Reviews
Rainer Wiens. Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors. More frequently heard playing guitar and prepared guitar in the context of jazz and improvised music, Rainer Wiens performs here on kalimbas—African thumb pianos possessing a distinctive metallic resonance—which are heard prominently at the beginning and end of this unusual[...] Read more
Birgit Ulher. Radio Silence No More. Hamburg-based trumpeter Birgit Ulher uses her improvisational prowess to shape this program, treating as full partners the extended drones and blurry hisses that emanate from a stand-alone radio and its speaker. On the nine mid-length tracks here—all with the suffixes ‑welle or ‑[...] Read more
Toca Loca. P*P. Toca Loca is a kick-ass ensemble with some of the heaviest performers in new music: Gregory Oh, piano and voice; Simon Docking, piano and voice; and Aiyung Huang, percussion and voice. All of them deserve kudos for this ambitious project of taking on pop music in the context of peer-to-[...] Read more
Saint Dirt Elementary School. Ice Cream Man Dreams. This newest effort from St. Dirt offers the most vivid image of this Toronto-based “junkyard jazz” combo. Whereas their two previous discs offered a rawer live feel and catchier tunes, the overall sophistication and nuance of Ice Cream Man Dreams showcases both the[...] Read more
Quatuor Qwat Reum Six. Live at Festival NPAI 2007. With textures and timbres often as inscrutable as the band’s name, four of France’s most accomplished improvisers explore non-idiomatic sounds. This continuous, though segmented, performance is not only tonally mesmerizing, it also negates, through the use of extensions and[...] Read more
Olga Neuwirth and the ICI Ensemble. Who am I? No More. Animated with sonic jump-cuts and unexpected timbral juxtapositions, these compositions—described as two audio films—by Austrian Olga Neuwirth, demonstrate that she is young enough to be influenced by John Zorn-styled musical pastiches, as well as by conventional music. That[...] Read more
Marteau Rouge and Evan Parker. Live. Devoting more than forty years to the painstaking development of an individual style doesn’t mean that British tenor saxophonist Evan Parker eschews new challenges and collaborations. Live is notable, however, because Parker manages, without altering his distinctive reed patterns,[...] Read more
Fast ’n’ Bulbous. Waxed Oop. Few artists have ever merged and transformed genres with the raw energy and freedom of Don Van Vliet, who under the alter ego of Captain Beefheart (and his Magic Band) merged Chicago blues, backbeats, free-jazz reeds, and lyrics that mingled science fiction, news stories, memoir,[...] Read more
Nicolas Bernier, Jacques Poulin-Denis. Sur Fond Blanc. It is not always easy to translate music composed for a theatrical setting back to a purely sonic form. Incidental music often relies on a different type of physicality, both in the movement of bodies through space and in the placement of speakers to facilitate the sound itself becoming[...] Read more
Jorge Lima Barreto. Zul Zelub. Melding inside-and-outside piano explorations with the pulsations of a randomly tuned shortwave radio or with pre-recorded ambient sounds issuing from four CD players, Jorge Lima Barreto creates an altogether unique, double-barrelled program here. A veteran Portuguese pianist, academic,[...] Read more
Ganesh Anandan and Hans Reichel. Self Made. Ganesh Anandan and Hans Reichel are instrument inventors as well as musicians, and this CD consists largely of duets between the two, recorded during a meeting in Wuppertal, Germany. Anandan, born in Bangalore, Southern India, and long resident in Montreal, performs on two different[...] Read more
Chris Abrahams and Clare Cooper. Germ Studies for Guzheng and DX7. As befits its name, Germ Studies for Guzheng and DX7 is a series of 198 miniatures, most ending in mere seconds, improvised on guzheng and the DX7 synthesizer. Partly intended, it seems, as a lark—the two-disc set comes with humorous illustrations of each germ, drawn by fellow musicians[...] Read more
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