AMPLIFY 2003: elemental
Tonic 107 Norfolk St., NYC Thursday, February 6 Greg Kelley/Bhob Rainey/Lê Quan Ninh (Yukiko Nakamura-dance) Keith Rowe/Günter Müller (world premiere) I-Sound/Tim Barnes Keith Rowe/Toshimaru Nakamura Friday, February 7 Keith Rowe/Lê Quan Ninh (world premiere) Greg Kelley/Bhob Rainey/Günter Müller Tetuzi Akiyama/Toshimaru Nakamura/Tim Barnes Günter Müller/Lê Quan Ninh (Yukiko Nakamura-dance) Additional shows in NYC before and after the festival: Wednesday, February 5 Diapason Gallery Toshio Kajiwara/Okkyung Lee/Tim Barnes Tetuzi Akiyama/Toshimaru Nakamura/David Watson Ursula Scherrer-videos before and after sets Saturday, February 8 (Quakebasket) Tetuzi Akiyama/Tim Barnes/Sean Meehan/Barry Weisblat duos (Yukiko Nakamura-dance) Saturday, February 8 (Engine 27) Tetuzi Akiyama/Günter Müller Greg Kelley/Bhob Rainey/Jason Lescalleet Keith Rowe/Toshi Nakamura concert photos |
REVIEWS
AMPLIFY 2003: elemental
Jon Pareles, NY Times
Tiny clicks. A hum. The buzz of static. A whoosh of breath through a trumpet. The rustle of a stick brushing a drumhead. The distant clang of a gentle touch on an electric guitar string. Those were among the sounds receiving intent concentration from both performers and audience on Thursday night at Tonic, starting the two-night Amplify 2003 festival of improvised music.
The four ensembles on the bill shared a predilection for quiet, purely textural music, with the musicians cooperating to create sustained, minimal, slowly changing pools of sound: music that is ambient and enveloping but by no means soothing. (Much of it is released on the Erstwhile label.) They share John Cage's acceptance of all sounds as the makings of music, and they have developed alternative techniques of virtuosity. Lê Quan Ninh, who played bass drum in a trio with Bhob Rainey on soprano saxophone and Greg Kelley on trumpet, had set up the drum sideways on a stand, and while he occasionally tapped the rim of the drum, he spent most of the set stroking the drumhead with brushes, sticks or a cymbal, which created rushes of activity and ringing, disembodied tones. Meanwhile Mr. Rainey was playing high notes, and Mr. Kelley was blowing rumbling, sputtering subtones.
A dancer, Yukiko Nakamura, seemed to sense tension and need in the unstable sound. Nude under a loose red robe, she gradually unfolded from the fetal position, groped her way from the stage to the floor and writhed slowly behind most of the audience, at one point crying out.
Keith Rowe, performing with a tableful of gadgets and electronics including an electric guitar and a portable radio, appeared in two duos with fellow gadgeteers, Günter Müller and Toshimaru Nakamura. He and Mr. Müller came up with a throbbing, crackling, burbling, creaking half-hour of sound, like a mad scientist's laboratory being inundated by floodwaters.
Mr. Rowe's duo with Mr. Nakamura made more austere music, similar to their duet album, "Weather Sky" (Erstwhile). They shared hisses and whooshes of w hite noise, low guitar notes like liquefying bells, little blotches of controlled static and high-frequency tones more often heard in hearing tests than at concerts, which sent shivers down spines. The music was simultaneously remote and intimate, demanding newly open ears.
Jon Pareles, NY Times
Tiny clicks. A hum. The buzz of static. A whoosh of breath through a trumpet. The rustle of a stick brushing a drumhead. The distant clang of a gentle touch on an electric guitar string. Those were among the sounds receiving intent concentration from both performers and audience on Thursday night at Tonic, starting the two-night Amplify 2003 festival of improvised music.
The four ensembles on the bill shared a predilection for quiet, purely textural music, with the musicians cooperating to create sustained, minimal, slowly changing pools of sound: music that is ambient and enveloping but by no means soothing. (Much of it is released on the Erstwhile label.) They share John Cage's acceptance of all sounds as the makings of music, and they have developed alternative techniques of virtuosity. Lê Quan Ninh, who played bass drum in a trio with Bhob Rainey on soprano saxophone and Greg Kelley on trumpet, had set up the drum sideways on a stand, and while he occasionally tapped the rim of the drum, he spent most of the set stroking the drumhead with brushes, sticks or a cymbal, which created rushes of activity and ringing, disembodied tones. Meanwhile Mr. Rainey was playing high notes, and Mr. Kelley was blowing rumbling, sputtering subtones.
A dancer, Yukiko Nakamura, seemed to sense tension and need in the unstable sound. Nude under a loose red robe, she gradually unfolded from the fetal position, groped her way from the stage to the floor and writhed slowly behind most of the audience, at one point crying out.
Keith Rowe, performing with a tableful of gadgets and electronics including an electric guitar and a portable radio, appeared in two duos with fellow gadgeteers, Günter Müller and Toshimaru Nakamura. He and Mr. Müller came up with a throbbing, crackling, burbling, creaking half-hour of sound, like a mad scientist's laboratory being inundated by floodwaters.
Mr. Rowe's duo with Mr. Nakamura made more austere music, similar to their duet album, "Weather Sky" (Erstwhile). They shared hisses and whooshes of w hite noise, low guitar notes like liquefying bells, little blotches of controlled static and high-frequency tones more often heard in hearing tests than at concerts, which sent shivers down spines. The music was simultaneously remote and intimate, demanding newly open ears.
AMPLIFY 2003: elemental
Steve Smith, The Wire
Tiny red Christmas lights and a teeming swarm of drones and ape calls conjured by soundscaper Toshio Kajiwara greeted the audience at Tonic on the first night of AMPLIFY, Erstwhile Records founder Jon Abbey's roaming annual festival of electroacoustic improvisation, which took place during two nights in February at Tonic with related events held elsewhere both before and after. Onstage, a bass drum stood alone, surrounded by a motley collection of cymbals, dog toys, pinecones and marbles. Their careful arrangement suggested a setting for an arcane ritual, which ultimately wasn't far from the truth.
Lê Quan Ninh, owner of that "surrounded bass drum," trumpeter Greg Kelley and saxophonist Bhob Rainey (better known as Boston-based microsound explorers nmperign), joined by dancer Yukiko Nakamura, clad in a loose red silk kimono. Ninh hovered and swayed in a deep bow over his drum, tapping, brushing and breathing gently on skin and metal as if to release music latent within them. Eyes closed tightly, Kelley and Rainey responded with a rarefied vocabulary of hisses, rasps and scrapes. Like a cat rudely awakened by unwelcome noise, Nakamura slowly stretched, shrugged off her kimono and lurched off stage, crawling down the aisle and plaintively crying out after she had disappeared into the crowd.
In contrast, Keith Rowe and Günter Müller maintained a gentle, conversational tone during their subsequent set, Rowe's analogue jolts and interjections meshing with Müller's soft, aqueous digital burbles. Müller's loose-limbed agility underscored his origin as a percussionist, as he manipulated contact microphones, percussive implements and foot pedals with all four limbs. As Rowe fanned his guitar strings and Müller bowed a sonorous prayer bowl, faint, ghostly voices seemed to hover in the stillness.
Percussionist Tim Barnes also openly courted ritual. He opened his duo set with laptop manipulator I-Sound by whacking a bass drum at the back of the club and scraping a cymbal along the floor during his procession to the stage, while I-Sound called forth sepulchral clangs and hissing drones. As Barnes took a seat at his mongrel kit, a cell phone shattered the mood he had so carefully evoked. "I don't fuckin' believe it!" he spat, lashing out at a drum with a tiny chain. Instantly, the music assumed a denser, more menacing tone. Despite moments of inspiration, the disruption took its toll. The set felt labored and joyless, and I-Sound wasn't the only one sneaking furtive glances at the clock.
Heads bowed and lights lowered, Rowe and Toshimaru Nakamura (no relation to the dancer) sculpted swirling electrons and plangent sine waves into a thrillingly intimate music irreducible to its constituent elements, dually plotting a sonic map of a single nervous system. With the deliberation of a chess master, Nakamura carefully pondered the implications of any potential movement and decision for long moments. The music demanded and received intense concentration from the audience; high-heeled footsteps in the back of the club near the end of the set rang out like thunderclaps.
The divergent musical approaches evidenced during the first night - one dramatic, the other ascetic - finally clashed during the opening set of the second evening, which paired Ninh with Rowe. As the percussionist laid into his battery with a fusillade of fingers, palms, a bell and a pinecone, Rowe countered with the same delicacy that marked his earlier sets. The counterpoint proved untenable: Rowe ultimately entered into a heated exchange with the voluble Ninh, repeatedly dropping snippets of American television's talking horse Mr. Ed and the Electric Light Orchestra into the shattering din. The set was tremendously exciting, at the expense of any deeper connection.
Kelley, Rainey and Müller proved far more compatible, as the digital texturalist underpinned the horn players' atomized utterances with a stream of tactile crumples, gently coruscating waves and the barest hint of a pulse. Together, their icy abstractions rarely rose above the level of a hushed library conversation. A trio of Barnes, Nakamura and guitarist Tetuzi Akiyama proved more garrulous, Barnes taking a back seat to Nakamura's more assertive stance, which at one point incorporated the kind of trance-inducing pulse usually reserved for his solo discs. The more theatrical Akiyama jammed a shuriken between the strings of his guitar and raked it with a vicious hunting knife. Despite the dizzying array of sounds produced, only during the final stretch did the three finally settle into a communal tongue - which nonetheless was worth the wait.
Closing the festival, Ninh and Müller established a ghostly wail with bowed prayer bowl and cymbal, while Yukiko Namakura stood between them, nude once more and staring fixedly into the distance. Müller met Ninh's jackhammer intensity with glowering helicopter swoops. Nakamura's interpretation was elemental, to say the least: During the first half of the set, her motion consisted solely of a tear slowly rolling down one cheek and a strand of spittle dangling from her chin. The density of the music waned as the dancer buckled to the floor in achingly slow motion, then mounted once more as she reversed the process and reached skyward. As the set continued, Ninh seemed more intent on pacing Nakamura's choreography than in maintaining any meaningful conversation with Müller, who gamely adapted a supportive stance for the duration. That's entertainment.
Steve Smith, The Wire
Tiny red Christmas lights and a teeming swarm of drones and ape calls conjured by soundscaper Toshio Kajiwara greeted the audience at Tonic on the first night of AMPLIFY, Erstwhile Records founder Jon Abbey's roaming annual festival of electroacoustic improvisation, which took place during two nights in February at Tonic with related events held elsewhere both before and after. Onstage, a bass drum stood alone, surrounded by a motley collection of cymbals, dog toys, pinecones and marbles. Their careful arrangement suggested a setting for an arcane ritual, which ultimately wasn't far from the truth.
Lê Quan Ninh, owner of that "surrounded bass drum," trumpeter Greg Kelley and saxophonist Bhob Rainey (better known as Boston-based microsound explorers nmperign), joined by dancer Yukiko Nakamura, clad in a loose red silk kimono. Ninh hovered and swayed in a deep bow over his drum, tapping, brushing and breathing gently on skin and metal as if to release music latent within them. Eyes closed tightly, Kelley and Rainey responded with a rarefied vocabulary of hisses, rasps and scrapes. Like a cat rudely awakened by unwelcome noise, Nakamura slowly stretched, shrugged off her kimono and lurched off stage, crawling down the aisle and plaintively crying out after she had disappeared into the crowd.
In contrast, Keith Rowe and Günter Müller maintained a gentle, conversational tone during their subsequent set, Rowe's analogue jolts and interjections meshing with Müller's soft, aqueous digital burbles. Müller's loose-limbed agility underscored his origin as a percussionist, as he manipulated contact microphones, percussive implements and foot pedals with all four limbs. As Rowe fanned his guitar strings and Müller bowed a sonorous prayer bowl, faint, ghostly voices seemed to hover in the stillness.
Percussionist Tim Barnes also openly courted ritual. He opened his duo set with laptop manipulator I-Sound by whacking a bass drum at the back of the club and scraping a cymbal along the floor during his procession to the stage, while I-Sound called forth sepulchral clangs and hissing drones. As Barnes took a seat at his mongrel kit, a cell phone shattered the mood he had so carefully evoked. "I don't fuckin' believe it!" he spat, lashing out at a drum with a tiny chain. Instantly, the music assumed a denser, more menacing tone. Despite moments of inspiration, the disruption took its toll. The set felt labored and joyless, and I-Sound wasn't the only one sneaking furtive glances at the clock.
Heads bowed and lights lowered, Rowe and Toshimaru Nakamura (no relation to the dancer) sculpted swirling electrons and plangent sine waves into a thrillingly intimate music irreducible to its constituent elements, dually plotting a sonic map of a single nervous system. With the deliberation of a chess master, Nakamura carefully pondered the implications of any potential movement and decision for long moments. The music demanded and received intense concentration from the audience; high-heeled footsteps in the back of the club near the end of the set rang out like thunderclaps.
The divergent musical approaches evidenced during the first night - one dramatic, the other ascetic - finally clashed during the opening set of the second evening, which paired Ninh with Rowe. As the percussionist laid into his battery with a fusillade of fingers, palms, a bell and a pinecone, Rowe countered with the same delicacy that marked his earlier sets. The counterpoint proved untenable: Rowe ultimately entered into a heated exchange with the voluble Ninh, repeatedly dropping snippets of American television's talking horse Mr. Ed and the Electric Light Orchestra into the shattering din. The set was tremendously exciting, at the expense of any deeper connection.
Kelley, Rainey and Müller proved far more compatible, as the digital texturalist underpinned the horn players' atomized utterances with a stream of tactile crumples, gently coruscating waves and the barest hint of a pulse. Together, their icy abstractions rarely rose above the level of a hushed library conversation. A trio of Barnes, Nakamura and guitarist Tetuzi Akiyama proved more garrulous, Barnes taking a back seat to Nakamura's more assertive stance, which at one point incorporated the kind of trance-inducing pulse usually reserved for his solo discs. The more theatrical Akiyama jammed a shuriken between the strings of his guitar and raked it with a vicious hunting knife. Despite the dizzying array of sounds produced, only during the final stretch did the three finally settle into a communal tongue - which nonetheless was worth the wait.
Closing the festival, Ninh and Müller established a ghostly wail with bowed prayer bowl and cymbal, while Yukiko Namakura stood between them, nude once more and staring fixedly into the distance. Müller met Ninh's jackhammer intensity with glowering helicopter swoops. Nakamura's interpretation was elemental, to say the least: During the first half of the set, her motion consisted solely of a tear slowly rolling down one cheek and a strand of spittle dangling from her chin. The density of the music waned as the dancer buckled to the floor in achingly slow motion, then mounted once more as she reversed the process and reached skyward. As the set continued, Ninh seemed more intent on pacing Nakamura's choreography than in maintaining any meaningful conversation with Müller, who gamely adapted a supportive stance for the duration. That's entertainment.
AMPLIFY 2003: elemental
Michael Rosenstein, Signal To Noise
Some of the most important music of the moment is being created by like-minded musicians from Japan, Europe, and a handful of U.S. outposts. They are forging strategies for improvisation at the transitory intersection of sound and silence; utilizing a sound palette drawn from electronics and reinvented techniques while operating in a dynamic range diving from the quietest flutter to palpable, bone-rattling rumbles. Jon Abbey, founder of Erstwhile Records, has been bringing together many of the top practitioners for recording projects which he described to The Wire as "seek[ing] the middle ground between improvisation and composition, acoustic and electronic, organization and abstraction." For the last few years, Abbey's AMPLIFY festival has proved to be a vital meeting ground for collaboration and exploration. The festival returned to NYC this last February for its third edition, which Abbey subtitled "elemental," providing a prescient thematic umbrella.
Thursday, 2/6:
The first night at Tonic began with a collaboration between nmperign (Greg Kelley and Bhob Rainey), Lê Quan Ninh and dancer Yukiko Nakamura. The four embodied the idea of elemental music, as their gestural abstractions gathered into hyperaware collective sound paintings. Ninh used a bass drum mounted sideways on a metal frame, rubbing and scraping brushes, sticks, pinecones, stones, cymbals and metal bowls across the head. Kelley added buzzing striations of squeezed microtones, grumbled smears, and jolting shreds of a metal plate scoured along the bell of his trumpet. Rainey's breathy shimmers, pops, and oscillating vibrato notes unfurled from his soprano sax, placing tracers ranging from microscopic vibration to searing overtones. Yukiko began curled on the floor in a fetal position, her lithe muscular body draped in a scarlet kimono. As the improvisation gathered density, she slowly dragged her body into the audience, physically channeling the dynamic energy of the music. The four traversed a fluid arc, ending with diminutive inflections ruffling the ambience of the room.
The potent arc of the opening set was picked up by the premiere of a duet by Keith Rowe and Günter Müller. These two have played such a formative role in pulling this scene together that it was hard to believe that they had never performed in a duet setting before. From the first moments, they engaged in an improvisation that pushed beyond process and technique into probing discovery. Rowe, with his battery of electronics, radios, wires, clips, hand-held fans, and tabletop guitar, he has spent the last three decades creating a new vocabulary for spontaneous collective invention. Müller has done the much the same since the early '80s, starting with a tom tom and cymbal and adding mini-disc players, contact mikes, and electronics to weave rich skeins. Their set began with quiet buzzes, clicks, and hissing static. Eschewing a sense of linear development, they shaped multihued timbres and densities with a constantly shifting sense of momentum resolving into slowly unwinding loops that dissolved into silence.
The third set of the night proved to be the only one of the festival that completely failed to gel. The looping, deconstructed trance-pulses and samples of I-Sound simply jarred against Tim Barnes's percussion and their improvisation wandered to an awkward ending.
The first evening ended with a duet between Rowe and Toshimaru Nakamura; one of the highlights of the festival. Their CD Weather Sky on Erstwhile is one of the defining documents of improvised music and so their duet was highly anticipated. As Rowe's billows of hums and harmonic shadows mixed with Nakamura's whiteout waves of hiss and crackles, the two melded completely for an enthralling collaboration. Nakamura uses no-input mixing board and delay pedals to shape and refract feedback and static into a minutely striated palette. Often flickering at the edges of perception, his soundscape hovered with low rumbles, clicks, and shaded high-frequency whines. Rowe coaxed out strata of hanging overtones, faint warm buzzes, and transitory vibrations from his guitar strings. Erasing gesture and propulsive momentum, their set moved outside of time as they floated subtly modulating whorls guided with poised deliberation.
Friday, 2/7:
The second night at Tonic kicked off with a first-time meeting with Rowe and Ninh. Ninh's virtuosic technique and more gestural approach to improvisation pushed the set in intriguing directions. The two prodded and pushed from a variety of angles as Rowe laid jagged textures around Ninh's more linear choreography. Momentum built to a hyper-kinetic volatility, launching Rowe into fiery forays as he let loose with blocks of slashed strings and ragged sheets of electronics and sampled radio snippets. The two gradually wound down, letting the bristling activity decay into silence. Though lacking the form and focus of Rowe's duets with Müller and Nakamura, the performance was imbued with a charged sense of earnest exploration.
The trio of Kelley, Rainey, and Müller reprised a previous meeting and provided a quieting resolve to the opening set. The slowly coalescing details of this trio stood in contrast to the dramatic arc of their meeting with Ninh and Yukiko. Quiet skipping pops from Müller fused with Rainey's choked reed overtones and breathy fillips and Kelley's muted half-stops and grated scumbles. The three eased into an improvisation that started with slowed duration and hushed dynamics. They shaped it with an unhurried, elastic arrangement of sound in space and the results were electrifying.
The third set brought together a trio of guitarist Tetuzi Akiyama, Toshimaru Nakamura, and Tim Barnes for an unsettling improvisation. Nakamura's needle-sharp feedback and glitched static had more of an aggressive edge and often steered the improvisation, invoking stretched loops and hinted pulse. Akiyama broke off dry, brittle, steel string guitar shards, leaving pregnant spaces throughout while Barnes nudged and poked with spare rubbed drum heads and scratched textures. Though their set had sections that crystallized, the process had only conditional results.
The final performance of the night brought Müller and Ninh together for the first time since they recorded their Erstwhile release La Voyelle Liquide. The two were joined by Yukiko Nakamura for a set of visceral dynamism. They began with Ninh's bowed gong and Müller's tiny sonic scribbles gaining resonance while Yukiko stood frozen between them; her gaunt naked body a stark, haunting presence. Ninh seemed in constant motion as he used spinning cymbals, bowed metal bowls, and his battery of accouterments to build surges of reverberating timbres. Müller responded with rumbling pulses and looping patterns that gathered in swirling, complex fields. As their improvisation built force, Yukiko's glacial movement provided a polarizing force. Things built to a crest, and then slowly ebbed as Ninh de-tuned his drum, rubbing the head to create ghostly throbbing vibrations against Müller's wafting shadows.
Saturday, 2/8:
While not formally part of the festival, the weekend came to a spectacular close Saturday night with a performance at Engine 27, a converted firehouse in Tribeca. The space has been developed as a venue for sound/music installations and performances with a state-of-the-art 16-speaker/48 channel sound system. The performers were placed in various parts of the long room with the audience snaked through the center. First up were Akiyama and Müller, who highlighted the potential of the space, as well as some of the inherent challenges. With a live sound mix by Michael Schumacher, Müller's pulsing layers and Akiyama's shredded splinters were panned around the room creating an engulfing experience. The sound had crystal clarity and precision, revealing every nuance. But the music seemed disembodied and the two musicians seemed a bit thrown off, working to react to the live mix as their sounds were fragmented by the volatile mix.
Kelley, Rainey, Jason Lescalleet took a different tack with the room. Microphones were set up in front of Kelley and Rainey, projecting the different spectrums of their instruments to different speakers. The low, gritty, rumbles of Lescalleet's tape loops and low-tech electronics provided a palpable cushion. Starting from a velvety silence, they thoughtfully carved through the space, gradually building to a visceral roar, which broke into a protracted silence as the audience sat, breathless. They used this to launch off again, building a crescendo as Lescalleet wove a looping pulse shot thro ugh with Kelley's rasping trumpet and Rainey's semaphored overtones. Their improvisation built and finally resolved into harmonized drones which slowly faded to silence.
After Rowe and Nakamura's resplendent set from the first night of the festival, it was hard to imagine how this performance could measure up. The two utilized more sagacious panning than Akiyama and Müller and their improvisation unfolded with a depth of detail that slowly shifted around the room. The layers emerged like the gradual rolling of a summer thunderstorm heard in the distance. The pristine sound system and hyper-attentive silence of the audience revealed the subtlest of shadings. The two painted the sound-space with static, overtones, stabs of hushed whines, and crisp crackles, which hung in the room and then slowly decayed into exhilarating extended silence.
With this third edition, Jon Abbey has cemented his AMPLIFY festival as one of the most significant meeting grounds for advanced improvisation. Abbey continues to show a remarkable ability to nurture the cross-fertilization of musicians from around the globe. The "elemental" theme for the three days was particularly provocative. With nary a laptop in sight, the ten participants explored the very elements of the collaborative construction of sound and silence. Having the opportunity to hear each the musicians in a variety of settings was revelatory. Not all the results were unqualified successes, but the cumulative effect was one of the most memorable festivals in recent memory.
Michael Rosenstein, Signal To Noise
Some of the most important music of the moment is being created by like-minded musicians from Japan, Europe, and a handful of U.S. outposts. They are forging strategies for improvisation at the transitory intersection of sound and silence; utilizing a sound palette drawn from electronics and reinvented techniques while operating in a dynamic range diving from the quietest flutter to palpable, bone-rattling rumbles. Jon Abbey, founder of Erstwhile Records, has been bringing together many of the top practitioners for recording projects which he described to The Wire as "seek[ing] the middle ground between improvisation and composition, acoustic and electronic, organization and abstraction." For the last few years, Abbey's AMPLIFY festival has proved to be a vital meeting ground for collaboration and exploration. The festival returned to NYC this last February for its third edition, which Abbey subtitled "elemental," providing a prescient thematic umbrella.
Thursday, 2/6:
The first night at Tonic began with a collaboration between nmperign (Greg Kelley and Bhob Rainey), Lê Quan Ninh and dancer Yukiko Nakamura. The four embodied the idea of elemental music, as their gestural abstractions gathered into hyperaware collective sound paintings. Ninh used a bass drum mounted sideways on a metal frame, rubbing and scraping brushes, sticks, pinecones, stones, cymbals and metal bowls across the head. Kelley added buzzing striations of squeezed microtones, grumbled smears, and jolting shreds of a metal plate scoured along the bell of his trumpet. Rainey's breathy shimmers, pops, and oscillating vibrato notes unfurled from his soprano sax, placing tracers ranging from microscopic vibration to searing overtones. Yukiko began curled on the floor in a fetal position, her lithe muscular body draped in a scarlet kimono. As the improvisation gathered density, she slowly dragged her body into the audience, physically channeling the dynamic energy of the music. The four traversed a fluid arc, ending with diminutive inflections ruffling the ambience of the room.
The potent arc of the opening set was picked up by the premiere of a duet by Keith Rowe and Günter Müller. These two have played such a formative role in pulling this scene together that it was hard to believe that they had never performed in a duet setting before. From the first moments, they engaged in an improvisation that pushed beyond process and technique into probing discovery. Rowe, with his battery of electronics, radios, wires, clips, hand-held fans, and tabletop guitar, he has spent the last three decades creating a new vocabulary for spontaneous collective invention. Müller has done the much the same since the early '80s, starting with a tom tom and cymbal and adding mini-disc players, contact mikes, and electronics to weave rich skeins. Their set began with quiet buzzes, clicks, and hissing static. Eschewing a sense of linear development, they shaped multihued timbres and densities with a constantly shifting sense of momentum resolving into slowly unwinding loops that dissolved into silence.
The third set of the night proved to be the only one of the festival that completely failed to gel. The looping, deconstructed trance-pulses and samples of I-Sound simply jarred against Tim Barnes's percussion and their improvisation wandered to an awkward ending.
The first evening ended with a duet between Rowe and Toshimaru Nakamura; one of the highlights of the festival. Their CD Weather Sky on Erstwhile is one of the defining documents of improvised music and so their duet was highly anticipated. As Rowe's billows of hums and harmonic shadows mixed with Nakamura's whiteout waves of hiss and crackles, the two melded completely for an enthralling collaboration. Nakamura uses no-input mixing board and delay pedals to shape and refract feedback and static into a minutely striated palette. Often flickering at the edges of perception, his soundscape hovered with low rumbles, clicks, and shaded high-frequency whines. Rowe coaxed out strata of hanging overtones, faint warm buzzes, and transitory vibrations from his guitar strings. Erasing gesture and propulsive momentum, their set moved outside of time as they floated subtly modulating whorls guided with poised deliberation.
Friday, 2/7:
The second night at Tonic kicked off with a first-time meeting with Rowe and Ninh. Ninh's virtuosic technique and more gestural approach to improvisation pushed the set in intriguing directions. The two prodded and pushed from a variety of angles as Rowe laid jagged textures around Ninh's more linear choreography. Momentum built to a hyper-kinetic volatility, launching Rowe into fiery forays as he let loose with blocks of slashed strings and ragged sheets of electronics and sampled radio snippets. The two gradually wound down, letting the bristling activity decay into silence. Though lacking the form and focus of Rowe's duets with Müller and Nakamura, the performance was imbued with a charged sense of earnest exploration.
The trio of Kelley, Rainey, and Müller reprised a previous meeting and provided a quieting resolve to the opening set. The slowly coalescing details of this trio stood in contrast to the dramatic arc of their meeting with Ninh and Yukiko. Quiet skipping pops from Müller fused with Rainey's choked reed overtones and breathy fillips and Kelley's muted half-stops and grated scumbles. The three eased into an improvisation that started with slowed duration and hushed dynamics. They shaped it with an unhurried, elastic arrangement of sound in space and the results were electrifying.
The third set brought together a trio of guitarist Tetuzi Akiyama, Toshimaru Nakamura, and Tim Barnes for an unsettling improvisation. Nakamura's needle-sharp feedback and glitched static had more of an aggressive edge and often steered the improvisation, invoking stretched loops and hinted pulse. Akiyama broke off dry, brittle, steel string guitar shards, leaving pregnant spaces throughout while Barnes nudged and poked with spare rubbed drum heads and scratched textures. Though their set had sections that crystallized, the process had only conditional results.
The final performance of the night brought Müller and Ninh together for the first time since they recorded their Erstwhile release La Voyelle Liquide. The two were joined by Yukiko Nakamura for a set of visceral dynamism. They began with Ninh's bowed gong and Müller's tiny sonic scribbles gaining resonance while Yukiko stood frozen between them; her gaunt naked body a stark, haunting presence. Ninh seemed in constant motion as he used spinning cymbals, bowed metal bowls, and his battery of accouterments to build surges of reverberating timbres. Müller responded with rumbling pulses and looping patterns that gathered in swirling, complex fields. As their improvisation built force, Yukiko's glacial movement provided a polarizing force. Things built to a crest, and then slowly ebbed as Ninh de-tuned his drum, rubbing the head to create ghostly throbbing vibrations against Müller's wafting shadows.
Saturday, 2/8:
While not formally part of the festival, the weekend came to a spectacular close Saturday night with a performance at Engine 27, a converted firehouse in Tribeca. The space has been developed as a venue for sound/music installations and performances with a state-of-the-art 16-speaker/48 channel sound system. The performers were placed in various parts of the long room with the audience snaked through the center. First up were Akiyama and Müller, who highlighted the potential of the space, as well as some of the inherent challenges. With a live sound mix by Michael Schumacher, Müller's pulsing layers and Akiyama's shredded splinters were panned around the room creating an engulfing experience. The sound had crystal clarity and precision, revealing every nuance. But the music seemed disembodied and the two musicians seemed a bit thrown off, working to react to the live mix as their sounds were fragmented by the volatile mix.
Kelley, Rainey, Jason Lescalleet took a different tack with the room. Microphones were set up in front of Kelley and Rainey, projecting the different spectrums of their instruments to different speakers. The low, gritty, rumbles of Lescalleet's tape loops and low-tech electronics provided a palpable cushion. Starting from a velvety silence, they thoughtfully carved through the space, gradually building to a visceral roar, which broke into a protracted silence as the audience sat, breathless. They used this to launch off again, building a crescendo as Lescalleet wove a looping pulse shot thro ugh with Kelley's rasping trumpet and Rainey's semaphored overtones. Their improvisation built and finally resolved into harmonized drones which slowly faded to silence.
After Rowe and Nakamura's resplendent set from the first night of the festival, it was hard to imagine how this performance could measure up. The two utilized more sagacious panning than Akiyama and Müller and their improvisation unfolded with a depth of detail that slowly shifted around the room. The layers emerged like the gradual rolling of a summer thunderstorm heard in the distance. The pristine sound system and hyper-attentive silence of the audience revealed the subtlest of shadings. The two painted the sound-space with static, overtones, stabs of hushed whines, and crisp crackles, which hung in the room and then slowly decayed into exhilarating extended silence.
With this third edition, Jon Abbey has cemented his AMPLIFY festival as one of the most significant meeting grounds for advanced improvisation. Abbey continues to show a remarkable ability to nurture the cross-fertilization of musicians from around the globe. The "elemental" theme for the three days was particularly provocative. With nary a laptop in sight, the ten participants explored the very elements of the collaborative construction of sound and silence. Having the opportunity to hear each the musicians in a variety of settings was revelatory. Not all the results were unqualified successes, but the cumulative effect was one of the most memorable festivals in recent memory.
AMPLIFY 2003: elemental
Nirav Soni, Squid's Ear
Why it has taken so long for me to write this review:
1. Naming:
The very first problem for the sort of music that was played at the AMPLIFY festival, is what to call it. Many have proposed names to encompass the range of approaches that musicians as diverse as Toshimaru Nakamura, Jason Lescalleet and Tim Barnes take to their instruments, but as of now, none really satisfy me. The one that I hear most often is "Electro-Acoustic Improv"; it is likely the most commonly used because of the discussion list http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Electroacoustic/ of the same name. Jon Abbey, founder of Erstwhile Records at one time called what he releases "dangerous improv." He now prefers to use "balanced improv" to describe his curatorial decisions. Electroacoustic-improv doesn't apply to everything that it covers; during this festival the first set was entirely acoustic, with the musicians forgoing all electronics, even amplification. The acronym "EAI" also refers to the organization Electronic Arts Intermix, who are a group of people devoted to preserving the legacy of video and multimedia art. I'm tired of confusing the two. "Balanced improv" makes a little more sense to me about the means of producing of this music, and more about what happens to the space.
Maybe one could call this "room improv." In his essay, "Towards an Ethic of Improvisation" (found in Treatise Handbook, London: Edition Peters, 1971) Cornelius Cardew says, "it is impossible to record with any fidelity a kind of music that is actually derived in some sense from the room in which it is taking place- it's shape, acoustical properties, even the view from the windows... The natural context provides a score which the players are unconsciously interpreting in their playing."
When I read this quote, I understood why it seemed to me like the set that Greg Kelley and Bhob Rainey (collectively comprising the band nmperign) played with Lê Quan Ninh sounded like it could have been composed. The form that I heard was not that of individuals performing a pre-determined score, but a conforming, an adaptation of personal style to circumstance, in this case the venue Tonic, on a frosty winter evening, with a very respectful audience. That one could detect this form within the music speaks volumes about the maturity of the players, and their immense discipline, focus and concentration.
2. Profundity:
On the Tuesday before the festival, Keith Rowe gave a talk/held a discussion at the Computer Music Center of Columbia University. Rowe introduced the talk with an excerpt from a work by Jean Cassanea de Mondonville, a French composer from the baroque period. After playing the cd on a small stereo that betrayed the size of the music, he asked the question of whether or not electronic music can approach the level of profundity that the piece by Mondonville did. During the discussion, I was the only person that mentioned religion (I, being non-musician, have a tendency to talk about other things in the way of my talking about music). It seemed to me that profundity is not a quality that music (or for that matter, anything, really) can possess, one instead has a relationship that is profound, with a piece of music, a painting, a cat, or a dish that only mom cooks just so.
Rowe mentioned Mark Rothko during the discussion, which got me to thinking about the relationship of the abstract and the profound. What strikes me upon reflection on all of the artwork I've come across by Rowe, is how so little of it is entirely abstract. His paintings certainly aren't, and one can easily look at his use of the radio as a way of distancing the listener from the sensual surface of the music. Rowe's radio always serves to bring the music towards the exterior, towards the social, but always in a tangential, distant, often fleeting way. He always seems to be, both in his words, and in his music to be alluding to the ethical, to the engaged.
3. Performance:
The Keith Rowe/Lê Quan Ninh performance on the 8th was one that I was eagerly awaiting after seeing such intense performances by both of them the night before. Upon reflection, it makes sense that the collaboration was less than harmonious. Where Rowe's sound-image recalls for me the moral and the conscientious, Ninh's style is very different. His performances were more about the erotics of the "surrounded bass drum". His playing is supremely graceful, precise, delicate, and most of all extraordinarily sensual. One cannot help but to reference the libidinal when you watch him rubbing his thumb across the skin of the drum.
It is entirely appropriate that it was Ninh who was touring with butoh dancer Yukiko Nakamura. Nakamura performed onstage during the first and last sets of the Tonic nights. I would comment about her role during the first show, Ninh/Kelley/Rainey, but she spent the vast majority very low to the stage, and thus obscured to me by a friend's head. I do recall that somewhere around a third of the way into the set, she dramatically rolled onto the floor, whereupon I completely lost sight of her. During the Müller/Ninh performance, she was completely visible. She went through a series of very, very slow movements, which made it seem like she was crumpling to the ground in slow motion. It was, however, bristling with tension and intensity, entirely in key with the tenor of the music.
I am generally very critical of visual accompaniments to music, and, possibly because of that, my favorite person to watch play during the festival was Tim Barnes. Barnes is the perfect foil to Ninh. Where the latter is classical grace and fluidity, eminently measured and controlled, the former's gestures are more intently muscular, more about the grain of the kit; coarseness. Watching him slowly scrape the cymbals across his kit was pure pleasure, it had the same visual rhythm as a turnstile.
Günter Müller:
I do not understand how this man is completely capable of making almost every situation I've heard him play in work. I've been worrying about how to write about what he does for weeks, and I give up now.
Instead of attempting to describe the music played, I ask you to accept this list of adjectives that I will append to the bottom of this review, in correspondence with the performance they apply to.
I spent a little while compiling these adjectives after the concerts, but no matter what I tried, they wouldn't find their way into the review. It's one of the great difficulties with this sort of thing, mostly because I can't remember any melodies, motifs, or themes that ran throughout the concerts. Some gestures have stuck with me, but only visually, divorced from their context within the improvisatory flow. I recall associating the bow in Ninh's hand with a shot of Michel passing a stolen wallet in Robert Bresson's film "Pickpocket." But, those hardly matter. One of the best after-effects of having so much music become such a part of your life for a short period of time is how it will creep into your day to day living; sometimes, when I hear the 6 train pulling into Union Square, I'll think of Greg Kelley scraping sheet metal across this trumpet at Engine 27, or when my roommate turns on the TV when I'm listening to music, I'll think of Keith Rowe.
Lê Quan Ninh/Greg Kelley/Bhob Rainey - open
Günter Müller/Keith Rowe - earthy
Tim Barnes/I-Sound - split
Keith Rowe/Toshimaru Nakamura - still
Keith Rowe/ Lê Quan Ninh - discordant
Günter Müller/Greg Kelley/Bhob Rainey - near
Toshimaru Nakamura/Tim Barnes/Tetuzi Akiyama - spare
Günter Müller/Lê Quan Ninh - thick
Günter Müller /Tetuzi Akiyama- long
Greg Kelley/Bhob Rainey/Jason Lescalleet- wide
Keith Rowe/Toshimaru Nakamura- deep
Relevant links:
http://www.l-m-c.org.uk/texts/rowe.html
http://eir.library.utoronto.ca/rpo/display/poem1751.html
Nirav Soni, Squid's Ear
Why it has taken so long for me to write this review:
1. Naming:
The very first problem for the sort of music that was played at the AMPLIFY festival, is what to call it. Many have proposed names to encompass the range of approaches that musicians as diverse as Toshimaru Nakamura, Jason Lescalleet and Tim Barnes take to their instruments, but as of now, none really satisfy me. The one that I hear most often is "Electro-Acoustic Improv"; it is likely the most commonly used because of the discussion list http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Electroacoustic/ of the same name. Jon Abbey, founder of Erstwhile Records at one time called what he releases "dangerous improv." He now prefers to use "balanced improv" to describe his curatorial decisions. Electroacoustic-improv doesn't apply to everything that it covers; during this festival the first set was entirely acoustic, with the musicians forgoing all electronics, even amplification. The acronym "EAI" also refers to the organization Electronic Arts Intermix, who are a group of people devoted to preserving the legacy of video and multimedia art. I'm tired of confusing the two. "Balanced improv" makes a little more sense to me about the means of producing of this music, and more about what happens to the space.
Maybe one could call this "room improv." In his essay, "Towards an Ethic of Improvisation" (found in Treatise Handbook, London: Edition Peters, 1971) Cornelius Cardew says, "it is impossible to record with any fidelity a kind of music that is actually derived in some sense from the room in which it is taking place- it's shape, acoustical properties, even the view from the windows... The natural context provides a score which the players are unconsciously interpreting in their playing."
When I read this quote, I understood why it seemed to me like the set that Greg Kelley and Bhob Rainey (collectively comprising the band nmperign) played with Lê Quan Ninh sounded like it could have been composed. The form that I heard was not that of individuals performing a pre-determined score, but a conforming, an adaptation of personal style to circumstance, in this case the venue Tonic, on a frosty winter evening, with a very respectful audience. That one could detect this form within the music speaks volumes about the maturity of the players, and their immense discipline, focus and concentration.
2. Profundity:
On the Tuesday before the festival, Keith Rowe gave a talk/held a discussion at the Computer Music Center of Columbia University. Rowe introduced the talk with an excerpt from a work by Jean Cassanea de Mondonville, a French composer from the baroque period. After playing the cd on a small stereo that betrayed the size of the music, he asked the question of whether or not electronic music can approach the level of profundity that the piece by Mondonville did. During the discussion, I was the only person that mentioned religion (I, being non-musician, have a tendency to talk about other things in the way of my talking about music). It seemed to me that profundity is not a quality that music (or for that matter, anything, really) can possess, one instead has a relationship that is profound, with a piece of music, a painting, a cat, or a dish that only mom cooks just so.
Rowe mentioned Mark Rothko during the discussion, which got me to thinking about the relationship of the abstract and the profound. What strikes me upon reflection on all of the artwork I've come across by Rowe, is how so little of it is entirely abstract. His paintings certainly aren't, and one can easily look at his use of the radio as a way of distancing the listener from the sensual surface of the music. Rowe's radio always serves to bring the music towards the exterior, towards the social, but always in a tangential, distant, often fleeting way. He always seems to be, both in his words, and in his music to be alluding to the ethical, to the engaged.
3. Performance:
The Keith Rowe/Lê Quan Ninh performance on the 8th was one that I was eagerly awaiting after seeing such intense performances by both of them the night before. Upon reflection, it makes sense that the collaboration was less than harmonious. Where Rowe's sound-image recalls for me the moral and the conscientious, Ninh's style is very different. His performances were more about the erotics of the "surrounded bass drum". His playing is supremely graceful, precise, delicate, and most of all extraordinarily sensual. One cannot help but to reference the libidinal when you watch him rubbing his thumb across the skin of the drum.
It is entirely appropriate that it was Ninh who was touring with butoh dancer Yukiko Nakamura. Nakamura performed onstage during the first and last sets of the Tonic nights. I would comment about her role during the first show, Ninh/Kelley/Rainey, but she spent the vast majority very low to the stage, and thus obscured to me by a friend's head. I do recall that somewhere around a third of the way into the set, she dramatically rolled onto the floor, whereupon I completely lost sight of her. During the Müller/Ninh performance, she was completely visible. She went through a series of very, very slow movements, which made it seem like she was crumpling to the ground in slow motion. It was, however, bristling with tension and intensity, entirely in key with the tenor of the music.
I am generally very critical of visual accompaniments to music, and, possibly because of that, my favorite person to watch play during the festival was Tim Barnes. Barnes is the perfect foil to Ninh. Where the latter is classical grace and fluidity, eminently measured and controlled, the former's gestures are more intently muscular, more about the grain of the kit; coarseness. Watching him slowly scrape the cymbals across his kit was pure pleasure, it had the same visual rhythm as a turnstile.
Günter Müller:
I do not understand how this man is completely capable of making almost every situation I've heard him play in work. I've been worrying about how to write about what he does for weeks, and I give up now.
Instead of attempting to describe the music played, I ask you to accept this list of adjectives that I will append to the bottom of this review, in correspondence with the performance they apply to.
I spent a little while compiling these adjectives after the concerts, but no matter what I tried, they wouldn't find their way into the review. It's one of the great difficulties with this sort of thing, mostly because I can't remember any melodies, motifs, or themes that ran throughout the concerts. Some gestures have stuck with me, but only visually, divorced from their context within the improvisatory flow. I recall associating the bow in Ninh's hand with a shot of Michel passing a stolen wallet in Robert Bresson's film "Pickpocket." But, those hardly matter. One of the best after-effects of having so much music become such a part of your life for a short period of time is how it will creep into your day to day living; sometimes, when I hear the 6 train pulling into Union Square, I'll think of Greg Kelley scraping sheet metal across this trumpet at Engine 27, or when my roommate turns on the TV when I'm listening to music, I'll think of Keith Rowe.
Lê Quan Ninh/Greg Kelley/Bhob Rainey - open
Günter Müller/Keith Rowe - earthy
Tim Barnes/I-Sound - split
Keith Rowe/Toshimaru Nakamura - still
Keith Rowe/ Lê Quan Ninh - discordant
Günter Müller/Greg Kelley/Bhob Rainey - near
Toshimaru Nakamura/Tim Barnes/Tetuzi Akiyama - spare
Günter Müller/Lê Quan Ninh - thick
Günter Müller /Tetuzi Akiyama- long
Greg Kelley/Bhob Rainey/Jason Lescalleet- wide
Keith Rowe/Toshimaru Nakamura- deep
Relevant links:
http://www.l-m-c.org.uk/texts/rowe.html
http://eir.library.utoronto.ca/rpo/display/poem1751.html
