A Spiral Cage

Below are the ten releases the struck me the most in 2009. Most of these received many plays, all of these pieces revealing greater depth the more you listen.  Several of these pieces deserve an essay in and of themselves and that perhaps is the greatest tragedy of the lack of criticism in this area. For the most recognition these albums will get in our time is perhaps a short review, little more then a gilded thumbs up/thumbs down.  Perhaps in the future there will be scholars who will examine some of these pieces as they deserve (and honestly the classical pieces are quite likely to receive such attention sooner rather then later) but for now placement on a “best-of” list and perhaps a few words will have to do.

Releases of Note 2009 (part 2/2)

Morton Feldman/Howard Skempton Triadic Memories – Notti Stellate a Vagli performed by John Tilbury (Atopos)

John Tilbury’s set of Morton Feldman piano pieces All Piano, released on the LondonHALL label has been in my opinion the definitive recordings of the later piano pieces.  Since recording these pieces in the late 1990s Tilbury has been called on to perform these pieces on numerous occasions culminating with this release of Triadic Memories from October 2008.  Freed from the constraints of recording for compact disc and masterfully fitting this music to the space at hand this recording is a leisurely 103 minutes. This allows the notes to float in the space, their natural decay seeming to linger for longer than possible. Tilbury’s unrivaled touch at the piano, played with the sustain pedal partially depressed (a trick he learned from Cornelius Cardrew), gives the individual notes and chords an almost buttery feel with the occasional dissonances seeming to almost resolve themselves in the lingering overtones. Absolutely sublime music and nothing else released this year received more spins in my player.

Along with this definitive version of Triadic Memories is the sublime Howard Skempton piece Notti Stellate a Vagli in which the mostly single notes are perfectly placed among pools of silence.  After the Feldman piece it almost feels hurried, but it’s a spare piece in which the sounds are allowed plenty room to to breathe. The icing on the cake, this is a beautiful compliment to the epic Triadic Memories.

Cornelius Cardew Treatise performed by Keith Rowe and Oren Ambarchi (Planam)

I don’t buy a lot of LPs but recordings of Treatise by Keith Rowe was definitely cause for me to pre-order this one and dust off the table. Treatise, Cornelius Cardew’s epic graphic score has of course been a favorite piece of mine for half a decade now and Keith Rowe is easily the most significant interpreter of the piece. He had worked with the piece as Cardew was working on it, sometimes playing from the hand drawn pages. He was involved in the first performance of the piece in the UK and in AMM who performed the piece with Cardew many times. Since those days it has remained a constant companion and it is doubtful there is anyone who has worked through the score as thoroughly or as rigorously.  Oren Ambarchi has been a stalwart of the experimental music scene for the last decade and has been involved in what I think are two of the most successful recordings of Treatise to date. The first being the fantastic Seven Guitars performances released as part of the Amplify 2002 boxed set on the Erstwhile label which again also involved Rowe.  The other is of course this release. Each side of the record includes two pages of Treatise from what seems to be a contiguous performance of pages 53, 58, 168 & 169 on February 8^th 2009 in Amsterdam (of which you can watch ten minutes of here).

Oren Ambarchi leans toward the drone, though a rich one made up of fractal like elements that reward close attention more then as a background sound.  If one takes him to be playing the lifeline and the divergent parallel lines it is an excellent interpretation of the pages played.  Page 53 can be seen in the little picture above and you can see how the lifeline runs through it with an line angling off of that which fits very well with Ambarchi’s drone that seems to open up as that secondary line does. Rowe in contrast plays in a spikier style, working each of the distinct elements on the score with a long defined set of actions. While these have been worked out over a long time as Rowe has constantly updated his setup and aspects of his approach his renditions of Treatise, while usually quite recognizable, have always remained fresh and vital. The first side of the record is page 53 and 58 over the course of about 14 minutes recognizable treating each element with care and consideration.  On the flip side of the platter are pages 168 and 169 which are the final pages in the score. These pages contain just the lifeline (and IIRC a gap in the line on the beginning of page 168) as a sort of dénouement of the piece. Ambarchi’s drone rustles in all buzzes rising and falling with dead silence for the gap. Rowe’s sound is equally subdued but instead of just working with continuous sound he works with small events, scrapes, little wirrs and rubbing on the pickups. These pages to me have a much slower feel then those on the other side and it is no surprise to me that they spend more time on them.  It is a beautiful rendition of the final pages of the score and the conclusion of what is in my opinion the best available performance of a section of Treatise (at least until Keith Rowe’s A Response to Treatise which hopefully is coming soon from the Cathnor label) .

Toshimaru Nakamura/Ami Yoshida Soba to Bara (Erstwhile Records)
No other album of improvised music was more surprising, challenging and ultimately rewarding then this first recording between Toshimaru Nakamura and Ami Yoshida. I’ve been writing an essay in which this disc features and it is something that I’d still like to finish but for now I’ve extracted from it just this short review of this album with a bit of additional framing, which will have to suffice for now. The existing “reviews” of Soba to Bara apart from limiting themselves primarily to the superficial were sure to include as an aside that this album is constructed from two performances recorded separately then layered together by Nakamura. These reviews (if positive) were sure to mention that the album worked despite this whereas the thrust of my essay is that the album works because of this (I should  note that Dan Warburton in his Paris Transatlantic “review” seems to take a similar stance). I came to this realization from playing music with the Seattle Improv Meeting when I found that the more I concentrated on playing the music at hand (we mostly played graphic scores) and the less I “listened” directly to my compatriots the more successful my participation was.  Listening has an exalted status in improvisation and to musicians of that stripe it means more then the word implies. It’s kind of like “swing” or “porn” in that it is indescribable but a musician knows it when he hears it. Now of course this doesn’t at all preclude listening to the gestalt, the room, as Keith Rowe would put it. The room contains the sounds that the other musicians are generating, as well as the audience, ambient sounds and its own ineffable character.

Soba to Bara in contrast with some of the earlier expressions of the use of independent recordings does not set out to directly express these experimental notions. Jon Abbey, the man behind Erstwhile Records, greatest talent is his ability to put improvisers together in new units that push each other in such a way to yield unexpected results. This really is a talent and one which seems to be severely lacking in so many people that attempt to do this.  On finding out that Ami Yoshida and Toshimaru Nakamura (two Erstwhile mainstays) had not performed as a duo he immediately set out to bring these two together.  In the course of preparing for performing and/or recording the two decided to record separately a track that Toshi would then layer together so as to get a feel for the duo.  Clearly they would try to record with their partner in mind creating a Sight like collaboration of memory. But it seems that the two participants remembered parts of their compatriots performances that the other chose not to focus so much upon. Ami’s vocal performance on this disc is harrowing, painful strangulations, gasps for breaths, a disturbing heavy breathing section, wrung out utterances and the like.  Toshi seems to have determined that he’d work more in accompaniment mode here and perhaps thinking of Cosmos, Ami’s duo with Sachiko M where Sachiko’s sinewaves are like a line drawn through Ami’s scattered pointillisms, his sounds form an uneasy background, one where he seems he is trying to allow space for what can be Ami’s very soft sounds. The nature of his instrument, its barely controlled feedback makes this a difficult task and in contrast with Ami’s strangulated sounds it has a straining effect, that falls back into little reprieves of jittering static. The combination of all these elements is as if something absolutely unknown and perhaps monstrous is being given birth. This is just the beginning as the piece develops Toshi’s wrestles his meandering static and juddering feedback into an uneasy background that Ami seems to try claw her way through. Perhaps considering how unsettling Cosmos can be at their most intense (2002′s Tears on the Erstwhile label for instance) Toshi’s contributions become increasingly fragmented, ripping the fabric of that background in increasingly dramatic bursts.  The way that one of these outbursts of feedback obliterate what can be a soft, or aggressive vocalization almost seems scored at times but never has that effect of following on, that “listening” in improv so often has.  I’m reminded of an example also involving Ami Yoshida, her 2006 collaboration with Christof Kurzmann (a s o, Erstwhile Records) where she does this odd little rising tone whose pattern Kurzmann immediately emulates with his software synthesizer. No single gesture has ever encapsulated the separation of old styles of improvisation and the new directions that are being explored.

Among EAI records in 2009 none I think captured its experimental basis as successfully as Soba to Bara and none challenged its listeners so directly. It was the most exciting album of the year, a year in which so much of the music had become incredibly predictable if of high quality. The cult of pure improvisation took some issue with it, but in the main minimized this aspect due to it’s incredible success. It is a testament to the musicians that they pushed themselves so far out in what was essentially a warm-up, a tool as a form of practice. Indeed when I saw them perform live in the fall of 2008 at the Amplify festival in Tokyo, it did not reach the heights of this album (which I hadn’t heard yet).  The direct situation allowed perhaps too much to be heard, or perhaps it was the demands of having to perform multiple times in a number of days, but for whatever reason it was a good solid performance but not the boundary stretching tour de force of this recording. It is also to the credit of Jon Abbey, who has publicly stated his dislike for projects of this nature, that he put this out. But the music is amazing and powerful and he certainly recognizes that transcends any such notions of construction and conceptualism.

Keith Rowe/Sachiko M Contact (Erstwhile Records)
When I said above that many of these releases deserve whole essays written about them I was thinking primarily of my unfinished essay that my Soba to Bara comments were taken from and this incredible, epic double album from Keith Rowe and Sachiko M. Keith and Sachiko have been involved in some of the most powerful, complicated and difficult music of the last decade and it is appropriate the decade end with their first recording as a duo. There is always something of the times in contemporary music and I think it is no coincidence that the aughts gave birth to what came to be known as EAI. AMM had been applying experimental techniques to improvisation for decades, what was it about this decade that brought so many disparate elements together in quite this way? Alas exploring this is beyond the scope of this post, but I hope that someday someone takes up that challenge.

Oval, Track 2 on the first disc was from Keith and Sachiko’s initial meeting at the Amplify 2002 festival in Tokyo and thus is part of the documentation of those four shows. One of the best shows of the festival and one that surprised me at the tack that Keith and Sachiko chose, both working in a hyper-restrained pointillistic vein. Over the course of the two hours of this set, we get most of the rest of the possible combinations from these two, though Keith seems to have permanently moved on from the so called “drone” produced by his guitars pickups, electronics and amp.  The long first track sounds the most like one would expect, Sachiko using a single tone for the bulk of its duration. For the next couple she works with the twittery sine effect as well as the dirtier electronic sound of the switches on her devices. The final track has her utilizing her contact mics, a tool she has used in the past but has begun re-exploring (to mixed effect) in recent years. All of the music on this set is incredible, easily the greatest bit of collaborative improv done this year.  It is interesting to contrast this a little with Soba to Bara, which personally I found a bit more exciting, most likely due to having seen this duo live last year (plus the initial long track here, but more on that in a bit).  Toshi and Ami were less interesting in the live show then on that disc which as I alluded to above was perhaps due to the unavoidability of listening.  Keith on the other hand I think can focus directly on what he is doing while only paying attention to the room. This I think is a real skill that he has cultivated over the years and that arose from serious thought and decades of experience.  Sachiko in contrast is simply unyielding which in one with such a refined touch leads to a similar effect.

Oval and Rectangle (d1t2 and d2t1 respectively) are the two most amazing tracks on this disc and the real achievements here. What is particularly amazing about Oval as I mentioned above is that it was their first time meeting. The opening track, Square, is much more like what someone who was familiar with the two musicians would expect. It is great music, epic in scope and rich in detail and yet it starts out safe, as if the two are feeling each other out, which is strange on the face of it, as their first meeting was days before. Thus this track feels a bit regressive, included only for completeness sake. In a way I feel that this set captures the entire range of Sachiko M – all of the ways she uses her sinewaves lie within. Keith on the other hand works with merely a subset of his toolkit and in the main sticks with this subset for all four tracks. Sachiko’s incredible taste and touch are her real strengths and why her minimal toolkit suffices. At her best she works as a colorist in these pieces as if she and Keith are collaborating on a painting made up of dots in which each has a shared set of paints that she applies with a fine knife while Keith uses several little brushes. The space and silences, especially in Rectangle are far more effective then most of the heavy handed conceptual uses of late using that space to complete a whole. The final track where Sachiko uses contact mics and Keith responds in kind is a beautiful exploration of texture an excellent way to complete the album.

So much more needs to be said about this album, I have touched on so little of its depths here and probably in a most incoherent way. It’ll have to do though for now, like I said this album requires an essay and all the research that that entitles. It is a fitting close to the decade though, one of the most powerful statements of EAI to date and incredibly fitting at this point of time when things are ossifying.

Christian Wolff Long Piano (Peace March 11) performed by Thomas Schultz (New World)

As I’ve intimated in the past I find it difficult to write convincingly about Christian Wolff’s music. There really is little more embarrassing then uniformed writing about classical music and rather then add too much to that unfortunate tradition I tend to demure. Wolff is difficult to write about because there is so much that has gone into the music, to make it what it is, that to ignore or gloss over that really does the music a disservice. Fortunately for you dear reader, New World has made the liner notes for this wonderful new disc available online so you can read John Tilbury’s insightful notes on Wolff’s music and this piece in specific. Along with that it contains a bit from Wolff himself explaining about the piece’s composition and Thomas Schultz writing about playing the piece.

“[Long Piano] seems to me like a kind of geological agglomeration. My hope is that it forms a possible landscape on one extended canvas. At first I just started writing and kept going. My tendency is to work in smaller patches. After the piece was finished I saw Jennifer Bartlett’s wonderfully engaging and cheerful work Rhapsody, first shown in 1976. It’s a 154-foot sequence of an arrangement of 988 one-foot-square silk-screened and painted enamel plates running around at least three walls of a gallery space. An extreme instance of what I’ve got in mind.” - Christian Wolff from the Liner notes

The prelude to the piece is the titular peace march which once again works in Wolffs deep commitment to humanity and social justice. TIlbury elegantly outlines this history in his essay in the liner notes and makes the essential point that Wolff, unlike his friend Cornelius Cardew, never gave up his commitment to the music in pursuit of these notions. Of course this works out better in some pieces then in others and in this piece, Wolff’s political statements are pretty oblique, fully at the service of the music it seems to me. Quoting again from the liner notes:

Long Piano begins unequivocally with a political “statement,” and yet in response to the question about the peace march from Long Piano, Wolff was equivocal. He simply replied, inscrutably, that “maybe it’s just to remind oneself. In my more recent work that content a number of times relates to a political mood, assertive, resistant, commemorative, celebrative, for instance. The connection may be fairly tenuous or subterranean; it is often discontinuous. “

It is a shame really that Wolff’s music is so unknown as much of it really is so appealing and not just to new music fans. Wolff worked a lot with interesting rhythmic devices, indeterminacy of composition and performance, empowering of the performer, but he never eschewed melody and his pieces are often quite charming as well as fully engaging on multiple levels. It is this dual aspect that again makes reviews that focus on the surface elements so useless as in many cases the magic lies beneath. And yet, Wolff always made those surface elements so compelling that the music can appeal to all really. As he wrote:

“But my notion is that music can function better socially if it is more clearly identified with what most people recognize as music, which is not a question of liking or disliking, but of social identity. By function better socially I mean help to focus social energies that are collective not individualistic, and that may therefore be revolutionary politically.”

The music herein may not appeal to many of those who read this site, but they are well worth a listen. The dissonance of some of the chords, the spaces between the sounds, the occasionally driving melodies, the odd rhythmic patterns all mixed together may seem inexplicable, maybe even a mess, but it all hangs together. The initial Peace March is perhaps the most incongruous, the “patches” that make up the primary piece contain all that I’ve ever loved in Wolff’s piano music and more, showing that his program is endlessly developing and always changing. At times beautiful in a way that evokes Feldman, yet owns nothing to him at other times beautiful in a way that brings Cage’s Number Pieces to mind and still at other times almost having that rigorously random sensation that Webern can inspire, while still others makes me think of Cecil Taylor! It evokes these, but never seems derivative of them always sounding to me like Wolff. Finally the performance of the piece by Thomas Schultz, who commissioned it is really quite a nice, a pianist I was previously unfamiliar with, but one I will keep my ears open for.

Finally Wolff’s music is a perfect example of the notion that I’ve long espoused that music based on ideas is richer because of it. Wolff puts this in the liner notes more succinctly then I ever have, so let me close this piece with another quote from him:

“Every piece, I think, has, in addition to the abstract arrangement of its sounds . . . what I would call a content, something that it suggests, which is not the same as its sounds, though such a content may deeply affect those sounds, how they are arranged and how they appear to us.” – Christian Wolff, quoted in the liner notes

Andrea Neumann Pappelallee 5 (Absinth)
It’s been a long time since Andrea Numann put out a solo release (Innenklavier in 2002, plus a self-released cd-r in 2007, Wohkrad, that I never heard) and really even her collaborations have never been that frequent.  Perhaps this has contributed somewhat to her mystique, there is none of that tendency for over documentation you sometimes see. Whatever the case may be, she remains my favorite of the Berlin improvisers and one whose new releases I am always anticipating. Of course there is a bit of a connection between Andrea’s music and my own; I play the wire strung harp, and the guts of a piano are referred to as the “harp” for good reason and are likewise strung with metal (though at far greater tension and with a lot more strings) not to mention the use of contact mics and the like. This was a bit of a shock for me the first time I saw her perform, at which point I immediately acquired what solo material I could find. As I listened more to her, I found a lot more differences then similarities and in the process she became a favorite. In addition her collaborative works, ATØN with Toshimaru Nakamura, In Case Of Fire Take The Stairs with Kaffe Matthew and Sachiko M and Lidingö with Burkhard Beins are among the strongest releases of the last decade.

This gem of an album was recording in this apartment building that she shares with a number of other musicians and the sounds of this environment permeate the album. It also features several artificial gaps between the various segments, which in themselves were not necessarily recorded in the order herein. This construction creates an image of a place, of a musician at work, of restless creativity and as a whole is a remarkable piece of music.  Listening on headphones you can hear some of the neighbors at play, practicing instruments or in day to day living. The silences allow the same categories of sounds from your own domicile to contribute likewise. An application of Cage’s work in silence that I find more sophisticated and successful then many, not only acknowledging such sounds as equal participants but working with them in a multitude of ways as the very fabric of the piece. The sounds that Neumann makes directly from her inside piano instrument aren’t too far from what those who have heard from her before would expect. But there does seem to be iteration in her overall sound, perhaps due to additional tools, or specific preparations but most of all from their collaboration with the space. Lots of sounds of strings: objects rubbed up against them, whirrs of rotating objects against them, brushes or steel wool interacting with string and pickup, objects vibrating against them, wonderful sounds, perfectly placed as always. A favorite section has a very distant conventionally played piano from one of her neighbors far in the background as Neumann works with these various techniques creating quite mechanical sounds in the foreground.

There was another album from Andrea this year ,a duo with Ivan Palacky playing amplified knitting machine (!) that was quite well reviewed in the couple I read. However I never saw it turn up for sale anywhere and thus never got a copy.  But great to see strong new statements from this most elusive of the Berlin musicians.

Various Relay: Archive 2007-2008 (The Manual)

“The first RELAY meeting was on 18 March 2005. We had two things in out mind; aesthetically speaking, we wanted a monthly improvisation concert more concentrated on making music (I still call it music) out of non-musical sound/noise, or even interaction with something extra-aural, the visual; regarding our artistic lives, RELAY’s main goal was to build a sustaining network among improvisers and experimental musicians domestic and abroad.” -Hong Chulki, from the liner notes

As I stated in the previous post of all of the various “scenes” in contemporary improv none seem as vital and bursting with creativity as the small group of musicians clustered around Seoul in South Korea.  This compilation documenting two years of this scene gives a compelling little glimpse into it for those of us far away. The RELAY series ran for four years and this double set documents the final years of the series when they had the funds from government grants to bring in a diverse array of guests musicians. RELAY seems to have been fully hooked into and facilitated by the internet and the documentation of the series can be found on the Manual site covering all of the events including listing the participants, scans of the flyer’s, pictures of various shows and mp3′s of a bunch of the sets.  My kind of series. This set documents the concert series warts and all: Mats Gustafsson not fitting in at all with Choi Joonyong and Jin Sangtae (I’d like to hear the story behind this rather unlikely collaboration), Taku Sugimoto’s self-indulgent composition performed by an all star tentet at Nabi, as well meetings that feel like long established working groups: Toshimaru Nakamura with Park Seungjun, Choi Joonyong/ dieb13/Joe Foster as well as local groupings such as Choi Joonyong/Joe Foster/Hong Chulki/Jin Sangtae/Ryu Hankil. Plus a delicious slice of English adding another piece to their small discography. Really all of the pieces are worth hearing barring the Mats track, though of course some work better then others.

2009 perhaps might have led to a slight over-documentation of aspects of the vital Seoul scene, all of the releases featuring Ryu Hankil rather spring to mind. Most of these have been good, but oversaturation can breed discontentment. This set came out in February 2009 and was like a breath of fresh air, something different from what we’d been hearing so far and infectious in its riot of energy and commitment to exploration. Being a compilation it would require a track by track writeup to really go into the music contained, so this will have to suffice.  I’ve kept up pretty well with the Seoul scene (though not exhaustively) and based on the recorded material (definitely not to be confused with being there) this is a fine overview, but even more importantly it contains some great music. Their idea of fostering a network of musicians appeals to me greatly as I think it does to all who live in an out of the way corner with only a small number of fellow travelers. This music is truly international and all of the vital regions have embraced that. Tokyo, London, Berlin and now Seoul, this aspect has kept things pushing ahead all the time. I look forward to hearing the further developments from Seoul and where ever else the music breeds.

Radu Malfatti/Klaus Filip imaoto (Erstwhile Records)
I’ve found Malfatti’s work over the last decade to be pretty mixed from fantastic early improvisations with Phil Durrant and Thomas Lehn, to astringent compositions that seem to lack, well a lot. It is with this album though that I made the realization that all of his compositions, his inflexibility and extremism have bascailly honed him into being able to make this kind of music.  Performing a composition that requires you to sit there doing nothing (while your collaborators – if any – may or may not do nothing as well) is perfect training to be able to do nothing in a live improvisation where seconds of inactivity can seem like minutes. It also forces one to really focus on the sounds used, a lesson that I myself learned in some pieces that I worked on that used some long spaces.  That really was my complaint on many of Malfatti’s compositions, the sounds seemed to be ignored and the structure wasn’t so interesting to sustain that.  Any ideas that may have been there were never elucidate clearly enough leaving it up to the listeners to draw their own. Those ideas definitely didn’t sustain the paucity of the structures or the disinterest in the sounds. But it seems that along the way Malfatti honed his sounds and in a studio context his dry hisses, simple taps and echoy exhalations have become rich and resonant.

I’ve never felt that Malfatti really works with silence in a Cagean fashion, that it’s not about ceding the music to the surroundings for him. Instead it always seemed more like an exercise perhaps related to the questions of memory somewhat poised by the quotations included on some of his albums, perhaps though simply as a parameter that can be pushed as some would push volume. This year I had a realization that if the silence in music is simply a space to allow other music to breathe then one can capture an aspect of this musically. To illustrate this consider Malfatti playing one of his spare compositions next to a babbling brook. His few sounds will come and go as the brook merrily babbles on the whole time. Now what if a recording of this brook was brought into the studio and allowed to play throughout the session? It is only one more step then to imagine a musician playing music in the manner of this babbling brook giving you a piece that captures the same essence of Malfatti playing with big “silences”.  This revelation turned around my thinking on a lot of things and I began working on a series of pieces exploring this notion (The Grey Sequence, so far unreleased).

When Imaoto was released in autumn 2009 it immediately struck me as an instance of this notion, intentional or not.  Klaus Filip’s sinewaves, always shifting and yet always present are just like that babbling brook.  Malfatti’s playing, as I mentioned in the first ‘graph, is meticulous here, etherial and perfectly honed.  The week I received this album I also bought Jonathan Lethem’s new novel Chronic Town and I incesently played this album each night for several hours as I’d read. I didn’t want to listen to anything else, the floating nature of this album somehow fit this book so well, creating the eternal fog that NYC lies under in the book or the haze of that other chronic that is burned so frequently within its pages. Pausing to contemplate what I’d read the music would always be there, rewarding close attention, with gentle tapping or an astringent hiss against the endlessly shifting tones.  It fills a space like that babbling brook does when you walk next to it in the woods, a snap of a twig or a rustle in the underbrush substituting for Malfatti’s ‘bone. I always listen to this softly and never on headphones, even when I’m not reading and it is like an open window.  This is easily Malfatti’s best album since dach and if it required all that unrewarding hard work to arrive at this, it was well worth it.

Kevin Parks/Joe Foster Prince Rupert Drops (homophoni)
There pretty much is just too damn much music out there and now that we have endless amounts of music freely available to download well there is just that much more. One of the most reliable curators of downloadable music is David Kirby’s homophoni label and this piece from Kevin Parks and Joe Foster was the highlight of his few releases this year (full disclosure, I’ve put out a piece on Kirby’s label, but don’t let that dissuade you from his otherwise impeccable taste). Kevin and Joe put out a disc a couple of years ago Ipsi Sibi Somnia Fingunt that while filled with many great moments had not ever quite done it for me, but this piece transcends all of the issues I had with that disc. This was another release from early in the year (Jan 31^st) that I listened to countless times throughout the year and it constantly engaged me.

It begins with shifting tones that come in and fade out, a sample from Parks? Foster’s trumpet through some effects? Hard to say, but in a way it almost feels like the sax from Ground-Zero‘s Consume Red, though it comes and goes it only plays for a few repeats when does and at a totally different level of intensity. The rest of the sounds seem more like they come from Foster’s damaged pedals and Park’s computer. A rumble that gives one’s low end a good work-out persists for a while, crackles and little metallic bits add color here and there, squeeks and hiss that could be electronic, could be acoustic drift around.  The use of such disparate materials really works in this piece, keeping your attention and never feeling superfluous. Toward the end of the piece there is this haunting tone, heavily effected that comes in, as this hesitant series of taps on a drum gently contrasts with it. It is as if the consume red-ish bit has come back mutated into a different beast.  Things pick up a bit from here, bringing a feeling of finality to close out the piece, not in any sort of cliched way, but just right for all that has come before.

This is genuinely great music and shows that the download is not in any way a second class citizen. Kevin is back in Korea and at least occaisonally playing with Joe, let’s hope for many more fruitful collaborations between these ex-pats. Anyway give it a listen, it is freely available after all.

Radu Malfatti/Taku Unami Goat Vs Donkey (Taumaturgia)
This release finds Malfatti and Unami in high conceptual mode and while I’ve been known to express my contempt for that at times, in this instance it works (I tend to almost always go along if it works. It just doesn’t most of the time). There were actually two Radu Malfatti, Taku Unami releases this year (the other being Kushikushism on Slub) and fans were rather divided on the relative merits between the two. For me there was no contest, the noisey atmosphere of the venue was the unheralded third performer on this disc and the gauzy nature of this room recording really gave life to this space.  Malfatti brings his hisses and a nice rather rattly tone at times, as usual coming and going with long gaps. The sound of the room, Taku clapping, moving around it, evening playing some sounds occasionally pluse the audience and room noise, these all fill the gaps. Three Backgrounds, my favorite of Malfatti’s B-Boim releases, works in the same way, the sounds of the background filling in the spaces and making the whole affair decidedly more interesting then the sounds the musicians choose to use. I really like musicians improvising within a space, letting whatever sounds that are there add to the precedings, I always have. I recorded a series myself, Out of Doors, where I would deliberately play outside recording open air. Never quite worked out how I wanted but its the same impetus.  The flow in this piece works as well, shifting in densities, though always quite soft and finally ending in mostly empty space with just the tapping on Malfatti’s trombone and what sounds like the shifting of objects continuing for a while and then just stopping.

This recording has been on my list pretty much since it came out but re-listening to it as I write it up, perhaps I’d shift it lower down on the list. The much later released Imaoto covers much of this ground in a way (as I write above) and far more successfully.  Still this album stuck with me all year and received many a play. Well worth hearing and probably the most interesting of the Unami projects released this year.

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So that’s it, 2009 in music. Well at least the music that I really liked. Yeah there was a bunch more things worth hearing this year, some of which just didn’t grab me quite enough, some of which I just have yet to hear and yeah there was a bunch of things I was highly anticipating that let me down.  So mentally place whatever you feel is missing on either of those lists and call it good. All of my rambling at the end of this year can be read by clicking here.  This also is it for this type of posts on this blog, or anywhere else from me. In the main I’ve enjoyed it, its been a lot of work but it makes me think more about the things I listen to and that is always a good thing. Thanks for reading along now and in the past. I’ve always done this for you and hope it has served at least some purpose. Happy New Year all and remember to keep looking up.

It was a strong enough year that there was pretty easily twenty things that I felt were well worth hearing, and I could probaly find another ten without too much trouble. Things do start to become uneven though, even toward the bottom of this list there are things that are worth hearing part of, or that may not fully sustain multiple listens but are still worth hearing.  So yeah, this is the bottom half of my top twenty which is still ordered, though beyond the first 5 or so, it gets a little meaningless. Several of these I simply didn’t have enough time to fully absorb due to getting them late, a couple others are mostly great with perhaps one dud track but all are strong in their own way and I’d wholeheartedly recommend them  all .

Releases of Note 2009 (part 1/2)

Keith Rowe/Toshumaru Nakamura Erstlive 008 (Erstwhile Records)
With this release the quartet of shows that Keith Rowe played at the AMPLIFY 2008: Light festival in Tokyo is complete. As an attendee of said festival, who was blown away by all of Keith’s performances it is a real treat to have high quality recordings of all of these shows as a memento. This is the fourth recording of this duo (Weather Sky, Amplify 2002 and Between all on Erstwhile) and that was the second time I’d seen them perform live. They are one of the strongest and constantly engaging duos in improvised music; always pushing each other to new places and ever greater heights. The performance as captured on this disc was the stronger of the two I’ve experienced and right up there with much of the material on Between. The piece begins aggressively and while it contains many periods of relative calm, the piece is mostly dense and rich with sound.  If Keith’s duos with Sachiko and Unami were exploratory, both in the sense of working with new partners and in pushing away from his previous works, this duo is sure in it’s footing but no less exploratory in its desire to bring these two into a new place.  Toshi, always at his best in this type of situation, fully responded in kind and stood toe to toe with Keith the entire time, pushing him in turn. In the context of Keith’s four Tokyo performances it was an incredible finally, encapsulating the festival, the city and his relationship with Toshi all in a dramatic and gripping performance. Get all four of the Tokyo Rowes and experience the highlights of AMPLIFY 2008: Light.

Phil Durrant/Lee Patterson/Paul Vogel Buoy (Cathnor Recordings)
This album was my first favorite album for the year – it was released right at the start of the year and has sustained my interest through countless listens right to the end. In a way this was a pretty surprising release to me as I can’t say I really expected this trio to actually work. It’s seems like it had been so long since we had heard much from Durrant that I didn’t really know what to expect from his laptoppery at this point, though he has done so much good work I did have high hopes. I’ve been loving Vogel’s collaborations mainly within the Irish scene and of the ones I’d heard that I didn’t think worked so well his playing was always rock solid. Patterson though, well honestly, his music to date has done little for me; while it is always impeccably recorded and contains interesting sounds there just seems to be something missing. There is a certain knack for field recording, I think, that recognizes a certain narrative arc without imposing too much of the recordist that I just don’t find in his work. Furthermore in collaboration, especially when one is interjecting pre-recorded material, it is the rare hand that possesses a sensitive enough touch to not undermine the proceedings. Thus I was surprised, even blown away by how well everything works here and how well it holds up over multiple listens. For this is usually the failing that arises from most improv that uses prerecorded material: it can seem great at first, but over time it loses its charm (as an aside I think in many ways it is the fact that placement  is the only parameter that Rowe fully controls in his radio grabs that makes them work so well, but that is another post). There are a couple of moments in this disc where elements from all of the participants teeters right on the edge of losing this listener – a cheesy bit of laptop, a buried vocal sample, an overly in your face clarinet line – but it always ends up resolved by what follows as if it was a dissonance made good by a later consonance. This album to me seems like the fledgling Cathnor label really finding its footing, putting out music that fully works and reflects Richard’s taste and passions so well (disregarding Sight, which remains the labels strongest release but which Richard was more a participant in then a curator).  It also contains my favorite of his, err Olaf’s, sleeve designs to date.

Noid, Taku Unami ￢ + : * (The Manual)
There was quite a few releases this year featuring rhythmic tocking sounds (numerous Ryu Hankil related releases in particular) with this one I think being the best. Made with Taku Unami’s laptop driven motors, beaters and effectors on Noid’s cello with interventions by Noid it is a particularly resonant and complicated extension of Unami’s more typical soundworld.  Possibly the final statement from Unami in this general area as well, as performance art and extra-musical activities have come to dominate his performances throughout this year. Noid’s contributions are harder to place though you can definitely hear string manipulations in a dry, scraping vein as well as what sounds like moving Unami’s devices around. Rich and endlessly fascinating this album is well worth hearing, though it does become a bit tiring over the duration.

Filament with Musikelectronic Geithain 4 Speakers (2-:+/Studio Parabolica)
Apparently Sachiko M and Otomo Yoshihide set up sound installations at Parabolica Bis in Tokyo this summer, both of which were recorded and released as little 3″ discs by the 2-:+ label (which appears to be associated with Parabolica in some, not immediately transparent, way). Musikelectronic Geithain seems to be a speaker company and the installation seems to be a four channel setup of their speakers playing Filament.  The disc sounds like Filament, which is something that Sachiko and Otomo seem to be able to just turn on and off as neither of them are making music exactly like this these days. Sachiko does spend more of her time here in the twittery mode and working with the noise that comes from the switches on her oscillators as she turns them on and off then in the very high pitched continuous sounds that she favored in Filaments heyday, though they do make an appearance here.  Otomo, taking a break from jazz and his more droney/noise focused pieces of late falls right back into the microsounds and whispers with occasional outbursts. And frankly I love it and am glad to hear more of it.  This would certainly be one of those releases that I would say fall into the “mature” category, though there is I think a slight incremental development (which lets face it, fits Filament perfectly: it would seem against the whole project to make sudden radical leaps) especially from Sachiko though I think Otomo drops in hints of his more recent work.  Interestingly enough it is Sachiko’s solo I’m Here ..Departures.. that really feels regressive and while it is a nice slab of music and well worth listening to, didn’t grab me enough.

John Cage Sculptures Musicales, Fifty-Five, Eighty-Three, Eighty (OgreOgress) dvd
Anyone who follows this blog knows how much I love John Cage’s music, from the early percussion works to the etherial Number Pieces. I do indeed love it all and were I to compile a list of my favorite Cage pieces it would certainly span that entire arc. That being said I do have a particular fondness for the anarchic, noisy electronic pieces from the 60′s where Cage, Tudor, Mumma et al would abuse contact mic, primitive electronics and the like to seemingly tap right into the broiling quantum foam that makes up our unseen universe. Thus it was with a lot of pleasure that on getting this dvd of unrecorded large scale pieces from the Cage discography to hear that OgreOgress brought the noise.  The later Number Pieces create their primal roar from the large ensembles involved (the numbers that form the titles of these pieces are the size of the ensemble) but Sculptures Musicales is its own unique beast. Composed in the late eighties, the height of his composition of the Number Pieces, it is for four performers using electronics originally performed to Merce Cunningham’s Inventions. They are to work with blocks of sound seperated by silences of a random length (up to three minutes) the sounds themselves to be heavy dense to form the structure of the sculpture.  In this performance there are blistering walls of sound, recorded sounds of trains and train yards, what sounds like vacuums, percussion both standard and bespoke and many more. There are numerious long gaps of silence which give the sculpture its form (and incidentally display that Cage also worked with longer silences then many people seem to think).  The number pieces on this disc are equally great, dense drones separated by spaces with Eighty never having been performed before (perhaps due to its conductorless nature and the size of the ensemble).  The DVD format allows for these pieces to be stretched out at length and nicely collected together as a unit. They are more of a pain to play, forcing one to listen at home, but I think the format serves the material well.

Joe Foster/Hong Chulki/Takahiro Kawaguchi/Ryu Hankil Oscillation Vacillation (Balloon & Needle)
This isn’t the rawest of the releases from the consistently fascinating South Korea scene to make it to CD this year, but it is one of the most perfectly balanced, always flirting with chaos. It never settles down too much in the oppressive rythmics that Ryu Hankil’s clockworks can sometimes fall into, nor does it become dominated by the blistering electronics that Hong Chulki cartridgeles turnable can generate.  Joe Foster is almost always a moderating element in his collaboration with his sometimes noisier compatriots. His sensitive and always angular contributions can bring it just as intensily but he rarely (and I can’t really think of a recorded example) allows to fall into excess. I’m not as familiar with Takahiro Kawaguchi but here he is credited with “remodeled counters, selfmade objects, tuning fork” which I think adds some of the subtle pure tones (tuning forks), percussive elements (self-made objects) as well as contributing to some of the wild electronics (remodeled counters). This is one of those releases that I’ve gotten late and really haven’t spent enough time but it has immediately captured my attention and I’ve listened to it more over the last couple of weeks then I would have thought (its one of those that compliments airplane roar quite well). This has been a strong year from those involved in the South Korea scene, which I think is unquestionably the most exciting region for this type of music today. They are constantly pushing, on the edge, raw and melding in material from other contemporary musics.  Much of it at this point doesn’t work, but that’s experimental music for you: it can, in fact must have the potential to fail.  It is the lack of failure as an option that has brought on some of that stagnation that I’ve spoken of before and that I think marks much of the other scenes right now (along with moves toward performance art, nostalgia, fusion with past forms and empty conceptualism). The music on this disc constantly flirts with failure, keeping it tense and and consistently engaging working at times with an extreme low end that disappears on headphones and lesser stereos as well as with almost empty flutterings that some to be mixed with people just moving around. I’m just getting started with this one, but it already has excited more then most of what I’ve heard this year. It has the elements to remain engaging over many listens, which I for one will be testing in the months to come.

Eliane Radigue Triptych (Important)
Important Records may have the most pretentious name of any label in existence but from time to time they really do put out releases that can be considered of at least historical importance. This year they put out two cds of early material from the fantastic and under recognized minimalist composer Eliane Radigue. Utilizing analog synthesizers and drifting drones as a kind of meditation she has created music that in a way is the inverse of the equally great and under-appreciated Phill Niblock (whose imposing two disc set Touch Strings I have alas not managed to hear this year). While his vast walls of finely pitched drones obliterate your consciousness, Radigue’s drifting tones work their way right into your very being and as they slowly drift apart so does your sense of self. There is no doubt that Radigue definitely got better at what she does and that in these early days she was still experimenting. Of these two discs that Important put out this year, one (Vice Versa, etc…) is clearly just experimentations released as multiple discs that you are supposed to simultaneously play. Tryptch on the other hand completely works as a piece of music on its own and while it is certainly much more slight then her later pieces is satisfying and well worth hearing.

Jason Kahn Vanishing Point (23five)
I had the pleasure of seeing Jason Kahn live multiple times in 2008 & 2009, several time solo and several times in various collaborations. I’ve always found his recorded output to be mostly hit or miss (mostly miss if I’m honest) but I really was taken by his live presence. The way he fills a room, the details that hide beneath his sonic washes, the texture that make up his drones, none of these have seemed to have made the transition to record in an even remotely quite as powerful a way. This release, which I got pretty late and have really only just begun to explore, is easily the best recording of this live presence that I’ve heard to date. Played on a stereo that can capture its full dynamic range and at a volume that he would use live (which gets loud but never oppressively so) it almost feels as if his snare drum and synth are in in my living room with Jason crouched behind it. I like the uncomfortableness of his drones, the way that they don’t really allow themselves to fall into the background, that the elements that make them up keep slipping and ultimately don’t really drone. The arc of the disc is great, beginning with an uncomfortable static washes, working through various levels of density and then slowly evaporating.

This album has been quite well reviewed, but for all the wrong reasons as far as I can tell. There seems to be a focus on externalities, a personal tragedy that people try to read into the music. I knew this long before I bought it (perhaps why I held off so long) and it is because of this that I wanted to stress how normal this sounds to the live solo performances of Kahn’s that I’ve seen. Those they think they hear loss, or despair or whatever are projecting onto the music, this is as I’ve said how Kahn sounds live and this cd is noteworthy for capturing it so powerfully.  People seem to be such suckers for any sort of personal connection that they can attach to this music, a tendency that has definitely led to several quite overrated discs. I don’t doubt for a moment that emotional events have pushed performers of abstract music to new heights but I am always skeptical of those that put albums on such a pedestalal once the cause has been made public. How many albums have been generated by similarly powerful emotions that this aspect has gone unremarked due to the artists not revealing this information? Frankly I’m a bit surprised that some of the more agent provocateur types have yet to capitalize on this fetish with a faux bit of emotional porn. Buy this album for the great solo performance captured brilliantly; don’t worry about the externalities.

Tomas Korber/Utah Kawasaki Pocket Size Isolationism (Esquilo)
This is another album that captured my attention early in the year and managed to hold it until the end. Like Buoy, it also was a bit of a surprise given that I’ve always had rather mixed reactions to Korber and Kawaski’s previous work and hadn’t really heard much from either of them in a while. Both of them have produced albums I’ve quite liked though so while I didn’t really have any expectations w/r/t this album I found the collaboration interesting and certainly hoped for great music to result. The music herein seems uncertain, not so much in a feeling each other out sort of way, but perhaps in some sort of overarching away. This seeming lack of surety which you’d expect to lead to lackluster music instead creates a tension and keeps one guessing the whole way through. Bursts of noise come in and out, soft sustained tones, low-volume white noise, and domestic sounding percussive elements combine with restrained feedback and mangled synthesizers and even a very natural bit of the neighborhood sounds work their way in. Recorded in Kawasaki’s apartment it also has that sort of hothouse feel that living room music often has – sheared of the pressure of an audience, it can have a looseness, but at the same time your fellow musician provides a much more demanding audience, the only one there, with no escape. Of course there’s also the neighbors… Ultimately I think this album is a nice document of two musicians working together. This was their first collaboration and it was successful but, perhaps because of that isolation, it doesn’t quite have the deep structure that I find makes things hold up in the long term. I’m still enjoying it, but its definitely a more slight affair then those that have preceded it on this page.

Tetuzi Akiyama + Toshimaru Nakamura Semi-Impressionism (Spekk)
This would easily be the most deeply flawed release on this list, but one whose charms keep bringing me back. The first two tracks on this disc could have been recorded in 2002 and are one of the most obvious examples of nostalgia I’ve heard in this area. I would have loved those tracks in 2002 and I enjoy hearing them now. Bluesy plucked acoustic guitar and broken chords from Akiyama and Nakamura firmly in textural accompaniment mode make for a highly enjoyable, if completely comfortable listening experience. Nothing new here, no pushing just nicely colliding sounds from perfectly restrained feedback and unhurried guitar. The third track on the other hand is a disaster.  Toshi is in the forefront here and frankly that utterly fails. Akiyama seems more in the accompaniment role on this track and that never seems to work for Toshi. Compare it to his duo with Rowe at the top of this list and you can see what I mean. When pushed hard by his collaborator he can be just as far out front, co-leading the production and absolutely spectacular. Given free reign like this and perhaps also trying to escape from the easy nostalgia of their other performances, his worsts tendencies come to the fore.  Feedback in this style has some really recognizable tropes and Toshi is among the best at slipping away from them. But sometimes, most obviously in the NIMB series, he lets those aspect reign and they have always marred the music. Overtly rhythmical at times coming across as incompetent techno, or cheesily melodic (this aspect is particularly egregious on this track) this element of the NIMB is best fought against. Akiyama likewise works some of his worst excesses into this track with banal strumming and ineffective random outbursts.  But those first two tracks, they bring me right back to what got me into this music (well at least in part) and they are beautiful and tasteful and well worth hearing. Plus this is definitely the packaging of the year.

Tomorrow is the final entry in my End of Year wrap up. Stay tuned!

Taku Sugimoto/Taku Unami Tengu et Kitsune 2 (slub)

I was a pretty big fan of the original Tengu et Kitsune so of course I had to pick up the follow up. This release features two tracks of 22′ and 26′ respectively. The first track is made up of rattles from Unami’s computer driven motors and devices and Sugimoto operating metronomes that gives the proceedings a rather interlocking mechanical feel. It somewhat evokes the clockwork’s of Ryu Hankil but not nearly as as interesting to these ears. It also evokes some the process pieces from the sixties especially György Ligeti’s Poème Symphonique For 100 Metronomes. I’m not sure if its based on a score but it doesn’t really seem so to me. Perhaps a very loose one, with instructions to just play at certain times. Anyway all things considered its not bad, if nothing earth shattering. I do rather like mechanical type sounds like this but I feel that the density at times mars the piece, if anything it could have used a bit more of the trademark Sugimoto space,

The second track is from six months later and seems to reflect a slight shift in direction as at least the reports of Unami in performance over the last six months seem to be in line with this performance. It is again focused on rhythmic structures but instead of the mechanical processes used in the first track it is mandolin and sounds that can be generated with the body. The mandolin playing is mostly broken chords, repeated rhythmic strumming and here and there, fragments of melodies. The other sounds are mainly handclaps though tapping the bodies of their instruments and tongue clicks feature as well. It seems to be an attempt to replicate the mechanical rythems of the first track naturally, perhaps even following the same loose structure. However these methods work a lot less convincingly then the first track mainly in the lack of precision. It could be deliberate or an element that they wished to incorporate but I was pretty unimpressed by the inconsistencies of their rhythms and the sounds themselves. I should note that it is definitely the rhythmic failures that make this less interesting, as failure in technique has long been a fasciation for me. That is to say the accidental events that occur that lead to different sounds are something I’ve exploited a lot. In fact I’ve even worked with failure in rhythmic structures with my Book of Musical Patterns and this is perhaps an insight into what would happen if someone chose to play those patterns very fast. Perhaps in the end I’m just not that interested in hearing handclaps and half assed mandolin melodies?

One of Sugimoto’s smartest moves is that he only really hints at what his point is in all of this. He is not like Mattin, who is right out there saying what exactly it is he is challenging. This almost always proves to be to the detriment of his activities as his challenges are almost always strawmen: he is railing against a situation that doesn’t really exist (see this post for a perfect example of this). Sugimoto for all we know could be just doing that but he doesn’t make dramatic public statements or issue manifestos, he simply does his show and puts out the occasional recorded documentation of it. Almost all of the assessments of what he is doing (and Unami as well, but I think he is mostly following Sugimoto’s lead in this) are pretty much conjecture, I don’t think we’ve had much of a statement from him since the beginning of his extreme silence phase. I tend to think these two (again Unami following Sugimoto) as trickster figures involved in a continuing commentary on improvised music and its audience.

Toshimaru Nakamura/English One Day (Erstwhile Records)

This album was among the first to reach my ears in 2008 and thus is one of the albums I have spent the longest amount of time with. I was immediately taken with this album, enough so that I did a rare full review of it.  Thus this entry is going to kind of be a “bye” – I don’t really have  much more to say. This works out as this falls on a day of travel for me, I am writing this in-route to visit family. So while I’m mainly just going to point interested punters in the direction of my previous examination of this album, there are I think a few points of new business.

One thing that often comes up w/r/t music, especially that of an experimental bent is the issue of longevity.  Perhaps its because I don’t buy every release in this area, or get any free discs sent to me I instead choose what I’m going to buy fairly carefully and then spend a decent amount of time with it.  Sure sometimes I’m pretty quickly turned off, or I miscalculated or other circumstances conspire against me, but I’d say that in the main the albums I really like get dozens of listens in a year.  I think that if you listen to an album a couple of times, or even a half dozen times and then move on you can review it a lot more superficially, in a “I like how this sounds” sort of vein.  That is to say issues of how it holds up aren’t really encountered.  Short reviews lend themselves to this as well I think, which is why perhaps brevity is not my hallmark.  If you are really delving into something, it takes a lot to actually examine it.  Context needs to be established, some attempt to communicate the content and ideally some analysis of some sort.  This all takes time and a constant stream of releases makes that impossible.  A small number of well researched in-depth reviews is a lot more valuable in my mind then dozens of short superficial quick hits, because you get to the issue of longevity.

I’ve listened to One Day twice over the last day or so in preparation for it’s “day” and I have to say I still find it as striking as I did in March when I first heard it.  What I find particularly captivating in this disc is its restraint.  English (Joe Foster and Bonnie Jones) have been known to generate some pretty wild sounds, barely on the edge of control flirting at the boundaries of noise and more deliberate musics.  Risky, chaotic stuff roiling with unexpected sounds and incongruities. While there are the occasional outbursts here, especially in ‘The Color Of‘, its nature is one of stasis, especially in the opener ‘Ong Time‘.  This in itself is a bit misleading as on the surface it comes across as static, but this stasis is built up of a series of micro-events that through remarkable control and restraint stay in a finite dynamic range and create this sensation.  There is a tentativeness to this first meeting between the new kids and the old hand, as if they didn’t want to screw this up.  But that tentativeness was displayed as that remarkable restraint which ended up creating something that is unique in its way.

Nakamura here seems to have fallen back into slightly older patterns here, working partly in his accompanist role he took on a lot last year but at the same time stepping up where the music needs a push. Again restraint.  It reminds me a bit of his work in his duos with Keith Rowe in that the two of them feed of each other and push each other into ever new territory.  Here it seems like Nakamura starts off as he had so many times in 2007, generating a static bed for his partners, but then English subvert this by displaying equal restraint. So he brings it up a bit, never aggressive, never dominating or going too far. But pushing just a bit and thus English ease up a bit and slip in a bit of their wilder side.  The results of this are remarkable: probing, testing and always stretching things further. Structurally this is a bit old school – you can say that this is how almost all great improv of the “make a group of these players who’ve never played together before” conceit works. Feel each other out a bit hesitantly and then push it as far as it will work.  The strategies here though make this more interesting and I think results in it’s depth and that is what makes it constantly rewarding to listen to.

For more on this album read my previously published in-depth review.

Annette Krebs Berlin Electronics (Absinth)

There isn’t a lot of information out there about Annette Krebs nor is she over-documented in recordings. But in the last couple of years her music has catapulted from being rather mixed to being rather outstanding. With the scant evidence that we have available to us it is interesting to attempt to understand this development.  The only interview I have been able to find of Annette is from Suzuki-san of Improvised Music from Japan in 2001 (IMJ has also done an interview in 2006 but it is alas only in Japanese).  This is from before the period in which I think that she has become much more interesting but I do think that it it provides the basis for why this is the case.

Krebs learned guitar quite young (age 11) and continued to study it academically up to the point she moved to Berlin in 1992.  She studied both Jazz and Classical guitar (focusing on Baroque) and supplemented this playing in pubs (more folk like stuff it sounds like) and also trying her own hand at more abstract forms of expression.

When she moved to Berlin she was able to see contemporary music performances and was exposed to Berlin’s vibrant improvised music community. She began playing in pubs here to “…get out of the classical–you know, it’s very serious, and I wanted to put this music in another place–this was nice. And then, to forget the scales–it’s in the hands, you have so many scales–at one time I preferred to hold the guitar like a cello, and to take strings off and have only a few strings.” From this she moved on to playing the guitar with preparations and playing it flat on the table. When speaking of table top guitar it is impossible not to mention Keith Rowe, and AMM did play in Germany during this period. In fact Krebs went on to adopt a lot of the material of Rowe: radio, brillo pads and the like. It is hard to imagine that there wasn’t some influence there, though this interview really does make her seem pretty disconnected. However it was five years after she had moved to Berlin before she moved to prepared table top guitar and being involved in the music scene there was sure to have involved absorbing influences.

Another interesting connection to Rowe is that both of paint and both of them have thought of their music in the terms of abstract art “I tried to play the abstract paintings,” she says and later in the interview:

While abstract painting and sculpture being touchstones for her music, she never seemed to find a way to really adapt that into her music making, she continues from the above quote: “But then I discovered that perhaps the music is music and I cannot make objects, really, with music–something that’s not there–so I took the guitar here on my knees again. I can do more with movements; it’s easier. ” This I think really gives us all the information that we really need on the development of Kreb’s music making; essentially as of this interview (2001) she had not really found her voice.  She had a lot of interesting ideas and had absorbed a lot of techniques but had not worked out how to translate them into her own music. 

Her early collaborations with Taku Sugimoto and Andrea Neumann are hit and miss, with good moments in them but usually driven by her collaborators with her sounds often coming as intrusive interjections. A solo disc, Guitar Solo, released in 2002 on the Fringes label was like a catalog of these techniques. Without a collaborator to step on this disc is easily the most successful of her early work.  Its interjections of radio, prepared guitar and other sounds had a near random feel to it as if it was all slightly out of her control – she knew she was turning on the radio but not what it was going to do or how it was going to fit in. Perhaps there was an attempt to utilize some of Cage’s ideas of indeterminacy but instead of achieving his program of removing the composer from the music it seems to almost do the opposite: bring the performer to the forefront.

After a release in 2003 (a not very successful duo with Alessandro Bosetti) there were several years of near inactivity from Krebs. In 2006 though she reemerged with a track on the IMJ Magazine EXTRA 2006 comp and far more importantly in a self-released CD-R: Various Projects 2003-2005.   This CD-R documents what was going on in these “lost years” and contains the seeds of her next several years of musical making activity. The first of these projects to be developed was a duo with Robin Heyward, sgraffito, which was one of my favorite albums from last year.  The next release would be from early this year, an excerpt from a solo performance released as part of Absinth’s Berlin Electronics comp.

Absinth has so far released four collections of four three-inch cd-rs each focusing on Berlin musicians playing a particular category of instrument: Berlin Reeds, Berlin Drums and Berlin Strings.  Each collection allows a each artist to have an entire disc to themselves, albeit only 20 minutes, without the issues of flow and disconnection that often surround comps. However I have found the series to be uniformly better in concept then in execution, almost none of the music released on these sets have been of much interest.  Berlin Electronics follows this trend, with the exception of the Annette Krebs track which is remarkable.

I saw Annette Krebs perform at the Vancouver New Music Guitars! Guitars! festival last October and that set was remarkably similar to what this recording has to offer. This disc is an excerpt from a live concert in Berlin in 2007 the same year as the Vancouver set.  It seems to me that she has whittled her tools down to a current set that she is exploring and thus these two sets from the same year have a similar feel to them.  Her sounds are mostly the same as they have been in the past: still using brillo pads, still using radio still working with feedback and electronics. However she has also added a laptop to mix and uses it to add in pre-set samples, and a soft-synth.  One use of this that she applies on this disc that I witnessed live is the playing and manipulation of spoken word samples. “… the samples being of spoken word pieces in French and maybe German that should would manipulate in various ways – speed up, slow down and so on.”. Reading again my review of that concert it really could be a review of this disc with some events changed in their order. Like that set this has loud washes of noise, the simple synth work, the aforementioned vocal samples and the occasional radio grab. It also has that semi-random, somewhat arbitrary feel of the live set and that I felt was somewhat of a detriment in her earlier work.  But here I think that it works to the benefit of the album, in a way it sounds like someone wandering the radio dial. It’s use of space is very effective, with a more Cagean feel to them then the more forced examples we hear a lot these days. Her control of the sounds used seems to be at such a higher degree then in years past.

It has been fascinating to watch Krebs grow from a musician with solid foundations and sloppy execution evolve into a much more focused and genuinely exciting performer.  The reports of her recent concerts in Ireland and elsewhere in Europe sounds like she is continuing to keep it interesting and fresh even as she works with this more limited set of tools.  I for one certainly am anticipating future releases from her.

Resources:
1) 2001 Interview with Yoshiyuki Suzuki at Japan Improv.
2) Home Page
3) Japan Improv Annete Krebs Page
4) Absinths Berlin Electronics Page

I initially listened to this disc at work on headphones and I could immediately tell there was some serious subsonics I was missing. Having had the chance now to hear it on my stereo at home that suspicion was fully justified. Open air listening on a system that can reproduce a pretty serious frequency range is vital for this release. For example at one point in the second track there are these room shakingly low frequencies that coincide really strikingly with a persistent very high thin tone and this twittery mid-volume feedback. So without the low end rumbles it’s both more static and kind of like not being able to hear part of a chord. The albums two pieces both play with stasis as a mechanic but there are things happening at various levels throughout.

The first piece, For Shizu Araki is half the length of the epic forty minute second track and it remains more firmly in this static territory with it’s variety all happening below the surface. It begins with this hollow whistling sound with a very high pitched pure tone very quietly above. In the same way that Nakamura uses contrasting near sub-sonic tones, this part is using nearly ultra-sonic frequencies that you can feel along your jawbone more then hear. The more midrange whistling sound seems to move in a very slow sweeping pattern and at certain ranges beats against the nearly inaudible tone. A slight hiss of static adds a kind of haze to things. About half way through this track a low tone is added to the above providing contrast and depth. This low tone builds in volume very slowly becoming increasingly dominant and felt more in the body the heard.

The second track, For Namiko Kawamura and Kubikukuri Takuzo, in contrast has fairly distinct movements with more aggressive transitions between them. They themselves each work again with stasis but usually with enough elements to avoid boring drones. With ones ears still affected from the concluding ending tones of the previous track Nakamura begins this one with white noise and an irregular crackling sound. This doesn’t last though and after a bit of silence some tearing feedback heralds a new sequence. A sound field is made with similar materials to the previous track but used in a different way. The use of low end begins as an element brought in and out in the first few parts but makes up the ground in the final. While it is dominate there are these unpredictable, almost mechanical sounds running beneath that again saves us from nodding off. Even this doesn’t last and in the final eight minutes there is just a whine and rustling sounds with super low end rumbles brought in now and again. The effect of these long sections of low tones is really dramatic when they go away: the room itself seems to reverberate with their absence and play against the resulting sounds.

I’ve never been a huge fan of Nakamura’s solo work but at it’s best it can really shine. The deservedly well regarded Side Guitar remains his most definitive statement to date. Two tracks on AVVA I think are his next strongest work as a solo artist and these bear a relationship to this music in that they are silent collaborations. Silent to the listener that is with video project in the case of AVVA and dance in this case. Being dance music we are only getting part of the story with just the audio but I think that it’s pretty interesting even so. Nothing here is going to blow your socks off but I think it’s pretty good overall and worth some time with. It reminds me the most of AMM’s Fine which was also a dance music and also had the surface appearance of stasis. So while not really sonically similar it has similar relationship to the respective artists more typical work. In a way I think these “silent collaborations” can bring out some really interesting aspects in a solo performance. You don’t have the ability to hang in the background and let your musical partner(s) take the lead, but at the same time you are supporting another artists work. So restraint is still called for but also presence.

Available from ErstDist or Bottrop-boy.

(review originally published on ihatemuisc)

While Joe Foster and Bonnie Jones have been active in various music making circles for a number of years it has been with their English project that they have come to be most widely known. Prior to this album they had self-released two CD-R s, both untitled. The earliest of these was from 2004 and was released as two 20 minute pieces each on their own 3” CD-R. A seething stew of glitches, feedback, super liminal trumpet sounds, pure tones and feedback generated rhythms. Never lingering too long on any sound or technique these two pieces are a rich mélange of sounds, relentlessly lo-fi and always engaging.. No chance of falling into drone with this strategy it also miraculously never feels impatient, undeveloped or scattered. The next year they again self-released their own recordings this time as five tracks on a conventional CD-R with times ranging from 5 to 21 minutes. The pieces on this release followed the formula of their previous work yet seem more mature, more able to delve into a sound world and escape intact. The short pieces don’t come across as under developed but as a tight focus on a few sounds. The long pieces in contrast feel like extended meditations on a structure derived from this sonic detritus, a structure that arises from the gestalt of the sounds and loses focus on close inspection.

Toshimaru Nakamura at this point has appeared on over fifty recordings in combinations from solo to large groups in any number of contexts. His work over the last decade has been amongst the most interesting and challenging of anyone and yet there has been a distinct something lacking in his recordings of late. His sound is really a gestalt sound that can range from pointillistic additions to the sound field or provide a wash that emphasizes and focuses other sounds. It is this nature of his performance that has clearly made him prized as a collaborator and as his reputation has grown so has those desiring him as a collaborator. This has led to a number of releases in the last year or so that have not resulted in that gestalt, releases that are less then the sum of their parts. While for whatever reason he has been willing to take on these collaborations it is clear that these need to be chosen with more care and perhaps after experimentation without expectations of a release. In his releases for the last year his role has been of extreme background, a mere wash to the canvas of sound. Perhaps in deference to this collaborators, perhaps as an easy way to work with incompatible aesthetics the results have uniformly been uninteresting and bland. It is with this backdrop of a hungry, fresh, risk taking duo and the old master in stasis, treading water that one must approach One Day with.

There is with English an element of being on the edge of and sometimes slipping out of control. When that control is lost it is reigned and those sounds are allowed in and worked with. There is a sense of boundary pushing, of not always choosing to take the easy route that can lead to failures and strange judgments. With this collaboration one can’t help but to think of their trio with Sachiko M, a collaborator with whom Nakamua so often does transcendent work, at the ErstQuake 2 festival in New York City. This was a risky set always on the edge, fraught with failure. It reached a very natural end point and Sachiko and Jones faded away. But Foster kept playing solo trumpet mouthpiece at first and various other objects in this increasingly sad display as it became clear he was on his own. As a recording with this ending edited out it could be a great track and one does wonder how much of their process that is indicative of: Play till it falls apart and take the section that works. At the same festival the duo of English were superb so of course it simply could have just been a risk too far in this situation. The trio of English and Toshimaru Nakamura performed for the first time in Japan in 2007 and then went to the studio to record the next day. The results of this session makes up the three tracks that form this release.

Ong Time (20’39”)
The initial track on the album kicks in right away as if taken mid improvisation. There is a steady state hum that dominates the sound field and this is augmented by hisses and electronic crackles. Thus we are introduced to the trio right away with Nakamura providing that hum of feedback, Foster the hisses via the trumpet or parts thereof and Jones the electronic crackles of her open circuits. This state last for a bit of time before the dominating steady state is slowly brought down. In the space that is opened up we get cascades of sounds from Jones’s circuits, a slippery and wonderful sound. A low tone comes in, glitched in and out amid rips of feedback, stuttering electronics and ping-ponging digital manipulations to create a rich assortment of sounds. A ticking sound is brought in and out as Foster creates the most organic sound yet tonguing his mouthpiece (or something similar) as Nakamura lets loose these tearing washes of feedback. This section goes from spacious to dense at a lightning pace, building up a structure whose foundations are laid bare but whose plans never seem finalized. In the later quarter of the piece, a static wash runs at a low volume along with an equally quiet rising rumbling tone as sparks and crackles and even the occasional digital beep comes in. There is little peace in this space, it creates a tension that seems to arise out of nearly nothing. It is not the tension of waiting for the next sound, or for a blast of energy or an abrupt ending; it comes from the sounds themselves. This tension resolves itself into nothingness as the track fades away with an organic crepitation, a sine wave and some orphaned crackles.

This track is the longest of the album (beating out the next by 38 seconds) and it sets the tone for the album with its sections made up of longer tones, overlaid with fissures of chopped up sounds that shift and trade prominence. The track develops in its own time with denser sections and near silences but never falling into predictability or routine.

Plant Signs (20’01”)
As if the scattered remains of the previous piece were swept into a pile, stirred around and picked through for novel bits and pieces this track opens with small little sounds of an indelicate nature. It stays very open feeling even as a rhythmic gasping sound comes in and a low rumble begins that continues for some time. All of this is eventually cut through by one of those rhythmic tearing events that a mixer fed back upon itself is prone to. This is brilliantly matched by a pulsing high pitched tone, probably from Ms. Jones’s damaged electronics. The feedback is cut off leaving this pulse which is gently brought down amid static tears, digital thuds and buzzes and then a rising whine. This track is akin to a canvas left its natural color that three artists approach, maybe crowding up to those already there, to dab, or splash, or even do a sustained stroke before backing off and leaving it to the others, or to itself. Toward the middle of the piece some more sustained sounds come in an almost mechanical twitter as of a rotating fragment of metal squeaking as it turns upon an off kilter axis. Even with a continuous sine wave layered against this and then later some more rhythmic feedback this never feels overly opaque. A much louder wash of static, built upon with feedback threatens this state, but never overwhelms it, it comes in and dominates like a splash of red paint on that canvas but it doesn’t become the whole world. The natural space always comes back, always setting the tone. The piece has a rising degree of intensity that is so subtle you don’t really notice until by the final six minutes or so the piece allows loud siren like sounds, jarring open circuit pops and metal on metal feedback to be layered upon the spaciousness and not corrupt its nature. As the piece concludes this intensity is backed away from which simply serves to underscore the degree to which it had ascended. The sounds retain a highly fragmented nature and a higher dynamics than what the track began with but the feel of space is more akin to how it all began. At the very end a number of sounds are allowed to play out, coloring the canvas before simply being cut off.

Like the first track this one again takes bits and pieces that are almost cliché, overused, trite even but through never letting them overstay their welcome and creative juxtapositions it becomes fresh, deep and endlessly engaging.

The Color Of (15’56”)
This, the shortest piece on the disc, begins much more restlessly. Chunks of mid-range muted sounds are chopped by static fuzz and digital skronks. It is the aural equivalent of kneading dough as someone drops additional ingredients into it. The kneading complete a sputtering fizz quietly plays out as wet stammers, most likely from Fosters mouthpiece, grind away amongst washes of static, gentle feedback and other sonic detritus. From this a roiling sound as of very distant thunder arises, greeted with a near raspberry from Foster as Jones keeps up a constant thin patter of electrics. The soft schizophrenia of this track continues as these sounds fade into space and new structures are unspun. Twittery sines, interspersed static, a ringing tone, squeaks and squishy sounds all swirl upon the listener. Unlike the previous tracks the conclusion of this comes from increasing danger. A hollow feedback is brought up slowly in volume as burst of almost synth like tones, pure tones and circuit noise flashes in and out. A rain like dirty static replaces the feedback and various components of this piece squeal through till two sounds as of devices being unplugged end it.

This final piece of the album is much more fragmented then the other two, but again fails to fall into familiar territory. Working with bursts of sound there is a risk of falling into the played out patterns of so called “insect music”, a risk that never fully transpires in this piece. The way that it is built of the constituent parts of the previous pieces and yet differs from them shows the range of this trio, their skill at using the tools of the last couple decades of improvisation and to transcend their routines and limitations.

In this album they flirt constantly with the conventions of drone, using long sustained tones frequently, but never allowing themselves to fall into that trap. At the same time even with the quick cuts and transitions it never falls into the ADD, schizophrenia that mars so much free improv. Likewise they use a number of the elements of modern noise, an area fraught with clichés that seem to be treated as goals. Again they only use it as tools, never falling into its trap of excess and ego. It is a knife edge balancing act that is pulled off through impeccable restraint. Nakamura may lay in a long near drone to which Jones’ chaotic, fizzing electronics undercut its potential soporific nature as Foster adds an overtone, or a contrasting stutter that just further subverts the proceedings. The degree at which these three work together is intense, constantly challenging and pushing the sounds to the fore. Consistently the results exceed the inputs, there are layer upon layer to reward a close degree of attention.

The playing from Jones and Foster is definitely the most mature I’ve heard from them. Apart from their collaborations and the concerts of theirs I’ve had the pleasure to witness, I’ve also followed their solo and collaborative work and there has been a continual refinement and increasing virtuosity with their instruments. Every new piece seems to push something further and this album is definitely a breakthrough for them. Nakamura is quite interesting on this release, sprung from the malaise he seems to have been trapped in for the last year or so. He is more dominate here in that he doesn’t relay on the static background style he’s used in many of his recent collaborations, yet at the same time working to actively augment the sounds of his collaborators. In many ways he has fallen back on his style and techniques of previous years, but mixing it up through bringing different things to the fore and using a much wider palette. You can tell they pushed each other, the music is always on the verge of falling into total noise and strays at the edge between stasis and chaos that where the truly interesting, challenging and deep sounds come from.

Relevant Links:
English
Joe Foster
Bonnie Jones
Toshimaru Nakamura
One Day
Erstwhile Records

(review originally published at ihatemusic)

One of my primary musical interests for the last few years have been in a genre that’s come to be called “eai”. Originally this stood for “electro-acoustic Improvisation” but has taken on a wider meaning then a literal take on those words would imply (however I think that the term does adequately describe the genre, but that’s another post). A post on the ihatemusic forum asking for “essentials” in the genre finally motivated to do something I’d been thinking about for a while – try to create a list of the albums that define this genre. Obviously somewhat tilting against windmills, especially as I certainly haven’t heard everything (however it isn’t an impossible task to hear nearly everything in this genre at this point in time) and furthermore a task open to endless criticism as peoples “favorites” may differ from what I think of as :”essential”. Taking this as a personal project though I think it is valuable and is well suited for blog posting. Here I can update, modify, expand and so on the list. One project I want to work on is the pre-history are especially links in modern composition. Anyway here it is, my list of the core EAI albums.

—

Pre-history

60’s
Group Ongaku Music of Group Ongaku (Hear Sound Art Library) 1960-61
M.E.V. Spacecraft (on Live Electronic Music Improvised) (Mainstream) 1966
AMM AMMMusic (ReR Megacorp) 1967
AMM The Crypt (Matchless) 1968
Music Now Ensemble Silver Pyramid (Matchless) 1969
AMM The Aarhus sequences (disc 1 of Laminal)  (Matchless) 1969

70’s
Taj Mahal Travellers July 15th 1972 (CBS/Sony)
Taj Mahal Travellers August 1974 (P-Vine Records)
Gentle Fire Earle Brown, John Cage Und Christian Wolff (EMI Electrola) 1974
Takehisa Kosugi Catch-Wave (CBS/Sony) 1975
David Tudor Microphone (Cramps) 1978

80’s
AMM The Great Hall (disc 2 of Laminal)  (Matchless)  1982
Hugh Davies Shozyg Music For Invented Instruments (FMP)
AMM - Combine + Laminates + Treatise ‘84 (Matchless) 1984
David Tudor Three Works For Live Electronics (Lovely Music) 1984
AMM - The Inexhaustible Document (Matchless) 1987
Keith Rowe A Dimension of Perfectly Ordinary Reality (Matchless) 1989

Early/mid 90’s
AMM Newfoundland (Matchless) 1992
David Tudor David Tudor Plays Cage & Tudor (Atonal Records)
AMM Live in Allentown USA (Matchless) 1994
Polwechsel Polwechsel (hat[now]ART) 1994
AMM Before driving to the chapel we took coffee with Rick and Jennifer Reed (Matchless) 1996
MIMEO Queue (Perdition plastics) 1997
Kevin Drumm Kevin Drumm (Perdition Plastics) 1997
Ryoji Ikeda +/- (Touch) 1997

Ascension

1998
Such The Issue at Hand (Matchless)
Sachiko M/Otomo Yoshihide Filament 1 (Extreme)
Polwechsel 2 Polwechsel 2 (hat[now]ART)
Kurzmann/Fennesz/O’Rourke/Drumm/Siewert s/t (Orange Disc) (Charhizma)
Taku Sugimoto Opposite (Hat Hut, hatNOIR)

1999
Keith Rowe Harsh (Grob)
Keith Rowe/Günter Müller/Taku Sugimoto The World Turned Upside Down (Erstwhile Records)
Otomo Yoshihide Cathode (Tzadik)
Sachiko M. Debris (F.M.N. Sound Factory)
Mon:goose At Penguin House (Slub)
Phil Durrant/Thomas Lehn/Radu Malfatti dach (Erstwhile Records)
Nobukazu Takemura Scope (Thrill Jockey)
Sachiko M/Günter Müller/Otomo Yoshihide Filament 2 (for4ears) (recorded 1998)
Toshimaru Nakamura/Tetuzi Akiyama/Taku Sugimoto The Improvisation Meeting at Bar Aoyama (Reset) (recorded 1998)

2000
Andrea Neumann/Toshimaru Nakamura AT0N (Rossbin)
Keith Rowe/Burkhard Beins Grain (Zarek)
Toshimaru Nakamura/Sachiko M do (Erstwhile Records)
Günter Müller/Lê Quan Ninh La Voyelle Liquide (Erstwhile Records)
Taku Sugimoto/Kevin Drumm Den (Sonoris)
Otomo Yoshihide Anode (Tzadik)
Otomo Yoshihide/Keith Rowe/Taku Sugimoto Ajar (Alcohol) (recorded 1999)

Peak Era

2001
AMM Fine (Matchless)
Various Artists Improvised music from Japan presents Improvised music from Japan 10 CD Boxset (IMJ)
Toshimaru Nakamura/Tetuzi Akiyama Meeting at Off Site vol. 1 (IMJ)
Otomo Yoshihide Ensemble Cathode (IMJ)
Tetuzi Akiyama Relator (Slub)
Burkhard Stangl/Taku Sugimoto An old fashioned duet (Slub)
Taku Sugimoto/Burkhard Stangl/Christof Kurzmann in Tokyo: first concert, second take (Music Genera)
Keith Rowe 29 October 2001 (Sound 323)
Rhodri Davies Trem (Confront)
Keith Rowe/Toshimaru Nakamura Weather sky (Erstwhile Records)
Otomo Yoshihide Anode (Tzadik)
Filament 29092000 (Sat/Amoebic)
Annette Krebs Guitar Solo (Fringes)
Hugh Davies Warming Up With The Iceman (Grob)
Various Artists Not Necessarily “English Music” (EMF)

2002
Norbert Möslang lat_nc (for4ears)
Dafeldecker/Hautzinger/Tilbury/Sachiko M Absinth (Grob)
John Butcher Invisible Ear (Fringes)
Kaffe Mathews/Andrea Neumann/Sachiko M In case of fire take the stairs (IMJ)
Toshimaru Nakamura/Tetuzi Akiyama Meeting at Off Site vol. 2 (IMJ)
Tetuzi Akiyama/Toshimaru Nakamura/Taku Sugimoto/Mark Wastell Foldings (Confront)
MIMEO/John Tilbury The Hands of Caravaggio (Erstwhile Records)
Cosmos Tears (Erstwhile Records)
Andrea Neumann/Burkhard Beins Lidingö (Erstwhile Records)
Various Artists AMPLIFY 2002: balance (7 CDs/1 DVD box set) (Erstwhile Records)
Sachiko M/Sean Meehan s/t (no label)
Philip Samartzis/Sachiko M Artefac (Dorobo)
Otomo Yoshihide/Taku Sugimoto/Sachiko M Les Hautes Solitudes–A Philippe Garrel Film: Imaginarry Soundtrack (Out One)
Otomo Yoshihide/Keith Rowe/Taku Sugimoto Ajar (Alcohol)
Tetuzi Akiyama Résophonie (A Bruit Secret)
Broken consort Done (QuakeBasket)
Radian Rec.Extern (Thrill Jockey)

2003
Otomo Yoshihide/Park Je Chun/Mi Yeon Loose Community (IMJ)
Toshimaru Nakamura Side Guitar (IMJ)
Toshimaru Nakamura/Tetuzi Akiyama Meeting at Off Site vol. 3 (IMJ)
Joel Stern/Matt Davis Small Industry (L’Innomable)
John Tilbury Barcelona Piano Solo (Rossbin)
Sachiko M 1 : 2 (A Bruit Secret)
Keith Rowe/John Tilbury Duos for Doris (Erstwhile Records)
Martin Siewert/Martin Brandlmayr Too Beautiful to Burn (Erstwhile Records)
I.S.O. s/t (Sound Tectonics/YCAM)
Dion Workman Ching (Antiopic)
Trapist Highway My Friend (hatOLOGY)
Stephane Rives Fibres (Potlatch)

2004
Anthony Guerra/Matt Earle In (L’Innomable)
Keith Rowe/Axel Dörner/Franz Hautzinger A View from the Window (Erstwhile Records)
Sachiko M/Toshimaru Nakamura/Otomo Yoshihide Good Morning Good Night (Erstwhile Records)
Keith Rowe/Burkhard Beins ErstLive 001 (Erstwhile Records)
Christian Fennesz/Sachiko M/Otomo Yoshihide/Peter Rehberg ErstLive 004 (Erstwhile Records)
Keith Rowe/Sachiko M/Toshimaru Nakamura/Otomo Yoshihide ErstLive 005 (Erstwhile Records)
Filament Filament BOX (F.M.N. Sound Factory)
MIMEO Lifitng Concrete Lightly (Serpentine Gallery)
Martin Ng / Tetuzi Akiyama OIMACTA (IMJ)
The Sealed Knot Unwanted Object (Confront Collectors Series)
Radi Malfatti/Mattin White Noise (W.M.O/R)
English s/t (Copula)
Hugh Davies Tapestries (Ants)

Plateau

2005
Four Gentlemen of the Guitar Cloud (Erstwhile Records)
John Tilbury/Marcus Schmickler Variety (A-Musik)
Sean Meehan Sectors (for Constant) (SoSEDITIONS)
Graham Halliwell Recorded Delivery (Confront Collectors Series)
GOD Anti-Sex/Anti-Wiretapping (Made in Taiwan) (Little Enjoyer/JYRK/GMBY)
English s/t (Copula)

2006
Keith Rowe/Toshimaru Nakamura between (Erstwhile Records)
Filament Dark Room Filled with Light (Uplink)
(N:Q) November Quebec (Esquilo)
Toshimaru Nakamura/Klaus Filip aluk (IMJ)
Eddie Prevost Entelechy (Matchless)
Taku Sugimoto/Taku Unami Tengu Et Kitsune (Slub)
Will Guthrie/Ferran Fages Cinabri (Absurd)
Bonnie Jones Vines (EMR)
Mark Wastell/David Lacey/Paul Vogel Live at the i+e festival (Confront)
Traw with Rhodri Davies Cwymp Y Dwr Ar Ganol Dydd (Confront)
Manfred Werder 2006¹ (Skiti)
Burkhard Stangl / Taku Unami I was (Hibari)
Fergus Kelly/David Lacey Bevel (Room Temperature)
Nmperign/Jason Lescalleet Love Me Two Times (Intransitive)
Jeph Jerman/Albert  Casais/Greg Davis - 6×20 (Winds Measure)
Joe Foster Knock Nevis (For Wilson Zorn and J.P. Jenkins) (homophoni)
Ami Yoshida/Christof Kurzmann a s o (Erstwhile Records)

2007
Annette Krebs/Robin Hayward sgraffito (no label)
Sachiko M Salon de Sachiko (Hitorri)
Keith Rowe The Room (Erstwhile Records)
MIMEO sight (Cathnor Recordings)
Mitsuhiro Yoshimura and so on ((h)ear rings)
Nate Wooley The Boxer (EMR)
5 Modules series I-IV (Manual)
Angharad Davies/Tisha Mukarji - Endspace (Another Timbre)
Taku Unami – Malignitat (Skiti)
Mitsuhiro Yoshimura/Taku Sugimoto BGM and so on  ((h)ear rings)
Marc Baron/Bertrand Denzler/Jean-Luc Guionnet/ Stéphane Rives Propagations (Potlatch)

2008
Annette Krebs Berlin Electronics (Absinth)
Toshimaru Nakamura/English One Day (Erstwhile Records)
Radu Malfatti L’Effaçage (B-Boim)
Masahiko Okura/Taku Sugimoto/Taku Unami Chamber Music Concerts Vol. 1 (HibariSlubloadfactor)
Annette Krebs/Toshimaru Nakamura SIYU (SoSEDITIONS)
Seymour Wright Seymour Wright of Derby (Self Released)
Ami Yoshida/Minoru Sato Composition for voice performer (1997 and 2007) (ao to ao)
Ryu Hankil/Hong Chulki/Choi Joonyong 5 Modules V (The Manual)
Mitsuhiro Yoshimura/Masahiko Okura Trio (Presquile)
Choi Joonyong/Hong Chulki/Sachiko M/Otomo Yoshihide Sweet Cuts, Distant Curves (Balloon & Needle)
Keith Rowe/Taku Unami Erstlive 006 (Erstwhile Records)
Keith Rowe Erstlive 007 (Erstwhile Records)

2009
Tomas Korber/Utah Kawasaki Pocket Size Isolationism (Esquilo)
Phil Durrant/Lee Patterson/Paul Vogel Buoy (Cathnor Recordings)
Radu Malfatti/Taku Unami Goat Vs Donkey (Taumaturgia)
Kevin Parks/Joe Foster Prince Rupert Drops (homophoni)
Various Relay: Archive 2007-2008 (The Manual)
Toshimaru Nakamura/Ami Yoshida Soba to Bara (Erstwhile Records)
Andrea Neumann Pappelallee 5 (Absinth)
Keith Rowe/Oren Ambarchi Cornelius Cardew Treatise (Planam)
Keith Rowe/Sachiko M Contact (Erstwhile Records)
Radu Malfatti/Klaus Filip imaoto (Erstwhile Records)
Noid, Taku Unami ￢ + : * (The Manual)

(so far…)