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gil gershman

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Nur Mar Mus

Nur Mar Mus [ review of: Nur Mar Mus by Limpe Fuchs (CD Album) ]

In the early '70s, Anima Sound, the husband-and-wife duo of Paul and Limpe Fuchs, tooled about the German countryside in a wooden caravan, converting the back of their vehicle into an open-air stage and playing "music for everyone." Their improvised racket of modified horns, metal-sheet percussion, and freeform vocals was in the joyously creative spirit of the day. Limpe's solo work preserves this delight in invention, featuring instruments ingeniously fashioned from metal, stone, wood, and other natural materials. "Nur" showcases the Paul Fuchs-designed ballaststring, an arrangement of wire-strung metal bars suspended from a brass drum and played like a cross between a vibraphone and a gong. "Mus" and the extended "Mar" are splendidly musical compositions that highlight Limpe's singularly flighty vocal fugues and the carillon-like, echo-soaked tones of the polished serpentinite and marble stones; the squeaky "Nop" presents the same stones in a decidedly different rubbed-and-bowed manner. A frugally ornamented one-note violin diversion ("Ton") and a riveting kettle drum composition ("Dru") round out the disc's solo selections. After introducing all of these instrumental characters-most already familiar from Anima Sound, Anima, and Limpe's earlier Muusiccia (Metal/Stones) album-Nur Mar Mus launches into a series of memorable duo and trio pieces featuring percussionist Thomas Korpiun and double bassist Georg Karger. "Mit" contrasts Korpiun's brash, thunderous sheet-metal gestures with the sonorous ballaststrings and Fuchs' vocal interjections. Fuchs' violin is expressive and evocatively folksy on "Hau" and "Did," pairing well with the richly romanticized Black Forest-fairytale color of Karger's stalking figures and Korpiun's clattery accents. The percussionist's active approach meshes perfectly with Fuchs' enthusiastic bronze-drum bashing on "Kra," creating a gamelan-like web of metallic polyrhythms. As a final treat, the Fuchs' famed Fuchshorn is dug out of mothballs and sounded in enthusiastic bleats at the climax of "Zug," a dramatic ballaststring number further enhanced by Karger's lyricism, volleys of Korpiun's disruptive percussive noise, and the unexpected audience-participation element of hammered iron bars.


Posted by gil gershman at 00:00, 21 Jul 2000

TG 11

TG 11 [ review of: TG 11 by Radian (CD Album) ]

Getting electronic music and the live-band dynamic to bed down together can make for an awful lot of ruffled sheets and awkwardly splayed limbs, but Austrian three-piece Radian has achieved a workable arrangement. Drummer-programmer-and-vibraphonist Martin Brandlmayr and bassist John Norman lay wobbly and wiry free-sounding rhythms as capably as your favorite Chicagoan entities. They keep things tight enough to groove yet just relaxed enough not to tangle up Stefan Nemeth's squirrelly spurts and schpritzes of high-frequency digital and analog noise. TG11 delivers on the promise of 1999's exciting, deservedly buzz-borne "Radian" EP. The trio's excellent follow-up evidences an even stronger sense of group rapport and intrepid spirit. "R4" twitches to furious, desperately funky life beneath Nemeth's carpet of charged crackle and Brandlmayr's diffident drum-and-vibes flourishes. Here, on the bewitchingly kinky title track, on the just-barely ballasted "Tornio," and on "Okazaki Fragment," Radian's surprisingly surefooted balancing act invites parallel with no less than the gymnastic floor show of '73-'74 Can. Elsewhere, Nemeth takes the upper hand. He issues cavity-cleansing kiloherz on "Sinus 440," "Ucotherm," and "Kadjet," goading his cohorts into negotiations resembling I.S.O.'s perfectly realized improv directive. Norman and Brandlmayr steer clear of close contact with the caustic fallout of Nemeth's Korg MS 10 on "Spektr" and seek immediate shelter from his white-hot pelting on "Moveg." As impressive as TG 11's main course is (and we're talking about a disc immediately in Top-10 of 2000 contention), the best is saved for last. The concluding "I/E" presents Radian as more of an integrated and ego-free organ, sublimating vibe harmonics, string vibrations, and electronic effluent in a truly radiant (sorry) electro-acoustic coda that very nearly matches Viennese improv paragon Polwechsel move for move in measured, metamusical mastery.


Posted by gil gershman at 00:00, 26 Jun 2000

Entain

Entain [ review of: Entain by Vladislav Delay (CD Album) ]

With two full-length Vladislav Delay CDs being released in February, you can be forgiven for mistaking the Finnish producer for an overnight success. Recent work for Chain Reaction, Sigma Editions, Phthalo, and Thomas Brinkmann's Max Ernst imprint has undoubtedly boosted Delay's profile, making him the moment's minimal-techno "it boy". But the Vladislav Delay story goes back a few years, to Helsinki microlabel Huume and 1997's all-but-unheard, The Kind of Blue EP. You could view the present fascination as a Delay-ed reaction - an inevitable response to the mystery Vladislav Delay has always exuded. His epoch-length tracks surrender few secrets to the impatient, seemingly unfolding in geological time. And yet Delay's marathon minimalism barely conceals the fact that his exquisitely controlled sound - evocative of ancient floes cracking apart under the stress of deepening and widening fissures - imposes an eminently inviting frontispiece on a frequently faceless music. Bearing this in mind, it makes sense that Mille Plateaux saw fit to salvage Kohde and Ele from Delay's out-of-print 1999 CD, Ele (Sigma Editions). To hell with obscurity, underground cachet, and insider privilege - people need to hear these brilliant creations. What begins as a barely moving river of glacial ice flows over a precisely plotted bed of samples and dub-like currents, gathering speed and texture as successive rifts and rents reduce Delay's monolithic masses by fractions. As one listens, these imposingly solid tracks melt into a chunky, sluicing slurry of rime and rhythm, dissolving in their final moments into trickles of ambient tone. Or are Delay's extended 22-minute and 15-minute excursions simply running full-circle, chasing their own tails, Oroborus-style? Delay has stated that his intent is to take each track so far from its origin - in patient, nearly invisible paces - that the listener is unable to recall exactly how it began. This fascination with circularity is most evident in Entain's new material, where Delay executes successive solid, liquid, gas, and flux-state transformations while showing uncommon regard for the physical laws of conservation of matter and energy. The magnificent Poiko (19:19) and Notke (16:49) start in an indefinite state, collect glitches, melodic impressions, and rhythmic fragments, evolve into kinetic but brittle Berlin-school techno-dub odysseys, gradually slough off all accumulated digital debris, and end in a familiar, indefinite state. It may be a long way to go for so little progression, but Entain's journey is its own reward.


Posted by gil gershman at 00:00, 18 Feb 2000

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