Music Round-Up: The Group, Dieter Moebius & Some Truths

The Group - The Feed-Back (Schema)

Reissued on vinyl with free CD by Schema, for those who haven't already got it from file-sharing blogs, or music-lovers wanting a cleaner, more 'authentic' experience and wish to support the boutique limited edition (500) industry. It's as good a cause as any to support. It won't save a rainforest or endangered species, just one element of cultural history which currently teeters on the brink of extinction or, if other reports are to be believed, is undergoing a revival, like a rare animal that's been cloned, in this case. Ennio and the gang play Free-psyche-beat-Improv...because they were crazy men, spirited men, making music...

***

Dieter Moebius - Nidemonex EP (More Than Human)

More than good, it's very good. 'Hey, Dieter sounds good...for his age' (back-handed compliment) - he is 70, after all and should have retired, in silence, to only contemplate his glorious past, namely as co-founder of the legendary K(C)luster, instead of continuing to make music. And this, this easily competes with anything made by whippersnappers today...because behind these transmissions from the machine mind of Moebius are all those years of experience in creating interplanetary sound vibrations. Listen to Zytos and tell me it isn't so. Even the potentially comic 'ghost voice' on Zytos is not funny because it floats in, or is drowned by, the sonic terror of Hellraising dread. Wonderful.

***

Some Truths - Some Friends I Lost To Bedlam, Others I Abandoned There (Mordant Music)

Planet-rocking Electro Acid Jazz trombonist Ralph Cumbers calling occupants of interplanetary, most extraordinary craft (inc Spaceship Earth) on another ravishing exercise in how to ingest influences but regurgitate them as something tasty rather than the contents of a bird's stomach, which wouldn't be tasty to us, but is to chicks, obviously. If you're not a slave to his rhythms as Bass Clef, you should be. Meanwhile, this is another magnificent Mordant Music release for modern star people.

Nate Wooley/C. Spencer Yeh/Audrey Chen/Todd Carter - NCAT (Monotype)

From the Monotype website

Why has this LP not been reviewed?
This LP has not been reviewed because?
                                                            It's noisy. The wrong kind of noise.
                                                            It features vocals, screaming, not songs.
                                                            It's "avant-garde" (should that description be locked in quotation marks? If so, why? Perhaps because the author fears it will dissuade potential listeners from giving the album a chance. Also, because he questions the validity of the term in the same way musicians in the 60s questioned "Free Jazz". Yet labels are handy, and Avant-Garde signals a refusal by artists to submit to musical orthodoxy).
                                                            It's not easy to write about music which does not conform to the rules of common genres (although this author realises that someone, somewhere, who is more conversant with avant-garde music than him, could do so with reference to the history of electro-acoustic recordings in an intelligent manner as befits her/his education, which would probably be more impressive than his).

(break)

Fact:

Nate Wooley - trumpet
C. Spencer Yeh - violin
Audrey Chen - cello
Todd Carter - mixing

(break)

The first three artists being musicians, albeit avant-garde ones, which means that to many ears they are not real musicians at all, played concerts whilst in residency at STEIM (Studio for Electro-Instrumental Music) in Amsterdam. Recordings of these were sent to Todd Carter, who set about playing the role of Teo Macero working with Miles Davis, i.e., cutting and remixing the music...far more radically, even, than Teo cut Miles...

...here, Carter is more akin to Pierre Schaeffer, perhaps. A digital equivalent? Except that whereas Schaeffer reconfigured relatively conventional acoustic music (along with the sound of trains etc), Carter worked with improvised acoustic sound. This made his job:
                a) easier because there were no formal patterns in rhythm, or melody and harmony to disrupt: or
                b) harder because spontaneously improvised music is already like an aural cut-up.

(break)

Hey, Nate, C, Audrey, Todd, what are you like?

Like the best nightmare you ever had, one which stimulated you to the point of orgasm whilst simultaneously piercing your throbbing heart with icy terror.
Like high-voltage Edgard Varèse conducting sawmill machinery.
Like walking through a shock corridor packed with imprisoned insane patients playing instruments freely.
Like a soundtrack to a sci-fi film in which creatures more terrifying than the Alien stalk astronauts before disembowelling them with razor sharp tongues, then eating their brains, raw.

Lest the wrong impression is given, it must be stated that this is, above all else, a beautifully crafted arrangement of sound, as opposed to a continual Noise manifesto. It is meditative,
                                                                                                          cacophonous
                                                                                                          and musical.

Yeh's violin-playing, as with Ornette Coleman's use of the instrument, already expands the sonic possibilities before being transformed again by Carter's post-production. Whilst the altered acoustic sounds rattle your ears, the electro ocean of sound rises and falls, consumes, and creates a bedrock.

The sound clips below only give a taste. Consuming the whole product is necessary in order to gain full appreciation and highly recommended.

Monotype

Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza ‎– Musica Su Schemi

I found the book, Magnificent obsessions. Persol, cinema and craftsmanship today (details here). It contains great photos of Ennio Morricone that are new to me. There he is, the man with the horn, the avant-mainstream maestro, maker of both soundtracks that even cloth-eared idiots know and member of Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza. I can't think of another musician who's suceeded in such extremes of music. Perhaps you can 'cause you're smarter than me.

So I've got the book and I'm on the bus home flicking through the latest edition of The Wire when I come across a review of  Musica Su Schemi because it's been reissued by Superior Viaduct. So that's my excuse for featuring it here. If you don't know G.I.N.C's music this album might be a better place to start. Saying that, I don't mean to underestimate your ability to take in purely improvised music, honest. Don't get me wrong, my collection's not packed with free-form avant-garde sounds featuring players tooting and hooting as they feel like it - no sir.

Since there's no immediate wow factor here you have to allow it to worm it's way into your brain. To do so, I suggest you put it on repeat and get on with whatever you want to do...the ironing...washing up...writing that post-modern non-linear novel you keep saying you'll write...whatever. You know the score...there isn't one, although I read that G.I.N.C use chess 'to define key parameters of their music' - the brainiacs! If that seems to promise studiously technical compositions the actual results are anything but. 'Omaggio A Giacinto Scelsi', in particular, grows organically from a quietly ominous drone into a dark vortex which sucks in your soul and spits it out again, fully nourished yet not quite sane.

Eroina - Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza

In relation to this previous post. 

An amazing album.

Second chance to Listen Hear  

Gruppo di Improvvisazione di Nuova Consonanza  (Wiki info)

Eroina & Niente LPs - Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza - Orgasmo

Update: Eroina is now here.

Orgasmo...

...'scuse me whilst I get carried away - and isn't that what music supposed to make us do? - two absolute belters from G.I.N.C., both from 1971, both loaded with funky drummer free Jazz deviant grooves & atmospherics like no-one else could deliver. Surfacing from the deep Improv pond to smack us in the chops with this shit! Too much. 

You could say words fail me. You could say 'I've got them!', in which case, well done, top marks, have a gold star. I've raved about G.I.N.C. before here and here - well give me one good reason why I shouldn't again.

Ennio's squawking like a cockerel, if cockerels squawk, and I might get to rambling, 'cause that's what I've been told I do quite often - well then...so be it...but this music is so fantastic, it makes me lose my sense of anything - time, place, grammar (which, let's face it, I didn't have much of  anyway) - 

Some slow drag drugged-up jazzy blues haze of sound floats through the speaker...'Bali'...and the thing is...this is the thing: I don't know of another group that managed to absolutely perfect this kind of fusion, aside from Miles, you might say, but in a different manner, of course. 

Sure, there are many treasures yet to be discovered, children, and I say go forth and find them, for me, and if you do, write back from your travels through the forest of files - 'cause I can't believe there's anything to compare with this. Not that you will write, I understand, there's so little time, and none for 'comments' - and what feels like a lifetime ago I did say I'm glad not have loads of comments to deal with because they'd take up more of my precious time, time that could be spent listening to G.I.N.C, or watching telly, 

or rambling  > > > > >

> > > > in the countryside, which I love to do, because it relieves me of the weight of urban existence in the form of traffic, overcrowded transport, & overcrowding generally - people are OK but, you know, in small doses, which is one reason I hate big concerts, or 'gigs', as I believe they're known, because who wants to be amongst thousands of sheeple bleating their appreciation of a Rock/Jazz (exception, if Charlie Parker came back tomorrow & played there would be thousands in attendance, I suppose, and I'd be one of them, but can you imagine Bird playing an arena?! No, neither can I), Dance (urgh), Reggae band - no. 

Perhaps you and me appreciating this music doesn't amount to a hill of beans, but so what? It's our thing, and we wouldn't swap it for all the tea in China or anything by Lana Del Ray, certainly, would we? 

Listen Hear

This is the reissue vinyl version of Niente that The Roundtable label have just produced, and it's gone already since only 500 were pressed.

But you can Listen Hear

Gli Occhi Freddi Della Paura (Cold Eyes Of Fear) - Ennio Morricone

Listen Hear

So this morning a friend asked what I’d been listening to recently and I said, amongst other things, Ennio Morricone, and he mentioned a covers album of his spag Western tunes by someone, so I told him other material by Ennio excited me much more, and I mentioned this soundtrack from 1971. He hadn’t heard of it, of course (the chances were slim). Ennio’s tied to his famous Western themes in popular culture, which is no bad thing since they are so good, but here’s a soundtrack I want to shout about from the rooftops. Hold on...right, I’m up here...THIS ALBUM IS ABSOLUTELY AMAZING! Perhaps no-one’s listening. I hope you are. This features  Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza. It’s like, er, psychedelic Jazz; the best you’ve ever heard. It’s electro-acoustic. There are even a few walking double bass lines, like a nod to the tradition, and when this element crops up it’s as if they’re also acknowledging the Cool Jazz Soundtrack school. But only in bursts, because otherwise they’re busy creating perfect improvised miniatures as mood music for a psychotic slasher flic nightmare.

Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza - Improvisational Mood Music For Modern Dream Extensions

Ennio again – playing trumpet. But ‘playing’? Yes, if not melodically, then ...what? Here he is with Il Gruppo as I like to call them (for obvious reasons) in 1969. An album called Improvisationen. I’m not a great fan of Improv with a capital ‘I’ and all that the abbreviation stands for, but Il Gruppo have been playing on (and in) my mind for the last few days.
   I first heard Ennio’s freewheeling side on the Feed-Back album. And I had a feint recollection of this group before actually listening. Now I listen. It’s a world of wonders and, to my ears, a brilliant example of the art of the improvisers.
   Perhaps it was Ennio’s plaything, dashing to the studio between recording his twenty-second soundtrack of the year to allow his imagination to roam free, completely. For all his brilliance as a film composer, we soon recognise familiar structures and sounds in them. But here he is, blowing as if he belonged to the world of total improvisation. Here is the sound of surprise that Jazz is supposed to be, which is not to denigrate the art form in any way.
   You cannot guess what is going to happen next, of course - piano keys are hit, and strings plucked? What is that sound? It’s part of the pleasure, not knowing what is being played, or how. Radio voices, a double bass, percussion, something being hit, and the ironically entitled Light Music, which is anything but. It’s music that is multi-dimensional, not only in what’s played, but how - something is rubbed, rustled, tapped, screwed, unscrewed...there are squeaks, drones...silence, almost...and so on. The usual stuff of Improv, you might say. Still, I urge you to give it a chance if you’re at all prejudiced against this kind of thing.
   We can hear something of Ennio’s artfulness, in dissonant strings, perhaps, or fleeting moments of what sounds like improvisation, amongst his film work. But this ‘soundtrack’ is most suited to the little movies played out in our heads every night as we sleep.