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If you’ve never been to London’s premier experimental music venue Cafe Oto, then you really must: their programme for 2011 is already looking staggeringly good. But rather than going just once, try taking in two consecutive nights: in 28 hours between 8pm one day and midnight the next, such a huge amount of ground can be covered. Take these two, for instance. There is no specific connection between the two events of this post’s title, other than that they did indeed occur on consecutive days: they demonstrated a wide range of music, and in particular the full spectrum between the idiotic and the truly savant. Thursday night saw Sicilian electro-acoustic improviser Valerio Tricoli and Australian prepared pianist Anthony Pateras following the performance art of Tim Goldie, whilst Friday had the duo of Neil Campbell and Michael Flower taking to the stage after the sculpted psych-noise of London’s Morgen Und Nite. Read the rest of this post over at The Liminal.
In advance of their forthcoming show at Cafe Oto, I asked Entr’acte curator, typographer, graphic designer and vacuum packer Allon Kaye to put together a mix for The Liminal. The mix includes all those who are playing: Olivia Block, Adam Sonderberg, Lee Gamble, John Wall, and Keith Moliné, and includes a number of unreleased tracks from Entr’acte and elsewhere. Anyone interested in taking a trip into some fascinating sonic landscapes should check this one out.
The solo work of cellist Julia Kent deals in different ways with concepts of borders and of spaces which are neither one thing nor the other. Her first solo record, Delay, was based on that most modern (and Eno-esque) of limbos, the airport. Having crossed the globe in a number of different ensembles, most famously as a member of Antony and the Johnsons, but also with a range of more leftfield acts such as Rasputina, Burnt Sugar, Angels Of Light and Stars Of The Lid, she found she was spending rather a lot of time trapped in those places, and elected to use them to her advantage. She made recordings in airports, and used them as the foundation for Delay, naming the resulting tracks after the airports in which they were recorded. The title of her second album for Important suggests she has found the way out, but only to another place betwixt and between: the place where the grey of the city meets the green of the countryside. And exactly how much of an escape that turns out to be is open to question. Read more over at The Liminal.
Since setting out as a leader in his own right, Matthew Shipp has mapped out an area of land on the border between jazz and electronic music via his custodianship of Thirsty Ear’s Blue Series. Collaborations with artists like El-P, DJ Spooky, Anti-Pop Consortium and Scanner have led him out into some distinctively experimental terrain, which makes his recent return to more conventional formats all the more surprising. His new CD, The Art Of The Improviser showcases his solo piano flights on one disc, and his piano trio excursions on the other. But I guess if you are going to stop and take stock at some point, the point at which you turn fifty might be as good a time as any. And, especially if you have as much to take stock of as Matthew Shipp. Despite this seeming scaling back of his ambitions, at the Vortex tonight, backed with the other two members of his trio, he proved he could still pack a lot of impressive detail, technique, and unconventionality into two very dense sets. Read the rest of this review over at The Liminal.
The description of Ryan Francesconi as an American guitarist, for so many reasons, just doesn’t do him justice. Indeed, his voracious musical appetite will have made itself known to many via his arrangement work on Joanna Newsom’s three course blowout Have One On Me, a rich stew of folk, pop, country, rock, gospel, classical and even more exotic ingredients. Even without that level of ornamentation, and reduced just to a six string guitar, he is capable of covering more ground than most. For crucially, Francesconi is a guitarist whose main influences aren’t other guitarists; untangle his strings and you’ll find they are joined to the Bulgarian tambur, the Greek bouzouki, the West African kora or, indeed, the harp. Read the rest of this post over at The Liminal.
There seems to be a quest in much of Stephan Mathieu’s work to disrupt the linear nature of time, to capture a moment and hold it forever, to reach back to the past and drag it through to the present day, and even to reverse the process of obsolescence. His is a very slow and quiet rage against the dying of the light. I saw a performance of his Virginals project (a version of which is to be released later this year) in Berlin last year, which saw him bringing not just the room – the crumbling old Sophiensaele theatre – back to life, but also rejuvenating that renaissance Virginals keyboard and a Philicorda organ, making them sing in ways their inventors couldn’t possibly have dreamed of, via versions of pieces by the likes of Charlemagne Palestine and Alvin Lucier. His much-lauded Radioland CD from 2008 grabbed threads of shortwave radio as they were vanishing into the ether, and span them into huge tapestries of sound, preserving them for posterity in these new forms. But it isn’t just about the fourth dimension, as the titles of these two new CDs for the 12k and Line labels, A Static Place and Remain respectively, suggest. Mathieu is stepping outside the relentlessly flowing stream and into new eternities where whole new rules of time and space apply. Read the rest of this review over at The Liminal.
In the eighteen months since Danielle Baquet-Long passed away, there have already been upwards of a dozen albums worth of material released which were recorded by her and her husband Will Long before her untimely death. Especially given the quiet, introspective nature of all this music, there comes a point where you have to wonder just how much more there is to say, or how many ways there are of saying it; even the title of this latest album may almost be verging on self-parody. But not for the first time, I’m confounded; once again I have found myself buying a Celer record, listening to it, and being stopped in my tracks by the powerful glare from its reflections. This new album, Vestiges Of An Inherent Melancholy, is a captivating journey – not just to a particular country, and to a particular time, but also to a very particular, and very personal, state of mind. Read the rest of this review over at The Liminal.
“The winter will make you a little more nutty than usual. This mix is all over the place. Try to party steady to this. This is a mix of stuff of things past and present. Some stuff I have always loved, some I’ve just discovered. Some is really stupid, some is supposedly “serious.” What’s the difference between stupid and serious, anyway??”
Download the mix that John Elliott from Emeralds put together for me over at The Liminal.
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