Touching Extremes Archives 2001-2008

Reviews from A to D

Home - from E to K - from L to P - from Q to Z – Free Man in Paris

@C - Up, Down, Charm, Strange, Top, Bottom (Cronica)

Miguel Carvalhais and Pedro Tudela recorded these files from 2002 to 2007, assembling the result in a multi-faceted patchwork that fuses improvisation, electronic, sampladelia and musique concrete. Surprisingly, after a couple of headphone sessions - in which, admittedly, this writer admired the quality of the studio work and the clever methods of combination applied by the duo - I gave the CD a try in my overall favourite listening setting: tranquil evening, open windows, moderate volume. The music became a great active ambience: incredibly rich, complex, full of chiaroscuro yet flowing without obstacles, sounding extremely natural to the ears. In a word, rewarding. To achieve this effect, @C taped several among the musicians with whom they had an artistic relation in the above mentioned time span (most names are not really familiar to yours truly, though Neil Davidson and Raymond MacDonald are well known in this place). Not that you can spot someone, as the timbral personalities get thoroughly mashed by a “quest for the unidentifiable” that makes Carvalhais and Tudela define them as “sampled guests”, although they also describe this work as a homage to the involved artists. So what does all this mean in terms of sonic manoeuvre? The definitive picture is one of technical excellence, a little less heart (but it’s not mandatory for this kind of stuff) and the will to discern deeper implications in something that, in all probability, is not containing them. It does remain a very good release, whose real value is not explicable on a single listen. This record needs persistence and attention.

@C & VITOR JOAQUIM - De-tour (Feld)

After the first minutes of this set, characterized by pretty inexpressive rustling micro-sounds, I was wondering where the beef was. What was lurking behind the corner was one of the most intense soundscapes in recent times, which @c (Miguel Carvalhais and Pedro Tudela, also the masterminds running the Cronica label) and Vitor Joaquim created by assembling re-edited and processed segments of live recordings captured during a German tour in 2005. The raw freshness and reinvigorating realism of the original takes is among the winning features of the disc, the music a succession of different scenarios that might or might not have been influenced by historic realities - from post industrial thudding pulses reminiscent of entities like Het Zweet to the entrancing repetitions of the best years of :zoviet*france: - but it’s clear that the involved parties are not hopeless copycats, their creations showing a genuine will of exploring the intimate essence of every new concoction with an enthusiasm that almost borders on the naïve. That very ingenuousness is what I like more in this artifact. Unusual samples, taped voices, terrific pre-recorded snippets, fractured fanfares - you name it, everything needed to displace expectation is used. Nevertheless, once we penetrate the hypnotic circle around which “De-tour” revolves, a curious sense of comfort takes control of our psyche, which kind of anticipates the factual evolution as in an unconscious preview. By repotting spontaneous improvisations into a well-conceived electroacoustic pastiche, @c and Joaquim have fathered something whose sincerity is palpable, an example of how to avoid digital tediousness for many poodle-faced, snot-leaking laptoppers.

AALFANG MIT PFERDEKOPF - Mezethakia Mukabalatt (Aalfang)

The record starts with an acoustic guitar strummed loosely in a mutation of Bowie's "Space oddity"; this is just the smart introduction to a very well crafted artifact that is the second solo CD by Mirko Uhlig. Aalfang's music is quite unpredictable in most of its forms, mixing regular instruments, loops, field recordings and personal fun in a series of sonic pot-pourris that, at least in this album, exclude futilities and gratuitous cheap tricks in favour of coherence and good taste. All parts are adequately connected, so that delayed guitars, tape accelerations, spectral continuums and voices of children at play succeed in picturing a fresh design of atmospheric suggestions that light up my curiosity for an announced upcoming release on the Belgian Mystery Sea label. "Mezethakia" is certainly a clear step forward from AMP's first CDR, showing a focus which keeps me hoping for more surprises.

AALFANG MIT PFERDEKOPF - Genmaicha: at the Opal Seashore (Mystery Sea)

"Genmaicha", besides being a very pleasant listening experience, is also my favourite album by Mirko Uhlig until now. The whole record is centred around amorphous sensations, its aesthetic engulfed by an equalizing process that privileges the cutoff of high frequencies, transforming Aalfang's soundpool in a morass of disturbing voicings, muddy chords and unquiet spirits dancing and whirling in slowly crumbling cathedrals. What's even better is Uhlig's work with sonic consecutio: no matter how we try to abandon defenses to get overwhelmed by reluctance, the breathtaking loops used by Mirko to raise the level of evocation work wonders in soliciting our sense of doubt, bringing out the most profound despondency in a continuous flow of appearances and displacements. Fantasies can be scary sometimes but this time Aalfang Mit Pferdekopf's imagination gave birth to a quasi-masterpiece of ultramundane music.

AALFANG MIT PFERDEKOPF - Ich habe nur noch 12 Seepferdchen in meinen tempel (Einzeleinheit)

The weird freaks populating the warped sonic world of Mirko Uhlig are back at work with serious intentions. Aalfang's music in this occasion calls for gnomes with children's voices, strumming of hardly tuned guitars, urban activity mixed with lunar radiations, drones apparently from the centre of the earth. As usual, Uhlig is not aligned; he's slowly but surely growing a totally personal pattern - a style, if you will - that mixes his progressive/krautrock influences with a great individualism. Most tracks sound like images reflected on a water surface: they are there but look crippled and deformed, acquiring a fascinating significance according to our observation point. Uncompromising yet absolutely benevolent, the sound of Aalfang Mit Pferdekopf is a viscous substance whose effect on the brain is damn near to a lobotomy: at the end of this CD you could find yourself absent-minded, blinking inexpressively at your wife asking you what you want for lunch.

AB DUO - Everyone is happy (Scrapple)

AB Duo comprises drummer Brendan Dougherty and trumpeter Aaron Meicht, who are also part of the electronic trio Feigner. The motivity of "Everyone is happy" is proportional to its reclusive appearance, the music offering nocturnal qualities that never transcend the limit of licentiousness. Meicht tends to break silence with gentle intracutaneous fragments and introverted spirals whose range is usually limited to predetermined melodic areas, "melody" in this case not to be intended as a lyrical expression, rather as a sheer succession of notes. On his side, Dougherty is even more restrained, moving small gestural bursts and succinct hints around ample spaces and intense taciturnities, often leaving us completely alone and naked in front of unexpected whiffles of nothingness. The final - and longest - track is a 32-minute live improvisation showing AB's total dynamic control: gleams of instrumental prowess define a discoloured poetic that whispers at our untold desires with the same conviction of a silent persuader. Difficult yet substantial matter, certainly worthy of repeated visits with concentration working at full steam.

A BROKEN CONSORT - The shape leaves (Sustain-Release)

Given that the large part of this label’s editions come in extremely limited quantities - from a single copy (!) to 28, to 100 - and that every item is singularly assembled and personalized with a dedication to the receiver, handmade artwork with beautiful leaves and similar preparations, plus fascinating graphic design and photos by Louise Skelton, then consider this review a random choice justifying my invitation to fathom the artistic microcosm of a gentleman named Richard Skelton from Lancashire (UK), father of Sustain-Release and - under various monikers - of the music contained here and in other albums published by it. The whole enterprise is a veritable loving memory, moved by the need of perpetuating the presence, both artistic and spiritual, of someone whose short life has inspired Skelton’s in many aspects. One can perceive this endeavour in every minute of the music, which in the case of “The shape leaves” consists of six tracks of spellbinding, single-chord acoustic tapestries where bowed guitars, violin, harmonium (probably something else too, but it’s not so important) and loops constitute the core of a sound that seems to represent the artist’s will to fill his mind with vibrations whose sheen helps dampening the effects of a deeply rooted sorrow. For strict musical references, Skelton has already been inserted by many in a well determined area, halfway through new acoustic folk and neo-psychedelia. I myself believe that this album could attract people whose tastes range from Third Ear Band to Peter Wright. But what I really want to stress as more relevant than anything else is the bright light of Richard’s devotion, something that transpires from his entire approach to art and music. A genuine, creative, deserving man.

A BROKEN CONSORT - Box of birch (Sustain-Release)

Richard Skelton has a unique style resulting from the conjunction of see-through elements and the extreme care with which he assembles them. That’s enough to guarantee sonic poetry of the highest order, and “Box of birch” is the inevitable confirmation of the validity of this process and the depth of the man himself. Already at its second edition - this time limited to 100 copies with the customary individually dedicated manual artwork - this CD features the best music that I’ve heard from Skelton until now, something pregnant with the total awareness of an inescapable regret which, creatively speaking, is exactly the key to those questions that people usually refuse to raise. The constituents of these four ravishing mantric improvisations revolve around strings, an accordion (…harmonium? Both?), dangling objects, piano, found sounds and percussion, various kinds of loops. There’s a splendid description on the cover, that - in between other words - talks about “barbed wire blues”, “dense thickets of slack strings” and “accordion mists gathering in the early morning light”. I can picture Richard opening the windows, breathing deep, inhaling the humid air and sitting down to reflect for long silent moments. Then embracing his “slacked-string” violin and commencing a chant coming from the very inside, inconspicuous proximities suddenly called out to accompany the newest exploration of a past that’s still grieving, but might lead him to a radiant future. This is one of those human beings who will be allowed to see what’s going to happen when our physical package has crumbled, and if you’re smart follow my advice: things like “Box of birch” come only every once in a while, in extremely small doses. We have to realize that they are there, earlier than the undeserving ones. We need to reassure ourselves that such a purity of intents still exists. This man’s foresight is enhanced by someone who is invisible to us, yet by listening to what he’s able to generate it becomes obvious that his art is just another shape for a soul to manifest itself.

ABSTRACTIONS - Ars vivende (Edgetone/Pax Recordings)

Another example of the Abstractions' fury, this time more violent and anguishing than in their previous "Sonic conspiracy". Mostly characterized by vocal eruptions over deranged rhythms and instrumental torturing upon impossible leit-motifs, "Ars vivende" is a record that stands in front of any "gentle" aesthetic with the impetus of anger, poverty, rage against the perpetual rule or - simply put - a demonstration that art must not always satisfy the educated ear. Like a Jackson Pollock painting, only splashed with blood, sweat and maybe stomach acids, this music will have you feeling uneasy. Ernesto Diaz-Infante, Rent Romus, Bob Marsh are just the better known entities here; but all the musicians involved make sure everything gets drowned in a turbid vapor of unanswered questions.

ABSTRACTIONS - Novo navigatio (Edgetone/Pax Recordings)

You could not say that Abstractions are slickers, as their "rags-to-raggedier" kind of artistic freedom makes their sound emissions appreciable by a few stray pigeons and a bunch of lucky critics - yes, it's me there. This collective's in-yo'-face, politically uncorrect lyrics mesh with rusty needles of disposed improvising sapience and remnants of Beefheartian corpses, poleaxing any concept of nearshore straightness while proudly showing the earmarks of genuine intelligence. The indented poetics of indecipherable sonic stenography offered by these musicians is more than enough to declare them basilar in the ever expanding galaxy of West Coast free music. Let's leave famousness to someone else and enjoy these strange bulletins; "California dreaming" this ain't.

ACOUSTIC GUITAR TRIO - Acoustic Guitar Trio (Incus)

The three acoustic guitar anti-heroes featured here are Nels Cline, Jim McAuley and Rod Poole. The "social interaction" among the instrumental entities are conveniently oriented towards a controlled dissonance, often opening up to reveal a flourishing variety of arpeggio delicacies and a very careful choice of tunings that will sound "wrong" to the ones whose maximum level of complication acceptance is the California Guitar Trio. But, to yours truly, those strange distinctions of chords and lines are the very essence of the AGT's musicianship. A concentrated listen will bring out an ever-present fantasy, a bright-minded attack to conventional guitar counterpoint and an involuntary slap in the face of boring virtuosos - not that Nels, Jim and Rod miss any technique, mind you; simply put, there's no trace of routine around and the music is often sparkling. These guys listen to each other instead of posing in front of a giant hollow mirror.

A CROWN OF AMARANTH - Love.Lies.Bleeding (Crucial Bliss)

After a few moments of grinding electronic noise and membrane-piercing distortion - both largely dominant characters in this music - I was telling myself "I'm too old for this". But I stayed and, sure enough, the reward came - under the guise of a structure. Yes - A Crown of Amaranth are not your typical noise bastards but use those unbelievably violent eruptions with a well developed compositional scope, so that you're forced to follow what happens with curiosity, even enjoying some blissful (pun intended) moment. As a matter of fact, while listening to this volcanic album at late evening, at one moment I found myself so "relaxed" by harsh drones and powerful low frequencies that I closed my eyes and let my brain function in standby mode - but when you're hit by hellish voices, slow melodies of scorching guitars and voices of children immersed in various interferences, you think that Neil Young was right: it's better to burn out than to fade away.

ADAM_IS - Moles (Echomusic)

Michail Adamis recorded these sounds during the construction of an underground tunnel in the national road linking Athens and Thessaloniki, the result used as a sonic installation at the planning offices of the involved company. The aim was to highlight the different aspects of the working environments in the realization of the project. On a purely phenomenal basis, this is a potent mass of rumbles, shrieking frequencies, long reverberations and violent thuds. The whooshing presence of the vehicles and the almost scary creaks and chugs bring recollections from the late eighties - post industrial a go-go in my house and head. Some of the sections were certainly looped, attributing a semi-entrancing quality to something that, on the contrary, usually causes a constant shattering of nerves. At times one hears voices drowned in the clanging hubbub. Is that an impression only? I don’t know. A fairly acceptable example of environmental recording, no pretence and not really “art”, with several surprising escalations. Perfect for looking at people’s mouth moving without hearing what they’re saying. The noise from a tunnel is more interesting anyway.

JOHN LUTHER ADAMS - Red arc/Blue veil (Cold Blue)

John Luther Adams is among the mainstays of that area of composers who gravitate around the orbit of labels like New Albion, Mode and New World. His music is at one and the same time accessible - down to the most elementary component - and crucially impenetrable when the final result is heard. What’s clear right away is that the fruits of Adams’ work introduce a spiritual force of imposing magnitude, so that one instantly tends to link it with powerful natural phenomena or some kind of unknown yet alluring ritual. The four pieces comprised by “Red arc/Blue veil” symbolize a journey of sorts; its extremes - the initial “Dark waves” for two pianos (Stephen Drury and Yukiko Takagi) and the conclusive, highly charming title track for piano, vibes and crotales (Drury with Scott Deal) - are the scores that mostly tend to that inquisitive crossbreed of gloriously resonant misty minimalism-cum-sound processing privileged by Cold Blue in a fair share of their releases. The central selections, “Among red mountains” (Drury on solo piano) and especially the grandiose “Qilyaun” - a bass drum duo featuring Deal and Stuart Gerber idolizing the dynamic laws of otherwordly rumble in a sequence of interlocked accelerandos and rallentandos - are the ones that wake up the listener’s senses a little more violently, but also give the effective demonstration of this composer’s versatility and not immediately apparent technical finesse, many of these concepts utilizing superimpositions of different rhythmic signatures that materialize into something comparable to the shimmering of a water course under the sun. Essentially, this is another gem from the Californian label, for which an artistic misstep or a less than satisfactory release would apparently be considered as a deathly sin.

MATHEW ADKINS - Mondes inconnu (Empreintes DIGITALes)

A member of BEAST (Birmingham Electro Acoustic Sound Theatre), Adkins is an English composer who studied with Jonty Harrison and Simon Waters. This audio DVD presents over 93 minutes of excellent, modern-sounding acousmatics that show what’s possible to accomplish when precise parameters are set at work to represent something that, in the end, is almost pure indetermination as far as aural imagery is concerned. As in every recording that I listen to in this musical field, I much prefer bobbing and weaving through the liner notes, which - Adkins being no exception - somehow create expectancies and influences by which I don’t want to be deluded. The music that a composer envisions before it goes on disc is never the same that we finally enjoy, thus a moment-by-moment description of each piece appears futile and pointless in cases like this. “Mondes inconnu” must be taken as a whole, a pictorial album of phenomenal appearances in which Adkins’ splendid work of juxtaposition immerses the listener in a synthesis of elaborated information that might or might not sound imaginary or, to quote the title, “unknown”, but it’s as detailed and (in)coherent as the most lucid of REM phases, in that it mixes concrete sources and fetching backgrounds in such a distinguished manner that the two galaxies mesh in progressively contrasting, thoroughly stimulating abstractions. All tracks were exclusively produced by Adkins except “Still time”, which features a gorgeous interpretation by Alejandro Escuer on flute against the pre-recorded material.

(AD)VANCE(D) - Poem#red128dot (Absurd) 

I didn't know anything about Mars Wellink before getting this CDR, then surfed the web a little bit and - thanks to omnivorous (and fellow Dutch) Frans De Waard - read that he was 50% of a duo from Arnhem, Vance Orchestra (again, unknown to yours truly). This work is dedicated to the late Geert Feytons, founder of Noise-Maker's Fifes and tragically deceased in 2006. It is a very simply conceived soundscape, yet a beautiful one. The main colours are people's voices - seemingly captured in a fair, or an amusement park, with someone repeating a series of phonemes (numbers, apparently) from a megaphone. In the background, something like a flanged-out guitar that mutates into a distant synthesized drone appears and disappears, giving this patchwork a cohesion that places it halfway through an electronic piece and a sheer document of half an hour somewhere in a town. Besides humans there are birds, too, and the section where a blackbird starts tweeting and chirping is the most charming of the entire disc. Towards the end, a crunchy sound (someone munching?) renders the whole a little bit more concrete, slightly diminishing the oneiric factor. It must be noted that the basic tracks appear as they were looped, or somehow seamed to return every once in a while. Not exactly a transcendental outing, but when the record ended I found myself gazing at the void, my headphone still on for long moments of thoughtful silence. The test is passed, with good marks.

AEMAE - The helical word (Isounderscore)

Brandon Nickell, a 23 year-old navigator of harsh synthetic and electronic seas known as Aemae, shows his admirable will to construct new kinds of uneasy architectures. The eight pieces of "The helical word" form a pyrotechnic cycle of cascading incidents, timbral shifts and granular abrasions which move like creatures without a preconceived position in an undetermined system, finally finding a way to transform contraptions and extrapolations into rough elliptical shapes and dehydrated approximations of parallel galaxies. Nickell starts everything from "a pure exercise in synthesis"; the mobile force of educated noise and a well planned mix, even in absence of natural sources, make this music live its life in full - no dead spots or dull moments. Considering the next-to-nil significance of most of today's electronica, not bad at all.

AEMAE - Maw (Isounderscore)

The synthetic consciousness of Brandon Nickell/Aemae fathers a lot of strange beasts whose voices and souls get their nourishment from unstable harmonic contents; just listen to "Spectral psychosis" to see what I'm talking about. What's indeed appreciable in "Maw" for this reviewer is Nickell's will to initiate us to a new method of approaching electronic music, without recurring to sterile tricks or violent changes of scenery - although the initial discharges of "PDE" would suggest the contrary - but furnishing us with new palettes of spectral evolution that show beautifully developed intuitions and a talent that was already noticeable in the previous "The helical world", and now looks to be fully flourishing. A track like "Bad entity", almost 11 minutes of glittering reverberations and subsonic pulses enhanced by abstract interferences, puts Aemae among the most interesting new realities in this area; indeed the whole CD sounds quite distant from the bell-and-whistle world of galactic nothingness typical of those sanctified computerized lyophilizations characterized by their ethereal (and eternal) absence of good ideas. By avoiding jarring contradictions between spiritual lettering and shallow meaning, Nickell shows his seriousness even as a human being; that his music is good just comes as a consequence. I'm willing to put my trust in this young composer, hoping that I won't be deluded in the future.

AFFLUX - Aizier/St.Martin-sur-mere/Dieppe (Edition)

Both the concept behind Afflux (Eric Cordier, Jean-Luc Guionnet and Eric La Casa) and the origins of these recordings are clearly explained in the CD notes. The force of wind and water is a fundamental element in this series of electroacoustic manipulations; the only recognizable human traces are the voices of the lookout sea post operators, whose radio calls mix hectically with outbursts of frequencies and shore winds manifesting all their raw power in the "Dieppe" track. The fascinating treatments of brooks gurgling into tubes and tidal waves swallowing previously prepared contact microphones are all part of a well known area of contrast between placid soundscaping and menacing exhalations of noise; yet, Afflux reach that point of suspension between air and ground that's exactly manageable from several points of listening; it's a gorgeous environmental portrait, a half-concrete document, an intriguing - sometimes distressing - ambient music; more often than not, it's excellent stuff.

AFFLUX - Bordeaux TNT (And/Oar/Alluvial)

The TNT cultural centre in Bordeaux was filled by "several hundred meters of cables" by Eric Cordier, Jean-Luc Guionnet and Eric La Casa, who proceeded to record the internal and external sonorities of the area placing a large amount of condenser and contact microphones, whose captured sounds were altered/processed and sent to a 32-channel mixer, then played in the building through eight loudspeakers. The perfect balance reached by Afflux is demonstrated by the beautiful results we achieved during consecutive listening sessions: at a good level with windows closed, the overall mix deploys a rapture of motors, trains and urban clattering juxtaposing the sublime of a peripheral zone and the danger of walking alone at night in the street. But if you let these recollections fuse with the sounds of life coming from outside - which in my case included a cuckoo, a distant jet and the faraway voices of a few Sunday country walkers among the rest - you could even feel entitled to some sort of monastic pondering alleviating this era's insecurity and mental tiredness.

AF URSIN - Aura legato (La Scie Doree)

Af Ursin is Timo Van Luyck (previously of Noise-Maker's Fifes, currently half of In Camera with Christoph Heemann) presenting a side project which indeed has nothing to do with either of the above collaborations, as far as its sound is concerned. Coming in an LP whose cover makes me think of ancient 78 rpm records (and, at least in my copy, the continuous crackles and pops of the vinyl contribute an awful lot to this "old-time" scent) "Aura legato" trips through mysterious atmospheres seemingly filtered by a patina of ritual incantations and magic ceremonials bringing out forgotten memories - and also the translucent, whispering ghosts inhabiting them. It's a very intriguing concoction of strange sounds made with acoustic guitar, organ, percussion and other instruments, at times comparable to Third Ear Band, Nurse With Wound and - why not? - even Mirror, if only for a few moments. Hypnotic voices and pulsating shadows create a sense of uncomfortable expectancy, announcing the arrival of a caravan of gypsy ectoplasms willing to steal your sleep for weeks to come. Apart from the annoying vinyl noises, which make me hope in a CD version one day, this is destined to become an underground classic.

SOPHIE AGNEL / PHIL MINTON - Tasting (Another Timbre)

It’s not a given that the pairing of a voice and a piano provide interesting results and, from this point of view, there are indeed renowned couples using those expressive means that are eventually more respectable for the seriousness of their single components’ artistic paths than the music they produce in those occasions (you do the maths and come up with the names). But “Tasting” is definitely on another level and I’m firmly convinced, after only three listens, that this is one of the best piano/vocals duos that I’ve ever heard. While Phil Minton’s poetry of the unexpected gratifies via large quantities of systematically fulfilled expectations - featuring monstrous technical expertise, irony and drama a go-go, providential multiphonic nefariousness and hair-splitting precision - it must be told that Agnel is the true revelation here. The pianist is gifted in fact with a unique style that fuses the inside and the outside parts of the instrument into a provocative communion of fermentable sketches, mixing the abrasive rubbing and the soft hammering and plucking of the strings with Minton’s overtone singing in masterful fashion, respecting the dynamic palette with few touches and scarce chords, building cathedrals of emotional intensity and fuliginous fumes of harmonic suspension with effortless ingeniousness. The six tracks of “Tasting”, recorded in 2006 at the Jazz a Poitiers Festival, are examples of a creativity that can be fresh-sounding and cinematic at one and the same time, sort of a documentary about the secret life of an uncommon kind of creature inhabiting the obscure sections of this vocal/instrumental microcosm. Still, no assertion can really express the wealth of minute details and the stunning reciprocal reactivity that identifies this splendid record.

BRIAN AGRO - Procession of the ornaments (Percaso)

Pianist Tomas Bächli studied with Werner Bärtschi and has been the receiver of numerous prizes throughout a career largely built upon interpretations of the works of modern composers (although he regularly performs Bach, Albeniz and other past heroes, too). He’s also half of a piano duo with Gertrud Schneider, in which they tackle quarter-tone and just intonation music. In this CD, Bächli plays a set of 14 pieces by Canadian Brian Agro, this recording constituting my first encounter with his output, in spite of the fact that he’s already released material on this very label. Although he was born in 1953, Agro is one of those musicians whose writing appears to be firmly positioned in a back-looking time frame: elegant lines and semi-consonant chords are sparsely deployed, fruits of a nostalgic temperament ready to be harvested by expert hands. In certain passages the instrument (which seems to have been recorded in a large room from a distance) resounds charmingly, an aura of smiley sadness pervading the air in a tranquil afternoon. Music that leaves a lot of space for thoughts to fly around and pose on the dusty shelves of distant reminiscences, played without magniloquence yet far from being secretive. A responsive interpretation of a rather mysterious artist’s compositional idea, his obscurity contributing to an even deeper intrigue in enjoying this disc.

AHLEUCHATISTAS - What you will (Cuneiform)

Compared to Massacre by several quotes in the press sheet, I'd rather say that this street fighting trio is a raw minimalist version of Forever Einstein with some Doctor Nerve spice (well, yes - some Massacre too, but the alchemy of Frith, Laswell and Maher is obviously technically superior; better using Naked City - minus the screaming - as distant reference). Drummer Sean Dail, guitarist Shane Perlowin and bassist Derek Poteat can play, though - and their energetic drive is something to be heard, a real breath of fresh air in the avant rock canon. Taking their name from a fusion of a Charlie Parker tune and the revolutionary Zapatistas, Ahleuchatistas play a sweaty corrosion of a trio's uncommon places, privileging intelligent rage and channeled fury to smash fractured rhythms and skeletal angular themes to even smaller smithereens. The instrumental combinations revolve more or less around the same colours, but this has to be considered a value, as the bone-crunching rough maths of these kids from North Carolina constitutes their own style, which shows many things to appreciate.

AHLEUCHATISTAS - Even in the midst… (Cuneiform)

The attack of “…Of all this”, which constitutes both the first track and the conclusive part of the titling sentence, would not be out of context on a Quentin Tarantino soundtrack; think Dick Dale meets early XTC, just before guitarist Shane Perlowin, bassist Derek Poteat and drummer Sean Dail launch a new assault against the cathedrals of four-on-the-floor by interlocking their virtual horns in chains of absolutely irregular metrics and contrapuntal audacity. The whole executed with the same ferocious attitude of a disillusioned human failure who decides to enter a McDonald and open fire with a rifle. One of the intriguing aspects of this trio, apart from an obvious technical command, is the nudity of their timbres. Ahleuchatistas are exactly what every garage band should aspire to, namely remaining exactly that while becoming knowledgeable players. Despite the illustrious comparisons that they’ve been subjected to, the boys hailing from Asheville (North Carolina) still maintain a clearness of vision that is well reflected in the thorough assimilability of the pieces, even the ones that seem to be inspired by the bite of a venomous spider, and there are several of them. Still, a track like “The bears of Cantabria shall sleep no more” could convince also the sceptical that there’s some measure of delicacy left in the most grumbling heart. Instantaneous rage tempered by mental discipline: that’s a great asset, and it’s not Ahleuchatistas’ only one. Party music for those who hate parties. Excellently rough stuff.

PEKKA AIRAKSINEN - Madam I'm Adam (Love)

Boy, is this music strange - no wonder if you find yourself "dazed and confused" after a good listen. A very prolific Finnish composer, Airaksinen seems to specialize in disorienting people with dirty-sounding cauldrons of spastic drum machine rhythms, synthesized lunatic themes, samples of various recordings of old music and other human activities, distorted feedback and next-to-impossible joints between techno and free music fragments. Convincingly anarchic and full of destructive aural satire, these patchworks have ingested thousands of influences without revealing a single one; if muzak, avantgarde and sci-fi collided in the name of audio-collage, you'd have a VERY vague idea of what this man is capable of. This double set is completed by a disc of great remixes by the likes of Curd Duca, Nurse With Wound, Mira Calix plus many others; also, take a good look at Pekka's history to better understand the sociopolitical context where all this creativity exploded. Certainly it wasn't easy being so particular without trouble at that time...

TETUZI AKIYAMA / JOZEF VAN WISSEM - Hymn for a fallen angel (Incunabulum)

Can a Baroque Lute be played with a bottleneck? Yes, if your name is Jozef Van Wissem. This reflective duet, the second recorded with Tetuzi Akiyama (himself armed with the same device, yet exercised on a Martin HD-28 acoustic guitar) was not realized in a single session. In fact, in this occasion the Dutch lutenist captured his comrade’s improvisations at home, then proceeded to “follow” him while replaying the results through a computer program called Garageband. That way, Van Wissem could “see the notes coming” and take improvisational decisions working for the best. Those choices mostly include many segments of silence amidst dots, spots and nicely dissonant chords, the instruments’ natural resonance clearly audible until complete decay. “No effects applied whatsoever”, it says on the cover, and it shows: the music sounds elegantly nude, and even the few fretting uncertainties perceived here and there contribute to a mystique of the purity that is all the more welcome in the era of hyper-processing. A refreshing set, one that defines the appreciation of hearing wood and strings in an atypical Zen context deriving from the interaction between two humans and a laptop. Take my description with a grain of salt anyway: to date, nobody has understood what Zen means despite billions of words and tons of books. What I do know is that listening to this record is a gratifying experience, already repeated several times by yours truly.

TETUZI AKIYAMA / JASON KAHN - Till we meet again (For 4 Ears)

The "quiet tension" which Günter Müller refers to in the press notes of "Till we meet again" is evidenced in a vast part of this profound series of duo and solo recordings. Akiyama's personal take on a peculiar sort of atonal blues goes through ample silent spaces interrupted by the sound of acoustic guitar strings that are loosened, scratched and pinched until there is no more trace of a conventional - "western", if you will - playing style. Kahn mostly applies his caressing delicacy to responsive cymbals, bringing out the essential harmonic resonance we had already experienced in his interpretations of Taku Sugimoto's scores in "Music for cymbal" on his own Cut label. Jason also presents a long track for analogue synthesizer which fits extremely well in a sound world made of healing waves not extraneous to composers like Eliane Radigue or Alvin Lucier. A nice touch comes from being able to detect the musicians' breath at times while they play, thanks to a beautifully detailed recording which also captured the engrossing faraway sound of a passing helicopter in the last section of the disc.

TETUZI AKIYAMA / TOSHIMARU NAKAMURA / TAKU SUGIMOTO / MARK WASTELL - Foldings (Confront)

Like Bernhard Günter's and other similar ones, most records involving Japanese improvising artists of the recent years require complete silence during listening because silence itself is a fundamental part of their creativity. Here, most recognizable is the "no input mixing board" by Nakamura who, in complete absence of movement, is capable of piercing you with frequencies and hissing highs that could help you both evolving your auditive apparatus and attracting animals (I'm not kidding - I noticed that if I keep my window open during some of my sessions, birds chant or not, depending on the context...). Akiyama, Sugimoto and Wastell contribute themselves with plucks, little noises and whirls that little have to do with guitar, cello or...air duster. I could try and have some Tai-Chi movement on this - love or hate it, I'm always standing in favour of near-nothingness opposed to useless wall-paper.

ERNIE ALTHOFF - Dark by 6 (Antboy)

Australian Ernie Althoff is a sound artist who builds his own instruments, using them with additional materials in highly personal installations which are autonomous or, at times, allowing audience performance like in "Dummy run", one of the five excerpts showcased here. Finely explained and detailed by explicative photos in the CD booklet, these on-site recordings present an uncessant mass of textural activity, mostly on the percussive side: aluminium bowls behaving like tuned bells, zithers repeating the same mechanical rasgueado for hours, woodblocks and homemades mixing with toys, marbles rolling in pans which rotate over a turntable. The aleatory strategies conceived by Althoff give birth to a world that sounds familiar yet is uniquely non-uniform, as strange patterns and distant surrounding backgrounds are situated in a self-generated framework, sort of a man/machine counterpoint where manipulation and multiplicity of chances are quite close to daily reality.

RODRIGO AMADO / KENT KESSLER / PAAL NILSSEN-LOVE - Teatro (European Echoes)

The first release of saxophonist Rodrigo Amado’s new label is an exciting trio that mixes lots of influences and innovative elaborations in four tracks, two pretty long suites and two shorter reflections. Amado’s playing, especially on the baritone sax, is at one and the same time forward-looking and elegantly protrusive. His lines cause my appreciation of a primal instinct, an almost physical consciousness, that inner quest which yields inspirations and consequent achievements spiced by a phrasing which aggregates spiritual values of the highest rank in solemn non-alignment. Amado's interrelation with the rhythm section of Kessler and Nilssen-Love reaches many points where it becomes a metaphor for the struggles of life itself, each player revealing intimate thoughts in no-secrets-hold fashion, willing to make the others aware of their sadness or joy, always finding different ways to share their dialogue with a potentially responsive audience. This is a trio that silently chooses a spokesman, yet their music's mechanics is so accomplished that one perceives no apparent division between the components. The general sense of amalgamation makes for a satisfying experience: no implosions or extraordinary events, only passion and pure heart by three artists who collaborated for the very first time in this occasion, a fact that renders this album all the more coherent and, for this, praiseworthy.

RODRIGO AMADO / CARLOS ZINGARO / TOMAS ULRICH / KEN FILIANO - Surface (European Echoes) 

After the previous “Teatro”, a trio with Kent Kessler and Paal Nilssen-Love, saxophonist Rodrigo Amado shows once again his value, this time in a quartet. Subtitled “For alto, baritone and strings”, the record produces a few moments of fascinating melancholy while introducing several new views on what’s commonly - and superficially - labeled as “chamber jazz”, the whole bathed in the refreshing waters of structural deprivation (sort of). Unbelievable how discreet Amado proves himself to be at times, his saxes largely absent from substantial chunks of the pieces; but when he’s in, his tone adds muscle to the collective’s skeleton, predictably shifting the balance from a more exacerbated transmission of dissonance to something that stands between abstract expressionism and unquiet contemplation, the only feverish exception being the final “Art is truth”. The string players, taken individually, are superb exponents of the noble class of fringe music: the contraptions and enthusiastic discharges, the solitary lines and the intertwining discourses between Zingaro’s violin and viola and Ulrich’s cello are much more than an impromptu narration, reinforcing their instant reciprocal insight with Filiano’s bass, a catalyzer of mercurial grace also appearing as the most evident reminder of the original jazz concept. Amado inserts, seams and gestures, reminiscing about faded images while envisioning a future that no one would really like to predict but, somehow, all imagine as being not so desirable.

OREN AMBARCHI - Triste (Southern Lord)

Recorded live at Nijimegen's Extrapol in 2001, "Triste" is a delicate construction of frail atmospheres prepared by Ambarchi with the exclusive help of a guitar, although in the final part of the album he's joined by looping eminence Tom Recchion. The first movement sees the Australian gently extracting opaque string drops from his instrument, whose tone's high frequencies are cut off and wrapped by the effects' hiss in a progressively crumbling decadence. Electrostatic noises and hums gradually replace these melancholic notes in the second part - probably the best moment of the CD - becoming a single-centre current of harmonic feedback just blemished by small pops accenting its engrossing, mesmerizing character; but after 10 minutes or so, the sounds become irregular and claustrophobic, manifesting themselves as uncomfortable interferences which somehow reminded me of Koji Asano's "The last shade of evening falls". The final sections, "Remake" and "Remodel", sound like a nostalgic look at Eno trying to project sepia-tinged childhood photos through one of his installation monitors, Recchion's Hammond organ and loops accompanying Ambarchi in a gradual fade to oblivion.

OREN AMBARCHI - Lost like a star (Bo Weavil)

I admit that I haven’t listened to everything that Oren Ambarchi has released, but I’m sure that this LP contains material that ranks among his finest. “Lost like a star” was composed for the Japanese dance company Gekidan Kaitaisha, its gradual growth seemingly perfect to accompany slow body movements that one can only imagine, having not seen the performance. Ambarchi deploys electric guitar, bowed instruments, samples, bells, cymbals and percussion to create fabulous layers of drones and glissando waves whose temperament stands halfway through Phill Niblock’s fclashing upper partials and David Jackman’s Organum masterpieces. The same kind of quasi-invariable harmonic tapestry based on a progressive alteration of quietness is to be found in the second half of “The final option” on side B, a piece that Ambarchi recorded live in Melbourne’s ABC studios in 2006. It all begins with single string globules processed in rarefied spaces, then mutates into another wall of sound that features guitar, bells, cymbals and a motor to produce a mesmerizing effect, utterly stunning at high volume yet equally functional as a subterranean presence. A caressing aura of semi-distorted overtones, towering over the average of guitar-derived soundscaping, right there with the best production by Aidan Baker, James Plotkin and the likes, with the welcome addition of a wider choice of sonic sources that, at the end of the day and after all this name-dropping, makes this music partially comparable to the most recent output by Rosy Parlane. Either way, splendid stuff.

OREN AMBARCHI / GUNTER MULLER / PHILIP SAMARTZIS - Strange love (For 4 ears)

Starting from its lovely cover up to the very last second of music, "Strange love" must be regarded as a perfect concoction of three strong personalities fused into a single body. The album is divided into two parts; the live one, "Cold", begins with pulses and frequencies at the threshold of human perception, to evolve in a pretty complex soundscape alimented by purring buzzes and some environmental source (brought in by Samartzis). It's an extremely controlled setting where even pops and glitches - by now omnipresent in contemporary electroacoustics - appear with a meaningful purpose instead of being just a randomly thrown ingredient. Everything flows according to plan - if there is one - in an inspiring piece, among the best I've heard by these artists in a long time. The second segment, "Warm" - conceived individually in the studio - is based, as the title suggests, on more enticing colours, mostly tending towards a relaxing and sense-abandoning low vibration. Benevolent spirits appear in a mist of enjoyable electronic perfumes, while the listener is glad to walk across a gentle desert wind...never feeling alone in that desert. All things considered, this is a high-standard, worthy recording.

OREN AMBARCHI / ROBBIE AVENAIM - Clockwork (Room40)

A great live improvisation whose brief duration - a little more than 18 minutes - does not detract a iota from its variegated intelligence. On guitar and percussion respectively, Ambarchi and Avenaim lead us through an involving trip to a strange land where the mechanics of common sense are totally reconstructed, and whose soundtrack is a frantic gamelan which starts from ominous metallic halos then becomes the rebellious outburst of a squad of bell clocks on dope. Instruments are virtually unrecognizable during this magic trick, the players just happy to tickle these complex percussive intersections with more and more enthusiasm until the end, with the audience saluting Oren and Robbie with a convinced and well deserved applause.

OREN AMBARCHI / KEITH ROWE - Squire (For 4 Ears)

Recorded live in Cologne in 2002, "Squire" possesses attributes and stamina to spare, revealing itself in all its staying power. The set starts with a hoard of subsonic rumbles which instantly caused my woofers to try and come out running away. About seven minutes into the piece, earth loop and radio voices have already established a reign of terror, different hues of natural earmuffing that could have an explosion near your house going almost unnoticed. The huge wall of low frequencies encroaches our mental control but leaves a few doors ajar for penetrating shortwave calls that better define the frame of questionable lethargy that this music causes. Inexorably, new emissions start giving the picture a more abstract quality and it's right there that a higher percentage of distortion is delivered, together with additional radiophonic intrusions, in a section of economical lucid surrealism that identifies the territory around the halfway mark. By now we've been inducted in "Roweland" and there's no way out in sight, as crackling discharges, scraped nonentities and semi-paralyzed cybernetic birds would all love to be portrayed in the family album photo, cell phone interference and electrostatic pulse riding the crest of a mercurial wave of uneasiness. At the half-hour point, the catharsis is fully operational and the ground-shaking vibrations are felt through the spine up to the skull (and down to the kitchen, my wife calling me with impressed excitement after feeling the floor quivering under her feet). A black cat is also attracted; he comes, peeps and goes - and I believe he heard things that I missed. I finally surrender to Ambarchi and Rowe's authority: do what you want of me.

SAM AMIDON - All is well (Bedroom Community)

You, yes you. Lovers of Jim O’Rourke’s circa “Bad timing” and Van Dyke Parks (…right, Joanna Newsom’s recent work with him too), there is something here that needs your credit card. One can’t believe how beautiful this album is: for sure it belongs in 2007’s top ten. And I had never heard of this man from Vermont before. Described as a “child of folk musicians”, Sam Amidon - who’s active in fringe indie-rock bands Doveman and Stars Like Fleas in the meantime - is gifted with an “improbably nice” voice: the same monotonous timbre always, no virtuosity, a detached “who cares?” attitude if you will. Yet it sounds, for want of a better word, “warm”. My wife, whose competence as an accomplished songwriter allows her to speak better than myself in this case, found a parallelism with elements of native Indian origin in Sam’s expression. Matter of factly, that voice is just perfect for these tunes, which are nothing but rearranged renditions of popular American favourites, such as “O Death”, “Sugar Baby” and “Wild Bill Jones”. The flawless combination of Amidon’s interpretation (his guitar strumming is also pretty peculiar, and it doesn’t hurt at all) with Nico Muhly’s sensitive wind, brass and strings arrangements (listen to those bass lines, and what about the fantastic Irish pipes appearing from nowhere in “Fall on my knees”?) yields repeated moments of unadulterated emotional rapture. All this, let me stress it once again, through simple songs which do not appear so simple after the treatment. Participants include Ben Frost, Eyvind Kang, Aaron Siegel, Morse and Valgeir Sigurðsson, producer of the artifact and once again confirming himself to be one of the most open-eared talents in that no man’s land between experimental and potentially market-gratifying music. A veritable classic, a standard for comparisons in this genre from now on. Not to be missed.

ANASTENARIA - Anastenaria (Echomusic/Editions_Zero)

Field recording of a ritual plus minimalism, maybe we could describe it as such. Yet another secret from the Greek vaults, a ceremony taped in 1979 at the Agia Eleni village, Serres. The whole revolves around a walk-on-fire performance, of which the CD explores the preparatory atmosphere. Translation: people talking (in the local language, of course - fascinating for those who don’t know it, resulting as just music to my untrained ears) and, especially, a fabulous series of percussion-driven violin ostinatos, a cross of East European dissonance and Steve Reich’s “Violin Phase” in a country-tinged version. Ceaseless rhythmic pulses that go on and on, our mind easily adapting to the semi-regular patterns until we come across short interruptions where someone talks again, then everything starts ex novo with additional figurations and analogous repetitions. It lasts 65 minutes circa, but neither I had a second thought about my liking of it, nor endured an “enough is enough” feel, even in the (possibly) less significant moments. The audio quality is also quite good - that surely helps. Traditions are hard to die, at least in recorded form: that’s fine with me.

ANCIENT MONSTERS - Ancient Monsters (Sijis)

The line dividing serious trance music from crappy, new ageish, fake spirituality is extremely subtle; Ancient Monsters belong to the "right" side, but understanding the reasons is not easy. The duo of Murray Henderson and David Sergeant, armed with guitars, samples, Farfisa organ and moog, explores placid meditative galaxies through mostly consonant chordal litanies that always manage to keep a door open to a slight deformation; it can happen under the guise of a slowly detuning oscillation or through the overlapping of extraneous frequencies blemishing the basic drone. The opening "The gospel according to a buzzard" is very reminiscent of Stars Of The Lid, while certain segments of "One day it will all be over" sound like a giant wall of inside piano parts in looping circles. The superimposition of harmonic layers in "Cicada" creates interesting movements of beating adjacent tones while maintaining an almost religious feel. This music is gifted with a simple beauty highlighted by Henderson and Sergeant's totally unpretentious stance.

LAURA ANDEL ELECTRIC PERCUSSIVE ORCHESTRA - In::tension:. (Rossbin)

Laura Andel's newest work, appearing in my ears as an orchestrated improvisation over a set of predefined rules, masks its influences pretty well; in its best moments, mostly gathered in the first three quarters of the album, this music whirls and flies then returns to the base with mutated genetics, only to relaunch itself into dreaming states and ironic convulsive twists. Ten musicians - three guitars, two keyboards, cornet, theremin, drums and percussion plus electronics and voice - are conducted by the composer towards dangerous territories where Igor Stravinsky and Henry Cow pose together for an out-of-focus photograph. Therefore, it's just a pity that - strangely enough - "In::tension:." loses a bit of steam in its final two movements, which sound much more confused and overloaded with events than the other sections, but there is no doubt that the short repetitive melodies and thematic fragments going around like a bunch of stray dogs running in an open field - typical of the majority of the album - are unconventional, anticonstitutional sonic declarations which sound like no one else.

LAURA ANDEL ORCHESTRA - SomnambulisT (Red Toucan)

Laura Andel is a composer from Argentina, working on pretty various forms (just think she's also a graduate in tango performance). Somnambulist is a sort of orchestral rendition of concrete feelings and moments of human life, its challenging score maybe more oriented towards the performance itself than to the listener, who must pay a good amount of careful attention to bring out all the subtleties present in Laura's tapestry. The disciplined freedom I detect in "SomnambulisT" tells me about suffering and liberation; it talks about the darkness experienced before coming to the end of an infinite tunnel. This music is very lively and deeply thought, even if its technical complexity and theatrical approach will find most people not ready at first listen. Even if the slow moving first movement seems to prelude to an opening of the space around, it brings instead lots of questions not easy to answer to; lovers of hard-to-cathegorize artists must have their ears burning right now.

BETH ANDERSON - Peachy Keen-o (Pogus)

In this collection of pieces by Beth Anderson three tracks stand out: "Tower of power", a massive church organ cascade played with the whole body, where clusters give way to strongly contrasting frequencies; "Joan", a superimposition of solo piano parts transposed from an oratorio concert performance, sounding like a traffic jam of carillons; the final "Ode", where low electronic purrs are mixed with the extremely musical voice of an auctioneer, the whole resulting in a mutant native indian chant - or something alike. Anderson, an acclaimed text-sound composer, is equally at home with self-expressive outbursts such as the solo drum/voice "I can't stand it", written out of her frustration when she had just moved to NY, or the lively and funny teacher-mocking "Yes Sir Ree". In the bad sounding cassette recording of the title track we're surrounded by strange B-movie soundtrack-like atmospheres where female whispers, lamentations, oblique guitars and tapes with Christmas songs and various oddities all contribute to a sense of psychological uneasiness. As usual with Pogus, this music is undefinable - therefore highly interesting.

NATASHA ANDERSON - Spore (Cajid Media)

Focusing on the "microscopic investigation of the recorder's anatomy", Natasha Anderson - a multimedia, improvised and classical musician out of Melbourne - extracts a multitude of flickering, wavering, gurgling and popping tones that maintain a dramatic physicality, impacting against our sense of anticipation with stirring disobedience, our confidence shattered in tatters by spluttering shards of lingual contortions sounding like venomous air bubbles in an underwater conduit, or by whirring continuums that one would imagine as generated by a motorized appliance. To give birth to her improvisations, Anderson uses a wealth of recorders (contrabass in F, middle joints of basses in C & F, tenor, Garklein) processing some of them through Max/MSP; yet the music is permeated by a thoroughly acoustic character for the large part of the album, emphasizing the byproducts of breath and saliva more than "studio difficulties" typical of certain computerized approaches. Anderson saves the best for last, ending the work with a splendid analysis of the lower regions of instrumental resonance quivering with intense undulations and subterranean buzzes, obtained via different layers of looped emissions that flow into a paralyzing silence, ultimately broken by the last few spurts of air.

PAOLO ANGELI / EVAN PARKER / NED ROTHENBERG - Free Zone Appleby 2007 (Psi)

Differently from the norm - and due to economic circumstances that have, for the moment, caused the festival to be suspended - the recorded volume of FZA 2007 is completely taken by a grand total of three musicians: Angeli on Sardinian guitar and electronics, Parker on tenor and soprano sax, Rothenberg on alto sax, clarinet and bass clarinet; namely, the only souls who performed in this edition, in different combinations. The shaman-sounding gyratory trances of Rothenberg’s clarinet and Angeli’s now agitated, now barely perceptible discordant figurations on the strings of his modified instrument generate moments of intense interaction, nous and uplifting intellectual capacity at work throughout “Shield (blue) duo I”, one of the most lyrical improvisations featured on this label. As Rothenberg and Parker lock horns in the successive track, their tussle mutates into a string of concentrated exchanges only to return to fighting stance in the space of ten seconds, each of the parts following an individual logic that, miraculously, lubricates the mechanisms of a mutual instant decision perfectly. The rest of the program finds the artists performing as a trio, where Angeli might be seen offering a substratum of plucked, stretched, lightly scintillating notes upon which rather uptight call-and-response episodes occur between the reed-gifted parties, intent in locating the right spots to insert droplets of clever-minded procedural expertise that rules out self-importance. Occasionally the guitarist - often overwhelmed by the saxophonists in the mix - comes in dramatically, outbursts of arcoed chords and chamber-like contrapuntal premeditations shifting the listener’s awareness towards the vibration of that mass while linear interrelations keep going on according to an ever-present, lucidly abnormal common sense. Elsewhere he acts as a percussionist, trying to establish pseudo-tribal patterns amidst “tone, squeal and stroke” proposals, or introduces sampled snippets of soundtracks from old movies - or are them? - to add a patina of recollection to the recipe, this radiophonic temperament functioning as basis for Parker and Rothenberg’s attempts of building momentum with hyperactive fusillades alternated to profound melodic intuitions. If that couple of bionic chirpers is a stable presence in my life as an adherent of the free music sect, this particular recording makes your reviewer genuinely glad for having found, at long last, another Italian musician to be proud of.

ANGLES - Every woman is a tree (Clean Feed)

The dedication is “for all women in Iraq, for all mothers, living or dead”, this exquisite live recording bursting with the right energy from the first minute to the last. Those who know saxophonist Martin Küchen from his explorative soloist work in close proximity to the boundaries of reductionism will be taken aback by the wholehearted commitment and vibrant attitude of this ensemble, also comprising trumpeter Magnus Broo, trombonist Mats Äleklint, vibraphonist Mattias Stahl, double bassist Johann Berthling and drummer Kjell Nordeson. The introductory “Peace is not for us”, with its hymn-like exposition of thematic materials, made me think “Blue Notes” and “Brotherhood Of Breath”, the awareness of other people’s sufferance at full throttle, a sense of still achievable freedom permeating the solos amidst the scored parts. “My world of mines” is the place to be if you want to unchain yourselves a bit to the sound of a rock-ish jazz sextet, the main riff just catchy (lovely bass vamp, indeed), the collective effort towards the liberation of positive vibrations made credible by letting us feel the sweat drops and intuit the musician’s reciprocal smile. The final Eric Dolphy-ish “Let’s talk about the weather (and not about the war)” is yet another moment of rhythmic push and magnificent use of the possibilities of parallel solo spots, generating a gorgeous fizzling counterpoint capped by Broo’s quick quote of Deep Purple’s “Smoke on the water” at one point. One might even try to slip this track in a player during a party - I’m sure many guests would love dancing to it, especially if slightly altered by alcohol. Great stuff.

THOMAS ANKERSMIT / JIM O'ROURKE - Thomas Ankersmit/Jim O'Rourke (Tochnit Aleph)

Thomas Ankersmit's contribution to this split vinyl release is "Weerzin" (2004), a piece for computer, synthesizers and saxophone. After a few minutes of munchkin electronics and barely audible small sounds, the composition assumes its definitive shape with an exponential growth of the spaces occupied by the music; silence is gradually replaced by an overwhelming cascade of white noise, electricity and cerebral stimulations which is quite exciting and almost unbearably hard to swallow at one and the same time. Ankersmit's uncompromising attitude is surely a fine example of remarkable seriousness, a much needed feature in today's "post-contemporary" compositional canons. Jim O'Rourke goes directly for your jugular with "Oscillators and Guitars" (1992), a minimalist-punk-distorted drone sounding like a sock-blowing melange of Lou Reed's "Metal Machine Music", Sonic Youth and Tony Conrad. Better still; imagine an infinite loop of Who's "Pinball Wizard"'s first suspended chord as analyzed and reinforced by Robert Fripp circa "Larks' Tongues in Aspic", everything filtered by the motor of a Glenn Branca-loving deranged vacuum cleaner. The modulation halfway through the piece, a sudden shift of the bass drone pedal changing the whole overall harmony, is alone worth the effort of getting this album.

ANPANMAN - Wood wind tide (KwanYin)

Clive Bell is always a treat when it comes to new approaches to traditional instruments, and a true master of the shakuhachi for that matter. This CD, which risks to be buried under an undeserved coat of mystery given that it's not exactly easy to find (here goes a tip of my hat to Yin Pin, label honcho, who gracefully sent me a bunch of releases including this one), sees the English improviser lending his abilities to Richard Scott's processing. Let's make it perfectly clear: this is not a “Clive Bell with delay and reverb” kind of a record. Scott thinks in instrumental fashion with his machines, capturing the essence of the partner's flute and building from it, or deciding instead to rape that very wooden soul by transforming its purity in the asphalt of a highway that leads to mesmerizing positive hollowness, an engrossing alternance between gigantic “chords” made of harmonized pitches and ever-mutating shapes where the shakuhachi starts with its regular timbre but soon morphs into some sort of quavering extraneous propagation. The overall sound is ominous in traits, luminous quite often, engaging throughout, taking possession of the listening environment with firm levity in a cross of extreme dissonance and disciplined stretching of unknown harmonies. Beautiful, in a word - and worthy of being tracked down.

ANTASTEN - Echos an kegelrändern (Loewenhertz) - Excentriques (Loewenhertz)

Antasten is a trio formed by Hannes Löschel, Thomas Lehn and Josef Novotny. In its general purpose, it should be an electroacoustic keyboard trio; in reality they play a very difficult music with absolutely no compromise to aesthetics, an electronic/concrete mesh of carefully researched sounds that's likely to be completely understood and enjoyed only by people capable of hearing pure vibration and electric noise as music itself, in opposition to looking for something to memorize and repeat. That said, both of the above recordings are a continuous surprise even to my well worn ears. "Excentriques" sees the three men confronting one another with a dialogue full of proposals and refusals, such as a well executed piano fugue that's completely dissected and made to pieces through filtering and distortion - or, somewhere else, a jazzier improvisation giving the illusion of a tranquil evening, only to be attacked by dissonant analogue synth oscillations. But this is just a try to describe something unreal, a record so particular you just have to listen to see it manifest itself. "Echos an kegelrändern" moves more or less on the same artistic coordinates but is quite different in its sonic final result. also due to the participation of guitarist Martin Siewert and the vocals of Didi Bruckmayr (completely distorted by electronics of course). There is a little bit more electro-freedom in this one; the trio leaves room to sound itself, treating it like a self-made creature that just wants to come out of the cave where it's squeezed in. This is the reason why dynamics can be a little more variating and suddenly harsher to the unaware listener, bringing the overall character not so far from the audioscapes typical of "classic" acousmatic school of thought, particularly in sections when random waves keep you by the throat and perfore your brain.

ANTIMATTER / ZBIGNIEW KARKOWSKI - Divide by zero (Antifrost/Carrier) 

I shouldn’t say that, but in 2008 Zbigniew Karkowski will be 50. It makes me feel older by the minute, thinking that I’ve been listening to his experiments for more than 20 years now. Thank goodness the man from Krakow doesn’t hint to stopping its quest, just like the other characters who have been collaborating with him and respond to the names of John Duncan, Francisco Lopez, Hafler Trio, Merzbow. As you can see, we’re talking seriousness here, not some adolescent who received a laptop as a gift for graduating and decided that he wanted to be a part-time noise monger. Xopher Davidson (Antimatter) is another trustworthy guy, having mastered records by the likes of Iannis Xenakis and explored the role of sound in various contemporary artistic ambits. The couple is not new to this kind of release (check the Sirr catalogue for example), but the energy deriving by their masterful juxtapositions of buzzing hums and throbbing frequencies is truly impressive. “Divide by zero” channels its intensity over the course of 52 minutes, in which changes of scenario - or of a single shade of whirr - are rarefied enough to get us lost in the kingdom of granulated brains for long blissful moments. As it happens in Phill Niblock’s music, one’s content of sitting there and sense the world sliding to complete nonsense, conscious that everything springs from that mother vibration from which the elected ones will be reabsorbed. It won’t take long, you see. The others keep wondering what’s going to happen and why they feel oh-so-bad, uselessly joining a group of brainless zombies, seeking help from wasted doctors who behave exactly the same, everybody helplessly trying to get noticed by those who have no time for them. Divide by zero, return to zero. Yet there’s still talk about “self-development”, despite most people not even being able to articulate their own language.

APOSTOLIC POLYPHONY - Apostolic polyphony (Drimala)

On the border between a pretty "linear" free jazz and a hommage to John Coltrane's most spiritual moments stands this beautiful Drimala release, thanks to the perfect amalgam of three major instrumental masters. Matthew Shipp is one of the best pianists in the world today; his phrasing is absolutely compelling and in my opinion constitutes the real basic ground from which all the music springs here, a silent coordinator and a sober virtuoso at the same time. Charles Waters plays with fire and soul, his sense of melody extremely developed through a series of ideas going from shamanic ostinatos to liberal blowing - but never exceeding a careful awareness of the whole musical system. Excellent Andrew Barker, previously participant in several projects with John Zorn and Thurston Moore among the many, shows a perfect cross between a rock-solid foundation and the display of the hundreds of colors a drummer can effectively use. A remix by DJ Shannon Fields, adding a more minimal/experimental touch, puts the final word to this very good recording, at the same time reinforcing the already high rank of this American improvised music label.

ARASTOO - Three (Isounderscore)

Arastoo Darakhshan is a young composer from the Bay Area, this vinyl album being his second release. Although not exactly breaking any new ground, these three tracks constitute a pretty focused - and at times very interesting - example of "active ambient music". "Three" works better at low volume, situation in which the functional analysis that Arastoo applies to his sources - including piano and female vocals among a series of undetermined synthetic sounds - brings respectable results, as we're in presence of endearing atmospheres whose sugar level is luckily kept next to zero, thanks to precise compositional skills privileging the odd resonance rather than the easy meditational soundtrack. All in all, a good example of sober electronica, made all the more enjoyable by the duration of the pieces, never overstaying their welcome and giving us an idea of the artist's personality in concise and unpretentious manner.

ARBEITSGEMEINSCHAFT FRUCHTTANZ UND ATVERWANDTE ORGIEN - Fisch zum frühstück (Archegon)

This difficult project springs from the minds of Claus Van Bebber, Antonia Grote-Schroth, Tobias Schmitt and Günter Schroth; it is a soundtrack for a private happening, held in Oy in 2003, combining fine arts, catering, photography and music. Those who have a sense of nausea when receiving a continuously changing sound stimulation should not even try to get near this unbelievable computerized pastiche: by accident or by conceptual choice, everything moves at a frantic pace while blankets of electronic shifts, crazed samples and a persevering tortured electroacoustic enigma do their best to destroy any form or scheme that could help the brain to acclimatize for more than five seconds. This decentralization is both attractive and puzzling, managing to dethrone common expectations by creating incessant dichotomies and antagonisms whose lack of solution is the main moving force after the basic idea.

ARC - Eyes in the back of our heads (Worthy)

Aidan and Richard Baker recorded this involving artifact live, flanked by Alan Bloor (Pholde) playing amplified metals at various tensions. While the record starts with obscure sounds growing in intensity - a cross of phantom machines and a slow agony of string loops - the atmosphere gets even more suspended as the music flows on, leaving room to trademark continuums of sampled/infinite guitars and modern rituals of percussive omnipresence. The final track "Soul window" brings everything to a standstill, allowing the mind to embrace a vast area of relieving hypnosis linked to that sense of doubt which has been the main character of Aidan Baker's output for all these years. All things considered, this CD is absolutely noteworthy - and beautiful.

ARC - The circle is not round (A Silent Place)

This is the first official CD by ARC after several minor releases; I'll just say that it's stunningly beautiful. Four movements of convulsive rhythms and mesmerizing trance ignited by enthralling loops lead us right into a kaleidoscopic hall of mirrors, in which simple melodic fragments become the excuse to start hallucinated shaman dances around an uncertain harmonic ground. Richard Baker and Chris Kukiel prepare an apparently infinite percussive bed in which the spellbinding deluge of Aidan Baker's guitars and flute cancels the many conventions which one easily gets used to when listening to hypnotic music made with less heart than this. Agonizing amidst the confusing rolls and penetrating clashes by the two drummers, who play like if already conscious of the absence of a future, these plangent spirals transport to a new cerebral dimension where infuriated creatures from the abyss and guardian angels of cats and dogs reciprocally join their hands to demonstrate how stupid humans are. With this album ARC have elevated the concept of sensual rapture to a superior level and one can only wonder where they can possibly go from here.

ARC - Arkhangelsk (Epidemie)

Aidan Baker, Richard Baker and Christopher Kukiel (of course you did notice that the trio’s denomination comes from their first name’s initials, didn’t you?) keep chasing the Muse of psychedelic rock in “Arkhangelsk”, only with an extra stroke of metrical beefiness and a soupçon of In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida-ism here and there, which might sound outlandish on a first try yet works fine when one gets used to the overall vibe of this effort. Partitioned into four extensive tracks the album interconnects, as usual, elongated loops and ancestral rhythms (all three performers are credited with percussion). What unquestionably leaks out amidst the traditional static stupor caused by Aidan Baker’s stratified reappearances is a motivation for improvising much more with drumming, to the point that part of the music’s nature appears to some extent unbalanced towards those very percussive elements. Case in point the final “Ossuary”, where the three cohorts roll and tumble as we’ve never heard before, almost inundating the fundamental static harmony of the piece. Still, a shamanic influence is present all through the material, the consequences on the psyche frequently overwhelming. In its own singular way, “Arkhangelsk” is an authentication: not a veritable step forward but, incontestably, not a faux pas either.

ARCANE DEVICE - Devices 1987-2007 (Monochrome Vision)

Do not anticipate impartiality in this review, as Arcane Device ranks among the names that instantaneously bring the tears of a bygone youth to my eyes (don’t believe that - I never cry). David Lee Myers’ apparatus of auto-regenerating feedback, consisting of several interconnected digital delays and a no-input mixer (well over a decade before many current heroes of this practice, I’m willing to add) was one of this writer’s frequent picks in the late 80s, an epoch in which your babbler was eagerly tuned on everything ranging from uncontaminated cacophonic dissonance to cultured noise: my post-industrial stage, when the classification did have a meaning, the music impacting on our rock-based convictions with the force of a well-aimed uppercut. Artists like Myers were trying to teach that life is not made of “moderato cantabile” and “smell the roses”, at least not exclusively (god bless). The two discs in question are manna for those who would be interested in knowing more about the unfathomable appeal of controlled feedback, which can manifest as a gruesome monster and a ravishing vision at once, threatening blurs and arrhythmic intimidations appearing for everlasting instants then dissipating in steam that, once inhaled, makes the subject a better man (or woman), if they manage to grab hold of a glimpse of what all this means for the upgrading of the psychophysical coordination. The first disc’s title is self-explanatory: “Rare and unreleased tracks” features shorter pieces from the composer’s archives and long-deleted compilations, including outtakes from one of AD’s masterpieces, “Diabolis Ex Machina”, while the second is entirely dedicated to the four movements of “Feedback Symphony”, an amazing if uncomfortable investigation of the roams of human ignorance around the essentials of sound. Which, despite the existence of people such as this very innovator, is hopelessly, depressingly embedded in the presumption of determining a revolution through mere combinations of words and numbers. Arcane Device eats imbeciles for breakfast.

LUIGI ARCHETTI - Februar (STV/ASM)

Swiss experimental guitarist/soundscaper Archetti creates unconventional organic music through various interconnections, whose points of reference are motionlessness and superimpositions of fixed frequencies that often become unstable agglomerates of disturbances and interferences; these entities transform the relations among the sources until they become a confounding series of constantly morphing creatures, each one gifted with its own logic. Cloudy masses of vibrating electricity seem to discover their proportional gravity in a consecutio of abstract/acrid atmospheres, saturating the air with deep yet weightless textures which one can only "perceive" rather than describe; when these hallucinogenic vapours finally reveal their coldness, attacking with an almost schizophrenic tendency to distortion and (white) noise, we're left on our own for long moments of choking doubt, then we're finally rescued by the definitive affirmation of a sheer entrancing intelligence.

ARDEN - Conceal (Stilll)

A project by six musicians (Mitchell Akiyama, aMute/Jerome Deuson, Sogar/Jürgen Heckel, Sebastien Roux, Christophe Bailleau and Jeuc Dietrich) fusing their respective personalities in a light-hearted, yet pretty melancholically tinged concoction of stringed instruments - guitars and cello - caressed by electronics and reworked by Deuson in a colourful tapestry of fluorescent dreamscapes. If it's true that most of the CD shows many echoes of new ambient, there are also saturated discharges reminiscent of post-rock pastures (ah, these foolish classifications...) and delightful crystalline arpeggios which - unassuming as they are - work pretty well if we don't make the mistake of expecting too much from the whole assemblage. Maybe the best definition for "Conceal" is "unnaturally organic" - but seriously, this genetically modified music has several pleasing moments.

SCOTT ARFORD - Radio station (Antifrost)

Shortwave music bears lots of intriguing contrasts: we experience apprehension and relaxation in equal measure, according to the matching of timbral colours, the element of surprise, the composer's attitude towards the exploitation of a pure source in opposition to heavy studio treatment. In this sense, "Radio station" by Scott Arford is a very balanced album; the sounds are thoroughly captivating in their non-confrontational homogeneity, yet maintain a halo of secrecy which distances the overall result from what one could expect from similarly conceived works. Developing a personal aesthetic which finds common elements with the experiments by John Duncan and Daniel Menche - particularly in the use of conglomerates of throbbing pulses and sub-frequency vibrations - Arford manages to highlight the most inherent "musical" nature of a highly fascinating cause of aural enjoyment.

RICARDO ARIAS / MIGUEL FRASCONI / KEIKO UENISHI - Object (Eh?)

You might be loosely familiar with Arias and Frasconi as collaborators, among others, of two artists that I admire in the same way even if they are light years distant, namely Hans Tammen and Jon Hassell; on the other hand, this is my first meeting with Uenishi, credited with laptop computer. This set was recorded in 2004 as a complementary exhibition in a series of concerts parallel to an installation at Long Island City’s Sculpture Center called “Treble”. In regard to the traditional aesthetic commandments of the label, this music is a little more minimal and less erratic, but just as lovely. The timbre of Frasconi’s rubbed, hit or slightly touched glass mixes nicely with the meager percussive components and synthetic episodes introduced by his Japanese comrade while Arias, from Bogotà, operates his trademark Balloon Kit (an instrument made of several balloons on a structure, played with bare hands or objects such as sponges and rubber bands), adding a further touch of “alternativeness” through rarefied soft bumps and unrecognizable noises, always perfectly efficient in the economy of the pieces. Not really equivalent to a “style”, this type of intercommunication privileges attentive listeners, repaying them with quite a lot of moments of fragile spaciousness and concentrated emotion.

JEFF ARNAL / GORDON BEEFERMAN - Rogue states (Generate)

The circumstances that allow any music - intended as the mere act of “expressing an idea through an instrument” - to become a means to the end of wholesomeness, while being delivered from the mental structures that systematize it into an archive of principles and codes, can easily be found in an album like “Rogue states”. Both Gordon Beeferman and Jeff Arnal represent that specimen of player who utilizes sonic tools, in this case piano and percussion, to alter artistic concepts at large and redefine the aesthetic meaning of visions captured on the spot, which they’re able to convert into elegant shapes and instantaneous miniatures that will be undoubtedly regarded as they should, especially from those who appreciate the duo outings that Irene Schweizer recorded on the Intakt label with drummers such as Louis Moholo or Han Bennink. The musicians render explicit their uncanny sensitiveness in guessing the right moment for shifting the gears of dynamics, thus being at ease both in “full freedom” settings (“Whirler-Wanderer”) and during pensive obscure elucubrations (“Rift and Resonance”, “Auuk”). Throughout the CD Arnal shows total command, using all he needs to elicit fractured patterns, one-of-a-kind rhythmic ambiguity, refined investigations where the continuous substitution of accents and beats sound as natural as the wind’s repeated changes of direction. Beeferman, whose playing I never had the pleasure of hearing until this disc, is an accomplished explorer of harmonic remnants and material intentions, his instrumental ability clearly distinguishable even for those whose knowledge of free music is limited. All in all, a comprehensive demonstration of idealistic harshness and concrete wonderment, self-awareness and survival amidst irrationality the symbolic basis of each of these improvisations.

JEFF ARNAL / DIETRICH EICHMANN - Live in Hamburg (Brokenresearch)

The object of this review is a 35-minute LP released in 2007 in a limited edition of 200 copies. It comes from a concert held by Eichmann (piano) and Arnal (percussion) in November 2004 at Hamburg’s Christianskirche, in the occasion of the Phenomorphonic Festival. The contents were totally improvised, even if they do possess all the qualities of a series of compositions, or maybe a single one divided in several movements. Scrutinizing the whole I couldn’t manage to find a moment of “violence” throughout the performance; everything remains dynamically confined in areas where obscurity and ebullience seem to be the keyword for the musicians’ approach to the context. Ever since the beginning, Eichmann stays for long spots in the lower region of the piano keyboard, basically offering a percussive contribution to the percussionist himself. The personalities - with their reciprocal relationships - start to come out more clearly as the time flows, when the two different instrumental voices begin showing unique characteristics in slightly changing settings. The rare solo spots don’t modify the general sense of restraint that the music offers, and which is the reason at the basis of the good results obtained by the pair. Improvisational segments that sound quite introvert, circumspect in a way, certainly well planned, as absurd as this concept might appear. A release that, for want of a better description, “swims underwater” to gain our approval, successfully.

JEFF ARNAL / SETH MISTERKA / REUBEN RADDING / NATE WOOLEY - Transit (Clean Feed)

This music is made of movable modules and riveting energy, something perfectly described by Dietrich Eichmann as "spontaneous dialogues that remain completely unpredictable". One of those cases in which the total is greater than the sum of the involved parts, "Transit" shows a dramatic intensity meshed with unwrought rationalizations; over the impressive interplay between Arnal on percussion and Radding on bass - totally far off the "rhythm section" banality - the air emitted during the horn-locking exchanges by Misterka on alto sax and Wooley on trumpet is enough to feed a nuclear plant without ever reaching a breaking point. The quartet looks for the ultimate purity, never finding shortcuts to easy shelters and precious-looking gadgetry, always leering at consonance like a stray cat does when one tries to near him; yet there are moments of tense composure - case in point being the final "Red hook" - in which, for short glimpses, we're led to think about a "harmony" that indeed exists: if you peep curiously enough, you'll see it shining through the vital force of these bright-minded guys.

ARSZYN - Emigrant (Sqrt)

Recordings of Polish émigrés in London mixed with frayed, dirty electronic emanations. That’s exactly what this CD encloses: no actual music, just crackle, filter-based aural defacement, subsonic pounding, urban bedlam and chatter by an entire lot of different people. The originator wanted to report about “the overwhelming noise of a vibrant life in a big city” and, in that sense, succeeded. Everything you want to hear is there: cars, voices, TV excerpts (maybe), the surrounding din, whatever. Then the interviewees start narrating their stories - mostly in Polish language of course, therefore incomprehensible for yours truly - and the whole becomes an audio documentary of sorts. Well recorded, harmonious in a way (I always tend to consider unfamiliar foreign idioms as music when listening to them), actually being nothing more than a curiosity - but it sounds good. Merged with the summer cicadas chanting outside my window, pleasing at times. Halfway through musique concrete and post-industrial, there are worse things around. This can stay.

KOJI ASANO - Final insurance (Solstice)

Beautifully packaged and adorned with the usual fine cover photo by the composer himself, the 38th (!) CD in Koji Asano's discography gathers pieces spanning from 1992 to 1994, before his debut album "Solstice". Considering the pretty spartan sources and materials used, these compositions - all of them raw electroacoustic jewels - show a great degree of intelligence and openness to unexpected solutions: there are juxtapositions of feedback and saturation-point percussion ("Half-moon"), long concrete shape shifts ("Sparrow", "Remedy"), menacing wall-of-noise explorations opposed to absurd no-man's lands in orchestras at 200mph speed ("Corridor", which is not so far from Frank Zappa's experiments in "The chrome-plated megaphone of destiny" on "We're only in it for the money"). Then again, remember that Koji was really just a kid when assembling these nice oddities and you'll have to agree that this man must undergo a serious re-evaluation process as his music - including these early works - is a constant challenge to obviousness.

KOJI ASANO - Spring estuary (Solstice)

Unclassifiable as always, Koji Asano shows yet another face of his sometimes difficult to penetrate music, this time born from lumps of electric/electronic sounds amassed in mountains of distorted dissonance and jangling resonances of undecipherable instruments - even if I'd guess that guitar and piano are somehow present. After three shorter "introductive" tracks that use lots of overdriven sources and excessive stereo panning, the 33'46" last movement is easily the best part of the album, showing the Japanese composer in his favourite dimension: extremely repetitive shimmering clusters of dense chords crossing each other, thus generating an engaging deconstruction of commonplace hypnotism; should we try a comparison, picture a distant ghost of Steve Reich's "Music for 18 Musicians" put into a mashed ill ambience of broken mirrors and illusions of figurative stimulations. It can be suffocating but, at the end, you get used to this crawling strangeness.

KOJI ASANO - Rabbit room reservation center (Solstice)

Love it or hate it - or something in the middle - Koji Asano's music always surprises one way or another. The over-prolific Japanese composer shows here his "rough minimalism" facet with an extremely simple study on the resonant power of a regular instrument (..is there a piano in there? A guitar, somewhere?...) totally modified by filtering and processing in order to amass tons of distortion while operating a frequency cutoff that leaves just a distant ectoplasmic reproduction of the original source. These experiments often seem to be born from improvisations, as Asano looks for the right angles and spots to release the tension accumulated over minutes upon minutes of repetition of a single note or phrase; one could think about illustrious lineages, say Palestine or Conrad, but Koji privileges the dirty over the limpid - which sometimes can yield very interesting results. Never mind if sometimes you would think that all your home appliances have decided to start a grumbling conversation: it's only Koji Asano, but I like it.

KOJI ASANO - Violin and viola suites No.1-No.7 (Solstice)

Masterfully performed by violinist Kumi Nakajima, a prodigy girl who started playing aged 4, and violist Masashi Sasaki, lead viola of the Sendai Philarmonic Orchestra, these suites rank not only among the finest compositions that Koji Asano has ever written, but also find their place in a virtual gallery of the most engaging music for strings that I've heard lately. The first suite "Hollersbach" was inspired by an invitation to Austria received by Asano in 2004; in that occasion, he listened to the duo of Willem De Swardt and Ursula Kortschak who influenced his desire to write this material, an inspiration which was furtherly confirmed after being marveled by Nakajima and Sasaki's gorgeous sound. All the suites are quite linear and "cantabile", exploring various motifs ranging from Bartokian melodies to serene descriptions of hypothetical scenes from a not too distant past; a competent use of controlled dissonance and quasi-Reichian processes of harmonic construction, well evident in "Hollersbach", adds some spice to this effective concoction of influences, digested by Asano in order to create a personal outlook on a quite difficult topic. Given also the beautiful recording, this is highly recommended to everybody.

KOJI ASANO - Baroque Ensemble N°1 - N°5 (Solstice)

A surprise release from Asano, who wrote these scores for the Ensemble Deneb of Amsterdam (Ayumi Matsuda - recorder, Lucas van Helsdingen - oboe, Arwen Bouw - violin, Maria Sanchez Ramirez - cello, Ere Lievonen - harpsichord). These artists play the Japanese composer's peculiar brand of Baroque music with enthusiasm and passionate drive, which render the few imperfections caught here and there an additional element of interest. Given also the large room reverb characterizing the recording, the music brims with adjacent overtones and strange light dissonances, the overall temperament of the album recalling a hybrid of Mikel Rouse Broken Consort, Arnold Dreyblatt and - get this - Mike Oldfield circa "Incantations". The musicians look for new places to establish their like-minded illusionism, managing to capture a "Baroque essence" that sounds pretty modern nevertheless. But there's actually more discovery than reminiscence in a little more of 40 minutes of enticing material, fathered by a prolific composer who - after an initial boom of attention by the media, probably due to his London residence at that time - has been a little (unjustly) overlooked in recent periods, although many of his releases contain ideas that are not similar to anyone else's. And let's not forget that Koji Asano is still only 33.

KOJI ASANO - Trio suites No.1-No.3 (Solstice)

These beautiful pieces by Koji Asano were played by Bin Ueda (piano), Akiko Nakae (oboe) and Shunichiro Miyasaka (cello). When listening to the Japanese composer's music, one never risks to get the same recipe over and over again; but his recent releases are among the finest pages that he has written throughout his prolific career. The suites are light-paced, gifted with a modern baroque touch that takes any reverential patina off the classical background of the musicians, three excellent players whose juvenile fervour overwhelms every potential weakness (and believe me, there aren't many here). These scores are plucky, even if somehow rooted in a tradition; Asano has grown us used to sudden changes of direction over the course of his career, including venturing into hyper-advanced electronica and exploiting a single source to its limit thanks to sapient studio treatment, yet his outlook on chamber music is as stimulating and refreshing as a cold shower. Asano's contrapuntal calligraphy highlights peculiar resonance and digestible contrast and, at a perfect length of about 36 minutes, we can enjoy an album which, far from sounding academically irreprehensible (read "sterile"), makes us curious enough to keep waiting for the next steps.

ASCOLTARE - Giving set (Strange Lights)

"Giving set" is a white-vinyl seven inch comprising three short tracks ("Crucible process", "Minik -1" and "Tour de force") whose overall character is part of a low-budget minimalism coloured in pseudo-consonance - picture a deformation of the "easiest" Terry Riley just to have a faint idea - slightly disturbed by arrhythmical interferences (and, in "Crucible process", by a referee's scoring...) that seem to filter the whole through a malfunctioning telephone. It's pretty peculiar music, quite appealing and - in its short length - absolutely not overstaying its welcome; I'd really be curious to hear how these fragments would fit in a longer context. For now, I just enjoy this small artifact as a raw little piece of my collection of unclassifiable materials.

AS 11 - Monotheism (Antifrost)

In December 2005, AS 11 made some field recordings at Mount Horeb (Sinai, Egypt). One could never guess the original source, though, as these sounds were radically studio-altered with the addition of "voice effects" after the return to Greece. The whole composition is engulfed by an oppressive distortion whose kiss of death has no mercy: gradually, the first elements of "Monotheism" start to revolve around themselves in a whirlwind of infernal utterances, destructured loops and anti-cosmic degradation in one of the harshest, uninhibited liberations of hidden monstrosity of the human soul heard recently. Nevertheless, it also feels like having been delivered; somewhere in this sea of lost hope, an element of sacred nihilism is to be found, its weak grip slowly becoming the guide light that finally leads to the end of this apparently infinite tunnel. More rotten beauty in the never disappointing gathering of fabulous contradictions which Antifrost puts out with blessed regularity.

AS 11 - Pneumatik (Echomusic)

When a release comprises sounds derived by mechanic devices, it is a good thing when it doesn’t overstay its welcome. This is the case of “Pneumatik”, which lasts 34 minutes and is divided in three tracks, two of them live. The latter were recorded in San Sebastian (Spain) in 2006, all we hear having been generated by an electric wheel and a tire. I would have sworn about other sources, but that’s how the world goes (then again here’s the reason of the album’s title, I suppose). What does that approach cause? Something like a drill which, aptly amplified and in contact with another body, starts to oscillate, groan and howl. This continues in spurts, and at times is even beautiful - in the first section a mermaid seems to have entered the scene with a dissonant lamentation. The second part is slightly tamer in confront, and at one point a sort of muffled chordal sequence underlines the basic buzz. The third track, the only from a studio recording, is definitely harsher, with a ripping frequency (that one rather expects from Mattin, or akin rebels) introducing a slightly calmer, if a little hiccupping finale. Not a great album, but not bad either.

ASHER - Two compositions (12k/Term)

Available on the 12k/Term website, these two introverted pieces mark my first introduction to electronic composer Asher. "For C" and "Untitled composition 10/4/04" sound like lungs affected by chronic air deficit, where liquids and particles try to find a way out but not before being exposed to radio waves from unknown planets. "For C" develops itself in a sort of dark hypnotic mantra, surrounded by the crumbling walls of desperation, while "10/4/04" is slightly more tending to the only small window present in that same building, from where rain drops and fading lights announce the end of another day of waiting. Both tracks should be appealing to lovers of Cranioclast and Maurizio Bianchi, but the personality is all on Asher's side.

ASHER - ...and invariably the blue (Conv Net.Lab)

A Brooklyn based sound artist, Asher is inexorably arriving to his artistic maturity; his second online release after "Two compositions" on Term/12k is a deep-digging three-part piece which takes this composer's minimal analysis of low-range electronica into a detailed relationship between sounds, the overall effect often resembling boiling water slowed down while dried by a giant sheet of sandpaper. The dark and glacial shadows of this impregnable elegy for the ostracism of sunlight have many common points with some of Thomas Köner's inscrutable soundscapes - think "Unerforschtes Gebiet" to get a vague picture - but the way the music moves reveals a disguised architecture which rubs its inspiration along artists like Richard Chartier, only with a little more organicism and less regular acyclic geometries. In the firmly rooted tree of good quality releases by this fine label, "...and invariably the blue" is yet another very juicy fruit.

ASHER - Graceful degradation (Conv Net.Lab)

There are a few elements: a $75 piano bought by the composer in Brooklyn, a tape recorder constantly nearby, several forgotten cassettes - containing Led Zeppelin and Police - found by Asher during an office cleanup. At home, he recorded his reflective piano playing over and over on the same cassette, therefore starting the process of "graceful degradation" to which the title refers, also in relation to our old blurred memories appearing when less expected. One could instantly think "OK, Basinski" and indeed there is a similar ongoing development here - but with a big difference, as in Asher's music there is no gradual loss of signal and particles; instead, the ears are constantly rubbed by the consumpted tape's hiss, crackles and pops that highlight these mournful arpeggios in quite an unconventional way. In "Untitled #305" the music and the tape noise blend nicely with the distant sounds of passing cars outside; overall, the melancholic character of this album made me think about Harold Budd's photograph put in an old, dusty frame. Intense and very sad - a sure keeper.

ASHER - Three untitled compositions (EarLabs)

The large part of the sounds contained in these tracks wanders around the area of "consumption minimalism", a place where many people are not usually welcome; yet, they keep going in that direction, hoping to determine the reason of a perennial anxiousness. Coats of digital dirt and hiss complemented by breathtaking subsonics and deep pulses, similar to the heartbeat of a giant entity after many days of decomposition under a thick stratus of soil, create the basis of an unfathomable introversion. Worn out by days upon days of walking around the same circular path, the virtual guide that leads to an unlikely redemption from the commonplaces of electronica still can't define the source of this deeply meaningful inner desolation; the incessant icy wind that accompanies these fundamental grey/white radiations slaps the cheeks of the braves who want to try again, their weakening bodies completely invaded by humming calls and low-frequency swells that keep illusions alive while slowly conducting to the end of material life.

ASHER – Directions (Leerraum)

If you subscribe to the theory of “less is more”, then you have to appreciate what Asher Thal-Nir is doing with his music, whose quality is noticeably increasing from album to album as he subtracts and engraves instead of adorning and appending. After the studies in decomposition of “Graceful degradation”, “Directions” returns to what Asher does best, namely a discreet pulse alimented by substrata of shortwaves, remnants of hypnotic dust, humming frequencies and buzzing condensations which – taken as a  whole – constitute a reassuring extension of our biological activities in a sort of vegetative suspension. One appreciates this blemished aura through thick and thin, a functional stimulation accompanying our gestures while allowing no evident distraction from what’s happening around. Apparently, this process never comes to the point of exhaustion: the unusual energies moved by these recurring flows generate something nearer to a withdrawn gratification rather than developing frustrating expectancy, re-alimenting themselves over the course of the composition's three movements. Listeners can thus adopt a defenceless stance, completely sure of feeling like unmovable rocks amidst a slow current, droplets of conscious tranquillity dribbling between moss and aquatic microorganisms very similar to the mental debris that makes us slip over erroneous judgements. Music like this helps to rub it out in a most effective way.

ASHER - The anguish is not the same (Homophoni)

Available for downloading at the Homophoni website, this splendidly titled composition is a synthetic, deeply involving representation of the many reasons for my growing interest in Asher’s production. Reportedly conceived through “samplers and effects”, the track - about 33 minutes, a perfect length - starts with a series of virtual in-and-out camera zooms that go from a distant perspective (silence) to close ups of scarcely distinguishable activity. The moments in which the sonic mass gets louder are characterized by a background disturbance, like a cross of modulated white noise and shortwaves, the whole creating a sense of being massaged by interacting physical energies. The real beauty of this composition comes forth after a while, when the ongoing forward-and-backward shift keeps growing in intensity, until we begin to hear the grain of the matter while the music keeps flowing; the most detectable derivations are human voices and, soon becoming a constant presence, leaking water drops. This creates the biotic quality that I’ve grown accustomed to by listening to most of Asher’s recordings, that sense of organic life, even in apparently next-to-dead structures, which moves his creations through a chain of distinct phases. Time is framed in a way that forces the listener to freeze and be completely subjugated by something that remains undisclosed, but is felt as a depurating radiance. I'm looking forward to this man getting famous.

ASHER - Landscapes elsewhere (Conv Net.Lab)

More residues of invisible digital life from Asher Thal-Nir, whose microenvironments show very little in terms of commonly intended pleasure but are animated by resinous energies which show their subtle meanings under the magnifying lens of silence. A declining sun offers its feeble rays to a body weakened by a humdrum existence, while the outside world is in "business-as-usual" total decadence; slow-paced disconnections from an already corrugated serenity introduce us to the antechamber of a reeling trance. Everything is comprehensible under the shroud of apathy, yet there's still something that must be integrated into this sculpture of unanswered questions and sorrowful leftovers; for the first time, Asher introduces fragments of muffled melodies in his creations and the new element is striking in its glacial implicitness. The four tracks of "Landscapes elsewhere" feed our need of isolation through quavering aural snapshots whose colour is modified by a patina of relentless melancholy; Asher is looking for different paths to show us the newest aspects of his frazzled prayers but, no matter how one approaches it, his music keeps touching our sensible spots with the same delicacy of snowflakes transforming an industrial area into an all-white peregrination through nothingness.

ASHER - The depths, the colors, the objects and the silence (Mystery Sea)

I always wondered how many people really possess the inner ability to become connected to the sounds that accompany their existence, up to the point of stopping in their tracks to attribute a value to each one of them, since everything that ears receive stamps some significance in our memory. Asher's music speaks to those very reminiscences, teaching us how to become aware of the world around us without being forced to keep note of things that happen. Printed in a 100-copy limited edition, this album contains three long tracks whose intimacy is oddly in contrast with the basic sources used, which mostly comprise urban environmental backgrounds that include voices from the road, passing cars, police sirens and distant calls. The whole is shrouded by the composer's trademark veil of hiss and digital dirtiness which, together with weak emissions between synthesis and shortwave, parallels the scene to an autumnal day observed from within the shop we hastily entered because we were surprised by the rain. On paper, one would figure these desolated ambiences as generating a sense of oppression, or at least communicating some measure of dejection; instead, Asher's soundscapes are capable of lifting some of the weight off our shoulders, all the while sweeping aside any residual consideration about aesthetical necessities. This music is not made of nail-biting apprehension, but transmits a few unequivocal messages that highlight short-haul flights to different kinds of enlightenment. Still, we manage to soil ourselves over the course of life, surrendering to a tangible indifference for something that one day we'll regret not to have considered more attentively.

ASHER - Untitled composition (for B) (Leerraum) 

In the 24 minutes of this audio DVD, Asher presents an absorbing piece that confirms a strong imprint while showing another facet of his sonic experimentation at one and the same time. The grey-tinged electroacoustic swamp that is typical of Mr.Thal-Nir’s most beautiful tracks is still with us since the very beginning; shortwave, hiss and barely emerging background voices create that sense of “comfortable displacement” that slowly takes command in our systems, facilitating the release of tension from our body while liberating a copious dose of pulverized steam that invades every available niche. The new “presence” is a subterranean, yet perfectly detectable harmonic wash, a come-and-go rarefied pulse somehow reminiscent of Nurse With Wound’s “Salt Marie Celeste”, which stabilizes the music into a fine-tuned elemental symmetry. Over the recent years, Asher has been recognized as an important voice in that area of the “minimalism of collapse” which many have tried to access without the necessary requisites. His sensitive ear, the acknowledged ability in utilizing few means to achieve something that succeeds in affecting the psyche quite deeply, are only a couple of the resources that make each of these episodes highly anticipated and always worthwhile.

ASHER - In Camera (Homophoni)

The world of Mr. Thal-Nir looks filtered by a flickering monitor which is also missing a good number of pixels, yet these imperfections are the very elements attributing to his music the granular textures and biotically attuned qualities that make it sound like the flow of bodily energy. This composition presents various degrees of newness, though. Contrarily to the usual preferences, frequently revolving around the constant development of a single concept, Asher focused on different scenes seamed one after another, featuring recurring close-ups and settings but at the same time highlighting a handful of concrete principles by putting them under a mildly magnifying lens. For example, voices and birds are instantly visible, not engulfed by the customary shortwave clouds (they are still there, mind you - that’s Asher’s main colour, and it will always be). There are basic melodic recurrences, too: keyboard figures of two, maximum three notes at a time which seem to represent a guide light of sorts amidst the fog, granting us a false sense of security while the real connections remain just intuitions, never turning into a delineated conceptual network. The irredeemable loss of hope afflicting most people’s humdrum existences finds a worthy soundtrack, although it’s strange to say that when evident signs of life are disseminated throughout the piece. A beautiful work, like everything this artist generates; above all, a testimony of Asher’s ongoing evolution as a composer.

ASHER - Study for autumn (Conv Net.Lab)

A 22-minute, simpler-than-usual discoloured pastel by Asher Thal Nir, not less interesting for the aficionados of this introverted sonic photographer of plumbeous afternoons. Factors: the ever-present hiss, very evident in the mix (this time it’s mostly outside wind, though). A piano, maybe the cheap instrument utilized by the composer in “Graceful degradation”. The crackling noise of the chair. The label website says “brass bells”, too, but I wasn’t able to locate them. The succession of the events remains similar throughout: starting with a continuous background wash, the piece is built on a few sparse notes rendered tremulous, almost out of tune by the poor quality of a tape that sounds like if it was used a couple hundred times. Is this a studio trick instead? We really don’t want to know. Even the smallest incidents are featured at regular intervals, again and again. The whole thing is a loop, one would say - the same melancholic circle in the life of dejected souls unable to abandon the old track to look for something different, just waiting for the end of existence without having done anything important, realizing that they have been always following, never leading. Asher is a specialist of this kind of soundtracks for those fascinating, if depressing segments of humanity, although he can’t possibly control what happens in the mind of a hyper-observing reviewer who applies the artist’s craft to social analysis. Some people believe they can, but that’s another story.

ASHER + UBEBOET - A map of the ocean (Trans>parent Radiation)

There are occasions that are just perfect for an album like this (which is not a solid object yet, it will be this fall; for now it’s an online release). One of the first real summer days after a period of heavy rain, hot sun, blue sky, all kinds of birds singing since the early morning. Asher and Ubeboet (Miguel Tolosa) donate their poetry of assemblage to this gorgeous setting with a series of environmental recordings underlined by the customary interference, this time less emphasized in favour of slightly more visible events, which comprise various examples of human activity as observed from a distant location - sounds of washing waters, the appearance of ghostly semblances, voices so far away that only the higher pitches - usually children - are distinguishable. And again: the moan of vehicles becoming a chant-like blurred memory, glimpses of “chords” from who knows what source - maybe Tolosa’s bowed lap steel guitar, maybe a radio - that seem to suggest a dapple of harmony. The voice of the seagulls on a shore. Everything extremely simple and utterly beautiful, the way in which all of the above mixes with today’s surroundings causing a moment of aching consciousness of something that’s obviously perceivable but still we can’t put our finger on it. An apparition of sorts, remorseful ambient music with a sense of resignation to the inevitable - especially for the deep listener.

ROBERT ASHLEY - Tap dancing in the sand (Unsounds)

“Tap dancing in the sand” is a magnificent compilation of less-vocal-than-usual compositions by Robert Ashley in strict cooperation with Ensemble MAE from Amsterdam (they’re none other than the former Maarten Altena Ensemble, minus the founder), a great chamber group with whom the American artist worked over the course of several projects. It might result as a surprising treat for many - as it happened to this reviewer - since the quality and richness of this music probably exceed any expectation. Ashley - who specializes in text/speech operas - has clearly influenced artistic entities such as Laurie Anderson; yet this CD shows that his ability in writing instrumental scores follows standards that are possibly superior to the ones of the works for which he is respected. This is an utterly gratifying listen, a collection of five delicately unobtrusive infusions of compositional sapience coming in a refined digipack complete with a booklet with full lyrics and notes from the composer. The title track features him in person, reciting the words along a constant harmonic change dictated by an elegant pianistic propulsion. His reading is counterpointed by reeds and strings similar to a parallel enunciation, the trombone curiously sounding like Charlie Brown’s teacher’s voice, a fascinating combination that ends with the instruments left alone for the closure. “Outcome inevitable” is a crepuscular piece that mixes doses of Bryars and Reich, beginning with a curious clean-toned jazz guitar that pushes the whole into an irregular pulse-based series of melancholic sketches enriched by melismatic vocalizations by Noa Frenkel. “Hidden similarities” presents a text recited, in succession, by all the members of MAE upon a rarefied background; about this Ashley writes “it shows my belief that the use of the voice is in every way as important as technical skills on an instrument” and, indeed, a good method for appreciating this kind of material is considering the spoken element as an orchestral hue. “In memoriam ESTEBAN GOMEZ” (sic) is a slow undulation of trembling pitches, alluring and hypnotizing at one and the same time, continuously shifting from consonance to slight dissonance then becoming a little threatening when percussion and gentle distortion creep in. It comes and goes, impalpable and inscrutable, downright impressive. “She was a visitor” (from 1967!) is another mesmerizing moment, a ghost chorale of repeated phrases, sustained tones and hissing whispers that ends the show with an additional touch of mysterious beauty, the perfect signature to a release that can be declared a masterpiece without questions. In my book, the best Ashley that I’ve ever heard.

ASHTRAY NAVIGATIONS - To your fucking feather'd wings (Goldsoundz/Absurd)

As lo-fi as you can get, this is a guitar/fuzz/tape project by Phil Todd which could be defined as a strange cross between pre-acousmatic-era Main and the rethinking of instrumental parts by Pink Floyd (circa "Interstellar Overdrive"). Though distortion is more or less constant, the sound tends to be slippery and with a proclivity to detached leisure; this feeling is just shortly interrupted by a few interferences that don't change the pillhead sensation permeating the whole release, which ends with a treated field recording coupled with a totally glazed-eye, out of tune arpeggio. If not revolutionary by any measure, this stuff keeps you snug during your slo-mo life segments.

ASRA - Souvenir à ASRA, la poupée vivante (Le Souffleur)

A vinyl, just like every Le Souffleur production, showcases the impressive talents of Asra, a duo formed by Raymond Dijkstra and Af Ursin. To get an idea of how this record sounds like, put yourself with your memory to the soundtracks of sci-fi movies of the fifties and the sixties, those suspended electronic atmospheres that could get scary and funny at the same time; add a good measure of improvisation on regular instruments (...did I hear a tuba or it's just my imagination?) and you'll really have a breath of fresh air: "Souvenir" is an interesting handicraft, well conceived and better played. It brings a sound that stays welcome both in the centre of your attention and in an eventual background, with hints to a naivetè that I found very capturing, particularly on the second side of the LP where a theremin - or something like it - sounds like a siren whistling or a blackbird on LSD!

ASSUMED POSSIBILITIES - Still point (Rossbin)

Chris Burn, Rhodri Davies, Phil Durrant and Mark Wastell are Assumed Possibilities, so I was prepared to hear something near the lines of "Strings with Evan Parker" - but that was not the case. Most of this record is an exploration of subtle timbres (often very near to silence) and a general exercise in the good old adage that "less is more". Compare the overall picture to a few persons carefully visiting a dusty forgotten attic, stumbling on small objects and old toys and putting them together in order to get usable sounds out of them; meanwhile, in the dark corners of the loft, the spirits of curious teddy bears and broken dolls join the visitors in the play, while the outside wind gently opens the window every once in a while, making the papers rustle and making tiny noises distracting the concentration. At the end, everything has changed but somehow the dust - and the forgotten memories - remain.

ASTRA - Steloj (Conv.net Lab)

The duo of Jason Kahn and Ilios, Astra create a tissue of compound materials which mostly insist on ear-piercing high frequencies that are differently perceived according to the position in the listening environment. Sixteen untitled tracks, pretty short in terms of duration, aggregate and transform energetic flows and icy winds into apparata for the generation of educated noise in finely tuned feedback processes; these interactions constitute a presence both heard and felt, as testimonied by my ears' ringing during the track pauses. Any further description would be useless: this is a classic case in which individual features play a fundamental role in the intention of appreciating something that could be puzzling - if not annoying - for someone whose will is not so powerful, but that instead is a concrete stimulation for the ones whose inquisitive sense doesn't stop in front of an apparently impenetrable façade. The hypnotic/looping quality of most of these aural footsteps is a useful booster for more powerful consequences; the immersion in a sonic idiom whose peculiarities reveal an advanced architectural intelligence is greatly enhanced by some dramatic spirals, characterized by incessant transmissions of unknown codes. Everything sounds organized, yet utterly unfamiliar. Surgical beauty of the highest rank.

@C - V3 (Cronica)

Sometimes it happens: from ruthless music generators a pulsating living organism comes to manifest itself, leaving questions and doubts behind, letting people have a glance to an uncertain definition of future without panic - instead confirming one's will to go over the easy paybacks of "educated" instrumental voices. Seaming together three different live exhibitions, @C and visual artist Lia plus selected friends (Manuel Mota, Joao Hora, Vitor Joaquim and Andy Gangadeen) created a multiform quilt of discarded sonic remains in a self-blocking totality of intelligent noisemaking. Rising from subliminal lows, metal beats, looping steams and repaired electronics flow right into a multitude of impartial spectrographies, revealing new intersections and evidences that appear under constant monitoring by the artists. All the way through, the basic pulse returns to let us remember we're still talking about life: our body reaction to this mixture speaks for itself.

ATELEIA - Swimming against the moment (Antiopic)

It takes a while, but after you put some minutes into listening to Ateleia his music becomes a relentless emotional disturbance, liable to create a complexity made of pleasure and unsteadiness. James Elliott has a knack for assembling pragmatic re-drawings of conventional instrumentals and wham-bang deformations of torrential flows of decorticated frequencies. All this comes from pretty regular guitars, synths and sampling, used as basic sources by Elliott and his colleagues to open several new vistas over vacant quarters and nondescript conglomerates of disposable detritus. Ateleia's muezzin call to unsettling aural prayers must be heard - loud - in many world's corners.

GILLES AUBRY / ANTOINE CHESSEX / TORSTEN PAPENHEIM - Swiftmachine (Creative Sources)

Absolutely no searching for purity here, as "Swiftmachine" - a computer, sax and guitar trio - are fully functional in their pretty atypical noise reflections. Indeed, Aubry, Chessex and Papenheim are not the most radical deformers of timbral regularity; it's rather one of those instances where the voices of the single instruments are always pretty recognizable throughout the music. Nevertheless, the concoction works well without additional efforts, as the mass of sound twists and turns with a good degree of colourful peculiarities, mixing nicely like in a mad scientist's laboratory alembics. These men do not try to rewrite the book of improvisational shapes, yet find their way through harmonics, string scraping, wet conduits and laptop transmutations in a series of strange bubbles which dissolve in the air wryly, like if germs of corruption decided to remain just a chuckle in the chaos of life.

AUDIOPIXEL - Memento rumori (Collectif Effervescence)

Almost 34 minutes of pretty nice music by Miguel Constantino, here at his first album under the Audiopixel alias. With just "an electric guitar, a mixer, 2 sampler pedals and a peculiar set that could enable him in sounding like a laptop without using one", Audiopixel leads us through a fun-fair with deformating mirrors and sweet/sour candy shops, where echoes of Albert Marcoeur, Aqsak Maboul, The Pastels and Fennesz appear every once in a while amidst twisted melodies and reverse elaborations which involve, among others, Chinese singer Shuang Song and a cat named Luna. Constantino's approach succeeds in most of the tracks, thanks to a light-hearted obliqueness that is relaxing as well as puzzling or - simple as that - amusing. Both in its guitar-based pieces and in more complicated pastiches, "Memento rumori" remains absolutely commendable.

AUDIO WARFARE AND CROWD CONTROL STUDIES - Less-Lethal, vol.1 (ALKU)

Shrouded by the intricate name lie 11 among the most legendary (or infamous…) suspects dealing with noise, environment and contingent sounds, therefore this might be defined as a “various artists” assemblage. The list: Carlos Giffoni, Dave Phillips, Francisco López, Gæoudjiparl van den Dobbelsteen, Justice Yeldham, Lasse Marhaug, Mark Fell, Torturing Nurse, Powerbooks for Peace, Weasel Walter, Zbigniew Karkowski. As usual, there’s not much sense in describing the single pieces; some of them are well made, others are curiosities or plain foolishness. One in particular tries to shock the listener through psychological violence, while several tracks are more ironic. Not everybody chooses true din to state a point of view, and there is also a combinations of rap (…) and silence. I’ll leave you the pleasure of discovering the worthy and the culprits, but what I actually recommend is to take a careful look at the CD booklet, the best part of this project. Paul Paulun’s essay “Music, sound and sonic technologies in military contexts” represents an illuminating read and a potential explanation of the bad feelings that sensitive people experience when they’re subjected to certain kinds of music from mind-regulating powers (radio, TV or just a shopping mall - speaking of which, did anyone ever notice the shoppers’ mood swing, from the initial excitement to an utter depression, in a couple of hours?). Interesting, thought-provoking stuff which one can enjoy accompanied by a stimulating soundtrack, relatives disqualified of course.

AUSTIN THEREMONIC ORCHESTRA - Electron cloud (Distillery)

Acid abstract theremin music comes from a sextet including guitarist/soundscaper Douglas Ferguson plus Aileen Adler, Heather Brand, Anne Heller, Steve Marsh and Lori Varga. The otherwordly sounds of the theremins mix and fight in a continuous shift of perspective, finding their place one moment just to leave it after a few seconds; soon this painting becomes a tissue made of inextricable knots, sweet/sour cries for help by extraterrestrial creatures urging us to tend our ears to gather some more data. Fans of sci-fi movies will obviously be enthralled by this mild mannered incoherent dream transforming itself in a symphonic war game of car alarms, but - if you listen carefully enough - there's some exquisite involuntary finesse among the chaotic lamentations of these fascinating machines. A true oddity indeed, to be listened when the mood is right, otherwise you could really hate it.

AUTECHRE / HAFLER TRIO - aeo3 / 3hae (Die Stadt)

Hermetic and inscrutable, the second part of this project by Autechre and Hafler Trio - divided into 2 discs lodged in an elaborate packaging - tells the tale of lethargical looms imbued of concealed energy which is ready to be sprayed around under a dress of volatile frequencies, subsonic rumbles and incidental noises. The exteriorization of any audible phenomenon becomes a bleached sculpture carved from the mucilaginous sea of pseudo-silence; indeed, imaginary voices of strange birds and scorching static lights are heard from a distance, their incommensurable power of evocation a constant menace on our alerted faculties. Those auditive hallucinations are just the hidden regrets of our hardened memory: giving their signal of existence, they make sure that our haughty regression to stupidity is at least accompanied by a well-rehearsed pantomime of anguishing stagnancy. The perdition in this enormous reverberating hall of nightmares generates malformed intentions which transform our composure in a silent abandon of hope.

AUTISTICI - Volume objects (12k)

It’s getting increasingly difficult to come up with something genuinely new in the area where Autistici is stepping. Over the course of nine tracks, we’re shown different facets of this sonic painter’s aesthetic, whose style has more to do with the peculiar placing of a series of acoustic events than a real compositional concept. The adjective “tactile”, referred to the recorded sounds on the press release seems pretty coherent to what I perceived in the disc. True, there are several of the genre’s trademarks (delicately ringing bell tones, whispered gentleness, extremely simple guitar arpeggios broken by electric discharges) but are we really sure that one still needs to hear the damaged vinyl effect in a record after all these years? Fortunately, the artist is intelligent enough to displace some of these obvious presences with a rather concrete view of things, which include casual sources such as a motorbike, or someone snoring (!), thus adding a most welcome human element to a patchwork that otherwise might result in yet another “imperfectly perfect”, cracked-glass framed photograph of already visited territories. At the end of the day, “Volume objects” can be considered instead as a collection of vignettes somehow modified by a child’s crayon into scribbled figures that, although not beautiful, possess now a few characteristics and slight deformations that attract our curiosity more than before.

AUTODIGEST - A compressed history of everything ever recorded Vol.1 (Cronica)

Just a flick of the switch and you're right into an absurdly efficient sonic end of the world or, even better, the audio equivalent of the Big Bang. As the title suggests, this is music dealing with compression; nevertheless, among the incredible accelerations and enormous expansions heard in this "History", you can reasonably think about hidden space caves and obscure galaxies without sounding like a Star Trek (or Tangerine Dream, for that matter) aficionado, as breathtaking suspensions and harsh awakenings run together like there's no tomorrow throughout the CD. Impossible to catch, never giving an inch of confidence to even the most courageous listeners, this artifact avoids "dark ambient" and "post-techno" stereotypes in favour of a no-genre fast recollection, similar to life frames running in the eyes of a man in extreme life danger: if he manages to save himself, surely he will remember those moments for a long time. Yeah, I'm waiting for the second volume!

AUTODIGEST - A compressed history of everything ever recorded Vol.2: Ubiquitous Eternal Live (Cronica)

At first, it makes you think of a bad joke or a divertissement: an infinite round of cheer and applause sampled from live recordings, more or less the same for long minutes. Then you notice it: there's a drone - a dark, deep growl - lurking under all this mess. The low buzz slowly grows, while the voices start sounding tense, saturated with negative energy in dire need of exploding. And explode they do, in the shape of "soloists" (male and female fans) screaming their lungs out of bodies like if they were skin-burnt in hell flames; this progressively apocalyptic mess literally ices me (no pun intended). Such a "reality based" composition is certainly uncommon; I can only recall Ror Wolf's "Der ball ist rund", made with layers of football TV speakers' voices - but "Ubiquitous Eternal Live" is sonically devastating, nerve-shattering and right to the target, which is the description of the totally idiotic behaviour and utter desperation intrinsically present in all kinds of people - especially when amassed. We're all destined to be eaten by the "blob" that's everyday life's brain deterioration. Autodigest is a genius.

STEVE BACZKOWSKI / RAVI PADMANABHA - Tongue rust and lead moth (Utech)

No standards or ballads in this exciting duo, only a continuous flux of wordless messages about the mortality of the flesh and the aspiration to transcendence, all created by the fantastic playing of Baczkowski (tenor and baritone sax) and Padmanabha (drums). These profound dialogues succeed on all accounts, achieving the result of an artistic integrity which requires a careful study of every gesture that the musicians do while prolonging their sonic intercourses. Ranging through the most disparate aspects of his timbral unconsciousness, Baczkowski is nevertheless able to conjure up scents of Ned Rothenberg and Peter Brötzmann, while also taking the opportunity of sharing his own vision in diverse territories. His convolutions are raging yet equally serene, getting finely counterbalanced by Padmanabha's rhythmical refractions which sound like a combination of disturbance and technical sapience destined to aliment the flame of active listening. Owners of their own small world, these artists show their absolute will to expand their horizons.

BAD GIRLS - Unauthorized recordings (Public Eyesore)

The violin/reed/guitar plus electronics formula brought by Mike Khoury, Wade Kergan and Ben Bracken makes for a non-homogeneous, non-regulated series of micro-organisms where noise and hum maintain a strict contact with artistic purposes; as a welcome addition you have the segments where these friends set up a three-way conversation in surroundings that change according to music's pace and intensity. This notwithstanding, phrasing and melodic exchanges are quite often gobbled by torrential waves of electric and acoustic mayhem where any personal ostentation is forbidden. This is one of those improvised projects where you can calmly do your things while listening, as everything comes and goes naturally like an every day's soundtrack.

BADLAND - The society of the spectacle (Emanem)

Badland are Simon Rose on alto sax, Simon H.Fell on double bass and Steve Noble on percussion. This trio plays a sequence of extended improvisations ranging from controlled passages - which could even have a good use as avant-theatre soundtracks - to full-blown, goddam uncontrollable music (don't call it "free jazz" because it ain't) where the single elements fuse in lawless blasts of extracurricular instrumental possibilities. Adjectives like "elegant" or "subliminal" are pretty much banned from Badland's idiom; Rose exhalts harmonics and ferocious intentions through his howling phrasing, which often has the flavour of conscious desperation; in his thoroughly detached seriousness, Fell is nevertheless able to bomb our chest with low-end grenades, showing his most radical face while never losing composure. Noble's surprising figurations gain muscle thanks to a precise choice of colours from his set, which he uses like a super-glue to individuate transitions and solo spots as parts of a giant mosaic whose nuances come from the artists' essence more than their instruments. This is difficult, fervent music that burns quickly but it's not easily forgettable.

SERGE BAGHDASSARIANS / BORIS BALTSCHUN / LARS SCHERZBERG / JACOB THEIN - Ilinx (FMP)

Here’s a typical reason for maintaining this section of Touching Extremes. A few months back, FMP’s honcho Jost Gebers was so kind to send this CD from 2002, which was previously unknown to me. Immediately upon the first try I had to declare, once again, that for all those hundreds of records reviewed on a yearly basis there’s always something important that can’t elude the barriers of my ignorance. “Ilinx” was recorded in different circumstances between 2000 and 2001, both in live and studio settings. The instrumentation comprises electric guitar, sampler, alto sax, drums, percussion and electronics. This is one of the finest examples of EAI before the genre became nearly fashionable (anathema!), a perfect amalgamation of original sources and modifications which sound like computer music at times, but with an acoustic feel that can almost be smelled. Manoeuvring their evident technical abilities in ways that range from the polite to the borderline, the musicians generate the disbandment of collective common sense while keeping in touch with a solid logic, driving the music across the most impervious unpredictability. A parapsychology of interdependence assisting the listeners with spurts of elegant mayhem where the need to separate timbre from pulse, rhythm from counterpoint, is absent. A salubrious layering of instrumental redevelopment, building uncertainty through intelligence, demanding equal intelligence to be understood. Satisfactory expressiveness from any conceivable angle in an important “reference point” release.

SERGE BAGHDASSARIANS / BORIS BALTSCHUN / ALESSANDRO BOSETTI / MICHEL DONEDA - Strom (Potlatch)

I can detect a classic after a few minutes - and "Strom" certainly is. Walking around the room, at a pretty good listening volume, one is caught almost off-guard by the sheer intensity of the vibrational movement given by the hum of Baghdassarians' ground noise coming from his mixing desk plus guitar; on the exact opposite of the timbral range stand the terrifying overacutes of Doneda and Bosetti's saxes, helped by Baltschun's sampler in the production of an overwhelming mass of hisses, squealing harmonics, multiphonic overcharges and contrasting frequencies that "beat" against each other at intervals so close that unison is damn near - but unreachable. Not all of the music is so powerful, though: finesse and mechanical shades are alternated in several sidelight exchanges, where sibilance and discretion want to establish different patterns of judgement, leading the quartet towards membranaceous creations with a life of their own. Nevertheless, the dramatically pulverizing dynamics of most of "Strom" 's movements make me think of birds desperately trying to escape from the fire of a giant furnace, without succeeding; their last screams communicate to the listeners a clear message: your fate is sealed.

SERGE BAGHDASSARIANS / BORIS BALTSCHUL - 13:46 / 11:04 / 25:09 (Charhizma)

An absurdly spartan, "industrial" cover with hyper-straight graphics and bar codes introduces three movements of austere, cold, utterly detached electroacoustic phenomena; yet, there is much to like here, as uncommon occurrences of intense events attack the tranquillity of our aural scenery, painting an evolving picture of approximating danger and undisguised evil energies. In "13:46" we're welcomed by the overwhelming force of a mechanical rotation that gradually withdraws its violence in favour of implosive hums and swelling power-drones. "11:04" shows yet another aspect of this duo's personal jargon, peeping clicks and digital noises mixing with silence in a chain of not-yet-progressed, undecipherable evolutions. "25:09" is the "quietest" track, a fresco of hush and sparse electronic ellipses whose substance is directly proportional to its longer duration. Baghdassarians and Baltschul score a lot of good points by remaining concentrated on the sheer sonic matter, their intimate relationship with the sounds acting as a magnifying lens over a microcosm that's just awaiting to be understood by inquisitive individuals.

BANKS BAILEY / DARREN TATE / IAN HOLLOWAY - Summerland (Quiet World/Fungal)

While we’re all more or less up to date with the work of Messrs Tate and Holloway (and if you’re not, go check this website’s archives), this is my first occasion to hear about Banks Bailey, whose lovely field recordings full of flies, water, birds and possibly frogs represent a sort of foundation for the rest of the sonic incidences. Darren Tate limits himself to the guitar this time, rather innocent treatments set to expose the core of an unbalanced paradox, thus causing countless minutes of absolute lawlessness. On his side, Ian Holloway is perhaps the most circumspect presence in the disc yet it’s he who protracts the suspensions, bottomless droning electronics wrapping the others’ individualities in a cushion of insightful wavering and throbbing majesty. That such a recipe of familiar ingredients manages to sound consistent is an infrequent occurrence these days, yet these men thrive in crafting soundscapes that - whereas not announcing something truly new-fangled in this neighbourhood - allow us to mentally detach from an actuality made of redundant presences and people frantically trying to affirm their continuation through cumulative and systematically worthless words which, in comparison with the mesmerizing landscapes evoked by these tapes are really zilch. These guys know what they’re doing, and this is a must for the clued-up ones, certain pages from the Monos book being an acceptable term of association.

DEREK BAILEY - To play (Samadhi Sound)

The title could perfectly summarize the essence of Derek Bailey's music. No prescriptions, no gimmicks, nothing more than his playing - and I'm certainly not the one who will repeat here how influential the man has been. "To play" was recorded in 2003 during David Sylvian's "Blemish" sessions; it's a scintillating proof of how Bailey - 73 at that time - could still teach many things. The recording quality of these improvisations - six acoustic, two "electric" sounding like "enhanced acoustic" - is magnificent, capturing the guitarist's nimble fingers on their way to the most shrouded areas of the fretboard - were there any for him? - in search of sparkling harmonics, percussive snaps, fine altered chords and rasgueado-on-the-neck entangled visions. The resulting music is crystal-clear counter virtuosity, a torrential flow of vibrations which to this day remains vividly unethical in a positive sense, hardly rivalled - mostly by Bailey's alumni - and still capable of bringing a guitarist to turn the CD player off, raise from the couch, take the instrument off the case and look for new reasons to love it. If Derek Bailey is still a perfect stranger to your record collection, "To play" could very well represent an excellent starting point.

DEREK BAILEY / EVAN PARKER - The London concert (Psi)

This concert was recorded in 1975, yet it sounds astonishingly modern and articulated in all its nuances. Bailey and Parker dialogue frankly, their instrumental voices devoid of any cerimoniousness, while their respective identities slowly come out like vapor, images of geniuses at work; Derek's uncanny ability to elicit harmonics and splintered bends from every part of his guitar is, to this day, uniquely puzzling: when we're caught defenseless, enjoying suave stereo panning and tasty, shimmering fretwork he slashes our presumptions with sheer string dissonance and rusty chords. Evan uses both soprano and tenor, his hugeness in saxophone's history already at full-fledged potential, his playing stubbornly opposed to the vulgarity of cheap phraseologies, like if the future of explorative canons depended on him only. It's a shame that these gentlemen remorselessly broke their relationship many years ago, as the level of turmoil in most of these conversations is enough to define today's free music directions.

BAKA! - Ephemere (Hitomi)

More experimental guitars from Hitomi. Franck Lafay and JL Prades are a French duo of manipulators whose capacities find a perfect light in "Ephemere". Fluorescent images and electric mayhem are juxtaposed in a strange nightmarish ambience; everything's revolving around real and sampled/delayed guitar notes and noises. Just when a catastrophe is lurking near, here comes a repeated sweet phrase or a warm oblique arpeggio to create the illusion that existence will leave you alone, letting you sleep and fulfil your hidden desires. This doesn't last for long: ghosts and evil creatures disguised under the appearance of multicolour flowers will entice you in a spiral of desolation before you've even realized what's happening...and when the music's over you still don't know if all this was true or just a fantasy.

AIDAN BAKER - Dreammares (Mechanoise Labs)

Limited to 100 copies, so you'll have to hurry to get this one, Aidan Baker's "Dreammares" is a mixture of powerful guitar/bass drones (the ones for which Aidan is most known) and taped voices, giving the music the "dreammarish" quality you'd expect from the title. But the new colour prominently added here is drums - drum loops, too - bringing Baker to the "nouvelle frontiere" of advanced drum'n'bass. The news is that his music becomes a little more down to earth and almost with an "industrial" touch - which is not to be considered a pity, quite the contrary - but it must be said that when the roaring final drone of "No exit" takes the reins you understand that the Toronto hypnotizer is always at his best right there: you could listen to hours of this and be dead to the world.

AIDAN BAKER - Threnody One: Lamentation (Nulll)

Starting from the margins - still working there for most of his releases - Aidan Baker has deservedly reached the top spots in my personal "gallery" of static music masters. Each new release is welcome, as his guitar treatments and amazing looping work get more and more marvellous. "Lamentation" is so beautiful, his deep strength making me quiver through the resurrection of unconventional memories. Baker's guitars are layered in a total haze, moving slowly across the room to reveal bits of frosty landscapes; no melody, only a slope of muffled, easing frequencies: fans of Klaus Wiese's masterpieces like "Space" or "Neptun" will surely find a lot to dig in this great record, as the Canadian's sound palette here is incredibly near to those fantastic recordings, without influences or derivations. Aidan Baker is a musician whose goal of giving refuge to emotions is obtained through numbing clouds of murmuring electric voices.

AIDAN BAKER - Blauserk (The Locus of Assemblage)

Baker's high standards are again well affirmed in another 3-inch CD adding to the excellent level of this collection. "Blauserk" has a slightly murkier sound quality than most recent works by the Canadian artist; that's because of low-frequency superimposition, layer upon layer, creating a suspended equilibrium that's also the main character of this piece. With a little touch of distortion for good measure and abundant pumping of subterranean rumbles, it's another long moment of introverted pacification with life's nervous patches - and another beautiful chapter in Aidan's always consistent body of work.

AIDAN BAKER - Antithesis (Petite Sono)

Aidan Baker's production is augmented by this beautiful release (limited to 100 copies). Divided into four sections, "Antithesis" is another example of the darker moods the Canadian generates through his guitars - the only source used throughout the CD. Apparently unmovable, the "dirtier" strata I've heard from Aidan in recent times hover all around you giving birth to strange hidden patterns of mourning calls that aren't actually there, though your ears discover them anyway. Even electric crackles and pickup hits are used as a composition/improvisation tool with good success. Putting yourself amidst Baker's hypnotic washes of vibrating drones is such a beautiful way of passing your time in those moments when you wouldn't want a tomorrow.

AIDAN BAKER - Butterfly bones (Between Existence)

You can change some factor, but Aidan Baker's high-level sound and instantly recognizable style remains something I could be exposed to all day long. Here we're introduced to Aidan's vision of the future (???) of drum 'n' bass, just listen to "I dreamt you left" where slow patterns of broken beat mix with clouds of loops slightly darkened by a loose sadness; from another point of view, "Hardly human" samples a raged voice to create a lopsided form of sordid delight. The Canadian guitarist managed to cut a personal niche in a very effective way, namely through quality and artistry put out in copious doses with each and any of his releases. Aidan is the required healer for sore consciences, a studious assembler of immaterial imaginations by the utter command of an instrument that - while incessantly raped by undeserving people everywhere - in Baker's hands spools and spirals towards a labyrinth of veritable emotional truth; even from the harsh distortion of the title track, something remains - and the last scintillating light flies away from there.

AIDAN BAKER - The taste of summer on your skin (Taalem)

The title captures the nostalgic character of this short composition by Aidan: its 20 minutes give the exact idea of a person meditating in isolation, in front of the waters, when summer is soon to be over. The masterful looping treatments are like a polaroid taken many weeks earlier but already faded and consumed after being exposed to the light. Even if the "taste/skin" element could obviously conduct to some kind of romantic afterthought, I also liked thinking to the rippling waves transporting straws, organic materials and oil residues in a sea that by now is nearing its death. But any negative connotation is cancelled by the sun light, making the water glow at sunset; indeed, we all want to be there for the rest of our lives.

AIDAN BAKER - Field of drones (Arcolepsy)

Recorded live during the summer solstice 's night in 2003, "Field of drones" is one of the most ethereal records in Aidan Baker's (luckily) prolific career. As usual, guitar is the only means for a cascade of looping beauty shining all over the music, which is often accompanied by a cricket drone, too. Listening to the first track "Twilight" makes me feel privileged: suffocated basses, touches of invisible chanting and the overall sense of being under a spell characterize this long-distance call to heavenly hills of contemplation. "Darkness encroaching" is a little more menacing, yet utterly emotional and extremely mature as a composition in itself. "Shadows" is the final liberation, the flight to a coveted shelter on the top of a cloud, a music that could move even the most stone-hearted ones, describing the leap to that inner peace we're constantly craving about. Of course we can't understand it now, but it looks to me that Aidan has already been enlightened.

AIDAN BAKER - At the fountain of thirst (Mystery Sea)

You must have this record; first of all it contains Aidan's absolute masterpiece "Rusalka" which, like the other tracks, is inspired by the tale of a water nymph. Here, a rhythmical cadence, a melody seemingly generating from water itself and what sounds like the creature's cry (a guitar loop superimposition, instead) all together contribute to a state of intense mesmeric emotion. This gem should not detract from the other beauties like "Lorelei" or the initial "Melusine", where I'm forced to lower the loudness level in order to let my room contain the complex morphology of Baker's spectra. The last composition is "Undine", based on a string-picked tremolo tapestry where a magic roundabout of lasting memories is left spinning in the shadow of our own melancholy. Don't let this rare disc slip away to the oblivion of artistic ignorance.

AIDAN BAKER - At the base of the mind is a coiled serpent (Le cri de la harpe)

The subtle line dividing pure pleasure and blissful discomfort is often walked over by Aidan Baker in this album, of which the basic live tracks were later "reworked" in studio. Using his signature guitar loopscapes like a paintsprayer on a wall, Aidan applies a series of modifying modulations that are sonically charming and menacingly undulating, in a rapture of echo and flanger spreading all over the place. Even in the more dissonant juxtapositions, Baker's stamp is totally his own: this music is never evil-tempered as it offers instead a placatory, almost ritualist bewitchment bringing more answers than questions. The Canadian guitarist is a thoroughbred enticer to otherwordly scintillations of lucid dreams and this recording is yet another chapter in a long book of aural rewards.

AIDAN BAKER - Figures (Transient Frequency)

A track featuring Baker's vocals and a string section by Lisa Rossiter-Thorton are enough to raise the levels of curiosity around this release, whose streaming character remains evident all over its duration. "Figures" is a little more tangible than most of the Canadian artist's albums, being prevalently built on slow arpeggios and patterns that add a sort of neo-psychedelic touch to the compositions, particularly in the title track and in "Figure 3"; Rossiter-Thorton's frail tones contribute to a sense of violated intimacy which doesn't alter the general strategy of hypnosis and entrancement, pretty much exalted by the frippertronic-like fuzzy waves of "Figure 1". Yet, the record's most emotional incantation comes with "Figure 2", where a plumbeous sky is portrayed via the repetition of intertwining muzzled guitar lines, bringing the lyrical degree of the piece to an undescribable radiance mixed with deep pain.

AIDAN BAKER - Traumerei (Evelyn)

In this release, the always prolific Baker changed a bit of method as the five tracks of "Traumerei" are each played on a different instrument replacing the usual haze of electric guitar drones, here represented only by the title track. "Reve" superimposes slow flute melodies with a sapient choice of dynamics, recalling ancient rituals and amorphous ectoplasmic entities. The more mechanical character of "Reversion" for acoustic guitar is followed by a towering monster of low-frequencies-cum-distortion in a pretty atypical bass piece called "Trauma". Aidan saves the best for last: "Reveiller" sees him manipulating a violin with masterful sensitiveness in a series of glissando layers and string plucks which form the basement of the album's best track, a cross of eastern trance and luminous contemplations. "Traumerei" closes the show Baker-style, its gentle guitar arpeggios and sinuous looping developing into cathedrals of clouds and strangled cries for help.

AIDAN BAKER - Songs of flowers & skin (Zunior)

After becoming one of the most appreciated overlords of loop/drone-based music in recent years, Aidan Baker - pretty courageously should I say - presents us with a totally different project, an MP3-only album of songs featuring his whispering voice besides his usual multi-instrumental abilities. Scents of Pink Floyd characterize many sections, more as a general rarefaction of concepts than an effective musical influence, but Baker's style comes out inexorably even in such a context; "Take me out of my" is based on one of his fantastic guitar tapestries, soon becoming a mesmerizing protection against any evil external ugliness, while the instrumental "Dance dance dance" features an almost sorrowful trumpet by Lucas Baker, punctuating a tune that is vaguely reminiscent of the most refined British pop of the 80s. A pleasant experience, revealing subtle layers of significance after repeated listenings.

AIDAN BAKER - Candescence (Verato Project)

The continuous flow of Aidan Baker's releases is fueled by an incessant creativity where repetition and tiredness are completely banned. "Candescence" consists of six tracks - all sounds, even the percussion, generated by guitar and bass - whose identity is recognizable as soon as the first seconds have elapsed. The consistency, the depth, the evocative factors are splendidly prominent in a series of structured meditations where Aidan shows new sides of his artistic being, crossing his usual magic impersonations and patented looping with pulsating devices which, at moments, remind of Jon Hassell or Rapoon, even if for short glimpses. Changing your listening position during these 53 minutes will make you discover inner murmurs and imaginary voices that move around the room playing a game of peek-a-boo with your daydreams, something that only a high-class low-frequency manipulator like Baker can activate - and he just does it time and again.

AIDAN BAKER - Remixes (Arcolepsy)

Ever wondered how Aidan Baker's enthralling guitar sounds could be applied to different, if not opposite contexts? The answers lie in these treatments of the Canadian's sonic sources by the eleven featured artists. "Remixes" is more a curiosity than a proper Baker release, nevertheless it's worth a good listen as all tracks suggest a nice alternative approach to Aidan's hypnotic figurations. Apart from the drum'n'bass/techno oddities of people like Millimetric and Naw (the latter's "Cloning" sounds more Muslimgauze than Baker...), there are some real jewels: Andrea Marutti is pretty respectful of the original piece, his reconstruction of "Metamorphose, 2nd stage" quite beautiful with its powerful drones on the verge of explosion, while Cordell Klier's "I've been waiting for you" is a glacial observation of a dying world. Fear Falls Burning's "Gossamer" is highly evocative in its nightmarish colours; the same could be told of "When you scream..." by Troum, verily the most PinkFloydian track of the whole disc, which is aptly concluded by a majestic superimposition of humming guitars by Duane Pitre/Pilotram, whose "Disfigured" is maybe the most incisive statement in a peculiar album.

AIDAN BAKER - Periodic (Crucial Bliss)

Even if quite atypical when compared to his abitual drone works, Aidan Baker's "Periodic" is a thunderous statement by the Canadian sound (de)constructor. Generated by "manipulated/damaged/re-assembled cassette 4-track recordings of electric/acoustic guitars and drums", this has to be Baker's most serious attempt to enter the realm of hallucinating post-industrial disease. Surreal nightmares and incinerating eruptions of post-mortem frequencies make us think about collapsing buildings; during semi-organic assemblages of mantric desperation, all instruments melt into harsh concoctions where even the roughest pulse gets chewed and digested by superior evil forces. The hiss and the distortion of the tapes add a nice touch of degradation to an album whose emotional level diminishes with the passage of time, like if we already knew we're directed straight to hell. The hypnotic concentration of many of Aidan's masterpieces is here reduced to burning coal - but, naturally, the final result remains absolutely noteworthy.

AIDAN BAKER - Dog fox gone to ground (Afe)

Yet another CD by Aidan Baker, you might say. Yes, prolificacy is a double-edge sword: usually, too many releases are the clear signal of a pumped self-belief which clouds the eyes of people taking advantage of the ingenuity - and fat wallets - of record collectors to churn out useless, totally hollow albums which generate absolutely unjustifiable cults. Names? Too many: look no further than the 95% of dark ambient, trance, esoteric catalogs. Luckily, Aidan Baker's numerous examples of enchanting creativity are the exception confirming the rule, as immediately evidenced by the first minutes of this, a record completely made with acoustic guitar with no overdubs that nonetheless sounds exactly "Baker", a testimony to an immediately recognizable style which - forgive this rare vanity attack - I'm proud to have been among the first ones to champion. Therefore, more than describing once again the bewitching loops and the shimmering, enthralling waves of these beautiful meditations, I'll just invite you to learn to raise your aerials and support real artists - like Aidan - rather than being subjugated by low-budget saints and presumed sound healers whose Paypal account grows thanks to your inattention. Kudos to Afe for releasing this rare example of sensitive hypnosis.

AIDAN BAKER - The sea swells a bit... (A Silent Place)

Three new handwritten messages from the hermitage of placental guitar stratification, courtesy of Touching Extremes' admittedly favourite looper, whose output level - both in quantity and quality - would suggest some sort of subscription to ensure long hours of blissful concentration. To the tracks: "The sea swells a bit..." opens the album with a two-chord slow litany, a succession of quivering radiations, concentric circles, barely detectable drums. A sense of wholeness pervades the room, its levity mixed with the pre-storm wind brushing the tree leaves on the outside; a masterpiece in the tradition of the very best work by Aidan. The splendidly titled "When sailors die" explores a drum pattern-cum-undefined bass line in an engrossing piece whose malaised lyricism induces the demise of our faddishness by putting a veil of subdued menace all around the mental places. "Davey Jones' locker" begins with a Pink Floyd-like arpeggiated invocation, immediately confronted by "spirit voices" captured on tape; then a new drum design comes in and the rest of the instruments follows accordingly, bringing the listener towards the fringe of what could be defined as 21st century psychedelia. Aidan Baker doesn't know the meaning of "pas faux"; his artistic level remains several tides (pun intended) in advance compared to the average flock of wannabes he's usually - erroneously - associated with.

AIDAN BAKER - Pendulum (Gears of Sand)

"All sounds produced by electric guitar recorded in a single take then doubled and the double reversed". Easy, one would say - but it ain't so. "Pendulum" is made of main roads that get abandoned to throw a look beyond the fences, only to discover that the sullen atmosphere you perceive is not only in your imagination but is born from the position in which life has forced you to remain. Baker's sound here is ominous and dirty, blemished by those small imperfections that any other guitarist would try to eliminate; instead, he uses them as speculative means of introverted stimulation, massaging both our curiosity and sense of anticipation with fragmentary distortions and huge low resonances. All the shortsighted definitions that usually come to mind are finally neutralized, in favour of a total emancipation of the sound from the instrument that generates it. Insurmountable barriers appear now as approachable, the maximization of the effect treatment as a way to understanding rules that do exist but cannot be written; walls of looping strata slowly become a complex architecture where the few irregularities sound necessary. Baker has been working for many years to arrive to these results, and his multi-instrumental skill and harmonic consciousness - which an attentive, educated ear can perceive even when he plays just a guitar - are what separates him from the mass.

AIDAN BAKER - I will always and forever hold you in my heart and mind (Small Doses)

I’m constantly impressed by the “frequency/quality” ratio of Aidan Baker’s music. This CD, unfortunately a very limited edition of 155 copies that’s already sold out as far as I know, is both another demonstration of Baker’s methods and an impressive example of how an artist can produce ever-stimulating sounds by using the same sources all the time, in a way or another. You guessed right: this is, again, a looped guitar soundscape. Yet different, in several of its aspects. For starters, the notes picked by the Canadian are often more concretely perceptible, I mean exactly the pick thudding on the string - which, once sampled, stratified and reproduced together with the customary celestial strata of nebulous chords, attributes a distinct rhythmic drive to the material, thus bringing it quite distant from the “exclusively ambient, exclusively airy” canons (not that we don’t like those, too: when AB is involved, individuating even a few minutes that are not on the level of excellence is a hell of a task). These new qualities, the usual concentrated attitude mixed with the guitarist’s keen ear for everything superimposed, the hiss and the noise that every now and then creep in amidst the sweetness. Signs of a unique personality, something that many won’t develop in a lifetime and that Aidan has possessed since his first record instead.

AIDAN BAKER - Noise of silence (Hyperblasted) 

Silence is dangerous for the weak, for the worst fears appear in that moment. Have you ever wondered why most people want to socialize at all costs, babble around, join communities, travel together, laugh insistently at parties, let everybody know who they are and what they do even if we don’t give a fuck, speak loud on the cell phone in front of others? That's right, they're afraid of silence. Aidan Baker - probably involuntarily - approaches a neighbouring concept with a 50-minute track and, by modifying the oneiric tendencies of some of his work quite heavily, hits the bull’s eye. Although guitars and tape loops are the only source for the music like in many of Aidan’s previous albums, this time there is a dominating colour that shifts the balance towards that perilous area where trance and mental influence meet. That hue is symbolized by Baker’s use of vocal fragments, which the man from Toronto adds to his stratified masses to highlight a correspondence between the basic elements, meaning silence and fear of course. These uttered syllables, elongations of speeches, disturbing accounts ("I felt suicidal", a male voice reports in the last minutes of the CD) create a confused, but still engrossing jumble of subliminal messages whose persuasive power is highly effective, especially via headphones. It's just like being submitted to some sort of psychedelic test without drugs, and sincerely I would not advise this record to someone who can be easily affected. A great release, then - but only if you're trained in keeping coolness when the brain suggests strange things: for many, the noise of silence is unbearable. That’s when they start doing damage.

AIDAN BAKER - Green & Cold (Gears Of Sand)

For Aidan Baker, a “song” is not exactly what’s usually intended as such, this CD at least partially explaining what he means. The Canadian starts - as always - with guitar loops, this time captured in a full-hiss lo-fi audio quality so that the sonic mass turns undetermined and murky as the minutes flow, a truly psychedelic stroke that has become one of Baker’s various trademarks. After a while, vocals comes in; but Aidan does not “sing” indeed, he whispers and mumbles, the voice itself processed and delayed, multiplied in a jumble of moans and wheezes amidst which only a few words can be intuited. It soon develops into a cross between a bad dream and a lysergic trial, and it’s not the first occasion in which I associate this facet of Baker’s music to Pink Floyd. Yet the artist, even in an album like this - which does not really fit in the very top of his recorded output - shows that touch of class that distances him from the imitators. It may be the celestial jangle of two adjacent chords, or a magic flourish of interlocked arpeggios, but we instantly recognize it. This shifts the evaluation of an otherwise regular release towards the “positive” grade, and there’s no doubt that the next time we’ll put “Green & Cold” in our player it will bring many additional emotions that we could have forgotten about in the meantime. My trust in this man remains unblemished.

AIDAN BAKER - Scalpel (The Kora)

Certain moments in life make us think that coincidental happenings do not occur for a real coincidence, following a bigger design instead. “Scalpel”, a splendid album featuring Baker’s acoustic guitar, voice, violin and a recorder, happened to constitute the intimate soundtrack of a gorgeous spring morning: shining sun, birds everywhere, even the distant noise of the vehicles contributing to a macrocosmic soundscape whose tentative description in writing would result in a deadly sin. It can only be perceived as a defence-reinforcing vibe, that’s all. The five long songs, which should be appreciated by fans of Syd Barrett and Nick Drake - just to give you vague references, but don’t take me for granted - are unquestionably Aidan Baker’s in style and hypnotizing allure. Vocals are often slow-ish, elongated emissions substituting meanings that are essentially there yet incorporeal, imaginary. The guitars underline the overall beatitude with elegant minimal arpeggios or languid-yet-penetrating strumming, and as usual a knowledgeable use of looping transforms the whole in an uncatchable cloud of damp (un)quietness, rich in overtones and spurious reverberations. No more words from this side: 500 copies could be enough for a while, but act fast. This is a record that eats the whole lot of overhyped neo-psych-folk rubbish around today for breakfast.

AIDAN BAKER - Exoskeleton heart (Crucial Bliss)

This time, the label’s name could be a good indicator of the effect that “Exoskeleton heart” causes if one’s in the right frame of mind. The record is divided in two long segments - “Interior” and “Anterior” - for a total of an abundant hour of music. The first half is a demonstration of how the Toronto looper is able to generate hypnosis through distortion, exploiting the billowing qualities of layered saturated guitars to bring out unstable harmonics and interconnected resonances easily linkable to his harshest production (Nadja) and/or those “alternative” drone-rock outfits - no names necessary - hailed by more or less everybody except me and the wind (*); still, the man is a master in that field too. This observer does have a preference for the second segment, fabulously efficient in whatever setting you decide to enjoy it: leaving it free to spread in the room, its suspended aura enhanced by lullaby-like oscillations and pseudo mermaid chants that literally throw into oblivion. But if we analyze the contents carefully, lots of sinister quasi-radiophonic dissonances and oblique cross-fades are doing the work, the result being exactly the same. I even managed to get asleep while listening to this magnificent tapestry, despite its non-tranquil character; certain frequencies function way better than a prayer. One of the best Baker releases in the last twelve months. (* thanks, Andy Partridge)

AIDAN BAKER - Book of Nods (Beta-lactam Ring)

The stylish sleeve, adorned by Japanese lettering in an all-black background, hides an album that introduces a slight change of perspective for the Toronto soundscaper. In fact, guitars are not the most prominent instruments in “Book of Nods”, even though they’re as always featured; piano, organ, flute and drums were also employed plentifully by choosing uncomplicated fragments of thematic ideas and tonal hues, looping them - as per customary practice - to generate stratifications of slow melodies and remote calls from unearthly circumstances. The record begins indeed with semi-inert piano repetitions underscored by ebbing and flowing organ lines, their superimposed truthfulness eliciting a Palestine-like feel of upper partial resonance that would seem to orientate the music towards proper minimalism. As the minutes slip away we start identifying the Baker known by the rest of the world, gaseous essences initiating quivering pictures of elusiveness, nothing being exactly what it seems despite the somewhat disrespectful intrusion of the drums, which - either sparsely utilized or themselves processed, as in the final “Good & Evil” - actually disrupt the enchantment a little bit. This is probably the only unpersuasive aspect of an otherwise compelling release, well worth of addition in the collection of any serious Aidan Baker devotee. Fortunately, the man’s prolificacy keeps maintaining its proportionality to the over-average significance of his musical ideas.

AIDAN BAKER & BETA CLOUD - An open letter to Franz Kafka (Laughing Bride Media)

An atypical record (well, not too much) involving Aidan Baker. The immediately evident discrepancy is that the guitar is not handled by the Canadian, but his partner Carl Pace (Beta Cloud) - who also manipulates trumpet and synthesizers - is in charge of the axe operations this time, as Baker is instead exclusively performing on flute. Apart from a slightly more evident pulsating scansion and the hint of “melody” distinguishing the beginning of the disc, the customary stratified vapours of stretched out sounds that we expect from this sort of release are at hand and welcome, although characterized in this circumstance by a manifest acridness and a quantity of electronic trouble. A cross of psychedelic rock and less-than-ethereal, frequently dissonant trance at times bathed in distortion and feedback, sounding reasonably blissful nevertheless, at least for the bulk of the album - and especially in the conclusive track “Brief an Milena”, probably the best segment together with “Brief an Felice”. An attractive diversion from the loopmeister’s canons, while my first aural encounter with Beta Cloud can definitely be considered an encouraging one.

AIDAN BAKER / LEAH BUCKAREFF / NADJA - Trinity (Die Stadt)

The traditional event-related CD issue by Die Stadt sees the two members of Nadja in separate solo sets at first then working together as duo, as the world by now knows them. The concert at “Friese” in Bremen on April 20, 2008 was the occasion to show the diverse yet corresponding talents of Baker and Buckareff, who - not surprisingly - present the most hypnotic suggestions over the course of their soloist exhibitions, reserving the more muscular kind of entrancement for the Nadja performance. The guitarist starts from a series of static layovers to engender cascades and garlands of tremulous notes, the constant billowing of spotless tones at the basis of ten minutes of idyllic floating around the same tonal centre. Buckareff remains, quite expectedly, in the lower districts of the frequency spectrum; the gradual slow pulse of the piece is as bewitching as her partner’s, a black cloud of threat perennially hovering upon the listener’s head, without lightning. The final and longest track finds Nadja introducing a skeletal cadenced component in their dome of harshly saturated drones, the result slightly martial but equally stirring - especially when the volume goes way up. Nothing more, nothing less than the commendable qualities we always expect from both these artists and the German label.

BORIS BALTSCHUL / AXEL DÖRNER / KAI FAGASCHINSKI - No furniture (Creative Sources)

"No furniture", created with sampler, computer, trumpet and clarinet, is a composition exuding intelligence. One can't gauge its value simply by stating "I like/I don't"; you just have to incline your sense of perception that necessary bit in order to experiment a powerful meltdown on yourself. The sounds generated by Baltschun, Dörner and Fagaschinski seem to have an ocular quality, like they were able to determine where YOU - as the listener - must stand and not viceversa; their total polivalence is the result of a pretty unique timbral research, even in this crowded field of "avant art". The musicians are sound-engineering daydreamers, transforming ditchwaters into a sparkling farewell to normality; amalgamators of endangered ideas, they escape hermetisms keeping the same intensity level of a moving-coil mechanism. This music's repassage through exhaustive analysis will guarantee its place among the most innovative exhibitions of indeterminate mastery. At the end of the day I still don't know how to decipher and define the complex modules that form the music's skeleton.

ELLEN BAND / DAVID LEE MYERS - Two ships (Pogus)

The timeless character of this collaboration is accented by its continuous flux of unpredictability, in a soundscape where environmental reverberations and polymorphic extentions of invaluable feedbacks "singing their own song" generate a truly involving experience. This is music made of extremely slow movements, subtle nuances and intelligent sensitiveness, at times sounding like a dozen radios emitting their last signals from the bottom of a mire, with birds and aquatic fauna joining in amazement and turning the dial for a better tuning; Band and Myers wrap their own clothes around each other, never trying to impose a basic value, always dancing together on the edge of hallucination. Listening to "Two ships" brings many beautiful gifts to our desire for detachment from the body - and that sounds incredible, given the deep complexity of Ellen and David's visions.

BILLY BAO - R'n'R granulator (w.m.o/r)

Billy Bao's noisy supergroup comprises Xabier Erkizia, Alberto Lopez, Pablo Reche, Mattin and Alan Courtis. Four truly sick tracks find the comrades playing ultra-distorted, angular guitar lines which get annihilated and/or chomped and spit out by various kinds of computer treatment, while the longest piece "El grado zero del pulso" is an extremely minimal percussive beat, echoed by modified ghosts of frequency as the time goes by. The record ends with a wonderful low rumble that extends its duration for long minutes, like a never ending thunder capable to lull us to sleep instead of scarying us. As usual with everything coming from Mattin's label, there is no compromise to any aesthetic law: the music is harshly sincere and direct to the bone; take it or leave it, this is as essential and brutally honest as you can get.

RUTH BARBERAN - Capacidad de pérdida (Creative Sources)

Trumpet player Ruth Barberàn belongs in that area of improvisers that play wind instruments exploiting their more obscure cavities in a completely new approach to virgin territories, thereby also inventing a modern vocabulary. In "Capacidad de pérdida", Ruth hoards lots of strange emissions and uses them to shut down every conceivable door leading to a "conventional" way of playing: we hear expertise and ingenuity in equal doses, the instrumental machinery radically altered by some kind of goblin robbing "regular" notes and leaving breath, tongue, saliva and fingers discussing about a future that has to be completely reinvented. Hell-bent on sheer gestural significance, distrustful of everyone in the perfect ruffle between the disclosure of a new secret and the opprobrium of ignorant reactions, this girl walks away with her head well high, like if she's telling us "Do it yourself...if you're able to!"

RUTH BARBERAN / MARGARIDA GARCIA / ALFREDO COSTA MONTEIRO / FERRAN FAGES - Octante (L'innomable)

The sounds that this quartet produces are probably the ones heard by an aching tooth's nerve before the dentist's machinery comes to devitalize it. Sometimes it gets really next to impossible distinguishing who plays what: is that sound of broken bones in a reverse closet Garcia's bass or Fages' clicking on pickups? How to separate the protrusive hiss of an almost dead accordion (I got you, Alfredo) from Ruth Barberan's strangling of her valves? And what about my ears ringing after being bombarded with splitting fits of mega-highs? The fact is that I'm lost for words to describe the almost surreal dynamics elicited by this poker of noise-gnomes; Ruth, Margarida, Alfredo and Ferran could carve the fat off an obese person with their scorching splinters, then burn it to use its fumes in another record. Now, where did I write the phone number of that tinnitus specialist?

BARK! - Contraption (Psi) 

Against the laziness of the cerebral circuits, and virtually dedicated to the brigade that waits for the moment in which music will be brought back to the ones who should officially own it, comes this exercise in uncontrollable instigation to disobedience recorded by Rex Casswell (electric guitar), Phillip Marks (percussion) and Paul Obermayer (samples). Nine tracks that fight the e-commerce of presets, laptops and pro-tooled bedclothes through the one and only available weapon: instant fancifulness. “Interplay” is a word that’s too often used without really considering its real meaning; this time, though, it makes all the sense in the world, as these three musicians not only listen - with the utmost attention - to what they reciprocally do, but also let us intuit what’s going to fill the blank spaces, leaving a little margin for the sounds to self-determine in order to extract immediate reactions and indeterminate enthusiasm from our systems, cranial twitches and spastic foot-beats augmenting their intensity in parallel with the puddles of scintillating liquids and ruptured percussive patterns characterizing spectacular tracks like “Snout” or “Mr Pointy”, the latter my overall favourite (think Last Exit put in a meat grinder with Bill Bruford’s trademark snare drum). Contrarily to many well known improvising motor-mouths whose redundancy leads them to repeated three-and-outs, Bark! is that kind of ensemble that deteriorates the patience of saints through insistent pricks to common sense that nevertheless cause an irrepressible smile of approval. A true fusion of radical gestures and wide-eyed electronic sapience that calls for an immediate check by the inquisitive minds whose goodness of heart makes them trust this obsessive scribbler.

BARKINGSIDE - Barkingside (Emanem)

This quartet’s name derives from the fact that none of the involved parties has ever been to the outer London suburb of Barkingside. If this means something in particular or it’s some sort of secret code we really don’t know. This aside, the four companions were recorded in different occasions - the first two tracks in Cambridge, 2006, the third in 2007 at the Freedom of the City festival. All three improvisations contain large doses of chiaroscuro interplay, with rare moments of clamour; basically, they sound like seamed preludes and interludes with ample spaces given to single instrumentalists to demonstrate a prowess that goes beyond the collective homogeneity. Alex Ward’s clarinet timbre is both matter-of-factly and highly refined, his control of nuances total during interchanges and soliloquies demonstrating that the meaning of “note squandering” is unknown to him. Pianist Alexander Hawkins introduces a half-formal, half-unchained method of choosing colours, resulting in several pictures of nervous positivity, still devoid of hypertensive gestures. The orthodoxy factor is taken care of too, courtesy of double bassist Dominic Lash whose work on the instrument is refreshingly snappy but, at the same time, almost sartorial in choosing links and connections. Paul May is the tickler of the group, always suggesting new frames which he promptly disintegrates, sprouting rhythmic concepts one after another with youthful enthusiasm. An ensemble that leaves a positive impression without actually doing nothing truly astounding. That speaks volumes.

MARC BARON / BERTRAND DENZLER / JEAN-LUC GUIONNET / STÉPHANE RIVES - Propagations (Potlatch)

The idea of a saxophone quartet might instantly recall ROVA, but “Propagations” certainly does not belong to that kind of expression. Two altos (Baron and Guionnet), a tenor (Denzler) and a soprano (Rives) are the tools that give life to this concise piece, a pretty homogeneous improvisation that is nothing but another try to exorcise the concept that every secret in this artistic area has been revealed by now. It is a successful one, in virtue of the players’ choice of dividing their introspective conversation in a series of frameworks whose basic characteristics exploit the nearly obvious, however fascinating conditions of pneumatic peculiarity that reed instruments determine when stimulated in the right way. Fluxes of continuous notes, halfway through the sound of a detuned squeezebox and an enthralling hypnosis, are reinforced by the slightly grainy distortion deriving both from the clash between the upper partials and the extended techniques applied by the four. Sine wave-like washes are complemented by impressively unhurried sharp frequencies, the sonic mass becoming at times almost colossal, a moment later next to pale-skinned and, just apparently, weak. Silence, when it appears, is soon disturbed by gentle hissing and tongue clicking and popping, only to re-launch the musicians towards those slanted settings in which the machines require once again to be set in vibrating contexts, the ones that better represent the most satisfying aspect of a music that - if intelligently tackled - has still much to say after all these years. Silently or not.

NATASHA BARRETT - Isostasie (Empreintes DIGITALes)

I heard rumours about Barrett as being one of the very best acousmatic composers around today; this highly engaging record shows me those rumours are true. "Isostasie" is one of the most natural sounding releases in this label's history, its constitution based on light touches, warm feelings, escaping glimpses, faraway remembrances. Everything revolves around electroacoustic translations of simple settings and well defined concepts, such as watching the snow falling outside the window or the excitement and fear one can get while venturing into the very depth of a forest (the truly wonderful "Viva la Selva!"). Though she studied with Jonty Harrison and Denis Smalley, Natasha has a distinct and strong personality of her own - I'd say the main influence in her music right now is the fact that she lives in Norway; her sound rises from introspective silence, then hovers around making us ecstatic, completing its cycle into the realm of that same silence where it was born.

CARLOS BARRETTO TRIO + LOUIS SCLAVIS - Radio song (Clean Feed)

In "Radio song", Mario Delgado (guitar), Carlos Barretto (double bass) and José Salgueiro (percussion) are joined by Louis Sclavis on clarinet, bass clarinet and soprano sax, if only for three tracks in which the French reedist's creative brilliance literally shines. "Distresser", based on odd-metred vamps, finds Sclavis and Delgado exploring unison complications and semi-dissonant phrasing; Salgueiro walks barefoot in a minefield of elegance with competence and authority. Sclavis lets it all go in a lyrically cutting solo, Barretto following with soft, tactile lines that go everywhere at first, then throw the whole quartet back into the main riff. "Nas Trevas" at first reminds of the most experimental Pat Metheny, but it soon bursts into rockish free-form and ebullient chit-chat between the members of the trio. "Searching" sees more repetitive angular guitar riffs flowing into post-bop, swinging harshness; echoes of early Bill Frisell are heard in Delgado's volume pedal-tinged distorted shades. "Asa Celta" finds Sclavis spinning his elicoidal clarinet in oneiric atmospheres that mutate into an Eastern theme played in unison with Barretto; again, the solo section swings and rocks thanks to the interaction between Salgueiro and Delgado, but Sclavis keeps the whole "near transcendental". "Espirito da Solidao" begins with Barretto in a meditative improvisation, then Delgado joins in, harmonizing with splendid arco melodies. "Luminae" is constructed on a slow bass vamp, the music creeping and barely moving until everyone finds a voice in a three-part march towards the sanctuary of 70's jazz-rock. "Final Searching" is characterized by Delgado's acid soloism, halfway through John McLaughlin circa Miles Davis/Tony Williams and Bill Connors' hard fusion; Salgueiro accompanies these fractured elucubrations with extreme ease. A nice album that sounds like a homage to a not-so-distant past.

NIK BARTSCH'S RONIN - Randori (Tonus-Music)

Nik Bärtsch is a Swiss keyboardist/composer, this record being my very first meeting with his work. Leading the Ronin quartet - Bjorn Meyer on bass, Kaspar Rast on drums and udu, Andy Pupato on shaker and India bells - Bärtsch calls his geometric scores "ritual groove music", where every track is defined "modulus". For sure, the main character of this ensemble is their mastery of polyrhythmics; almost every piece starts with a looping (but really played) bass or drum/percussion pattern, then slowly but inevitably every musician follows his own path, creating a simple but extremely effective cross of jazz rock and minimalism. Then Nik adds his touches of piano, DX7 and Rhodes, just like a painter would lay some finishing touches to an already working picture. The grand total brings a result that I found lively, aesthetically pleasing and pretty innovative. Stay tuned on these guys.

NIK BARTSCH'S RONIN - Live (Tonus-Music)

Ronin keep their "search for the perfect groove" alive and kicking; and, in this Zürich and Bern recordings, they show to those who dare following their vision a lot of interesting developments in their already alluring style. With Bärtsch and friends there's only no-nonsense patterns and a concrete fusion of different worlds: an esoteric beat can be used as a basic source to introduce complex bass/piano time signatures, while somewhere else shades of synthesized waves only nod to an almost total harmonic immobility. I dig a lot some repetitive Rhodes arpeggios, perfectly disposed in what could be a cross-pollination of Soft Machine and not-so-regular techno beats. The mix between an approach to well known idioms and the conscious effort to bring on a new way of playing hypnotical yet extremely technical figures is what actually separates Ronin from anyone I could think of right now.

NIK BARTSCH - Hishiryo (Tonus-Music)

Bärtsch's approach to solo piano pieces is somehow reminiscent - not only for the Japanese title - of an oriental ceremony, such is the seriousness and the utter avoidance of embellishments and gratuitous effects during the continuing proficiency of his music. Nik is grasping concepts and mathematics to transform them into beautiful harmonic creatures intersected by obsessive moods and reiterative phrases. He's an observer of tides, an intelligently poised rider of an artistic currency he himself invented; his compositional method is at the same time familiar and completely new to my ears, its staying power pretty high in memory. In the parched world of new music this Swiss musician is surely going to soar to well deserved high consideration.

NIK BARTSCH'S MOBILE - Ritual groove music (Ronin-Rhythm)

Not a single note is wasted in "Ritual groove music". The whole recording is impregnated with impulse control, a general sensation of everyone being law-abiding as far as putting that necessary touch or chord right then and there where it's due. This laudable attitude elevates the pieces to a place where no one can say "Been there, done that" - because Bärtsch's peeled structures and balanced progressions are contemporarily one of a kind and catchy. Kaspar Rast (drumming), Mats Eser (marimba and percussives) and Don Pfäffli (alto sax and bass clarinet) are all excellent painters on the same canvas prepared by the leader; I have to be prudent and not exaggerate with words, but deep in my heart I have the opinion this is going to be music that lasts.

WILLIAM BASINSKI - Water music (2062)

A one-hour track entirely composed on a Voyetra synthesizer, "Water music" is a perfect antidote to the saccharin-drenched ambient cakes released nowadays by hundreds of self-producing wannabes. It's a never-too-present low humming lullaby, caressing the brain and the ears and slowly developing from silence. Comparisons could be made with some of Eno's best old releases, but please be advised this is not "Music for films 2002" - instead, Basinski gets right to the point with a simple idea, a small plant that needs to be growing in the semi-obscurity of your deep feelings. What a nice sensation.

WILLIAM BASINSKI - The disintegration loops (2062)

William Basinski's music has a profound sadness buried into itself. This particular release unifies two kinds of sorrow in its slowly unfolding, almost unreal sounds: the loss of youth's memories (old tape compositions that just dissolved in dust while transferred on digital) and the pain for what happened in New York on 9.11.2001, which Basinski was a direct witness of, right in the middle of working on this CD. What you get then is a repetition of a series of lamenting phrases, a mourning melody that turns into itself and asks only to be remembered, because it's inevitably evaporating in the middle of nowhere. It's wonderful being captured by the magic of this work but also it's not easy freeing the brain from the mass of thoughts that will grab us while thinking to a future that - by now - we're afraid of.

WILLIAM BASINSKI - The disintegration loops II (2062)

The second "Disintegration loops" consists of two long segments, both strikingly beautiful; the first one is a single muffled - but radiant to my ears - chord repeating over and over, a musical fragment that, more than evoking abandon or solitude, brings to my mind the effort of a woman giving birth to his creature: repetition and the ongoing pulverizing of sound resemble the extreme force of life desperately wanting to overcome. The remaining part is one of the best tracks by William, as it's based upon a loop seemingly taken from a "calm" moment of a western soundtrack - like someone watching an immense prairie in front of him; of course, the deterioration process and the constant shift of memories guarantee much more, as the two notes creating the constant, slow melody of the piece remain in your ears for weeks. Another testimony of how one can fill the pages of his own album of grey pictures without a trace of glue, only with a slight touch of soul opening.

WILLIAM BASINSKI - The disintegration loops III (2062)

As time passes by, one feels like trapped in quicksand: the more you try to liberate your mind from the echo of memories, the worse you get entangled into that certain "something" thought to be completely forgotten, but still there in your very "me". This image came to my mind while listening to the fifth movement of Basinski's work-in-progress on these heartbreaking loops, probably the absolute top of the series as far as a simple concept of "beauty" is usable. A few orchestral chords stretch one over another while the rolling tape shows here his worst kind of deteriorating, transforming a throbbing atmosphere of delicate infancy rememberings into a flesh-tearing interruption, then again getting into an almost complete silence, broken only by tape hiss and the last remnants of original sound: let me tell you, truly memorable. Part 6 begins right there where the other ends - more chordal superimpositions in infinite repeat - this time with minor damage to the tape during its course. This particular piece sounds like a long reflection on what's become of us after so many beautiful moments of our life; what should we try to do to the ones we care about to let them feel our love and respect? William's music is certainly a sign to all of us, he's opening his chest and letting us see what's in there: unbelievably, I - for one - have been able to look into a good portion of my own past thanks to his sad yet wondrous recalls.

WILLIAM BASINSKI - The disintegration loops IV (2062)

And then, the man remained alone with more doubts than ever before. Music had flown through the years, the tapes definitively gone. "IV" draws the final line in this groundbreaking "disintegration" cycle and it does it with a high grade of acute intensity and a totally developed loop aesthetic...moreover, the final track is sort of a reprise of the first segment in "I", like putting an end to a whole giant texture. Basinski's repetitions are truly addictive; I could listen for days, each repeat bringing out new details to punch my stomach with majestic emotional landscapes. This music turns slow cartwheels in the conscience of the "ones who know": it's a rerun of those life segments our brain likes spitting out randomly when we're reflecting in the silence. This Brooklyn artist casts a shadow on many so-called "Ambient" semi-gods because of the simple contrast between his articulated flashbacks and the very simple means he uses. These loops are much more than fine-grained soundworks, rather they just turn out to put some well placed knot in carefully chosen throats.

WILLIAM BASINSKI - The river (Raster-Noton)

This is a highly anticipated release, as it brings more beautiful moments by the person who I believe has inherited the mantle of "king of ambient music". Dating 1983, "The river" is a double CD consisting of two long suites, both based upon the superimposition of long loops of found sounds and shortwaves. Like in the previous - wonderful - "Disintegration loops", Billy finds a simple way to bring the inner emotions out of us, still part of this cynical world. More than a river, I tend to link this sound with an image of myself watching a harbour immersed in the fog, standing far away and having few clues of what goes on - a boat call, a tidal wave, the quest for a communication that life itself makes more and more difficult to achieve. I love all the material but I must admit I have a slight preference for disc two, which in my opinion is a masterpiece for the years to come; try it in a low-key rainy day.

WILLIAM BASINSKI - Melancholia (2062)

"Melancholia" is probably the best Basinski's record until now, even if this is hard for me to say given my love for each one of his releases. Contrarily to his "continuing" projects such as "Disintegration loops" and "Water music", this is a sort of a sketch album, made of short pieces all created with tape loops and some synthetic wave here and there. This music is so beautifully delicate and sad in its auto-reflective moods, it stands right there with everything ranging from the usual suspects in the "ambient" field, to a distorted damp ghost of Claude Debussy or Maurice Ravel put into a time machine. Just ravishing as you can imagine, William's almost suffocated loops celebrate the burial of any enthusiastic thought, to make room to the most difficult introspection - the one growing you in a hurry and leaving you alone, observing from a safe distance. This beauty is for any human being who's not afraid to understand life's happenings - maybe the hard way, but who cares?

WILLIAM BASINSKI - A red score in tile (Three Poplars)

Another beauty by Basinski, this time on vinyl. "A red score in tile" is a 1979 piece, based on a single loop whose sound quality is very similar to the (by now famous) "Disintegration" ones, as the slow piano phrase characterizing the whole LP sounds slightly out of tune and missing more frequencies as the record goes on. Think how Erik Satie could have sounded like if his most famous pieces had been inserted in a muffling mix after dropping him down a couple of octaves: a lament of decaying sounds, the feeling of a growing sorrow; on top of everything, William has once again managed to touch my heart very deeply. I suggest you to listen to this in a sunny late afternoon; you could have a lot of secrets revealed.

WILLIAM BASINSKI - Variations: a movement in chrome primitive (Durtro/Die Stadt)

The sunlight cutting through the window reflects itself on my writing paper, projecting a stencil shadow of trembling leaves upon the white sheet. Meanwhile, William Basinski's "SatiEnoesque" loops sound like another presence from a non-existent ancient radio at the opposite side of the house, like if the ghosts of an old man's hands played decaying memories on a forsaken piano. To the ones who eternalize their own nothingness, Basinski posts a memento of caducous contemplation where the safety of solitude leaves room to the fear of being not heard in our prostration. These heart-ravaging sonic experimentations from 1981 inflict a coup de grace to the whole plethora of hasbeens and neverwases dealing with new ambient and loop treatments; William is so unique, you'd recognize him shining in a thousand suns. As it often happens, the "chrome primitive" can teach a lesson or two to modern elitism.

WILLIAM BASINSKI - Silent night (2062)

It's not a coincidence that I first listened to "Silent night" on Christmas day, since this is intended to be a "somnolent meditation" about the birth of Jesus, as told by William himself. Completely conceived on the Voyetra synthesizer, it's a delicate cross of gentle intertwining melodies and cricket-like frequencies that instantly caress the nerves, inducing a state of relaxation and serenity. When compared to other Basinski's milestones, it is also a less dramatic piece but its significance - in a world where no one cares about the others anymore - is extremely deep nonetheless. The synth notes are just like children chanting carols: sincere and comprehensible without hidden ends, while the accompanying "crickets" remain alone for the final 15 minutes or so, leaving everything just suspended in the air. If I confessed you that I almost cry each and every time I watch - and listen to - "A Charlie Brown Christmas", then you will forgive me when I tell you that William's records, so different yet so near to that in their purity of intents, always manage to strike a nerve, one way or another, in my very soul. Yes, he's special indeed.

WILLIAM BASINSKI - The garden of brokenness (2062)

The leftovers of time are usually tone-deaf, nevertheless their unintentional melodies are capable of putting the finishing touches on our incidental presence in the complex process of existence. An inanimate nature, the tenaciousness of a simple three-note piano arpeggio - this is all what William Basinski needs to confront the reality of a dying world; through morsels of recaptured memories, he gives a voice to those spiritless creatures who inhabit our monochromatic self-assurance, mining the decorative mind poses we usually strike when we already know that nothing more remains to be done. Repetition, silence, a fragment of a phrase, then a distant mass of dull noise, like a microphone stuck in a gallery during the passage of cars; the events succeed to each other like in a subterranean contemplation where there are no loopholes to perpetual gratification. The naked frailty of these heavy-hearted musings brings us back of many frames, images of children playing in fields while still-young parents look at the camera waving their hands. This candid ingenuousness is no more - and it hurts.

WILLIAM BASINSKI - Variations for piano & tape (2062)

Hoards of imitators are desperately trying to join the professionals in the decomposed minimalism area but the real thing continues to be William Basinski, founder of a movement which identifies a whole existential background through a few iced frames of consumed - and consuming - stillness. The single track, more than 20 years old, is named "Variations #9: Pantelleria", in memory of a 2003 residency particularly enjoyed by the artist, who doesn't hide his love for the Italian island he frequently visits. A short, delicate, Satie-tinged piano arpeggio is looped and repeated all over the piece in a sort of conceptual continuity with Basinski's previous outing, "The garden of brokenness". The defining touch comes - once again - courtesy of the tape slipping along the play head, "revealing", as the composer says, "an extraordinary counterpoint (in reverse) on the other side". A typical crossover phenomenon that, in this particular case, seems to connect the feelings of calmness and anxiety that everyone (?) experiences over the course of inner growth. This piano figure walks parallel to a quick sequence of dampened bumps and ill-coloured, warped suggestions of misshapen harmony, the whole sounding like a relentless hallucination heard through cushioned walls. Every once in a while, the basic loop is brought forth in the mix, without its unfathomable, inscrutable accompaniment, as to remind us that no matter the ordeals one goes through, there will always be a guide light to save our head from crumbling. It's undoubtedly one of the very best efforts by this disintegrator of loops and souls, setting an even higher standard that many will reach for, miserably falling short as always.

WILLIAM BASINSKI - Shortwave music (2062)

The first four tracks of "Shortwave music" constitute the original nucleus of a much sought-after Noton LP from 1997, while "Particle showers", closing the CD, is an additional track that brings the total duration to almost one hour, everything according to the high standards that are typically expected from the Brooklyn-based artist. Those who don't know this material and associate Basinski with albums like "Disintegration loops" or "Melancholia" will be partially surprised, as the cold embrace that the shortwaves give to the pieces is often able to swathe whatever sense of heartbreak one may feel. Considering that this composer became known worldwide for the association of his mournful repetitions and the most bloodcurdling event in modern history, it is curious that a wonderful moment like "Fringe area" - created, like all the rest, in 1982 (!) - sounds like a prophetic vision of what was to happen in New York 19 years later: a couple of decadent, nostalgic loops are encrusted by the frozen evidences of hesitant underbrush signals, a highly emotional moment for pondering about the intangible elements of our most intimate experiences that would be the perfect soundtrack for a documentary about desolated metropolitan areas. "On a frontier of wires", lasting almost 24 minutes, decrees the triumph of cruel disturbances, unsociable frequency cascades wrestling with sick calmness to underscore a circumspect walk through the ruins of a soul destroyed by self-doubt and angst. Different, yes, but an instantly recognizable "Basinski must" nevertheless.

WILLIAM BASINSKI - El Camino Real (2062)

Recurrence is the basis of security, and nothing more than a cyclical repetition of something perceived as protective puts us in contact with that state of non-objective vision of reality that's probably the best condition we, as erstwhile sensitive human beings, want to experience. "El Camino Real", William Basinski's latest emotional stream, is the perfect means to reach that level. Constructed upon a single orchestral loop, conductive to the third instalment of "Disintegration Loops" as far as sheer evocative power is concerned, this wonderful piece is another stunning example of Basinski's sonic poetry, capable at its best of penetrating even the most stubborn defense, forcing us to ineluctably accept the poignant burden that its uncertain timbral definition provokes more or less always. Those familiar with Basinski's work don't need my words to understand: the loop - artfully misaligned - creates instead a slowly swaying balance that facilitates the flow of positive energy, sometimes down to moving depths. I've seen people who I esteem very highly crying while listening to this album, and that should count for something if we still believe we're able to "feel". On the other hand, this record is also perfectly fit for "active ambient" purposes, its presence a reassuring one in keeping with the above mentioned sense of safety that the best hypnotic music invariably generates. It's easy to associate "El Camino Real" to the unchanging movement of a placid sea; this brought a distant comparison with the recent, gorgeous Iain Stewart/Keith Berry DVD "58° North" in which heartbreaking marine vistas were paired with Berry's inspired aural visions. Still, Basinski remains one of the very few artists in the last twenty years or so that literally have given birth to a genre from nothing. This CD, one of his best, fully reinforces my theory.

WILLIAM BASINSKI / RICHARD CHARTIER - Untitled 1-3 (Line)

There are records that were born to be milestones since the very beginning, without further explanation needed. One just starts playing them, and something clicks - “that’s it” - their presence becoming instantly necessary. The fact that “Untitled” was reissued only four years after its first release (on the Spekk label) says it all; then again, circa 17 minutes of additional materials were added in this edition (remastered by Taylor Deupree), so enthrallingly gorgeous that alone are worthy of owning this CD. For the aliens that didn’t get the chance of listening to the original, this album is the result of a collaborative friendship that started with Chartier sending tracks to Basinski, then working on a piece tentatively called “The garden of brokenness” (the title, as you probably know, will be subsequently used for another recording). The New Yorker adapted Chartier’s “very rich” slowly spinning soundscapes to his own experiments with tape loops and a Voyetra 8 synthesizer; given both artists’ concordance on the good quality of the studio-manipulated final version, blissful history was made. The new pieces comprise more recent sonic circumstances by the couple, including sounds from the “Mixing desk” installation in Saratoga, California from 2006. While the earliest segments maintain the hypnotizing radiance of a heavenly succession of cyclic events, constituting what can be defined as the best ambient music of the 21^st century - grace and geometry weighing exactly the same in the overall architecture - the third and newest part adds a touch of mysterious emotion to the whole, exploiting the desire of fully opening our inner essence to vibrational resonance through emotional washes of droning communions, slightly scarred by crackling disturbances and metallic shimmers. As usual, few means to a majestic end - and every abused concept of presumed “perfect cosmic order” becomes useless, for the umpteenth time. People keep talking while those who really know get to the point.

BASSDRUMBONE - The line up (Clean Feed)

The liners define BassDrumBone a "super team" and it's difficult proving the contrary, as Mark Helias (double bass & bass guitar), Gerry Hemingway (drums) and Ray Anderson (trombone) are three of the finest jazz musicians on the scene, their collaboration dating back from about 30 years ago. "The line up" comprises nine tracks that leave no time to back up from the flurries and combinations that these gentlemen bring to our ears. The most visible voice is naturally Anderson's, his trombone gauging the need of liberating jazz from the chains of irrelevance through a kind of phrasing that converges towards tonal centres and immediately flies away while remaining totally independent from poor-spirited gestural uselessness, his tone instead both effervescent and placatory. Helias is one of those bassists that play the line like the air would like to hear it, propelling the contrapuntal activities into the realms of field-day improvisation while remaining lyrically conscious at all times. Hemingway is the symbolic incarnation of the war that should be declared against the feeble-minded swingers who cause the idiots' heads in the clubs to cluelessly bounce up and down with their glass in hand; his playing is spectacular at times, fractured at the right moments, always able to shift the balance of the trio within the space of half a beat. An electrifying effort that captures at the first listening.

BATCHAS - Explorations 85-95 (Monochrome Vision)

How many names still unknown to me after decades in this trade. Batchas is only one of the several monikers of French musician Robert Massé, who was active as a composer in the electro-acoustic and industrial scene between - you guessed it - 1985 and 1995, year in which he stopped creating music altogether (he currently works on multimedia project as a Flash developer). Where was I at that time? Why I never met this artist before? Questions without an answer - and this was among my principal musical fields of interest in those years, go figure. This CD features tracks from an unreleased Batchas album, plus reworked and remastered materials from the same decade. Most of this stuff is definitely enthralling, based as it is upon heavily processed vocal and instrumental sources that attribute an aura of mystery to the pieces. Think Lustmord - meaning the best Lustmord - and you’re not too far away: cavernous resonances, glacial tempests, breathtakingly throbbing low frequencies, reverberant quakes. Very well made, with consistency and a sense of limit - something that today is depressingly missing, resulting in esoteric releases that make me laugh hard. Rustling matters, tapes that slow down becoming a mournful ellipsis of beguiling shadowy beauty. Even the segments that could result as harsh possess a smoothness of sorts, making sure that they don’t overstay their welcome. Dark ambient at its finest. On a second thought, I’m not surprised about Massé quitting. He had probably realized that the genre was all but dying - so better leave it at that.

PASCAL BATTUS / ALFREDO COSTA MONTEIRO - Ductile (A question of re_entry/Organized Music From Thessaloniki)

After the extraordinary “Allotropie”, Alfredo Costa Monteiro shows once again his instant-composition talent with paper and microphones, this time in the honourable company of Pascal Battus, armed with the same instruments. The core of the question is that the sounds generated by the duo were captured on tape without any processing or effects, which is all the more astonishing when one hears the mind-dazzling variety of abnormal emissions, ranging from the most delicate (?) hissing caress to the harshest methods of distortion, all the while being surrounded by falling bombs, shrapnel-like fusillades, deformed whistles, crunch-and-munch morsels of insane noise. I suppose that the techniques used by the couple comprise the use of the mouth at least, but with this kind of maniacs you can never be sure of anything. The metaplastic quality of this music confines with a sense of jeopardy: well-trained listeners are already acquainted with this feeling. Two gentle sonic energumens who decided long ago that trying to explain a concept with words is totally useless. They do it with sound itself, which is always the best. Schismatic gestures and ominous emissions that the ears need to reinforce our structures.

MARTIN BAUMGARTNER - Shoot’s huft (For 4 Ears)

Swiss label For 4 Ears is among the scarcely diffused imprints publishing laptop-generated music that sounds a hundred yards away from those click-clacking, glitch-skipping fizz-fizzes we are submerged from since portable computers became the weapon of choice of pustulous students who couldn't get a woman (or a man…) to save their lives so decided to give it a try in “creativity”. Not only Baumgartner doesn't belong to that group, but his stuff is largely ferocious, with a few welcome exceptions under the guise of calmer droning electronics that don't last too much anyway. Still, the large part of this CD borders on pure terrorism, indeed at times sounding more akin to something that could have been released by Mego. Baumgartner’s adroitness in alternating strata of dirty distortion and hypnotic loops just blemished by a sub-skin grittiness constitutes the point of strength of the work which results lively, surprising, doubtlessly interesting to the ears. Yet it's violence that mostly fills the menu du jour, the kind of sonic guerrilla that makes one pant “got to turn down the volume or I'll become deaf”, but instead is missed when it ends. Because while this noise might bite, it also contains forms of grace that the expert’s ear immediately picks up. Despite the difference in style from the label's canon “Shoot’s huft” is a well-built, stubborn record on the same quality levels of the rest of their production.

SEAN BAXTER / DAVID BROWN / ANTHONY PATERAS - Ataxia (Synaesthesia)

Like a crazed gamelan orchestra or an army of overhyped tin drumming teddy bears wreaking havoc among crystals, these gentlemen don't let the grass grow under each other's feet: with prepared piano and guitar used prominently with a percussive approach, Brown and Pateras dialogue with Baxter's "regular" hit-and-run tactics in a multifaceted agglomerate of improvised punchouts and calmer contemplations. If the latter are few and far between, there' s no denying that the energy level put in the music by the trio is at times incredibly high; everyone pulls his weight, forcing a balance not always readily available in such undefined forms. Without the need of showing teeth Sean, David and Anthony express their virtues like if telling us something right off the chest, without thinking too much, directly and straight faced; "Ataxia" kicks like a horse.

EMIL BEAULIEU / JASON LESCALLEET - Rock ’n’ roll parts 1-2 / Toys in the attic (Absurd)

Another “absurd” oddity from Nicolas Malevitsis’ label, this is a 7-inch coming in an octagonal sleeve containing short pieces for, I believe, vinyl, found objects and tapes. Beaulieu is the most frictional character, dismembering any tentative sweetness into myriads of non-malleable shards of distorted dirtiness and recorded mayhem; Lescalleet tries to give some structure to his side, but after a few moments of more “regular” white noise turntablism he shifts to a low-budget kind of musique concrete where tampering and manipulation of things produce a nice crunchy confusion.

GIANLUCA BECUZZI / FABIO ORSI - Wildflowers under the sofa (Last Visible Dog)

There are occasions in which simplicity wins over pretense. Becuzzi and Orsi - this being their third album together - bring us three tracks whose primary ingredient is the slightly amorphous resonance that a superimposition of guitars generate. I really couldn’t say if they managed to get all of these engrossing gradations through the sheer detuning of some of the strings in small percentages - a sort of “just intonation guitar”, if you will - or only via effective processing methods. The fact of the matter is that the large part of this record sounds quite beautiful, without exception. When the clouds of harmonics are not hovering around the listener’s head, quavering arpeggios and pretty delicate thematic materials keep good company just the same. Points of comparison, rather distantly, could be individuated in Peter Wright and Birchville Cat Motel, but don’t take my word as Bible on this: the duo shows its own distinct personality, the music certainly less dramatic - and probably also less powerful - than the artistic entities in question. Becuzzi and Orsi found their niche, and it’s a very pleasing place to visit; they’re not overconfident, yet this fragility is a winning card. An inspired proposal that works harmoniously with peaceful minds in a quiet setting.

BEEHATCH - Beehatch (Lens)

A new venture by Phil Western (whom I didn't know; he is a producer and DJ active both as solo performer and with Download and platEAU) and Mark Spybey, of Zoviet France renown and a teammate of James Plotkin in one of my choice drone albums of all time, “A peripheral blur”. This disc was prepared via internet, the musicians never meeting directly if not in a (very) early performance in Vancouver, deciding to do something together after 10 years or so. "Beehatch" is a rather light album in regard to the Touching Extremes canon, yet well made and, in the main, nice to the ears. Sharp electronics, imposing chorales of sampled voices morphing into godly manifestations, skilled synthesis. But also techno, drum'n'bass and sections that almost sound like a workstation's demo. In those instances as well the couple inserts some slight disturbance or a few shapeless sounds so that an apparently silly concept becomes tolerable enough not to stop the playback. File under "oddity" without too many questions, and everything will work out okay.

BEEQUEEN - Time waits for no one (Herbal)

The duo of Frans De Waard and Freek Kinkelaar, Beequeen belong to the bulky file of musical entities that I’ve been familiar with for many, many years - but only nominally. Believe it or not, your over-enthusiastic reviewer had never listened to their records before, although meeting the name on every mail order list of the last decade and a half. This reissue of a 1994 Staalplaat release fits perfectly in the ice-breaking experience, as inaugurating my acquaintance with the project by listening to an earlier-period outing is perhaps a good thing. Credited with “instruments, electronics, treatments, voices”, De Waard and Kinkelaar seem to know what they’re doing since the very beginning. What they actually do is eliciting outlandish kinds of resonance, generally from the vibration of one or more strings or single notes (i.e. the opening of “Six notes on blank tape”), while adding lots of oscillating high frequencies (“Rupert writes a rainbow” fuses the best of two worlds in that sense) and trance/ritual waste materials. You might often be tempted to call this record drone-based, yet it’s not exclusively that: the vu-meters indicating the level of abstractness point to the red area quite frequently, and there’s nothing that can be acceptably defined as monothematic or minimal, unless we want to consider enthralling looped segments as such (“The shore of leaves” being dazzling stuff indeed, somehow reminding yours truly of Zoviet France; the same goes for the percussive “V-time”). In essence, this album still sounds modern enough for us not to neglect it, leaving the door of the room of past experience ajar to get a glance at our memories. Even those about previously unheard music.

MARC BEHRENS - Transition (Edition) - Security vs. Freedom (Edition)

Both these projects are released in a double 3-inch CD format with the same kind of graphic presentation, namely cards with striking images and photos from various cities and contexts, all of them expressing an almost heartbreaking desolation and/or experimenting with lights and colours. It all looks and sounds like a conceptual continuity but any technical disquisition is put on hold as soon as the sound comes out of the speakers. Behrens' music is a set of measures of a listening space that's scanned, painted and finally invaded by waves, transmissions, artificial environments and extreme frequencies definitely marking the membranes. There aren't two compositions alike in the four discs; forms, angles, cold breezes and mercurial acoustic behaviors zero in on your head's centre, retrofitting the brain with the necessary power to catch a glimpse of the upcoming silent apocalypses that your whole system will experience if you are in the right frame of mind. Better listen to this couple of double sets consecutively; then, everything will seem perfectly clear, no matter if no one knows what remains of that "everything" after your aural equilibrium is more or less gone.

MARC BEHRENS - Animistic (for Donatella) (Auf Abwegen)

As usual, Marc Behrens' configurations give some food for thought. By listening to "Animistic" we're projected into an almost intimidating no man's land, as Behrens' field recordings are integrated in a soundscape where apparent silences dominate the first part (there's always something lurking underneath, even in the quietest sections) then most of the acoustic indications take the shape of a deeply resonant hum or some kind of rumble. Tibetan bells and a metal chair were also used to rupture this document's quietness. What really strikes is the sense of solitude transmitted by the natural sources: the composer reports that his perception of an "animist" understanding of a landscape's sound came out strongly during his customary walks through the hill forests near Frankfurt and the Italian/Slovenian border. The whispering wind and a flock of rooks seem to suggest a means of communication to that very nature in which Behrens tries to find possibilities of music that's not made by humans. These doubts - and an even stronger feeling of extraneous presence - are reinforced by "Decaying study 3", an engrossing juxtaposition of frequencies halfway through radio waves and nuclear winds, whose intensity level ranges from the barely audible to a pre-explosive dangerous feeling. Despite the many questions proposed, Behrens is one of those artists whose work can withstand a thousand tests and still refuse logical explanations. But, just like his countryman Asmus Tietchens, he manages to touch emotional spots that many of their peers can't even detect.

MARC BEHRENS - Entity Mülheim (Auf Abwegen)

In 1998, Marc Behrens started working on various audiovisual installations that dealt with the sonic characteristics of predetermined sites which he defined "entities", like if these places were "a being, an essence" to quote the artist's words. "Entity Mülheim", from 2005-2006, was originally conceived as such and subsequently transferred on this double DVD, whose sequence can be played both in "linear" and "random" mode. Mülheim is a district of Cologne, Behrens bringing to our attention aspects that could be normally perceived as "regular" - a bridge suspended on the river, traffic, kids playing in a courtyard, a flea market, a dirty beach. But he does it by vivisectioning both their pictorial qualities and sounds, the latter rendered fascinatingly impenetrable thanks to his knowledgeable methods of alteration. The images are sometimes edited, too - more or less heavily - to add a sort of casual schizophrenic touch. Two representatives of the biggest ethnic groups in the city (a German man about 60 on the first disc and a younger Turkish woman on the second) were asked questions about Mülheim and their opposite ethnos; yet their answers aren't heard, as they were fragmented, scrambled and mangled by Behrens, transforming the experience in something akin to a sensual electroshock. In another combination people, cars and trains on the above mentioned bridge move forward and backward like in a metropolitan dance. The sounds aren't necessarily paralleled by pictures; indeed, a good number of sections consists only of the audio segment while we find ourselves staring at a black screen. But the quality of the aural messages is on such a level of evocative response that we could listen to them singularly and declare ourselves happy enough. The very last couple of minutes pairs an aircraft in a blue sky with a breathtaking subsonic rumble, ending this excellent piece of work with yet another classy touch.

MARC BEHRENS - Architectural commentaries (Entr’acte)

The logic surrounding Marc Behrens’ artistic output is often inflexible, not really open to chance except for slight and mostly controlled intermissions (or is it?). But, at the same time, this scarcity of openings results in a rarely seen coherence which, on a sonic level, guarantees that each one of his releases sound absorbingly attractive, placing the listeners in a space that might appear either like the restricted area of their interior conflicts or a symbolic representation of human thought in its most inaccessible corners. The aural constructions that Behrens is able to conceptualize, elaborate and, ultimately, exploit are indeed unique, in this case facilitated by his choice of presenting successions of events separated by short silent segments, a concept based on Luigi Nono’s “isole musicali” (musical islands). “Architectural commentaries” comprises three pieces composed between 2002 and 2005, built around field recordings that our man has accumulated over a 15-year span. The composer writes that he was inspired by “architectural criticism, structures, buildings, involuntary cityscapes (…) and technological noise within buildings”. The latter point is expanded in “Architectural commentary 5: some models for resonant behaviour”, which utilizes the sources captured at Resonance FM in June 2004 (both the studio equipment and the room’s noises), remodeling and juxtaposing them in splendid fashion; the segment starting around minute 13, an awesome humming moan-cum-oscillating high frequencies, is purely and simply a thing of beauty. The opener “Architectural commentary 4” shows at times a strong conceptual link with Asmus Tietchens’ work, even if Behrens’ coldness still possesses a degree of humanity - barely visible in the distance, yet it IS there - that attributes a “faraway-light-in-a-thick fog” aura to the piece, something that could appeal to fans of the best dark ambient as well. The album’s overall quality, excellent in any circumstance anyway, will be enhanced by your own preference of setting as this is the kind of music that, while revealing more details on close listening, yields the most satisfactory outcome when we let it manifest its grayish blackness in the rare, precious moments when the world’s asleep.

MARC BEHRENS / FRANCISCO LOPEZ "A szellem alma" (.absolute.[Koblenz])

Find me, if you can, someone more intransigent in sonic research than Francisco Lopez and Marc Behrens; I was sure in advance about the value of this 2-CD release and of course I didn't fail. Working on the same basic materials, namely recordings made at Frankfurt airport, Marc and Francisco put their definite personality stamp on the sound mass, directing the energy ejections as they please in a series of aural maps that mark silence with groundbreaking effluvia, finally arriving to inhabit it without our senses' complete approval. Behrens is more than happy to bring us right into a distorted overload: large parts of space are filled with snarling white noise and scathing frequencies, with long moments of almost total absence of sonic content to balance the yin/yang element of the composition. The same extreme measures of calmness are applied by Lopez in his customary way: minutes of pure whisper-to-nothingness, the only sound is blood pressure in your ear and maybe a virtually inaudible hiss; then, a monstrous growth of perturbed audiovisuals is shown only to be completely burnt out by torrential insufflations of instabile laptop violence, bringing the whole to a clicking quasi-standstill - again.

MARC BEHRENS / NIKOLAUS HEYDUCK - Plastic Metal (Antifrost)

Gracile but determined, tending to the high spheres of psychoacoustic whispering, "Plastic" is a massive demonstration of genius by these two masters of the art of attributing deep significance to inanimated materials, like shopping bags or medicine packages. An intense, under-the-skin bubbling activity is gradually revealed; images dissolve in fractions of seconds to disclose follicles and particles which - opening and changing their shapes - launch our sense of aural perception in a ruthless infrasound rollercoaster, proposing a whole new series of decoding signals which we'd better be ready to accept pronto if we want to keep in touch with sonic evolution. Even more beautiful to my ears is the second disc "Metal", which was started during a cleaning day at Behrens' place; here the not-so-subliminal titillations of forgotten steel objects originates longitudinal waves and less than domesticated impingements which saturate the air with menacing rumbles and implacable clangours. The space between these vivid manifestations is inhabited by self-centred whirlwinds of celestial elucubrations that could teach a lot to many practicers of pseudo-experimental infotainment; on the contrary, Behrens and Heyduck's procedures avoid any pourparler to get straight to the core of a sound that's among the most propositional I've heard in a while.

MARC BEHRENS / DAVE PHILLIPS / CHEAPMACHINES / KEITH BERRY - Coincident (Entr'acte)

"Coincident" comprises five pieces, four of which commissioned by Phil Julian (Cheapmachines) who asked for a 4-minute location recording to be realized exactly at the same hour of the same day (19:00 GMT, 15 October 2005) by the participants. Behrens responded with creaks, knocks and thumps of a table and a chair (plus his sighs while working), Phillips submitted a taped conversation, Cheapmachines collaged domestic noise with radio/television zapping and interference and Berry processed the sounds of an indirect hot water cylinder with contact microphones, this being the only contribution with a kind of harmonically resonating content. The four tracks were layered together in a fifth one, which became a (still too short) specimen of moving textures constituting an interesting patchwork of real life sonic snapshots. It's a pretty simple concept that could be exploited in myriads of combinations and - although headphone listening is recommended in the CD notes - the effect is intriguing also by pressing the repeat button and utilizing "Coincident" as unquiet ambient music.

MARC BEHRENS / PAULO RAPOSO - Hades (And/OAR)

The sea is an obvious source of fascination; innumerable artists have tried to come to terms with its sonic power in the past. Marc Behrens and Paulo Raposo added a "mechanical" nuance to their interests by recording the noise of ferry boats and quays in various Portuguese marine locations, placing them amidst other local environmental recordings to generate this beautiful artifact. "Itinerantly" composed between 2003 and 2006, "Hades" stimulates and wakes up the nervous centres, but even more often it leaves a lot of mental room for concentration and reflection. The raw materials chosen by Behrens and Raposo allow for an intriguing deployment of gradations that might sound indelicately harsh in tracks like "Gate 1" but, when sapiently treated, become mutations of angelic choirs looking for a sky to dissipate in, ruptured by faraway thuds and bumps, or even studies in dreams elicited by adjacent pseudo-tones, finally directed to complete oblivion ("Crossing into"). "Gate 4" is an enthralling, obscure drone in a reverberant virtual cathedral of noise, exquisitely sober and impressively layered, later morphing into a siren's lament lowered three octaves, wind and seagulls barely perceived in this profound context; it's a masterpiece of the untold, one of the overall best compositions I've enjoyed in at least a decade. Every sonic object manipulated by the couple is translated into something utterly meaningful, and the silences they leave for the sounds to breathe in are nicely filled by extraneous elements (a faraway belltower entered my room at noon this Sunday during this listening session, and it was wonderful). "Hades" is brilliant, just like everything in the And/OAR catalogue.

BURKHARD BEINS - Disco prova (Absinth)

German percussionist Burkhard Beins' intelligent use of resonant space is fundamental, in that his music is built upon a few simple sources that need a lot of air to deliver themselves from their original citizenhood. For those who really want to know, "disco prova" means nothing else than "test record" in Italian; that's one of Beins' elements here, an old test-tone LP containing analogue synthesizer waves which he puts at good use in two pieces ("EQ-20" and "Reel") together with location recordings and environmental matters. The self-explanatory "Igniter" multiplies the click of an electric gas lighter until thousands of ticks are diffused all around the listening space, while "For Ian Curtis" uses minimal snippets of Joy Division's LPs rendered unrecognizable until a thorough dismemberment of any meaning is achieved in blurred post-industrial visuals. The overall most satisfactory composition on offer is "Sekante": two microphones are placed into a polystyrene box, which amplifies the "oscillation and friction sounds" of a 12-metre string that Beins attached to it; water is also added to contribute to an impressive electroacoustic potion. This record contains basic forms of beauty that are there to be discovered, sapiently camouflaged by Beins within structures that appear more threatening than they really are; indeed, repeated listenings bring us to a different conclusion, as each layer reveals minute particulars and disguised codes which the ears find extremely pleasing to dissect and swallow.

BELASKA - Vault (w.m.o/r)

Working at the junction of almost pulmonary exhalations of grainy textures with barely perceptible human intervention on contrasting decolorizations of feedback and gloomy silence, Belaska (Mark Wastell and Mattin) are two shelterless walkers in the middle of a fogbound course. Their method privileges those huge low vibrations that somehow remind of thunderstorms caught when you're closed into a room - something you "experience" rather than "hear". Then again, the duo travels all around the membranes without really uncovering objects or bodies; squatting amidst uncharted sound emissions, always looking for the most important balance - that between tension building and breathing room for the ears - Wastell and Mattin spear commonly known electroacoustic codes and regulations, once again grabbling under unbroken sonic soil to come back with a good measure of truth.

CLIVE BELL & SYLVIA HALLETT - The geographers (Emanem)

Droplets of hallucinogen reiterations take fantasies by the hand, cold-shouldering any possible machination designed to keep emotions at bay; instruments from ancient cultures as well as cheap department stores are played without scumbling their edges, in a gradual departure from pure sound artistry to the inspection of remote cavities, in search of those small discarded treasures that - appearances be damned - are giant steps for the refinement of the act of listening. While Hallett's haunting ceremonials sound like they were born after a blow on a magic powder causing twilight fever and deceptive fancies, her mastery of bowed instruments and perfectly disposed looping traps is what this wonderful music needs to be promoted to the top rank of improvisatory sensitiveness. Bell could not be a better companion for this highly reminiscent connection of memories and instinct, as the imprinting he puts on all the duets is decisive, given his thorough command of shakuhachi, pi saw, khene and the likes: it's a perfect 50-50 concoction of gracefully balanced miniature dreams that every once in a while make a proposal for recanalizing fear and anguish into a single course of placid joy.

CLIVE BELL / BECHIR SAADE - An account of my hat (Another Timbre)

Unbelievable how many albums are being released these days whose content is differently appreciable according to the context and the technical setting in which they’re enjoyed. During my first time with this collection of duets for ney (Saade) and shakuhachi (Bell) I found myself in the condition of catching the single voice’s essence, mentally absorbing any droplet, any barely audible harmonic, all the complex relationships existing between the wood and a pneumatically enhanced system of liquids during the circumstantial occasions in which those elements are put in direct confrontation. A wonderful experience, rendered memorable by a detail-splitting recording quality that lets the audience feel like the very embouchure of those exotic whistling tubes. The notes just flow through our substance, into the core of self-examination. I tried a second listen at low volume, and was astonished to discover that the spirit of the music was still there, certain aspects of its ritualistic charm even boosted by the connection that my ears and brain had already established during the first session. Naturally, it helps that Bell and Saade are masters of the game, their intertwining sensitiveness and intelligent choice of spaces, reticence and wavering vibrations - or the mix of all these ingredients - demonstrating what “inner ear” really means. Music that spread-eagles between the silence of your reflections, arriving at the right moment to save us from idiot television programs and useless chit-chat to establish a poetic logic of no-nonsense and gratification of the remote depths of the soul. A great, great record, confirming Another Timbre as currently the best English label devoted to improvisation, on a par with Emanem.

BELONG - October language (Carpark)

Turk Dietrich and Michael Jones, from New Orleans, are the human element behind Belong; with "October language" they have managed to produce an apocalyptic soundtrack for the succumbing ones, a sort of ill elegy depicting the transition from the final part of life to death, evoked through montages of looping materials - sliding orchestral modulations, chorales, instrumental lamentations - put through a massive distortion treatment to the point of, er, disintegration. Indeed, the press notes declare William Basinski and Fennesz as Belong's main influences - and there are moments (for example, "Who told you this room exists?") in which these influences cross the borders of plagiarism. But there are lots of good things in this CD, like the stunningly beautiful title track, which get me prone to pardoning the "offense", since Dietrich and Jones are capable of eliciting strong emotional reactions through their already evident personality; they do it by challenging our fear of the unknown with heavyweight intensity and pitiless stretching of the unconscious. Play loud - and prepare yourselves to the end.

JUSTIN BENNETT - Wildlife (Spore)

My only prior contact with Bennett’s output was “Noise map” on this same label. As good as that one was, “Wildlife” is probably better: I wouldn’t hesitate in classifying it as a great album, a nearly faultless crossbreed of environmental recordings (mostly zoos and botanic gardens) and post-processing that proposes ample opportunities for relaxation, concentration, sheer thinking. The maker, born in the UK but residing in the Netherlands, offers an interesting explanation of his work: “hybrid artificial spaces for the listener to inhabit”. This is exactly what this music gives, without any pretence of unconventional views or “political” statements. Bennett is certainly not the first analyzing the contrasts and the overlapping between natural and metropolitan soundscapes, yet one can’t help observing how plausibly the different pictures of life succeed, frogs and cars, lions, children, nocturnal activities, birds. We feel the air, the hot, the damp and the vagueness. Does all this imply some sort of revelation? Of course not, yet the gratification deriving from listening to routine presences according to a dissimilar perspective - especially when contained by your own silence - can literally transform the approach to the forthcoming day (that’s right, you did get it: this CD should be listened to at very early morning for greatest results). Add to the whole the eye-striking container - a folded A2 poster featuring beautiful B/W photos of the visited locations - and the fact that this is a limited edition of 300 copies to finally accept that this release is needed.

HAN BENNINK & TERRIE EX - Zeng! (Terp)

Arrived at their second CD as a duo, Han Bennink and Terrie Ex present a series of curiously titled improvisations that won’t delude those who are acquainted with the creative fantasy and anarchic tendencies of the components. Drums and guitar is not an easy pairing; let’s face it, the risk of boring the audience is pretty high. No danger here: the pluralist approach of Bennink allows the limbs to follow three or four different logics at once, his use of the colours of the drum set uniquely rebel to any rhythmic common sense. He’s a very intelligent drummer, one of the wittiest explorers of techniques around, and the interaction with Ex’s guitar is just perfect. On the opposite side, the latter is an animal in the hands of someone who does not want to know about a regular phrase, chord or scale. We’re talking grunts, moans, hollers and yells; we hear feedback and hum as concrete elements of a “sound”. There is not a single moment when one can guess in advance what will happen an instant later. The dynamics that Ex throws up in this slapping game are efficiently invigorating, his timbres leaking oil and rusting the air. Brisk musicianship all over the album, conversations brought forth with clever irony and no fear of errors. Like improvised music should always be, this is fresh, vivid playing that doesn’t ask for anything more than being serenely enjoyed.

VINCENT BERGERON - Philosophie fantasmagorique (Vincent Vit Et Sent Comme Un Berger Rond)

Here is a curiosity for those who are REALLY curious - did you look at the label’s name? Canadian Bergeron composed this artefact “with an imaginary movie in his mind” (a pretty worn out concept by now) about “an artist who finds his identity in a confused world” - an undecipherable scenario from this perspective, since my fluency in French is insignificant and the record is wholly sung in that language, or in an English-French mixture. Not that this man sings “regularly”: no, VB rambles with a timbre which is peculiar to say the least - picture a cross between a culturally developed turkey and a castrato who loves serialism. The protagonist’s voice is constantly present, female contributions shortly appearing somewhere, together with minimal help from other participants. What’s nice is a good portion - maybe three quarters - of the instrumental foundation, standing halfway through sampladelia and theatre of absurd, crazed loops and unpredictable pre-recorded sources alternating with out-of-control electronic and acoustic instruments. In the first part it sounds quite interesting - sort of “John Oswald meets Albert Marcoeur” - but overall there’s a slight bit of “too much everywhere” to define this a totally valid release. I do see germs of unadulterated creativity in there, yet what needs to be done is either reducing the program’s length or giving the music some relief every once in a while. Bergeron’s vocal character itself is funny at the beginning, yet as minutes elapse one gets used to the perennial eloquence, which becomes a drag at the end. A little less please, and we’re all set. Building upon the most intriguing orchestrations - the sound-seaming work is almost flawless indeed - will have to be the starting point for the next chapter. File under “Self-believing in sounding strange, partially succeeding”.

DAVID BERNABO - Graphic scores (Abstract On Black)

Multi-talented David Bernabo is both Abstract On Black’s superintendent and an artist active in the audiovisual field. As you might easily figure out alone, “Graphic scores” is an album built upon the sonic interpretation of “visual markings and cues”, played on an assortment of different means - acoustic guitars, sitar, dulcimer, electronics, percussion, voice, viola and violin - by the boss with the help of Ben Harris, Daryl Fleming and Megan Williams, either semi-regularly or through what the world knows as “extended techniques”. There’s not a lot to say other than remarking the great capriciousness and multiplicity of this nonfigurative (indeed) material, whose range expands more or less everywhere without actually deepening any of the points touched, just giving us pure sounds in bursts and flashes. From yelping gurgles-in-water to peculiar explorations of the non-existent relations between disenfranchised strings and random hints to instrumental open-mindedness (intangible as this concept may be, but you do the work after I did mine), clutches of good things that deserve to be listened to do exist here, although one might want not to ask too much to the music in regard to its permanence in the memory.

KEITH BERRY - The golden boat (Trente Oiseaux)

Some of the best sound artists make music where vagueness is a virtue. While listening to this CD I felt the necessity of remaining seated, waiting for events coming out of a cloud of silence and undetermination; sure enough, soft frequencies, nebulous waves and mixed strokes were soon joining the strange, pre-rainstorm calm atmosphere made of mist and haze that characterized my afternoon's weather. I'd say "The golden boat" is the perfect record for early birds, right in those moments where even the smallest noises are shoved out like a persona non grata. You can pledge a hour of your life putting your ears in full reception mode, devoiding your room of any additional intrusion as Keith Berry's work must be fed with generous doses of reflective spaces and stimulated by total absence of speech. Let this sweet mizzle wrap you completely and enjoy its beauty.

KEITH BERRY - Buddha's mile (Authorized Version)

Endless seconds of silence transport the first sounds out of the speakers: a peripheral urban area that one watches from a safe distance while going home in a slightly rainy evening. From this desolated sense of grieving awareness we go to an even deeper level, to fading images of constantly shifting environmental sights. One moment it's like walking along a marsh with your dog sniffing and rustling around; right after a corner you meet a shortcut to incogitable, mind-bending materializations of unexpectedness. What transpires from the body reactions is our incapacity of accepting the unexplained; the soul is inappetent when it all comes down to fear. Passing halos of low drones make clear that the readmittance to a daily routine will carry a high-price tag; a final crumbling mass becomes just a symbolism for contemporary brainlessness. While thinking to all this, you've missed the last bus to home: your path starts now.

KEITH BERRY - The ear that was sold to a fish (Crouton)

Perseverance, circumspection, specularity. Longsuffering renouncers should never expect to be rewarded with anything different from an additional repassage through their own voiceless doubts; just like followers will continue to hold their breath until the necessity of oxygen will finally clear their salt-burned eyes, consumers of juvenilia will always be linked to moments and events that don't exist anymore - and maybe they were fallacious in the first place. Then, your time to delineate a personality is up and of course you're gonna pay for it, but indefiniteness becomes an instant gratification for those needing to hide behind a mental shelter; yet, it's likely that sorrow will constantly be a faithful companion throughout the trip. Thus, consider "The ear that was sold to a fish" like an undespoiled retrieved drawing of the many and one personal projections generated during childhood's games, all gathered under an incommensurable shadow of heartbreaking awareness which won't stop swallowing the few remains of that time we believed abundant and now are crying about as mostly wasted.

KEITH BERRY - A strange feather / Turn left a thousand feet from here (Twenty Hertz)

No available reason to justify our continuous fencing of shrouded instincts. We aren't willing to admit it yet, but an undeviating route to becoming totally forgotten by the rest of our own world of insulse acquaintances and uneducated friends is being traced - right now. With impassive perfectionism, superior presences give answers that are still too evasive, as one wants to know more about those strange fumes coming out of the underground; they modify their colour according to the feeble, sloping glimmer of casual watchers' smiles. Still speculating about our right of remaining misinterpreted, we stand still while perceiving a warm wind of docile dejection that swallows shapes and movements, drying tears before they're dropped on a book which is opened on the same page since weeks. Halfway through a poised strength and the desire of completely evaporating after being exposed to the malign disease of a rudimental menticide, we shut the windows, turn off the TV, pocket our small change and turn backwards, squeezing a sheet of handwritten memoranda into our sweaty palms until the ink gets blurred. Lying behind these undescribable impressions, the laziness of the senses is progressively exuviating; its remains will help the reason to be restored, as fear recoils from our newly acquired tranquillity.

KEITH BERRY vs FESSENDEN - Bleu: résultat (Chat Blanc)

Joshua Convey, Stephen Fiehn and Steven Hess' sounds - appearing as "pt1/1 original w/mix" in the final track of this 3-inch CD, a hypnotic Tortoise-meet-Can interlacement featuring chugging non-rhythms spiced with jangling strings and moaning opacities - were reworked by Keith Berry in the remaining two tracks of the set. "Floating weeds (for Yasujiro Ozu)" starts with a few treated sources (apparently, rain and slowed down crickets but I'm not really sure: Keith is a master of the unlikely transformation) that immediately get embraced by a warm superlunar drone bringing us right back to the beginning of our atavic doubts. The best is yet to come, though: "The other shore" is a marvel of a piece, in the same vein of the recent "58° North" DVD's soundtrack released by Berry with Iain Stewart. The resignation to a still unknown fate is wrapped by an engrossing mantle of synthetic emanations moving in the low regions of the audio spectrum; upon this cloud of grief a barely perceptible, inherent embryonic melody characterizes this poignant combination, which I'd gladly enjoy for hours. "Bleu: résultat" comes in a limited edition of 111 copies; those who love the involved artists' work should not miss this microgem.

ANDREAS BERTILSSON - Paramount (Komplott)

Also known as Son Of Clay, Andreas Bertilsson presents a very interesting and well tought-out composition under his own name. After rising from a deafening hush, a deep drone underlines concrete sources (squeaking sounds, water and birds) surrounded by a superimposition of electronic frequencies. Sounds of wood and water are placed at the forefront in the mix. A voice whispers a few phrases in Swedish, the ever-present drone interrupted by spurts of treated and warped emissions; the atmosphere is pretty dark and mysteriously reticent despite the sonic variety. More birds and strange harmonic codes open the second movement, interrupted by short silent segments. Faraway subsonics are heard, like the sound of cars heard from a long distance. Rustling and crackling fuse with peculiar resonances, apparently computerized, then an improvised section of drum'n'noise breaks both the tranquillity and the sense of anticipation perceived until that moment. It finally cuts back to that half-scary, half-protective environment heard at the beginning of this quite inscrutable section. The third instalment is the most unpredictably dissonant, with percussive sources and disguised rumbles introducing what sounds like adjacent stratifications of female vocals, disturbed by additional doses of interferent electronics. The concoction annoys and allures but never for a moment loses its grip on our attention. A noisy mayhem is started about 5 minutes into the part, and it involves everything: destruction has finally won its war against the basic immobility of the track. "Paramount" is 30 minutes of excellent acousmatics, well worth of everybody's consideration.

TONY BIANCO / PAUL DUNMALL with MARCIO MATTOS / PAUL ROGERS - Hour Glass (Emanem)

The propulsive drumming of Bianco and the continuously ripping sax of Dunmall (particularly awesome on the soprano in the second CD of this double set, 62 minutes named "The teepees dive deeply") are the main colours in this release. More than in other Emanem recordings, this has a contemporary "jazzy" feel and - with ideas flowing one after another, often without stopping for VERY long spurts - it nevertheless results as a pretty relaxing meeting among complex musical personalities. What's really different here is the use of bass: in the hands of Mattos, who plays on the first set "Hour Glass", you get classic deep, solid notes; the instrument is meant as a strong expressive communicator and meshes perfectly in a global conversation. On the other hand, with the pluri-stringed A.L.L. bass played by Rogers, one can almost smell wood, being its character a little more "light-hearted" than the regular acoustic bass (but what a sound...likely to be appreciated by guitarists more than bassists). Tony Bianco's light but steady pulse and the never ending lung pumping by Paul Dunmall are absolutely astonishing; the same old "thumbs up" is required, but that's no news to the label's aficionados.

TONY BIANCO / DAVE LIEBMAN / TONY MARINO - Line ish (Emanem)

Tony Bianco's mercurial drumming is the propeller of this great trio, where each voice brings common sense and solidity in every single moment. Dave Liebman applies his phrasing like a whirlwind, quivering, self-consciously groundbreaking, exploring theme fragments and pulling out harmonics like a drink of fresh water. The jawboning sound of Marino brings back fluids to parched ears, emerging like a paramount element even in a cohesive setting like this. Bianco's wrists are probably made of highly elastic rubber: his sticks' command is a good explanation for a scorching yet natural playing, more evident than ever during his solo parts. The feeling here is that this is a nugget, a record that's destined to stay, without flashes but with feet planted in the concrete.

BIOSPHERE - Autour de la lune (Touch)

The first of the nine movements forming the skeleton of "Autour de la lune" is somehow deceiving: a very long repetition of the same electronic ripple which had me thinking along the lines of "Geir Jenssen goes minimalist", pretty disorientating in regard to the total purity of the largest part of the following aural beauties. But - having been Biosphere a class act for many years now - one doesn't need to wait too much to find a way through a mass of frequencies that are sometimes scarily powerful and all times absolutely mesmerizing like in the fantastic "Deviation", a vibrational kneading on the cerebrum to which anyone who listens will become addicted in a matter of seconds and that puts most of the sacred cows of the "inner spirit department" to a heavy shame. At least 50 of the 75 minutes of this disc could be successfully used to cure nerve-related disorders; listening without headphones will add the resonance of walls and objects to something which - more than music - should be defined as evolutional phenomenon. When "Autour" reaches its conclusion, you'll notice your cochlea has suddenly become thirsty, for this is a milestone of contemporary electronica.

B.W.BIRD - Solo Duo Trio (Stoat of Victory)

Bryan W.Bird - for his own admission - still believes in the "power of abstract". This can be guessed from his self-made CD covers, which I dig a lot by the way, but - above all - from his music. He has a lot of different projects ranging from the "totally free" random electronics to looping nostalgic soundscapes. This very short record (33 minutes) was recorded one instrument at a time in several weeks, overdubbing improvisations on a multitrack recorder. Except for the presence of a drummer in the final two tracks, everything is played by Bird; I could not help thinking about extreme radical music such as Borbetomagus - a lot of raucous electric guitar screaming and arguing with a sputtering, free-flowing, really gorgeous saxophone; here and there, rare calm moments are abruptly swatted away by more raging distortion. Don't be afraid to try; this is voracious music, highly energetic and fresh.

BIRDSONG FOR SEWERS - Birdsong for sewers (Digitalis)

This is a duo project between Peter Wright and Uton, who divided their instrumental and recording duties and sent the reciprocal results to each other via mail. The music is fantastic; it has a tension building towards infinite that makes it shine brightly, even if most of the atmospheres are created through droning guitars, obscure looping and a thoughtful use of field recordings. The inexplicable becomes imagery, while the moaning of distant strings shifts the level of our conscience up to oblong figures of mistaken identities. The mind gets out of any known frame, avoiding the manipulations of many puzzling cerebral settlements to librate in open air, just content of being shipwrecked in opiate silences. Grounded on a cross of unapproachableness and sense of unstable gravity, "Birdsong for sewers" is another of those hidden masterpieces you'd better search with all your zeal; if I never had the pleasure of meeting the work of Uton until now, Wright confirms his undersung greatness once and for all.

BIRDSONGS OF THE MESOZOIC - The iridium controversy (Cuneiform)

Let's just hope this absolutely perfect object guarantees more exposition and kudos to the band, one GREAT collective of REAL progressive music, if you ask me. Tying their instrumental knots with harmonic mastery in tapestries of lush arrangements, mixing every second like it's their last chance to say something to the world, Lindgren, Field, Scott and Bierylo stamp their knowledgeable singularity on a healthy pinguidity of beautiful pieces. The senses are just iced over by the continuity of smart compositional devices that leave you almost breathless right away; just like self-collected sonic killers, Birdsongs seize a golden path until the definitive affirmation in the selective process my mind does when thinking to similar groups. Verily, an easy process: there's no group like this one and their regal class should be peppered onto many technically-proficient kings of nothingness. Can someone say "a peremptory must"?

BIRDSONGS OF THE MESOZOIC with ORAL MOSES - Extreme spirituals (Cuneiform)

Bass baritone Oral Moses is one of the most renowned singers of operas, oratorios and spirituals. Birdsongs are one of my all-time favourite new progressive-chamber rock ensembles. And - get this - I prevalently HATE opera, especially when it's sung in Italian (but, while we're at it, I also consider John Adams' "Nixon in China" one of the most horrible records that I've ever heard). So I was prepared for the worst, but...how can one doubt artists at this level of heart, intelligence and technique? Moses' voice is imposing and always perfect, and Ken Field, Michael Bierylo, Erik Lindgren and Rick Scott managed to father a series of arrangements for twelve famous (or less) spirituals that, at times, left my mouth agape. Try to get the correct picture here: we're talking about songs like "Joshua fit the Battle of Jericho" and "Sometimes I feel like a motherless child" played by a quartet that morphed them into their technologically advanced versions by cross-pollinating Igor Stravinsky and Univers Zero, yet sounding unquestionably Mesozoic. On top of all this, a gorgeous lyrical singer lays powerfully articulate lines, which at a first try might sound slightly strange but after a while you really need them - and how. "Extreme spirituals" is one of those records that take about ten minutes before you completely fall into their arms; it is a splendid rendition of music that is already ageless and - after the "Birdsongs extreme makeover" - is likely to become even more valued, maybe also by those who don't like spirituals. I call it a perfectly accomplished experiment, and you'd better give it a very attentive listen.

MICHAEL BISIO QUARTET - CIMP 360: Circle this (CIMP)

Bassist and composer Michael Bisio declares himself to be a superstitious man, thus explaining the strange album title, which joins its catalogue number and the name of the first track recorded in the session, here also the program’s opener. Personal convictions aside, we're safely cuddled by a warm, smooth-going kind of slightly edgy jazz that shows both the qualities of innovation and various links to a reverenced past, without sounding outdated for a moment. In the rhythm section, the leader is sustained by drummer Jay Rosen, the pair working together as a perfect counterbalance for a couple of "conversational fighters" on reeds, Avram Fefer (tenor and soprano sax) and Stephen Gauci (tenor only), two soloists whose musical intelligence and will to share long confrontational moments makes for a few sizzling exchanges that mesh unhampered counterpoint and upfront nods to the giants. The swing-for-the-fences drumming creativity of Rosen - also excellent in the quieter sections - and the sober, always elegant tone of Bisio's double bass define the foundations of the compositions (all penned by Michael except "The Fighting" - here we go again - by Bob Nell, a splendid fusion of reflection and right-about turns). Short linear cells are expanded until they become more complex constructions, their structure allowing repeated implementations of that kind of virtuosity whose primary nuance is modesty. Yet the best feature of "CIMP 360" remains its sense of solid continuity and constant inspiration, the artists sharing intuitions and influences without despotism, a well regulated democracy that the length of the CD - about 72 minutes - does not endanger for a split second.

MICHAEL BISIO TRIO - Composance (Cadence Jazz Records)

Bassist Michael Bisio, helped by Rob Blakeslee (brass) and Greg Campbell (percussion, French horn) represents one of the "traits d'union" between freedom and scheme in modern jazz. His music possesses that leading edge quickening the separation from stereotypes and gossip-like hyper-technical passages; on the contrary, his trio organizes ideas and intuitiveness with the same deadpan rigour of a small chamber orchestra, honouring their influences yet saluting new sights whenever they materialize. Extremely mindful of his performing strength, Bisio alternates his fingering sapience with cascades of royal arcoing, while his companions join the discourse lessening tensions and building intelligent examples of precise sound equipartition. Easy music it ain't; just listen without preconceptions and enjoy the rewards.

JOHN BISSET - Smithy (2:13 Music)

Without gadgetry, armed of an acoustic guitar only, Bisset plays expressively and free of cliches without any trace of gabbling. Couching in a niche where silent reflection and the exposition of himself meet, John paints splashing small drops of fretboard knowledge that leave a door slightly open, like he wanted us to peek into his own private moments without entering or disturbing his flux of thought. I love the surrounding sounds captured by the recording, too - the distant cars passing by are a truly magnificent touch of reality in an already out-of-canons piece of work. "Smithy" is limpid and extremely sincere, standing the test of a lasting attention - which not always is easy to keep during instrumental solo albums.

SINDRE BJERGA / JAN M. IVERSEN - The Oslo groove machine (Utan Titel)

My first encounter with Bjerga and Iversen is a pretty short live set, recorded in 2004 at Oslo's Brugata. The guys dabble with amplified electronics, various objects and ground noise, the latter a major presence throughout the whole CD. More than the refined undulations of people like Mattin or Graham Halliwell, "The Oslo groove machine" looks for a barely restricted control of a rather industrial sound, with metallic tampering and pre-adrenalin slow movements which rarely abandon the territories of rusty rumbling interference. It's a familiar, fleshy, relatively invigorating exercise in maintainance of expectancy, as the duo keeps its head down, holding us in a continuous waiting for a full-blast eruption that never comes. In their raw-sounding genuine approach, these gentlemen remind me of the Russian group ZGA - but their personality is clearly defined.

SINDRE BJERGA / IAN M. IVERSEN - Cosmic surgery (Housepig)

I love the label’s description of this 100-copy limited edition CDR, which talks about “a disturbing atmosphere of surveillance, paranoia and desolate space”. Indeed, the three segments presented by Sindre Bjerga and Ian Iversen, who are among the noisemongers using the means at their disposal with compositional competence rather than stupid rage, are effectively functional in many of their applications; they even work at lower volume in a sort of gloom-drenched ambient music. There’s always a sort of thrumming underground pulse that gives a definite direction to the mass of hiss, rumbles and moaning reiterations that characterize the tracks; the diversity, in this lo-fi heterogeneous jumble of anti-relational information, resides in its implicit harmonic content, which pushes the brain towards the acceptance of the inescapable. We expect something, but that something never happens; meanwhile, the sound appears like an external background in which the mind adapts quite effortlessly, no questions asked. The half-hour duration helps to avoid any potential doubt; the record is concise and intelligently realized, one of the best noise works that I heard in years. Noise? This is just good music.

HEIMIR BJORGULFSSON / PIMMON / HELGI THORSSON - Still important somekind not normally seen (always not unfinished) (Cronica)

It takes a while to fully enjoy this recording, which is best appreciable if you listen to it on shuffle play mode: that way, the "out of tune TV" effect of this schizophrenic enigma will show its complete efficiency. A complete lack of communication is reconfigured through an apparatus of strange codes, each one looking for uncommon expressions and non conventional coupling with other weird physical manifestations. The three artists do a "catch-them-all" kind of electronic trawling, mixing silences and distortion, fragmentations and ironic looping, aleatory phases and algesic acousmatic shapes that rarely touch my heart but, for sure, stimulate my attention. Robert Hampson edited the whole show, recorded in Holland in 2002, but don't think this could even remotely sound like a Main record.

PETER BLAMEY / JIM DENLEY - Findings (Split)

This is a succinct statement by a duo of systematic analysts of the harmonic properties of resonant air (Denley’s alto sax) in conjunction with an expert manipulation of a mixer (Blamey). How many releases such as this one have already been discussed since, say, 2000? Hundreds? Well, Blamey and Denley managed to find different escapes from a canon that usually welcomes few inventors and dozens of imitators. In this instance, the couple looks mostly interested in the harder core of the matter, Denley insufflating with a good degree of violence so that even a normal wheeze tastes like rusty metal. When he adds doses of massive overtone emissions to the recipe, that’s the signal for Blamey to augment the visibility of his sibilant textures in a murmured rebellion to silence, corroborated by minuscule plops and almost inaudible gurgles in a strange kind of reed-ish radioactivity. The result is excellent, 34 minutes of burbling currents, shrieking upper partials and disguised counter-patterns appearing in the form of a violent hail storm or, in other occasions, more similar to a malfunctioning steam locomotive running at speeds that no regular vehicle can usually reach. It remains to be seen how this compact unity of intents will stand the test of time in this congested sonic field; still, on a deep listening basis, “Findings” reveals a number of unexpected gradations that separate it from the average, precisely delimited intuitions presented with rational balance. Not all improvisers are endowed with that.

BLANKDISC TRIO - im KomikerLand (Nurnichtnur)

German imprint Nurnichtnur is one of those places where hidden genius and deserving unknown talents gather; when messages from that zone are received, the fun and liveliness of the improvised materials is all but assured. This particular group is formed by Georg Wissel, who plays prepared alto sax, obone (?) and a.o. (???), Srdjan Muc (electric guitars) and Róbert Rósza (no-input mixer, electronic), the latter two hailing from Serbia. The disc is divided in halves: the self-explanatory “Pieces and shortcuts” contains eight tracks whose length goes from 1’28” to 4’36”, while the “Zrenjanin suite” is made of different sections linked into a whole, yet sounding as fragmented and mangled as the previous ones. The trio explores different expressive areas with nonchalance, not really focusing on a subject but individuating a few nodal points around which they build a discourse that might or might not follow an immediate logic. Electronic sounds, scratched strings and squawking reed emissions gain a well deserved citizenship in magmatic cauldrons of inexplicably attractive music that just refuses to be classified. Piercing distortion is alternated to articulated chatter without noticeable problems, the artists willing to stay awake and conscious also in the moments where the sonic events flow in apparent full autonomy (yet they remain totally - and coherently - anarchic). Quirky and twisty, this CD is a nice surprise from three musicians demonstrating a much appreciated purity of vision and intents.

TIM BLECHMANN - Re-reading (Free Software Series)

In keeping with the libertarian policies of about anything established by Basque artistic agitator Mattin, the Free Software Series make use of the chance of producing music unyoked from the obligations of copyright, and I believe that an initial statement better than this fabulous offering by Tim Blechmann couldn’t possibly have been made. “Re-reading”, recorded in a live performance in 2006, is a laptop composition that would not be out of place on a label like Antifrost, in that it’s a masterful exercise in restrained violence amidst gradual mutations. A slowly unfolding, cirriform piece based on granular crackle and ever-growing, sinisterly hissing whirrs which nevertheless leave the scenario they depict available for observation at all times, reminiscent of the most impenetrable aspects of the work of pioneers such as John Duncan, but also early Daniel Menche and - why not - Bernhard Günter: the last fifteen minutes contain sonic data of such a subtlety that it’s difficult to perceive their essential functionality without the aid of headphones or a dead silent environment. Blechmann shows great maturity in applying strictly rigorous rules to his sound, the outcome being a record that doesn’t really appear as a real-time recording but bears the characteristics of a painstakingly conceived studio track. The most perceptive among the listeners will certainly appreciate the infinitesimal reiterative currents that characterize several of these icy passages, underlining through their presence the ripening of frequencies that, in an ideal world, should delineate human evolution. Things that, inevitably, are reserved for few lucky ones.

TIM BLECHMANN / GOH LEE KWANG - Drone (Herbal)

The title could be a little misleading, since Blechmann and Kwang are not selling meditative resonance or deep hums; instead, "Drone" is a composition - neither mixed nor mastered by its originators - for prepared mixer and laptop. The slow/speedy/slow complexion of the basic pulse helps the electronic element to introduce a sense of displacement - particularly evident when listening by headphones - enhanced by hardly perceivable frequencies on the extremes of the scale. At about 40 minutes into the piece, we're left with subsonics juxtaposed with piercing highs tending to the realms of ultrasounds; the music has finally reached its fixed equilibrium, the innocence of the initial exploration of the aural space has given way to a glacial manifestation of human impotence. Sustaining almost one hour through such a course of restrained sonic acts comes as a major plus for these silent analyzers of our head's chances; declaring "Drone" as an excellent release is the least we can do after being left suspended, waiting for answers we don't need.

OLIVIA BLOCK - Change ringing (Cut)

A finely balanced juxtaposition of "field recordings, scored segments for acoustic instruments and electronically generated sounds" constitutes the signature of composer Olivia Block, whose "Change ringing" - in its 30+ minutes - is a good representation of the dynamic phenomena and secret relationships between the single parts that she loves to apply to her music. Fifteen of the most accomplished improvisers (among them Kyle Bruckmann, Jeb Bishop, Bhob Rainey) lend their instrumental voices during the liveliest sections of a disc which - in various instances - recalls the work of artists as diverse as David Behrman, Christof Kurzmann, Lionel Marchetti, Voice Crack; yet, don't be influenced by these comparisons, as the crafty care for the sonic circumstances which Block puts throughout the piece expands the sound up to a high degree of contrasted linearity and morphing electro-biology in perfect self-disposition as the time goes by. A rare case of multi-faceted psychoacoustic structure within the impalpable borders of unpredictability.

FRÉDÉRIC BLONDY / LE QUAN NINH - Exaltatio utriusque mundi (Potlatch)

Piano (prepared and/or played with extended techniques) and percussion install a series of lucid dialogues never transcending to hullabaloo, instead inhabiting many open spaces carved in silence. Blondy and Ninh accept no manacles whatsoever, going from (Cecil) Tayloresque articulations and arco/long string sonorities mingling with omni-directional shards of sinless percussive eruptions - quite often after repeated preliminary caressing. At the end, we listeners sat out the 45-plus minutes with tangible pleasure: after the music is over, the house hasn't been left in shambles and on the walls there are a few new abstract paintings looking to be appreciated any time more than the previous one.

FRÉDÉRIC BLONDY / JEAN-SEBASTIEN MARIAGE / DAN WARBURTON - L'écorce chante la foret (Creative Sources)

Spurts of macerated puissance have their original vehemence transformed into a needlework of lyophilized surmise, as these three men glance one another like if their most important revelation had to be kept secret. Mariage's unyoking of guitar from ill-equipped concepts reveals a whole subterranean game of torment and reclusion, rarely interrupted by stabilizing minutiae. Warburton's micro-dissection of his violin shows all the details of a visionary head carefully disposed in total disappreciation of artistic licentiousness; his sound sparkles and cracks in the very moment of its generation, then waits hopelessly for its specular image to come back. Blondy uses piano parts like surreptitious writings, flanking his colleagues with acoustic lip-reading and noble telepathy to put a three-way breakage of silence under the umbrella of a laconic maturity. Yes, it's just another masterpiece by Creative Sources.

FRÉDÉRIC BLONDY / THOMAS LEHN - Obdo (Another Timbre)

The basic method used by Blondy and Lehn for “Obdo”, a record born from different recording sessions from 2003 to 2006, is feeding the analogue synthesizer’s external input with the audio signal of the piano, thus obtaining what the liners call a “cross-effecting real time sound processing”. This means that what would normally constitute the typical features of a piano note - attack, sustain, decay, the dampened metallic qualities of the hammer-on-string processes - are heavily disfigured. OK, not always so massively, but certainly in a most unusual way. Apparently marginal phenomena, semi-distracted touches or quasi casual hits are captured by the modulating network of Lehn’s machine, portraying the worrying presence of some intruder who creeps behind your relaxed posture with silently threatening attitude, content with letting its blurred image be reflected in the mirror, the listener wide-eyed and open-eared to understand what’s going on. There’s no attempt to our security, though, the music mostly belonging to the “discomfort zone” where the instrumental lexicon privileges morphologies previously unheard of, totally excluding rosiness in favour of jangling impingements and unquiet modifications of the surrounding reality. The whole remaining on the “subdued” side for large chunks of the album, which only towards the conclusion of the title track brings out a quantity of repressed nervousness, the kind of “boiling inside” rage that ill-minded individuals disguise with affected smiles and fake goodness while intent in unsettling the life of someone perceived as superior to them. Lehn and Blondy seem to sonically portray exactly that feeling at the end, their conversation finally erupting in harsh contrasts and noisier parallelisms, enough to let us declare this CD as the most “concrete” - at least partially - in the already significant history of Simon Reynell’s imprint. Fascinating stuff, like in all the other chapters.

BLUE COLLAR - Lovely Hazel (Public Eyesore)

The trio of Nate Wooley (trumpet, flugelhorn, voice) Steve Swell (trombone, voice) and Tatsuya Nakatani (percussion) plays with perennial ardour in a bang-for-the-buck cycle of unpretentious trajectories, where nervous irony and marginal seriousness imperceptibly depict a multiform structure of moving particles in peculiar rituals. In the nine tracks of "Lovely Hazel" we're treated to new shapes of controlled freedom whose refreshing abstraction enhances both the musicians' performance and our competence in interpretating their short stories of disembodied formulae. Always instant composers, never sheer noise makers, these men provide lots of good sounding impulses to the utopian desire we secretly grow within us when thinking to subvert the world order while playing an instrument; unfortunately, it's usually much easier running towards the opposite side, wrapped in total numbness.

F.S. BLUMM / LUCA FADDA - F.S. Blumm meets Luca Fadda (Ahornfelder)

Multi-instrumentalist Blumm and trumpeter Fadda recorded this long-distance artefact utilizing both regular and toy instruments for what the liners define as “light-hearted tunes”. Intermittently, the patterns and themes constituting the backbone of the pieces generate a bit of head-scratching. Taken as compositional ideas they don't amount to an awful lot, yet manage to elicit some measure of cloudy tranquillity. The two longest tracks are built upon repetitive bass vamps and processed trumpet tones, which is a good thing when we deal with proper minimalism; here, the trick becomes a little worn out at the end. The deployment of toys as an orchestration tool is