keith rowe celebration festival, km28, berlin, april 27–29, 2023

first night
it begins with something of a letdown: keith rowe apologizes that, contrary to the advertisement, he will not join any of the sets. the fixed rate of his parkinson’s tremor would make his contributions sound uninteresting, and he does not want to force us into the role of voyeurs, comparable to an involuntary audience to a victorian anatomical theater. i quickly repress my disappointment and merely wonder to what extent the spirit of the man will define a festival in his celebration, if the stage is dominated by berlin schools of electro-acoustic musicians whom i expect to favor a quite different approach?

to make up for things, the first set has lots of keiths … four, to be exact. kaffe matthews offers a live remix of the four cds of rowe’s release “the room extended” all at once. the first impression is of a busyness that just feels wrong, conflicting events projecting from different corners, noises running into each other, jump-cuts across the listening field. the many layers dissolve the room, the merging timelines and conflicting gestures destroy any sense of narrative. once i abandon my attempt to closely follow the plot, i fare better. it becomes striking how musical a voice emerges from the scrapings, how personal this sound is. (though when afterward i try to ask keith what importance the actual sound of guitar and objects is to him, he flatly refuses the category with regard to his practice. no exploration of the acoustic properties of things, their employment follows a (mostly inner) score.) the longer the performance runs on after all questions have been answered, the more pleasurable listening becomes, a sonograph describing the artist rummaging around a chamber of sound devices in accumulating detail. then when i think i have grasped the essence, some musically unexpected events happen, intrusions of tones cushioned by a digital shimmer, passages thickening into proper noise territory, which seem distinctly out of character. i am sure this is where matthews adds her own personality. but no, she says it’s been a straight remix. apparently i don’t remember the record well enough. on purely musical terms this performance has worn rather thin in parts of its hour-long duration, but as food for reflection on the original material it’s been fascinating. things are off to a fitting start.

next is a duo between marta zapparoli, who has all manner of antennae set up, shaped like loops, grills, and dishes, with cables strung through the room and out the window, plus a huge array of radios to receive the signals and interfere with them, and andrea parkins, who has a laptop, some kind of controller for more gestural freedom in triggering patches, and an assortment of banknotes, belemnoids, foliage, melodica, and whatnot to make sounds with. zapparoli says beforehand that if reception is good this might become a very playful set. apparently reception isn’t good and instead she shapes static textures into layers which serve as a bed for parkins to go through an array of noises and musical snippets from the computer and engaging with her catalog of objects. though she covers a wide area of sounds, the performance is closely focused as they dig into their materials until suddenly for the first time the voice of a radio comes through loud and clear. since that’s the ending, i wonder if maybe reception has been sabotaged on conceptual purpose.

the third scene reveals lucio capece holding a bass clarinet, in front of him a line of pedals to control speakers and electronics, and sean meehan pondering two cowbells on a stool, one small, one for a medium-sized cow. they sit in silence, meehan swaying in tune with a dangling speaker. capece begins sounding an occasional low note, catching a drone via his freeze pedal, activating the little speakers that emit a granular, more detailed noise, all very sparse and tender (the rumbling of stomachs can be heard in the background) … then meehan gingerly gets up, cradling the smaller cowbell, silencing the clapper while moving carefully, so every muffled ring is like an accident. the bell indeed evokes cattle, cows stepping carefully not to wake their herd fellows, cows walking on eggshells, sometimes still longing to affirm their presence to quietly reassure the others. areas of the stage are amplified to the edge of feedback, so meehan has to shield the bell to prevent a screech as he moves about. there is a strong ritual aspect to the proceedings, in the calmness of occasional events, the gestures necessary to get a new tone from the bass clarinet to feed into the mildly churning electronics, the deliberateness with which meehan places the smaller bell back on the stool to take up the larger one, while the air audibly bristles with undirected electricity. after a brilliant twenty minutes or so the ritual comes to an accidental halt that for a moment offers closure and perfection … the musicians throw glances back and forth, alas there are so many moves prepared and not yet performed: the bells still have to be stroked against each other, paper fans have to be waved at the bass clarinet, more complex pedal action makes for a more complex sound field, so they continue, the ritual dissolved, more like an under-the-breath jam session throwing perfectly reticent moves around. not bad music by any means, still i prefer to pretend they stopped at the occasion.

second night

so here’s a reverse surprise: keith rowe does sit in with annette krebs, suggested, i think, by the fact she has prepared a piece including real-time speech manipulations, so she’ll be able to apply these to treat rowe’s vocal contribution. rowe takes a chair at the edge of her table, which carries an interesting construction with possibly bags and a dangling strip of sheet metal, and starts reading words of laozi wisdom that begin: he who knows does not speak, he who speaks does not know. which can fruitfully be applied to the zen-like minimal improviser, while offering a conundrum that demands a breakdown of any music or communication at all (outside of mindless chatter) … and be it because the words offer no escape or because of some technical malfunction, the set breaks down immediately and the participants have to start from scratch. the set develops into a strange beast that’s part half-hearted brainstorming session, a trial and error gear demo, an abbreviated audition of krebs’ excellent piece “konstruktion #4,” and an awkward between-the-ferns-style interview scene. it is all borderline cringey, but krebs is both milking the confusion and deflecting serious musical events or return questions with considerable charm. so i feel i have a choice when i ask myself: should i approach this with a theoretical toolbox and posit that this event is testing the limits of performance etc.? arguments for that are the clear power structure where rowe is held hostage as his answers are digitally rendered into a darth vader drone. it’s totally disrespectful, but it’s also really not meant that way … in the end, there just isn’t enough of a performance to hang any thinkpieces onto. something happened on a stage that didn’t manage to stop when it didn’t come into being. luckily, no one is bored during the making of this non-event. in fact it’s quite riveting and hey we’ve become voyeurs after all.

lidingö is the veteran pairing of andrea neumann on inside piano, which is the piano frame put on a table with some objects added and the whole thing miked up, and burkhard beins, who plays a percussion set dominated by a cymbal and what looks like a circus drum. i am sure beins is contractually obliged to start the set bowing a cymbal as a reference to eddie prévost’s playing in his and keith’s old band amm. it sounds very different, though, more overtly musical, ranging from a wide, breathy scratch to clearly differentiated thin tones, nothing like prévost’s (in some circles controversial) more blunt attack. (i always say prévost bows the cymbal like dylan plays harmonica, but that never works because people don’t have opinions on dylan’s harmonica playing anymore.) anyway, they expertly move to a noisy passage where neumann maltreats the springs and other stuff soldered to the frame and beins beats the circus drum until a cloud of pawnshop dust hangs over him. this develops into a good (old) improv session, where both listen to each other and in an attentive back-and-forth use their arsenals of sound-making objects to provoke piano strings or drumheads alike. unsuspecting, they move into a quiet passage and suddenly hit a lull, both listening to the reverberations for a moment too long until they realize there is no way out of declaring the ensuing silence as final.

the night’s third piece is a composition by cat lamb, titled “the additive arrow,” in a version for herself playing viola and lucy railton on cello. both instruments move slowly and deliberately, first upstroke then downstroke and on to another pitch, played starkly without a shadow of vibrato, following some strange tuning that sounds vaguely ancient and definitely microtonal. a piece both dry and moody, conceptually based in some pre-baroque tradition, harkening back to old systems to find new sounds. my ear, helplessly well-tempered thing that it is, cannot get accustomed to the micro pitches. the only consonance is when both musicians play a note in unison. despite the title there does not seem much addition, they cycle in variations that sometimes move to a slightly higher register, then back again. the lower the tones, the more satisfying the sound. i cannot crack the organization of notes any more than the pitch relations, sound and construction remain delightfully alien to the end. maybe if you’re into complex tunings then this sounds like a placid little mood piece or conversely just a bunch of acoustic equations?

third night
it begins with a solo set by jessie marino, who over a modest backdrop of sounds reads words by keith rowe, some musical commentary and some autobiography, dry descriptions of (post-)wartime squalor. or rather she performs them in a very enunciated, very american voice (maybe think laurie anderson as a point of reference, just more in-your-face), milking every actual or perceived punchline with utmost theatricality, even putting words through voice effects so it’s clear we have a punchline (keith rowe is a delightful comedian really! just hear what he said then). some john cale-like fiddle drone that interrupts the parts does not help things for me (except to strengthen the anderson reference) … but quickly i notice that something is wrong, i am not at all vibing with the room. like, i feel the room is into this. the room contains the man who wrote the texts, his biographer brian olewnick, who received and supplied the correspondence, two of the genre’s most eminent critics (there is some overlap of personnel here), a host of (potentially hostile) musician peers, and a few lay audience members like me, who are all delighted with what is going down. and some will declare this the strongest set of the complete festival. taste is supposed to be subjective but here i objectively get my ears handed to me on a platter. i see that as a rare opportunity. i will recalibrate and return with a much better grasp of the good and the bad.

the trio of quentin tolimieri on piano, ignaz schick on a close-miked empty turntable, and valerio tricoli on tape machines plays amm … not some particular piece but rather the texture of tilbury-era amm with a classical piano player flexing his exquisite touch against two more noisily-minded companions. at first it’s not a very close attempt: tolimieri starts with fast repeats on a single high note as a way of getting things going and keeping them together, establishing a safe ground where no accidents can happen. he spreads into chords and back again, always in the same insistent patterns, while the revox rumbles and the turntable grates, acts as a soundstage for all kinds of objects, and is being bowed. the piano sounds great and the noise from the two electronic musicians rings full and satisfying, but things are just a bit too comfy and direct for that amm feeling … then the music calms down into something more incidental, the piano finds impressionist notes to go with the slipstream of the more subdued and bristly electronics, and the trio indeed manage to hit the mood of some amm drift interludes with its continuous slippage.

the next pairing goes for a completely different mood, raw and unruly, with bryan eubanks on soprano sax, pedals, and electronics and axel dörner on a trumpet fit with a steampunk appendage that’s half slide refrigerator and half brass dials that conjure up their own sounds either proto-electronically or maybe unlocking crevices that scramble up the airstream in funny ways. their modus is strictly pointillist, short outbursts and frequent mood changes, and if by chance they hit on some interlocking motif, it is very briefly acknowledged immediately discarded before each blows their separate way again. the change of pace from the previous set is refreshing, and the range of sounds is wide, especially when eubanks adds some seldom heard elements to the context, such as cheap synthesis and sudden passages of rudimentary garbarek on full ecm reverb. the music doesn’t go anywhere specific, nor does it want to, but keeps it gnarly from start to a sudden finish that feels like something has been said.

to close things out, we hear the composition “midmeste” by judith hamann, who plays the cello while james rushford balances a portable organetto on his lap, fingering with his right hand and working the bellows with the left. like the previous night’s closer, but more immediately catching (if the tuning here is off, too, then in more subtle intonations), this feels like the reinvention of pre-baroque music with a set of apocryphal rules, countering the dangerous mix of old scales and deep drones with distinctly modernist strategies: a post-minimal lingering of notes, an appreciation of side noises, of bare textures without ornament (again without vibrato from the cello, though frankly i yearn for vibrato to go with the slight wobbling of the organ, but then my tastes are off, as established above) … it’s very beautiful, and one can even find a connection to keith rowe feeding recordings of old music into his improvisations, as templates that all musics have to measure themselves against …

… and fail more or less miserably. keith has some final words for us, admonishing us to go and continue his mission (which seems a bit much to ask but then i’m not a musician), while admitting that none present can hold a candle to, say, bach. as he outlines his own motivation to apply strategies from disciplines outside of sound, to move the music beyond the guitar, a difference in approaches becomes more clear: over the three days, most of the improvisers found the core to their practice exactly in their instruments, their self-built tools or objects of choice. yet the exact amount of keithness does not really matter. the love in the room is palpable and the inspiration offered by the celebrant’s constant questioning and playful conceptualizing easily crosses over musical approaches.

james rushford and joe talia, km28, berlin

the first set was announced as piano solo and then drum solo, so offered some potential for self-indulgence. rushford played from a single small sheet of music, which i didn't see, but probably it offered a choice of notes to be delivered in changing patterns, distributed over two layers: dryly minimalist, slightly nervous notes rubbing against each other, and beneath and between that deadish notes barely reaching the threshold of existence making for a brittle mood. this went nowhere, but then we liked nowhere, and as soon as we wondered what he might do with it since as a statement in itself it would have been slight, talia switched on a computer patch that seemed to focus on some of the same tone centers, atmospherically bridged things until he had slouched over to the drum set and begun some similar patterns, a bit more wavelike, mostly on cymbals that stood on stands or lay on snares, then slowly exploring more of the kit, the first hits of the bass drum or a tom feeling like awkward exploratory steps (or even practice room bungle) until the new element was integrated into the pulse and we approached full drum solo, but patiently, ending on a rather fast (possibly electronically enhanced) bass drum stutter. wrapped up like a perfect lp side, these two have vinyl in their blood. the second set was two computers and as hoped for dwelled in some of the same territory as the duo’s excellent manhunter lp (without that record's nods to queasy downer genres), ominous static vibes that sounded sourced from vintage synth emulations or field-recorded atmospheres, plus wafts of prerecorded music, muffled mutterings through some kind of lo-fi talk box, and drumpads sometimes verging on idm. more than on manhunter, the atmospheres appeared tuned and playable and the moods more unpredictable, some transitions organic, some forced, improvisatorily so, yet their sound always had the necessary weight and their demeanor was sufficiently stoic so we could trust the music to have made sense once the performance was finished. a gratifying evening.

list season 2022

so i’ve accidentally done a top ten again. though i’ve dropped out of the loop so thoroughly i don’t even know if the loop still exists? i’ve seen a lot of cooler-looking lists out there so i might still edit this for the sake of my self-cred. also this train is packed so i can’t think yet here are some notes:

john scofield: solo, ecm … hey i’m playing more guitar again, the electric is all pedaled and amped up beside my desk always. so sco, the greatest living jazz and all-time dad rock guitarist has to come along and show me what i’d be trying to do if i had any sort of chops (this is not the first time either). doing funny wobbly sounds for accompaniment and even misstomping the looper. this record sounds almost tentative at times ... sco’s never really much evolved his style, but these days he plays a bit rawer and he’s at peak inspiration again. thank you, sir.

aldous harding: warm chris, 4ad … three great records in a row makes for a pretty select circle of songwriters? you can say this one loses a bit of steam around the middle, or it ponders, because yay the funny voices are back again and for added perspective. the set is full of lyrical earworms. all i want is an office in the country.

vanessa rossetto: the actress, erstwhile … it’s called the actress, but it’s firmly author-driven music, where found sounds, staged sounds, and played sounds are composed rather than collaged together from a pre-existing life of their own. this sits eloquently between hörspiel und konkrete musik and if i were german radio i’d commission the hell out of her.

qasim naqvi, wadada leo smith, andrew cyrille: two centuries, red hook … smith and cyrille are going as strong as ever and have been involved in a lot of great music lately, naqvi is from dawn of midi and probably hasn’t recorded a single listenable note in his life but it doesn’t matter because he’s being masterfully engaged with, whether he does analog bubbles or ambient droney stuff, to the point where his contributions sound sharp and contemporary.

josephine foster: godmother, fire … this is by far my favorite record from her, i like the voice but the backing is usually non-descript. here the synths make all the difference. they are unabashed synths, really shameless presets used enthusiastically but still it’s all really tasteful and light and that contradiction gives her a new punch.

rirette, tanzprocesz … this shouldn’t work. it begins abstract and then moves into a kind of post-industrial doom folk with drone and booming floor toms that makes me afraid of somebody mentioning a band name as reference or possible ideological baggage... but as the very french female singer puts her voice thru a heavy tremolo it’s clear this strikes a specific balance. so these must be nice people, are they nice people? we quickly move through more shady genres, electronic film music, maybe asmr, then it’s over, a short poppy ep, perfect really.

arturas bumsteinas: so-called space, sloow tapes … more found sounds, this time clearly a collage dripping with history and there’s sufficient space to let the snippets of these (it says) theatrical recordings breathe enough that the cuts teleport listeners from one mood to the next. yet the title suggests heaps of meta-awareness. music is gone in the air and spaces are lost in the sounds staged within them. i am not a witness.

doug mccombs: vmak..., thrill jockey … more guitar music. this just came out so my liking might still fluctuate. it’s both sparse and luscious sound-wise, adding guest elements to the music for a better narrative flow while the electric rings out like a good amp and select boutique pedal and the playing is direct and free from an annoying amount of idiom, except in the end where it gets tortoisey only more tasteful and of course he’s allowed to do that.

charles mingus: the lost album from ronnie scott’s, resonance … this counts since the music’s not officially been released before. it’s not even top-tier mingus, i guess, though a different drummer (and pianist) work great and bring fresh tensions and sillinesses. there’s bad musical jokes and some noodling especially from faddis, but mostly there’s huge energy and depth of communication, they don’t make music like this anymore.

angelo bignamini: anna, staalplaat … kind of the higher-concept end of used tapes overdubbed with slices of life and practice sessions. no musique concrete here even where it sounds like it, because this guy blue-eyedly believes in whatever made the sounds. and the wonky tape (fifth generation dictaphone dub? how does one even get this lo-fi today) make for a rather nostalgic mood. as the liners say, all plans end up on the beach.

mdou moctar, ut connewitz, leipzig

the sound is so loud and mushy i cannot tell where a phrase begins or ends. the guitar solos work as a single gesture rather than detailed architecture, a raw movement made from multiple refractions of the propulsive riffing below. actually the mud seems more or less on purpose (proven when the rhythm guitarist gets his solo tune and suddenly the scales are articulate) as mdou moctar strikes his guitar hero poses in amused scare quotes before he lets forth another squall of phasered vintage rock noise and simply seems to love how close he can get to the original feeling while speaking another language. the love easily translates as we parry the blows with our bodies while our minds are occupied by a drummer who varies the even and rather heavy ground beat with subtle forceful variations, giving us the necessary textures to keep the ears happy throughout.

i thought i heard

"buddy bolden would say, 'simmer down, let me hear the sound of them feet.' the new orleans bands, you see, didn't play with a flat sound. they'd shade the music. after the band had played with two or three horns blowing, they'd let the rhythm have it. that's what buddy bolden meant when he said that. the rhythm then often would play that mixture of african and spanish syncopation--with a beat--and with just the rhythm going. they'd let the people use their imagination for the other sounds." that's guitarist danny barker in "hear me talkin' to ya," the oral history of mostly early jazz by shapiro and hentoff. obviously bolden did not record, and i don't think there's any recorded document of such an approach, which makes one think of much later rhythm passages from basie to monk. it seems the earliest example of a downtime rhythm chorus does involve basie, "squabblin'" by walter page and his blue devils, recorded in late 1929. that's in kansas city, not in new orleans, of course, and within the busy uptempo and the tight three-minute time constraint there's not much space for simmering (it feels more like an attempt to bring something that works great at the live gigs to the studio, where it doesn't make the same sense), but starting at 1:05 they let the rhythm have it:

'tis list season again again

i know it makes no sense to keep dropping lists before commencing operations, but scanning some best of 2020 lists to see what i've been missing and finding little overlap, i’ve instead come up with a favorite fifteen myself. this is ranked for the exact amount of solace offered by each rather than some intrinsic state of masterpiece:

treasury of puppies (förlag för fri musik)
kelly jayne jones: the reed flute is fire (takuroku)
keith rowe: gf suc (amplify)
musa dwarf: ammollaan (lal lal lal)
claire rousay: quarantine concert, march 21 (experimental sound studio)
oliver leith: good day good day bad day bad day (another timbre)
tara clerkin trio (laura lies in)
taku unami: the idiot dictator drifts on the lake (amplify)
datblygu: cwm gwagle (ankst musik)
grey park: railroads/fight fire with rifle (self-released)
tricky: fall to pieces (false idols)
juice machine: status quo (falt)
kassa overall: i think i’m good (brownswood)
cate le bon & group listening: here it comes again (mexican summer)
mac blackout: love profess (trouble in mind)

for possible future reference ...

it's list season again

... and this blog still hasn't got going. i love me a list but don't know how people do it so quickly. while i can roughly date releases around the hifi by dust layer thickness, regular play shakes off some of the dust and adds oily fingerprints, so this method lacks scientificness and doesn't work for vinyl at all. also you need time for the dust to gather and the media to find their favorite crawl spaces. still i'm willing to put in the work, so here finally is my list of 20 favorite records from

2019, sketched out in rough order of excellence:

dan melchior: squirrel ii (the sequel) (chocolate monk, his best so far in a strong run (disregarding his career in dad rock))
loren connors/daniel carter: the departing of a dream vol. 7 (family vineyard)
toshiya tsunoda: extract from field recording archive (erstwhile)
aldous harding: designer (4ad)
don brown & dan reynolds (cough): d=d (sacred realism)
embla quickbeam: stones that move and grow (chocolate monk)
brötzmann solo: i surrender dear (trost)
jason lescalleet: this is what i do vol. 21 (glistening examples, there were too many of those to follow with any amount of curiosity, but then this finale was great again)
dean blunt: zushi (files dropped somewhere i forgot where)
natalia beylis et al.: house sparrow settle back (crow vs crow)
akiyama/ikeda/hatakeyama: erroribus humanis et antinomy (otooto)
thom yorke: anima (xl, sorry)
r.p.m.: circle line (icr)
james rushford: the body’s night (black truffle)
kate tempest: the book of traps and lessons (american)
torba: musique inconcrète (fragment factory)
dax pierson: live in oakland (ratskin, mostly for the a side)
berrocal/fenech/epplay: ice exposure (blackest ever black)
marja ahti: vegetal negatives (hallow ground)
the comet is coming: trust in the lifeforce of deep mystery (impulse, without the “dub” track)

now the idea would be to relisten to these over time and see if they are ranked correctly. this should take about a year, and then in 2022 we could start the best of 2020 thing. it's a plan. let's see if we can get this started.