#devin disanto

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Devin Disanto, Choi Joonyong - recording session with Taku Unami for Erstwhile Records at Third Hand Seoul, 2023/10/08 (photos by Taku Unami)

[ballooneedle]

노이즈 음악가 최준용, Devin DiSanto의 새 앨범 [Strange Skills]

피아노 부수기, 감싸기, 놀기, 다시 부수기.

[radiophd]

choi joonyong / devin disanto -- taking apart a piano reel 1

[dustedmagazine]

Lucas Schleicher’s 2015

(Jeph Jerman and Tim Barnes at the Goethe-Institut in Boston, MA - May 22nd, 2015)

Last year was my first full year not working in the music industry since graduating from school. I thought leaving the business might kill my ability to write about new releases, but instead it energized me. Ignoring stuff I didn’t care about got easier, concentrating on what I did like became more pleasurable, and a lot of the fun in music that had gone missing in the previous three years returned. Negative forces dissipated and positive reinforcement prevailed.

I heard fewer new albums in 2015 compared to 2014, and missed many things that I am sure I would have liked, but I wrote a lot more about what I did hear and I went to a lot more shows too, a lot of excellent shows, in Boston (Sarah Hennies, Jeph Jerman and Tim Barnes, and Fraufraulein, via the always excellent Non-Event), Portsmouth (Jason Lescalleet, Olivia Block, Kevin Drumm at the 3S Artspace), and Los Angeles (courtesy of Steve Flato, Richard Kamerman, Joe Panzner, Greg Stuart, Michael Pisaro,and everyone at the wulf). I found myself returning to more records more frequently and I became more familiar with their ideas, more involved in the worlds they created. Some of those records and shows got me back on the creative boat and now I’m writing and recording sounds of my own again (or someone’s sounds anyways, they don’t belong to me). It was a good year for focusing.

Once I allowed myself to slow down and move at my own pace, the creative, renewing force of sound and art re-asserted itself. I bought more records and tried more new things because I wasn’t always inundated at the end of the day or worn out by the flux of whatever someone else was saying was worth my time. Which isn’t to say I didn’t check out records other people wrote about. That United Bible Studies LP is one of my favorites this year and I have to get my hands on that new Áine O'Dwyer record before it goes out of print. I don't mean to pontificate about buying less music or something stupid like that, even if that was part of what helped me. The point is that I’m happy I haven’t gone deaf yet and that music still excites me the way it did when I was 15 and finding Coil and Merzbow for the first time. Something missing came back.

Below is an unordered accounting of the six albums I most enjoyed in 2015, plus a longer list with some briefer comments here and there. One album, however, stood out as particularly significant. It was the first thing that came to mind and the one thing that stayed there as I went through all the records that left the greatest impression on me, so it comes first and is my choice for album of the year. Here’s to an even happier (and a more hopeful) 2016:

Joseph Clayton Mills, Sifr (Suppedaneum)

In my review, I played with the idea that Sifr isn’t a piece of music so much as it is a multimedia thing, a collection of poetry, photography, and visual art with an album to boot. Ascribing the project to Mills alone is misleading, even though the CD with the music on it bears his name. Ryoko Akama, Sylvain Chauveau, Jonathan Chen, Patrick Farmer, Sarah Hughes, Michael Pisaro, and Adam Sonderberg were all involved in the release, their scores acting as performances of the music instead of the other way around. The idea alone is excellent and had things turned out less sharply, Sifr would still be a remarkable release. But everything about Sifr is sharp, from the gorgeous music to the surprising ways in which each of the participants interpreted it. There’s also a kind of musical reverse perspective at work in that the sounds and the ideas presented all converge on the listener. It’s almost impossible not to respond to the process of interpretation on display. If music is often a kind of representation, in Sifr’s case it’s an open space where the audience can participate in its creation in exactly the same way as the artists involved. Maybe that’s why Joseph chose to package the release in an envelope, because he wanted people to write back.

Devin DiSanto/Nick Hoffman, Three Exercises (ErstAEU)

I told myself I would only pick one Erstwhile record to write about at the end of the year, but that’s an impossible task. There’s nothing that Jon Abbey released in 2015 that doesn’t deserve a mention on this list. And if you think that’s an exaggeration or just the product of a fanboy’s enthusiasm, take note of how many different Erstwhile albums ended up on people’s best-of lists. If it isn’t the Graham Lambkin/Michael Pisaro collaboration, then it’s the Kevin Parks/Vanessa Rossetto disc or the new Kevin Drumm/Jason Lescalleet album or the puzzling work of Eric La Casa and Taku Unami. Erstwhile dropped seven solid albums in less than 12 months and not one of them is skippable, but with space a consideration and exclusion the rule, Devin DiSanto and Nick Hoffman’s Three Exercises comes to the fore. The excitement of that recording and the playfulness it captures are two big reasons it stands out. It's unpredictable and theatrical, a Möbius strip that twists through elements of documentary music-making, voyeurism, and architecture. There’s a temptation to try and decode the thing like it's a puzzle, to map out every event DiSanto and Hoffman enacted, but at least some of the fun comes in relaxing that critical muscle and surrendering to the idea that it’s not always possible to know what the hell is going on.

Greg Stuart & Ryoko Akama, Kotoba Koukan (Lengua de Lava)

Greg Stuart’s performance on “fade in and out procedure” is one of my favorites of the year. It’s subtle, slow, and in theory relatively simple, involving the fading in and out, as the title implies, of five sounds over a period of 25 minutes. I imagine in practice it’s not nearly so easy. If you have had the chance to see Greg Stuart perform, you’ll understand why. If you haven’t, know that his focus, intensity, and talent refute the idea that open scores such as this one, or any of the others on Kotoba Koukan, are simple or easy to play. As for Akama, her compositions are fascinating combinations of poetry, visual art, and seemingly contradictory instructions. The more I think about them, the more they seem like prisms. Thought enters them at one wavelength and leaves them dispersed, fanned out in surprising directions. What at first seems impossible or unlikely, such as producing "soundless sounds," becomes an occasion for seeking out some new aspect of music-making. In Stuart, Akama found a perfect partner for that task.

Coppice, Cores/Eruct (Category of Manifestation)

Of the two full-lengths released by Noé Cuéllar and Joseph Kramer in 2015, Cores/Eruct is the more rhythmic, somehow more mysterious one. Since first hearing it back in February, I’ve tried to figure out what exactly Coppice are up to on it but have come up short. Materially, the album sounds like it is made up of old failing machines and instruments, or of parts of instruments: the bellows, nuts, bolts, and motors of accordions, organs, cassette players, and so on. Its structure is more elusive, a hall of mirrors that falls into itself until it condenses and becomes a mood. Even though “Son Form” and “Bluing” have identifiable components and are maybe even regular enough to be notated, their effects are more unpredictable and unexplainable. I’m also sometimes reminded of Twin Peaks and Angelo Badalamenti when I listen to this, but I have no idea why because superficially there is very little resemblance. Maybe it’s in the ghostly qualities of the instrumentation, or maybe it’s a result of the eerie spaciousness in all of the performances. Whatever it is, it makes for great music.

Michael Pisaro, A Mist Is a Collection of Points (New World Records)

Sample from New World Records here

Seeing A Mist performed live in Los Angeles did a lot for my understanding of it. Maybe because mists make me think of distances and spaces before anything else, hearing and seeing the work performed in a sizable theater was what I needed to get at its essence, or at least a part of it. In person, the points of the title were the places where pianist Phillip Bush and percussionist Greg Stuart played their instruments, the mist the interaction and dissolution of those instruments in the air, along with the sine waves produced by Joe Panzner, who was not on the stage at all. On album, it’s easy to lose track of the fact that multiple instruments are actually being played. The nature of the piece is that they get lost, fade away, and re-emerge in unexpected places. Melodies travel in circles, crotales are subsumed in high frequency tones and vice versa, and hammered chords turn into warped resonances. So when I saw Greg start to play his crotales and I couldn’t tell whether he or Joe Panzner was responsible for the ensuing dissonances, something clicked. If a mist is a collection of points, then music might be like a mist too, organized and definable, but always slipping through our fingers anyway.

Jeph Jerman/Tim Barnes, Matterings (Erstwhile)

In a year filled with fantastic live shows, Jeph Jerman and Tim Barnes put on one of the very best concerts I’ve ever seen, at the Goethe-Institut in Boston on May 22nd. Some of their material that night was familiar to me as it came from Matterings, which I had been listening to almost non-stop since it’s release in February. At some point, though, Jeph started to spin two or three small silver bearings around in a shallow, dimpled bowl that looked like it could have served as an ashtray. Held up to a microphone and combined with a surprisingly melodic blend of synthesized noise and contact-mic percussion (using a wooden board and what I think was a screw; check out minute 14 in the video above), those two little beads turned into two massive boulders spinning inside a metal drum. The ensuing drone felt like it could swallow the room whole. The special edition of Matterings, which comes in a sizeable wooden box, includes a second CD with some of that live material on it, but if you can’t get a copy, the standard edition offers more than enough to chew on, including “In Situ,” one of my favorite songs of the year.

Ilyas Ahmed, I Am All Your Own (Immune)

John Chantler, Still Light, Outside (1703 Skivbolaget)

Sounds so good with the volume turned up. A powerful, physically imposing album recorded on St. John at Hackney’s three manual Mander organ and in Stockholm’s Elektronmusikstudion EMS.

Loren Chasse, The Sodden Floor (Notice Recordings)

Morton Feldman, Clarinet and String Quartet (Saltern)

Fraufraulein, Extinguishment (Another Timbre)

Jürg Frey, 24 Wörter (Edition Wandelweiser)

Jürg Frey released a whole lot of gorgeous music last year. I could have picked Another Timbre’s Grizzana and Other Pieces 2009-2014 to fill this spot, but went with 24 Wörter because it’s a self-contained cycle comprising 27 self-contained wholes. Even pieces like “Tänzer” feel complete and significant, despite their sub-minute duration. The music is sparse and fragile in places, but some of my favorite Frey melodies are here too, many of them strong and brightly asserted. Some people might need time to adjust to Regula Konrad’s voice, especially if they like their music instrumental, but it’s an easy adjustment to make, especially after hearing a song like “Sehnsuchtslandschaft.”

Heather Leigh, I Abused Animal (Ideologic Organ)

Try not to stomp a hole in the floor listening “The Return.” I came to this one pretty late in the year, but that song had me on the first playthrough. The rest of it snapped into place a listen or two later. Like the Nzʉmbe and Radu Malfatti records (below), I Abused Animal generates an atmosphere of its own: it's stripped down (maybe even more than the Malfatti record in a way) woozy, and heavy, even when "All That Heaven Allows” isn’t on repeat.

Jason Lescalleet, This Is What I Do (Glistening Examples)

By my count, Jason Lescalleet was responsible for 15 new releases in 2015, 12 of which were part of the This Is What I Do series. Finding one and singling it out as a favorite would be an exercise in futility. In all honesty, I only ever made it part way through the series anyway, stopping somewhere in August just so I could reflect on what I'd heard. You might think these are collections of improvisations or sketches because of the rate of Jason's output, but I'm not convinced of that at all. Each volume feels too tight, too carefully edited and considered to be just an exercise or just the product of some fooling around in the studio. Maybe I'm wrong. That's OK. I'll keep checking in when I can as it doesn't look like Jason is going to stop anytime soon (Volume 16 hit the Internet on December 31st, beating the New Year buzzer). Even if this series were to end, he has his Glistening Examples label to run. On top of the releases with his name attached, he released six albums by other artists last year, including the much-loved new LP from Marc Baron. The question is, will he keep doing what he does, or will there be a non-series, non-collaborative LP from him in 2016? Where does the process end and the product begin?

Radu Malfatti, One Man and a Fly (Cathnor)

A misleading title if only because there’s so much more here than Radu and a fly buzzing out. Literally. There’s an airplane, a car, a lawnmower I think, maybe a cow in there somewhere, the sound of wind, and a trombone of course. If that sounds flippant, it isn’t meant to be. One Man and a Fly is one of the most calming and strangely atmospheric records I own. Strange because at times it almost disappears into the background. Some small noise will then alert you to the fact that in the perceived silence something very slight and very interesting has been going on the whole time, and it wasn’t coming from your window or the next apartment over. The environment may contribute of course, but Cathnor did a wonderful job producing this and creating a still, somehow full environment on CD.

Meridian, Tuyeres (caduc.)

Nzʉmbe, Titubeo (Organized Music from Thessaloniki)

Pop music of a sort, dredged from the subconscious and shaped into surreal arrangements for synthesizer, guitar, alto sax, trumpet, and accordion. One of the stranger records I heard and one the more pleasant surprises.

Claudio Parodi, Primo del terzo (Unfathomless)

Keith Rowe/John Tilbury, enough still not to know (SOFA)

James Saunders, assigned #15 (Another Timbre)

Dark, glassy, glacial music performed by Apartment House, based on one of James Saunders’s #[unassigned] pieces. Chamber organ, dictaphone, and shortwave radio mix with cello, flute, viola, and piano, creating something that sounds both seismological and machine-like.

United Bible Studies, The Ale’s What Cures Ye (MIE)

Joseph Burnett’s review had me looking frantically for a copy of this. Limited to 300 copies, it disappeared in a hurry, but I was lucky enough to snag one. It’s melancholy and bleak as hell in places, but absolutely gorgeous. Couldn’t hurt if the next volume (this is subtitled Traditional Songs From The British Isles. Vol. 1) were a little more plentiful; I think there are a lot more than 300 people out there that would want to hear this music and read about how the band interpreted it. They were also responsible for one of my favorite Listed features in 2015.

[2kxx]

"Three Exercises" by Devin DiSanto & Nick Hoffman. available June 2015 from erstwhile records. www.erstwhilerecords.com