Friday, December 24, 2004

Esoteric Circle Playlists

Esoteric Circle is a program I present on 3D Radio 93.7FM in Adelaide. Jazz, new music, improvisation and modern composition make up the program and every month I’ll attempt to put up the playlists from the show to give you an idea of what I’m playing and the direction of the show. If you’re a musician or running a label or have anything you think I should be playing drop me a line or send yr disc. Here’s a sample of the last month or so - kami
ESOTERIC CIRCLE 15TH November 2004
ARTIST TRACK ALBUM

Marcus Belgrave Space Odyssey Gemini
George Adams/Dannie Richmond Joojoobie Hand To Hand
Paul Dunmall Moksha Big Band I Wish You Peace Pt 1 I Wish you Peace
Bucket Rider Evenement 1-4 Le Evenements
Eve Packer All Night West Frm 42nd
Christoph Gallio Curtains Dream A Gertrude Stein
Christoph Gallio Improvisation A Gertrude Stein
Charles Lloyd/Billy Higgins What Is Man? Which Way Is East?
Phillips/Haino/Toyozumi Two Strings Will Do It Two Strings Will Do It
Rope Love Without The Illusion Of Permanence Widows First Dawn
Marcus Belgrave Glue Fingers Parts I & II Gemini
Eve Packer Swept Away West Frm 42nd

ESOTERIC CIRCLE 22ND November 2004
ARTIST TRACK ALBUM
Alice Coltrane Sita Ram Translinear Light
Alice Coltrane Leo Translinear Light
Pharoah Sanders Upper Egypt & Lower Egypt Tauhid
Paul Dunmall Moksha Big Band I Wish You Peace Pt 2 I Wish You Peace
Stuart Busby Sorrow Breathe
Stuart Busby Ernestine Breathe
Charlotte Hug No Land Neuland
Sonny Sharrock Blind Willy Black Woman
Sonny Sharrock Peanut Black Woman
Alice Coltrane Blue Nile Translinear Light
Alice Coltrane Translinear Light Translinear Light
Paul Grabowsky Tailfin Tales Of Time & Space

ESOTERIC CIRCLE 13TH December 2004
ARTIST TRACK ALBUM
Joel Ryan Shaker Mix Or Air
David Murray Gwotet Gwotet
Milo Fine Skinny Frogs Ikebana
Neil Leonard Sacred Bath 1-3 Timaeus
Fred Lonberg-Holm Dialog 2 Dialogs
Ginger Baker Skin The Pizzle No Material
Donkey Fog Big Sur
David Murray Ovwa Gwotet
Remote Viewers Astro Black Low Shapes In Dark Heat
Roger Miller Space Is The Place Oh
Marcos Fernandez Bullets For Ballots Hybrid Vigor

ESOTERIC CIRCLE 20TH December 2004
ARTIST TRACK ALBUM
Albert Ayler Trio Ghosts Second Variation Spiritual Unity
Henry Grimes Trio Flowers For Albert Wire Tapper 12
John Sinclair Hellhound On My Trail Steady Rollin’ Man
Machine Gun Arsenal High Tech Open Fire
Machine Gun Mommie Sir Open Fire
99 Hooker/ Diaz-Infante/Zzaj Shape Of The Future IsUtah Future Has Already Been Done
Milo Fine May Radicals Five Ikebana
Fred Lonberg-Holm Dialog 6 Dialogs
Triosk I Am A Beautiful Snowflake Moments Return
Remote Viewers Wild Is The Wind Obliques Before Pale Skin
Veryan Weston Even Angels Die All Angels Concerts 1999-2001
Eugene B Redmond All Athighed In Black Blood Links & Sacred Places
Necks Mosquito (Excerpt) Wire Tapper 12

Friday, December 17, 2004

Flatulence - the only truly disposable artform - a gig review

Gig review – Jade Monkey Adelaide 16th December 2004
This was one of those nights that don’t translate into words – you try and tell your friends how good it was, how much fun they missed – and they look at you with that look your parents used to give you when you brought your report card home – but here goes anyway!
In the best reviewer tradition I missed the opening act Sound Of Mercy Killing but having seen them before I know they would have assaulted the audience with a short, sharp brutal attack of twin guitar noise and bad rock drumming (if I’m wrong I’m sure someone will let me know) – always good but unfortunately usually first on the bill – they deserve better. I did however arrive just in time for Home For The Def. Nigel "don’t call me a hippy" Koop had a table full of fx pedals, a microphone and flatulence – that was all he needed to produce a bucketful of noise, looping and farting about until he got a rhythm that was just right – jungle beats and hip hop grooves – all he needed was a rapper (or maybe not). Highly entertaining.
Nun were next, two serious young insects taking the traditional folk art of playing the spoons to new levels – shimmering noise that demanded your attention – amazing what you can do with the cutlery drawer.
Who says the white man can’t play the blues? They’ve obviously never seen Justice Yeldham - a blues man who couldn’t find his harmonica – he adlibbed with a plate of glass and a belt of fx pedals and blew that pane like he’d lived the blues all his life. I’ve seen some girls "glassed" in my time but he took it to new heights. Can’t wait to see what he can do with a door.

Ian Nagoski

On Fevered Mind: The Slow-Burning Drones of Ian Nagoski by John Berndt
The first time I saw Ian Nagoski play live, I thought incredulously to myself "This guy is one of the best musicians I’ve ever heard in my life." What was so unbelievable about this thought was that it was directed at the activity of a young man whose output consisted of an almost unchanging, buzzing, throbbing layer-cake of electronic drones controlled by incredibly subtle adjustments to a primitive rig of
analog tape decks, CD players, and modulators spread out on the floor in front of him. The sound seemed to hang free of what Nagoski was doing, and was extraordinarily moving. The pace of change was glacial, and Nagoski’s intent manipulations were
sometimes spaced minutes apart as his processes unfolded or achieved equilibrium as if in a thick medium, a melting iceberg in electrified auditory ocean. The music also had a viscerally slowed-down and drugged quality--it dragged time backwards, cancelling the momentum from past to future. I had previously heard Nagoski’s music on CD and had enjoyed it, but this live performance was something else, an unqualified new experience. Nagoski’s sound saturated the room with considerable volume, but rather than being an opaque wall or endurance test, it had an incredible lyricism to it, an almost heartbreaking emotional presence. Far from cold or academic, the sound engulfed you in a tangled interplay of frequencies that were overripe with intention and focus. At the mid-point of the roughly forty-five minute piece, the volume sea-changed up perceptibly, and the sounds clearly began overdriving some piece of the equipment, possibly the speakers Nagoski had supplied for listening. With this move, a new lattice of veined micro-melodies shot through the sound,
interference patterns already subliminally present brought into brittle relief by the speakers "clipping." While this might have been annoying on its own, the distorted spires that launched from the already established hypnotic sound field were a
fascinating, alien musical adjustment, a new kind of orchestration. There was something also strangely desperate (relentlessly searching and uncompromising)
about that small move and it was a break with any hint of detachment or preciousness. As if the aperture on a camera had been changed to widen the depth of
field, the drones "sharpened" in all directions and complex, architectonic towers of harmonics geometrically seared and flowered through the sound, making it more melodic, more emotional, more intense. By the time Ian slowly faded down the sound to end the piece, I was in a state of timeless amnesia, barely able to reconstruct the large-scale course of the piece in my mind. It was hard to come back. … Let’s put
aside the awful term "minimalism" for a second (as it applies to academic instrumental works that has less new musical content per-square-foot than Late
Romanticism). There is music which (however complex or minimal), deals with sustained sound and immersive audio experiences. In 2001, this kind of activity has
A LOT of history accumulated there are many and varied musicians on record who work only with "sustained sound" or "drone sound environments." I now consider
Nagoski to be one of the most important in that group a highly original artist, though he is also clearly (and vitally) inspired by what has come before. Time
will separate him from the score of equally obscure young artists who work with sustained sound or sound fields. I think it is interesting to note how qualitatively different superficially parallel contributions can be within this roughly defined genre
of "slowly changing, sustained sound." La Monte Young (who was a kind of early teacher to Nagoski) may have inaugurated the genre, with "drone" pieces that are
ultimately focused on stasis, precision, and kind of scientific hygenicism of tuning. Some of Young’s sound installations (both the large smooth sine wave pieces
and singular works like "Gong for Bob Morris,") can achieve amazing, disorienting new forms of sensuality though they are perhaps largely devoid of "supplied"
emotional content. Young’s metaphysical-copyright antagonist, Tony Conrad (previously well known for his film "Flicker") has revived his own take on the early
live "Theatre of Eternal Music" work made in collaboration with Young and others in the 60s. Conrad’s "reborn" music sustains (usually two note) string drones, presented at very high volume (without electronic distortion), but a tremendous amount of
"unhygienic," churning musical content added by the rhythms of irregular bow-articulation. Sometimes the experience borders on an endurance test--on a good day, it can also be quite thrilling. There are also a great many who, like Nagoski, work with what I might call "densely massed sustained sound" or "poly-drone music."* Phil Niblock, Charlemagne Palestine, Herman Nitsch, Eliane Radigue, and Michael Schumacher all come to mind as composers who have worked with textures of densely layered, prismatically changing frequencies. Though I find things of interest in all these composers, I (and I would warrant, Nagoski) find considerably more inspiration in the as-yet-unpublished work of Catherine Christer Hennix ("The Electric Harpsichord") and Henry Flynt ("Glissando," the four-track version of "Celestial Power") a very fragile, limited body of work which has been defined by Flynt as the genre of "HESE: Hallucinegenic-Ecstatic-Sound-Environment"or "The
Illuminatory Audio Program." These three obscure pieces have drug-like effects and raise the bar through the roof for "trance" music and use sustained, tuned audio textures and highly orchestrated psychoacoustic-aesthetic effects to produce altered
states. To my mind, the "HESE" pieces are truly ecstatic works that represent a degree of seriousness, commitment, and unarguable success that more or less blows the rest of available "trance music" out of the water. One can only hope they will all achieve
publication and a wide audience. Nagoski’s work pushes in the same rich direction of delirious seriousness and precision of intent, not yet achieving the relative and isolated perfection of the "HESE" pieces, but still accomplishing a great deal. And it is work that is still very much evolving from month to month which may well throw open its own new doors of perception. The music can certainly have intense and original hypnotic and time-distorting effects which are of interest in their own right, but what is most crucial is its emotional, stripped down quality the fact that Nagoski is so consumed and focused by his unpretentious micro- and macro- choices, making very real, very strange music which has an extraordinarily intimate, subtle, and honest quality. The raw materials of the music are extremely crude, but Ian’s endless sympathetic reworking of the sounds through very carefully tuning and processing transforms them and infuses them with layers of warmth and glowing audio halos. The work also involves informality and chance-taking which is notable for the genre having seen him perform many times now, it is clear that he is a real improviser, working out his music as an uncanned, real-time process in a truly exploratory
manner, despite the unusualness of his aesthetic parameters. This means that not every concert will be a success, but those that are have a special potential to be stellar. Such unguarded integrity and emotional intensity are extraordinarily rare and fragile, and it
is particularly odd to encounter both in a style of music often associated with pseudoscientific clap-trap and urbane one-upmanship. But nothing less than this
sort of rawness is required to create something new, to move beyond the cognitive and emotional boundaries of the culture into new modes of sustainable psychedelic experience. In live concert, Ian Nagoski has probably made some of the most emotionally charged, organically crafted drone music that has been yet produced. His music is extremely qualitative deep-digging into the mind, into emotive elongations
of tiny private primate moments through what are still relatively new electronic means--an experiment with consciousness, if you will. Most recently, Ian’s output has involved a long series of fascinating sound/light concert collaborations with the light
artist, musician and inventor Dan Conrad (who is, coincidentally, brother of the afore-mentioned Tony Conrad). Conrad’s Chromaccord light machine is a performative instrument that allows him to lyrically "play" two fields of variable color, one inside the other. The resulting disorienting afterimages from this minimal (but highly flexible) display are breathtaking. In concert with Ian’s extremely focused drone work, the resulting combination is a new kind of synthetic two-part harmony… with silent afterimages of pulsing color chasing or clashing with the harmonic ripples of Nagoski’s emotional current. This is an extremely challenging situation, and very difficult for both performers, as they improvise with radically difficult and unusual materials and across sensory modalities. The resulting cultural experience is often
ecstatic, and defines a new genre of light/sound work where neither sense is allowed to be dominant, and the overall mood is driving and lyrical rather than atmospheric or assaultive. The world may not be ready for this sort of work, work which is not pretence but begins in terra incognita. The world certainly isn’t telling anyone to do it--but Ian Nagoski is doing it, and he is doing it for real.
* Not sure who originated this term, but it may have been the person called tentatively
John Berndt


Monday, December 13, 2004

noises from the funhouse

Some reviews from the funhouse/esoteric circle mansions to get things started cheers kami


Rev 99 – Everything Changed After 7-11 (Pax Recordings)
A loose collective of instigators, originators and manipulators led primarily by sound poet 99 Hooker, Rev 99 has set out to undermine and overturn any preconceptions you may have about improvised music. Clashes of found sound, musical instruments, background leakage, remixing, slice/dice/cut & paste all come together in a soup for the soul – as long as you’ve sold that soul to the devil. This recording from 2002 sets the tone just by its title – instant recognition of (and poking the bone at) America’s consumer culture and its commercialisation of the country’s grief. Rev 99 want to make you think, want to make you notice what’s happening around you but they offer no easy way out, or in for that matter. With pieces recorded over phon e lines, remixed via the mail, channelled back and forth to be poked & prodded, the lines between improvisation, composition, ownership and responsibility are not so much blurred as rubbed out with a cheap eraser, still there just smeared and barely visible.
(www.paxrecordings.com)

Ernesto Diaz-Infante – Ucross Journal (Pax Recordings)
More and more I find myself drawn to minimalist works, pieces that say as much in the silences as in the music. The solo piano pieces presented here and inspired by Ernesto’s time in Ucross, Wyoming are again works that show that sound does not necessarily need to be heard to be felt. This is the sound of the desert, of the clear horizon and your watch stopping. You sit by an open window, watching clouds gather, listening to the silence between the keys – time travel is now possible.

Evan Parker/Stan Tracey – Suspensions and Anticipations (PSI Records)
Saxophone and piano improvisations from two of the elder statesmen of the U.K. scene. (or are they all elder statesmen now?) A subtle work with both players showing constraint and playing within themselves. And by that I don’t mean that they’re not trying – I simply mean that there’s as much left out as put in. It’s knowing when to push and when to pull back that sets Parker apart. And in no way is Tracey just a sidekick here – this is a duo recording, he’s not here to accompany Parker, he’s here to partner him. Anyone can play ‘crash & burn’ but it takes a master (or in this case two) to hold back and let the nuances of sound reveal themselves, to let the instruments guide you instead of vice versa.
(www.emanemdisc.com)

Claudia Quintet – I Claudia (Cuneiform Records)
Vibes, accordian, clarinet, acoustic bass – by all rights you’d expect this quintet to be old guys playing dixieland in a corner bar but they ain’t and they don’t – instead it’s a sweet, full sound by a bunch of ‘young’ veterans offering hints of jazz history but staying ahead of it the whole time. Tiny licks of memory sneak out to tease you occasionally but then slide back to hide behind the sweet rhythms of a unit who just maybe like to dance in the privacy of their own homes but ain’ too sure about making it public just yet. Truth is, these guys can swing; that might not be hip right now but it is mighty refreshing. And I get the feeling they don’t really want to be hip anyway.
(www.cuneiformrecords.com)

Tuesday, December 07, 2004

beginnings?

Hey, i think i just got a blog...now what to do with it? Well, the well overdue issue of Funhouse could be a start. After all it's only been three years. First though, i'll have to work out what the hell i'm doing... being computer illiterate can be so much fun. You can expect to see regular music reviews, information, gibberish and playlists from the radio show i do on 3d radio 93.7 on the fm dial here in Adelaide (it's on monday nights 9pm Esoteric Circle - jazz and new music - tune in!) - there'll also be pieces on musicians, writers, people that i find interesting... like i said there's a well overdue zine in my system... enjoy


Kami