michael pisaro, wandelweiser, etc.

i like how in a different context this would be 'soothing nature sounds' (well kinda), $3.99 at target

http://www.diafani.de/?product=seascapes

but here it's like fuck u i'm a composer this is my field recording

feelin those seascapes

i seriously don't get why cds of basically different configurations of white noise aren't more popular

finally got my hands on crosshatches. fantastic; immediately put it on again when the second disc finished.

trying to parse out what's 'natural' or 'electronic' is a fun little game to play.

― (⊙_⊙?) (Alan N)

thrilling sine waves

wow, i can feel the bassy one even on my shitty ipod speaker (ok, it's not that shitty but still). it must be incredible on a real system.

http://olewnick.blogspot.com/2013/08/this-place-is-love.html?m=1

a decent summation of this recording... can't say it's a pleasure listen, but it certainly has an unusual definition, dimensions difficult to measure.

http://www.thewatchfulear.com/?p=8381

One of what I think totals ten recent releases by the German composer Eva-Maria Houben, Orgelbuch is the one amongst them not released on her own new Diafani label, appearing instead at the end of last year on Wandelweiser. Orgelbuch is an intriguing release. For the composition of the work Houben has prescribed three sets of fourteen manual and/or pedal stops for the pipe organ, which she plays here herself. There are fourteen bicinia, trios and quatuors here. Not being an expert on matters of the church organ, I am not sure how much these settings completely prescribe the music heard here, but I am assuming, from what my ears are telling me, that a bicinium involves just two notes, a trio three, and a quatuor, four, though it would appear that one note can be played in different octaves. The various pieces then selected for this release utilise these simple raw materials to form short works that have something of a rigorous minimalism about them- shortish pitches each of roughly the same length within each piece placed alongside one another, almost like the simple, stark modernism of early Dutch typography, drawing beauty from the juxtaposition of simple elements arranged in near-rhythmic patterns and the negative spaces between them.

So the fourteen pieces chosen here from the possible forty-two are each quite different, each similar, but also containing its own individuality. The semi-mathematical constraints placed upon the compositions then force the music into a strange, almost inhuman space. There are repeating forms in each of the works, pitches standing alone, sometimes undercut by another, sometimes them both sounding together, but never more than four notes and often, as with the five bicinia here, just two notes, sometimes sitting neatly adjacent to one another, sometimes careering off of each other at angles. There is a clinical feel to the album, a kind of stark inevitability to the music, that once a piece begins, and its few elements are clear, then there is nowhere else for the music to go apart from rotate slowly, so letting the various elements collide, combine and separate again. In places the album feels like systems music, and yet, beyond the restrictions placed upon the number of stops to be used, the placement of notes has been freely composed by Houben. As Webern and companions restricted themselves through serialism, so Houben attempts something similar, even more restrictive here, and so that the resulting music has a kind of haunting beauty to it, an almost alien simplicity around how the soft, warm notes reflect of one another. Strange, almost unsettling music then, but at the same time oddly enchanting and thoroughly beautiful. Nine more discs to go…

http://www.newmusicbox.org/articles/faithfully-re-presenting-the-outside-world/

on pisaro's 'transparent city' and toshiya tsunoda's 'grains of spring' (which is neat)

https://soundcloud.com/peckinpahtrio/j-rg-frey-stranger-with-melody

been getting play out of this frey piece, as well as the Dedalus disk on Potlach. Good stuff

we have a new Gravity Wave coming in a few weeks, 'Closed Categories in Cartesian Worlds'. for bowed crotales (Greg Stuart) and sine waves (Michael P). it is mind-warping like nothing I've ever heard before, along the lines of Lucier and Amacher but to my ears much more powerful/successful.

so, yeah, I'm into it. :)

!!!

there's an excerpt of it up on the GW site now:

http://michaelpisaro.blogspot.com/2013/10/gw-010-excerpt-and-pre-order.html

http://michaelpisaro.blogspot.com/2013/11/closed-categories-in-cartesian-worlds.html

http://images.static.steveweissmusic.com/products/images/uploads/1104031_10530_popup.jpg

in case like me you suspected a crotale was perhaps some kind of

http://manrepeller.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/cronut.jpg

we have a new Gravity Wave coming in a few weeks, 'Closed Categories in Cartesian Worlds'. for bowed crotales (Greg Stuart) and sine waves (Michael P). it is mind-warping like nothing I've ever heard before, along the lines of Lucier and Amacher but to my ears much more powerful/successful.

so, yeah, I'm into it. :)

― jon abbey, Sunday, October 27, 2013 8:11 AM (1 month ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I certainly say more powerful or successful than those two, but I would definitely agree very impressive in a way I rarely get to hear & that he's understood exactly why the pieces of those two composers work as music and not just science demonstrations

interesting, Milton, was waiting for your feedback.

so to go off topic slightly, which recordings along these very general lines by Lucier and/or Amacher would you most highly recommend? I'm a big fan of the first track on the first Amacher Tzadik disc, but the rest of the two discs never did much for me, and I've never connected with almost any of Lucier's sine wave work, it always feels to me like it's sine waves plus something and I never hear the connection/interaction like I do here with Greg's crotales. maybe it's an issue with the way the Lovely discs are produced/recorded/performed/mastered/something, as I do like the double CD on Antiopic with Charles Curtis quite a bit.

ha ha meant to say certainly wouldn't say. but I do see why you'd use the word 'powerful' -- those crotales have a lot more energy to them than your typical sinewave + single xylophone note setup

I'm positive you've heard the 2CD edition of 'Still And Moving Lines Of Silence In Families Of Hyperbolas' -- it connects for me. The suite for piano 'Still Lives' is also probably my favorite sine wave piece of his, the generators are in slow but constant motion and so as the piano intersects them, you get not just the phenomena but these baffling but inevitable little tunes, it's a beautiful way to write a piece.

good recordings of Amacher barely exist. the Tzadik CDs are more just the libraries / ingredients and don't have much with how she'd mix them together live, where it was basically one of the most powerful / unprecedented sounds anyone had ever heard. Naut Humon's Recombinant has a 12 channel 90 minute set archived that is pretty much the best document apart from odd room recordings like 'Music Gallery Live 1982'.

thanks, Milton! maybe I'll revisit 'Still and Moving Lines…', and maybe sometime I'll be able to hear that Amacher recording as she intended...

Naut Humon's Recombinant has a 12 channel 90 minute set archived that is pretty much the best document

Didn't know of this.

The thinking with Amacher has been that we'd need an installation to represent her work. Maybe one day..

floored by this continuum unbound box set...

http://recordings.irritablehedgehog.com/album/j-rg-frey-pianist-alone

^realness

lol: Twelve minutes have passed.

poor as i am i look forward to the time haflway thru 2015 when someone has finally ripped continuum unbound and file-shared it long enough for me to yoink a copy, it sounds super spiff

or earlier

it's funny, over laptop speakers the first disc (second too) sounds like a goddamn jungle, but even over my crummy ~~home listening arrangement~~ all the nature sounds are way in the back and the soundstage is dominated by the tones, which i hadn't even heard before over laptop speakers

I think the first disc is a straight field recording?

the way each disc is a really well done ver of diff variations of his style reminds me of pan sonic's kesto. still soaking it all in but this is really top-notch stuff.

huh maybe i was listening to #2, i only have 1 + 2 right now i think and thought i had sorted out which was which

the progression of it is weird. or i dunno the… demand on / enticement of yr attention. it has many features that could be absorbing elsewhere, maybe are here, but… aren't. the sounds are there. there's not the blanketing-environment effect that's all too easy to shoot for in a droney-soundey- recording-piece, aural comfort.

yeah, I really like that about it actually. the sounds being used are pleasant and soothing and it all sorta works in an ambient bg listening mode... but the level of detail in composition, density, and production all really reward attentive listening.

third disc is super cool btw, a lotta variety.

http://www.anothertimbre.com/laurencecrane.html

^ w/ sooper positive pisaro review

http://www.allaboutjazz.com/laurence-crane-composer-of-the-year-by-john-eyles.php

http://www.sinfinimusic.com/uk/features/interviews/composer-interviews/laurence-crane

the album is really good. Pisaro also has notes in the sleeve for Lost Daylight, an excellent recording of Terry Jennings pieces played by John Tilbury.

yeah, i listened to it (the crane 2-disc) this morning, would be good for ambient hedz i think; there were some definitely tilburyish moments

http://blogs.villagevoice.com/music/2014/08/the_best_noise_music_in_august_springsteen_shitshower_bryan_eubanks_pagan_cops.php

yeah does there have to be so much ear-piercing

http://youtu.be/AtKajbX5ZL4

taylan susam – tombeau (2014)

http://youtu.be/sQHPyMm5ldY

Morton Feldman 'Two Pianos' -- played by John Tilbury and Philip Thomas, June 2014

http://ihatemusic.noquam.com/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=9621

this one's way weird and good. a lot of piano, heavy atmosphere and crisp production.

re: the piano on Schwarze Riesenfalter.. i'm catching vibes of Frederic Rzewski, Erik Satie, a bit of Feldman, and hints of George Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue." Maybe that's a stretch.

It took a while but Schwarze Riesenfalter really grew on me over the past week. The other two Erstwhile releases were much more immediate, particularly the La Casa/Unami. And are we using this thread to talk about modern classical as well as other electroacoustic/eai associated with the scene? Didn't even realize this thread existed (though, I'm still a fairly new user).

I was really surprised by the new Glistening Examples release with Meyers & Lescalleet. I think Lescalleet's TIWID series find him honing his craft but at the same time, it all sounds very similar and I find myself getting a bit tired of them rather quickly. I still enjoy them whenever I put them on though. As of right now, I'm most excited to hear the Rie Nakajima LP on Consumer Waste. Waiting for copies to show up at Winds Measure though since I live in the states.

I supposed anything goes, really. I started posting things Tilbury, or Pisaro-related in this thread, and these are still more sort of quiet musics. There's an Erstwhile thread, but I figured since Pisaro performs on the latest one, then why not. I'm not sure I'd call what Lambkin or Pisaro are doing "EAI," necessarily. their processes are not divulged, but the results certainly do not sound improvised.

Oh I wasn't implying that the record was EAI by any means, was just wondering if we were also talking about that stuff here. Didn't know there was an Erstwhile thread though either.

Have you heard the self-titled Jurg Frey album released on Musiques Suisses from last year? It's phenomenal. I tend to think Frey is hit or miss-in the past couple years I liked Pianist, Alone and Dedalus but didn't like II and Cantor Quartets-but this new one is really in my wheelhouse. The whole record's relatively melodic and the final track especially is a beauty.

I've been 'seeking for it with no results.. The samples on the page are pretty nice, it's a pricey item though.

http://youtu.be/LpJG3sw5HSA

Jürg Frey: Paysage pour Gustave Roud

it's closer to sounding like this piece than most the Frey that I've heard.. I really like his track on the Dedalus (Potlatch) disk, though.

Lovely vid. It reminds that I should check out more of Stefan Thut's works. His Two Strings And Boxes album with Johnny Chang a couple years ago surprised me. Seems like it's overlooked from what I've seen.

I can share the Frey album with you if you're interested, not a big deal.

This might be one of the few times I've been compelled to shell out upwards of $40 for a cd.. listening to the Frey now, a second time through. Very sublime, the melodic activity is most welcome.

https://youtu.be/oJPUjqQuYH8

you can cop the musiques suisses disk thru Erstdist now, though it's gonna be difficult to choose between it and this new recording on AT..

surprised there's little to no discussion of Frey on ILM. it's a shame

http://www.wandelweiser.de/_e-w-records/_ewr-catalogue/ewr1501.html

on a side note, this is one of the nicest things i've heard in a while... the audio sample is a good representation. it actually feels like the barometric pressure drops in the room, when i put this cd on.

https://youtu.be/YUwq63OIPtk

one of the fine cuts from lost daylight.. the original recording doesn't contain any of these incidental sounds (birds chirping etc.)

The Fraufraulein album on Another Timbre is one of my favorites this year.

likewise! i had just put it on actually... funny bit of synchronicity there. Had a near-transcendent experience listening to it one night, about a month back. It's very painting-like, rife with imagery.

Got a bit carried away, posting here today, but I had to chime in as it's a definite favorite. The AT youtube excerpt is not a very good indication of the depth of it.

I'm sorta tiring of Another Timbre's uniform packaging, even though it's a clean look. It recalls the Tzadik series from the 90s, which was a bit of a repellent.

SImon Reynell (Another Timbre guy) has said countless times that he doesn't care at all about packaging (paraphrasing).

I am out of those Frey Musiques Suisses discs again at ErstDist, but will try to get another batch.

the actual cover images are nice.. it's the general layout that almost projects a same-y ness on the music, not just the packaging. of course it's a terrible generalisation, and i don't own many AT releases. i completely forgot that "Lost Daylight" is on AT, so maybe the uniform gatefold is a good thing.. i suppose i just miss jewel cases.

Picked up the Crane double cd the other day (after sbody mentioned it on another ilx thread), then promptly ordered the Wandelweiser box.
This stuff really scratches an itch for an old David Sylvian, Morton Feldman junkie. So good.

https://youtu.be/RuZwzoj85C0

Cellist Oliver Coates performs 'Raimondas Rumsas' by Laurence Crane

oh man that's incredible.
super excited for the new AT releases. the Jurg Frey sounds like it's gonna be one of his best and the Saunders should be good too (performed by Apartment House who did the Laurence Crane album).

yep it's lovely. I need to do some closer listening but it's similar to continuum unbound in sound and scope and especially in the way that the field recordings are essential. I especially like the second disc so far.

just wanted to chime in (wasn't aware it had been mentioned already) about Denatured and Found Again... it's a well-engaging (and long-ish) series of field recordings, blended with electro-acoustic, compositional elements. it's my favorite Pisaro release in quite a while

also, l'ame est sans retenue I (Jürg Frey) is really great passive listening material. Been playing it on the stereo in an adjacent room for the last few weeks. it's maddening to actively listen to ('waiting' for sound events), but when i'm not focused on it, it's lulling, and there's loads of subtle detail. I'd like to call it ambient (it's not), but it works great as ambient sound art. It can sound like ocean surf crashing (intermittently), or the sounds of jet airplanes in the sky, or like a distant freeway/din of the outdoors--with vague, incidental, tonal elements (very subtle, or pronounced, but nearly impossible to anticipate) ... each of the five discs work well for repeated listening.

These two releases work quite well (simultaneously, w/add'l, low volume, minimal / drone-type ambiance) to simulate a sort of relaxing, 'inclement weather' environment indoors.. i'd been going on two weeks of marked (cold turkey) Benzo- withdrawal (a fucking nightmare), and i was using these recordings to calm my nerves, even when (i don't know) [if] they're not intended to be used as ambient music. The Tone Glow review is linked above, but here's a direct Bandcamp link - https://erstwhilerecords.bandcamp.com/album/l-me-est-sans-retenue-i

I'd be curious to hear others' thoughts on these recordings!

yeah, i like that frey too

i have been in the same listening situation, or constellation of listening situations, for many years now, and while i can get a certain amount of mileage out of recordings like these here and there, i always feel a little let down at not being able to really audition them the way i imagine i ought to—quiet room, big stereo, environing sound

the payoffs from waiting for the sound events on the frey, and on plenty of the others (similar stop-start structures on the new pisaro sometimes), are certainly weird. you wait and get used to waiting and forget that you're waiting; eventually things flip and the silent stretches feel like surprises, like 'oh yeah i forgot sometimes it's not ging'; sometimes they remind you that you were listening to something else in the first place, after you blanked it out.

it's been a while. load of remarkable events, releases, and pieces of writing (Tone Glow online, etc.) have transpired during the last ~four years. feel as if i've been clobbered by work and life, haven't been keeping up much with these sorts of things. labels Erstwhile & Elsewhere (their catalogues are up on bandcamp) have been putting out albums at a steady rate... as well as Another Timbre (of course)

Gondolas, by Graham Lambkin & James Rushford (on Erstwhile) is one of the freshest, rawest things i've listened to in a while. TOP (erst 093) sounds wicked on the hi-fi, as well. but, re: wandelweiser, Eva-Maria Houben's ensemble works, played by ordinary affects (along with E-MH), has remained my favorite release on the edition wandelweiser label. haven't kept up with more recent releases on EWR, though. the Houben disc (disc one, EWR 1904) is just perfect. it's tonal, spacious, and quite unhurried (almost still) ..yet it's massive-sounding (on a proper stereo), and enveloping. check out the samples: https://www.wandelweiser.de/_e-w-records/_ewr-catalogue/ewr1904-05.html

Germaine Sijstermans' Betula (elsewhere 023-2) is similar, though it's less porous (more sustained sounds) and very understated. i've had the album for several months and i'm still hearing new sounds, timbres, and events (attack transients, etc.) with new listens. it's v smooth, sort of muted, and kaleidoscopic.

*that have transpired

Someone dumped the Jurg Frey collection on Dusty Groove recently

“A” Jurg Frey collection

several of those are "choice" jurg frey CDs. of the ones that are still in stock, Fields, Traces, Clouds is ace, along with Ephemeral Constructions. EC is the weirder and less tonally straightforward of the two. Fields, Traces, Clouds is an excellent entry point into Frey's oeuvre, and my current favorite of his.

Has this article already been discussed here, on ILX ?

https://theatticmag.com/firstperson/2495/the-weirdness-of-experimental-music%3A-the-reproduction-of-in%2Fdifference.html?fbclid=IwY2xjawOoLk5leHRuA2FlbQIxMABicmlkETFGZm5zM0cyeDVVYTE1MHdZc3J0YwZhcHBfaWQQMjIyMDM5MTc4ODIwMDg5MgABHkYNp5q6nfnXi4bGEEY3xFtoaNs1EY3Glwygv9sY3-90XYu2kuD5ZKQKlkUe_aem_xiiMddy618YPC1pT1H6-6Q

apologies for the mega hotlink / sorry if this piece of writing is old news! I'd be interested to hear about what people make of it. Cheers

why lump julius eastman in? his music is the polar opposite of lowercase thumbsucking. a good performance of one of his long pieces is a radical ecstatic experience akin to a religious experience. a live performance of Feminine by LA group Wild Up left me shaking and in tears like the Holy Spirit entered me

I feel like this points at something real but then the scope of the argument overreaches and the focus disappears. Clearly there's a strong representation of this broadly Wandelweiser-y stuff at these festivals and on these labels, but there's also a lot of other stuff going on, which reading this you wouldn't imagine. (I also wonder how precise a categorisation that spans Wandelweiser, Eastman, Radigue, and Laurie Anderson really is.) In particular the reflexive perspective on the histories, milieus, and ideologies of experimental music that this article is calling for is one of the major things that these festivals and institutions have been doing over the last decade or two, and with that comes a lot more representation of music that seems to work with values more aligned with this guy's. Maybe you can say that in the end this reflexiveness only perpetuates and reaffirms these WEIRD institutions, or remains too academic in scope, or erases the borders only to then redraw them just a little further out, but that's a different argument.

Stripped of the sweeping claims about the Western canon and WEIRDness (itself an argument that in its original form I think gets lost when it overextends: a claim about practices in psychological testing, fine, a claim about some bifurcation in human subjectivity caused by a medieval shift in kinship structures, I'm less sure), I don't know that there's much in here that George E. Lewis wasn't saying thirty years ago - https://www.amherst.edu/media/view/58902/original/Lewis+-+Improvised+Music+after+1950-+Afrological+and+Eurological+Perspectives+.pdf. Of course he still has to say similar things now (https://www.on-curating.org/issue-44-reader/a-small-act-of-curation.html) so it's not a done deal, but I'm not sure this really pinpoints any of the ongoing issues.

I *am* tired of low-effort ambient soundscapes that everyone and their granny (not on bongos) is churning out by the yard lately.

but there's also a lot of other stuff going on, which reading this you wouldn't imagine

yeah, i just read this and didn’t find it very convincing for this reason. it seems to me like the author is a little bored with a specific thing that, at the end of the day, remains fairly marginal and easy to ignore if you’d like to.

its hardly omnipresent, unlike watered down third/fourth gen “minimalism” or “music to drowse to” which major orchestras commission and plagues the major classical labels

yep. and outside of academic spaces and institutions, good ol' messy noise that sits comfortably next to things like the balloon & needle set the author enjoyed (guessing it was choi joonyong & hong chulki from the little description) seems alive and well too. just go to those shows instead!

grabbed some of these toshiya tsunoda “early experiments” for bandcamp friday - excited to dive in!

https://toshiyatsunoda.bandcamp.com/music