Railing backstage at his musicians between sets, drummer and big band leader Buddy Rich once declared, "There’s no sound in flutes. All I hear is noise!" It's unclear if Alex Riva ever listened to these covertly made recordings of Rich chewing out his band. But if he had, Rich's words certainly could have been the rallying cry on Riva's new solo CD, Solos and More, recorded in Bangalore, India in 2019.
Riva plays a wide variety of plastic recorders, the bane of many parents worldwide as they struggle to withstand the sheer torture of hearing their offspring struggle through horribly mangled versions of "All My Little Ducklings" and "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star," as assigned for homework in their early music school courses. No! Riva embraces this and dives headlong into those very qualities which might make the recorder certainly one of the most detested musical instruments of all time.
In the first track of the CD, "The Self-Immolation of a Toe," Riva sticks to the higher registers, allowing his improvisation to unfold at a relaxed and even place. The generous amount of background noise and ambient nature of the recording could lead one to believe they're listening to a long-lost recording of Moondog playing on some quiet side street of the Lower East Side. Or hear this as an imaginary folk music, a sonic spell cast against the sounds of the city.
Riva follows this with "On Glasses-but-no-Cheese Street," moving over to a lower-register recorder and working through a process of staccato attacks and bursts, before shifting into circular-breathing mode. He manages here to apply a constant friction between simultaneously blown high whistles and a deeper drone, before leaving the listener hanging for a full ten seconds of just the sound of the room Riva is recording in. He reenters with soft, asthmatic-like rasping barely audible above the ambient sound level of the recording space. Ultrahigh frequencies creep in to end the piece, as if Riva were try to split apart the silence he'd left before in his wake.
Track three, with the unfortunate title "Sun Ra Becomes Rasam," pairs Riva with long-time collaborator Mikael Szafirowski, listed in the credits as providing "mixes and remixes." Which in this case means a kind of enfolding electronic sheen chasing Riva's playing like a sonic shadow. The beginning of the piece leaves the impression of someone routing a very loudly amplified flute through a distorting ring modulator. Though at times Szafirowski's contribution takes its own detours, employing a constant of high-pitched oscillators set against Riva's chirping, stuttering tones, which eventually drop down in pitch against Szafirowski's deep pulsing drone. Something like an alap for the industrial age.
The next track, "Beedit Power," Riva credits in the liner notes with the discovering of something new in his repertoire. Overblowing on what must obviously be a rather large member of the recorder family, Riva's playing here sounds at times like an absent-minded elephant mumbling to itself. The intimate, warts-and-all recording, which doesn't shy away from including the odd microphone bump, eventually devolves into a slew of white noise and what could be a pack of very angry dogs barking raucously somewhere off in the distance.
On "The Reincarnation of a Toe," Riva returns to what by now has become one of the prevalent modus operandi on his CD, opting again for the higher registers in sputtering oscillator mode. Riva definitely falls more into the category of sonic explorer than gestural player, mining the depths of his sounds for interference and impurity. And as such, makes his recordings a prime example of some excellent noise music. The simultaneously-blown high pitches fight it out, relentlessly phasing in and out of tune with each other. Perhaps one could imagine a sped-up Sachiko M on endless repeat.
Mikael Szafirowski joins Riva again on the next track, "Mika's Minutes," which obviously sounds more like some discarded Blue Note title than what actually takes place on this recording. The piece opens with Szafirowski panned hard left with what could be a recording of Riva run through a granular synthesis patch, bubbling and quivering vigorously. Riva then joins in on the right channel, managing to sound very close to Szafirowski's processing. The two proceed in similar fashion for the length of the piece, electronics casting a kind of aura around Riva's playing. After a short break of nobody making any sound — a device by now used several times on the CD — they drop down deep into a swirling morass of chunky, low-pass filtered curtains of white noise.
The shortest piece of the CD, "Narashimha's Toothbrush," follows with what could be a straight-up field recording of a tree full of birds chirping furiously at a family of monkeys laughing at them. Maybe Moondog in a more frivolous moment. This type of playing is certainly one of Riva's fortes, and he uses it to great effect here.
Finally, we end this collection with "Carnatic Music Class with a Martian," the longest track of the CD. The Indian singer Bindhumalini opens the recording with a kind of gentle alap. A slight veil of reverb encloses her voice, which quickly gets joined by Riva's accompaniment. He doesn't exactly play along or react to Bindhumalini but provides something more like a parallel texture to her sounds, much like Szafirowski does in an electronic fashion on his tracks with Riva. A persistent ground hum haunts the proceedings as the two build in intensity, with Riva's recorder obviously being altered through some kind of electronic distortion and conjuring up images of a Carnatic version of Ornette Coleman on amplified violin.
At one point, Riva soars up into a high-pitched drone, mutating in function to that of an experimental shruti box. Bindhumalini immediately brings her voice in line with Riva's oscillations, phasing her pitch ever so slightly in and out of tune. Riva eventually fades out, and Bindhumalini closes out around the last minute of the piece alone. Here Riva and Bindhumalini meld traditional Indian musical qualities with western notions of noise and dissonance. Not a fusion, but a successful juxtaposition of two worlds which might have more in common than one might think.
In a way, Riva has managed to vindicate Rich's dictum of there only being noise in flutes. But on Solos and More what a glorious noise it is.
Les femmes formidables à l'heure du choix - Alex Riva
Les femmes formidables à l’heure du choix – Alex Riva
Les femmes formidables à l’heure du choix – Alex Riva
Editions Denoël ~ (novembre 2018) ~ Env. 320 pages
Format numérique / Format broché
-Un grand merci aux éditions Denoël pour la lecture de ce roman en service de presse-
On retrouve dans cet opus nos charmantes femmes formidables à l’heure du choix… Deux années se sont écoulées, durant lesquelles il s’est passé beaucoup de choses.
Quand l’imprévu s’en mêle – Alex Riva
Editions Denoël ~ (juin 2016) ~ Env. 288 pages
Format numérique / Format broché
-Un grand merci aux éditions Denoël pour l’envoi de ce titre en service de presse- Je me suis régalée exactement comme avec le premier tome des femmes formidables !
Quel plaisir de retrouver Alice, Andréa, Chloé et Emma dans « Quand l’imprévu s’en mêle ». Ces femmes sont…
Editions J’ai lu – (juillet 2017)
Parution en format broché – Environ 279 pages
-Je remercie les éditions J’ai Lu pour ce service presse-
*Départ imminent* // Nous sommes à bord du vol ‘La grève des femmes formidables’, à destination de Volos en Grèce pour un séjour d’une semaine en compagnie de Emma, Alice, Andréa et Chloé. Nous vous prions de bien vouloir rester assises à votre place et de…
