Annette Krebs/Toshimaru Nakamura SIYU (SoSEDITIONS)
I have spoken at length about the transformation of Annette Krebs in my discussion of Berlin Electronics and of the recent work of Toshimaru Nakamura in my review of One Day, so it is interesting to hear these two in collaboration. The question of timing is of course important; Krebs has really come into her own in the last few years and Nakamura has been in a certain state of flux for the same. So it isn’t overly surprising that SIYU was recorded in 2005. At this period of time I’d say that Nakamura was at the height of his game, in the midst of a series of amazing and innovative collaborations: Erstlive 005, Erstlive 002, 4G, a duo with Sean Meehan, the next year would bring between(1). At the same time this was the end of Kreb’s period of isolation and her process of reinvention from which her current stream of great collaborations have come from. From the artist page for this release on the SoS Editions site:
since 2003, she has worked to combine composed musical sounds with layers of concrete meanings, including word and visual materials. in her pieces, all materials are composed in a very equal and abstract way; the possible decorative function of sound is averted.
similar to an acoustic collage, fragments of language, words and field recordings are integrated as musical materials together with tonal and rhythmical abstract composed sounds, noises and silences. concrete meanings, fragments of memory are sometimes softly suggested, and then reintegrated immediately, as reminders of short fragments of thought in the abstract soundlanguage.
musical hierarchical structures, foreground and background, exist in her pieces in a mostly fluid form; they can appear for a short moment, however, immediately disappear again into each other, framed together like images in a kaleidoscope. seconds later, they reveal themselves in other combinations, in new, surprising ways. (2)
This description (which oddly I hadn’t seen before writing this) pretty much puts into words exactly what I’ve been hearing in her music. It also confirms that this strategy and system has come from that post 2003 period. The “samples” I’ve mentioned before are these composed elements and clearly the use of pre-composed vocal elements is a major component of this ‘abstract soundlanguage‘ she is working with. The “…possible decorative function of sound is averted.” shows an adherence to the Cagean notion of letting the sounds speak for themselves (or perhaps reflecting Feldmans intention that you can’t push the sounds around). Her techniques and subsequent sound are a direct reflection of this statement: her sounds come and go, rarely lingering, you can definitely sense an equal weight to all sounds and there is always surprise there, even to the performer it appears when you witness a Krebs performance.
The disc contains two tracks, both created in 2005, the first, longer track having been previously released on Kreb’s self-released CD-R Various Projects 2003-2005(3). While so much of that CD-R presaged Krebs work to come (the solo material invoking Berlin Electronics, the duo with Heyward) this track was the real standout. The CD-R was never easy to get a hold of and in that alone this disc was incredibly welcome, but the addition of the second, short track from the same session really promoted this into a fantastic release. While half the length of the previous track the second track acts as both a second movement and coda to it and makes for a whole that transcends its two parts. They are both great as solo pieces but together I think that make for a complete piece.
Wrr finds Nakamura deep in background territory which in this case compliments Krebs’ style of interjections and bursts of activity. The track begins in stasis with a background hiss from Nakamura and within the first couple of minutes you hear brillo pad on Krebs’ guitar, a shot of her tweaked vocal samples, some radio and other bits of sonic clutter. Nakamura simply responds with a mid-range pure tone, backed with a lower drone that this activity rises out of. They aren’t wildly off in dynamic range which keeps this from seeming two aggressive and as Krebs always puts these bursts of activity into wide spaces it never gets overly dense and busy. But as she drops out Nakamura subtly changes his sounds – for instance that mid-range tone just discussed was slowly rising in volume until the point where Krebs drops out, to which he responds by backing it off. This is brilliant interplay in that he didn’t just drop out in kind but he changed the texture in response to her dropping out. This track all works like that, with Nakamura taking the lead in a real subtle way. That is to say that Krebs more or less does what she would do solo and it is the collaborative aspect that is driven by Nakamura’s playing. He works a lot with continuous sound in this piece, but he mixes it up enough that his sounds are quite textured. The near static parts are always my favorite in this where there seems to be almost nothing going on but maybe a subdued hiss, or a low background hum and then little burbling radio grabs, higher pitched tones, bleats of static or short cut off bit of vocals. But in the more intense parts there is a lot to hear as well: washes of static, swarms of bees, ringing tones, cutting feedback. In interplay with Krebs diversity of sounds, both in character as well as in dynamics this is a varied and intricate collaboration that pulls me in every time I listen.
Brr, begins with a low rumble from Nakamura to which shortly a vacillating tone is brought in contrast against. An oddly hollow scraping sound flutters across the stereo field as the oscillating tone comes up only to be replaced by a brief moment of feedback. Burst of radio static and then a return to stasis. Like the previous track this quick series of events comes in and out quickly, never shockingly, but again restlessness pitted above stasis. But unlike the first track this stasis from Nakamura doesn’t last; he works with longer events but is constantly shifting in this piece. Although it is shorter than the previous piece this one is a constant miasma of sound, layers of washes, sudden bursts of feedback, and moments of silence with only a faint trace of hiss probably from inactive electronics. This activity from Nakamura, though at a dramatically lower level, than Krebs gives this whole piece a feel of sands shifting under ones feet: there is no solid ground on which to rest. In the end though this piece transforms into a shift decrease in activity; still never falling into stasis but the events from both partners are more drawn out and low energy as if they were fading out through self-editing.
References
1) Toshimaru Nakamura Discography
2) SOS Editions Artist Pages
3) Annette Krebs’ CD-R Various Projects 2003-2005
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.
“I lived in Frankfurt, and I started studying classical guitar at that time. At the same time I was making abstract paintings, and I tried to play the abstract paintings, but only a bit. Perhaps it didn’t sound very good, like with melodies only, and abstract lines–it was not yet noises. It was always pitches.”(1)
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:
“And at that time I wanted to find a kind of music very much like a statue–like something which stands here, like an object. Not like being a musician who is moving and making music, but making objects with two amplifiers. That means not being a musician, in fact, only being someone who makes objects. “(1)
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
