Mike Sopko, Bill Laswell, Tyshawn Sorey: On Common Ground

This 2020 release on Bill Laswell's M.O.D. Reloaded imprint definitely seems like a descendant of the first incarnation of Arcana, the trio that, a quarter century ago, harnessed crackling power and squalling intensity in intriguing ways with guitarist Derek Bailey and drummer Tony Williams.  Here the ever-explorative bassist and producer is joined by the titanic percussionist Tyshawn Sorey and the very creative guitarist Mike Sopko, who made a 2015 album with Laswell and another awesome drummer, Thomas Pridgen.

On the back of the package under the label logo are the words "Iconoclast Music Dialogue" and that certainly holds true with his uncompromising and bracing quintet of pieces, which begin with ambient soundscapes and, mostly, evolve into powerful and bracing explorations of far left-field power trio dynamics.

  Sopko is heavily featured here and his trebly power chords, often angular, knotty and skittish, are highly expressive in terms of his approaches to structure, manipulation of strings and broader effects.  As with all of his group efforts, Laswell largely holds the rhythm in a consistent way that allows for Sopko to employ a full-range of performance techniques, though he gets center stage for much of "Parascience."  The amazing and very versatile Sorey utilizes the full resources of his drum kit, from heavy fills, thundering rolls, complex polyrhythms, crashing and slashing cymbal work good old bashing and thrashing and dub-like textures.

With his "collision music" ethos of bringing together players from diverse backgrounds with little or no advance preparation, Laswell's approach means these pieces aren't so much songs as acoustical canvasses on which these musical masters apply their media, varying one from the other, sometimes with aggression and little structure, but often with precision and careful consideration.  What also stands out is that it can easily be discerned that the trio listens to each other, following where one leads, not playing over each other and almost always working seamlessly toward resolution.  And, when they don't, it doesn't much matter because exploration and improvisation allow for some level of ambiguity and uncertainty.

On Common Ground is another of Laswell's trio projects that can, at times, confound, but also be highly rewarding in hearing these excellent performers work together, seemingly with little or no composing, to push each other toward what are often the outer limits of musical structures.  With Laswell seriously ill and largely unable to perform, one hopes that he'll be able to recover and reward us with more music as exciting and gripping as this outstanding record.

Christian Wolff: For Ruth Crawford

This 1994 release on the Swiss label HatHut presents four works from 1968 to 1993 by the composer whose work was large built, as stated in the liners by Art Lange, on the fact that his "particular interest was in creating circumstances in which the performers would need to react spontaneously—with either precise details or those chosen from variable possibilities—to events occurring within unpredictable conditions." 

This could mean notation that had different forms or the use of graphs, images or spoken instructions "to create such indeterminate conditions of musical activity."  That word in the quote evokes the landmark 1959 John Cage/David Tudor recording, Indeterminacy and Cagean principles relating to chance operations and the choice made available to the performers.  

For Brown, however, it got to the point where his 1968 work, "Edges" was developed for "any number of players, any number of instruments" and no instructions as to harmony, pitch, rhythm, tempo or time.  Rather, players were given 25 symbols, the words "singing" and "slow" and markings of "ff" and "ppp" along with the number "3" randomly placed on a black page.  So, the performers on piano, trombone and viola decided to have four separate types of movements in 20 minutes.  The effect, Lange writes, is that "the sounds are in a constant state of . . . becoming" and "completely dependent upon the commitment of the performers.

1970's "Snowdrop" was written for harpsichord and perhaps other instruments and with notes placed on staves without bars and indications space, with numbers, "between the phrased sequences," emphasizing the importance of space and silence.  The piano, violin and trombone are overdubbed and "they are free to distribute the material at their discretion.

The more recent pieces of "Ruth" (1991) and "Peggy" (1993) are for Ruth Crawford, stepmother of folk master Pete Seeger and an experimental composer who later worked on transcriptions of folk music with Seeger's father Charles, and her daughter Peggy, also a folk singer.  "Ruth" has standard notation, with opportunities for players on piano and trombone to work with microtones, timbre and other elements at their choosing.  Drumming on the piano and whistling are also included.  With "Peggy," overdubbed trombones also perform with mostly a notated score, with some melodic material taken from the namesake's pieces.

Interspersed in Lange's text are quotes from Wolff, such as "I'm trying to see how little I can indicate [to players] and yet come up with a piece that's clearly itself, one that still has a life of its own," or his idea that "we had to liberate ourselves from the direct and preemptory consequence of intention and effect," or "my music is often just material" but that a key to performance was "how the individuals relate to each other as they play."  Perhaps most important are the statements that "all music is propaganda music" and if "you still haven't the foggiest idea what my music sounds like; you have to hear it or play it to find out."  For this untutored listener, the main idea is to go where the performers take you and to enjoy the journey, not worrying about the map.

Luciano Berio: Orchestra Works

The music of Luciano Berio is a rollercoaster ride of tonal color, striking contrasts among instruments and exploration of the sound possibilities of solo performers, small groups and orchestras.  Berio was also interested in reprocessing his works in varied contexts, as is the case with the first two pieces of this remarkable recording, issued by the Col Legno label from Vienna.

A previous post here was on his astounding Sequenzas I-XIV, which dynamically expounded on solo instruments of various kinds and, here, Chemins I from 1965 and Chemins IIb from 1970 take those sequences for harp and viola and place them within an orchestral context.  The result is a depth and richness to the pieces, spectacular as they previously were in isolation, that reinvents the works in notable ways, especially as the playing of these typically "softer" instruments interacts with the range of those around them.

The expansive Concerto for Two Pianos and Orchestra, the juxtaposition of the keyboards and their relation to each other and the orchestral instruments.  Berio once wrote that the traditional concerto was passé when he wrote this work in 1972 and 1973 because he felt that the relations between the orchestra and soloists were totally changed from the days of Baroque, Classical and Romantic composition.  He noted that this piece was one in which "the soloist develops mobile, diversified, and very unstable relationships between themselves and with the soloists of the orchestra, creating chamber ensembles."  While there are major contrasts in these interactions, which is exciting, if also disconcerting, the composer continued that "behind all these differences lies a unifying harmonic process," with the keyboards beginning alone "almost like a map consulted before starting a journey."

The final piece, Formazioni, is from the middle 1980s and the title is crystal clear, as Berio experimented with orchestral formations in arranging instrumental clusters and exploring, as one analysis stated, "relationships within the traditional families of instruments and the roles they are given to play," so that these are "defined and allotted in a new manner."  The unfamiliar and unexpected become an exercise in resolution, for the performers and for the listener, and, as an amateur, this blogger can only really go on the feelings generated and they are of intrigue and the position of being unsettled, but ultimately invigorating, especially as Berio mines both space, the quietude of some passages and then jarring densities and great intensity.

These feelings are represented in the notes by Ferdinand Schmatz, an Austrian experimental poet and essayist, who seems to write in a free associative prose poetry for these first three pieces and a more structured and far more concise way with the last.  Impressionistic throughout, Schmatz asks questions as well as offers his reactions.  It is interesting to read notes that don't inform but share reactions and this listener could certainly relate to much of it.

Fred Frith: Guitar Solos

The last thing anyone should expect in listening to this remarkable and fascinating compilation are "guitar solos" in any popular sense.  Fred Frith has spent decades exploring the sonic range and textures of the instrument using fingers, picks and a great many other devices and tools, so that a "prepared guitar" is commonly utilized, not to mention sounds made by his breath and feet.

Moreover, improvisation is core to these eighteen pieces, the first eight of which were recorded in 1974 over four days with remainder recorded in 1976, 1978 and 1988 and the compilation made in 1991 by the Swiss label Rec Rec Genossenschaft.  Beyond this, it helped this listener to dispense with the idea that there are songs, though some titles like "Glass c/w Steel," "Out of Their Heads (On Locoweed)," "Alienated Industrial Seagulls," and "Insomnia," are evocative what is heard in the pieces.

This is also not background music and dedicated attention, either through headphones or the volume turned up is most cases, is the best way to approach these challenging works.  Though there is some harshness, including the "Alienated Industrial Seagulls" and its intense string-stretching and other elements, much of this could be heard as ambient.

The goal is not the representation of traditional technique in terms of riffs, the rapid recitation of notes in soloing and so on, but, it seems, the exploration of tone, color and the evocation of environment.  In this, Guitar Solos is a decided success, especially if one allows for the music to envelope the listener as an engrossing atmospheric experience.

Ohm+: The Early Gurus of Electronic Music (Special Edition)

While the Ellipsis Arts label was best known for its "new age" and "world music" releases during its 1990s heyday, it did issue, in 2005, an interesting and notable triple-disc, with a bonus DVD, anthology, Ohm: The Early Gurus of Electronic Music.  Bad puns aside, this is an impressive collection spanning pre-1980s performances mainly from the so-called "classical" world, though there are contributions from some composers outside of that generalized genre.

There is quite an array of composers represented here, from well-known figures like John Cage, Terry Riley, Iannis Xenakis, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Steve Reich, La Monte Young, Milton Babbitt, Edgard Varese, Olivier Messiaen to lesser-known, but important, pioneers like Pauline Oliveros, Alvin Lucier, the MEV collective, Morton Subotnick, Pierre Schaeffer, Luc Ferrari, and those outside "classical" and academic circles like Holger Czukay, Kalus Schulze, and Brian Eno.  Even the inclusion of a 1999 version of Reich's "Pendulum Music," in which suspended microphones are swung in pendulum movements to generate sound, by noise-rock legends Sonic Youth is something of a bridge between "serious music" and the pop-rock world.

Obviously, music like this is going to have a polarizing effect on most people, a great many of whom would find this unlistenable noise.  There is, however, a range of material with some pieces moving more towards some form of accessibility than others.  For example, the haunting excerpt from Tchaikovsky's "Valse Sentimentale" pairs piano with the strange and wonderful sounds of the theremin, as played by its greatest exponent, Clara Rockmore.

Messiaen's "Orasion" is also other-worldly, with its "ondes martenot,"a keyboard that provides pitch changes through a ribbon and a ring, and which is also linked to traditional music.  Babbitt's "Philomel" blends the human voice with the electronics in an appealing way.  Oliveros's stunning "Bye Bye Butterfly" skillfully wends excerpts from "Madama Butterfly" into her improvised electronic stew.

Subotnick's "Silver Apples of the Moon" had the distinction of being the first commissioned work by a major label, Nonesuch in this case, for an electronic composition.  Riley's looped piece "Poppy Nogood" [really, "Poppy Nogood and the Phantom Band"] is an amazing work using soprano saxophone, inspired by the great John Coltrane, and organ to develop a time-lag effect with a patch cord.

Czukay's mesmerizing "Boat-Woman Song" has medieval choral singing with the over-dubbed samples of simple and haunting folk singing to give it a highly memorable effect.  Paul Lansky's computer-generated "Six Fantasies on a Poem by Thomas Campion" has a warm and enveloping sounds of vocalizations of the poetic works that is quite beautiful.  Another computer-geneated piece, Laurie Spiegel's "Applachian Grove I" has a quiet, ambient approach to creating something that has melodic associations.

Alvin Curran's "Canti Illuminati," one of the longer excerpts, is a fascinating aural experience with a sequencer, a VCS3 (used by some "progressive" rock groups in the early 70s) and the addition of bass tones and the addition of falsetto vocalizations at the end softens the electronics.  Lucier's unplanned excursion "Music on a Long Thin Wire" has a droning, ambient quality that builds off a tuning from an oscillator and seems like a possible precursor to so-called "isolationist" electronic music.

Hassell's "Before and After Charm (La Notte)" has an eerie and compelling repetition of percussive sound accompanying keyboard drones in varying tones and his highly effective in giving an "Eastern" vibe, thanks to the composer's interest in Indian music.  Finally, Eno's "Unfamiliar Wind (Leeks Hills)" is a characteristiclly understated, yet warm, ambient piece that closes out the CD portion nicely.

The DVD is a great bonus, especially the filmed footage of performances and interviews, including one with Rockmore talking with her sister, nephew and Robert Moog, inventor of the (in)famous synthesizer, about her work with the theremin and its inventor, as well as a snippet of a performance with her and her sister pianist.  A great, though very short, clip of Paul Lansky being shown how to play the eerie instrument by an aged Leon Theremin in the latter's Moscow apartment in the waning days of teh Soviet Union is remarkable.

Milton Babbitt gives an entertaining and informative 1987 interview about his early associations with experimental electronic music, including the Mark I and II synthesizers.  A lengthy performance on film from Lucier dating to 1965 is of his incredible "Music for Solo Performer."  Here, Lucier is hooked by electrodes to several types of percussion, including a trash can, and uses his brainwaves to send waves in varying speeds and energy to play the percussion instruments.

A 2005 performance of "Bye Bye Butterfly" by Oliveros with visualizartions by Tony Martin is also something to behold--gorgeous musical conception with a visual accompaniment that fully supports the performance.

Finally, there is a six-minute segment from a documentary on Robert Moog, to whom the DVD is dedicated and who died in 2005, just prior to the release of the special edition.  This interview with Moog about his creation is an excellent capstone to a superb anthology (provided that the listener has any inclination towards electronic music to begin with, that is.)

One last word about the package:  Ellipsis Arts outdid itself (and it was at the end of its tether at the time) with a beautiful box for the discs in a clear plastic sleeve, while the 112-page booklet is chock full of commentary by the composers and others about the excepted pieces and a wealth of great photos.  It really is a work of art that fully complements and serves the amazing sounds found on the four discs.