JON ROSE/CHRIS ABRAHAMS/CLAYTON THOMAS

Artery
The NOWnow

RODRIGUES/UEBELE/ RODRIGUES/OLIVEIRA
Contre-Plongeé [six cuts for string quartet]
Creative Sources

By Ken Waxman

August 16, 2004

Turbulence and silence, rapidity and languorousness, are the attributes that separate each of these string-driven sessions from one another. Yet the precise methodology and sophisticated experimentation of the seven musicians involved, makes it obvious that contrapuntal chamber music is a plastic enough form to be successfully adapted to pure improv.

The musicians here hail from two port cities -- Sydney, Australia and Lisbon, Portugal -- and are all trained traditionally enough to know of the regard followers of so-called classical music hold string groups, especially if they’re playing say, Beethoven or Schubert. Yet the unorthodox explorers aren’t content to have this major contribution to musical culture shoved into a sound museum.

Non-standard instrumentation helps the cause on both CDs. The Portuguese quartet is led by Ernesto Rodrigues on violin and viola, who has played with local flautist Carlos Bechegas and Italian saxist Gianni Gebbia among others, and who cites electronic music as an influence on his acoustic violin playing. The other group members, violinist Gerhard Uebele, cellist Guilherme Rodrigues and José Oliveira on acoustic guitar and inside piano, have extensive playing history with local and international improvisers

The Aussie trio is sparked by the extroverted soloing of British-Australian Jon Rose on violin and tenor violin. Another member, who variously plays organ, harpsichord and piano here, is Chris Abrahams, one-third of the country’s microtonal free music ensemble, The Necks. On bass and preparations is Clayton Thomas, who holds down the bottom on these six instant compositions. Making the group a string quartet on one long track is Clare Cooper who similarly prepares her concert harp.

When the penultimate cut of CONTRE-PLONGEE is “Cut 3” and the disc begins with “Cut 2” you figure there has been some rearrangement after the fact. However the four musicians possess such a communality of improvisational thought that no awkward fissures are apparent. What is conspicuous by its absence, though, is the sort of virtuostic clamor that longtime experimenters like Rose specialize in on the other disk. Instead, the Lisbon installation is organic, with even the extended techniques such as col legno and sul ponticello used subordinated to pointillism rather than displayed for histrionic statements. Call this a symphony of scratches.

Like most reductionist music, of course, there are many instances when particular timbres can’t be attributed to specific instruments. On “Cut 2”, for instance, wood banging resonation is heard, and at the end of “Cut 3” there’s a basso voice that could come from a tugboat whistle, though no oral instruments are cited. Similarly “Cut 4” features cymbal-like resonation from something other than percussion, and throughout the CD, a spreading mechanical glissando shimmers in the background.

All during the program, prolonged silences give way to insect-like plinks, squeals and scratches, often as the result of pizzicato as well as arco activities. Oliveira, who works frequently with Ernesto Rodrigues, may feature his guitar here, but the suspicion remains that some of the flailing flat picking and rasping come from one of the other strings or internal piano wires.

Other favorite tones include a pizzicato continuum that backs rotating bottom tones, wood rending scrapes, spiccato raps on the lower strings, intermittent plucks and single fingertip prods on a string instrument’s necks for split-second sound-making.

All of this cumulates in “Cut 6”, where solo flat picking and what sounds like paper being crumbled meets motorized cylindrical tones and the internal ruffling of piano strings. Bell-ringing touches from beneath the guitar’s bridge and high-pitched, tinkling piano notes meld polyphonically with the col legno bowed instruments until the piece concludes with silence.

As brash as the other quartet is understated, the trio of Rose, Abrahams and Thomas charges out of the gate on the nearly 19½-minute first track, “The Superior Mesenteric”. Featured are lacerating bull fiddle movements and steady arpeggios from the forte piano which turn to double, then triple time, trying to keep up with the near-demonic accelerated bowing from the violinist. After a while, Thomas swoops across his lowest-pitched strings as Abrahams attempts some -- purposely? -- campy 18th century harpsichord fills, though neither gesture retards Rose’s accelerated bowing.

At this point it appears as if the fiddler has two bows in use, one for the top of his instrument’s strings, the other for the bottom. Soon he turns right into hoedown mode, building up to a tremolo crescendo of sounded string tones alongside grating, col legno raps. As Thomas follows along, moving from arco to pizzicato and back again in an eye blink, Rose introduces clawhammer banjo-like frailing that soon threatens to become as mechanical as a dobro’s licks. Near boogie-woogie and prepared piano timbres are contributed by the pianist, but as much as he and the bassist try, keeping up with the violinist is like trying to harness a typhoon. Rose’s lines go past presto to prestissimo, past staccato to staccatissimo and past forte to fortissimo. As a climax and crescendo he redirects the layered sounds of all the strings into tasto timbres and the piece ends with Abrahams chiming, right-handed dynamic clusters.

Cooper’s harp tones added to those of the other three for “The Ascending Aorta”, is a stark contrapuntal example of the difference in string quartet conception between the Australians and the Portuguese. The harpist, who regularly plays with Thomas, creates an ostinato made up of an assembly line of strokes -- that is when she isn’t producing a steady slide from the highest register of that 27 string instrument downwards. Abrahams contributes warbling calliope-like timbres from his keyboard as Thomas inserts knitting needles, clothespins, mallets, sticks, cellophane and cardboard strips between his strings to add subterraneous resonation and percussive shuffle bowing to the mix.

Instructively, Rose’s output on this cut stays defiantly near traditional and moderato, leaving the slaps and passing tones to the others. Jus before the finale, he lets loose with a speedy ponticello line, but the aural memory that’s more prominent is of an eerie continuum of near church organ undertow plus buzzing scrapes and reverberating slaps from the 31 other strings.

As a trio the three can call up any technique and style on a moment’s notice and alter it just as quickly. That means that Abrahams creates a fantasia of semi-classical cadenzas in one place, and with the same intensity play a boppish run or exhibit what sounds like the manipulation of aluminum pie plates colliding with the internal piano strings. Similarly, Rose produces a vibration that could come from a reed instrument on one tune, Paganini-like double stop harmonics and flying staccato elsewhere, or ease out flat picking like a Bluegrass mandolinist in a third instance. Thomas can sound like a buzzing, arco string section if he wishes, and produce poised grace notes, basso tones and frenetic wood slaps with the same speed and finesse.

In other situations, Rose has played with Free Jazzers such as drummer Kevin Norton and trombonist Johannes Bauer, and Thomas with multi-instrumentalist Cooper-Moore and tubaist Joseph Daley, so the most original departure from the norm here is “The Feeding Lumbar”, which could be termed the trio’s “jazz” track.

Including walking bass, piano fills and double and triple stopping from the violin, it finds Abrahams exposing restrained dynamics and just-as-restrained chordal patterns to play a contrasting melody in opposition to Rose’s slurred and chicken-clucking fiddle lines. Thomas keeps the time steady until eventually, the piece ends with dagger-sharp tones emanating from both from both the violin and the piano.

Traditional chamber music followers probably would deny that designation to these CDs. But the committed musicians here are giving that old form new life, or is it lives?

August 16, 2004

JON ROSE

Fleisch: The Hyperstring Project 2
Saucerlike Recordings SL005

Madman Rose is at it again. The man who is to the violin as John Coltrane was to the saxophone -- or maybe Dr. Edward Teller was to the atom -- is at it again.

The British-born, sometime Amsterdam-based, Sydney, Australia-resident Jon Rose has, like Coltrane did with the saxophone, immersed himself in every facet and technique of his instrument. But like Teller, father of the H-bomb who put the atom to non-peaceful purposes, Rose also uses this great knowledge to create a musical version of a weapon of mass destruction and nearly destroy any concept we have of the four-string music maker.

The 20[!] tracks on FLEISCH offer up more of this formula. Rose treats fiddles figuratively somewhat the way American troops used to literally treat Vietnamese villages in the 1960s: he sonically destroys them to preserve the basic sound underneath.

Thus on this collection of tracks, recorded between 1997 and 2003, and running from less than one minute to almost seven, you find the violinist in all his guises. Rose, who has been involved with projects as different as fanciful, music-directed radio plays and membership in Slawterhaus, a mostly (East) German rock/jazz improv group, always seems to be able to find new areas of mischief within which to become involved.

Early on, for instance, on “The Screaming Pope”, Rose, using a live violin plus sampled piano, bass and cello improvises along with a voice. But the voice isn’t from a soundsinger like England’s Phil Minton or Holland’s Jaap Blonk however. Instead it’s the recorded-off-the-TV sound of a highly agitated and garrulous Italian mobile phone salesman named Roberto pushing his latest product until his voice is hoarse from the effort. Competing with the real-life sounds of cell phones, customer testimonials and seemingly indefatigable Roberto, Rose creates a baroque-inflected chamber music work for the 21st Century.

Another duet on “The Call” features a sampled whipolin that mirrors the voice modulations of a dog race caller at an Australian racetrack. Then there’s “Perfume”, where the violinist manipulates a 78-rpm record of a cello player with all the dexterity of a club DJ, forcing the unknown player into unexpected repetitions and contortions as the sound advances.

Don’t forget the trio of “Geigebones” tracks. They features a combination of sampled instruments, real-time violin and some artful tampering and machination with the sound sources so that they become percussive, discordant -- and perhaps just plain cracked. The results create what could be a new genre of found sounds, maybe musique fou?

Finally there’s the CD’s 10, mostly one-minute-or-so-each “Nose” variations, where MIDI pitch-shifted, boogie-woogie piano licks, rote classical pianism, rattling clawhammer banjo picking, echoes and reverberations join real-time, violin and tenor violin tones to produce a cumulative sonic miasma that pushes the limits of electro-acoustic creations. Of course being Rose-created digressions, these variations amble along at a rapid enough clip that they lack the bloated seriousness that affects many electro-acoustic projects.

Obviously this is no CD for anyone who regards the violin as a sacred object that only plays oh-so-proper music which is only consumed in a proper setting. In fact, it may frighten virtuoso string followers as well, whether their preference is Jascha Heifetz, Stéphane Grappelli or whomever else is pushing this year’s version of the classical -- or classical jazz -- repertoire. But if your idea of violin music includes deadly serious mirth makers like Billy Bang and Stuff Smith. And if you like exceptional improvisations spiked with a dollop of sarcasm, hilarity and myth making, head off prestissimo to find this disc.

-- Ken Waxman

Track Listing: 1. The Word Becomes Fleisch 2. The Screaming Pope 3. The House of Goth 4. The Call 5. Trumpet Crumpet 6. Geigebones 1 7. Geigebones 2 8. Geigebones 3 9. The Nose 10. Second Nose 11. The Broken Nose 12. The Repeating Nose 13. Mr. Nose 14. The Twitching Nose 15. The 2 part Nose 16. The Seventh Nose 17. Not the Nose 18. Nose End 19. Spare Body Parts 20. Perfume

Personnel: Jon Rose (violin, tenor violin, bowed string, one-string violin amplified bow, viola, wind-up 78 rpm record player, and interactive MIDI powered samples of piano, bass, cello, 19-string cello, whipolin, viola, cymbalon, banjo, bow plus MIDI controlled bow pressure, accelorometers, the three dimensional pedal, and foot pedal board)

September 29, 2003

JON ROSE

S-T-R-U-N-G
Sublingual SLR011

Jon Rose is the Thomas Alva Edison of the vibrating string. Just as the American inventor occupied himself with an assortment of inventions from the light bulb to the phonograph, so the British-born, Australian-affiliated violinist is concerned with the sonic possibilities of bowing, scraping, hitting, plucking or otherwise exciting these thin strands of wire or gut.

This CD is an example of that experimentation to the nth degree, because just like the assistants Edison had helping him out in his Menlo Park laboratory complex, Rose is aided in his fiendish experiments by a clutch of mostly expatriate musicians who, like him, now call Amsterdam home. Again, like Edison, who never spent too much time on any single thing, Rose & Co. is involved in 24 different procedure here, which extend from 50 seconds to three and one half minutes.

Members of the string family as common as the violin, guitar and cello, and as unique as Cor Fuhler's keyolin -- a violin played upside down by keyboard action -- Mary Oliver's Hardinger fiddle with its amplified sympathetic strings and Rose's two-stringed pedal board, are used in various ways. Chief co-conspirator Steve Heather adds drums, percussion and electronics to the mix, and most of the players use electronics and samples of another four string specialists to further complicate the program.

Most of the time you're not sure which tones result from the manipulation of a conventional instrument or a home made string or, as a matter of fact, which sounds are real and which are sampled. Looking over the names of the so-called virtual string players sampled, moreover, the suspicion exists that some, if not all, may not exist in this dimension and may actually be some of the real musicians in disguise. Certainly Rose himself has used variations of "Doctor" Rosenberg as his pseudonym on different projects and that doctor makes a sampled appearance here.

In short, this CD is fascinating, revolting, interesting, upsetting and mesmerizing at the same time. It's analogous to what would happen if vaulted, future 500-channel television universe was made up of that many experimental musical conduits and the remote control was in the hands of a hyperactive male. Imagine split second clicks among a symphony rehearsal, a techno discotheque, a folk music concert, an arena ProgRock extravaganza, a viola concerto, a technical demonstration of sonics, an elongated rehearsal, short wave communication with extraterrestrials, an instructional audio tape and feeding time at the zoo, and you may get some idea of what you can hear here. Then imagine it happening all at the same time.

Not for the faint hearted, but certainly for those who are musically adventurous, S-T-R-U-N-G can string you along for hours. Play it over and over again and you'll still find new theses and textures.

-- Ken Waxman

Track Listing: 1.String 2. Stroppy 3. Strumble 4. Staps 5. Struth 6. Stripes 7. Stroke 8. Stumpf 9. Straddle 10. Strip 11. Straw 12. Stretch 13. Strongo 14. Stromage 15. Strangle'em 16. Street 17. Stress 18. Stream 19. Strain 20. Strenuous 21. Strndlfmp 22. Straggler 23. Straight 24. Strum

Personnel: Anna McMichel (violin); Allison Isadora (violin with electronic modulation); Mary Oliver (viola, Hardinger fiddle); Jon Rose (tenor violin, 19-string cello, 2-stringed pedal bard, amplified bow, midi bow and accelerometer animated samples of strings); Alex Waterman (cello); Andy Moor (electric guitar); Cor Fuhler (keyolin, turntables with records of string music); Richard Barrett (samples of strings); Steve Heather (drums, percussion, electronics, whipolin) plus Virtual String Players: Aha May (bass); Hildegard von Knikkersdorf (harp); Wild "Bill" Pickering (banjo); Dr. Johannes Rosenberg (harpsichord)

September 24, 2001