Pat Metheny Group - The Way Up (2005)

For their final (barring any future reunions) outing together, the PMG core of Metheny, Mays & Rodby, unchanged since the early 80s, plus more recent members Cuong Vu (trumpet/voice) and Antonio Sanchez (drums), produced a masterpiece of a sendoff.

It was the start of 2005; many of us who'd been tirelessly defending Metheny/PMG against the "jazz muzak" putdowns had been getting slightly worried that Speaking Of Now had just been giving those naysayers more fuel.  Then along comes a new album - a single, 68-minute piece of music composed around recurring themes but still leaving plenty of improvisational space, that stretched Pat & Lyle's writing skills and celebrated all that had made them great.  It remains my post-ECM favourite by both bandleader and group.

Conceived by Metheny and Mays as a "protest song" against the dumbing-down of modern music (© every generation since music began), The Way Up was always intended to be a big statement, and a long one, but that doesn't make it inaccessible.  One helpful concession was to divide the hour-plus work on CD into three sections, preceded by a five minute 'Opening', which does make the whole thing more manageable to digest (and to write about!).

It's also just so damn enjoyable: to hear Pat run the whole gamut of acoustic, electric and guitar synth; to hear the main themes introduced then seamlessly reconfigured much later on, like the Reichian pulse in the Opening coming back in Parts 2 & 3; to hear all the buildups in tempo and intensity suddenly stop in their tracks, only to immediately start building up the next stage of the journey.  The Way Up always feels like a lengthy train ride to me, no doubt helped by Metheny's career-long evocation of Midwestern open space; if you ever feel less than enamoured with the scenery for a bit (I'm not crazy about Grégoire Maret's guest harmonica solo, for instance) there'll be something else, both new and familiar, along shortly.  And as a complete journey, I seriously can't rate The Way Up highly enough.  Essential early 21st century jazz at its finest.

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Iannis Xenakis - Oresteïa (1987 recording, rel. 1990)

Xenakis gets operatic, for what seems to have been the only time in his career.  Oresteïa is actually more just a condensed cantata from the hour and a half of music composed for the city of Ypsilanti, Michigan in the mid 60s, on the opening of their Greek Theatre.  An LP of the slimmed-down version appeared on Erato in 1970, and doesn't seem to be available digitally.

In 1987, Xenakis added a new section, Kassandra, and the premiere of this version in Strasbourg in October of that year was recorded, and released in 1990.  If you're familiar with Iannis Xenakis, either from this blog (there's loads - see tag below) or otherwise, you'll know what to expect - staccato attacks, queasy glissandi, thunderous percussion (in great ritualistic rhythm here at times) and general chaos that lends itself well to Aeschylus' classic tragedy trilogy.

The score includes "whips, sirens and metal sheets" as well as wood and metal simantras, tuned blocks originating from the Eastern Orthodox Church.  There's even a direction for the audience to be given some of the metal ones - wonder how that worked out?  Vocally, the choir (an otherwise unrecorded one from Anjou) are suitably stentorian and portentous, and the visions of Cassandra are relayed in a spectacularly unhinged falsetto.  As I've said before, Xenakis at full tilt satisfies me in a way that few other avant-garde composers can, and Oresteïa is a fine example of something a bit different, even for him.

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Keith Jarrett - La Scala (1997)

Jazz Piano Friday again, and why not, when it comes to one of Keith Jarrett's grandest statements in all of his solo concert history.  The 44 minutes of the first improv, 27 minutes of the second improv and a sweet little Over The Rainbow encore on the night of 13 February 1995 were certainly enough to move a seasoned conductor's assistant to tears, as Jarrett relates.  Whether that sleevenote comes across as an endearing anecdote about the power of music, or a hilariously self-important bit of pomposity from an artist who would become ever more notorious for them, largely depends on what mood it catches me in.

The music from this performance in Milan's great opera house, however, never fails to move me.  After about 15 minutes of sedate beauty, Jarrett appears to hit a wall to some listeners' ears, but the tentative mid-section of La Scala Part 1 works just fine for me as a refreshingly minimal interlude that gradually builds in ritualistic intensity.  It then falls back again before finally bursting into the stream of notes that will build up the triumphant final five minutes (remind anyone of Köln Pt. I?).

La Scala Part 2 finds Jarrett suitably re-energised to take off on a more knotty, abstract flight.  Round about the halfway mark, this coalesces into a more melodic, flowing, cruising altitude.  Jarrett then settles down to ten minutes of music that must rank among the most wondrous ever to have come from the fingers of this, or any other pianist (final bit of crazy notwithstanding).  As the cherry on the top of this, we get five minutes of Over The Rainbow that would melt the hardest of hearts.  Agelessly beautiful stuff.

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Vilod - Safe In Harbour (2015)

The meat in the middle of this week's ECM sandwich comes from two electronic musicians who have in fact featured on that label together, in the remix double-album Re:ECM.  That one was under their own names, Ricardo Villalobos and Max Loderbauer, and I'm still making my mind up about it - it'll probably appear here at some point.

For their first full-length album of original material, Villalobos and Loderbauer compressed their names into Vilod, and compressed jazz, dub techno and free funk (yup, I've checked around to make sure I got my subgenres right!) into a subatomic particle chamber to let them freely intermingle for an hour.  With the beats made up of at least as much live drums as machine programming, and some moody electric piano on tracks like Beefdes and the outstanding title track, this is a record that genuinely swings with its jazz DNA.

Both artists wear their love of classic jazz on their sleeves in the grin-inducing opener Modern Hit Midget.  The track samples the between-song announcements from a Modern Jazz Quartet performance for NDR Hannover in October 1957 (released in 2013), and a few bars of Milt Jackson's vibes, both speed-shifted into absurdity.  That one and the title track are my definite favourites, with the epic Zero running them close, but every time I listen to the other tracks as well there's a fresh microscopic detail to pick out and revel in.  Deep listening electronica par excellence.

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previously posted at SGTG: Fizheuer Zieheuer

László Hortobágyi, György Kurtág Jr & Miklós Lengyelfi - Kurtágonals (2009)

If I could count the number of times I've said to fans of reunion-era Throbbing Gristle / X-TG / Carter-Tutti / late-period Coil that there's an ECM album they should pick up at the first opportunity, as they'd pretty much be fans of it from the word go - that would be precisely... once.

This is the album in question, and it was recorded by three Hungarians who collectively go under the name Hortagonals, although the group name appears only in the liner notes.  Whether that was to avoid confusion with the album title, or that using the contributing artists' names up front is closer to ECM convention, dunno, and it doesn't really matter.  What does matter is the 71 minutes of dark electronic brilliance cooked up here by composer György Kurtág Jr (b. 1955, avant-garde credentials obvious straight away from his name, came up through IRCAM in the 80s), "transglobal" composer László Hortobágyi (b. 1950, and a major scholar of Indian music) and bassist Miklós Lengyelfi (b. 1955, with his roots in folk music).

The centrepiece of Kurtagonals is arguably the 38-minute stretch that takes in its three longest pieces - the self-explanatory Kurtagamelan, which feels like it's only missing a hooded and bearded Jhonn Balance moaning over the top; the more soundtracky Interrogation; and the more explicitly beat-driven drones, pads and micro-details of Lux-Abbysum.  After this, we get a bit of uneasy respite in Dronezone, one of quite a few tracks here that made me imagine Chris and Cosey hunched over laptops (anyone heard his new solo album yet? I've been a bit lazy picking it up), and the possibly weakest but still hugely enjoyable track Kurtaganja.  A couple of nice short tracks wind up this brilliant album, which sadly appears to have been The First and Final Report of Hortagonals - shame there aren't loads more to dig deep into.

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Herbie Hancock - The Piano (1979)

How 'bout a proper, old-school-SGTG jazz piano Friday, courtesy of an old master who I don't listen to nearly enough these days, especially not in pure, acoustic-jazz format.  At the end of the 70s, as his funky fusion era was beginning to dip in quality, and his proto hip-hop future shocks were still a few years away, Herbie Hancock got right back to his roots in this Japan-only solo piano LP.

Recording for a famously audiophile, tech-savvy market, Hancock made his second foray into the then state-of-the-art Direct to Disc recording technique.  A one-shot deal for each 16 minutes max album side, Herbie got the nod from the engineer that they'd started cutting direct to the master that would be pressed straight to vinyl, and started to play each of these two suites.  The first was three jazz standards associated with his career-making time in Miles Davis' band - masterful renditions of My Funny Valentine, On Green Dolphin Street and Someday My Prince Will Come.

The second was a gorgeous run of four originals - the sweet and lovely Harvest Time, the more groovy Sonrisa, then a similar variation in mood between the perfect closing pair Manhattan Island and Blue Otani.  As perfect an album as this was, the wider world wouldn't get to hear it for over 20 years, unless prepared to fork out for an import copy.  Thankfully though, The Piano is now much more accessible and remains ageless and fresh sounding, much of which will be thanks to the live-in-the-studio, against the clock limitations of the original recording.  This is quite possibly my favourite Herbie Hancock album, full stop.

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la! NEU? - Gold Regen (1998)

One of the final la! NEU? studio recordings, Gold Regen was also the mellowest, and featured no electronic instruments.  More recognisable from previous efforts by this band was the structure of the album, Klaus Dinger foregoing any conventional wisdom for simply dropping in rough-cut tracks from lengthy jam sessions in whatever order he pleased, like a box of unsorted photographs.  With mother Renate starring in the opening track, and the Dinger brothers reunited in four others for the first time in 15 years, Klaus did actually refer to Gold Regen as "a family album", which suits the homely loveliness of the music just fine.

For all of the above notes about la! NEU? albums being randomly structured, Gold Regen does actually fit into three distinct sections.  The first of these is the two-minute opener, Zeeland Wunderbar, a slightly corny but sweetly executed (you want more sleigh bells after the Eastman post the other week? We got 'em) song by Mutter Dinger that also featured in la! NEU?'s final concert.

The second section is half an hour of improvisational excerpts based around Rembrandt Lensink's piano, Viktoria Wehrmeister's gentle vocals, and occasional percussion (Klaus) and violin (Thomas).  The mood is mostly sedate and melancholy, perhaps best exemplified in the gorgeous Lansam Bewegt, aber nicht Traurig, with occasional diversions into mid-tempo jamming on Strahomaso and Dinger Brothers mit Remmi & Wicki.  

After one final 'Intermezzo' from Lensink on piano, the stage is set for the third part of the album: 25 minutes of blissful ambient drift from just Viktoria on vocals (with a little percussion on its middle track) and Klaus on harmonium.  Based on an increasingly slowed-down version of the intro to Die Engel Des Herrn's title track, these three tracks are almost indescribably beautiful; another reviewer once likened them as 'the sound of being in the womb', or words to that effect.  Highly recommended.

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Masayoshi Fujita - Apalogues (2015)

Oh this one is just gorgeous.  Perfect late-Spring mellowness from Berlin-based Japanese vibraphonist Masayoshi Fujita, in the second album released under his own name.  Previous releases had been under the alias El Fog, in which Fujita subjected the vibes to an array of electronic effects.  Without the alias and without all the processing though, the natural sound of his instrument is right up front and centre, with understated support here from a judiciously-used group of chamber instruments - violin, cello, clarinet, flute, french horn, accordion and snare drum.

The violinist in question is Hoshiko Yamane, a member of latter-day Tangerine Dream, and Apologues was recorded and mixed by Satoshi Okamoto aka sub-tle, who fellow Klaus Dinger aficionados will recognise as the keyboard player from Japandorf.  But enough krautrock trivia, just sit/lie back and luxuriate in this wonderful record.  At its centre is the self-descriptive Beautiful Shimmer, where Fujita plays accompanied only by reverb; everywhere else the various members of the ensemble act as perfectly-mixed cocktail ingredients into which the ice cubes of vibraphone clink around for your instant refreshment.

Apologues offers a well-balanced programme of uptempo compositions and just-slightly-melancholy meditative pieces.  It's almost impossible to pick favourites, but from the former type I'll go for the forward momentum of Flag and the jazzy Puppet's Strange Dream Circus Band, and from the latter the wine-glass-edge eerie Knight And Spirit Of Lake, and the admittedly mid-tempo opener Tears Of Unicorn.  But then I should also go for Swallow Flies High, and... argh, let's just say every track is perfection.  Each of these titles is expanded to an equally evocative little epigraph in the liner notes; no idea if they're original writings, or from Japanese folklore, but they do add another cute dimension to a stunningly lovely album.

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Philip Glass - Einstein On The Beach (1979)

The big breakthrough moment for mid-70s Philip Glass, composer, plumber and taxi driver, started when he agreed to collaborate with avant-garde theatre director Robert Wilson.  Agreeing to work on a non-narrative portrait of Albert Einstein, Glass spent most of 1975 writing to a series of Wilson's storyboards.  Einstein On The Beach's four Acts, linked by five short 'Knee Plays', totaled around five hours in duration and premiered in France in July 1976.

Three years later, this first complete recording by Glass' Ensemble was released.  Most of the individual pieces had to be significantly shortened by necessity to fit on to four LPs, but you still get enough of a sense of what an epic work this is even at just two and a half hours.  All of Glass' experiments from the late 60s and early 70s into harmonic, repetitive and additive structures finds fruition here - the epic Music In Twelve Parts (admittedly only part-released in the 70s) now looks like a warmup for Einstein On The Beach.

As with that earlier work, the vocal text for Einstein was written as solfège (do-re-mi etc), intended, as were the chanted numbers, to be placeholder text, but ultimately kept in the finished opera, only enhancing its beautiful absurdity.  Texts on a variety of odd subjects, most of them seemingly random and cut-up non-sequiturs, were contributed by Christopher Knowles, Lucinda Childs and Samuel M Johnson.  On stage, Wilson's staging and choreography would fill in some of the gaps in understanding, but on record Einstein is still a hypnotic and joyous experience; no further explanation is needed.  And you'd have to have a heart of stone not to be moved by the closing two minutes, as the 'Bus Driver' character from the opera's final Knee Play recites Johnson's 'Two Lovers On A Park Bench' monologue.

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A Winged Victory For The Sullen - Atomos (2014)

Album #2 for A Winged Victory For The Sullen arrived three years after their debut, and saw Dustin O'Halloran and Stars Of The Lid's Adam Wiltzie refine their sound just a little in this gorgeous hour-long suite that was commissioned for a dance work.  Each track is simply numbered Atomos I - XII (with no IV), with the ten minute first part virtually comprising a suite in itself, moving through a droning intro to more animated string arrangements, to the first major feature of O'Halloran on piano, to a languid close.

The fully-intergrated orchestral sweep of AWVFTS continues to separate them from Wiltzie's previous project, such as on the aching melancholy of Atomos II, and O'Halloran's piano work continues to be thing of plaintive beauty from Atomos III onward.  My only negative on Atomos is that there ought to be more of O'Halloran on piano - but the particularly lovely Atomos IX is worth waiting for.

The major progression from the self-titled album is more of an electronic tinge, given centre stage at the outset of Atomos V before the orchestration takes over, and in the middle section of Atomos VI - wonder if their association with Robert Rath's Erased Tapes stable had anything to do with it?  There's more subtle sound effects too, in Atomos IX and X.  In any case, this album is another knockout from an inspired duo who hopefully have several more still to come.

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Electronic Music For The Mind And Body (2013 compilation, rec. 1958-62)

Cheekily parodying the title of Country Joe & The Fish's legendary psych classic, this inspired compilation from Cherry Red's él subsidiary turned back the clock a further decade for 80 minutes of truly revolutionary sound warping.  The first 35 of these 80 minutes is an entire album in itself, originally composed and recorded 1959-60: Stockhausen's still-astonishing Kontakte.  Working at WDR with Gottfried Michael Koenig, Stockhausen laid out his grandest vision yet of electronic tones, timbres and (in live situations) spatial movement.  A second version would later add in David Tudor's piano and Christoph Caskel's percussion.  Whether in that form or in this pure electronic recording, it remains a magnificent, otherworldly soundscape to get lost in.

Next up on this CD is Iannis Xenakis' Orient-Occident, already featured here, devised in 1960 as a film soundtrack for Enrico Fuchignoni, and featuring a definite Pierre Schaeffer influence.  The shortest piece on the compilation is György Ligeti's Artikulation, recorded at WDR in 1958 with the assistance of Koenig and Cornelius Cardew.  One of only two electronic pieces that Ligeti would fully realise, Artikulation certainly packs a lot into its four minutes, arranging different recordings of noises before piecing them together at random into a 'conversation' of sorts, as if inventing a new machine-language.

Lastly, we get two pieces of prime John Cage.  The 20-minute Cartridge Music was composed in 1960 for performers following a chance score, armed with phonograph cartridges and contact microphones which are then struck against various objects.  This recording is an amalgamation of four performances of the score by Cage and David Tudor in 1962.  The final track on the CD is Aria With Fontana Mix, another 1962 recording overlaying two Cage compositions - his free-score Fontana Mix (much more noisily used by Max Neuhaus a few years later) is used for various tape sources, whilst Cathy Berberian performs his vocal work Aria over the top.

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Jordan De La Sierra - Gymnosphere: Song Of The Rose (1977)

Meditative minimal piano from Jordan De La Sierra, born Jordan Stenberg in California in 1947.  Having spent the early 70s soaking up ideas from meetings with La Monte Young, Terry Riley and Pandit Pran Nath, De La Sierra recorded Gymnosphere: Song of the Rose in 1976 in a small Berkeley studio.  Five hours of retuned (following the intonation preferred by Riley and Young) piano recordings provided the raw material for the four circa-25 minute pieces for this album; post-production involved playing back the tapes in the environs of the Bay Area's Grace Cathedral and re-recording them with its reverberating acoustics.

The resulting Gymnosphere 2LP release came resplendent with De La Sierra's lengthy liner notes, very much in tune with the nascent New Age movement - which makes for comedy gold when reproduced in full on this 2014 reissue.  The music has aged much better, with De La Sierra's gentle pianistic meanderings shimmering in a bath of modest tape delay and all that gorgeous natural reverb.

The first and fourth tracks (likely one long piece split in two) have the most forward momentum, with the melancholy arpeggios bouncing around in a way that made me think of mid-70s Manuel Göttsching more than once.  The middle two are more subdued for the most part, and will appeal to anyone who's ever wondered how Harold Budd might've sounded if he'd plumped for much more long-form piano pieces.  Lovely stuff.

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Nurse With Wound - Alice The Goon (expanded edition 2000, orig. rel. 1995)

Steven Stapleton in fun mode, with an extended bit of darkness never far away.  This EP was originally released as a 2-track, single-sided 12" limited to 500 copies, at a festival in France, and was "inspired by a lurid Popeye cartoon" which is the source of its name.  On the opening track, (I Don't Want To Have) Easy Listening Nightmares, a chugging rumba loop is the basis for nine minutes of thoroughly enjoyable chaos, as the loop is overlaid with electronic noise and an insane guitar solo.  The rhythm of the loop is occasionally shifted by a delay effect, until a voice announces "It's so easy, baby... easy... easy..." to draw things to a close.

The second track, Prelude To Alice The Goon, is all atmospheric bass and guitar rumbles, eerie effects and a creepy, goonlike voice cooing as if discovering a shipwrecked human to drag off to a subterranean cave where an echoing, percussive ritual commences.  On the CD reissue, a third track was added and left untitled, but for obvious reasons has become informally known as Alice The Goon.  This track is the most minimal, with only the ghostly atmosphere remaining from the Prelude.  All in all, a really enjoyable, bitesize half hour of prime NWW.  Easy, baby.

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