You are currently browsing the monthly archive for October 2011.
Featuring reviews by me of new records by Cory Allen, Enrico Rava, Mike Weis, The Remote Viewers and Yves De Mey. Over here.
Birmingham may be the home of metal, but metal kids have to grow up some day. Now in its ninth year, there is a sense that the city’s Supersonic festival is maturing. While it remains based in Birmingham’s Custard Factory, this year it spread out further into this industrial sprawl, making more sensible use of the myriad of dark spaces beneath the railway arches. This attention to the design of the individual venues extended to the audio and the visual aspects of the festival: the new Boxxed and the reworked Space 2 areas in particular had some of the most advanced sound systems I’ve ever heard in a festival setting, while all stages now had space for artist-specific projections. These are timely developments, especially in light of Supersonic’s continuing interest in more experimental art forms, enabling an increasing range of musicians to wed their vision to that of the festival organisers Capsule. Read the rest of this review at The Liminal.
As a follow-up to part one of our feature on three live drummer-plus-one duo performances, I’ve picked out ten recorded examples of the format. This is by no means a definite or representative list (I should maybe have plugged that 21 year gap), so I’d welcome any other recommendations. In fact, I doubt they are even all currently in print, but I do know that the curious will be rewarded with some precision percussion, and some intense interplay. I’ve listed the duos drummer first, regardless of their billing on the sleeve, in order to, you know, give the drummer some… Read the rest of this post at The Liminal.
I typically listen to a lot of John Coltrane, but I’ve been increasingly drawn to his Interstellar Space of late, the duo with the drummer Rashied Ali. It is an oddity in his canon by virtue of its minimal instrumentation, but the result of that is that it affords the listener an opportunity to really hear the interaction and the dynamic between its two protagonists. In a duo, there really is nowhere to hide, no rest, you can’t drop out while an another formation spontaneously assembles from within a larger group, and as a result, there is a particular intensity, you can really hear them listening. With a duo comprising a drummer and another, there is the potential to exploit both rhythm and melody, obviously, but some skilled practitioners can blur the expected roles, the drummer using extended techniques and kits which expand the range of pitches available to them, and the other engaging them on their own turf with staccato patterns and pulses. There is also the potential for extreme dynamics, from huge bass drum kicks to the faintest of brushwork, from full-throttled rampages to more circumspect approaches. It makes the drummer-plus-one format, in the right hands, potentially one of the most exciting and varied, whether the partner be sax, piano, guitar or electronics, and the results anywhere on a spectrum between jazz and noise. Read the rest of this post over at The Liminal.
“Since you went away the days grow long…and soon I’ll hear old winter’s song”. No matter how often I’ve heard it, the switch from major to minor key in “Autumn Leaves” brings an icy chill, despite the lyrics being for the most part the sort of sentimental fluff that would float off in the slightest breeze. Suddenly, I feel that cold hand on my shoulder. The grey clouds that blow over the song are enough to cast that phrase about “old winter’s song” in a Keatsian shade, you sense a recognition of mortality, the leaving of a lover (or in Keats’s case the season’s last swallows) being linked to that most final of departures. Read the rest of this post at The Liminal.
Bridges have shaped our history for centuries. Where rivers were forded, settlements were built, and trading routes were formed, and those have remained in place to this date. Even where a bridge outlives its useful life, crumbling and derelict, we rebuild them, or supplement them with bigger, parallel crossings. Innovation is in form, far more than location (consider the example of London, where Tower Bridge has remained the most easterly crossing for over 100 years). The rivers between the worlds of field recordings, noise, jazz and electronic music have long since been forded, but there is still space for the forward thinking sonic architect to construct something in a new form. One such person is the Dutch artist Machinefabriek, who has himself straddled these divides via his burgeoning discography in recent years. Read the rest of this review over at The Liminal.
Mark Fell took to the Cafe Oto stage wearing a cap with the logo of the tractor manufacturer John Deere on it. Could there be anything more incongruous? Fell’s music is far from agricultural, being a repurposing of Detroit techno stylings, by way of the Sheffield electronic avant-garde. Come to think of it, techno in Oto is itself slightly out of place, although Fell’s is a particularly complex and challenging take on it. Intelligent Dance Music may be a Very Stupid Music Label, but Fell’s records (and those born of his partnership with Mat Steel, SND) do light up synapses that few others manage. Tonight at Oto he was joined by Ben Vida, another artist creating some experimental sonics, to complete a mind-expanding lineup. Read the rest of this review at The Liminal.
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