Petra Verba/Joke Lanz

Sophie Agnel & Joke Lanz
Ella
Klanggaler GG 492

Advancing his idiosyncratic approach to turntablism Berlin-based, Swiss native Joke Lanz involves himself in fascinating duos with acoustic and electro-acoustic timbres here. On Mutants in Siberia he uses his instrument and voice to face off with Czech Petra Verba’s trumpet and electronics. Then on Ella, his partner is French pianist Sophie Agnel. Lanz, whose platter manipulation involves noise and improvisation has worked with everyone from Shelley Hirsch to the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra. Vrba is involved with groups like Prague Improvisation Orchestra, while Agnel has recoded with sound innovators such as Daunik Lazro and John Butcher.

Resolutely electronic speedy voltage protraction and contractions, merry-go-round music, flanged vinyl, deconstructed voices and platter scratching is present from the beginning of Mutants in Siberia, with portamento trumpet buzzes with half-valve squawks and brassy shakes at a minimum. With both players plugged in most of the time among the frequent extended clamor and granular synthesis encompasses pivots to human whistles, bongo-drum-like beats, peeping signals processing and field recorded voices reduced to truncated syllables or enigmatic statements, often in English.

The program is eventually completed as brassy flatulence, accordion like squeezes and human coughs give way to a brief melodic motif emphasized with a falsetto voice and a train-whistle like shrill. However earlier instances better illuminate of the duo’s close-knot cooperation. A mini- audio playlet “No Surprise” advances from a mixture of mechanized yelps and hollow echoes to when heraldic brass triplets cut through the static, preceding a vocal recitation of “a man with a megaphone says ‘come up with your hands over your head’. “Eat shit asshole” she said and was immediately gunned down”. The acoustic drama wraps up as choked trumpet smears and a flanged roar reinforce the drama.

Elsewhere isolated mostly English vocalized phases are subsumed under granular static, short wave radio-like crackles and ratcheting turntable abrasions. All of this builds up to the extended “Ferry Boat to your Brain” where beeping signal processing and moist bubbling jockey for  space with a thin nasal voice’s words cut into, or stretched past, syllables completed by trumpet mouthpiece suckling.

Ella is a more acoustic sounding session than the other, with Lanz using his vinyl cropping and turntables speeds to complement Agnel’s equally inventively improvisations, extracting high and low timbres from the keyboard and with extra timbres arising from the manipulation of the instrument’s inner strings. In essence the strategy matches either abrasive platter shakes and buzzes and outside-sourced snatches of reconstituted voices, music and discord with piano expositions that can feature delicate, almost celeste-like meditations, funereal paced patterns unrolling, speedy comping or autoharp-like string plinks and twangs. Thematic sequences, often proposed by the pianist, are usually cut off or rearranged into harsher treble clips or tolling pedal point. These dampen turntable interludes that successively can project sounds that start from a cuckoo clock cawing, mellotron cascades, plastic idiophone clunks and many variations of voice fragmentation.

Moving among keyboard clunks and stops, wooden raps and sweeping circular glissandi from Agnel to squeezes, stops and squeaks from motor buzzes and vocal and instrumental flanges from Lanz, the duo reaches a climatic finale with the prolonged “21st Century Humans”.

As a choir of recorded voices hocket and harmonize over a percussive backdrop of turntable rumbles and distant sirens, strummed inner piano strings and timed key stops, join for ascending intensity. Agnel’s swift keyboard improvisations are framed by mechanically induced aviary twitters, whooshes, fragmented crackles and woody stops as a vinyl extracted dissected soprano voice mouthing “wake up” over and over, finally  condenses the phrase into a squeaky “oh”.

Seriously aleatoric turntabalism make be too abstract for many. But by hooking up with sympathetic electro and/or acoustic partners, Lanz raises the comfort level to high appreciation.

–Ken Waxman

Track Listing: Mutants: 1. Mutants in Siberia 2. Ornette Coleman’s Elephant 3. Planet Paradeiser 4. Washing the World 5. Submarine inside your Body 6. Corner 5^th Ave & 61^st St 7. Dizzy in the Subway 8. No Surprise 9. A Rifle in his Hand 10. Ferry Boat to your Brain 11. Carrier Pigeons in Distress 12. Buster Keaton’s Pork Hat

Personnel: Mutants: Petra Verba (trumpet and electronics) and Joke Lanz (turntables and voice)

Track Listing: Ella: 1. Elevator for Alligator 2. Rehearsal for Retirement 3. The End of Handwriting 4. Wittgensteins Hand 5.  Looking Into the Valley 6. Sporadic Bursts of Sympathy 7. Her Foot in the Swamp 8. Alone with the Clock 9. Illusion of the World 10. Tulips And Chimneys 11. 21st Century Humans

Personnel: Ella: Sophie Agnel (piano) and Joke Lanz (turntables)