Keith Rowe - The Room Extended (lossless)

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Lossless AIFF (16bit/44.1kHz) 

ErstSolo 004-4

A massive and rewarding work of organized sound extending EA-improviser, AMM guitarist Keith Rowe's work "The Room" into a massive 4 CD set of compositions, layering work familiar from his recent improvisations with classical compositions, field recordings. 

For 4CD format, go to this page.
TRACK LIST

DISC 1
1.   01:00:01

DISC 2
1.   01:00:01

DISC 3
1.   56:29

DISC 4
1.   01:09:34

(released December 7, 2016)
CREDITS

Keith Rowe: guitar, electronics

recorded at home from mid-2013 to mid-2016

mastered by Taku Unami
design by Keith Rowe and Yuko Zama
produced by Jon Abbey
REVIEWS

Michele Palozzo, esoteros
Live and invent. I have tried. I must have tried. Invent. It is not the word. Neither is to live. No matter. I have tried. […] I say living without knowing what it is. I tried to live without knowing what I was trying. Perhaps I have lived afterall, without knowing. 
(Samuel Beckett, “Malone Dies”)

“Invention” usually indicates something finished, different from and potentially better than its predecessors. History, arts – and music even less – aren’t keen to reward those who proceed by trial and error, unless they reach a concrete and tangible result.
About ten years ago Keith Rowe was the author of the first solo work in Erstwhile‘s catalog: The Room is the perfect metaphor for a sedentary research, admitting spatial boundaries and demolishing  the expressive ones; a motionless space-time on which you can leave only subtle and impermanent signs, or intercept what comes out of it regardless of one’s actions.

Fifty years after the pioneering AMM experience, today his acolytes appear more than ever as sovereigns of a no man’s land, strenuously engaged in increasingly stark and uncompromising artistic gestures. Specifically, rather than in the distant antecedent, The Room Extended tacitly echoes the monolithic non-musical object enough still not to know (2015, Sofa), Rowe’s third radical studio session with pianist John Tilbury. Four CDs for as many hours next to inaction, or rather where the human presence is almost completely obscured.

The original “room” was an isolated area of disquiet electroacoustic meditation, in its own way an ideal showcase for the British experimenter’s prepared guitar. The present ‘extension’ refers to duration alone, given an even more hermetic, claustrophobic setting, like a cramped stage without lights nor actors.
The same walls, it seems, exude reminiscences and interrupted telegrams from a remote elsewhere: a Romitelli-esque “Dead City Radio” that on several occasions, in the middle of long electro-acoustic interference, transmits excerpts from classical works in lo-fi (arias, symphonies, oratorios); above all Wagner’s prelude to Tristan und Isolde, the putative requiem for the Romantic era, from this perspective an almost ancestral reference to an expressive code lost in time.

It really isn’t possible not to feel the threat of an imminent and sudden end, precisely because of the presence of unusual melodic fragments matched to the anti-language of a guitar lying horizontally, Rowe’s decades-long ruse to force himself to “forget” the musical grammar and work on the surface, following slight and instinctive gestures, in direct contact with the pure and pulsating analog sound (David Toop suggested a direct link with Jackson Pollock’s action painting, almost coeval). Reconfirming this, is the absolute contrast of the funereal artwork, nothing but an X-ray of Rowe’s brain, some time before he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. In the last minutes, a cold continuous tone seems to presage a flat encephalogram, stirred only by a creaking of string that sounds like a pliable goodbye, surrounded by the shadows of other musics somberly departing.

Recorded over the course of three years, from mid-2013 to mid-2016, The Room Extended is a diary of aleatory percepts merged into an all-encompassing vision at the extreme boundary between memory and forgetting, between music and its unknowable contrary, the persistent utopia of a definitive silence that (luckily?) always fails to occur. According to diametrically opposite criteria to those of the late 19th century, one could boldly name it the Gesamtkunstwerk of contemporary improvisation.

“I have spoken softly, gone my ways softly, all my days, as behoves one who has nothing to say, nowhere to go, and so nothing to gain by being seen or heard.”


Brian Olewnick, Just Outside
I first noticed the tremor in Keith's right hand on a visit to his home in Vallet in the summer of 2014. Presumably it had existed for some time although while I was in Paris (from February 2013) we saw Keith several times a year and I hadn't picked up anything before. When I returned to Vallet in November for two concerts in honor of Christian Wolff's 80th birthday, Wolff at one point asked him directly about the shaking and Keith replied that they were having examinations but it might well be Parkinson's which, in fact, it turned out to be. The Room Extended was begun in 2013 and completed in 2016. Death had always been on his mind, often talked about very matter-of-factly, but, as clearly indicated by the cover image of his brain (a pre-Parkinson's diagnosis scan for a possible tumor), one assumes a permeation of this concern over most of the course of the construction of the present work.

As in 2007's The Room (ErstSolo 001), this was put together at home, composed if you will, though the multitude of components themselves are largely improvised. One of the first things that hits you is the immense depth of much of the work; there always seems to be at least four or five layers of sound occurring, enough that on each subsequent listen (I've been through its four-plus hours five times so far), you pick up not only sounds you've not heard/noticed before but, more rewardingly, new relationships between them, both simultaneous ones and ones spanning the course of the piece. For a while, Rowe has been interested in revisiting sound areas he's investigated over the years, seeing if there might be aspects he'd previously missed or investigating new ways of deploying them and at several moments here, listeners familiar with his history may well recognize some signature sounds. There are plenty of new, even startling ones as well, such as the artificial sounding bird call that's looped for an almost unconscionable length at one point. More tellingly, the habit he first (as far as I know) used in his solo performance in Tokyo in 2008, that of the intentional inclusion of extracts from Western classical music, is a thread that winds through the entirety of The Room Extended. In at least one sense, it's simply an honest evocation of his room, the main room of his home in Vallet, in which any visitor will hear over his stereo, not the latest release from the contemporary improvising world, but rather Wagner, Haydn, Brahms, Purcell, Mondonville and others. This is, in a circumscribed sense, his room. So certain themes that have preoccupied him in recent years--Wagner's 'Tristan und Isolde' or the death scene from Purcell's 'Dido and Aeneas', for instance--make their presence known quite strongly. It's an odd mix, I think, for those of us who know his work, on his own, with AMM or in collaboration with countless others. There's a difference between a random radio grab and an explicit implanting of material, one that I've struggled with but am coming around to. For Rowe, in addition to simply having a great appreciation for their beauty and probity, it's an overt acknowledgement of the tradition from which he arises.

Of course, Rowe's notion of The Room encompasses much more than the Western classical tradition and here one gradually encounters more from the East, including what seems to be Indian and Egyptian musics via the radio (the latter sounding like Mohamed Abdel Wahab, though that's a guess). But more than id'ing this or that source, the power in The Room Extended derives from the way these and the far more prevalent electronic and guitar sounds (there are surprisingly many very recognizable instances of the latter) are filtered, layered and paced over its 246 minutes, the fact that, to these ears, intense interest is consistently maintained. Apart from The Room, Rowe's historic involvement with anything remotely compositional has been very limited, essentially confined to graphic scores (Cardew, Wolff, Brown, his own work like 'Pollock'), so you wonder how things might have evolved differently had he been working more often in this milieu, where things are carefully considered over a long period of time. Once when we visited, he played us a portion of music that he was considering using for The Room Extended, a thick sandwich of string sections from six or seven sources, layered atop one another. Sounded amazing and I think you hear a snatch of it (or something like it) at a couple of points, including toward the end of the present work. But more, the overall feeling I get from the piece is one man, sitting at his work space in his small loft in the converted cellier in Vallet, letting all the sounds, remembered and ongoing, filter in, mixing with his knowledge of what's occurring in the world (one is tempted to read an uncritical demographic observation in the increasing presence of Islamic music as the piece develops) and, always, with the acknowledgement of the certainty of death. His upcoming recording with Michael Pisaro deals with the Venerable Bede's analogy of life: a sparrow flying into a mead hall where a raucous feast is taking place and quickly flying out a window on the opposite side. Here, amidst a whirlpool of sound, from radios, news commentaries, orchestras, guitars and electronics, at the very last, an alarmed voice speaking in Spanish is abruptly cut off. Then nothing.