Vincent Bergeron, Canadian Original

Vincent Bergeron composes electro-acoustic music. He takes orchestral and other found musical sounds, chops them up into sound bits and puts them together to create avant garde but somewhat disturbingly familiar, "normal" sound worlds (as in a dream where you are not sure where you've heard the music before but it sounds somehow changed). There's just enough ordinary-music--gone-haywire in his musical phrases to grab your ears and direct them to the music. These oddly weird-yet-normal melodies are often then completed by a vocal part (Bergeron) sung overtop the phrases. Listen a little, and it sounds as if you were in a musical hall on Mars. It's pretty incredible.

He's been for several years offering free downloads of his music on the internet, a great example of which is the longer work Casse-tête de l'Existence. You can go grab it in FLAC format at www.archive.org. It's from 2004 and gives you a full take on his wonderfully different sound worlds. He has a website and you can purchase an anthology and newly remixed versions of some of his other work if you rummage around there and elsewhere.

If you are looking for something profoundly different, try the Archive piece. Bergeron is an original.

Ensemble Economique's "Standing Still, Facing Forward"

Composer Brian Pyle and his virtual Ensemble Economique give us something quite wonderful on their release Standing Still, Facing Forward (Amish 032). It's part of Amish Records' "Required Wreckers" series which, if this is a typical example, is presenting important work.

Maestro Pyle takes pre-existing recorded samples of orchestral and otherwise instrumental music along with other found sounds and field recordings, and puts them together in the studio to create unique compositions. Standing Still, Facing Forward is his latest and (apparently) most fully realized piece based on these methods, and it is something that brings to your ears a memorable sonic world.

The music functions as a soundscape at times, as a modern classical composition of a more organized sort at other times. It's a fully worthy CD that should be heard by anyone interested in the avant garde today.

David Borgo's "Chance, Discovery and Design" DVD

David Borgo, musician, composer, conceptualist and educator, has much going for him. He plays fluent sax and flute in the jazz-improv-new-music mode, he combines at various times electronics, electro-acoustics, his "metric" music (which has an African sound to it), improv, modern jazz and modern classical. He also has a flair for visual video creation. All of these facets of his art are well in evidence on his DVD Chance, Discovery and Design (Circumvention).

The visuals: they are extraordinarily interesting. They actually go completely with the music. There's animation, computer graphics, and altered visuals of the musicians in action. They enhance the experience of the music in palpable ways.

There is a cast of some 16 musicians that come in and out of play on any given piece.

Chance runs the gamut from quasi-tribal to avant-fusionesque to high-impact improv. The vibrant visuals ought to help those who might not be familiar with these musical styles because they give them a "total art" context. But even if you know about these sort of sounds the package makes for a very stimulating foray into new music today.

Excellent.

KaiBorg: David Borgo and Jeff Kaiser

The world of electronic music has altered drastically since the days of Milton Babbitt and the RCA Synthesizer. . . one man in extended real-virtual time with a wall of glowing tubes and tediously compiled punch cards. You can do things on a laptop or two live that used to take months in the studio to accomplish, tape splicing block in hand. New software gives improvisers the ability to incorporate live electronics into their performances without a mass of equipment. Of course making things easier does not always lead to more "masterpieces." You get what the musicians' ideas can accommodate. Happily there is nothing ill-considered, unimaginative or hastily conceived in the music of today's posting.

KaiBorg's new CD Harvesting Metadata (pfMENTUM 058) reflects contemporary technical developments with music that entertains, challenges and stimulates. KaiBorg consists of reedman-composer David Borgo and composer-quarter-tone-trumpeter Jeff Kaiser. Together they explore the electro-acoustic interstices with a varied program of pieces that alternately overwhelms the senses and gives pause for contemplation. There are moments of thick electronic texture and quieter way stations of comparative repose. Free-style improvisations have counter ballast in the electronics that give form to a dialog between two imaginative players and their performance resources.

This music can at times be a bit abrasive but always expressive. It's an impressive outing.

Harley Gaber Today: "Mount Fuji" Soundscape

Harley Gaber in my mind will always have the distinction of composing and recording one of the most extreme instrumental avant garde classical pieces I've ever heard. The Winds Rise in the North is a work for string group, originally released as a two-record set in the early-mid '70s. What made it rather extreme was his treatment of dissonance. The original 12-tone composers, the serialists and post-serialists dealt with dissonance generally in a pointilistic way. The bleep and bloop sort of music may have had no harmonically tonal basis or a very expanded one, but the music generally gave you dissonances as if they were tiny points of light on a screen or literally (with some of John Cage's piano music) as a representation of stars in the firmament. For audiences unaccustomed to hearing unresolved dissonance as part of their musical experience, the pointillistic presentation gave the listener some space between tones and also consonant intervals to relieve the tension, for the most part.

The Winds Rise in the North pretty much did none of that. Gaber approached the use of tone in blocks. The string group generally started softly with ever crescendoing complexes of often boldly dissonant sound. The music seems to have represented the build-up of wind currents in some rather extreme weather event, or alternately, some sort of cosmic apocalypse. When those blocks reached their various climaxes, the sheer intensity of continuous dissonant sound (albeit of much interest as sound color) was exhilarating for some, excruciating for others. I still consider it a masterpiece of the era, but perhaps one that many would find hard to sit through.

His latest recording, I Saw My Mother Ascending Mount Fuji (Innova 231) is quite another story.This hour long work, composed between 1968-2009, involves a combination of a piece for multi-track violin and one for processed flute, inserted into an electronics matrix devised by the composer.

Like the Winds Rise in the North, Mount Fuji sprawls throughout its hour-plus duration using long-toned, gradually evolving, wind-like sound-color events as its way of proceeding. Unlike the Winds piece, the music here is much less dense, much less dissonant, and makes for an entirely pleasing listening experience. It's a soundscape of some delicacy, with sustained long-form utterances of a kind of frozen beauty. As much as I appreciate his earlier masterpiece, Mt. Fuji is far more listener friendly. It is a mysterious mountainous essay that speaks as much through omission as commission. And it sounds rather stupendous coming out of the speakers.

Phil Kline & His Zippo Songs

OK, Phil Kline's song cycle Zippo Songs (Cantaloupe Music) has been available for some time now. If I am mentioning it today it is because it transcends the trendy and flavor-of-the-week sorts of come-and-go "product" that we find ourselves bombarded with every day.

Phil Kline created in this group of songs a kind of musical equivalent to Goya's Disasters of War paintings. It is based on the inscriptions soldiers in the Vietnam War scratched on their Zippo lighters. It's sometimes about a kind of gallows humor in the face of horror; then again the inscriptions sometimes communicate a despair that certainly is not at all ironic. They are invariably touching, moving, heart breaking.

The music is what of course puts this all over in a way that transforms it into art. We have a chamber ensemble of Todd Reynolds on violin, the composer on guitars and Dave Cossin on percussion. Theo Bleckmann takes on the vocal part, and he does so without using a trained, operatic sort of sound. This only serves to bring home the contemporaneity of the whole thing. There are electronic manipulations and double tracking passages that thicken the sound but of course that has been a consistent part of Phil Kline's sound and trademark.

I try not to read other reviews before I do one but I accidentally stumbled on a review of Zippo Songs by somebody; I don't recall who. It commented on the work's "brutality." Well certainly the music itself is not at all that in any systematic way. It is sad, reflective and a bit angry at times. But the music is so distinctive it does much more than parallel the lyrical content. It recreates the "looking at a distance" we necessarily experience looking back on a tragic event from a later time. That's in part the magic of this music. It's a tribute to the men and women who fought in that war and the absolute insanity of having to fight in it.

More than that, though, this is music that bears the Phil Kline stamp. It refuses to accept what the "modern classical" genre would dictate as to how the music sounds. It also refuses to accept what the "post-" mode would expect Mr. Kline to produce. There are moments of metal music, especially from the guitars, there are moments of a lyrical tenderness, there are influences of every sort of music Phil Kline has ever heard, I would think. And that's how it should be with a contemporary composer of his caliber.

We sometimes forget that a Haydn, a Mozart, a Beethoven enriched their compositional palettes by the music in which they were immersed as human beings in place and time. Hence interludes of "Turkish" music, references to the dance music of the era, and so on.

The difference between them and Phil Kline is that he is alive right now. And like the other composers I mention, this is not a matter of appropriation as it is of transformation. It isn't music about other music.

Zippo Songs I believe is one of the masterpieces of our current era; Phil Kline is one of our most important composers. But don't take my word for it. Listen.

Alvin Curran's Remarkable Musical Collages

Alvin Curran is one of those composers-performers-improvisers that should be heard by anyone with designs on a complete understanding of modernity (whatever that will turn out to be when looking back 200 years from now).

He was the co-founder of Musica Elettronica Viva, one of the very first (and best) groups to combine live electronics and improvisation. They did things then that were so influential that improv groups are still trying to follow in their footsteps. He's since done a great deal of improv per se with some of the luminaries of the field.

It's his solo collage-like work that we look at today. The John Cage of "Fontana Mix" and "Variations IV" is a precursor, certainly. Sliced, diced and transformed snippets of sound, noise, musical excerpts of high. low, middle, folk, jazz, electronics, vernacular and what have you form the raw material. Where Cage had a kind of anti-structural, aleatoric stance, Curran perhaps is more sensitive to dramatic impact, the audience if you will, and there is more of a sense of structure and immersion in the distinctive sensuality of sound to what he does.

Songs and Views from the Magnetic Garden was one of his earlier masterpieces in the collage idiom. If you haven't heard it, you should. Today, though, we're concerned with his work Toto Angelica in its realization released in 2005, I believe (i dischi di angelica). The CD release has this fascinating version of the piece, plus several shorter works. It is a continuous barrage of various vocal, instrumental and extra-instrumental sounds, and if you listen a number of times it really starts to make sense. Well, more than that. Mr. Curran is one of the most creative musical minds at work today.

Swarmius Return with New EP

We took a look at Swarmius's first CD a few days ago (see listing below). Today it's time for their EP follow-up, Also Normal (Aleppo), and it's another good one. Jozefius and company create orchestrally conceived music that does not fit easily into the ready-made categories. There's a modern classical component but the drive of rock and the electronic wizardry of the best of hip-hop. They conflate genres the way Zappa and Zorn do, but in ways that distinguish them as original.

The thirty-some-odd minute EP ranges over wide and relatively uncharted territory. "Cali' Karsilama" is a wild romp through the mid-east-near Asian-Semitic zone and it has a joyous quality."Orpheus is a Tiptoed Steamhorse" has lively contrapuntal passages that punch through all obstacles and communicate with widely varied textures and timbres in ways that will not leave you somnolent. "Moonlight Beach Chaconne" adds voices to the mix and some really captivating solo violin for a choral opus that plays out its musical cards in a poker game where Swarmius's hand takes all the chips.

In short, this is another intriguing offering and well-worth your listening time. What's next for them? I look forward to whatever it is, and I suspect there are more surprises in store for all of us.

Johnny Butler's Looped Based Solo Saxophone Music

Johnny Butler plays the alto sax. He heads up an interesting ensemble, Scurvy, which I cover in one of my other blogs (see www.gapplegate.com/musicalblog.htm). He also has developed a composition-performance style using his sax and live loops. An EP of this music has just been released, Johnny Butler Solo (no label listed). He gives a nod to Robert Fripp's work with guitar and loops, and when you listen to the EP you can see he has taken the concept and come up with his own distinctive approach and sound.

There are four pieces on the disk, each different, each in its own way evocative, musically inspired and a pleasure to hear. He goes with the rhythmic possibilities of the loop format on one piece, the saxophone choir sound with (nice) soloing on top on another, and there are two that flesh out fully orchestral soundscape panoramas.

That all of the results develop out of Mr. Butler's saxophone in a live setting is impressive. The results are stunning musically, which of course is what counts in the end. Johnny Butler creates music that shows a keen ear for honing in on good musical ideas and then deftly handling the loop technology to get some highly interesting sounds. Mr. Butler is a gas!

A New Version of Riley's "In C," with Remixes

When Terry Riley's concert piece In C was first rather quietly unveiled in the later '60s (as a Columbia recording under the direction of the composer), it did not seem a likely candidate for 40 years of continued recognition. Yet that is the case as we look back today. It was rather experimental in nature and revolutionary in structure. Riley wrote a series of melodic cells, deceptively simple figures in the key of C, modulating into another key, then back again to the original C tonality. The piece was to be performed by any combination of instrumentalists and vocalists, a practice that hearkened back to the earlier music performance ways of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. There was a continual pulse played in octaves of C on the piano, and the instrumentalists were to repeat each music cell in sequence, going from one to the next as they saw fit, so that at any given point in the performance there were overlaps between the cells. The piece ended when all musicians had progressed to the last cell and played it a number of times.

Each performance could differ somewhat dramatically in its length, instrumental color and combinations of cells. A good performance involved keen listening from all participants, so that the patterns of overlapping cells remained interesting and varied.

In C proved to be enormously influential in the development of what later was dubbed minimalism. Its organically evolving patterns of repetition and the sound produced became blueprint guidelines for later composers in the idiom. The trance producing effect looked back to Africa and Indonesia while pointing forward to what became electronica. Progressive rockers and avant jazzmen were significantly influenced as well.

There have been around ten different recordings over the years, all different. Plus In C has been performed countless times all over the world. Its rather frequent presence on concert programs and audio disks gives credence to its continued relevancy for the modern listener.

And now we have the latest version, a 2-CD set (Innova) that includes a complete performance of the piece by the Grand Valley State University New Music Ensemble under the direction of Bill Ryan, plus 16 remixes by, among others, Phil Kline, Todd Reynolds, David Lang and DJ Spooky.

First, a look at the Grand Valley performance of the piece. It is a pretty middle-of-the-road version, which is only to say that it captures the essence of the piece well. There is good spirit and a lively interplay between the musicians. The ensemble is a little light in the area of mallet instruments, which perhaps I have come to expect from listening repeatedly to the original version and those minimalist works (especially those of Steve Reich) that came after. Really though, this is only to say that the Grand Valley version is different, which is the point and part of the beauty of the composition.

The remixes cover much ground. Each one of them takes a number of aspects of the performance piece and filters, alters, and adds instrumental or electronically modified parts not originally elements of the piece. We end up with a set of variations on the themes (the cells) to be found in the score/performance. We come full circle in some ways on those remixes that do sound quite like electronica, but there are as many different sound worlds evoked as there are remixers.

This is a fascinating set of sound events. You get a respectable version of Riley's piece itself and some quite interesting remixes in one package. I think all interested should also hear Riley's original performance (if you can find it). That and this set give you a pretty keen insight into the work and it's open-ended possibilities. By all means listen if you have any interest in where music has been going, and where it might be in 100 years!