ISSUE Project Room : an open and versatile environment in which established and emerging artists conduct, exhibit and perform new and site-specific work

To kick off ISSUE’s Chamber Music Month, downtown regular Elliott Sharp brought himself and Italian-born conductor/composer/percussionist Andrea Centazzo out for a few excellent improvised sets. As one might expect, it’s all good—check out Centazzo’s three cymbal trees in the above picture. Although according to the Wikipedia Centazzo’s a “minimalist” composer he, like Sharp, never seems to fit into that box. What they do both take from Reich & Co., however, is a concern with the effect of repeated sound on the sound. What they don’t take is diatonic harmony and pure “process.”

That downtown improvisation departed in style and content from minimalism is nothing new. This music turns a fixed process into an arbitrary element, and in that it seems to break the mold. Any aesthetic element of minimalism that seeps in—repetition, strong rhythmic pulses, ebow drones—is arbitrary and bound to change, and seems in active discourse and even disagreement with its downtown friend.

In the very last improvisation (below) just a few minutes from the end, Centazzo begins to play repeating patterns on his hanging gongs (parts of a gamelan? I can’t quite tell—check the above picture) and the decay of the gongs never really meshes with the next attacks from his yarn mallets. For one, the yarn mallet does not cause the sound to instantly appear, but rather draws the sound out a split second later, by which point he’s already moved on to the next note. It’s like looking at a spinning wheel that looks like it’s beginning to spin backward, where no percussive hits really make it through—they’re coming too quickly—and instead the focus is not on the actual attack, but on the point at which the tone from the gong becomes audible as a tone.

This takes maybe a half-second, by which point Centazzo’s already made it just about through his loop. Additionally, this repetitive auxiliary percussion calls to mind a certain someone, but evokes no tonality or central pitch, or even mode. This is why I suggested gamelan; these non-equal-tempered tunings defamiliarize a very familiar percussion pattern (extra credit to anyone who transcribes and analyzes these pitches). This is important: as the attacks quieten, and as the mallet sounds soften, the inharmonic sounds take over, and draw ears in. The attacks melt together, like fondue. All important things become as one and the differences have disappeared.

Sharp’s playing is always enveloping, a virtuosic display meant not to impress, and a rarity of form and ethos among musicians. Too often, those with the technique compromise or use it to replace real content, because they can get away with it. But in this—in never seeking to impress, only to convey—Sharp is in a rare territory.

As one of the grand finales for this year’s fantastic Unsound Festival (making it’s first appearance in NYC), the excellent Canadian experimental-drone-ambient-shoegazer-doom-metal duo Nadja -- Aidan Baker and Leah Buckareff – conjured an absolutely massive soundworld of near-impenetrable density at ISSUE. Nadja design jagged, skyscraping architectures out of scalding and charred streams of noise and distortion, abstracting gestures of drone and doom into complex, infinitely detailed structures of intense beauty. Amidst sprawling ambient landscapes that are at turns placid, quivering, frightening, and impassable, Baker and Buckareff erect looming, spiraling towers that jut, writhe, and twist into the boundless vertical dimension before culminating into screaming spires of searing energy.  Be braced to emerge/escape in a collapsed crawl – drained, soaked, cleansed, and exorcised.

David Daniell works in transparencies and onion-skin shapes, and recurring, overlapping tones. Daniell slices the layers of drone to create something optimistic and mobile. As he layers the sounds, each new sound changes somewhat the meaning of the ones that already exist, and these sounds cycle in and out so that the shapes are constantly shifting. Daniell interrupts these environments with loose, melancholy pickings, that evoke some kind of campfire in the forest, where the pulsing high pitches are a cicada choir.

Daniell’s work gives the impression of travelling through a universe of sound sources, so that they fade in and out with no perceivable order. It is not quite narrative, but a slow transition, building to a one-man guitar army with some clear connection to Daniell’s work as concertmaster for Rhys Chatham’s large-scale guitar performances.

Yet, the one-man performance, while similar sonically, is far removed from Chatham’s compositions. Daniell, in a feat that would be impossible with a guitar army, oscillates between the cosmic and the personal, effortlessly fusing orchestral power and scope with the intimacy of a solo performance.

This recording, from Daniell’s February 12 performance at ISSUE, was a part of the Unsound Festival, presented by the Polish Cultural Institute, among many others. Daniell’s recent Table of the Elements release, I IV V I, was a part of their Guitar Series, which is ongoing. All of his albums are available from his site, as well as from various other independent stores.

When Pete Nolan sings as Spectre Folk, his voice goes through a clipped, disarming delay that turns all held notes into phased-out noises, and makes all consonants trail off and blend into the next word. His songs seem to have verses and choruses, or at least that's the assumption, until they spin off into other phrases that don't quite fit into the same boxes. Instead of moving along through verse, chorus, verse, these songs just seem to stay put, throwing verse after verse off a bridge to nowhere.

Last week, I put up Steve Gunn's set (from the same night) and claimed it was Pete Nolan's Spectre Folk. Now that our files are all in order and correctly labeled, both of their sets are available on the FMA for download. Steve Gunn's latest work, Boerum Palace, is available as of last November from Three Lobed Recordings. In addition, the revised version of last week's post is up (all the good things about the music intact).

All of Spectre Folk's tracks here on the FMA are from the recent LP Compass, blanket, lantern, mojo. The LP is put out by Arbitrary Signs (003), and is available for $12 at petenolan@hotmail.com or for complete download at www.othermusic.com. The attached music is from Spectre Folk's January 29, 2010, performance at ISSUE Project Room, and if it doesn't convince you to get the LP, then who knows what will.

A video for "Sat Around" is available here, and the Arbitrary Signs release notice (with a couple pre-reviews) is here.

Steve Gunn's playing shimmers like a raga-inspired blues, or maybe a blues-inspired raga. It seems like it's all plucked guitars, roots and open strings, and cymbals.

In this music, every beat is the same. There are moments, here and there, where it starts to feel like it settles into something like a simple rhythm, the threes and fours we're used to hearing. It doesn't take long, though, because Gunn turns it around again and the "accent" (or what we're used to hearing as an accent) is somewhere completely different. After this happens enough times, the mind just shuts off. There's no use trying to re-calibrate every five or ten seconds.

Or, properly, "that part" of the mind just shuts off: the part that likes to keep time. Not that likes time, but that likes to keep it, and package it, and remember it for later in more easily-digestible threes and fours. When that part acquiesces, there's an entire universe to be found–the universe that consists of addition, not multiplication—a universe that does not remember multiples.

Steve Gunn's latest work, Boerum Palace, is available as of last November from Three Lobed Recordings.

This Friday (2/19/10), ISSUE’s first-ever Artist-in-Residence Collective returns for their second monthly concert. The ensemble consists of Shannon Fields, Laura Ortman, Matt Lavelle, Shelley Burgon, Ryan Sawyer, and Jon Natchez (long-time collaborators from their 10+ years of work together in the now-concluded Stars Like Fleas). For the second residency concert, Jon Natchez and Matt Lavelle will present works to be performed by the collective. Shelley Burgon and Ryan Sawyer will lead the ensemble on 3/26/10.

To get everyone amped for the second installment of the residency, Shannon Fields and Laura Ortman have shared the recordings from their fantastic first performance. I‘ve included all three compositions from the show in a mix included below.

This Valentine’s Day evening, a handful of our world’s most soulful guitarists will gather at ISSUE Project Room to pay loving tribute to the great Jack Rose, who passed away in December at the much too young age of 38. The lineup, comprised of those friends whom he inspired and who inspired him, includes the Black Twig Pickers (the group featured on Jack’s most recent album), Pelt (with whom Jack played on and off again from ’95 until his death), Steve Gunn, Tom Carter, Marcia Bassett, Michael Chapman, and Glenn Jones.

I have compiled a mix from the ever-astounding well of riches that is the FMA, featuring musicians set to take part in Sunday’s celebration of Jack Rose’s incredible music. The mix traverses equal territory in the lands of drone and Takoma-style virtuosity, both worlds in which Jack established a voice of deeply-felt originality and undeniable importance.  The last work in the mix features Mr. Rose himself, performing live with Peter Walker -- a long-established member of a short lineage of finger-picking legends whose ranks Jack has undoubtedly joined.

Unsound Festival New York kicked off last Thursday evening (2/4) – marking the first incarnation of the innovative performance and lecture series outside its homeland of Poland. Founded in Kraków in 2003 by curator Mat Schulz, Unsound Festival explores the intersections between “electronic, experimental, independent, post-classical, and club music scenes.” After only four days time, the festival is already crowded with stunning highlights. I caught the opening night show at Lincoln Center featuring a terrific set from Finnish DJ/composer/drummer Vladislav Delay (whose Tummaa album was probably my fav release of 09) in collaboration with German video artist Lillevan. Still recovering (in a variety of ways) from a startlingly fresh sequence of programming at Le Poisson Rouge last night: performances of classical music touchstones Pictures at an Exhibition (Moussorgsky) and Bolero (Ravel) were followed by an absolutely resplendent, mind-blowing set of abstract electronic improvisations from the North American debut of the Moritz Von Oswald Trio, featuring surprise guests Francois K (!) and Carl Craig (!!).  Levon Vincent closed the event with a blistering DJ set that carried on until the very early morning hours (I’m lame and only made it until about 3:30am…)

ISSUE Project Room will host two events in the festival this week. The “Electronic Bridge” program on Tuesday night (2/9) serves as the first in a thread of thematic shows under the Eastern Promise banner, seeking to highlight a number of important Eastern European artists generally underexposed in the U.S. The “Electronic Bridge” will feature a diverse array of experimental electronic music from Zavoloka (Ukraine) and Zenial (Poland), as well as a set from NY local Bora Yoon in collaboration with composer R. Luke DuBois on the live video tip. To whet appetites for what should be a fantastic show, I’ve compiled a dope little mix featuring works from the artists on the program.

Check here and here for more info on the two shows at ISSUE, and here for a full schedule of the rest of the festival.

It’s not so much hearing things happen. It’s more like noticing that things have changed, and now it’s time to re-assess your surroundings. It’s not so much listening for individual motivic and textural changes. It’s more like looking at time-lapse photography. It’s not so much seeing it all happen sped up. It’s more like looking at each image for a full minute or two. It’s not so much like noticing the movement of forms in the photo. It’s more like noticing the movement of color and shadows, whether random or patterned.

As a direct consequence of stretching one moment into such a duration, the slightest changes become tectonic shifts.

The Necks’ music comes in pockets, in revolutions per second that sometimes are very slow, and other times are very fast. Still other times, slow moments are superimposed on percussion patterns approaching twenty Hertz, the lower range of audible frequency. Phantom sounds come from Chris Abrahams’ piano strings, or maybe from Lloyd Swanton’s bass bowing in the upper registers. They could also be coming from how Tony Buck drags a cymbal across another cymbal.

More from Tony's brain today: this one comes from the MIVOS Quartet's June 2009 performance at ISSUE that also featured Luke DuBois's string quartet "Hard Data." Tony Conrad's "Minor" takes a 31-pitch-to-the-octave scale (a step up from the usual twelve), and fairly common harmonies become unfamiliar.

The first chord sounds, then the second, in an angular harmonic move like something from late Wagner, and back to the first chord again. Or, wait, it sounds like a new chord now--the microtonal inflections giving each chord a different vector and acceleration, like looking at the same object at dusk instead of dawn.

The contentious history of the "minor" scale might have something to do with this. Harry Partch, whose influence trickled down through La Monte Young (and many, many others), used an "undertone" scale as well as an "overtone" scale. In this tuning, the composer would (essentially) multiply the base pitch by whole numbers for a major scale, and divide the base pitch for the minor scale. Young, on the other hand, just used the upper-reaches of the major scale (the multiples 6, 7, and 9) to form the minor triad: there were many more different conceptions of "minor" theorized in the 20th century alone, which is not to mention that the minor chord was the number one roadblock for just about every tuning theorist since "minor" came into being.

Tony Conrad uses these "minor" tunings and more to defamiliarize the scale as we know it. For this performance, the MIVOS Quartet detuned their instruments ("scordatura") so that they could play in the same hand positions to reach strange notes on mistuned strings. The performance resonates with the open strings, and feels less like moving through standard chromatic harmony than like looking through a microscope at a large object and trying to keep the whole thing in your head at once.