David Behrman - Leapday Night (1991 compi of works 1983-90)

The second album by US composer David Behrman continued the computer-music experiments of his first, On The Other Ocean.  The hardware and software had been upgdraded, now coming with a colour graphic monitor and pitch sensors to interact with each musician's semi-improvised performance.  Two suites of this nature were released on LP in 1987, the running order of which corresponds to tracks 6, 7, 1, 2, 3 respectively in this expanded CD edition.

Following the CD programming, we're first given the title suite in its three 'Scenes'.  Supported by Rhys Chatham, the main instrumentalist is Ben Neill, inventor of the electroacoustic 'mutantrumpet' which was designed to easily produce quarter tones and wider sonoritiy and was then further modified by Robert Moog. 

The two parts of A Traveller's Dream Journal that come next are the work new to the CD, and were recorded in Berlin in 1988 and finished in New York in 1990.  As well as the bouncing, twisting electronics, percussion and further keyboards flesh this one out into the most engrossing part of the collection.  Lastly, violinist Takehisa Kosugi fronts Inrerspcies Smalltalk, a commission for a dance piece by John Cage & Merce Cunningham, with some gorgeous playing.  Listening to the whole collection is like a window into some futuristic recording studio with tiny AIs bouncing around the instruments and mixing desk, like zero-gravity balls of liquid.  Highly recommended.

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Third Ear Band - Alchemy (1969)

British free-improvisation with its roots in the heady, psychedelic days of London's UFO Club.  A year or so on from those days, members of two bands had coalesced into a stable lineup based around percussionist Glen Sweeney, and following an equipment theft after a gig at the Middle Earth decided to start from scratch with acoustic instruments.

Now using oboe, recorder, violin/viola, cello and hand percussion as the core of their sound, the medieval and raga-influenced Third Ear Band were in place, augmented by various other instrumentalists.  If legend is true (the general reliability of the legend-spreader suggesting 'No'), they may have been joined on occasion by a teenaged Genesis P-Orridge for some multi-violin jams.

Even if true, Gen's not on this album, but John Peel is, playing harmonica and Jew's harp, and Peel's encouragement and promotion of the group was instrumental in their modest early success.  The eight tracks on Alchemy, their debut, jam around raga-like structures to hypnotic effect at their most potent.  They were certainly good musicians, and had a good (third?) ear for group improvisation.  At its most unsettlingly atmospheric, such as on Egyptian Book Of The Dead, the album shows a promising talent as soundtrackers who'd become best known for Polanski's Macbeth.

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Ricardo Villalobos & Max Loderbauer - Re: ECM (2011)

My favourite thing about the sheer volume of ECM's back catalogue is that you can spend years listening to hundreds of albums, and still have hundreds to discover.  When given free rein of the label's output in 2009 to sample and remodel, Ricardo Villalobos and Max Loderbauer's first hurdle must've been to decide where to start with their choices.  The thirteen albums that they settled on could easily have been a completely different set.  As per my opening line, I'm only personally familiar with two of them, the only two here of 70s vintage: John Abercrombie's Timeless and Bennie Maupin's Jewel In The Lotus.

Far from being some sort of 'remix album', Villalobos & Loderbauer worked with a live mixing board setup and a modular synth to improvise around the spatial structures of the original recordings.  Taking full advantage of ECM's famously audiophile frequency range and sense of space, they sampled not just instrumental/vocal elements but "also used pauses, gaps and the microphonic impressions of the rooms as source material", to compose the 17 new tracks that make up Re: ECM.

The resulting two-hour listening experience is a deep, subterranean dive into pure sound that continues to pay fresh rewards with every listen.  I've been living with this album on and off for about five years, and dug it out this month to enjoy during a major Villalobos kick that I've been going through.  There's enough here that's recognsiable to please fans of Ricardo & Max, in the minimal, jazz-inflected drum tracks when they appear - a far more reductive, ultraminimalist version of this approach would lead to Safe In Harbor.

There's also more than enough that's classically ECM, even when heavily manipulated, such as a faraway snatch of piano, bass (although nine minutes of Miroslav Vitous' bass buzzing midway through disc 1 may be the album's weakest point) or, in its most sublime moments, a haunting vocal from one of Arvo Pärt or Alexander Knaifel's ECM New Series releases.  Listen and enjoy, many many times, and let this singular project, a fully respectful homage to the ECM sound, wash over you.

Disc 1 link
Disc 2 link
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Scott Walker 1943-2019

R.I.P. :(

What a career... with the most envelope-pushing stuff saved til the end.  Sheer bloody genius.

Previously posted on SGTG: Tilt

Brian Eno with Daniel Lanois & Roger Eno - Apollo - Atmospheres & Soundtracks (1983)

Ambient weightlessness at its most divinely spacious and melodic.  Recorded for Al Reinert's documentary on the Apollo missions, which wouldn't be finalised until 1989, this 1983 LP collected all the original music.  Sampled heavily by subsequent artists, and reappropriated for other film soundtracks, Apollo - Atmospheres & Soundtracks is still a standout in the careers of Brian Eno, Daniel Lanois and Roger Eno.

Making extensive use of the then-new DX7, Eno further processed the sounds of the synthesizer to create a spacey, floating atmosphere.  Mixed in with this at intervals is the sound of pedal steel guitar, played by Daniel Lanois, more associated with country music.  On Eno's part, this was a deliberate stylistic choice, finding country imbued with a sense of weightlessness when he heard it as a child, and also drawing the link between country as music of the American frontier with the space missions.  All of it is magnificent in its desolation - no highlights necessary to list.  Just play the whole thing, and drift in space.

link
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Previously posted at SGTG:
Another Green World
The Plateaux Of Mirror
The Pearl

Ricardo Villalobos - Vasco (2008)

Been in a massive minimal-electronics mood this past week, so here's some music from the maestro of minimal techno/microhouse.  Vasco, meaning 'Basque', was originally released as a pair of 12" vinyl EPs a few months apart, before this CD version ditched the remixes from the vinyl but added one new track, and massively extended another.  It works beautifully as a double-album length immersion into just how much can be done with so few elements.

Taking up the first 31 minutes is the epic Minimoonstar (Full Session), which as noted above only ran for 13 on vinyl.  Given such room to breathe, the listener can fully appreciate just how intricate a Villalobos production can be, and how audacious an envelope-pusher he's been at times.  Whereas Fizheuer Zieheuer/Fizbeast (link below) were based on much more spartan, beat-driven repetition, Minimoonstar's percussion programming is a delight in its constant variation.

The next two tracks match their vinyl counterparts, sans remixes.  Electonic (sic) Water is full of subtle clicks and pulses, with the occasional ear-blasting spike, and the wonderful Amazordum is the most relatively conventional track here.  Rounding out the CD is the previously unreleased Skinfummel, which samples dialogue from the French erotic thriller Nathalie... (2003, dir. Anne Fontaine) to great effect.  The claustrophobic, disorienting production makes for an unsettling, memorable closing track.

link
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previously posted at SGTG:
Fizheuer Zieheuer
Safe In Harbor

Adriana Hölszky - Bremer Freiheit (1992)

Avant-garde opera today, from Adriana Hölszky (b. 1953 in Bucharest; has lived in Germany since 1976).  Bremer Freiheit, completed in 1987, recounts the story of Gesche (or Geesche) Gottfried (1785-1831).  Whether motivated by abuse she suffered, Munchausen by proxy, or just plain ol' murderousness, Gottfried poisoned 15 people, and became the last publicly-executed convict in Bremen's history.

The libretto, taken from Rainer Werner Fassbender's 1971 theatrical setting of the Gottfried story, is naturally all in German, but there's a useful summary of the main plot points here.  Musically, it's a wild, disorienting hour of fragmented orchestral thuds and squeals, blaring brass, subtle electronics, and the declaimed vocals of the cast plus a shrieking chorus.  Absolutely exhilarating music to dive into and enjoy the instrumental drama driving the story forward, even if following the language is out of your reach as it is mine.

link
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Pat Metheny & Lyle Mays - As Falls Wichita, So Falls Wichita Falls (1981)

Recorded in between the second and third Pat Metheny Group albums, this collaboration of the PMG creative hub was highly significant to the larger group's direction.  For the first time here, Metheny and Mays worked with Brazilian percussionist/vocalist Naná Vasconcelos, and Metheny's innate sense of wide open space in his music would expand further into full-on panoramic vistas.

Nowhere is this better expressed than in Wichita's 20-minute title track.  Evolving from ambient sound into a gently throbbing pulse, the track's beautiful opening phrase only lasts a minute before setting off into dark wilderness.  Over the extended, filmic landscape, Vasconcelos' voice & percussion and Mays' synth explorations traverse the frontiers of ambient jazz in a journey that remains one of the crown jewels in the ECM catalogue.

At the outset of the album's second half, Metheny and Mays remain in the rural outdoors for the joyful Ozark, before taking the tempo and mood down a notch for a sombre tribute to Bill Evans' passing (which occurred during recording).  Next up is It's For You, another outing for Mays' synths and Vasconcelos, as Metheny creates shimmering rainclouds of acoustic guitar before taking a solo at the halfway point.  The sweetly atmospheric Estupenda Graça closes the album.

A quick word about the album cover, said to be both a reference to the track It's For You and to Glen Campbell's Wichita Lineman; it might come in for some stick from many fans, but I kind of like it.  And it does provide a link to another of my favourite record labels, Erased Tapes: two years after the recording sessions for Wichita, the cover photographer Klaus Frahm would become father to a son named Nils.

link
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Olivier Messiaen - Turangalîla Symphony / L'ascension (rec. 1998, rel. 2000)

Probably Olivier Messiaen's most famous orchestral work, the Turangalîla-Symphonie was completed in 1948 and has been recorded dozens of times since.  This 1998 version remains my favourite, probably because it's so well recorded and allows close investigation of all the crazy elements that make up Messiaen's mindblowing 'love song to life' (one of the possible translations of the Sanskrit turanga lîla).

The symphony is one of the best known outings for the ondes Martenot, that ghostly sounding proto-synthesizer invented in the late 1920s.  Played here by rare instrument specialist Robert Bloch, the theremin-like sweeps of the ondes first make their presence felt in the second section, or first Chant d'amour.  It's also used as one of the main melodic instruments in the Joie du sang des etoiles section.

Throughout, the rest of the orchestra whirls around in great multicolour shades (Messiaen was apparently a synesthete) and four central themes weave in and out at various points.  Listening to the 80 minute work for me is like hearing an early form of psychedelia - it's a long, strange trip, but an absolutely beautiful one.  The shimmering wonder of L'ascension, four meditations for orchestra (1932-3), which fills out the second CD, has a similar effect despite being an earlier work and more rooted in Messiaen's spiritual ouevre - a different recording can be found here.

Disc 1 link
Disc 2 link

Miles Davis/Gil Evans - Miles Ahead (1957)

Miles Davis and Gil Evans, who'd first worked together on the 1949-50 sides that would make up Birth Of The Cool, reunited in 1957 for the first of three major album projects.  Miles Ahead was to be an ambitious suite of jazz and classical pieces that were arranged to run together.  Right from the upbeat Springsville segueing into Léo Delibes' Maids Of Cadiz, it was an inspired album that expanded the vocabulary of jazz and third stream music, and still sounds fresh and essential.

Miles abandoned the trumpet in favour of flugelhorn for Miles Ahead, an inspired choice that was a natural fit for his playing style.  The 20 musicians are masterfully arranged by Evans, and the linking together of each piece makes it hard to pick favourites; they're just all brilliant.  Still to come from this legendary collaboration was a setting of Gershwin's Porgy And Bess, and of course the magnificent Sketches of Spain.

link
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Duke Ellington, Charles Mingus & Max Roach - Money Jungle (1963)

A firey, tempestuous trio date organised at the suggestion of the great bandleader who wanted to record a piano trio album.  The musicians booked to back up the 63-year old in September 1962 were two decades his juniors, drummer Max Roach and bassist Charles Mingus.  From the opening title track, this was a session that cooked hard, with Mingus sounding like he's about to tear his strings off.  The almost-stern sounding, staccato take on Caravan was my introduction to the classic tune, back when it appeared on a popular Blue Note best-of CD in the 90s.

The famously short-fused bassist actually walked out on the sessions at one point before being coaxed back by Ellington, and much has been written about how the tension in the studio audibly contributed to such exciting uptempo tracks.  There is light and shade on the album too though, especially on the gorgeous Warm Valley.  Originally issued as an eight-track LP, Money Jungle was expanded to ten in the 80s, with this CD reissue following the original order then putting all the extra material afterwards - all of it absolutely essential listening.

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Die With Dignity - Kraut? (1998)

This came free from Captain Trip when I was ordering the last couple of la! NEU? albums that I didn't have, packed in between the other items sans jewel case.  I knew the story behind Kraut! from Klaus Dinger-related websites describing it as a one-off by a young German band who through Dinger's patronage had their album released on Captain Trip, crediting him as "musical advisor " (which led to the la! NEU? logo confusingly appearing on the cover.)  I also knew the general critical consensus was that it wasn't very good, so popped it in a spare case and ignored it for a few months - hey, it was a freebie, I'll get around to hearing it maybe once.

When I did give Kraut! a listen, it was with pleasant surprise - it's not bad at all.  The five-piece band exist in a kind of semi-improvisational space between krautrock, post-punk and electronic avant-garde.  The album's 16 tracks average about 5 minutes, mostly built on a drum machine base with frequently noisy guitars and electronics over the top, and often distorted, mostly spoken vocals, all in German. 

Highlights include the stiff, robotic wah-wah guitar groove of Magischer Traum, with regular singing and post-2000-Neubaten like electronic squeals; the ill-sounding synths of Kochrezept that follows, and Kommunismusangst-Fantasie with its synth swirls and subtle acoustic guitar flourishes.  The longest track, the 10-minute Ein Wahn, is also worth a mention for its gradually distorting trumpet and mangled vocals.  All in all, a really worthwhile experimental album that with a bit of pruning could've been a minor cult classic.

link
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Penguin Cafe Orchestra - Concert Program (1995)

The unseasonable weather round these parts in the last week made this one a shoo-in for premature Spring listening.  Recorded at the Wool Hall, Beckington, Somerset on 23 July 1994, this PCO live performance leans heavily on the their final studio album Union Cafe, plus a handful of earlier favourites from a gorgeous Air A Danser onwards.  As might be expected, even performing live PCO were a polite, largely sedate affair, allowing the strength of these wonderful melodies and arrangements to take precedence as they rightly should.

Making things even less gig-like, and slightly odd on first listen, is the complete absence of any audience applause - whether it was snipped from the end of each piece, or the audience were asked to only applaud at the end like symphony-goers, I'm not sure.  This makes Concert Program (another lovely PCO quirk - why the choice of US spelling for such a thoroughly English group?) more akin to a re-recorded greatest hits than a live document, but it works, and works wonders in the more spacious and immediate sound.

Disc 1 link
Disc 2 link
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Angel Bat Dawid - The Oracle (2019) [review only + Bandcamp link]

Received a tape in the post on Monday last, following reviews in Pitchfork and The Guardian that intrigued me enough to snap up one of the limited run of cassettes on which this Chicagoan clarinettist/vocalist/pianist has released her debut album.  The Oracle can also be bought digitally at the Bandcamp link below, and at time of writing there's a handful of second-run tapes left.

Recorded completely on her phone, Angel Bat Dawid's album actually sounds very professionally made.  Overdubbing layers of clarinet, voice and electric piano (except for one epic live clarinet-drums jam), The Oracle's eight tracks cover free jazz, gospel and densely-layered avant-garde classical stylings. 

It's sparse on lyrics, mostly just exclamations of spritual ecstasy; one track borrows the opening couplet from a poem by Margaret Burroughs and layers it over and over.  My personal favourite is We Are Starzz, in which a simple descending sequence blossoms into gorgeous clarinet solos and aching vocal lines.  I honestly can't recommend this enough - do investigate if this sounds at all like your kind of thing.

link

Giya Kancheli - Symphony No. 3, No. 6 (1984)

To follow on from Bright Sorrow/Mourned By The Wind, here's two more great recordings of Giya Kancheli's works, again performed by the State Symphony Orchestra of Georgia.  These two symphonies were originally paired on an hour-long single LP in 1984, with CD reissues in 1990.

Kancheli's 3rd Symphony (comp. 1973, rec. 1979), taking its cues from Georgian folk music, opens with an stark, wordless tenor voice before a stabbing brass theme brings in influences from Stravinsky.  The work marches on in the gloom of more brass and some eerie strings before a really lovely middle section calms things down slightly, and the voice returns, as it will once more to end things as they began.

The 6th Symphony (comp. 1978-80, rec. 1981) has a similar structure, but the main melody is led by the strings, and little punctuations of flute and harpsichord.  As with much of Kancheli's work, any calm period is highly likely to be blown away in spectacular style at any moment, and the 6th does this in spades in its near-apocalyptic second half.  Really enjoyable, invigorating stuff to listen to.

original LP cover, 1984

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