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2009-19: A
Decade Reviewing Unusual, Experimental, Improvised, Composed, Rock, Folk, and
Other Musics for Squid's Ear
2020 will be my eighteenth year working as a music journalist.
Well, define "work" as a hobby that gets me free CD's and a few dollars now and
then. I used to write for the free concerts, opportunities to interview bands
and other famous types of people, opportunities to hang out with bands, free
everything and movies at Sundance, very random stories that come from free
everything and hanging out with band members and famous people. All the
lingering with professional musicians made me feel like I was part of their
story — I could at least be a contributor via my compliments, blog posts...I
guess I was simply an asexual groupie. With Squid's Ear, however, I stick
around because I continually find brave, new stuff just when I think I've heard
it all. You suppose you know what Avant-Garde is, but there is a basement in
that club. And a tunnel leading from there, and a fork in that tunnel, and a
cave behind that wall, etc. You know of John Zorn? Great, now dig deeper. Keith
Rowe? That's just the start of the anti-guitarists. Find that cave — and keep
your eyes open along the way.
I put together a list similar to this in the mid-2000s. That one outlined
a musical road map from my birth (Magical
Mystery Tour in the womb) to grad school, so the group of artists mentioned
therein is a more wide-eyed, sometimes fashion-forward, "there is a big world
out there" choice of a young person mentally escaping the ick of a conformist, religion-saturated
town. That is, this music was crucial, but the whole package is what cultivated
my range. There is the arbitrary fifth grade field trip to a Japanese temple -
punctuated with lunch at Chucky Cheese — the first time I heard Depeche Mode
(age thirteen), learning about sampling from Art of Noise (also age thirteen),
watching a Throbbing Gristle video (I thought it was gross), officially claiming
to be goth after five minutes of Bauhaus, finding out that Jazz can be really sexy if it's Bitches Brew, being immersed in a wall of color and sound of
Tibetan non-secular music, and having George Crumb's daunting Black Angels murder my thoughts of writing
for string quartet. When writing that account, I had barely discovered Jason
Kahn's revelatory Cut label, Japan's Onkyo collective
(i.e. Otomo Yoshihide, Taku
Sugimoto, Tetuzi Akiyama) and label Ambiances
Magnétiques, specifically the boxset Montréal Free. And off
I went.
What have I gained during my ten-year residence with Squid's Ear? I'm
a few steps closer to comprehending:
1) The word "music"
2)
The possibilities that sound is capable of
3)
Awareness of the illusion of pitch relative to
each living organism's brain (I believe our tastes can be swayed by this phenomena)
4)
The ever-widening definition of "consonance"
With each epiphany, I add another pin to my philosophy sash. And I
understand that music becomes my emotional support animal when someone can create
an environment, or a heterotopia (a world within a world), or otherwise
convince me of a new reality, universe, microcosm, wormhole, etc. On the downside,
I always squint and fidget and force my mouth shut while thinking "I'll be the
judge of that" every time someone says the words "experimental", "atonal", or
the worst, "unlistenable"; I'm tolerant but I won't suffer loud, uninformed
chumps who assign pejorative definitions to something they want to dismiss while
under the influence of being cool. It physically hurts me — ask my former
chiropractor.
(But I haven't increased the number of synonyms for works, music, sound,
record, album, disc, sonic, pieces, performers, players, guitarist, listen,
hear, strings, frequency, bow, trumpet, horn, and instrument. I can never
remember the rule about apostrophes after singular and plural S's. These are my
frustrations.)
While there are plenty of other albums that made a substantial
impact on my relationship and approach to sound since 2009, reviewing these CD's
- doing it right — forced us (me, the CD) to get in there under a blanket and
be intimate. Ahem. Looking down at the list below, I remember the moments when,
after sequestering myself with headphones, time and patience, I allowed this
often genre-agnostic music to tell me what it's about. With each, I
figuratively went cross-eyed as I felt the universe expand, and / or saw the
Hand of God, and / or had a peak behind the curtain that hides all of life's
answers.
So here are the records I was most intimate with. Ahem.
1) Fünf:
La règle (Ambiances Magnetiques)
Who and what: Brace yourself. Magali
Babin (amplified objects, tape deck, nebulophone, field recordings), Andrea-jane
Cornell, (amplified objects, field recordings, accordion, loops and voice),
Martine H Crispo (circuit bent toys, iDensity, electronics), Anne-F(rançoise)
Jacques (rotation, objects, amplification), Émilie Mouchous, (analogue
synthesizers, electronic fabric), and Erin Sexton (oscillators, electromagnetic
fields, microphone) each sit back, toss a little spice, debris, paint, clay, or
whatever they have to build sonic collage.
What it taught me: Lessons in space and pause. You don't have to constantly speak to
convey a message, and you don't have to use everything you packed in your stick
bag (the results of this sextet have the potential to be an impermeable wall of
noise). Everyone in a band should have to abandon ego and adhere to these règles (they should have to pass a
test). I spent a while playing in Jazz combos, and the maddening competition in
that world felt like a contest of "the best soloist wins at music!" As one does
with a fickle, delicate garden, I am still trying to figure out how to groom
and feed when playing in an ensemble. This record is a benchmark for that.
2) Håvard Volden & Toshimaru Nakamura: Crepuscular Rays (Another Timbre)
Who and what: Håvard Volden (prepared 12-string
guitar) and Toshimaru
Nakamura (no-input mixing board) in an articulate mix of acoustic versus
electricity where both sides find a balanced middle ground. I called them
"godlike contrarians" in my review. I also said that Volden "...has ingested his instrument's history — including chapters
written by Keith Rowe — circumvented the potential for dominance via amplitude
and rendered it to a post-language whisper." I assume most reading are familiar
with Nakamura's "outputs of a mixer plugged into inputs, put some effects in
the middle of that chain, wait for the brilliance that no other no-input mixer
performer can measure up to."
What it taught me: More
lessons in space and pause. There is an awesome, tremendous confidence that
accompanies not playing a note, especially
on a recorded medium where the audience can't see you holding your breath or
scrunching and twitching your eyebrows (the "thinking of the next move" face).
The same applies to holding a note or repeating gesture: How long should it
last? Perfecting this is a life-long struggle. And I'm still trying and failing
but inching forward with my no-input mixer work. I might feel comfortable
showing it at some point in the distant future (after someone goes back in time
and forbids Nakamura access to electronics).
 3) Tim Olive & Anne-F Jacques: Dominion Mills
(845 Audio)
Who and what: Tim Olive on magnetic pickups, aka his prized ramshackle
one-string guitar, and Anne-F Jacques on "rotating devices", those being
anything from hacked turntables to toy motors that make brushes flick against
strips of cardboard to a sardine can soldered to wire and springs.
What it taught me: Tim Olive's The Specialist
is something that thoroughly expanded my idea of "sound art". His aesthetic is
a grumbling, mostly-mono, inimitable affair, and it's what I imagine will be
heard on the daily once technology fails and we adopt simpler, more focused
means; his language increased my awareness and admiration for city noise (it
might have helped me speak thousand-foot crane and jackhammer). I am forever
indebted to him for what he does with his collaborative, curatorial 845 Audio
label. These are the worlds within worlds I reference above. They are
self-contained ecosystems, largely free of outside influence, wherein I can
meditate or disappear. And did I mention "rotating devices"? I read this phrase
and had to know more and more and more about Anne-F Jacques. I wish I could
inherit the time, tools and talent of a welder or renaissance craftsman capable
of forging immaculate noisemakers à la freaking Harry Partch; not having the
ability to build these contraptions means my mental invention vault periodically
dries up. But rotating devices can be anything, and they don't have to be hard
to assemble and transport. In fact these devices are (I think) a reaction to our
complicated tech that can play itself without human guidance. Like the individual
parts of a Rube Goldberg project, the interest of Jacques's modest-looking creations
sinks in only after watching and hearing them do a thing. There is an "a-ha!"
moment with each when my brain's LED lights brighten, and I laugh, or
double-take, or think "I would have never thought of that — well played,
Anne-F", and then I usually fall into the emotions cycle every artist has when
seeing something they wish they did. Check
it out yourself https://vimeo.com/294155071
4) Kuwayama Kiyoharu &
Urabe Masayoshi: Heteroptics (Songs From Under the
Floorboards / Intransitive Recordings)
Who and what: Kuwayama Kiyoharu on cello, viola, percussion i.e. metal junk, wood
sticks, etc. and Urabe Masayoshi exploiting alto saxophone, percussion i.e. chains,
metal joints and bells. Captured in one of the many of the abandoned warehouses
found in Nagoya Port.
What it taught me: One can make the activity between
what we think of as music as important as the music. The anticipation during
the journey is equal to that of the arrival (smacking a snare drum). What we
think of as tension and release might invert. Use everything around you as an
instrument. These guys stomp through an abandoned building, kicking up crap, plunking
out a few raw gestures on whatever happens to be in hand, and lean heavily on natural
reverb as part of the ensemble. They create those sonic environments I
mentioned in the introduction. As with Jeph Jerman and a bunch of other people
(more on Jerman later), there are no wrong notes, there is no wrong production,
experimental actually means to experiment. About Heteroptics, I said, "...the techniques and craft of the artists we
review here all generally attempt to offer both a new voice and queries about
'What is music?' Kuwayama and Masayoshi further pose 'Where is music?'"
continued...
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