Jon Abbey, producer of Erstwhile, has often remarked that he approaches his label as a fan, putting together combinations of musicians that he himself would like to hear, usually in groups that hadn’t previously existed. In the last couple of years he’s carried this over to the programming of small music festivals in New York. In October of 2002, Abbey arranged his most ambitious affair yet, a three-day fest held in Tokyo and featuring many of the leading figures in both the Japanese and European improvisatory avant-garde. The results of this occasion, and much more besides, are lovingly and lavishly presented in this 8-disc set (including a DVD) and a major event it certainly is. Oddly enough, I think that (expense aside) it’s not a bad place at all for the new listener to dip his or her toes, offering a wide range or approaches, a generally warm and embracing atmosphere and consistently superb (sometimes incredible) performances.
The collection has an appealingly symmetrical structure: the four discs that contain the music heard at the festival itself occupy #’s 3-6 and are sandwiched between two discs of music that largely took place just before the AMPLIFY fest and a set that occurred a day later (plus the DVD). This is all sumptuously packaged in digi-paks bearing the mysteriously evocative, gorgeous photos of Yuko Zama, accompanied by a info-packed 52-page booklet (which includes remarks by the musicians involved, sometimes quite telling ones) and encased in a box that’s attractive enough to qualify as an art object all on its own.
The very first thing one hears sounds almost like a whistle or an avian ululation, an “Attention!” heralding the set. Disc 1 contains three performances that took place in the week prior to the festival proper and one that occurred afterward, all including Toshimaru Nakamura (in duo with Thomas Lehn, trio with Tetuzi Akiyama and Gunter Muller, duo with Christof Kurzmann and trio with Lehn and Taku Sugimoto). Though all have their rewards, my favorite of this bunch is the trio with Muller and Akiyama. Muller, as is his wont, leavens the proceedings with a sly smoothness that highlights both Nakamura’s ethereal abstraction as well as Akiyama’s rich, delicate strummings.
If the studio disc, Nakamura and Muller’s “Tint” had been released as an individual recording, it surely would have ranked as one of the very best of the year. As is, it’s a major highlight of this set, a perfect pairing of talents. The music, in five tracks, throbs and bristles with energy and barely controlled power, ranging from the quiet control of the first two Nakamura-produced tracks to the explosive abandon of the final three mixed by Muller. The last cut in particular, “…..tint”, is one of the very finest improv pieces in recent memory.
Amazingly, the set that begins the festival itself might go Muller/Nakamura one better. The duo Cosmos (Sachiko M and Ami Yoshida) offers what I think is the highlight of the collection, a blindingly intense, effervescently beautiful creation melding icily pristine sine waves and static with the most wondrous voice working in this genre today. Sachiko, employing an attack she’s been working toward for several years, concentrates her tones into narrow, perfectly balanced stria, decorating them sparingly with nearby pitches or dustings of noise, providing a seemingly gauzy but quite solid framework for Yoshida to dance within. Yoshida’s voice, almost entirely ultra-high peeps, sputters and strangulated cries, is in perfect apposition, not as any kind of glib contrast but as an equal partner: larynx and sine-wave made for each other. Anyone who enjoyed their earlier Erstwhile release, “Tears”, will be knocked out by this one.
The remainder of that disc and the next one include a darkly rich, relatively restrained performance from the trio of Keith Rowe, Thomas Lehn and Marcus Schmickler, a powerful and surprisingly violent and percussive one from Muller and Otomo Yoshihide than melts into a deep, deep hum and a wild, 40-minute romp stuffed with blistering, burbling back and forths between Schmickler and Lehn.
Discs 5 and 6 capture the close of the festival with four sets that alternate quiet/near-melodic with quiet/severe. Both of the former feature guitarist Burkhard Stangl, who has become something of the John Tilbury of his instrument, tending toward tonally beautiful strummings placed with exacting care in the musical space. In the first piece, he plays alongside Taku Sugimoto (who, at the time of this festival, was going further and further toward his ultra-minimalist stance of hardly playing at all) and Christof Kurzmann, who takes out his clarinet to supplement a somewhat malfunctioning G3 computer. They begin tentatively and maintain a certain delicacy throughout, but gradually create a softly flowing pastoral feeling that’s very enchanting. Stangl’s duo with Muller is, unsurprisingly, undulating and luscious, Muller setting up rolling, heaving swells for Stangl to navigate with the well-chosen chord, ultimately resulting in a totally beguiling, dreamlike atmosphere.
The remaining two festival sets reprise duos who had prior releases on Erstwhile, Rowe/Nakamura and Nakamura/M. By this point, Rowe and Nakamura were operating with a telepathic degree of compatibility and their set, essentially a single, endlessly complex and fascinating drone, sounds like the work of one mind. Around this time, Rowe was remarking that he had reached the stage of not having to actually touch his guitar during a performance and that may almost have been the case here as one hears the flutter of his handheld fans and various controlled feedbacks and hums far more often than anything reminiscent of guitar strings. The bubbling patterns that Nakamura calls forth midway through provide a more vociferous and roiling substream than had been present on ‘Weather Sky’. A glorious set.
The festival proper closes with the duo that created the epochal do a couple of years earlier. As in Cosmos, Sachiko here narrows her focus sublimely, her pure sine tone acting as spine for Nakamura’s staticky grafts. The relatively short piece becomes a sonic tendril, a sparse shoot with a simple surface appearance belying hyper-complex, interactive strata.
The day after the festival closed, Rowe gathered six of the musicians (including Oren Ambarchi, who was in Tokyo to hear the music) and formed a unique guitar septet. They perform two pieces here, an interpretation of three pages from Cornelius Cardew’s ‘Treatise’ and an improvisation. The Cardew is relatively uncluttered and open, but the differing intonations and timbres of the guitar make for a fullness that belies the sparseness. Things get more dense and resonant in the concluding improvisation, sustained, ringing tones engaging in conversation with harsh ones, the seven guitarists forming an impressively uncrowded and consistently engaging whole.
But wait, there’s more! Filmmaker Jonas Leddington gives us a DVD of the festival and surrounding activity titled ‘Balance Beams’ that succeeds on several fronts. Despite varying his visual approach from fairly straightforward naturalism to high degrees of abstraction, Leddington never upstages the music or draws unnecessary attention to himself, no small feat. On several occasions, the audio-visual pairings are stunning and ingenious, as when a Rowe/Lehn/Schmickler performance suddenly shifts gears musically and the image wrenches from a stage shot to video of the lower limbs of Tokyo pedestrians. Secondly, the portions of performance, generally of at least ten minutes in length, sometimes provide a valuable additional element, allowing contextual understanding of an event that might be difficult to grasp with only aural input. This lets the new listener have greater appreciation for Cosmos, for example, and most impressively, lends enormous weight to the otherwise undocumented show by Sugimoto’s guitar quartet, wherein the four musicians play only the barest handful of notes over ten or twelve minutes. What might be a too spare and ethereal audio experience becomes fraught with delicious tension. Additionally, there are several “extras” including musician discussions and surround sound versions of two of the sets (Rowe/Lehn/Schmickler and Muller/Yoshihide).
There is really nothing even approaching a weak set in this box, which is saying something considering both its ambition and sheer volume. Several of the performances capture these fine musicians at or near their peak as of this date. AMPLIFY 2002: balance will no doubt be a landmark event in the history of this music — forget the price and go for it. You are guaranteed not to be disappointed.
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