You are currently browsing the monthly archive for January 2011.
“En Form for Blå is another superb genre-defying suite of experimentalism from four free-thinking musicians” Read the review over at The Liminal.
Head over to The Liminal to find an interview of mine with Sam Britton and Ollie Bown, in which they talk about their work as Icarus, and their involvement with the excellent Not Applicable label and collective of musicians. They have also put together a mix of Icarus and Not Applicable tracks, including some exclusive unreleased material.
This was my first trip to the Vortex this year. It was also Steve Lehman’s. In fact, this was his first ever UK date. Given that fact, and the acclaim his work has been met with in recent years, the Dalston venue was completely sold out. It was also sold out to a noticeably different crowd than usual; the average age can’t have been much more than 30. And rightly so, for the Steve Lehman Octet’s 2009 album Travail, Transformation And Flow combines some clever jazz arrangements and classical theory with more modern elements. Influences from hip-hop and electronic music feature strongly, with the superb drummer Tyshawn Sorey providing the precise, intricate, and even funky rhythmic frameworks which kept young heads nodding in this packed venue all evening. Read all about it over at The Liminal.
“Natural events such as the collision of hail or rain with hard surfaces, or the song of cicadas in a summer field…these sonic events are made out of thousands of isolated sounds; this multitude of sounds, seen as a totality, is a new sonic event. This mass event is articulated and forms a plastic mold of time”. That quote from Xenakis was used by support act Rogers and Jones to illustrate the ambitions of their piece, a musing on the relationship between our perceptions of time and sound; however it seems more apt in the context of Oval’s recent work. Markus Popp’s O album was a veritable barrage of tiny sounds, all individually clipped and cleaved from context, scattered like rain from seeded clouds. The pristine precision of this new sound, or sounds, showed a huge progression from his previous smudged glitch; this live performance too showed further changes to how we perceive a Popp performance. Read all about it over at The Liminal.
At the very end of this record by English experimental musician John Burton, better known as Leafcutter John, there is a burst of applause. It is a reminder that Burton, for all his association with music producing software – his own Forester programme being a highly regarded Max/MSP development – is most at home in the live setting. The antithesis of the email checking laptop musician of journalistic cliche, a solo set by this most inventive of performers is as likely to see him sampling the noise of deflating balloons or playing with a slinky as jabbing at the space bar. Such are his chops in this setting that he found himself co-opted into the rather popular jazz group Polar Bear. Read the rest of this review over at The Liminal.
The final leg of my return from my Christmas break had me catching a train back to London from Leeds. The snow that had been covering the country for much of the festive period seemed to have turned into a icy, foggy suspension, hiding the Yorkshire countryside from view. It felt eerily still, particularly with headphones in; only a faint mechanical chunter told me that I was in fact travelling. My attention was caught, however, by the occasional sudden appearance of a tree through the haze, its blackness picked out against the brooding grey behind. And another, hard edges amongst soft textures. And another, crisp shapes contrasted against a diffuse background. Gradually, I found the album I was listening to on those headphones, Pearls by Cory Allen, and the outside world, were seeping into one another, it was as if the pure tones were becoming immersed in the fog, and the trees were emerging from static. The sounds adding new colour to the sights, and the sights adding fresh harmony to the sounds. Read the rest of this post at The Liminal.
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