ASSUMED POSSIBILITIES

Still point
Rossbin RS 007

AKIYAMA/NAKAMURA/SUGIMOTO/WASTELL
Foldings
Confront 12

Silence and the overtones associated with near silence are the guiding factors of these CDs, which both include British cellist Mark Wastell. With textural space on show and protracted electro-acoustic wheezes characterizing many of the abstractions here, neither of the two chamber-style quartets could be confused with conventional jazz, rock or New music ensembles. Neither sounds like the other either. All of which proves that there are as many variations of near silence as there are types of noise.

Part of the growing coterie of younger performers wedded to understated near-inaudibility as a style, the London-based cellist is featured here in one very familiar and another literally alien setting. Assumed Possibilities (the band) is a working group filled out by Britons Chris Burn on piano and toy piano, violinist Phil Durrant and harpist Rhodri Davies. Each of the string players has a long history with one another, having intersected in a variety of groups as well as in bands with other sonic experimenters like saxophonists John Butcher and Evan Parker and bassist Simon H. Fell.

Antithetically, FOLDINGS is a live concert recording from January 2002, which mates the cellist with three local performers at Tokyo’s Off Site gallery. Many like-minded Japanese and European musicians have improvised in this setting since no-input mixing board specialist Toshimaru Nakamura, first organized the series in 1998. Resident collaborators are customarily guitarist Taku Sugimoto, best known abroad for duets with, British tabletop guitarist Keith Rowe and Swiss computer specialist Günter Müller; and Tetuzi Akiyama on turntables and air duster, a former guitarist who concertizes with saxophonist Masahiko Okura and synthesizer manipulator Utah Kawasaki as well as Sugimoto.

To really appreciate the output on either of these discs, turn the volume knob of your playback system up, probably 25 per cent louder than usual for STILL POINT and about 40 per cent for the other disc.

During the course of the nine pieces that make up the first CD, the most identifiable sounds that emerge from the droning vibrations and textural gestures of the four are Wastell’s cello and Burns’ toy piano tinkering. On “Tyrin”, for instance, abrasive scratches on the cello’s strings and a later percussive bass line vie for sonic space with what sounds like a shrill, two-fingers-in-the-mouth whistle, a galactic screech from the violin and an unidentifiable buzzing tone.

Sharing the characteristics of a xylophone on the Wastell-composed “Related Activity”, the toy piano creates protracted glissandos and tinny keystrokes that to produce volume must have demanded more than usual finger pressure from Burns. Allied to that sound are pedal point cadenzas from the harp and intermittent cello plucks. When all the chamber ensemble strings are plinking out notes in unmatched and untempered patterns, the pianist produces a quasi-authentic clog dance on the sides and top of his veritable plaything.

All instruments here are acoustic, but somehow among the low frequency vibrations of the keyboard and the ghostly overtones from manipulated strings, the four also manage to come up with sounds that in other contexts would arise from electric instruments or at least sampling. Minimalist followers can identify when a bow takes a few swipes at a cello strings, or when a fingernail scratches taunt nylon. But surely no musician was stretching cellophane across the studio until it tore or ringing a tiny bell as some sonics suggest. Definitely too, the airplane motor drone you hear on one track, as well as the short wave radio static, police siren and reverberation of a subway train entering a station don’t result from the presence of any of these objects.

FOLDINGS, recorded almost exactly a year later, can be heard as Ur-minimalism. In fact, as the sounds on the two long improvisations move in -- and more frequently out -- of aural focus, the Tokyo quartet starts to make Assumed Possibilities sound like Grand Funk Railroad or Motley Crue. Even with a volume boost much of the first track is almost out of earshot. There’s the crackle and drone of static, indeterminate cricket-like buzzes and the whining scrapes of what’s probably Akiyama’s air duster -- at least the performance space must be lint free. Less than isochronal flick of guitar strings and fuzzy cello strokes are also sometimes heard.

With suggestions that musical movement is taking place just outside of hearing range, this sound field isn’t expanded until roughly midway through almost 29½ minutes of the second track. Wheezes and rumbles arising from Akiyama naked turntables and Nakamura’s no-imput mixing board start to move into human hearing range as does the extreme pitches produced by Wastell’s cello. Soon, what could be the sound of crickets chirping in a field is superceded by what’s likely the cellist deliberately hitting his contact mic. At last, a whippoorwill cry is succeeded by the sounds of some guitar flat-picking, a buzzing amplifier being turned on and off, and the feel of the bow bouncing against stopped strings. Textures created by a mechanized assembly line are prominent for a moment, as are intermittent string plucks and a complete chord from one of the string players. Then almost complete silence.

It may be redundant to say so, but a strong commitment to the principles of space and texture, plus an appreciation of the silences associated with microtonalism and minimalism should be brought to these discs, especially the Tokyo session. They certainly put the lie to those who characterize all abstract improvisations as noisy and ear splitting.

Whether the two groups succeed in producing microscopic sounds isn’t up for discussion here. These CDs should be heard -- if you can do so without straining you ears, that is. But the question still remains if this type of monochromic structure can’t be mixed with other sound sources to produce experimental music that offers more sonic colors along with the same intellectual rigor.

-- Ken Waxman

Track Listing: Still: 1. Kett 2. Tronig 3. Related Activity 4. Still Point 5. Starwyte 6. Needle 7. Tyrin 8. Ut 9. Riwe

Personnel: Still: Chris Burn (piano, toy piano); Phil Durrant (violin), Mark Wastell (cello); Rhodri Davies (harp)

Track Listing: Foldings: 1. First Fold 2. Second Fold

Personnel: Foldings: Taku Sugimoto (acoustic guitar, preparations); Mark Wastell (cello, preparations, contact mic, amplifier); Tetuzi Akiyama (turntables and air duster); Toshimaru Nakamura (no imput mixing board)

March 17, 2003

OKURA/KAWASAKI/AKIYAMA

Bject
Hibari Music 02

CHAINWORKS
Red Room
Sachimay sca 9358

Novelty instruments have been around as long as the existence of improvised music. Red McKenzie was able to produce some memorable sounds from comb and tissue paper in the 1920s, around the time Adrian Rollini was taking solos on the goofus and the hot fountain pen. Yusef Lateef recorded an LP featuring a percussion section of balloons and 7-Up bottles in the 1950s, while Steve Beresford’s collection of toys and Eugene Chadbourne’s electric rake have been showcased more recently.

Consequently we shouldn’t be surprised that some of the most distinctive sounds on BJECT come from the rolling reverberations of alto saxophonist Masahiko Okura’s bass tube, and Tetuzi Akiyama, who is nominally a guitarist, plugging in his air duster. Considering that the former has a background in techno-noise and loud jazz-rock and that the latter knows avant-garde improvised classical music and free improv noise, the history of novelty instruments might have escaped their notice. But their anything-goes approach, amplified by the textures of Utah Kawasaki’s analog synthesizer, appropriately typify one method of performing free music with an electronic base. Akiyama, whose improv history goes back to 1987 and who works with guitarist Taku Sugimoto and Kawasaki in another trio, exhibits his skills with turntables and electronics here as well.

Serendipitously, a month after these two tracks were recorded at Tokyo’s Off Site concert space in April 2000, three American musicians of totally different backgrounds were exhibiting their take on electronics in a live session at Baltimore’s Red Room. Chainworks, their band, is built around the keyboard excursions of New York’s Dan DeChellis, who has adapted his extended techniques to sounds that bleed through the barriers that separate so-called jazz and so-called classical music. A collaborator with the keyboardist in the latter’s Focus Quintet, percussionist Matt Hannafin is interested in non-metrical rhythmic structure. Moving in the fields of both free improv and traditional Iranian music, he plays the Persian tombak drum as well as selected and unselected cymbals and the standard drum kit. Electronics manipulator Brian Moran is part of the intermedia trio Nneng, creates live audio and video improvisations with video technicians, and has also played with other DeChellis associates such as drummer Jeff Arnal and guitarist Chris Forsyth.

Although it’s meaningful to itemize the many dissimilarities between the trios -- and to praise both for originality of conception and intonation -- it’s illuminating to consider what tone images are now so much a part of the musical gestalt that the two geographically distant bands could easily work the same venue without disquiet.

Beginning in a much quieter space than Chainworks inhabits, Okura, Kawasaki and Akiyama initially build their soundfield out of repetitious electronic rushes and synthesizer drones. Okaura’s reverberating blasts of rolling spit from his bass tube introduce a small concerto of ear-splitting squalls. This is amplified by the abrasive scrape of metal against metal; what could be a sidewalk drill splitting concrete, but is probably a stylus tracking a turntable groove; and the hushed near-silence experienced when you “hear” the sea by holding a sea shell to your ear.

“Big Comic”, an even more extended track at more than 33½ minutes, contains more robotic tones. Using what appears to be the unvarying buzz of a turbo engine as an leitmotif, other sounds surface then submerge from the swirling soup of the improvisation. Besides the now expected shriek of metal abrasion you hear what could be the sound of a dentist’s drill -- the air duster perhaps? -- sped-up turntable rumble, a sharp object percussively hitting another -- the stylus and turntable again? -- a shrilling whistle, chipmunk scratches and dog howls, some unexpected mixed choir harmony -- straight off the radio dial -- and an attempt at tuning this static-attached radio. As the drone moves from high-pitched to subterranean and from foreground to background, all sound seems to vanish down an aural drain, leaving a very brief tuba-like blast, silence, and then another blast for a coda.

Mesmerizing in its concept of pure sound, the trio may take some of its inspiration from a variety of sources. There are Sugimoto barely audible projects with Japanese and Occidental musicians and Kawasaki’s duo with Ami Yoshida who wants her creations to be perceived as sound itself rather than as vocalization. Of course, the ideas of British band AMM, which has pursued the idea of drone plus non-idiomatic improvising for more than 30 years, hovers over the set.

AMM’s influence makes itself felt with Chainworks as well. DeChellis, especially, during his period in Boston, was closely involved with many performers whose minimalist approach drew on that band, as well as the ideas of local iconoclasts such as pianist Ran Blake and reedist Joe Maneri.

On the three untitled tracks here, that together add up to just under 38 minutes, the AMM suggestion is more pronounced than it is in Tokyo, since this trio shares two instruments -- percussion and keyboard -- with the Brits. However DeChellis, who has his own unique style, has a different approach than AMM’s John Tilbury. Tilbury’s motif involves bursts of arpeggios then silence, DeChellis is much more likely to advance single note octave patterns, treble and bass congruence with the adjacent overtones. Almost at the disc’s end after theme snatches have appeared, in fact, there’s even the barest hint of piano boogie woogie, buried underneath the crunch of distant cymbals.

Additionally, Hannafin’s percussion accents do take in techniques from jazz, non-Western and contemporary classical sources. When DeChellis unrolls a melody on what sounds like an electric harpsichord, he exercises his hi-hat and ride cymbals. Elsewhere, to cut through the sound of Morton’s bed of buzzing electronic impulses, it appears as if Hannafin uses mallets on his attached cymbals and rolls smaller, unattached ones on the ground, benefiting form the echoing vibrations. Other times faced with the warbles and twists of the mixing board-produced intermittent drones, he scrapes skins and metal as if he was using a Zydeco rubboard. The unique tombak rhythm probably make an appearance as well.

On the second and longest track, the three mix it up with even more unusual sounds. Turning from straightforward arpeggios, the keyboardist adds unexpected runs that recall some of Sun Ra’s outer-space excursions. Morton’s door-creaking, rumbles and smacks surround all this, resolving themselves as asymmetrical buzzes. But who is it producing what sounds like the clink and clank of manual typewriter keys?

Eventually DeChellis gets animated enough to sound out a short theme from the electric piano, that is dependent on trebly, bended notes so higher-pitched that it almost appears as if he’s using a toy piano keyboard. In response Hannafin brings various noise makers into play as drumsticks, brushes and mallets are manipulated and moved about on top of drum skins, until the sound dissolves.

Putting it all together, it appears that novelty noise makers and electronics can coexist to produce some memorable sounds, just as long as real instruments aren’t neglected. The two trios here have categorically proven that with these CDs.

-- Ken Waxman

Track Listing: Bject: 1. Business Jump 2. Big Comic

Personnel: Bject: Masahiko Okura (alto saxophone and bass tube); Utah Kawasaki (analog synthesizer); Tetuzi Akiyama (turntables, radio, air duster and electronics)

Track Listing: Red Room: 1. 10:46 2. 16:38 3. 10:32

Personnel: Red Room: Dan DeChellis (piano, keyboards); Brian Moran (electronics); Matt Hannafin (percussion)

February 10, 2003