gil gershman

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

[ 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

[ 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

Just Landed

[ review of: Just Landed by Burnt Friedman, The Nu Dub Players (CD Album) ]

In his restless travels, Cologne's digi-dub wizard Bern'd Friedmann (Drome, Nonplace Urban Field) has bounced between Chilean jazz trysts with expatriate amigo Atom Heart and romps with his Unitone HiFi mates in New Zealand. Just Landed catches Friedmann with new antipodean allies the Nu Dub Players, tripping the dub eclectic for Stefan Betke's brilliant ~scape label. The bottom line here is Crucial Guenther's bass. His rock-steady undertow floats the crew's pert and peppy old-school-Kingston melodies and ballasts Friedmann's expertly incorporated digital mischief. Just Landed is about not merely reveling in the spirit of dub but reworking its hands-on tricks and fades for the DSP generation. Friedmann's conspirators in this venture - Guenther, turntable trickster DJ Booth, crafty drummer Bernie the Bolt, and gat twanger/meat meister Cousin of the Sausage Smearer - have determined the daftest digi-dub detours down which to send their songs skanking. The casually paced Just Landed thus becomes a marvelous mixing-desk melee of dubwise heritage, groove-surfing frolic, and microprocessor monkeyshines. Cassock Attack and Railway Palace, Melbourne may radiate roots reverberations, but there's an insouciant current of non-traditionalist mischief running through the album. The opening Hut Selector meanders in a chilled ambient space antithetical to the island swelter of Jamaica. Friedmann's distinctive programming nails the jaunty rhythms of Just Landed and Cassock Attack to modern blueprints. And when his constant production meddling injects Dub to the Music, It's Thunder, and the standout I Shot the Fashion Victim with splashes of Vocoder damage and insidious, speaker-hopping bolts of Pole/NUF-style micro-crackle, it becomes apparent that Friedmann and Co. have indeed successfully stirred up a brave "Nu" Dub.

Posted by gil gershman at 00:00, 17 Feb 2000

Get Out

[ review of: Get Out by Pita (CD Album) ]

Like many musicians who have embraced the frequent-flying lifestyle of the laptop/hard-disc set, Peter "Pita" Rehberg spent much of 1998 and 1999 far from his Vienna home base, circling the globe with little more than a g3 Powerbook and a suitcase at his side. It's an exciting time to be a musician; your hard drive can be packed with samples and DSP plug-ins and set up anywhere within minutes. Get Out was composed on the go - on trains, in hotel rooms, in private homes, in friends' studios - wherever our wandering Macintosh minstrel might have found himself during his travels through Paris, Oxford, Amsterdam, Tokyo, New York, and Vienna. The album holds to the WYSIWIG creed; what you hear has sustained only a modicum of postproduction "file management." Get Out witnesses a significant leap forward in compositional quality over the fussy frequency fidgets and visceral inner-ear assault tactics of 1996's prize-winning Seven Tons for Free. Throughout the nine untitled tracks, Pita's store of raw sound remains the same cache of sour glitches, whiny frequencies, and corroded samples from which his remix, duo, solo, and improv projects all cull. Perhaps a streak of masochism informs his choice of such unworkable and impaired sounds. But Pita pulls it off with the patience and persistence of a master puzzle-smith, finding a perfect fit for each fragment or frequency regardless of its irregularity. More importantly, however, Get Out reflects Pita's increasingly refined grasp of dynamics and striking dramatic effect. Track 3 provides the show-stopping peak, as the disc's lone melody is decorously unfurled only to be suddenly and startlingly tormented by a blizzard of digital detritus and resampled feedback.

Posted by gil gershman at 00:00, 09 Feb 2000

Insulation

[ review of: Insulation by Oren Ambarchi (CD Album) ]

Renegade axe-men keep raising the bar for one another, making it more difficult to push the envelope of six-strings-and-an-amp possibilities. Christian Fennesz and Kevin Drumm may dominate the current heat of guitar innovation, but these popular contenders would be wise to look out for Oren Ambarchi. The Sydney-based musician, late of such diverse projects as the JP-noise-flavored Phlegm and Ambarchi/Avenaim's The Alte Rebbe's Niggun (Tzadik), is coming up from the outside with some impressive new tricks up his sleeve. Ambarchi has been self-releasing solo guitar recordings for a while, but Insulation is his first missive to the mass market. Like his peers, Ambarchi seems intent on making his improvised performances sound like anything but solo-guitar performances. He skillfully transcends the instrument's conventional range, turning Insulation into a parade of guitar-sonic impossibilities - watery gurgle, wildly zigzagging piezoelectric effects ("Lungs"), percussive tattoos ("Murmur") - euphonic feedback fabrications, and harmonic afterimages. "Simon" and "Preamble" stretch the guitar's palette to include expressive reed-chirps, chimes, tongue-flicked brass emulation, and mewling ghost notes. Waves of derived sound wash in rough ripples over the shallow rhythmic bed of the 14+-minute "Snork", one of several collaborations with Adelaide's Matthew Thomas. Considering Ambarchi's source, rhythm is a mystifying constant on Insulation. "Concurrents," "Lungs," and "Murmur" incorporate insistent, insinuating pulse rhythms - some quite disruptive - that imply extensive computer trickery. The pseudo-breakbeat maneuvers of Ambarchi and Thomas‚ "Strategem" and the looped glitch entanglements of their "La Notte" seem similarly dependent upon sequencing. "L‚eclisse," dedicated to Ambarchi's father, recalls the fascinating suspended-in-air harmonic composition of Polwechsel guitarist Burkhard Stangl (see his dazzling Récital CD on Durian) but again echoes with a faint background pulse. Remarkably, Ambarchi claims to have foregone all editing artifice and computer sleight on Insulation. These are spontaneous performances, relying solely upon his technical ingenuity. Which certainly makes the show-stopping "Study No. 1" and "Study No. 3," dizzy musique concrète-styled displays of cartoon-ish electroacoustic noises, all the more astonishing. If Ambarchi can do this with a guitar - and his results stand admirably alongside even the most splice-intensive "old-school" efforts - I can't imagine what other feats of six-string defiance this crafty guitarist might have in stock.

Posted by gil gershman at 00:00, 20 Jan 2000

Alomoni 1985

[ review of: Alomoni 1985 by Karuna Khyal (CD Album) ]

1999 saw the unearthing of another coveted relic, thanks to the efforts of Paradigm Disc's Clive Graham. As with the label's reissues of (the possibly related) Brast Burn's Debon, Trevor Wishart's Menagerie, and The Reverend Dwight Frizzell & Anal Magic's Beyond the Black Crack, Karuna Khyal's Alomoni 1985 is something very special - unburied treasure, indeed. The MO on Alomoni 1985 is thoroughly corrupted rock & roll, steeped in ragtag R&B and crisscrossed by croaked vocal mantras and deliriously dizzy slide guitar. On the first of the albums two 20+-minute fractured tracks of rambunctious, bass-led "song," Alomoni 1985 invites comparisons to nothing less than a low-rent Faust Tapes - less dependent upon Faust's bucolic demeanor and rigorous studio-as-instrument directive - or a particularly gone Magic Band outtake (free from the Captain's authoritarian censorship). And while KK is at least more deserving of the "Japanese Faust" descriptive misleadingly bestowed upon Brast Burn, even this seems bluntly dismissive of a unique, remarkably potent brand of madness.

Liberally laced as it is with dated Canned Heat-isms, copious shofar-squawk harmonica riffing, grim oompah/cosmic jug-band plod, smears of visceral feedback, and truly insidious tape-work, Alomoni 1985 is most uncannily analogous to the early catalog of Hapshash & The Coloured Coat. An LSD-besotted English trio, H&TCC recorded one of the freakiest records of its day, 1967's giddy Hapshash & The Coloured Coat Featuring The Human Host and The Heavy Metal Kids. Rumor has Hapshash's lysergic excesses leading members to death, insanity, and, natch - production work for a major studio after only one other (very different) album, 1969's fun, Moby Grape-flavored Western Flier. H&tCC's legacy long outlived the band, as Hapshash's music and communal lifestyle directly inspired the first stirrings in Germany of what would become Krautrock.

Heaping complication upon confusion, the smoking second half of Alomoni 1985 winds through a noisy tribal exorcism-cum-hoedown. With a bacchanalian commotion of scrappy percussion, a dozen shades of vocal damage (overtone chants, wordless mumbling, tuneless singing, raucous whoops and hollers), gusts of modulated (wind? synth?) noise, and spurts of volatile, psychedelicized improv, KK bursts through the free-music barrier - albeit in a stomping, stumbling Cro-Magnon fashion. No-Neck Blues Band adherents take note. Surviving lore about KK, however, places Alomoni 1985 quite a few years earlier (maybe), in Japan (maybe), with an unknown (maybe), substantially more menacing quantity either cut adrift of its contemporaneous musical timeline or orbiting decades ahead of such. Or consider that such modern concerns as Ectogram, Ulan Bator, Ghost, and all aforementioned and kindred souls could sticker their names on the cover of Alomoni 1985 without anyone batting an eye. It just doesnt add up, does it?

In fact, so many questions concerning KK persist that the CD tray includes a plea (from Mr. Graham!) for any information about this enigmatic crew. Alomoni 1985 may lack the provenance needed to calibrate its actual historical import, but the album remains a compelling oddity - brash, bristling, baffling, and all but inexplicable. One is left wondering what might have become of Karuna Khyal, whatever year's model Alomoni 1985 represents.
Posted by gil gershman at 00:00, 17 Jan 2000