Four-Way Musical Crash

Ron Anderson, Robert L. Pepper, David Tamura, Philippe Petit — Closed Encounters of the 4 Minds (Public Eyesore, 2012)

Here’s a frenetic mix of noise and rock and improv, a constant tumbling of sounds, with lots of grating (in a good way) electronics providing a basslike backdrop.

It’s musical dodgeball, a bombardment that starts early in the first track: incoming sci-fi volleys and the fast tremor of Ron Anderson’s guitar. David Tamura’s sax blazes and squeaks with high lung power.

It’s the sax and the guitars spike the energy levels (you might be familiar with Anderson’s frenetic tendencies from The Molecules or PAK) and provide a semblance of rhythm. But don’t picture metal or ferocious speed-punk. In fact, there’s a cross between wildness and musicality in here. Crazy sax or guitar scribblings in one moment, a near-pleasant melodicism (backed by the same crazed, pulsing attitude) in the next.

Even a relatively calmer track like number 5 (they’re all untitled), with its zoned-out buzzing like a synthetic sitar, has the disquiet of David Tamura’s cranky sax and some ominous guitar electronics.

The album is often like a conversation where everybody wants to be heard at once, and in many contexts, that wouldn’t be a good thing. But you have to consider the intent. This music aims to be dynamic and aggressive — they fill the page with scribbles — and I love the bustling chaos it creates. It works.

That said, some points are a bit much. I’m torn as to whether I enjoy Track 4. It’s got an alarm-blare sound that just goes and goes and goes. Some days, I can take it as part of the scenery. Other days, I’m ready to reach through the speakers and rip out somebody’s laptop battery to end the pain. The loops of saxophones and of a keyboard-like sound (as on The Who’s “Eminence Front” — it might be the electric psalterion (harp) played by Petit) can feel either nicely juxtaposed or relentlessly annoying, depending on my mood.

But on most tracks, I enjoy the musical assault, and I like the structures they’ve built with the music. The 10-minute finale (track 8) progresses through phases that could each be described as a descent into madness. One segment has the feeling of shooting down a tunnel, with a pulsing fuzz in the bass spectrum representing the walls speeding past, until it disintegrates into a crunchy, staticky sound bed for the other instruments. It finally gives way to a rhythmic guitar chop that sets up the noisy ending.

Samples:

The first moments of the album:

Track 5. Zoned-out buzzing that’s still not peaceable:

Track 4, with that alarm blare. You decide:

The “tunnel” from track 8:

Jack of All Noise (NYC Part 4/4)

Pre-show setup. I wasn’t the only one who touched the walls to see if it was real aluminum foil. (Answer: Yep.)

JACK is a new arts space in Brooklyn, an emptied-out storefront innocently tucked away in the hipster enclave of Willambsurg. Here, I got to experience an evening of aggressive noise.

The intention was a CD release show for an improvising trio called Iron Dog, but the theme was aggressive noise, with three like-minded groups playing one long improvisation each.

Mostly geared toward theater, JACK is an eclectic spot. It hosts Tuesday-night readings of French plays translated into English, for instance. And it hosts experimental music, including occasional concerts titled Aural Dystopia — big, noisy improvisation. My friend Dan clued me in about the November installment, and I made plans to go get a taste.

This was the same day as my Central Park tour, so after relocating my things to Brooklyn, where I would spend the night, I took a quick nap before heading into the subway. It wasn’t going to be a complicated trip, but it was still comforting to catch a glimpse of Jim Black — part of the night’s opening act — farther down the subway platform.  At least I’d picked the right train.

I arrived early with the intention of finding an espresso, which turned out to be a little tricky. Old Brooklyn still dominates the neighborhood; Starbucks hasn’t yet overrun the two or three blocks that I explored. I did find a hipster grocery boutique called Brooklyn Victory Garden that gladly sold me a coffee and a dinosaur cookie. You can’t turn down a dinosaur cookie.

The show started with heavy saxophone blasts from Briggan Krauss, a choppy, ragged attack like a helicopter or a half-speed machine gun. That set the tone for the trio Han Blasts Panel, consisting of Krauss (sax, guitar), Curtis Hasselbring (trombone), and Jim Black (drums), with all three adding electronics of various shapes.

We got to hear plenty of Black’s offbeat grooves, which start out tight and then unravel, as if slowing down (as I’d recently heard in his Nels Cline duo). Hasselbring sent the trombone through a variety of effects, and when he shut them off, the pure trombone sound suddenly felt bright and fresh.

Black added electronics played off of a pad, including low, floor-rattling bass tones that worked especially well when Krauss was playing electric guitar. Towards the end, Krauss was riding a one-note groove, settling himself as the rhythm section while Hasselbring soloed and Black contributed those bass notes and some electronics crackles. When Krauss broke out of the groove, Black switched immediately back to drums, and the piece exploded into a new life. Great sequence.

Next up was The Home of Easy Credit, the duo of Louise Dam Eckardt Jensen (sax, vocals) and Tom Blancarte (standup electric bass), who performed a set of sustained fury. They opened with Jensen playing smooth, mellifluous runs on sax, but Blancarte put a stop to that with a hard bass attack, using sticks and fingers to pull out loud, sticky notes, as if he were extracting teeth from the instrument.

(Jensen and Blancarte’s Web domains seem to have been replaced by spam sites, so use caution searching for them. Probably better to look them up on Facebook.)

Jensen’s demonic growls were spooky enough, but it’s a moment of overdubbed syllables, a falsetto harpies’ chorus that she built up from loops and echoes, that’s going to turn up in my nightmares.

Their set included some gorgeous cooldown segments (definitely in the minority) and some moments of mood-shifting that showed an attentive listening that’s the key to good improvisation.

Then it was Iron Dog‘s turn, performing their piece in the dark accompanied by abstract video. Sarah Bernstein played violin and recited poetry for certain passages. Stuart Popejoy played electric bass, usually so heavily distorted and pedaled-up as to become a roar of electronics. Andrew Drury at the drum kit was a treat to watch; I loved his jazz-influenced drumming, but he spent a larger amount of time in a soundmaking space, bowing his cymbals and creating other scraped noises.

Bernstein’s poems are written down, but she selects them on the fly, inserting them into the flow as one would a violent cadenza or a steady backing sound. She did this deftly, and the improvisation overall had a strong, episodic feeling, to the point that I thought it might have had a pre-arranged structure. But it was all improvised, with the group collectively steering the shifts in mood and intensity.

It wasn’t always that way, Popejoy told us after the show. It just goes to show what can happen when a band plays together for a long time, developing an instinct for one another’s moves.

The poems became a focal point, but Bernstein’s violin playing was terrific, too. (Turns out she plays in settings like Braxton ensembles.) At one point near the end, she sawed ferociously, fingers ratting up and down the neck, with the other two gradually building up until white-noise intensity. Another moment that stands out in memory is when Popejoy played with a fingerpicked guitar-like serenity, but with the bass producing a sound like shrieking steam.

As for the poems themselves, there was one about conversation being an accident, something you always wish could be undone. Another was a word collage — “didactic,” “auto,” several others — echoed back. Bernstein would repeat the words at a different tempo so that the echoed loop brought up thewords at unpredictable, incongruous moments. Simple idea, but I liked the sound of it.

The new Iron Dog album is called Interactive Album Rock, and it’s good. So, they’re on my map now, as is JACK.

Sounds from The Bran

Hopefully, when you click the video below, it will have more than “1” views.

It’s bran(…)pos, testing out a (relatively) newly acquired synthesizer.

I happened to be on Twitter right after he linked to the video, so I checked it out. I knew bran back when he was “The Bran (Another Plight of Medics) POS,” creating noise pieces from distorted samples of his screaming voice. Cool stuff.

Anyway, I happened to be the first person to view the video. Not that that matters now, but hey, I got to feel special for a few minutes. And I liked the video — with the self-run camera work, it’s like a little mini-tour of the synthesizer. Hopefully, it’ll keep you noisily entertained for a few minutes.

As for bran(…)pos’ voice work, you can check out soundcrack.net, and you can see him perform in the August 31 installment of Pamela Z’s ROOM series. That show will focus on vocal artists.

Help Moe Put Another Beautiful Noise on Disc

Moe Staiano is up on Kickstarter again, this time hoping to commit a very special performance to vinyl.

For years, he’s been building large improv/orchestral pieces for Moekestra, a varying but always large and loud ensemble. The group began more than a decade ago with the epic “Death of a Piano,” and the concept reached a pinnacle in 2010 with “End of an Error,” a piece performed in Wels, Austria, at the Music Unlimited Festival.

For a while, it looked like that might be the final Moekestra appearance, and it certainly would have been a fitting finale. (Moekestra did reconvene this year.)

Finale or not, the fact that the band got an invitation all the way from Austria made this performance a special occasion.

The Kickstarter funding would go towards a vinyl release of those recordings. So, check out the proposal, and help produce a cool musical souvenir if you’re so inclined.

(For details on Staiano’s most recent Kickstarter-funded vinyl, check out Surplus 1980.)

Day of Noise Is Done (aka Photos)

Figured I should do a blog post with that title, just to confirm that the Day of Noise did in fact complete.

Photos of mine can be seen on Flickr. A few samples are below; they all link to the Flickr versions. (More detail about the Day of Noise is in the previous posting.)

More pics can be had at the Flickr streams of KZSU DJs Fo and Decca.

Frank Rothkamm plays K5, a new work for computer electronics.

Bill Orcutt chills out before his solo guitar set.

The many pedals of Thomas DiMuzio.

David Leikam signs the Day of Noise T-Shirt.

The green room — and yes, we had one. From left: John Ingle, Matt Ingalls, Matt Davignon, and Abode (Caroline Pugh and Paul Stapeleton).

Day of Noise Has Not Yet Ended

UPDATE: I’ve now got a set of photos posted to Flickr. Other KZSUers will be posting photos there and elsewhere, I’m sure, and plenty are on Twitter (like this one). I’ll add photos to the blog somehow — either this entry or another one — in the coming days as the Day Job permits.

I’m in the Green Room for KZSU’s Day of Noise. Yes, there is a thing; we’re borrowing the Stanford Drama Department’s green room, just upstairs from the station.

Abode, the duo of Caroline Pugh and Paul Stapleton, are about to start their set; I’m watching the Ustream feed and seeing them setting up. Megabats, from Seattle, just got done performing; this is one of the few breaks during the day when we’re spinning CD music between acts. We’re managing to fill more than 90 percent of the 24 hours with live performance.

I haven’t been at the station all 24 hours, although some have (some with no sleep at all, it seems). Here’s some of what I’ve caught so far (and photos will be coming later):

* Brian B. James and crew started the day with a performance piece (as noted last night), the “score” of which was available on fliers at the station. It culminated in the performers literally preparing a meal — making sushi, specifically, with contact mics on every feasible tool and implement.

* One part I actually didn’t see: Voice of Doom playing his Machinery of Doom, at about 4:00 a.m. Doom was a KZSU DJ in the ’90s, the one who organized the first several Days of Noise, back when. Great to have him involved in this one.

* David Leikam and Joe Straub attacked a bass and a guitar with bows and random objects for a partly-toneful barrage of sounds.

* Leikam later brought his z_bug free-psych band into the studio for a good heavy set that culminated with a strong actual rhythm (oh no!) on drums. It was a well timed, soaring coda to the whole set, actually.

* Bill Orcutt, of Harry Pussy, attacked a four-stringed acoustic guitar with precision and abandon. A peg on one of the strings has been malfunctioning, so it became three-stringed guitar after a while.

* I was not able to hear much of Jessica Rylan‘s set, as I was attending to other duties around the station, but I’ll note that she has a pink mixing board.

* Frank Rothkamm played the world debut of his newest song set, titled K5, to be released later on his Flux record label. We had a fun interview as well, where he talked about his love for older technologies: vinyl records, analog synths. He’s got one of the very first (if not the first) Hewlett-Packard oscillators in his possession, it seems. And on his way out of the station, he was intent on visiting the Computer History Museum, which seemed fitting.

* Matt Ingalls and John Ingle played a terrific duo set that I heard in the car, with woodwinds playing off one another, sometimes in scribbly quick sounds, sometimes savoring the dissonant beats arising from simultaneous long tones. They got joined by Matt Davignon and Abode for a terrific second set. Paul Stapleton brought an array of insruments, including percussion; Caroline Pugh does a lot of inventive vocalizing, sometimes enhanced with props (an electric toothbrush, e.g.), sometimes in odd texts (a recitation of a recent dream). She has a lot of personality in her vocalizing; it’s not too over-the-top serious.

* Megabats turned in a couple of good electronic improvisations, the last one being heavy on tone and melody. (Again: oh no! But seriously, we don’t mind a touch of those qualities during Day of Noise.) Right now, they’re in the Green Room with a stack of CDs they brought, and DJ Adam (who led the coordination of the whole Day) and others are geeking out with them over bands and CDs. It’s pretty cool, and it’s the kind of vibe that college radio should be all about: sharing common joys and new discoveries.

Photos later, as I noted. I’ll tack some onto this post and/or put them into a separate post, and I might add annotations and links (and proofreading) to this post as well. The bands White Pee, The Lickets, and Vulcanus 68 — KZSU favorites all, especially among noise-minded students — are yet to perform tonight, and Thea Farhadian is due to be up right now. It’s been a tremendously successful Day of Noise. Big props to the staffers, especially the students, who did most of the organizing, and of course a big thank you to all the artists for coming down to perform.

Brace for Impact: KZSU Day of Noise

The Day of Noise comes to KZSU on Sunday, Feb. 12.

It’s 24 hours of noise music, experimental music, and free improv, with live performances taking up most of every hour. We will be pausing for musician introductions, interviews, etc. — but the idea will be to pack as much live performance into the time as possible. We’ve even set up an ersatz second studio for some of the performances, so we don’t have to wait for setup time.

The whole program is available at the link above. Three things to note:

First — The opening act, Brian B. James, is apparently promising to do something visually spectacular. They’re not telling me what it is. But it’s so compelling that there’s talk of putting up a screen in White Plaza on the Stanford campus just to expose passers-by to it. (Yes, this would be after midnight on a Saturday night, essentially — apparently there’s quite a bit of foot traffic at that time.)

If all goes well, you’ll be able to watch the video stream from the comfort of wherever-your-broadband-is, by watching the Ustream feed. (I don’t think that feed will have audio, though; you’ll have to get that from the usual on-air feed: kzsulive.stanford.edu.)

Second — “NegativWobblyland,” originally listed as “Wobbly Black Hair People” is the combination of Peter Conheim (of Negativland) and Wobbly. They did a few live shows together in Europe in November. Expect greatness, or at least madness. They’re due on at 2:00 p.m.

Third — It looks like I’ll be interviewing Frank Rothkamm for about 20 minutes, preparatory to his performance, which (I’m told) is designed to last 33 minutes and 33 seconds. This’ll start at noon on Sunday. Rothkamm’s work includes electronics and modern-classical piano; I’ve mentioned his Spongebob Variations before.

SF Tape Music Festival: Night 1

It’s not a 2001 homage. This is the front-stage speaker I stared at between pieces.

The title here might imply I’ll be at Nights 2 and 3, on Saturday and Sunday. I won’t. And Saturday’s concert (Jan. 21, a.k.a. tonight) will include a backwards playing of “Revolution 9” — a “song” I know well enough that it would be really, really cool to hear backwards. Insert sad face.

But I did catch Night 1 of the San Francisco Tape Music Festival, and it was pretty darned cool.

I keep emphasizing the number of audio speakers that they place around the audience at this event, but there’s a more important fact that occurred to me last night: These are really, really good speakers. I’m not an audiophile, but — they seem really good. Crisp sounds and percussive sounds are so clear, you feel like you could reach out and grab them.

As for Friday’s program itself, here are a few arbitrary highlights. (Note that every night’s program is completely different.)

Maggi Payne‘s “Glassy Metals” was a pleasure to hear on a bigger stage than my small headphones. More immersive, with precision added to the more crystalline sounds. (See “A Taste of Tape Music.”)

This is where all the magic happens.

Two John Cage pieces sounded appropriately chaotic and cut-up. Both consisted of instructions for building a sound collage using sources that are arbitrary but that come from set categories. “Williams Mix” called for six types of sounds (city sounds, country sounds, etc.). That one was fun — sounds blipped at you from all directions — but “Imaginary Landscape No. 5” was a more grand descent into madness. The San Francisco Tape Music folks put that one together themselves, using fragments of Cage’s own performances and lectures . It was a crazy mix of monologue and tiny music snippets, taking advantage of all 16 speakers around the house — and, adhering to the randomness required by the piece, it ended mid-sentence.

Jacob Felix Heule, not taken during the concert. It’s from heule.us.

Bay Area drummer Jacob Felix Heule‘s “Counterpoint” was created by overdubbing one electronics improvisation and three percussion improvs, each performed without listening to the previous takes but with conscious attention to the memory of those takes. Heule did edit the final result a bit, so the disparate pieces did fit together nicely. Each improv included lots of long silences, so you weren’t bombarded, and some of the starts and stops were aligned very nicely, a product of the editing, I’m assuming.

Thom Blum‘s “Couplings” was full of sour, grumpy sounds that I found interesting. These are supposedly paired with something more mellifluous, but I couldn’t find that element. Maybe I was distracted by the rain on the roof (which was usually drowned out but caught my ears during this piece), or maybe I was looking for the wrong thing.

Source: Karamanlis’ Bandcamp page.

“Στέρφος” (“Sterfos”), by Orestis Karamanlis, ended the program. Inspired by the sounds of his home in the Greek isles, the piece opened and closed with splashing water — delicious sounds, altered in places to sound almost like a verbal language. (Or, maybe listening to splashing for that long alters your perception of the sound, like saying a word repeatedly until it sounds funny?) There were also snippets of synthesized symphonic chords, folk music (or am I imagining that after the fact?), marketplace crowds, people talking in Greek… and loud sounds like firecrackers or gunfire. Not sure if that was also tied to life in Greece or if it was just electronics gadgetry added — the piece, composed in 2009, did use lots of modern computer-generated sounds as well. The 21-minute span, longest on the bill, was episodic; it did feel like Karamanlis was telling a story, in an abstract narrative-less sense. This piece won a 2010 Giga Hertz Award for Electronic Music.

You can hear stereo versions of the whole thing on Karamanlis’ web site (linked above) or on Bandcamp.

So, weather be damned, you should set aside time for the festival Saturday or Sunday. The new ODC Theater is cozy and sleek, and the ginger snaps at the mini-cafe are yummy.

One tip: Sit in the center. Meaning, not to the left or right, but as close to the middle as possible. The stereo balance will be much better. As for whether you should sit to the front or the back — I dunno. In many pieces, most of the sound seems to come from the front, making it a pleasant surprise when sounds blip out from the back speakers. It might be a real treat to actually sit back there. I want to try that next time.

Skatchbox Redux

T.D. Skatchit — Skatch Migration (Edgetone, 2010)

As on T.D. Skatchit & Co., an earlier album, Skatch Migration combines two skatchbox with a variety of guests, trying out different sound combinations.

It’s still sometimes incongruous, as on the first album. But skatchboxes — homemade instruments played by scraping combs, sticks, or files against various textured surfaces — make for fun headphone listening, and some of the instrumental pairings are quite innovative. If you enjoy the curled, quirky sounds of abstract electronics/noise, you’ll find a lot to like. Sounds range from determined and fast-paced scratching to slower, calmer sounds — one resembling a marble being rolled around a wooden box, for instance.

But this territory got covered pretty well with the first album. The skatchbox has such a distinctive sound, and the lack of any sustain give its varied noises an overall dryness that doesn’t ever let up. While it’s got the infinite possibilities of any instrument, I have to admit I found myself wondering whether another whole album of skatching was really called for.

I did like the album. In its defense, it reflects a good number of strategies for mixing other instruments with the skatchbox.

Some of the acoustic “musical” instruments, for example, take the foreground, at least for my ears. The skatchbox chatter became a crisp alien backdrop, supporting the lead improviser. That’s especially the case with Scott Looney’s sad piano piece, or Bruce Ackley’s not-so-traditional saxophone melody.

Other players worked at fitting in. On “Flammable Skatch,” Kyle Bruckmann, who’s good at making the oboe sound non-oboe-like, plays airy screeches that almost could have come from skatchboxes. One of Doug Carroll’s cello tracks goes for a slashing, reverb-laden sound that reflects the kinetic skatchbox mentality.

As on the first album, we get to hear that abstract electronics can be a natural skatchbox partner, through contributions by Gino Robair and especially Tim Perkis. And while the first album had Karen Stackpole’s gongs, this one has Jacob Felix Heule scraping a cymbal for a similarly deep, doomy ringing — a really interesting setting for the skatchboxes.

Vocalists appear on five of the 15 tracks. Bob Marsh’s deep voice makes a nice cartoony babble on “What Did It?”, a fun track. But Aurora Josephson — the only guest duplicated between the two albums — steals the show, first with “Tip of My Tongue,” which is full of wordplay written by Michalak, and with “Indecision Revision,” a collection of “Mm-hm” and “Huh-uh” sounds.

Tom Nunn and Dave Michalak do seem to have added to the skatchbox vocabulary. I’m out of town as I write this, without T.D. Skatchit & Co. handy for direct comparison, but Nunn and Michalak seem to be working with amplified skatchboxes more frequently on this album and they may have added some new elements that produce nearly vocal sounds, similar to the puppy-dog sounds I’d heard from a bowed instrument called the daxophone. (Each skatchbox is uniquely hand-made, so each instrument can be vastly different.)

Previous skatchbox posts:

• Skatch It Up II (album review)
• Skatch It Up

Outsound New Music Summit: July 17-23

The Outsound New Music Summit begins next weekend — Sunday, July 17 — and I thought I’d preview this annual event with a series of posts rather than one ineffective blast.

The Summit starts, as always with Touch the Gear, on Sunday, July 17. It’s a free interactive exhibit where you get to talk with musicians and see how some of these electronic noises get made. There are exotic instruments (some of them acoustic!), computer programs, and lots and lots of pedals.

That’s followed on Monday, July 18, with a free panel discussion that we’ll discuss later. (It relates to concert #3.)

What I’m going to do is concentrate on the four concerts that follow, one post per concert. As in previous years, the concerts run in themes. This time, it’s vocals, improvisation, composition, and newly invented instruments.

The whole summit takes place at the San Francisco Community Music Center, 544 Capp St. (near Mission & 20th). The concerts open with a 7:15 p.m. Q&A with artists and composers, followed by music at 8:15 p.m. Admission $12.