eleven

81-88


Ab & Terrie - Hef (Atavistic) 2000

Ab is Ab Baars of the ICP Orchestra and Terrie is Terrie Ex... of... The Ex. OK? Both their day jobs involve large collective outfits that play either jazz or politically active punk... but here they've stripped right down to guitar and sax to explore a more microcosmic musical realm. Quiet, but still confrontational... they manage to collide like two big pogoing brains.
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Abir/Wales - Movement A, Study 33/Landscape (Sulphur) 2000

Robin Rimbaud aka Scanner started this Beggars Group sub-imprint to explore the burgeoning
electronics field, especially work by artists who shared his affinity for cinematic soundscapes built from varied sources. This split release features two long tracks. The first one by David Abir is very restrained and moodily effective... sadly Abir seems to have faded off the "scene." The other by Ashley Wales is an equally stirring counterpoint, a little busier and buzzier but still well measured. Wales was/is a member of groundbreaking Drum and Bass duo Spring Heel Jack... who've since moved further into the realm of improvised music having released several full lengths in Blue Series by Thirsty Ear records.
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Muhal Richard Abrams - Visibility of Thought (Mutable) 2001

This is a bit of an anomaly for Abrams, who is know primarily as a free jazz pianist and first president of the AACM: an album of interpretations of his classical compositions. It's a nice surprise to hear these mostly gentle though complex pieces played either solo by Joseph Kubera, know also as an interpreter of John Cage's work, or with delicate string accompaniment by Mark Feldman, ETHEL String Quartet and others.


Accelera Deck - Ipsissima Vox (Scarcelight) 2003

Remember in an earlier post I reviewed another Accelera Deck disc... saying how I was surprised by it's bedroom folkiness given that the other one I own was more abstract and electric and infrequently melodic? Well this is that other one. Perhaps the best way to summarize this one is to mention how, when I was playing it in the store, a woman from the office next door to see if there was some sort of alarm going off. There wasn't.
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Adler/Chauncy/Lloyd/Palmer/Wachsmann - Apparitions (Leo) 2004

As improvised music enters the digital age you find more and more of this kind of group... with musicians who play both acoustic instruments and electronics, either homemade or computer-based. I'm sure there's a huge messageboard debate always raging about the purity of this kinda thing, but I'm mostly interested in how each recording manages the tools they employ. This quintet sticks to the quiet side of things... preferring to find how the "real" instruments can imitate machinistic sounds or how the electronics can emit organic tones. Like a "Hands Across America" for farmers and robots.
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AGF - Westernization Completed (Orthlorng Musork) 2003


AGF/Delay - Explode (AGF Production) 2005

Antye Greie-Fuchs is a German artist who is arguably an inheritor of Laurie Anderson's mantle in music and language. Before working solo she was a member of the duo Laub who's work process included using the programming language of software, musical or otherwise, as lyrical content to be sung/recited. AGF studies language as tool of both communication and alienation in many ways... such as "singing" in English instead of her native tongue to subvert clear meaning, or by razor-edits of vocal tracks to alter sense... much like William Burroughs "cut-up" technique of writing. It comes full circle, as one of Laurie Anderson's songs was based on Burroughs' quote that "language is a virus from outer space." Her partner, Vladislav Delay, is a worthy foil on Explode... having worked both in more structured dance electronics as Luomo, while under his "real" name he explores generative and expansive takes on the Dub genre. Their collaboration touches on many of the elements form their individual works, but also provides a certain stability that neither fully possess separately. If you click on the album artwork you'll also see how they've cleverly presented the songs' lyrics.
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Brian Agro - Poems and Preludes (Percaso) 2000

I've never been a big classical music fan... the pomp and thunder of orchestral music seldom unseats me. I do, however, find comfort in solo piano composition: Chopin's Nocturnes, Satie's Gymnopedes, Cage's Sonatas for Prepared Piano. Brian Agro is a Canadian composer whose work I received in early solicitations for airplay material. He has many of the qualities that I find compelling in the aforementioned artists' pieces. Therefore... me likey this too. Simple.