Paul Lytton / Nate Wooley — Known / Unknown (Fundacja Sluchaj)
Known / Unknown by Paul Lytton / Nate Wooley
Working sometimes as a duo and other times in the company of one or many additional musicians, American trumpeter Nate Wooley and English percussionist Paul Lytton have been working together for over a decade. As is so common among improvisers nowadays, their engagement is fitful; they’ll play a one-off gig here, a little tour there, or maybe Wooley might call Lytton up to be part of his periodic Seven Storey Mountain project. Periodic encounters and extra participants are both effective strategies for keeping musicians from getting too familiar, but even without those mechanisms, these two guys approach music making with an ethical imperative that makes each encounter (to borrow Val Wilmer’s words) as serious as your life. They’re not going to just sit back and blow; again and again, they’ve both made themselves re-confront the point of being improvisers. It’s not about getting good at playing something and letting people know about it, but about counting on a process of constant self-challenge to give whatever music happens an immediacy that won’t let you turn away.
On Known / Unknown, one of the challenges is that of expanded opportunities. While Lytton spent some time in the 1970s lugging around a percussion rig so big that he needed his own van to transport it and several hours to assemble or disassemble it, more recently the circumstances of modern travel have often forced him to play with a borrowed kit plus whatever hardware he can fit into a small suitcase. Quite often, the duo’s work has taken place in such situations. But for this studio date, Lytton used an electro-acoustic set-up that permitted him to amplify and distort the small sounds of bits of metal hung from a framework. Over the course of the album’s three lengthy pieces he shifts between the framework, drums that one usually finds in a jazz kit, and the chains, cymbals, and detritus that he brings with him on tour. He makes full use of these resources, manipulating tiny strikes into funhouse mirror images of themselves or whipping up an a-rhythmic blizzard of acoustic sounds; imagine a sonic representation of a dust storm in which you’re at least as aware of each speck of dust as you are of the cloud’s wholeness, and you’ve got an idea of his drumming. Wooley uses amplification to similarly expand the range of his trumpet beyond the already prodigious range he obtains from wind, lips, horn and mute.
It’s not just the sounds they make, but the fact that they make them together, and over lengthy performances that stand as metaphors for their cross-generational relationship. Lytton can play pretty much anything, and he is quite willing to revisit the more time-oriented music he played before he joined England’s nascent free improv community in the late 1960s. But that’s music that he gave up out of that aforementioned ethical sense, so for an aware partner to go there, they better know why. Wooley, who was born in the 1970s, rarely pushes overtly in that direction, but he does throw out little bits of melody as well as episodes of pure, raspy sound and blown-up microsounds. Lytton doesn’t exactly swing, but he does create sustained streams of sound that are in constant transformation, but also maintain a steady momentum much of the time. This makes it especially potent when Lytton does stop for a moment; nobody else can invest a silence with as much tension, or shock you so much when he breaks it. The recording is quite transparent, adding nothing extra to the range of sounds each musician plays.
That transparency invites the listener to think about what lies between Lytton and Wooley. Their years of shared work mix with vastly different personal and musical experiences, enacted in a form of parallel play in which each man’s playing goes its own way, but still is always conscious of its relation to the other’s. You don’t just hear them play, you feel them reacting to their own and each other’s playing, and trusting each other in ways that justify each other’s decisions. That’s what this stuff is all about.
Sound of the Mountain with Tetuzi Akiyama and Toshimaru Nakamura — Amplified Clarinet and Trumpet, Guitars, NIMB (Mystery and Wonder)
Photo by Akira Saito
When Macbeth’s witches incanted the words “Double, double, toil and trouble,” they might have been looking further into the future than the events recounted in William Shakespeare’s play. They might have been listening through a loophole in time to this CD, whose two tracks were recorded in Tokyo in October, 2017. Certainly, those words describe both the line-up of musicians involved and the sonic action that they brew.
Tetuzi Akiyama and Toshimaru Nakamura have been partners in sound since the days when Tokyo’s onkyo scene was perceived as a Pacific counterpoint to the near-silent improv that arose in Berlin and London. They’ve worked as a duo, and toured and recorded with a trio of Scandinavian horn players under the name Koboku Senju. While it’s tempting to compare that latter assemblage to the one on this CD, you’ll find more sonic differences than similarities. Sound of the Mountain is a Canadian duo comprising Elizabeth Millar on amplified clarinet and Craig Pedersen on amplified trumpet. Aside from their work with Akiyama and Nakamura, they’ve toured their native country, Mexico, and around the Pacific rim.
The common ground that this combo builds from is refusal. Everyone here has decided, at least in each other’s presence, not to play their instruments the way that convention prescribes (caveat — Akimaya’s well-documented talent for boogieing requires acknowledgement that he can spank his plank in conventional ways with memorable results anytime he pleases). While the identity of his instrument is never in doubt, here his widely separate chords and sullen notes sound adrift in a sea of jagged sounds. Bored with his own music, Nakamura renounced guitar playing over twenty years ago in favor of working solely with a mixing board. By plugging the input into the output, the thing generates feedback. While Nakamura initially faced endless surprise from his instrument, he has developed considerable authority playing the thing, but his improvising aesthetic might still be characterized as system-oriented; by adding and subtracting sounds, he changes the overall character of the music without dominating it. Millar and Pedersen both use amplification to magnify the innards of their instruments, as well as to change their horns’ respective timbres. Both let slip some familiar tones, but squiggles, pops and huffs predominate.
As the CD begins, the ensemble is already engaged. Keypads and electronics bubble around Akiyama’s serrated sounds, and the music proceeds from one metaphorical sound experience to the next. First, it’s a well-heated kettle, then a windblown forest at night, and later a congress of contrarian potlids. Another listener might reject such descriptions as needless filtering of the concrete fact that four people are making sounds that refrain from adhering to convention, yet cohere most grippingly.
Toshimaru Nakamura, Rhodri Davies, Dafydd Roberts, Angharad Davies & Andrew Leslie Hooker — Exemption from Meaning (Listen to the Voice of Fire)
Photo by Daryl Feehely
Exemption from meaning by Toshimaru Nakamura, Dafydd Roberts, Angharad Davies, Rhodri Davies, Andrew Leslie Hooker
Listen to the Voice of Fire is an experimental music series that has been hosting concerts in Aberystwith, Wales since 2017. It is organized by Dr. Dafydd Roberts, who is on the staff of the local university and has made music since the 1990s under the name Our glassie Azoth. This CD documents a musical gathering that was shaped by his interests and priorities, but could not be bound by them.
Improvisational music benefits from exchange, and one challenge facing isolated practitioners is figuring out how to engage with ideas and practitioners from other places. Bottom line, you either have to travel or get people to visit you; part of the point of this particular event was to get Japanese no-input mixing board player Toshimaru Nakamura to Aberystwith. The university’s Department of Theatre, Film and Television Studios hosted him for a residence, and for the centerpiece performance Roberts devised a score intended to elicit musical responses by Nakamura and some Welsh musicians to the school’s Japanese ceramics collection. For Roberts, whose sound work is connected to his investigations into alchemy, the idea of deriving inspiration for sound action from a representation of a creative process was not a stretch. But not everyone involved bought in. While Nakamura is no stranger to functioning within the confines of a score, when it comes to playing, he deals with sounds, not representations. Instead of improvisationally informed musicians realizing a score, it would seem that on Exemption from Meaning, some musicians improvised with graphic scores sitting in front of them.
Nakamura is the only musician on all three of this CD’s tracks, each of which is named for an ancient Japanese ceramic object in the university’s collection. Roberts, playing modular synthesizer, and fellow Welsh electronician Andrew Leslie Hooker, join him on “Katsue Ibata_c1244.” While you can posit similarities between the fiery kiln and the sonic combustion that plays out, the dynamics of the musicians’ interactions fall mainly into the “you let her rip, and I’ll let her rip, too” category. What makes this performance vivid is the dangerously physical quality of the sounds they stir together. Feedback lances, static blasts, and shortwave squiggles seem to battle for space so roughly that it sounds like if you dipped your hand into the action, it would come out stripped of flesh. If you’re looking for a clear representation of a process, it’s hard to tease out; if you want some noise that’ll singe your eyebrows, crank it up.
“Ryoji Koie_c1243” is much more consonant. It starts with Rhodri Davies applying an eBow to his harp’s amplified, prepared strings, drawing out long, fluttering tones somewhat similar to his work on his album Over Shadows. Nakamura matches him with similar material, and from their it becomes music of layers and addition. Tones appear and subtract, evolving into an expanse of textures that stretch to the horizon. Periodic visitations from shorter sounds — an electronic cough or a drum-like boom — add depth to the sound. The result is somewhat like a more muscular version of the similarly patient music that Nakamura used to make with Keith Rowe.
The final track adds violinist Angharad Davies (sister of Rhodri) to the duo. While continuous sounds, in the form of either mechanically agitated strings, microtonal bowing, or sputtering electronics, have their place, there’s a lot more space and overt change in their music. In a way, this piece comes closest to the ceramics that were meant to inspire the work, if only because their accumulating, morphing sounds feel like something being made. Exemption from Meaning comes creatively packaged, with the CD sleeve tucked into a 7” x 7” booklet with some swell color photos of the event and text that provides context and reckoning.
Trumpeter Peter Evans and drummer Weasel Walter already have already amassed half a dozen recordings over the past ten years. Do you need more? If the outcome was more of the same, they’d be the first to tell you no. While both men maintain a prodigious level of productivity, neither is satisfied with mere repetition. Make your point, and make the next one a little better, they might say. Or make it a lot better, or at least different.
So the concentration at work here goes far beyond the decision to boil down their collaboration to a duo. They spent just a few hours together one January day at Seizures Palace recording prepared themes, improvisations and noise. Then came the work of chopping, shuffling, layering and compressing that material into seven tracks. Once it was done, they cut it all back down, and then cut it back again. Each piece splits from within, bursting with the sort of pressure that comes either from being one of a species that must shed its skin or die, or by people with a shared commitment to making intense sounds in real time. Just to be clear, Walter and Evans are not critters breaking out of an egg or an exoskeleton; they’re humans breaking out of their shared history of extreme improvisation, determined to turn it up one more notch.
“Yellow Stainer” kicks off the record with dueling metronomes panned hard left and right. The differences in their time signatures create pockets of space that open and close at uneven intervals, and a pair of Evans / Walter duos take aim at those spots, shooting quick blurts and bashes that must never touch the outer edge of their targets. On “Satan’s Boletus” selective amplification and comprehension blow another improvisation up like digital magnification; the sound you hear, ladies and gentlemen, is not what was played but the way it was pixelated. Tracks of horn noise press upon tracks of fast drumming on “Sulfur Tuft,” which will push you to the wall like a blast of some heavy metal mutation that is unfit for normal life but too vigorous to die.
Piece follows piece, each named for a mushroom of escalating lethality, and it would hardly be in the spirit of the enterprise to simply name each one’s contents and methodology. Besides, if you go the album’s Bandcamp page there’s already a video that’ll do that for you. So let’s just acknowledge that we haven’t even gotten to the exploding marching band or the black hole implosion segments, suggest that you really ought to hear them do it through speakers big enough to handle a bit of destruction, and praise the duo for delivering not more of the same but more.
In Cathode one realises just how much of life is dictated by simply waves; few have power over such an elemental part of our being – yet Otomo Yoshihide does. Here he elegantly, emotively heightens and manipulates something most of us cannot fathom, in his presence, us listeners are helpless with awe.
Self-governing Improvisation as a Justification of Forthcoming
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Dispense from Improvisation as a Basis in connection with Revelation
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