October 10, 2011

Festival Report:

Météo Music Festival August 23 to August 27 2011
By Ken Waxman

Météo means weather in French, and one notable aspect of this year’s Météo Music Festival which takes place in Mulhouse, France, was the weather. It’s a testament to the high quality of the creative music there that audiences throughout the five days were without exception quiet and attentive despite temperatures in non air-conditioned concert spaces that hovered around the high 90sF. More dramatically, one afternoon a sudden freak thunderstorm created an unexpected crescendo to a hushed, spatial performance, by the Greek-Welsh Cranc trio of cellist Nikos Veliotis, harpist Rhodri Davies and violinist Angharad Davies, when winds violently blew ajar the immense wooden front door of Friche DMC, a former thread factory, causing glass to shatter and fall nosily. MORE

January 18, 2011

Thomas Ankersmit

Live in Utrecht
CD Ash International 8.8

Elliott Sharp

Abstraction Distraction

D’autre cordes dac 181

Two accomplished sound explorers – a veteran New York-based American and a younger Dutch-born, Berlin resident, independently probe the timbral limits of electronically processed saxophones. Both CD’s are engrossing, with the American’s probably more so, since he’s primarily known as a guitarist.

That person is Elliott Sharp, who during the past couple of decades has evolved a individual catalogue of works touching on Blues, Jazz, Rock, Improv, Contemporary Classical and electronic music. He has played solo, in the Terraplane combo and in collaborations with players as different as guitarist Scott Fields, violist Charlotte Hug and turntablist Christian Marclay. Someone who occasionally adds reed lines to his improvisations, on the seven tracks here Sharp concentrates on tenor and soprano saxophone, modulating the woodwind output through computer-processed analog and digital synthesizers and adding drum samples from Joseph Trump, Sim Cain or Tony Lewis. MORE

October 6, 2010

Festival Météo, Mulhouse, France

August 24 to August 28
By Ken Waxman

Proving that varieties of improvised music can sound as different as the personalities of those who play it, the annual Météo festival offered a cornucopia of noteworthy sounds from the bombastic to the barely audible, solo or in groups.

Venues in this Upper Rhine French city, located 30 kilometres northwest of Basel, Switzerland, also reflected this sonic diversity. Performances take place in the hushed surroundings of a 12th Century chapel downtown, and on the city’s outskirts, a capacious night club usually used for rock shows; and, new this year, within the expanses of an abandoned 1930s’ thread manufacturing factory. MORE