Alvin Curran, "Electric Rags II" with the Rova Saxophone Quartet, 1990

Alvin Curran composes music that confounds and conflates genre-al expectations. Most of what he does has improvisational aspects, but also vivid aural sound painting and new music qualities. He is unique. I found his Electric Rags II (New Albion 027) a few years ago used and am now finally getting to a more intense series of listens. It features the Rova Saxophone Quartet along with Alvin Curran's templates for live electronic and electro-acoustic elements.

It is not music for pigeonholing. There are pre-arranged melodic events adroitly handled by the quartet, there is improvisational avantness, and there are sound colors and electronic transformations of various sorts as well. As is often the case with Curran, the sequence of music has a strongly narrative quality without there necessarily being a textual equivalent.

The electronics were derived from a special program that allows Curran to transform the sax quartet sound at any time. The notation for the quartet is sometimes standard, sometimes aleatoric (involving choice and chance on the part of the performers). Each of them is able to pilot one or more MIDI controllers that react to the sax utterences in variable ways. Plus the sections are to be performed in a random order. In the end there will be a different version every time the work is performed.

It's one of those Curran works that you must hear at least several times to absorb. And it is another good example of how Curran and the Rova Quartet make music of enduring vitality and impact. You can no doubt find this on the internet if you look for it. It may be out of print but it's worth finding! Like a Zen rock garden, the music has a plasticity that may bring you to another place in how you view your world. That depends on how you listen I suppose.

Anthony Braxton's Four Ensemble Compositions, 1994

Anthony Braxton has been so prolific over the years that I have been guilty of not keeping up with it. So especially his music of the '90s for me, partially because that was a decade where I was so absorbed in trying to make a living that much fell by the wayside.

Realizing this I searched out some of Braxton's music from that period, one being his Black Saint release Four Ensemble Compositions, 1992. Now I know some people find his classical-improvisational pieces perplexing or difficult. I think that usually that has to do with the need to hear the music a number of times. The four compositions on this recording, for example, do not yield their charms to the listener the first time around, at least not all of them.

Once you hear them three, four, five times, you start getting inside them. That is, if you have developed the close listening concentration that's necessary to appreciate all such pieces.

At any rate, I found the Four Ensemble Compositions to be some remarkable music. They combine the expressivity of avant garde improvisation a la Braxton with the kaleidoscopic play of sound colors that composed modern ensemble music offers. To me what's especially good about these pieces is how, by this point, Mr. Braxton has mastered an idiom that allows both approaches to meet on common ground. The result is not pastiche. It is pure Braxton.

Highly recommended. . .

Eli Keszler Combines Improv and the Compositional on "Oxtirn"

Eli Keszler has a new LP of his music. It's on ESP and sounds like it should be (in the positive sense). Keszler plays drums, percussion, prepared piano, guitar and a number of prepared found objects. He is joined by a brassman, a clarinetist and a second prepared pianist for the two longish pieces featured on Oxtirn (ESP 4061). The LP is a limited edition; a digital download includes one bonus track.

And what of the music? It is a blast of sound, thickly textured. The first piece sounds like an acoustic version of one of Xenakis' classic electro-acoustic pieces. Dense, rapidly articulated metallic percussion sounds contrast with long, bowed-sheet metal envelopes.

The second piece is less dense but once again creates the impression of altered sounds even though this is music made "live."

It's a fascinating set of sound poems. If you like MEV and AMM, this one will give you something similar yet distinctive.

George Lewis & Marina Rosenfeld's "Sour Mash:" Modern Electronic Music

We have come quite a distance from the early days of electronic music and musique concrete. In the early fifties, unless you were working on the mainframe computers programmed for synthesized sound, you had a couple of mono tape recorders, an oscillator or two, a microphone to sample sounds and a splicing block where the composer painstakingly and slowly assembled a work from the bits and pieces of magnetic tape he or she had created.

The personal computer, sequencers, MIDI and all the rest have revolutionized electronic music, and of course the innovations that seemed so startling back in 1958 have been readily absorbed into modern day pop, rock and hip-hop music.

Thankfully though there is still vitally creative composition happening in the electronic field.

With that in mind we turn to a recent release of a composite electronic work by Marina Rosenfield and George Lewis, Sour Mash (Innova 228). This is a collaborative effort by the two. Marina is a sound artist of growing reputation; George made his name originally as a trombonist in the avant improvisational area, one of the most important trombonists of his generation, and has increasingly turned to electronics.

Sour Mash consists of one short and one longer construction by each composer. The pieces are then combined together in a second, double version. Sour Mash is being made available as an LP and as a CD. Marina and George think of the recorded result as something open-ended. For example, turntablists are welcome to work with the music and remix it in whatever way they see fit.

There are processed sounds and electronic sounds in the works. The sound events tend to flow more than punctuate. They are noise and tone soundscapes, as it were. I have listened a fair number of times to the music and I must say that I found myself only gradually entering the insular sound world at hand. The first few listens left a rather neutral impression, then I began to grasp what was happening. The music doesn't so much articulate memorable motifs as it creates an ambiance. I find it a fascinating listen.

Stockhausen's "Mantra" in a Pleasing New Interpretation

Karlheinz Stockhausen was without doubt an enormously important composer of the last half of the 20th century. If you are reading this you may well know that. He said something after 9-11 that was apparently misquoted and he became anathema to some during the period leading up to his death. We now can put all that behind us. A resurgence in the performance of his works would indicate that it is happening.

There are many aspects to Stockhausen's music. His music for the pianoforte is very much a central part of it all. The Klavierstuck series and the sprawling two-piano work Mantra would seem to all-but-assure a permanent place in the ranks of the last century's greatest music titans (though I could go on and talk about some other seminal aspects of his output).

So it seems appropriate that his Mantra has been the center of a new spate of performances and recordings. Xenia Pestova and Pascal Meyer have done a version of the work, recently released as a Naxos CD (Naxos 8.572398).

There are a couple of factors to consider when thinking of this fine new recording. First off, I am reminded of what John Cage said about one of his Variations works after hearing it performed countless times. The gist of his comment was that, as time passed and performances continued, the piece started to transform itself. At first, the notes and silences seemed like isolated punctuations in the fabric of aural life. As further versions came about, the notes came to have a logic not previously noticed. The notes became melody; the combination of notes, harmony. In part that was a matter of the listener's (Cage's) perception; but it also appeared that the performers were grasping the score more as music than as avant experiment.

The second thing that comes to mind was a review of Mahler symphonies I read in the New York Times years ago. I forget who wrote it, but he spoke of how Mahler performances, as well as the continued performance of other originally less-known works, could be seen as following a pattern. The more familiar the musicians-conductor-audience were with a work, the slower the tempo of at least some passages. The idea was that now that most everybody was accustomed to the music, it was time to savor it in a more leisurely fashion. As one of my professors used to say, it that is not true, it should be!

All this applies to the new Pestova/Meyer version of Mantra. The original DGG recording of the work by the Kontarsky brothers may be definitive; but the Pestova/Meyer version here generally takes things slower. It is more deliberate. And it perhaps brings out more the quality of the note values in the score. The Kontarsky brothers made the music seem strange; this version makes it seem familiar.

For example, there is towards the end a long and rather exciting passage where the two pianist drive into a long series of endlessly modulating, continuous lines. The Kontarsky brothers took it at a maddening clip, as a cosmic blast of sound. Pestova/Meyer take it slower, almost at a boogie-woogie tempo. And the note values are more specifically articulated at that speed. It is more a savoring of the familiar.

There are listener-perceptual issues involved in this too, as the allusion to Cage's comment above implied. In 1970, Mantra was at the very edge of the avant garde. Its use of live electronics, its added percussion colors as performed by the pianists, the incorporation of spacial silences, the introduction of repetition. . . all that seemed vitally avant. Listening to the new version 40 years later, I hear it as much more coherently musical. I get where it is and where it goes much more readily than I did when I first heard it back then. What I hear now reassure me that it is indeed a masterpiece of the era, fully worthy of revival now and appreciation in the years to come.

The excellent performance of the Pestova/Meyer Piano Duo in the Naxos recording helps me get there. It stands shoulder-to-shoulder with the original recording. It creates another space for the work that gives it another life for us in this second decade of the millennium. Bravo for that! And bravo for the recording!

Kiva Presents Some Advanced Ensemble Improvisations

The group Kiva goes way back to 1975, when American trombonist/violinist John Silber and Franco-percussionist Jean-Charles Francois co-founded the ensemble at the Center for Music Experiment, University of California San Diego. Judging by the recording at hand, they created some very formidable group improvisations during the 16 years of their existence.

The self-titled two-CD set released on Pogus Productions documents four moments in their history: three lengthy musical discourses from 1985 and 1991, and a tape collage of various group performances assembled and re-realized by John Silber.

Essentially the group as represented here consists of the founding members plus Keith Humble on piano and synthesizer, and Mary Oliver on violin and viola for one of the performances. The collage segment seems to include additional members, which were often culled from students at the university.

That deals with the basic logistics. The music is what matters, of course. And the music is quite challenging. It is a series of excellently executed abstract improvisations that owe something to MEV, AMM, Il Gruppo and the improvisational ensembles led by Stockhausen, more so than the music created by, say, Albert Ayler or Evan Parker. This is more on the new music end of the spectrum. It isn't so much jazz-related.

They are in excellent form, whatever the stylistic parameters. The double CD set gives you a very generous amount of music and I must say it is all of a very high provenance. There is a sensuous revelling in the sound universes created. Nothing seems academic in the pejorative sense (a sense I do find a little disturbing, but yet I evoke anyway).

Kiva is an ensemble that could have easily been missed, I for one am very happy to have gotten the chance to hear them on this release. Highly recommended.

Magical Sounds From Open Graves

I rely upon the kindness of strangers. OK, so I watched that movie again last weekend (A Streetcar Named Desire) and it still kills me. But I do depend on people I have never met (for the most part) and the music info dissemination network. If it weren't for that I would never have known about the group Open Graves and their CD Hollow Lake (Prefecture).

The group is Paul Kikuchi on percussion (the drummer for the Empty Cage Quartet, whose CD I reviewed earlier on these pages, among other associations) and Jesse Olsen, Bay Area composer and performer. Those preliminaries tell you little, just as I had no idea what to expect when I first put this CD on my player.

It is first off important to note that the entire album was recorded inside an empty two-million gallon water cistern. That factor gives the music a hugely cavernous resonance that makes the sound distinctively ambient. Kikuchi and Olsen wisely make full use of that sound by populating the eminations with plenty of room, with space between sounds and notes so that the full impact of space and sound becomes primary.

The musical sounds are produced by percussion instruments and a long noted, eastern sounding string instrument (sounds like something out of Harry Partch, but in an infinitely lengthened temporal world) among other things. The music is partly improvised, partly composed, and sounds like it belongs with some kind of ritual for a world we do not yet know. Parts consist of very long event-centered series of resonant sounds, other parts have a quasi-gamelan like quality and feature more pulsating chimed phrases.

This is music for your deepest brown studies. It has a kind of rather profound stillness to it in parts; in other parts it moves one along on a well-conceived path. Either way this is highly original, very moving aural sculpture that should be required listening for anyone who likes music in the long form, the lingering phrases, the feeling of universal expansion. It's subtle. And it is an uplifting experience.