KILLED in CARS

Three from Eh?

I’m especially excited to showcase some records from this awesome label with long-standing Midwest connections. Public Eyesore, founded by creative improviser and instrument designer Bryan Day, will turn 15 later this year! Public Eyesore has been a home for a wide variety of recordings, “progressive and regressive,” from artists all over the world, and they added a second line of CDR-based releases around four years ago under the Eh? imprint. In my opinion, they’re a particularly important label to follow if you’re interested in free improv and EAI music, but they also release music from a wide range of other disciplines, giving voice to the feral edges of pop, rock, jazz, and classical musics.

Full disclosure: PE released an album of mine back in 2006. But I had already been a long-time fan of the label, having released some of my favorite records from artists like Blue Collar (Nate Wooley/Steve Swell/Tatsuya Nakatani), Jesse Krakow, Mike Pride, Amy Denio, and many more. PE is a label that will consistently surprise you—one never knows what kind of auditory surprises might be awaiting you when you put on a random release of theirs. Recently I’ve covered a couple of their new albums from Philip Gayle and Ydestroyde, and here’s another batch of compelling recent releases. All three of these are officially under the “Eh?” imprint, shipped as CDRs in paper sleeves with poly jackets—not the most fancy packaging, but it gets this music into the world, which is the most important thing. There were similarly spartan releases earlier in the “proper” PE catalog, but nowadays those have gotten fancy packaging—I’ll be covering a couple of those releases in the near future as well (awesome job on the Anderson/Pepper/Tamura/Petit release!). I’m especially excited about the upcoming Normal Love full-length being co-released by Weasel Walter’s ugEXPLODE, and the Cactus Truck album sounds promising, too…

KBD(uo) - Any Port in a Storm

This release features the “principal agents” behind the KBD Sonic Cooperative, with Michael Kimaid on percussion and electronics, and Gabe Beam on guitar and electronics. This is the second Eh? release from these folks, minus Ryan Dohm who also appeared on the earlier “Four Plus One” album. This time around, we get six more untitled tracks of EAI, very cleanly recorded in a very “controlled” sounding, intimate room. The music is produced with percussion (including a lot of bowed cymbals/gongs), guitar (which mostly sounds like “tabletop guitar” with effects), and an arsenal of electronics.

The music evolves slowly in these pieces, usually letting ideas overlap one another for a long time. The first two tracks focus on long tones and sustained atmospheres, and the third piece starts to introduce contrasting ideas, made mostly of short, pointillistic bursts. Polyrhythms of sorts are featured in the fourth piece, with oscillations against softly-repeated drums that come and go amidst subtle guitar manipulations. Like their previous release, the final track is a live performance around 25 minutes in length: while the album mostly works with gentle, carefully unfolding textures, things can get much louder and more intense in live performance, briefly building up to a wall of sound around the six minute mark. But that’s an exception, and most of the live set stays well below fortissimo as well, thoughtfully blending a variety of axillary percussion tools, cymbals, gongs, and occasional undercurrents of sizzling electronic drones.

Hag - Moist Areas

Like KBD, Hag’s name comes from the last names of the musicians involved: in this case, Brad Henkel on trumpet, Sean Ali on bass, and David Grollman on snare drum. This Brooklyn trio plays a fine brand of meditative free improv, working with layers of texture rather than any kind of trad jazz vocabulary. Henkel’s trumpet work sometimes reminds me of Nate Wooley’s catalog of otherworldly sounds, and David Grollman’s snare drum work similarly deconstructs his instrument of choice—I don’t think there’s a moment on the album where I would’ve pinpointed what I’m hearing as coming from a snare. Instead he works with scraping, rubbing, and (I’m pretty sure) blowing directly on the drum head, as there are moments where it sounds like there are two horns playing. Sean Ali’s bass playing is the closest to convention on the album, with occasional cascades of chromatically ascending or descending lines and even brief passages of bowed work, but he too works to draw extended sounds from his bass.

My favorite track is also the longest, “Moist Again,” placed in the center of the album. It shows off how well the group listens to one another, each member getting moments where they lead the ensemble, coming to the front of the mix and moving the group into new variations in texture. It also features an especially wide dynamic range, contrasting not just loud and quiet sections in terms of volume but also with variations in density at both ends of the volume spectrum. The title track, which closes the album, also features some of the louder passages on the record, as well as some trumpet lines played with considerable crunch in the instrument’s lower range, sounding surprisingly like a woodwind instrument instead of brass. 

Psychotic Quartet - Spherelon

My favorite of this batch of Eh? releases, Psychotic Quartet is a Philly-based group that brings together a number of really exciting musicians from one of my favorite music scenes in a free improvisation context. Trombonist Dan Blacksberg also plays in Archer Spade with guitarist Nick Milleovi (whose own recent contribution to an Eh? release will be covered soon), bassist Evan Lipson plays in one of my favorite bands, Normal Love (and was probably the only person who could successfully follow Jesse Krakow in Dynamite Club), and violinist Kat Hernandez (who recently relocated to Sweden) specializes in microtonal and alternate tuning systems, a recent obsession of mine. They’re joined by NYC drummer Michael Evans for five rounds of complex improvisation referencing a wide range of musical traditions.

Microtonal doesn’t necessarily equate with “out of tune,” of course. While it can mean touching quarter tones or making waves of weird noise, it also points to playing music that can be even more “in tune” than is possible within equal temperament. I was excited to note that all three melodic instruments working on this album have the potential to play outside of the constraints of ET with little effort, and I found myself re-listening to this album many times with my attention directed at subtle adjustments in pitch happening organically as a simple side effect of listening carefully to one another. And the group keeps things interesting with moments of duo and trio playing, too. The music breathes with the kind of control many groups can only get through composition, but this is what you can achieve when you put four virtuosos who all have their own compositional chops together: cooperation truly equals instant composition.

This is much more note-oriented than the other two releases covered here, which more closely follows my own musical obsessions. Though it is a very “free” affair, there are allusions to various musical genres, especially jazz and even bits of swing violin, that can give listeners moments of stylistic context which slide around in interesting ways that frequently reminded me of very early Anthony Braxton ensemble playing. And that’s a high compliment—parts of this sound like a kind of extension of Braxton’s BYG Actual 6 album from ‘69, one of my favorite records, and that’s a style that just didn’t get enough love for my ears. While sections of this music can be very “serious,” there is also a great sense of humor, humility, and fun running throughout the record. You can tell the musicians are having a great time playing together, and they’ve been kind enough to invite us to listen in. I’m looking forward to the next invitation.

—Scott Scholz

Extra Life - Dream Seeds

Lately I’ve been really impressed with young Brooklyn label Northern Spy’s releases. Home to Neptune, whose newest album I recently reviewed here, they first came to my attention for their involvement with the recent Zs album “33,” and they’re starting to release a number of “Zs family” projects such as last fall’s Hubble Drums and an upcoming full-length from Diamond Terrifier. So I was pleased to see them handling “Dream Seeds,” the latest LP from Extra Life, currently a main project of Zs co-founder Charlie Looker.

It’s my hope that some of these longish reviews can transcend the smarmier consumer-culture exigencies of “record reviews,” and I suspect the subject matter involved here raises those odds. You see, I find it difficult to think of Extra Life as a “band.” I find myself drawn to describing their music in sacerdotal, rather than musical, terms. There are extraordinary riches to explore in this music from intellectual and aesthetic perspectives, but at its best moments, the music consumes you from within, transcending language: a powerful experience, but a perplexing state from which to write a review!

Before we explore Dream Seeds, I want to draw your attention to two earlier Charlie Looker compositions that have been paradigm-shifting for me. The first is “Nobody Wants to Be Had,” from the 2007 Zs release, “Arms,” and the second is “I Don’t See It That Way” from the debut Extra Life full-length, “Secular Works.” In hindsight, I hear “Nobody Wants” as the conceptual beginning of Extra Life, and “I Don’t” seems to be its companion. At first, they seem to be musical antipodes: “Nobody Wants” is sharp and pointillistic, expanding on the idea of recitativo secco, while “I Don’t” is rich with melismatic passages and the lyricism of early music. But as they both rail against the conditions of modern life in their lyrics (conspicuous consumption, homogenized culture, shallow relationships and the like), they perfectly avoid the obvious cliches of turning into abrasive metal screaming sessions, leaving much more unique—and powerful—impressions instead. I still find it difficult to articulate my feelings and thoughts about this music, but as luck would have it, I think Looker did a good job describing the breadth and depth of his own work in a review he wrote of Little Women:

“Like all of the music which I find profoundly revealing, the music of Little Women embraces and consolidates vibes which are normally considered in opposition. The band renders these vibes non-dual, non-opposing, returning to the original place where they are one to begin with. This is the basis of magick in both the East and West, from the Tao to the Hermetic and alchemical traditions.”

So it is with Extra Life as well. This music has plenty of value in terms of entertainment and aesthetics, but for me it especially shines as a catalyst for heavy contemplation, a series of musical sigils that open difficult doors and embody their hidden contents.

Onto Dream Seeds proper. The third full-length effort from Extra Life, Dream Seeds finds the band working in a trio configuration continued from last year’s Ripped Heart EP: Tony Gedrich (bass) and Travis Laplante (synth, sax) are gone, Caley Monahon-Ward has moved over to guitar from violin, and Charlie Looker is playing synth instead of guitar, with a focus on covering bass duties. The other major difference is the compositional approach, which is collaborative this time instead of Looker writing everything. The singular Extra Life sound remains—I think that spinning a minute of any of these songs would be enough to know what band you’re hearing—but the project continues to be refined toward generally more traditional song forms.

I must admit that I miss Looker’s baritone guitar playing. His angular, tense riffage on earlier Extra Life records, blended with delicate arpeggios, was totally unique. But his left hand covers similar riffs on Dream Seeds with a frequently metallic-tinged bass sound. Guitar parts have generally taken a more supportive role, with Monahon-Ward filling in spaces with chord work and Lynchian atmospheric flourishes, though there are times when the synth and guitar parts interact rhythmically to create riffs, such as the verse playing on “First Song.”

There is some truly beautiful songwriting on display in Dream Seeds. No stranger to evocative melodies on previous albums with songs like “I’ll Burn” and “Black Hoodie,” “First Song” is the newest gorgeous and mostly gentle offering, and the violin/piano arrangements in the last half of “Little One” are breathtaking. But my favorite moments continue to include a lot of muscular, more rhythmically active writing: “Discipline for Edwin” repeatedly builds to an explosive chorus, “Righteous Seed” is a propulsive, high energy workout, and there are some crazy, disturbing moments in the center of the album closer, “Ten Year Teardrop,” which build to almost impossibly beautiful melodic passages at the record’s end.

The last two tracks are exceptions to the move toward pop songforms—and maybe “exception” isn’t the best word, since they occupy half of the album’s playing time. “Blinded Beast” is a plodding dirge that builds slowly, eventually adding some very interesting countermelodies and twisting riffs, like a kind of avant-prog Swans. It would be a great album closer by itself, but “Ten Year Teardrop” takes the band into an even more expansive drama. Like the Beast, the first half of the piece is a slow dirge, but without percussion. The center of the piece is a nightmarish collage of reversed sounds, metallic textures and dissonant synth tones, gated reverbs, and intense singing, followed by a brief spoken soliloquy. Once the drums enter the piece, it rises to a wonderful, redemptive end as mentioned above.

Nick Podgurski’s drum work with Extra Life deserves a special mention. It’s difficult to stand out in a band with a songwriter/leader so distinct as Charlie Looker, but Podgurski’s creative approach to drums is a major component of the unique sound of Extra Life. He rarely plays anything approaching a generic pop or rock drum beat, and he lays out a lot of time. But his parts are critical to building tension in all of the right moments in this music, and when he settles into part playing, he emphasizes all of the interesting interactions between melodic and harmonic parts instead of pushing a particular beat. We’re supposed to be big boys and girls—we can find the “one” all by ourselves.

In addition to guitar and other instrumental duties, Monahon-Ward did an exquisite job recording Dream Seeds. This music covers such a vast range of feels, from intimate to anthemic, that it can be difficult to capture on record, but everything is very clear. In particular, the vocals seem to be mixed a little higher and recorded with a little more detail than previous Extra Life albums to my ears, and it’s a lot easier to make out the lyrics.

Speaking of lyrics, I don’t want to attempt a full exposition of the lyrical concepts behind this album, but there is more of an album-length concept behind these songs than previous Extra Life LPs. There are moments of black humor and sometimes quite disturbing imagery, this time focused largely on issues of childhood and dreams. Mostly presented from the perspective of adulthood, simultaneously coveting and fearing the innocence and depth of emotional experience possible in the young (before social conditioning dulls our senses), we re-experience these acute highs and lows as they’re born and buried in our dreams. This doesn’t form a linear narrative, as it flows through the wild terrain of dream logic, but I get vibes of various confrontations with the Jungian “shadow,” terrifying as they occur but offering the potential of powerful transcendence. Many choose to ignore or retreat from stuff this heavy, but Looker doesn’t back down. He’s already done so much of the Work for us that you can simply buy the album and watch the battle from a safe distance. Or you can consider these lyrics and this music to be a fragment of the map into your own unexplored territory—what will you find if you go further into yourself? More light, more darkness, more light.

—Scott Scholz

Philip Gayle - Babanço Total

If I were grading recent submissions on a curve for weirdness, Philip Gayle’s “Babanço Total” would set the top of my curve. This is a record that immediately demanded my attention and cut its way to the front of a long review queue with its uncompromising and sometimes uncomfortable soundworld, gently described as a “one-time exploration of the voice and body soundscape” in its press release.

The first track, “sleep rain,” got me thinking that I was listening to an album of layered avant-garde vocals, in the spirit of albums like Mike Patton’s “Adult Themes for Voice” or Maja Ratkje’s “Voice,” or Jaap Blonk’s work. Overall, that is indeed a good starting point for “Babanço Total,” and I suspect that if you like those records, you’ll want to track down a copy of this album. Most tracks are built of many, many layers of overdubbed voices producing an impressive variety of textures and rhythms. But by the third track, “esa peko peko pah,” I was considering how “body soundscape” presumably refers to sounds originating from more than voices, which is articulated slightly more explicitly in the album’s subtitle on the back cover: “Improvised bodily functions, etc.”

Gentler readers, how to say it?—you might hear some eructation, emesis, lower-body peristaltic themes and variations. I don’t want to make too much of it, as “sounds from the bathroom” are a small percentage of the overall recording, but there are 3 or 4 tracks on which burp-ish, fart-ish, or puke-ish sounds may come to your attention. If you’re inclined to be irritated or upset by that sort of thing, there’s your fair warning. I can deal with it in the context of this music, though I must admit that my less mature side is quite amused by a mental image of this album being partially recorded at SugarHill Studios in Houston, the self-proclaimed “Abbey Road of the South.” I’ll bet these were surprising sessions for the engineers there!

Philip Gayle’s previous solo efforts have concentrated on layers of mostly stringed instruments overdubbed in what amounts to a kind of free-improv solitaire, focusing on textural and timbral aspects of sound design. I went back to his 2005 “The Mommy Row” album in search of context for “Babanço Total.” It’s a great record that alternates between sections of long-tone, mostly bowed drones punctuated with Asian-sounding percussion, and fast skittering acoustic strings playing lines that remind me of early Eugene Chadbourne. Some tracks like “Cow People” use a lot of liquid pouring/bubbling sounds that form a great timbral bridge between the two records. Both records are dense with overdubs, which remain fairly independent from one another rhythmically, proving that free improvisation can happen via overdubs instead of ensembles.

That’s not to say this music is created quickly or carelessly: in the case of “Babanço Total,” recording started in 2000 and wasn’t completed until 2008. The tracks flow freely within themselves, but there is a clear sense of prior deliberation toward framing out the boundaries and approaches unique to each piece. And postproduction plays a role in many pieces, like the tremolo-like rhythmic voice clusters undulating beneath most of “feral basil pesto,” with quick fade-up articulations before each iteration, or sped-up speech patterns comprising much of “falling off brain like i told myselves,” which pleasantly remind me of Renaldo & the Loaf. Even the potentially juvenile burping sounds tend to be used in unexpectedly “mature” ways, like those in “naked brunch” that essentially become long drones oscillating beneath scrapes, breaths, and almost horn-like quick sounds whose origin I can’t quite identify. “agnes unknown” uses long belchy sounds, too, but they’re more foreground than background on that track. Especially effective for me was the album’s closer, “pajama turtles,” which features long quasi-microtonal chorale overdubs on shifting vowel sounds, all supporting a frenetic sped-up sounding solo munchkin freakout.  I really liked “feral basil pesto,” too, which for me evokes some kind of Muppets-meet-zombies aural opera.

The packaging for this disc deserves a mention, too: Houston artist and musician John Cramer’s work is featured in color on the front cover, and four more panels of his drawings are found inside. All depict creatures made of heads fused together in various ways, an eerily perfect visual analogue to the music found inside.

As mentioned earlier, this record is a one-time exploration for Gayle, whose plans for the immediate future are focusing on a guitar-based record. He also plays guitar and mandolin for more conventional acts, including a recent tour on guitar with singer/songwriter Ember Schrag. But he certainly brings a set of interesting ideas to the table with “Babanço Total,” and considering how few weirdovocal albums are released, let’s hope he returns to the form as time and inspiration allow.

—Scott Scholz

Sometimes I really miss the glory days of the Kansai scene in the 90s, especially the early to midperiod Boredoms records that had a great “Sesame Street on PCP” vibe that sat perfectly with my youthful need for music that could simultaneously amuse and terrorize. Those days are mostly gone, with cut & paste montage/collage approaches abandoned in favor of psych/tribal long-form work. The newer stuff is enjoyable in different ways, but I still crave the less-controlled energy release potential in the short disjointed freakouts on albums like Pop Tatari or the Ruins/Omoide Hatoba collab album from ‘94.

Enter Ydestroyde, whose work has been floating around Japan for the last decade but rarely heard in the US. With the release of Synzosizer on Public Eyesore, we now have a stateside taste of this fascinating stylistic bridge between the scattered/deconstructive japanoise approch of yore and newer slow-build psychedelic impulses.

This iteration of Ydestroyde is mostly a solo effort by founding member Synzou, who sings and programs, though most tracks also feature guitar contributions from Shintaro Kinoshita. The music isn’t as cut-up as some of the earlier Osaka noiserock referenced above, but the vocals often take me back to that vibe with screams perfectly placed in rhythmically exciting moments on tracks like “Hissatsu,” or the simple repetitions of words or short phrases found throughout the record. Musically there is a punk influence, and the riffs are allowed to extend over full compositions, creating grooves rather than obliterating them. I hear a Misfits vibe at times, or something along the lines of the best riffage on old Mad Capsule Markets albums. And the drum programming and synth sounds frequently point to breakcore influences.

But ultimately I hear this as a sort of amped up electropsychedelic release, though it attains this atmosphere without resorting to the standard psych tropes of reverbs and delays. When Killed in Cars head honcho Paul was guesting on the Other Music program a couple of months ago, we talked about the nature of contemporary psych bands, and he pointed out how a generous application of reverb can have a transformative effect on a typical blues riff, practically transubtantiating a blues/rock track into an outer space psych experience. Generally I agree—there are lots of bands creating an “outer space” vibe that way. 

Ydestroyde is different. This music makes it to orbit with relatively dry ambient spaces. But we start our journey in space, asserting “THIS IS SPACE” repeatedly in the first few minutes, and Ydestroyde sustains the excitement of a rocket ride throughout the album. The exquisite programming, sample editing, and synth playing create a compelling, expansive atmosphere, leaving room for guitar riffs to lumber across alien landscapes while the dry, spoken/yelled vocals hit listeners head-on. Interestingly, the first s/t Ydestroyde effort did rely partly on a reverb + lo-fi production to drive its point home, and I don’t care for it nearly as much. The general musical approach here is similar, but it sounds like this album was produced with a lot more studio time and clearer goals. 

It succeeds. The riffs are relentless, the percussion alternates between energetic drive and jarring interruption in all of the perfect places, and the vocals take me back to my first memories of hearing Japanese rock approaches in the early 90s, the beginning of a long strange love affair with music that can follow its muse on its own terms. THIS IS SPACE!

Travis Laplante - Heart Protector

Another solo tenor saxophone record review so quickly after Bertrand Denzler’s “Tenor”…hey, why are you backing away from me?

Seriously, though, folks, Travis Laplante’s first solo release, “Heart Protector,” was just released a month ago, but it’s definitely among my favorite albums of 2011, and I can easily see it hanging with the small pile of records I find myself returning to repeatedly over time. Laplante is a great player, but this music isn’t about technique or combining genres or contributing to the advancement of jazz or experimental music in some clever way—this is soul and spirit racing into one another.

I’ve been trying to write about this record for the last two weeks, but I find myself settling into a mostly wordless meditative state within the first few phrases of the opening piece, which is also the title track. It’s a multiphonics-based composition played with a warm, inviting tone, gentle articulations into each chord, and the intimacy of Laponte’s breathing faithfully captured in the anticipations before each note.  It really does feel like a “heart protector.” Subsequent tracks aren’t as calm as the opening number, but all of them seem determined to place their listeners deep within sacred spaces.

The story of the making of this record found on Laplante’s BandCamp page is a starting point for understanding the transcendent qualities of this music: ill with severe vertigo, he ultimately found his way to an acupuncturist who started him on a path toward both his own health and incorporating healing practices into his music. Since then, he has been practicing Quigong, meditating, and generally letting his energy flow as freely and widely as possible. Based on “Heart Protector” and the recent recorded efforts of his band Little Women*, his approach is working wonderfully.

“Five Points,” the second composition, focuses on various trilling, tremolando, and pedal point procedures, each emphasizing a vibratory center. In a few passages that avoid the trilling action, rhythmic shifts between alternate fingerings create some phasing oscillations instead. For most of the last four sections of the album, the music deftly outlines the continuum of the electromagnetic spectrum: vibration, oscillation, frequency, pure energy.

“The Great Mother” opens side B with plaintive trumpet-like tones before hypnotizing its listeners with multiphonic chord-drones. These aren’t so melodically uplifting as those of the title track, but they’re very trance-inducing. The overtones shift around in ghostly fashion as the fundamental pitches move in mostly chromatic fashion. In terms of vibrational energy, the relatively short physical distances between half-steps embody much more emotional potential between one another than larger leaps of fourths and fifths: the larger intervals relate to one another through simple ratios and live together most of the time as harmonic overtone companions, while half-step movements vibrate in monumental and dramatic opposition.

Repeated notes in the first half of “She Heals as She Harms” play a similar oscillatory role to the trills in “Five Points.” This is probably the technical centerpiece of the album, full of dexterous runs whose flow is informed in a pointillistic fashion by the quickly-tongued pitch reiterations. Its last half is a somewhat free-form emotional release of high pitches, squeals, and trills, ending on more half-step pushing and pulling. The final composition, “The Tear Dam,” is the most traditionally-played piece on the album, and as its title suggests, it seems to hold back from the instinctual emotional release so natural to the rest of the record. It builds in a dynamic swell on its primary five-note motif toward the end, hinting at another emotional flood—but this time, the Tear Dam holds.

I really love the recording quality of this album, too. At times the music is harsh, and the sound quality picks up a slight amount of high-end distortion, but that’s what it sounds like standing right in front of someone playing like this. These hair-raising moments are captured while also picking up Laponte’s breathing, and you can really hear the sound of the room, which I’m envisioning as a medium-sized space in an attic or garage, mostly devoid of objects. To my ears, it sounds like the kind of place where musicians tell their deepest secrets to themselves and their closest friends, and music so full of introspection and healing as this often sounds its best in these sacred spots, which themselves come alive over time with the repeated emotional and vibrational outpouring of their occupants.

Highly, highly recommended.

*Speaking of Little Women—there was a short post about their most recent album, “Throat,” on KiC around a year ago. It referred to the band as “in the vein of Naked City,” and as a fellow who has listened to Naked City and Little Women albums well beyond recommended daily allowances, I would make a significant distinction between Zorn’s 80s projects and the newer NYC bands of the 00s and 10s like Little Women and Zs. Zorn was essentially a montage composer for Naked City and the 80s “file card compositions,” interested in juxtaposing styles toward the creation of cinematically evocative (or sometimes simply amusing) aural spaces. I’ve always gotten a much more direct emotional punch from the music of Little Women. Influences and genres may peek through, but the music operates at a much higher temperature where genre distinctions are mostly converted into pure energy. I love both approaches, but they’re very different to my ears. Little Women’s 2010 release “Teeth,” by the way, has already enjoyed a short tenure among my shortlist of favorite records. It can be a harsh record when you first approach it, but deep within it becomes pure, sustained euphoria. If you haven’t heard it, I would recommend it as a perfect companion to “Heart Protector.”

Bertrand Denzler - Tenor

Solo instrumental records can be difficult to live with, but they’re often worth the effort. At their best, they give us windows into the deep, lifelong relationships many performers develop with their chosen instrument over years of multi-hour practice sessions, listening, experimenting, playing with ensembles of all kinds. They can share intimacies simply impossible through performances in group settings, private experiences that many musicians have in the walls of their practice rooms and studios that even their closest musical collaborators might never hear.

And I must admit that I’m especially partial to solo sax albums. Though my “years of shedding” experiences have all been with guitars and the voice, I often feel like I was meant to play the saxophone. I love the “normal” voice of saxes, especially altos and tenors. I love the huge range in timbre that is possible, the ease of wicked vibrato, the many kinds of scale and arpeggio runs that lend themselves to nimble sheets of notes, the clarity of articulation possible, and on and on. And it’s a great instrument for extended techniques: growl tones, slap tongues, multiphonics, alternate fingerings, altissimo, reed biting—I love it all. Anthony Braxton’s “For Alto” is an all-time favorite album of mine, and I’ve been delighted to know the solo work of many others: Zorn, Abe, Lacy, Parker, Butcher, and so on. So I was delighted to receive Bertrand Denzler’s “Tenor” for review. I was not familiar with Denzler’s work before this disc, but I’ll definitely be looking for more.

“Tenor” is made of three long tracks that were recorded on one day (and it sounds like they’re probably all part of one long improvisation or composition broken into three sections for tracking convenience). Presumably this is a studio recording, with close micing in a small space. There are no effects used here, and even the tracking room gives Denzler no reverbs or delays to play with or against. It’s all Tenor, all of the time.

Denzler’s playing is pure patience. This is a delicate record, in effect a drone/ambient affair, and every note and extended technique is carefully executed to keep the focus on sounds produced rather than the person producing them. I don’t know if this is improvisation, but it sounds very composed. There are only a few notes used on the whole record, no vibrato, no shredding Coltrane licks, and because of this I think its appeal extends beyond fans of “saxophone music.” In fact, long passages of the album sound almost electronic in their careful realization.

“Filters” opens the record on a long Bb (concert Ab) that is continually teased throughout the course of its 17+ minutes. As the title implies, Denzler manipulates the pitch by adjusting his oral cavity, through alternate fingerings, and through multiphonics, creating a series of rhythmic and melodic interjections out of his fundamental note. If you’re not familiar with these kinds of sounds, imagine solo Tuvan throat singing, making melodies out of overtones while the root continues to sound, and you’re getting somewhere near this kind of effect. To that basic sonic approach, the alternate fingerings add quick pitch/tone adjustments that also have a rhythmic component, and some of the multiphonics evoke louder, more abrasive sounds, especially in that last third of the track. While dynamics stay within a fairly consistent range in the early part of the track, there are some louder moments in the last section as well, especially in the 12-14 minute range, where multiphonics almost sound like bowed guitar feedback at times. Many of the rhythm/filter/overtone motifs repeat and oscillate throughout the piece, creating a very composed feel. Denzler does stop to breathe, reattacking his horn again and again, but this doesn’t detract from the drone music vibe for me—if anything it heightens the tension through repetition.

Earlier minutes of “Signals” continue to work with some of the same materials used in “Filters,” but a few additional pitches are introduced. Occasionally tonguing effects are used to stop or flutter the pitches, sometimes while they’re also being manipulated through multiphonics. A few very high pitches appear around the 10 minute mark (the “signals?”) which reappear a few more times throughout the piece.

Like “Filters,” “Airtube” is a fairly literal description of its music—this piece works with breathing and sucking sounds, sometimes with different keys depressed to change the size/resonance of the instrument, slaptongues that violently and percussively pop through the horn, overblows, etc. This piece moves away from the drone/ambient implications of the first two tracks toward a music steeped in almost industrial sounding rhythms. It also uses the widest dynamic range of the album, with incredibly loud moments and others that are almost inaudible. There are some particularly stunning moments that seem to be produced by following hard slaptongues with extended breathing sounds—I’ve never heard anything quite like it.

Obviously this kind of music isn’t for everyone, but for readers of KiC who like EAI and drone music while shuddering at the potential “macho jazz” implications of a solo sax album, this album will be a pleasant surprise.

Photos from Taku Unami’s set at the Stone last night for AMPLIFY 2011. The linked flickr is Yuko Zama’s, including all of her photos from AMPLIFY. I can’t wait to make it up there on the 16th and 17th for this.

*Paul* - I’ve added the reblog below (via), because I think it adds good commentary:

It’s been an interesting past couple years in EAI. If you follow the I Hate Music message board, innumerable discussions have taken place about the future of this area of music. The continued antics of Mattin, and Diego Chamy, have certainly been sketchy, often misplaced pointers toward some fundamental questions about what exactly it is we are doing here. Perhaps there is a feeling we have asked all the necessary questions about the music, and now we must question the situation in which it takes place, and the perceived hierarchies, within.

In a way this has been going on for a long time, or maybe it’s always going on, but certain statements seem to move the whole thing along, light-years beyond the rest of the conversation. Enter Motubachi. Probably the most successful representation to date, of a work that goes beyond the flat stream of sound within location. It disorients the listener with a blurring of lines between recording, performance, theater, and composition, and leaves one to only guess at what actually has taken place.

This was the first document of a new approach for Taku. One that (whether it’s his intent, or not) seems to address a lot of these concerns, but far from the heavy handed stance-taking of some of his contemporaries, it does so with Taku’s singular sense of timing, and impish wit.

This new approach was taken a step further in last night’s set. Without the presence of a grounding improvisational force, such as Krebs, Taku was left to assemble (in some ways literally) his own field of experience, and transform the Stone into an activated space that included both the building, and the audience.

The set began out of nowhere. Everyone knew by this point that he was going to be doing the “box thing”, but it was unclear, exactly how this would go down, how much setup was needed, etc. So with the house lights up, and the crowd still murmuring, he began, like a sculptor in his own workshop to build up the space. He’d place a box, look around, fumble in a bag, adjust furniture placement, tie pieces together with twine, stand measuring tapes on the floor, and even banter a bit with the audience (gesturing to the oscillating fan… “Too much wind?”). It was initially unclear if this was a start or setup, though I think everyone knew that this was it deep down, and so with the air slowly being sucked out of the room, a quietude took over, both domestic, and ritualistic.

Taku seemed to be up for digging himself into a hole, and then letting the dirt fall in on him over and over, taking us all deeper into what we didn’t know, one precarious cardboard construction after another. He would build, and build, and it would shift ominously, or shake, and near topple, as he stomped around. At one point he leaned a tall box construction against an already precarious oscillating fan, atop two chairs. Surely a recipe for disaster, when one looked around at how it was all tied to objects throughout the room in twine and tape. And so it shifted and shuffled about, slipping slowly minute by minute until it all fell to the floor in a thunderous crash, leaving only, the strangely Unami-esque slow rhythmic ticking of the oscillating fan, still dead set on doing it’s work. This was one of several toppling crescendoes, punctuated here and there by less thunderous failures, a knocked over tape measure, or a lone collapsing box.

All the while Taku proceeded as if he was legitimately not trying to cause a ruckus. Each blunder was met with him rushing to try and catch something, or cringing as some piece of debris fell near an audience member.

After several failed attempts, at last he had his construction, it was all standing. The fan was shifting clip light shine against a framework of boxes, casting shadows of twine and tape measures. Finally, he turned down the house lights, and we all stared at what he’d built. It was beautiful shape, light, and sound play, all on it’s own. Taku even seemed to be arrested by it as he stood taking it in for what seemed minutes on end. And then it was time for the climax. Earlier he had handed myself and another audience member the ends of a string, and he instructed us at the count down of three, to pull the strings as hard as possible. So we did, and brought the whole thing down in a series of crashes to the floor, the only remaining sound the fan again, grinding away for dear life, the lights, splayed out, casting fragments of illumination from the pile. But then another sound became apparent, Taku, in the back of the room, in the dark, tapping out a rhythm on a pair of differently tuned calves, in contrast to the steady beat of the fan. This sudden conscious aesthetic move, seemed to wrap the whole of what went before in it’s simple musicality. We hung there, enjoying that moment for a minute or so, and then the lights were brought back up, and without a word Taku began to pick up, a bit. After a bit of confusion, hushed questions, and looking about from the audience, he ended the set with the word, gracias. Perfect.

The whole play was a delight. It was humorous, but not cloying. It was artful, but not pretentious. It was unmusical, and it was wondrous music all the same. It seemed to cast a spell the way the best performances do, and yet, everyone seemed easy with themselves, comfortable. You could laugh out loud at will, or shift in your seat without care. We were all in a way, a part of the performance. Not forced, not antagonized, or scrutinized, but invited, into an intimate space where something both pleasurable and challenging to the senses was happening. All of the concerns, and arguments about where and what we are, and why we go on, all seemed to be given an answer in a way, but not in some overbearing sermon, but like a friend, inviting us to play.