Che Chen & Robbie Lee — The Spectrum Does (Audiomer)
Familiarity, novelty and antiquity entwine to make something rare on The Spectrum Does. You have probably already heard Robbie Lee and Che Chen in other settings. Lee co-runs Telegraph Harp records and writes/plays/sings in Creative Automatic; he’s also a utility player who has joined the bands of Baby Dee, Neil Hagerty, Brightblack Morning Light, Cass McCombs and Talibam! Chen, of course, plays guitar in 75 Dollar Bill, but has also made records on his own and with Tetuzi Akiyama and Chie Mukai. And for about five years, Chen and Lee had a partnership that encompassed intense wood shedding, a bit of playing out, one prior LP and a tour and record with Jozef Van Wissem under the banner Heresy of the Free Spirit.
Chen and Lee first got together to play bass clarinet duos. That early practice of playing the same instrument probably has something to do with the ego-less cohesion of their music, but there was no way they’d stick to just one instrument. Lee collects ancient instruments and Chen is also a multi-instrumentalist; no doubt Van Wissem was drawn to them because they not only played portative organ, bass recorder and harmonium, but improvised non-idiomatically with those instruments.
The Spectrum Does is drawn from two performances that took place in 2011, one at Issue Project Room and the other at Glasslands. On side one Lee comes out swinging, blowing his taragato like Peter Brötzmann (the Eastern European reed instrument’s main contemporary proponent) was looking over his shoulder. Chen responds to his tough, tunneling lines with coarse, choppy fiddle scrapes that sound like Tony Conrad playing the way a traffic cop talks until their abraded timbres fall together and then subside into a machine-like whir. Next, delay-distorted sounds rise and retreat from a carpet of harmonium, turning the vibe both prayerful and apprehensive. Then the violin returns, still Conrad-like, but Lee counters with a slow, pastoral melody played on a great bass recorder.
Some improvisers might keep duking it out, but Chen switches to bass recorder himself. Whether they relate aggressively or passively, even when you can tell who is playing what, that seems to matter less than the consonance of mood and uncertainty of century that they create together — there are passages where it sounds like some Hungarian goat herder from the 1760s is playing with some turtlenecked freaks in a 1960s NYC art loft via a time portal held open by vibrantly fluttering magnetic tape. There’s really nothing else around that sounds like this stuff, and it’s a shame that the duo is done, but we have another piece of analog magic to tell you what they sounded like — this fine record.
Aki Onda & Paul Clipson — Make Visible the Ghosts (Audiomer)
The relationship between film and music is usually hierarchical. Directors commission soundtracks; musicians project some footage onto a screen at the back of the stage; practitioners in either discipline study the pacing, messages, and working methods of their favorite auteurs in the other. Paul Clipson, a film-maker from the Bay area who died quite suddenly in 2018, forged a uniquely close working relationship with many musicians. He didn’t just contribute visions to their sounds; he got in the van with them, and changed what he was doing on the fly to respond to what they did. Whether touring with the band Tarentel, sharing stages with Grouper, or improvising with players that he didn’t know, he found ways to make his projections coexist with sounds that drew hitherto unnoticed details out of the music and completed his own images.
Aki Onda first met Clipson when they were headed to the same European festival, and their relationship grew first through a friendship founded upon shared personal affinities. Those affinities include some similarities in how they work and what they use. Both men layered found materials and exploited the textural qualities of analog recording and playback. Ultimately, they got around to performing together in 2012 at an event sponsored by Issue Project Room. Onda recalls the piece as a kind of a blind date; he made 70 minutes of music, and Clipson 70 minutes of film, which they then played together. It would be impossible to capture the experience of being in a room as sound and film are projected, so rather than simply synch up the original components on a DVD, they settled on an interpretive approach. Make Visible the Ghosts is modeled after Lost City, Onda’s poster and LP collaboration with Loren Connors and Alan Licht. Clipson composed a collage of film frames for the poster that combines images of light, sensate organs, and buildings that were part of the original performance. Onda fashioned the LP’s four tracks from excerpts of his original contribution and recordings made at the performance. They finished the album a few months before Clipson’s death, and now Audiomer has issued as a non-digital object, with the LP folded inside the poster and encased in a heavy, printed vellum sleeve.
Make Visible the Ghosts opens with the sounds of Clipson’s 16 mm. projector, which would seem like an emotional play if it hadn’t been done well before his demise. There’s no denying its posthumous effect, but the listener needn’t stop there; after all, this is the work of artists who refuse to be bound to simple, one-on-one assignments of meaning. The sound of the projector brings the filmic origin of the project into play without trying to reproduce it, effectively declaring that this record is an entity unto itself. It is gradually joined by long, electronic tones, whose purity contrasts with masking murk of unidentifiable found sounds. When the projector eases to the front of the mix, it propels the music like a dance beat. When it fades back, muffled voices and melted-down noise unfold at a slower pace. Onda also adds thick synthesizer chords at one juncture, forging through a swirl of outdoor sounds like mole pushing determinedly through earth. Neither sounds nor images try to explain themselves or each other; rather, they co-exist, adding further layers of related but unbounded information to the original piece’s twin streams.
‘Kunlun is but one of the many aliases for French artist Max P. who’s known to the world as the man behind percussion driven psychedelia projects like High Wolf and Black Zone Myth Chant.
‘Since 2009 he has released LPs through Not Not Fun, Holy Mountain, Editions Gravats and Leaving Records.
‘On his new record for audioMER as Kunlun he serves up an dish of eccentric library / new age music gone wrong. The LP is based around improvisations recorded in the summer of 2011 making his first steps on analog synthesis with a very simple set up.
‘Some of those improvisations were also featured on a winged sun tape called Kunlun III released on 2012.
‘The A side offers 5 tracks where he explores a sort of heavily layered chamber acid, diving into low frequencies and ravelly bass synthesizer pieces with weirdly dissorienting fluctuating time signatures.
‘Side B is one long trippy maelstrom of seismic submarine bass hypnotisms with deep eroding noise bursts blasting through halfway.
As a whole it make for a dark and claustrophobic piece of psychedelia that will delight fans of Hieroglyphic Being, Bernard Fievre, Ron Morelli or Low Jack.’
Aki Onda with Loren Connors & Alan Licht ~ Lost City
Aki Onda with Loren Connors & Alan Licht ~ Lost City
Aki Onda is known for his work on memory and the musical implications of technologies that help us remember how to hear, and in Lost City, created in collaboration with veteran experimentalists Loren Connors and Alan Licht, the composer and his colleagues weave the aural image of a 9/11 New York in the painful process of re-cognition, of re-presenting itself after a terrible trauma. By turning…
hieroglyphic being - le jardin des chemins bifurquants
jamal moss po ścieżce solowych koncertowych nagrań na organach sun ra, ale chyba też muzyki odkrywanego dopiero przeze mnie conrada schnitzlera. niesamowite jak acidowe brzmienie uzyskał. czasami, aż zatyka mi uszy. dwie 20 minutowe kompozycje nagrane na analogowym sprzecie, właściwie bez bitów. szalona okładka pana z hair police.
This Friday MOTTO Berlin puts MER. Paper Kunsthalle in the spotlights! Come join us and have a look at all the good stuff MER. Paper Kunsthalle publishes. Artists present: Pieter Vermeersch, with editions specially created for the event, and Erik van der Weijde.
