Disquiet

Amsterdam-based musician Robert van Heumen visited San Francisco last month. He documented the trip with an overview of his stay and, all the better, nine MP3 files. On three, recorded at the Lab and at Mills College, he plays with Roddy Schrock (whose website, fundamentallysound.org, mentioned Heumen’s travelog, found here). Others feature Laetitia Sonami and Michel Waisvisz, together and solo. The highlight is a piece by Joel Ryan, in his own kind of collaboration, in that he’s mixing a recording of saxophonist Evan Parker. There are two versions, one recorded at the Lab, and one at Mills. Now, Parker’s a saxophonist who essentially mixes himself as he plays, virtually taking his instrument apart as he wrings sound of it by any means necessary. Midway through his eight-minute Lab dissection of Parker, Ryan appears to lay some of Parker’s music bare, a cycle of circular breathing in which a melody seems to peep its head out of the intense rhythmic patterning. Otherwise, there is even more in Ryan’s vision of Parker than Parker himself could accomplish on his lonesome. Snippets of sound bound against each other, echoes take loft like skittish birds, tones are warped and stretched like taffy, and harmonies develop as if in a pressure cooker. Check out RvH’s travelog and files here. (It being a small world, RvH has contributed to Aaron Ximm’s One-Minute Vacation series, the subject of several Disquiet Downstream entries, including yesterday’s; his was on Valentine’s Day of this year. Visit Ximm’s project at at quietamerican.org/vacation.html.)

By Marc Weidenbaum