CM von Hausswolff, 800 000 Seconds In Harar (Touch)

This may be the audiovisual artist Carl Michael von Hausswolff’s first solo album for Touch, but that isn’t to say he hasn’t been an integral part of their community for some time: indeed, he recorded with The Hafler Trio (in his Sons Of God collaborative guise) as far back as 1993. My own first encounter with von Hausswolff was in 2006, when he played after Fennesz and Philip Jeck as part of Touch’s 25th birthday celebrations, which shows you just how highly they rate his work. And quite rightly too: his performance that night was the one that I still remember most vividly. Wisps of cigarette smoke and pure sine waves curled into the night air, people lay on the floor with their eyes closed and let this succession of tones wash over their heads, like waves breaking on the shore. It was a vivid demonstration of just how powerful the most minimal of music can be at the hands of a skilled exponent of the form, marrying the scientific (the precise combinations of frequencies) to a blissful emotional resonance. That isn’t to say von Hausswolff has been inactive in the intervening periods, far from it in fact. In recent years he has created audiovisual installations around the world in cemeteries, ruined buildings and train sheds, documented his interest in Electronic Voice Phenomena, recordings which purport to contain messages from ghosts living within buildings or even electricity grids, and ruled over his conceptual Kingdoms of Elgaland-Vargaland, which comprise the border spaces between countries, and between the conscious and unconscious. These themes of travel, place, architecture, communication, death, and liminal space are all worked into the 2,437 seconds of 800 000 Seconds In Harar. Read the rest of this review over at The Liminal.

N.E.W. at the Vortex 14/04/11

The Japanese trumpeter Toshinoro Kondo was supposed to be at the Vortex this evening, but for understandable reasons, he couldn’t it make it. The venue offered refunds on the tickets, and some seemed to take them up on it, judging by the empty seats dotted around the place. Those people are fools. For in Kondo’s place, the superb improvising trio N.E.W. were given two sets. After his duo with Arthur Doyle at Cafe Oto, this meant I’d be seeing Steve Noble play drums for the second night in a row. That probably isn’t the first time that has happened to me. After all, Steve Noble and John Edwards (who is the E to Noble’s N in the trio’s name) are the two musicians I’ve seen in concert more than anyone else. I’d call them the country’s finest rhythm section, but that would be doing them a massive disservice – for what they do on their respective instruments is about so much more than rhythm, it is about dynamics, about feel, about listening, about texture. And, because even given that, what pairing can you point to anywhere in the world that is better? Read the rest of this post over at The Liminal.

Arthur Doyle and Steve Noble at Cafe Oto, 13/03/11

Noah Howard’s 1969 album The Black Ark begins with a bouncing bass and piano groove, before massed horns assemble loosely around a melody. It doesn’t last long, as a succession of solos lead the track “Domiabra” into increasingly free areas. However, nothing can prepare you for the extraordinary entrance of Arthur Doyle five minutes in, cutting short the trumpet solo with a devastating solo which builds on the more brutal developments made by the likes of John Coltrane, Albert Ayler and Pharoah Sanders. In the liner notes to the Bo’Weavil reissue of the LP, Oren Ambarchi describes his playing on the track as “incoherent rage…a chaotic and murderous sound”. It is a truly shocking moment. As was his entrance to the Cafe Oto stage for this rare performance, but in a very different way. I’d seen clips of him playing with Sunny Murray or Han Bennink over the last decade, and he seemed in decent nick, so the suddenness of the decline in his physical condition was quite upsetting. Now without his dreadlocks and his teeth, he looked almost unrecognisable, and worryingly frail. During a particularly violent set of solo drumming by Steve Noble, Doyle could be seen bent double at the side of the stage, bent double, coughing feebly. When it was his turn to finally play, he shuffled uneasily to his seat, and we fell quiet to hear his spoken introduction. Which was, owing to the lack of teeth, entirely indecipherable. Read the rest of this review over at The Liminal.

Matana Roberts and Seb Rochford at Cafe Oto, 7/3/11

“It is a good thing there isn’t a microphone up here,” said saxophonist Matana Roberts early on in this performance, “as if you’ve seen me before you’ll know it can be dangerous to give me a microphone”. Indeed – for Matana Roberts has a lot to say. Her live sets will be interrupted with stories, with Q&A sessions, with calls for comments, and requests for requests. But her music too feels like a continuation of this side of her personality. Solo, she is a raconteur, telling tales from her Chicago roots and her Harlem home. In a group setting there is a full and frank exchange of opinions. So in a duo, as in tonight’s set with Polar Bear drummer Seb Rochford (for a change, Roberts didn’t have the most eye-catching hairstyle on the stage), I was expecting something akin to a conversation. It didn’t always feel that way. Read the rest of this review over at The Liminal.

Tim Catlin and Machinefabriek, Patina (Low Point)

So many words associated with the process of patination have such negative connotations: the act is a tarnishing, a corrosion, a corruption. Yet in certain circumstances, the formation of a patina is welcomed, sought after, even encouraged. Just down the road from where I sit right now, there are some new houses which have been there barely a couple of years, but their roofs are a bright green, copper having been used with the clear intention that it would oxidise this quickly. Likewise, new timber structures are designed to change in appearance prematurely, to silver, or to attract moss; as well as providing additional layers of protection, or even insulation, there is an implied message that the buildings are working with, as opposed to usurping, nature. But more than anything it is the age, or the desire to set the young in the context of the aged that is prized. Indeed, inside those homes, brand new furniture will have been made from reclaimed, pre-patinised, or even, to use another word which doesn’t sound like it should be a good thing, distressed materials. Read the rest of this review over at The Liminal.

Bee Mask, Canzoni Dal Laboratorio Del Silenzio Cosmico; Fabric, A Sort Of Radiance (both Spectrum Spools)

Perhaps I’m overthinking this, but the decision to call this new Editions Mego offshoot label Spectrum Spools seems just too perfect, almost unavoidable even. Though it is going to be issuing LP-only editions, the reference takes in recordings which use tape as part of the creative process, as well as things which are actually issued on a format which continues to have such persistent relevance in certain musical scenes. The spectrum aspect, as well as the allusion to that vivid display of colour (as beloved of psychedelia as much as its more recent musical cousin, hypnagogia) is surely a reference to a continuum: a body of analogue electronic music, one which stretches back to the musique concrete (and tape-based) work of Pierre Henry and Francois Bayle at INA-GRM, taking in the Radiophonic and modular synth pioneers, the kosmische and subsequent new age movements, the Lovely Music catalogue, and leading right up towards more recent excursions into synth-pop, industrial electronics and noise (which are, of course, so often issued on tape). Read the rest of this review over at The Liminal.