There is a moment on NO/1, the solo debut album by Sofus Forsberg on the Denmark-based Jenka Music label, as fine as anything released this year. Well into track three, which is titled “Autotune Track,” a little buzz shuffles its way from background into the foreground. Up until that moment the track has consisted of squiggly noises and playful beats, very much like something Aphex Twin might put his name on. That little buzz is just static, additional texture, noise. It may raise the tension a little, but it’s not so much in tune or out of tune as it is apart from the tune, like something passing by, like a fleck of dust in the eye. As soon as your ear accepts it as such, though, that noise turns into a melody very much like the melody with which the tune opened; that strange little noise warps into a strange little riff, bringing to mind nothing so much as the magical anthropomorphizing utensils in Walt Disney animated films. NO/1 is rich with such detail. There’s the deep hum on “So Alone” that can feel like a scalp massage if you’re listening on a proper pair of headphones. There’s the bouncy stereoscopic play at the start of “Venice Beach,” in which reverberating tones bound from left ear to right in a delightful syncopation. Forsberg has produced 11 fine tracks, which share an attention to memorable moments but otherwise vary widely, from heavy percussive polyrhythm to spacious drone to quiet song. When he uses acoustic instruments, like the piano at the end of “Convertible Love” or what sounds like guitar at the start of “Det Ser Vi Pa,” the sounds are lightly treated — clipped or looped — in a way that blends them perfectly into his electro-acoustic palette. He recorded most of the music himself, but there are a few guests — there’s the occasional vocal by Henriette Sennenvaldt, who has Bjork’s majestic remoteness, and there’s the occasional saxophone part by Niels Bottcher, the rare untreated analog instrument in this sea of digital sounds, and just about the only thing to suggest the record was recorded on Earth.
Two Guitars, One Thick Tone
Keith Rowe and Oren Ambarchi play a mix of guitar and electronics on Flypaper (Staubgold), an exhilaratingly stark album, if such a thing is possible. Their tandem playing has the randomness of field recordings, the spaciousness of great soundscapes and the give-and-take of substantive free improvisation. Flypaper is a pan-generational affair, teaming old-school avant-guitarist Rowe (b. 1952) with a guitarist of a younger generation, Ambarchi (b. 1969), who besides a rich resume of free/noise music has experience in today’s experimental pop-electronic realm, largely as a result of his association with the Touch label (which is home to, among others, Fennesz, who has done his part to make the electric guitar at home in the modern realm of the laptop-computer studio). Over the course of four tracks, “Flypaper I” through “Flypaper IV,” Rowe and Ambarchi tread rarified territory, eking out granular layers of dread and texture, and keeping to stoic rhythms that tend toward the ritual. Rowe can be a tough guitarist to love, because the sounds he himself loves are generally abrasive, and he seems bored by playing the same thing twice. That said, he’s more than happy to play the same thing — a shuddering low tone, a buzzy rasp — for minutes at a time, and to let that thing resolve on its own accord. Only a diehard fan could begin to imagine where he lets off and where Ambarchi comes in, so intimate is their deeply sensitive sense of ensemble and their weighty patience.
Nortec Collective Sequel
The soundtrack to Frontier Life (Accretions Records), a documentary about Tijuana directed by Hans Fjellestad, is an unofficial sequel to the Nortec Collective‘s 2001 album, Tijuana Sessions, Vol. 1. The Sessions collection made many folk’s top-10 lists that year with its assortment of the city’s digital-dance acts, including Fussible, Terrestre and Hiperboreal. Frontier Life crosses the border by mixing Nortec acts with those of San Diego’s Trummerflora Collective. In many ways, it’s a better record than Tijuana Sessions: darker, deeper, never remotely frivolous. The act Panoptica, which was downright house-y on Sessions, is decisively downbeat — make that downtrodden — here, on a song titled “Aguasnegras en Dub.” To say the track is stripped down understates how much was left behind. The track is hard and slow, a heavy downbeat that leaves behind an opening trill in favor of concerted, sullen, punch-in-the-gut beats. By the end the music has splintered into a lonely echo chamber. And the Panoptica track’s length, at close to seven minutes, gives the act (a pseudonym for Roberto Mendoza) a lot of space in which to make those musical transitions.
Discar’s “Iofobia,” the album’s opening song, fulfills the desire for spaghetti-Western drama. And “Com Com,” by Las Cajas del Ritmo, brings a border-party feel to the kind of ascetic pointillism we’ve come to expect from Japanese aesthetes like Ryoji Ikeda and minimal-house stars like Plastikman. Director Fjellestad provides some beautiful ambient background music with his “Phone Damage,” a tenuously held together array of found sounds and held tones. The same could be said of “Ensemble Circuits,” a slightly more invasive bit of minimalism credited to Point Loma. Not that you can’t dance to all of Frontier Life, but even the most rhythmically straightforward tracks, like Clorofila’s “El Animal,” have a sense of purpose that keeps them from becoming lounge fodder.
Toil and Trouble
Mephista is three women improvisers on the verge: Ikue Mori on laptop, Suzi Ibarra on drums, Sylvie Courvoisier on piano. They performed on Monday, January 27, 2003, at the Contemporary Art Center in New Orleans, LA.
They’re on the verge of making a name for their group, where they’ve made names for themselves individually previously (a debut album, titled Black Narcissus, is out on Tzadik, the record label run by John Zorn). They’re on the verge of bringing fresh sounds and musicianship to the musical community that goes by the name of “free improv.” And, of particular interest to listeners with a digital orientation: they’re on the verge of fully implementing electronic equipment in what has long been a largely analog-only scene.
Those listeners will focus on Mori, because with her laptop she is the official digital emissary. She is also both the most experienced and the most quiet of Mephista’s members. Mori has been known as a musician since the mid-’70s, when she arrived in New York (from Japan), playing in the group DNA alongside guitarist Arto Lindsay; DNA’s music was documented on the No New York album, produced by Brian Eno. Both Ibarra and Courvoisier were in the single-digit age bracket when Mori was first playing in NYC. Ibarra has been playing for years with a host of free-improv musicians and with other adventurous contemporaries whose work gets filed in record stores under jazz or “new music,” when record stores know to pick up a few copies in the few place; she has played with, among others, Evan Parker, David S. Ware, William Parker, Pauline Oliveros, Eugene Chadbourne and Derek Bailey; she has also played with the brainy art-rock acts Sonic Youth and Yo La Tengo. Courvoisier, who is Swiss, has played with, among others, Fred Frith, Mark Feldman and Dave Douglas.
Often in electro-acoustic music, which involves the blending of digital and analog instrumentation, it is difficult to tell what and when the “electro” musicians are playing. This is the case with Mephista, in part because Mori favors textural elements, and in part because her two fellow musicians, Ibarra and Courvoisier, are fond of making their instruments make sounds beyond what is expected.
Ibarra has a small bag of tricks, including bells that sound like landing UFOs, and she’s as likely to stroke her drum as one might a cat as she is to pull out her brushes or padded mallets.
Courvoisier is as likely to play her piano traditionally, which is to say, seated, as she is to play it in a manner that tends to be called “prepared,” in which one messes with the piano’s intestines. When she plays seated she generally brings to mind the airiness of French impressionism (Ravel, Debussy). When she stands, she plucks the strings from deep inside the piano, or mutes them with her palm or with strips of tape. She often lays down duct tape atop the strings, which doesn’t mute them so much as near-deaden them, so when she hits the piano keys they sound like an African thumb piano, Japanese shamisen or Vietnamese dan nguyet — or like an uptight harp. After employing this technique for some time, she will pull the tape loose, unleashing a duct-tape glissando. With her long brown hair, she looks at times at risk of being sucked into the infernal, black-lacquered machine.
Mephista performed for well over an hour: two long pieces, of 20 to 25 minutes, three short ones, each less than 10 minutes in length, and a brief encore. The concert was part of the CAC’s Awake-Nu Series of Jazz & Improvised Music, which is programmed by New Orleans musician and concert promoter Rob Cambre. The three women of Mephista played with compelling concentration, emphasizing a circular, harmonious motion in which sounds produced by one musician were picked up by the next and rotated around, less like a hot potato than a nascent musical theme, tended by three parents. Musical emphathy made them gracious partners, but it was amplification that made the three women of Mephista equals. Look away from the stage for a moment, and you’d notice that Ibarra’s drum set was miked in such a way that lent emphasis to ingredients (the traps for example) that would have sounded considerably quieter in a pure, unamplified jazz setting. Likewise, Mori’s laptop held its own against the grand piano.
Throughout, Mori sat center stage with her Apple laptop, summoning up rhythms to match Ibarra’s drums or Courvoisier’s woodpecker-like flourishes, or laying down a rich textural underlay. One thing that became apparent, and helpful to inquisitive listeners: Mori’s laptop was plugged into a separate box that, due to its having a small but evident green-lit volume meter, allowed the audience to know when, exactly, she was emitting sounds. When the little box was black, she was silent, but when the green lights sparkled, she was emitting something.
Likewise, you knew when to applaud at the end of a Mephista piece because, a second or two into an extended silence, the forceful concentration on Ibarra’s face would give way to a full smile.
Related links: Susie Ibarra's website. Sylvie Courvoisier's website. Ikue Mori's website. Tzadik Records's website. Contemporary Arts Center's website.
From Russia, with Filial Love
Andrei Tarkovsky, the Russian film director, is a familiar name these days. Steven Soderbergh has remade his film Solaris and science-fiction novelist William Gibson references him in the first chapter of his new book, Pattern Recognition. (Gibson can currently be heard reading the chapter on the New York Times’ book-review site, here or here.) Artemiy Artemiev is the son of Edward Artemiev, who scored various Tarkovsky films, including Solaris. Artemiy runs a record label, Electroshock, from Moscow. In 1999, Electroshock reissued cues from various Tarkovsky soundtracks, and it has released four albums by Edward, who also contributed to several of the label’s compilation CDs.
Electroshock, now in its eighth year, has released Visions, an “homage” — according to its subtitle — by Victor Cerullo to Andrei Tarkovsky. Visions takes the form of a dozen tracks, ranging from brief efforts in full-on musique concrete to 10-minute-long swaths of synthesized ambience. Elements of classical music, including samples of work by Modest Moussorgsky (Boris Godounov) and Luigi Nono, shift in and out of focus amid blankets of long, sinuous sound and bracing real-world elements, like breaking glass and water drops. The effect is at times consternating, and at others thrilling. Overall, however, the record emphasizes expanses of like-toned source material, which reflect Tarkovsky’s reputation for painstaking pacing and metaphysical contemplation.