Reviews
Big Ears Festival. Knoxville, Tennessee. March 26–28, 2010. Clean, tidy, and walkable, downtown Knoxville feels more like Europe than America. Unlike the Next Big Thing-chasing club crawl of that other Southern-U.S. fest, South by Southwest, in Austin, the Big Ears Festival is a carefully curated festival driven by an artistic mandate to showcase cutting[...] Read more
Sonic Acts XIII. Amsterdam, The Netherlands. February 25–28, 2010. Since its launch in 2000, Sonic Acts has become a major biennial showcase for electronic music and intermedia art in Europe. This year’s thirteenth edition lived up to its reputation with an ambitious and densely packed program of concerts featuring new and established artists from such[...] Read more
Densités Festival. Fresnes-en-Woëvre, France. October 23-25, 2009. A rural French hamlet in the Lorraine countryside isn’t the setting you would imagine for a world-class festival of unadulterated Electronic and Free Jazz music. Yet the Densités Festival in Fresnes-en-Woëvre—population five hundred—about eighty kilometres[...] Read more
Decibel Festival. Seattle, Washington. September 24–27, 2009. Decibel is an annual international electronic-music and visual-arts festival celebrating its sixth year, which it did by expanding its programming with stacked line-ups within genre-themed showcases, creating some scheduling conflicts and dilemmas of choice for audiences. The[...] Read more
Debashis Sinha. Anudrutam. Lean, economical and crisp, Anudrutam infuses a minimalist techno sensibility with acoustic percussion and naturalistic field recordings (collected by Sinha himself in Kolkata). While the bareness used by some similarly oriented artists tends to emphasize the cold, machine-like precision[...] Read more
Brian Ruryk. Cycle of Fords. While the ingredients in any recent Brian Ruryk release are basically the same—rapid-fire editing, rubbery cassette-tape contortions, anxious Sonny-Sharrock-on-amphetamines acoustic guitar scribblings, torrents of debris (aural and actual) flying across the stereo field—[...] Read more
ROVA Saxophone Quartet & Nels Cline Singers. The Celestial Septet. The Celestial Septet combines two institutions of California’s experimental and improvised music, the ROVA Saxophone Quartet and guitarist Nels Cline’s instrumental trio with bass and drums, ironically named the Nels Cline Singers. This music is rooted in the free-jazz[...] Read more
Yannis Kyriakides. ANTICHAMBER. Dutch-Cypriot composer Yannis Kyriakides is better known for his extended multimedia and music-theatre works, but the ten pieces collected on this double-CD demonstrate that writing for smaller ensembles affords him equally fertile ground for creative exploration. The album offers[...] Read more
Grutronic. Essex Foam Party. Essex Foam Party sees Grutronic, a free improvising collective, join forces with guests vibraphonist Orphy Robinson and sampler Paul Obermayer. Mixed among the moist pulses and triggered cross textures that characterize much of the music are interludes of keyboard comping and runs from[...] Read more
FURT. Sense. Two methods of creation play out on this disc by FURT, the British electronic composition-performance duo of Richard Barrett and Paul Obermayer. The track Uranus is a forty-six-minute studio composition developed over a two-year period. In contrast, Curtains, the second track on the CD,[...] Read more
Lori Freedman. Bridge. Bridge largely emulates the pattern of one of Freedman’s solo clarinet concerts, exploring the relationships between composition, interpretation, and improvisation. If composition and improvisation were once separated by a gulf, here they’re constructed as a continuously[...] Read more
The Element Choir. At Rosedale United. Christine Duncan leads the most unlikely ensemble devoted to collective improvisation, Toronto’s fifty-one-voice Element Choir. The choir’s improvisation is strongly shaped by Duncan’s ongoing “conduction.” In performance, members respond to a series of[...] Read more
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