An explanation of the link between gamelan and 20th century classical music

Featuring “Rituel” by Boulez

Tony Oxley / Derek Bailey – “The Advocate”

I got this on a whim after getting caught up in browsing through the Tzadik catalog online for a few hours (it’s an easy way to lose half an evening without noticing). I’ve been listening to a lot of Derek lately. There’s tons of material online about him but the quick rundown is that he had a steady career as a jazz guitarist in the 50s and 60s and after becoming obsessed with a reel-to-reel copy of the complete works of the Austrian composer Anton Webern he abandoned his jazz aspirations and adapted many of Webern’s musical ideas (a peculiar atonality, an application of unusual contrasts in timbre and texture to conventional instrumentation, and wide intervallic leaps incorporated into melodic patterns) into his own playing with the Joseph Holbrooke Trio, a group of improvisers consisting of Bailey, drummer Oxley, and bassist Gavin Bryars (later to find fame as a composer). The Joseph Holbrooke Trio was  one of the first groups to play freely improvised music exclusively, with no compositions to guide the way and no advance planning or discussion of the material to be played. After the dissolution of Joseph Holbrooke in the late 60s, Bailey and Oxley went on to become two of the most visible members of the European free improvisation movement.

He employed a dual volume pedal/dual amp setup with which he could place his guitar anywhere in the stereo field as well as articulate his notes any way he wanted, from gentle swells to jarring icepick clanks and did more with natural and artificial string harmonics than anyone before or since (harmonics are the bell-like sounds you get when you place your fingertip on a string when picking a note instead of pressing the string down on the fret; using them, Bailey would often coax notes far outside of the guitar’s normal range as well as exploiting the shimmering natural dissonances inherent in the guitar’s tuning system). According to Wire magazine, “He speaks in dead stops, lightning clusters and wowing open strings, all of which highlight the instrument’s construction, as well as the nuts and bolts of real-time creation.” One of the most interesting things about Bailey is that his playing technique was for the most part totally standard, as was his equipment. He used a big hollowbody Gibson in standard tuning, heavy strings and a heavy pick, the exact same setup that someone like Barney Kessel or Herb Ellis used. The uniqueness of Derek’s sound came entirely down to the fact that he simply played unusual combinations of notes in ways nobody had thought to play them before:

“…there may be enormous intervals between consecutive notes, and rather than aspiring to the consistency of timbre typical of most guitar-playing, Bailey interrupts it as much as possible: four consecutive notes, for instance, may be played on an open string, a fretted string, via harmonics, and using a nonstandard technique such as scraping the string with the pick or plucking below the bridge.” – wiki

This disc consists of three duet tracks recorded live in 1975, when Bailey, Oxley and the rest of the British free improvisers were at their peak of creativity. Bailey and Oxley are utterly telepathic throughout these pieces, pairing the  cascading, ultra-precise stabs and keening dissonant harmonic swells of Bailey with Oxley’s abstract percussion and electronic manipulations.  Even the quietest passages crackle with nervous energy,  and really there is an astonishing level of awareness here on the part of both players, as they mesh their languages to create one unified and evolving piece of music that is totally abstract and devoid of accessible rhythms or melodies but still is undeniably the product of a unique and unrepeatable moment of creative delirium. The fourth track here is a thrilling solo Tony Oxley improvisation for percussion and electronics recorded in 2006 at a tribute concert to Bailey, who passed away the previous year. I’ve only ever heard Derek’s solo recordings, and this CD is really a revelation to me, not only regarding Tony Oxley’s stellar contributions but also as a document of the level of interaction that can be achieved by improvisers of this caliber.

I suppose a lot of people (the vast majority of people actually) would totally disregard this as not being music, as being “just noise” or “something my three year old could play”. I never really understood that line of thought because for me, this is if anything even more enjoyable to listen to than music with a more accessible nature… I always think about something like a Miles Davis solo (I love Miles, make no mistake) where he’s playing a great melodic line and the group is playing a rhythm and harmonic backing you can follow and that frame the melody perfectly, it’s beautiful. Take away one element of that accessibility and it’s still music, right? I mean, let’s say Paul Chambers was in bed with the flu that day so it’s just Miles and Bill Evans and Philly Joe Jones. Maybe you don’t have Paul’s bass line to show your ear where the main key is, but it’s still implied by what Miles and Bill are playing, it’s just not as explicitly stated. If you take away Bill, then it’s just trumpet and drums and maybe you can’t even tell what key Miles is playing in unless he’s really incorporating those notes into his melody a lot. It might be hard for your ear to find it’s way there, but there’s still music being played, there’s still something being communicated.

For me, each level of abstraction makes the expression more universal and less specific, you can sense that something is being created and that there is an energy there but it’s not tied to a specific idea or feeling, you can sort of work out your own personal interpretation which is unique to you and your own experience. Someone can look at a Jackson Pollack painting and get the power there, they can understand that something unique was expressed even if it’s not a painting of something familiar like a bunch of fruit on a table or whatever. It seems like the same person will completely dismiss any piece of music unless they can sing along with it or tap their foot. I love a good pop song, and I love the abstract stuff. I don’t really understand why someone wouldn’t want to try to enjoy everything they can in music and art, or at least give it a fair chance and see if they get anything from it, you know?

To me, Bailey’s playing is delicate, patient, thorny, sour, and funny. Actually, a quote by Steve Vai (the quote is not about Derek Bailey needless to say) just popped into my mind which describes my feeling perfectly.

“Did you ever have broccoli rabe, this extremely bitter Italian broccoli? When you’re a kid there’s no way you would ever like it, but now I eat bowls of it. It’s stimulating!”

Tomas Korber/Phil Julian – “Herbe Zeiten”

This is a 3″ CD-R release that I ordered from Con-V records a month or so ago after reading this review on Bagatellen.

Tomas Korber is a guitarist and improvisor from Zurich who works primarily with prepared guitar, which involves using objects such as alligator clips, handheld fans, and pot scrubbers to draw odd timbres out of the guitar.  Englishman Phil Julian, who also works under the alias of Cheapmachines, employs circuit-bent electronics as well as laptop for his contributions here.

I have recently become enamored of the 3″ CD format, as it contains about 20 minutes of music, which is ideal for me. It’s enough to sink your teeth into, but you don’t have to feel like you’re committing 80 minutes to listening when you sit down and put a piece of music on, and even if I wanted to listen for that long my attention span starts betraying me around the 30 minute mark. Plus the little discs look cute. This one is packaged in an odd mini-DVD style case, which is charming except mine got a little bit mashed up in transit so I had to repair it with electrical tape.

This release consists of one 18 minute long track, which starts out with static and high sinewave drones giving way to string rumbles and creaks. After a brief respite, the static and grain returns, bathing the listener in overtones while Korber’s strings rattle like mausoleum chains. It’s a great balance between billowing static drones, electromagnetic micro-clicks, and more abrupt incidental sounds that poke and prod the ears, demanding attention. Eventually the resonances of the room take over the proceedings, with beams of feedback peering through the clouds. Another thing I like here is that the flow of the piece is not predictable, it doesn’t start out quiet and get really loud and dramatic two thirds of the way through and then end quietly. It’s a piece that breathes and evolves, with many peaks and valleys throughout, and takes you through a lot of different spaces as it unfolds. Great stuff, highly recommended.

You can visit Tomas Korber’s website here

You can visit Phil Julian’s website here

You can order this release from Con-V records. It’s limited to 50 numbered copies, so don’t dilly-dally.

Daniel Menche – “Wolf’s Milk”

I just did an order from Squidco a little while ago and took advantage of the $8 sale they were having, ordering a few titles from the Utech label which looked interesting. This particular one is a three-track piece by Portland noise/dronist Daniel Menche. Quite concussive and aggressive, but very textural and involving at the same time. Each of the untitled tracks is apparently based off of the processed sounds of one instrument, with the first track labeled “organs”, the second “gongs” and the third “trumpets”. Track 1 builds hypnotically into crescendos of raw fuzz and sizzling, whirling overtones, while track 2 is a serene interlude of plangent gongs. The third track is a nightmarish wall of nasal tone clusters and infrasonic throbs.  I love Steve Roach and that kind of more atmospheric, ambient drone, and I also like the power drone of Sunn 0))) but this is some of my favorite drone I’ve heard since it seems to incorporate my favorite elements of both; it’s meditative and spiritual like the best drone while being fuzzy, grinding and intense like the best metal and noise. Probably the work of Phill Niblock is the closest parallel I can think of, but while that is music showing painstaking fastidiousness and attention to detail, this just emits a halo of rough-hewn spontaneity, like a white-hot slab of metal freshly drawn from a blacksmith’s forge. Play it LOUD on good speakers and bask in the frequencies like a lizard in the rays of the sun.

Visit Daniel Menche’s site here.

an added reason to enjoy this release is the surfeit of excellent performance stills harvested by a simple image search.

I mean, just look at this fucking guy, and he’s not a metal frontman, he makes drone records with gongs and trumpets. It’s like the brain of Charlemagne Palestine with the attitude of David Yow from Jesus Lizard. It’s genius.

Lou Harrison – “Varied Trio No. 1″

A piece by my favorite composer. Lou Harrison was a student of Henry Cowell and Arnold Schoenberg who went on to study and incorporate many elements of non-Western music into his work, particularly Javanese Gamelan music.

Read an excellent interview with Lou Harrison here.

Perfume – “Computer City/Edge” live

Complete over-the-top insanity. THIS is a concert worth paying good money to see! I’ve been feeling too pretentious lately so I’m including this to lighten things up a bit. Best enjoyed with your favorite sugary cereal and fizzy caffeinated beverage.

Mika Vainio – “Aineen Musta Puhelin”

Mika Vainio is one half of the Finnish noise/techno duo Pan Sonic (formerly Panasonic until a lawsuit from a certain electronics company robbed them of their A). Vainio uses samplers, homemade noise generators, static, and sine waves/oscillators to create abstract post-industrial soundscapes in his solo work, while the same tools are used to create music that is relatively more accessible when working with Ilpo Vaisanen in Pan Sonic (although basically the difference is that Pan Sonic will sometimes have a discernible rhythm to their music and the songs have more of a recognizable dub element).

This is a VERY abstract record, with long periods of silence interrupted by bursts of fuzzy noise and disorienting sub-bass tones. Each track is like a tone poem, with Vainio deploying an intentionally limited selection of sounds (Vainio and Pan Sonic never use computers or laptops, recording everything live to DAT, which immensely adds to their appeal for me) with supreme concentration and economy of expression. Rather than being a juvenile “run everything through a bunch of pedals and make some random noises to freak people out” exercise, this is really a carefully considered musical statement in which every element is deployed for maximum effect on the listener and nothing is extraneous. I always think of martial arts as a metaphor for this kind of supremely disciplined approach, where a tremendous amount of impact and force is concentrated into very small gestures.

While I suppose this would be considered noise music, it has more in common sonically with Pierre Henry and Stockhausen’s tape/electronic works than with something like Wolf Eyes. Maybe another parallel would be the dark ambient work of Lustmord, but far more abstract and given to silence.  As out there as this record is, it’s immensely enjoyable; this record is best experienced in its entirety and without distraction, as small gestures which seem meaningless when taken individually have an immense impact on the listener when one hears them in the context of the whole piece. Bursts of static and high whistling sine waves are like bird song and insect calls which let you know the sunrise is approaching (except when a huge sustained bass note swathed in fuzz erupts at the 22 minute mark of the record, this sunrise is more like a black hole appearing over the horizon). HIGHEST POSSIBLE RECOMMENDATION.

Check out Pan Sonic’s Myspace HERE

“Aineen Musta Puhelin/Black Telephone of Matter” is out NOW on Touch Records, and can be obtained at fine record stores everywhere (including Hoodlums).

Immortal – “All Shall Fall”

A play by play account of my reaction to the new Immortal upon first listening…

First song, the title track,  is kind of weak, no really strong riffs, and there is a kind of lame spoken word part in the bridge. And some almost-clean vocals… this does not look promising.

Not too crazy about the production, it seems like they smoothed things out a little more than necessary, losing that trademark “crispy-fried” guitar sound. They used to have a signature upper midrange tone on their guitars which gives the riffs clarity and doesn’t sound like the same old mid scooped metal guitar you hear everywhere… the tone here is a lot more generic. These are guys who used to tune all their guitars UP a step just to be different from everyone else.  A lot of reverb on Abbath’s vocals as well. One of the things I liked best about the last record was that you could really hear the overtones on the vocals (sorry, vokills). On “One by One”, the opener of their last album, Abbath sings “one by one, we took your LIIIIIVES” and you can hear the low harmonics vibrating in his voice, like Tuvan throat singing.

“The Rise of Darkness” starts much stronger, solid riff to start the song, this is a lot more melodic than Immortal has been in the past… I’m not sure how I feel about this development if this is going to continue through the album. No clean vocals this time though, so that’s good. There are a lot more midtempo riffs here, it sounds almost thrashy… The ringing arpeggio riffs sound almost like Enslaved or something. Not bad necessarily, just different. Well the second song was a huge improvement on the first in any case.

The third song, “Hordes To War”,  kicks off with a HUGE riff, throwing together tremolo picking and power chords, thrashier still. Generally though, a lot more of a black metal sound to this, this song could have been on “Battles In the North”. Good. Improving even more. Looking forward to digging into the lyric sheets to investigate the always excellent lyrics by Demonaz. OK! During the bridge there’s the sound of a bunch of horses charging! This song totally kicks ass.

Song four, “Norden On Fire”, starts with an almost clean guitar line, followed by a riff that sounds pretty similar to “Tyrants”. The whole song does, actually. A pretty solid but unremarkable mid-tempo stomper. Another spoken semi-monologue in the middle, but this time delivered by Abbath in his best Popeye quack, which of course makes everything better. My favorite thing about Immortal is that they are so campy but it’s really past being intentional or unintentional because they are 100 percent sincere about it. They put on their war paint, change their names, dress up in spiked boots and  go all the way with creating their own aesthetic universe in which nothing is ridiculous, and by doing that they just completely create their own musical world in which they inhabit  totally different personalities from their day-to-day lives. Black metal in general is exciting to me for this reason, because people who make that music  just go all the way in creating an alternate personality, with the name and the corpse paint, and in going through this ritualistic process they transcend the limits of what they would normally allow themselves creatively. It’s like the black metal aesthetic is a system of rituals intended to allow one to shed the baggage and self-conscoiusness of one’s everyday life and create a completely different persona for the express purpose of making art.  Way too much reverb on his voice throughout this record so far though.

Song five, “Arctic Swarm”, is another  piece in the “Sons of Northern Darkness” style, great spidery guitar riffs throughout here, and some… synth strings or something. Mixed low, mercifully. Guitar solo sounds like Dave Mustaine. In a good way.

Song six starts with the sound of winds (frozen blizzard ones, no doubt)! This is a good omen! Yup, pretty solid so far, kind of weird chord progression, oddly timed. I love it when Immortal write riffs like this- totally weird and off the wall, but instantly memorable. This song is awesome, although there is a part that sounds like it was written to be a crowd chant. “Mount North!”…. this song still kicks ass though. Some wimpy clean guitars near the end of the song though. This isn’t Isis, guys, you are IMMORTAL. There shouldn’t be any clean guitars, ever. At least the early dalliance with clean vocals was quickly abandoned.

“Unearthly Kingdom” starts with a keyboard and some… clean female vocals. Just something for atmosphere I hope. Ah ok, so this is another epic “Tyrants”-paced deathmarch… a solid chiming chordal riff, love it when they don’t just stick to the power chords. As Piggy said “there are other strings on the instrument, y’know?”. The bridge kicks into a really satisfying, crushing riff, with Abbath making a quack and that noise the dead Japanese chick makes in “Grudge” before continuing on about some icy mystical forest shit. And another classic riff. This is awesome, but someone please mix the synthesized clean vocal pads out of here. Ah well. Here’s the fadeout, so I guess that’s it. Not bad for an album closer, pretty awesome and majestic. So ends my 40 minute vacation in Blashyrkh, I believe I will be returning very soon.

Verdict: Not as good as the last 3 Immortal records, but those were masterpieces, and this record is still better than 95 percent of the metal records out there.

4 out of 5 Nordic battleaxes for “All Shall Fall”.

Vladislav Delay- “Tummaa”

Finland’s Vladislav Delay (known to his mom as Sasu Ripatti) has put out his first record in two years, titled “Tummaa”, which is Finnish for “Stupid Cover Art”. Not really, but the cover art is pretty dorky, not sure what’s going on with that. Once you get past that, though, this is another excellent release from Mr. Ripatti. I was expecting something a little jazzier since much has been made of this album being influenced by his former life as a jazz drummer, as well as the fact that he is playing percussion in Moritz Van Oswald’s trio (although that’s not particularly jazzy either, it’s more like live dub techno). It is very focused on percussion, more so than other releases under his Vladislav Delay alias, but at the same time there is always a melodic element to his pieces and they are quite accessible here, with Craig Armstrong’s acoustic and electric piano bringing to mind Eno’s “Thursday Afternoon”. As with earlier releases such as “Entain” the percussive elements are pretty abstractly conceived, but they show a huge amount of detail and variety in timbre.

A lot of the record stumbles along at a dub-like pace with the drums, melodic samples, and live elements like electric piano interlocking and drifting apart- that’s one of the things I always find interesting about Delay’s productions, that he doesn’t feel compelled to force everything to fit together in lockstep. It adds an element of seeming entropy to things- a bunch of interesting musical things are happening and they add up to something greater than the sum of their parts, but you never feel like he’s just slapping a bunch of beat-matched loops together in Ableton or something.

Also intriguing is the mix itself; he really keeps the mix dry and natural-sounding  here;  you can really hear the different spaces these sounds came from, with some samples bathed in natural room space and other sounds so dry they graze your eyeballs. A transporting and utterly beautiful listening experience.  It’s just too bad about the cover art.

Read more and listen on Vladislav Delay’s website.

Cloaks – “Versus Grain”

Latest recommendation is this newly-released slab of brutal dubstep by UK duo Cloaks, about whom I know nothing. I’ve been kind of edging into dubstep a little through the Maryanne Hobbs comps and the Appleblim Dubstep All-Stars comp, but I just bit the bullet and ordered a couple of recent full-lengths that sounded interesting because I wanted to get a little more in depth rather than just a Skream track here, a Benga track there or whatever. So I ordered this based on a review I read on Boomkat, and it is just fucking MEAN. I like dubstep as a genre but it can be a little sterile. No such worries here, it’s just super dark, aggressive and distorted, exactly what I want out of a dubstep record. Even the vocal samples are distorted beyond recognition, it’s like Burial on PCP. No need to worry about this showing up in a cellphone ad or something, that’s for sure! When I started finding out about this genre, I would read these descriptions about huge loping two-step beats and fuzzy wobbly bass drops, and it sounded like it should be the raddest thing ever. After finally hearing some of that stuff I was kind of underwhelmed but this is EXACTLY what I was hoping for when I read those reviews, it’s like someone looked into my head and made a record out of what I imagined dubstep should sound like. You know that awesome breakdown in “Raining Blood” where the guitars are going “chunk chunk…chunk chunk… chunk chunk” and you just sit there nodding your head because it’s fricking heavy and grooves hard at the same time? This whole record is exactly like that.

Listen to them on their Myspace.