Tomasz Stańko Quartet - Lontano (2006)

Recorded in November 2005, Lontano was the conclusion to a trilogy of albums recorded by the Tomasz Stańko Quartet: the trumpeter, now in his sixties, backed by a trio of fellow Poles half his age, who'd continue to produce great music in their own right.  The quartet's expansive, cinematic feel for space and patient, at times near-ambient improvisational pace reached their apex in the diffuse, impressionistic music on this aptly-titled album.

At the album's core are its title tracks, numbered I, II and III, a total of 40 minutes of free improvisation credited to the full group.  Whether they were all recorded as a single session or as three separate takes I'm not sure, but the Lontano tracks provide the deepest expression of this quartet's spacious sensibility, the shorter pieces that surround them highlighting the spare beauty of Stańko's writing and more sublime playing.  Stańko reaches back to his first ECM appearance for a fresh take on Tale, and even further to his first appearance on LP, the muscular version of Komeda's Kattorna giving an upbeat contrast to sublime ballads like Song For Ania and Sweet Thing.  A masterpiece of an album that keeps on giving with every listen.

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pw: sgtg

Tomasz Stańko at SGTG:
Jazzmessage From Poland
Purple Sun

TWET 

Balladyna
Freelectronic in Montreux
Bluish
Bosonossa And Other Ballads
Matka Joanna 

Suspended Night

Neighbourhood (Manu Katché) 

Wolność W Sierpniu - Freedom In August
Dark Eyes
Wisława
Polin

Tribute To Tomasz Stańko, London Jazz Festival 2022

Alexei Lubimov - Der Bote: Elegies For Piano (2002)

A sublime programme, and one spanning the centuries from baroque to modern, performed by Alexei Lubimov (b. 1944, Moscow).  This recording was made by DRS Radio in Zurich at the end of 2000, and released as an ECM New Series album a year and a half later.

 

Kicking off with a 20-minute stretch that pairs CPE Bach and John Cage, it's clear that this is no ordinary classical solo piano recital.  But you know what, the Fantasie Für Klavier and a nice pacey In A Landscape complement each other just fine, and things just get more interesting from there.  With an overall theme of 'elegies', and an album title of 'the messenger' (taken from the haunting final piece), as a concept piece it plays out well, and just sounds heavenly.  Balancing stock repertoire choices like Liszt, Chopin and Debussy with the kind of more recent composers that have long been Lubimov's interest (Tigran Mansurian, Valentin Silvestrov), he turns in a great set that feels satisfying from beginning to end on every listen.

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Jacob Young - Evening Falls (2004)

It's been an ECM kind of week for me, so here we are again, this time jumping back a decade for another guitarist, in his debut with the label recorded in December 2002.  Lillehammer native Jacob Young has been working with some of the hottest names in Nordic jazz since the 90s, and here fronts a two-horn quintet that includes one of my favourite ECM trumpeters of recent years, Mathias Eick.

Rather than put his clear guitar talents front and centre, Young's sound on this set of his own material is a sumptuously arranged and well-meshed group performance of highly lyrical tunes.  The immersive melancholy makes Evening Falls a well-chosen title for just under an hour of late listening.  As well as enjoying Young's lean playing, Eick is the obvious breakout star of this session, but Vidar Johansen sounds fantastic here too, especially when he switches from sax to bass clarinet.  Lovely stuff all round.

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Giacinto Scelsi - Natura Renovatur, Anagamin, Ohoi, Elohim (Orch. Royal de Chambre de Wallonie, 2000)

Icy, ghostly uneasy listening from microtonal magician Giacinto Scelsi (1905-88).  This nice compact album from the Royal Chamber Orchestra of Wallonia contains four of Scelsi's works for string orchestra; as the liner notes point out, this is the ideal force for really exploring in depth how Scelsi's music was so unique.  The continuous shifting of the tonal and harmonic ground beneath your feet, coupled with the various advanced techniques applied to the strings, mean that any temporary refuge in a recognisable chord is likely to vanish into thin air the next moment.  

 

This can be appreciated to its fullest extent on the first and lengthiest piece Natura Renovatur (1967), a rewrite of an earlier string quartet.  The unrelenting darkness of Anagamin (1965) is next, contrasted with the calmer, luminous Ohoi (1966), then to finish comes the brief, but no less eerie Elohim, published posthumously.  Incredible music to get lost in on dark nights.

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Previously posted at SGTG: 
Quatro Pezzi Per Orchestra/Anahit/Uaxuctum 

Hurqualia/Hymnos/Chukrum
Tre Pezzi (Daniel Kientzy, saxophone)

Vassilis Tsabropoulos - Akroasis (2003)

Very lovely solo piano suite from Athens native Vassilis Tsabropoulos, previously featured here in trio format - see link below.  Akroasis is based on five traditional Byzantine hymns, which together with three of Tsabropoulos' own compostions "became a poem of eight pictures".  Enjoy just under 45 minutes of blissful piano poetry.

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Previously posted at SGTG: Achirana

Shackleton - Three EPs (2009)

Lancashire native/Berlin resident Sam Shackleton just returned with a new album, so here's an old one.  I started listening to Shackleton a few years back in a phase of trying to tackle more recent, interesting electronic music, and absolutely loved the dark, spacious production.

 

Three EPs, Shackleton's only release for Perlon and despite the title counted as his first album, was released on three 12"s (hence the title) or one CD.  Minimal beats, low frequency bass, jittery Middle Eastern-style percussion, doomy organ, hissing clouds of electronics and samples from what sounds like a self-help lecture all combine to provide an immersive, hypnotic hour of unsettling darkness.  At the same time, oddly enough, as many listeners have noted, it's oddly calming, and very satisfying.  During its 2000s vogue, the more commercial end of this sort of stuff was known as dubstep; to my ears though it's just very good atmospheric, percussive electronica in the tradition of Zoviet France and Muslimgauze.

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Dustin O'Halloran - Piano Solos (2004)

First solo album by Phoenix-born musician Dustin O'Halloran, who'd go on to form A Winged Victory For The Sullen a few years later with Adam Wiltzie from Stars Of The Lid.  Twelve beautifully composed and rendered solo piano miniatures make for a meditative 40 minutes of music, with perhaps some similarities to Nils Frahm's work in the same field, or even those from the prior generation like George Winston.  That's all there really is to say about this lovely record - just relax and enjoy.

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AWVFTS at SGTG:

s/t debut

Atomos

Live At BBC Proms 2015

Pierre Boulez / Ensemble InterContemporain etc - Sur Incises, Messagesquisse, Anthèmes 2 (2000)

Typically engrossing Boulez, both in composition and in production.  The main event on this album is the two part, 37 minute Sur Incises, based on Boulez's earlier solo piano piece Incises.  With the addition of two extra pianos, three harps and percussion instruments, the various sonorities and textures of the solo piano are blown out into an incredible macrocosm of sound.  Messagesquisse, a shorter work for cellos, provides an interlude and a bridge to the other substantial 'revision' on the album, Anthèmes 2.  On this one, a solo violin plays against recorded and electronically-manipulated violin parts to great atmospheric effect.  I always find Boulez fun to listen to, and the whole of this album just sounds wonderful.

link

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Previously posted at SGTG:

Le Marteau Sans Maître

Sonatine For Flute And Piano

La Visage Nuptial / Le Soleil Des Eaux (BBC Proms 2002)

Boulez Conducts Boulez (and Varèse and Stravinsky) (BBC Proms 2002)

Dug out this great archive concert as Boulez and Varèse seemed liked a good follow-up to Zappa.  Re-broadcast as one of the "Past Proms" last summer, this performance from August 2002 saw Pierre Boulez (1925-2016) reunited with the BBC SO: he was their conductor at various points in the 60s and 70s.

Edgard Varèse's Intégrales is the concert's curtain-raiser, with its sharp bursts of orchestration and percussion; a full overview of Varèse's music can be found at a previous post here.  The next two works are a "Boulez conducts Boulez" immersion: both date back to the 1940s (with various revisions since, including for this concert), and both are cantatas that use verse by French poet René Char.  The longer of the two is the five-section Le Visage Nuptial, with the soloist backed by a shimmering choir and twinkling percussion.  Le Soleil Des Eaux contrasts the summery, anthropomorhic romance of its flowing introduction with a more strident Char poem later on about protesting fishermen.  To end the concert, Boulez conducts the original score to Stravinsky's Petrushka in fine style.

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Previously posted at SGTG:

Le Marteau Sans Maître (also uses Char's poetry)

Sonatine For Flute And Piano

Tomasz Stańko Quartet - Suspended Night (2004)

Second album by Stańko's "Polish Quartet" of the 2000s, or, as the three younger musicians became known outside of Stańko's employ, the Marcin Wasilewski Trio.  It was an inspired combination that produced three great albums of spacious exploration, both rooted in classic post-bop jazz and completely up to date, a forward-looking example of the modern ECM aesthetic.

The album's predecessor had no track titles at all - this one at least starts out with a named piece, the lovely opener Song For Sarah, before embarking on the Suspended Variations, just numbered I - X.  The first of these lays out the template in fine mid-tempo form, highlighting each musician in turn, then journeys through sublime group telepathy in uptempo (like II, V, and VIII) and wispy, becalmed modes (III, IV, VII) and more to complete one of Stańko's most rightly celebrated late-period albums.

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pw: sgtg

Tomasz Stańko at SGTG:
Jazzmessage From Poland
Purple Sun

TWET 

Balladyna
Freelectronic in Montreux
Bluish
Bosonossa And Other Ballads
Matka Joanna 

Wolność W Sierpniu - Freedom In August
Dark Eyes
Wisława
Polin

Manu Katché - Neighbourhood (2005)

Active since the 80s as a high-profile session musician, French drummer Manu Katché had only released one other solo album prior to this beautifully relaxed ECM session.  He was no freshman to the label, having played with Jan Garbarek throughout the 90s, and it's Garbarek who is the main instrumental voice here, in fine form.  The rest of the lineup was Tomasz Stańko's "Polish Quartet" of the time - minus the drummer, of course.

The ten tracks here, all composed by Katché, only raise the temperature a few times - for the most part, Neighbourhood is a wonderful, laid-back immersion in pure group dynamics.  When the album does start to groove, it's with a taut, understated funkiness that makes Katché's deft touch endlessly enjoyable, as on Number One, Lovely Walk, No Rush and the catchy Take Off And Land.  The rest is pure heaven for a rainy afternoon and a beverage of choice.

 

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pw: sgtg

Gianluigi Trovesi, Umberto Petrin, Fulvio Maras - Vaghissimo Ritratto (2007)

ECM gorgeousness from clarnietist Gianluigi Trovesi, with fellow Italians Umberto Petrin on piano and Fulvio Maras on percussion & electronics.  The starting point for this album's concept was a Palestrina madrigal in which the phrase "vaghissimo ritratto" appears; it apparently translates to "most graceful portrait".  A series of thematic "portrait" suites take in music by Monteverdi, Desprez and others, and even a rendering of Brel's Amsterdam, alongside tracks composed or improvised by the trio.

As can be expected from ECM, every note, every little sound from the instruments, and the occasional little electronic effects or bits of spoken voice all sound absolutely phenomenal.  Each musician plays with such refined subtlety (barring occasional dynamic flourishes from Trovesi - he almost sounds like Garbarek on Mirage) that the result falls somewhere between chamber music and beautifully mellow jazz.  Highly recommended for late night immersion.

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Previously posted at SGTG:
Gianluigi Trovesi & Gianni Coscia - In Cerca Di Cibo

Hans-Joachim Roedelius & Tim Story - Inlandish (2008)

Stately, melancholy ambience from two masters.  The story (no pun intended) goes that the younger, American musician first met one of his biggest German heroes in 1983, and ended up staying with him in Austria for a week.  Story & Roedelius wouldn't collaborate until over a decade later, but when they did they made a handful of albums together, of which Inlandish was the third.

It's a gorgeous album that bears all the Roedelius hallmarks you'd expect: sparse, affecting melodies on piano cocooned in gentle ambient waftings and burblings.  In this case, the pair worked from Roedelius' piano sketches, with Story filling out the backgrounds.  Occasional beat-driven tracks like Downrivers and Riddled keep a bit of energy going, but mostly this is mellow meditativeness par excellence.

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P.S. - Florian Schneider-Esleben, 1947-2020
R.I.P to one of the founders of electronic music's Big Bang, who has died of cancer at the age of 73. To celebrate Kraftwerk at the outset of their classic era, head over to Electronic Orgy, where they recently re-upped one of the most astonishing concert bootlegs ever taped.  Or hang out here and enjoy Electric Cafe from 80s Kraftwerk, when their contemporaries had began to catch up on them but they still had plenty to offer; or a recent celebration of early Kraftwerk performed by Zeitkratzer.

Nurse With Wound - Creakiness And Other Misdemeanours (2012 compilation, rec. 1991-2005)

A bit of a strange compilation, even by Steven Stapleton's standards.  Creakiness, his 17-minute collage of cartoon-inspired zaniness, had already featured on the Sugar Fish Drink compilation in 1992 (it first appeared as half of a split LP in 1991).  It was still great to have Creakiness back in circulation in 2012, at a time when Sugar Fish Drink was out of print, and it's one of his most fun adventures in sound that always deserves a wider audience.  What was odd this time around was Stapleton's decision to fill out the disc with half an hour of offcuts from his 'Echo Poeme' dark ambient project from 2005, and a single B-side from 2004.  It's all great music though, and hey, who ever said Nurse With Wound had to make any sense.

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Previously posted at SGTG:
To The Quiet Men From A Tiny Girl
Merzbild Schwet
Insect And Individual Silenced
Homotopy To Marie
Gyllensköld, Geijerstam And I At Rydberg's
The Sylvie And Babs High-Thigh Companion
Spiral Insana
Lumb's Sister 
Soliloquy For Lilith
A Sucked Orange / Scrag
Thunder Perfect Mind
Alice The Goon
A Missing Sense
Man With The Woman Face
Salt Marie Celeste
Angry Eelectric Finger: Spitch'cock One
Paranoia In Hi-Fi
The Surveillance Lounge 
Painting With Priests

Nurse With Wound - Man With The Woman Face (2002)

Since Steven Stapleton recently compiled all his "Trippin' Musik" from last year into a box set (that I've yet to explore), why not take a trip back to one of his most eerily psychedelic albums from the early 2000s.  Featuring just three tracks in a succinct 38 minutes, Man With The Woman Face was in hindsight a subtle, understated prelude to the hallucinatory madness unleashed with the Angry Eelectric Finger series.

Beware The African Mosquito (Ring Your Doorbell, Put You To Sleep) is the first extended fever dream that develops from a gently pulsing drone and fluttering, clattering sounds.  Bell tones, snatches of voice and more gradually fill out the lysergic landscape into one of NWW's most striking album openers for some time.   

Ag Canadh Thuas Sa Spèir (Up in the sky, singing) is based around more drones and electronic tones, smudged into a blend of unsettling electronic muck and robotic voice.  Six minutes in, snatches of a full-on Amon Düül style freakout suddenly disrupt, before leaving behind electronic chirruping.  The final 15 minutes plus of White Light From The Stars In Your Mind (A Paramechanical Development) take in even more of a krautrock influence, with a straightup (if speed-shifted) borrowing from early Amon Düül over another pulsing dronescape.  One of the most hypnotic and satisfying NWW records.

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pw: sgtg

Previously posted at SGTG:
To The Quiet Men From A Tiny Girl
Merzbild Schwet
Insect And Individual Silenced
Homotopy To Marie
Gyllensköld, Geijerstam And I At Rydberg's
The Sylvie And Babs High-Thigh Companion
Spiral Insana
Lumb's Sister 
Soliloquy For Lilith
A Sucked Orange / Scrag
Thunder Perfect Mind
Alice The Goon
A Missing Sense
Salt Marie Celeste
Angry Eelectric Finger: Spitch'cock One
Paranoia In Hi-Fi
The Surveillance Lounge 
Painting With Priests

Ana-Maria Avram / Iancu Dumitrescu - Remote Pulsar (2005)

Longtime readers here will know what to expect from these two Romanian spectralist composers.  If you're unfamiliar though, just sample the first three releases in their catalogue below, then enjoy the rest as they take orchestral, chamber and electronic music and stretch them into ever more extreme distended shapes of sonic mayhem.  Or indeed just start here with today's post, the most recent release I've got up to so far in the music of Iancu Dumitrescu (b. 1944) and Ana-Maria Avram (1961-2017), and one of the most understated by their standards.

Dumitrescu's three tracks are up first on this collection, two of which are reconfigurations of his computer music pieces from album No. 18 in the catalogue (in list below).  Remote Pulsar and Numerologie Secrete both benefit from being fleshed out by the creak and clatter of Dumitrescu/Avram's Hyperion Ensemble.  In between these tracks is a fine workout for percussionist Thierry Miroglio.

The three Avram pieces that complete the album start with another percussion piece, the highly atmospheric Galaxy-Reflection performed by Gustavo Aguilar with some subtle electronic sounds.  Quatre Etudes D'Ombre is another solo piece, this time performed by Isabelle Hureau on bass flute.  Lastly, the Hyperion Ensemble performs the droning Lux Animae, perfectly concluding one of the most eerie and subtly unsettling Avram/Dumitrescu discs that relies on atmosphere rather than sheer power.

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Previously posted on SGTG:
ED.MN.1001 - Medium/Cogito
ED.MN.1002 - Au Dela De Movemur
ED.MN.1003 - Pierres Sacreés
ED.MN.1004 - Musique de Paroles
ED.MN.1005 - Galaxy
ED.MM.1006 - A Priori
ED.MN.1008 - Five Pieces
ED.MN.1009 - Ouranos II 
ED.MN.1010 - Meteors & Pulsars 
ED.MN.1011 - Musique Action '98
ED.MN.1012 - Etoiles Brisees
ED.MN.1014 - Orbit of Eternal Grace
ED.MN.1018 - Remote Pulsar
ED.MN.1019 - In Tokyo

Vassilis Tsabropoulos with Arild Andersen and John Marshall - Achirana (2000)

Greek pianist Vassilis Tsabropoulos made his ECM debut with this October 1999 session, and he's since become an ever more exquisite composer and player.  He's first heard in this most modern-ECM of formats, the piano trio, subtly and with gentle understatement as the title track gets underway.  It's the first of two group improvisations, with the second, Diamond Cut Diamond, being much more alive and propulsive and proving this is a well-chosen trio that gelled really well in the studio.

From there, it becomes increasingly clear that the real group leader is probably Arild Andersen, as soon as he wraps a characteristically solid-oak-carved bassline around his composition Valley.  A further Andersen-penned track is She's Gone, based on a Norwegian folk song.  Throughout the rest of the material written by Tsabropoulous, Andersen plays some of his most sublime bass work, whilst the pianist carries on in gorgeously understated mode.  John Marshall proves to be a great sympathetic drummer throughout, making this one of the very best ECM piano trio albums.

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Vladislav Delay - Multila (2000)

Finnish electronic minimalist Sasu Ripatti returns later this month with his first album as Vladislav Delay in over five years, so time to dig out an early classic of his.  Although it's technically a compilation of two EPs, Ripatti regards Multila as a proper album in his discography.  It came from a fertile time in his career: "The Helsinki period... where I wrote lots of music and didn't do anything else", and the resulting EPs and this CD came out on Basic Channel's Chain Reaction, the sublabel used for their most avant-garde releases.

Basic Channel and Chain Reaction would prove highly influential on the dub techno and minimal techno scenes to come, and there's certainly long stretches of Multila that sound someone doing a Perlon DJ set at the bottom of the Marianas Trench.  None more so than the epic 22 minutes of Huone, the most propulsive track here that at least has a clear beat to follow throughout. 

Elsewhere, the rhythm tracks are submerged so far in the murk as to just offer a vague suggestion of where they should be, or reverbed/delayed into incoherence (as on Pietola) or absent altogether other than little blips of static (Karrha).  Regardless of how far from the dancefloor Multila drifts, it always ends up taking you on a journey into inner space that never stops paying its own reward.  Timeless, essential electronica.

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Previously posted at SGTG: Anima

Current 93 - Halo (2004)

A quintessential live album that does all the things it ought to: a great-sounding memento for fans, with a judicious setlist; and an accessible, stripped-down best-of for the curious.  Halo was my first Current 93 purchase, after a few years of absorbing Nurse With Wound albums - Thunder Perfect Mind in particular, which of course had a C93 'sister album' of the same name - where David Tibet's presence at the margins made me wonder what his own group were like.

Current 93's studio albums admittedly can take a bit of effort to love.  Tibet's voice does take a bit of getting used to, and his dreamlike, Hermetic lyrics can sometimes feel impenetrable.  For this London concert from October 2003, though, the highlights of the very best Current 93 records (arguably their 1992-1998 run) were well chosen and beautifully rendered.  It was released the following year as Halo, with the album cover a tribute to the Moody Blues' Every Good Boy Deserves Favour as painted by Tibet.

For most of the concert, the pared-back instrumentation, based around piano, guitar, cello and woodwinds, and the clarity of Tibet's voice offer a more welcoming path into songs that sometimes get obscured in the originals by the production.  The more natural acoustic sound works well, and nudges them closer to the Incredible String Band than on any prior efforts.  The scaling back of the title track from Sleep Has His House from a 20-minute harmonium drone to three minutes of piano and voice makes Tibet's tribute to his late father heartbreakingly effective - just one example of how well C93 work in a simplified live setting.  Then, for the closing songs, they dig the farthest back into their catalogue and add in more electronic effects for a truly memorable and harrowing ending.  If you own one Current 93 album, make it this one.

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Coil - Black Antlers (2004-6)

Jhonn Balance's tragic death amidst unfinished recordings meant that there was no clear-cut "last Coil album".  The original version of this one might've been the last Coil album released in Balance's lifetime, but even so it was presented as a work in progress; CDRs handed out on tour.  As far as I'm concerned, though, Black Antlers has always felt like just as fitting and satisfying an end to the Coil discography proper, as the more polished Ape Of Naples.

The Gimp (Sometimes) starts proceedings with a full five minutes of discomforting squiggles before settling down into a wearied lament, Sleazy & Thighpaulsandra's electronics reaching ever further into other dimensions.  The late-Coil collection of sardonic and surreal Balance narratives hits a high point with Sex With Sun Ra, and Wraiths And Strays captured how dynamic and exciting their live work had become.  In 2006, three more tracks were added by Sleazy to round off one of the most satisfying Coil releases, and most poignant in showing what they still had to give.

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Previously posted at SGTG:
Astral Disaster
Musick To Play In The Dark
...and the ambulance died in his arms