nice sense of restraint, the other half were chattering with 'playful' sounds, most of them repeating the same sound many times throughout a relatively porous playing field. I felt the input from the trumpeter, two cellists, koto player, and analogue synth player would have worked well as a sextet here - the others (two voices, upright bass, two pianos, two laptops, sax, electric guitar) were mostly injecting moans, whistles, runs of melody, cooing, video-game style twinkling (maybe a max-msp patch?), and loud blurts of sax which would drown out everyone else more than once. During these two sections ('Daypiece' and 'Nightpiece') Keith introduced a sparse palette of bristles, quick scrapes, and crunches, all of which played a sort of punctuation in the 20 minutes of Daypiece. The 20 minutes of Nightpiece was much of the same, alluding likely to the circle mentioned in the score, though Keith brought in a sort of 900Hz (approx.) whine which came in and out via a volume pedal and was pitch-shifted up in the last minute of his contribution to the piece, which ended shortly after. The major tools at work during these sections from what I could see were steel wool, a contact mic, a small chain, and a brush. It seemed that while Keith was maybe working from syntax to arrive at his sound selection, the others were working representationally from descriptive flourishes? This is maybe the best way I can describe my impression of it. It was as if a small desert (Keith) were placed amidst a jungle teeming with animals, insects and birds (Mills contributors).

'Guitar Solo Twilight Version' was the 20 minute bridge between the two parts of the score, and this was phenomenal to me. This was my first experience with Keith live, but from photos I've seen, it seemed to be a scaled down version of his setup, at least in terms of objects to apply to the one guitar in use here. The segue into the solo was announced by the loss of all lights save for the desk lamp at the edge of Keith's table. I found this very appropriate as the work that followed was intensely dark and focused with an almost end-times cracked electronic dementia going on, really unlike anything familiar to me by recordings of his, save for some general similarities to sections of The Room (iirc, without re-listening now). The arid bristle work from Daypiece bled into an immediate microscopy, not necessarily dense, but very intentional and as a bit of diversion from the previous overall 'ambience' of the first section. Temporary layers would come and go, a thin wash, a slow crunch, a slight reference to the sound of a guitar string, all over some faint amplifier fuzz, but for the most part I heard very few applications of loops or samples. A kind of heavy distress was coming through, with electricity and delicate metal bound up in a quiet low hum which was hardly present enough to constitute a foundation. The fan was introduced mostly on the chord of a contact mic, from what I could see below the stage, which let the fan sound itself become predominant as the deep hum and radio static were brought a bit more to the foreground. This was let to become quite loud for a brief passage, the fan being raised and lowered to create pulsing onslaughts of sound fields, a charged storm cloud, feeling very oppressive and somehow oddly militaristic (I was returning often through this solo to thoughts and imagery of dusty bunkers, helicopters, and forlorn minds in a vast landscape) coming from two separate amplifiers. What was most striking was the use of radio in this set, pitch shifted down to a syrupy drawl, really hammering in the feeling of isolation and dementia. While the swell of electricity had been pushed to the background, this low voice dripped through the tense buzz, eventually turning to a few pulls of a cello from a classical broadcast, now at a normal pitch. At this point the hum dropped out altogether along with the radio, and the approach shifted to violent moments of scrapes and strums, some crackling with space reintroduced, heightening the memory of the heavy cloud which had subsided. Small electric candles were then lit by each of the members on stage as the transition out of this solo Twilight Version had run its course, sometimes lending itself to a sound of musique concrete preparations, sometimes drifting or absent, sometimes rearing teeth, but always with excellent withholding of the performer's ego - the sound produced could be full of imagery or emotion if the listener wished to approach it as such, but never was the intention of pure self-expression coming through which equally added to an isolationist theme in my listening while proclaiming direction for new activity in this music. [not as a messiah, but as an example of the removal of self-expression from eai, which i had been a bit skeptical to when reading comments of this sort. after all, if you really want to prevent self-expression, don't make sounds at all. i was glad to hear in these terms, letting the sound shape the room without looking at one man's (keith's) face or hearing one man's agenda.]

[Cornelis]

mmmm, just to balance things a bit, before we turn people into demi gods

so yes, November 4, at Steim in Amsterdam

3 sets:

--Gert-Jan Prins solo
--Axel Dörner - Toshimaru Nakamura
--Raed Yassin - Lucio Capece - Gene Coleman

First set really great, very loud sometimes, but always puling it back, great dynamics
G-J also had a timpany with its skin vibrating and sometimes put objects on it, with great effect

Axel/Toshi
great, very great set, Axel's sounds really moved me, hard to believe how broad and colourfull sounds he gets out of his trumpet

last set didn't do much for me, dont know what it is, 2 bass clarinets playing long notes with overtones, flutters, hisses, sigh.... it just got boring very quickly and I was glad I had to leave before the end (due to baby sitters....)
(but I did like the electronics of Read Yassin who I have never heard before)


But it made me think,
Some thoughts I had afterwards of wich I'm not sure.... but maybe good for a discussion.

the 2 things I liked most was the quality and personality of sounds of Axel and Gert-Jan

a bit like a painter mixing his/her own colours rather than buying your standard colous out of a tube from the paint shop.

Once a saw an exibition of Karel Appel, a so called very colurfull painter, and I really didn't like it in the end because if you went to a shop to buy colours you just saw all of his colours right there (I could just imagine the names and the corresponding numbers of the paint all the time), so for me it just was a dull grey experience.....
And the thing with Gert-Jan is that he really makes everything himself, and that gives just such a personal and unique sound.
Axel has that as well, extremely actually.
But that's one aspect I always find lacking in for example Keith Rowe. I know there are so many great things in his playing, but for me personally, I always hear these sets of factory made apparata.....and I find it hard to get around this sound quality issue.....

But maybe I'm just too sensitive for that specific aspect....

Cor

[diederich]

mmmm, just to balance things a bit, before we turn people into demi gods

This seems a bit unnecessary.

[kcorcoran]

mmmm, just to balance things a bit, before we turn people into demi gods


But that's one aspect I always find lacking in for example Keith Rowe. I know there are so many great things in his playing, but for me personally, I always hear these sets of factory made apparata.....and I find it hard to get around this sound quality issue.....

But maybe I'm just too sensitive for that specific aspect....

Cor

yeah, totally unnecessary comment. not turning anyone into a demigod, but when you put keith rowe on stage with a bunch of young musicians who are 'finding their voice' in music school the gap is evident, all i was saying there.

also that there are some areas of keith's playing i don't care for that i've heard on recordings, and this set just struck me as decidedly focused and dark, and not what i expected to hear really.

as for sets of factory made apparatuses, i too tire of hearing instruments, pedals, mixers, tape machines, radios and amplifiers or anything else. still, i don't worry about what but how and how honest?

[skrobek]

Read your post again and you might change your mind.

Honestly, what are you talking about? Where in the completely off the cuff "review" did I turn anyone into a demigod? Yes, Rowe means a lot to me, he has loomed large in the last six or so years of listening and it was great to see him live. How is being excited about seeing a performer I like a lot turning anyone into a demigod? I had high expectations and they were met. That was really my only point. That and the students tended to not add much.

My point of view is that Keith Rowe decided to play with those people who are 'trying to find their sound" because he finds it interesting. Maybe because he is "trying to find his sound" too, which is what every musician should do, all along his life, no matter how much he is celebrated in his own circle.

I can understand oh saying that those people were not up to his level of skills can be read as a "he's no match for them" statement because precisely, this music is not a sport, nor an exact science.

Please consider that I'm not criticizing the fact that you were enthusiastic in your report, nor that you had a great evening of music

[Kyrre Laastad]

And the thing with Gert-Jan is that he really makes everything himself, and that gives just such a personal and unique sound.
Axel has that as well, extremely actually.
But that's one aspect I always find lacking in for example Keith Rowe. I know there are so many great things in his playing, but for me personally, I always hear these sets of factory made apparata.....and I find it hard to get around this sound quality issue.....

After having dabbled a bit with SuperCollider and PD and stuff (having made those obligatory awful MouseX/MouseY theremin patches and blips and blops, of course) I started reflecting a bit around these issues (factory made vs. homemade). One of the things that are so great about Keith Rowe to me is the fact that he uses factory made effects and engage with them in a very open and non-conventional way (dare I say subversive?). When he uses eq or pitchshifting or whatever, it doesn't sound like eq and pitchshifting or whatever, but as something fully integrated into his relationship with the guitar, the same way that Axel Dörner uses the trumpet in a very open and non-conventional way. This is something that can be hard to work with when you build your own instruments (this has nothing to do with Gert-Jan Prins, who I haven't really heard except for in MIMEO), but to me when I worked with building stuff, that subversive (not really the best word, but it'll do) aspect of playing it sort of disappeared. I'm sure this is different with Gert-Jan Prins.

But anyway, I find the opposite, and the way he operates these factory made apparata inspires me, and it creates some really good music.

[surfer]

Gerardo, myself, and David Gitin were there at Mills as well. We were all the way up front on the left. I'm not going to write too much, just respond to a few things. I agree somewhat with what Faultsleep and diederich have said . . .

With all due respect to the students involved in the two prose pieces of Tiger's Mind, it is apparent that not just anyone should be thrown on stage with Keith. While about half of the students observed a very nice sense of restraint, the other half were chattering with 'playful' sounds, most of them repeating the same sound many times throughout a relatively porous playing field. I felt the input from the trumpeter, two cellists, koto player, and analogue synth player would have worked well as a sextet here

I think during Daypiece, by and large the problem was too much restraint. They were waiting for Keith to lead them somewhere, and when he did do something, they would respond and a very slight buildup would occur, and then Keith would drop out, as if (imo) he wanted to stop leading and "circle around to the back" so to speak, and let the students go, but then they would instead drop off with him, and the momentum would die off, and this would be repeated. The trumpeter I will single out here as being the most bold voice. However, he did not look at all engaged in what was happening, bordering on outright boredom. He looked like a guy who was used to playing in a much more traditional setting and just wanted to play some "music", and his expression conveyed to me the sense that he thought this was all pretty silly. His contributions which seemed impatient, were very long single notes, played loudly and held, some extended techniques in the bell of the horn, and later hitting the mouthpiece. I thought he was really inappropriate and just not listening to what was going on. There was a woman right in front of me sitting cross-legged, and gently rocking back and forth. I think she sang one single note (for about 4 sec) in the entire first 20 minutes. At first I thought she was the group yogician. The koto player had some very nice contributions, I wish she had played more. The laptops, a guy wandering around the stage with earphones on, like he was listening to a walkman, I have no idea what these people were doing. I couldnt see much of the right side of the stage, because they were blocked by Keith. This was a very large ensemble, much larger than I thought, and I think they erred much too much on the side of caution. Frustrating first movement for me.

'Guitar Solo Twilight Version' was the 20 minute bridge between the two parts of the score, and this was phenomenal to me. really unlike anything familiar to me by recordings of his, save for some general similarities to sections of The Room (iirc, without re-listening now). The arid bristle work from Daypiece bled into an immediate microscopy, not necessarily dense, but very intentional and as a bit of diversion from the previous overall 'ambience' of the first section. Temporary layers would come and go, a thin wash, a slow crunch, a slight reference to the sound of a guitar string, all over some faint amplifier fuzz, but for the most part I heard very few applications of loops or samples.

I thought the first part, maybe 5-6 minutes, of Keith's solo part wasnt that interesting. The steel wool or brillopad or brush didnt really do that much for me, its kind of a one dimensional crackling. IMO it works well as accents, but not as his main soundsource. But then when he started with the fan and shortwave more, it became much more interesting, in particular, the shortwave was really deftly manipulated and his most interesting soundsource.

This was let to become quite loud for a brief passage, the fan being raised and lowered to create pulsing onslaughts of sound fields, a charged storm cloud, feeling very oppressive and somehow oddly militaristic

This was my favorite part, but I didnt get this vibe at all. Usually I dont have much patience for aggressive or loud eai, and I didnt find this part (iirc at about the 13-15 minute mark maybe) particularly loud - and I was in the second row - or aggressive. Now certainly these waves of pulsating feedback werent warm like a fennesz static field, but its bassiness took any edge off it for me. Very nice.

What was most striking was the use of radio in this set, pitch shifted down to a syrupy drawl, While the swell of electricity had been pushed to the background, this low voice dripped through the tense buzz, eventually turning to a few pulls of a cello from a classical broadcast, now at a normal pitch.

Yeah, I liked this section, right through to the part where they turn on their electric candles (which were kind of dorky). So for me the second half of Keith solo was much more interesting, and this inspiration carried over into the last ensemble movement Nightpiece, which I though worked well, up until the last 2-3 minutes which dragged. I thought the students (prepared piano, koto, and cello particularly) had something relevant to say, and were more confident. There was generally more activity in this movement than the first. I dont know, just overall I found this mroe satisfying. but I think its fair to say that the majority of student players are not really comfortable using this vocabulary yet.

Overall a mixed evening of music. But worthwhile to me, I'm glad I went.

[jon abbey]

thanks for the reports, I also talked to Keith a bit about it after he arrived back here last night...

I think its fair to say that the majority of student players are not really comfortable using this vocabulary yet.

I mean, it's fair to say that there are maybe a few dozen people in the entire world who are really comfortable using this vocabulary. I'm not arguing at all with anyone's perceptions, I'm sure if I was there that I would have felt similarly, but FWIW, at least one member of the Mills faculty was amazed at how (relatively) sensitively Keith got them to play.