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experimental music reviews
Reviews for Tuesday July 16, 2024
Reviews for Monday July 15, 2024
Karen Borca Trio/Quartet/Quintet - Good News Blues
Released May 27, 2024
Karen Borca is a name that deserves to be much better known among music fans. She is the genius behind the use of bassoon as an instrument in free jazz. You can hear most of her recorded output in groups like those of Cecil Taylor and others who she played with in some of Taylor's groups, like bassist Alan Silva's and her fellow reedist (and former husband) Jimmy Lyons. Although there are no studio albums released yet with her in a leadership role, we are lucky in 2024 because the excellent Lithuanian record label No Business Records has released this new compilation. It consists of four cuts which make up two live performances at the same festival (once in 1998, once in 2005) with Borca leading a trio, a quartet, and a quintet. Among the musicians she plays along side in these recording dates are such heavy hitters as Susie Ibarra, William Parker, Rob Brown, Cooper-Moore, (remember the In Order to Survive Quartet anyone?) and Reggie Workman. The energy and feeling are unmissable. It will be hard not to catch the Good News Blues just listening in on these sessions, which we no longer have to merely wish we were flies on the wall for.
Inshallah, there will be more music with Borca's leadership which surfaces. Certainly her mark has been made, with most free playing bassoonists in her wake have been women taking it on as a "women's instrument" in some capacity and while it may seem
Rhodri Davies, Robin Hayward, Julia Eckhardt & Lucio Capece - Amber
Released April 2005
This quartet on the often excellent Portuguese Creative Sources caught my eye before it caught my ear. This is because half of the quartet (Davies & Hayward, on harp and tuba respectively) played together on one of my favourite albums of all time, Valved Strings Calculator as two thirds of a trio with Taku Unami, which at the time of the recording of Amber was a few years away from being recorded. Davies
The other two musicians present here are Julia Eckhardt on viola and Lucio Capece contributing both some bass clarinet and soprano saxophone. Eckhardt is a highly accomplished artist who in addition to working extensively in both classical (with modern composers like Eliane Radigue, Pauline Oliveros, and Stefan Thut) and improvised musical circles has written, edited and presented about the intersection of gender in the worlds of sound art and experimental music. Her best known books on the matter are Grounds for Possible Music and The Second Sound, the latter named with a nod to Simone de Beauvoir's feminist classic The Second Sex.
Trumans Water - Godspeed the Vortex
Released 1993
One musical idiom which unites more than a few different varieties of record nerd is noise rock! What a diverse range of sounds can be referred to that way, too. One group with a dedicated fanbase which you might not have heard of are one of the late John Peel's favourites, San Diego's very own Trumans Water. Right around the time of their probably best loved albums, 1992's Of Thick Tum which Peel famously played in its entirety on air and Spasm Smash XXXOXoX Ox Ass (these were certainly my introduction to them), the Water (as some fans call them) put out their "Godspeed" quadrilogy, to wit, four albums each titled "Godspeed the _____".
This album illustrates rather well the elements of the band which I enjoy so much: a sense of the surreal, a good amount of improvisation, a sound distinct from their peers which is harder to point to, and a sense of the casual. As much as I love strange music, sometimes when music is done with no or little sense of humour, it can make it harder to revisit. Trumans Water's stated influences are said to include the likes of the earliest Sonic Youth recordings (read: the more shambolic stuff before even the New Yorkers' beloved early classics like EVOL, Bad Moon Rising, Daydream Nation, etc.) and Pavement, and while the album certainly feels in line with that, it does a hell of a lot more than wear formative tastes of band members on its sleeve or rock tees. I will definitely need to revisit this album and listen to more of their career before I can get a better sense of where it ranks for me but at first blush, Godspeed the Vortex certainly feels like it belongs almost on the same level as the first two I heard, maybe only slightly less so.
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Milktrain to Paydirt
Released August 1995
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Genre(s): Alt rock, noise rock
This album, the last by Trumans Water for Homestead Records, takes its bizarre yet catchy name from the title of a Sam Spence composition of the 1970s composed for the second volume of Music from National Football League Films as recorded by the Elliot Blair Orchestra. Perhaps someone in the Water came across a copy of one of these compilations at a record shop one day and liked the sound of "milktrain to paydirt". It certainly does have a certain ring to it, I'll admit as much. However, having stepped off the milktrain, I regret to say that paydirt has not been reached. While Trumans Water at their best are one of the most creative groups of their peers, the loss of Glen Galloway is palpable. But hang ona second, because with that said, most people who aren't me, would more than likely find it a strength of the album, not a weakness that this outing of the Water sounds a heck of a lot more like what is generally understood by "indie rock" and without doubt not only appeal to more listeners, but this is considered a better LP. Just feels less for me, if I want to listen to something significantly more comparable to Pavement or The Fall, I think I'll listen to them, please and thanks.
Tongues of Mount Meru - Hiranyagarbha
Released December 2010
Genre(s): Drone
Hiryangarbha is one of a few albums by the Norwegian duo whose name references the sacred site Mount Meru, a place sacred to Hindus, Buddhists, and Jains. The duo consists of Lasse Marhaug, a highly prolific noisician, improvisor, producer and head of several labels, and occasional jazz, rock and metal musician and improvisor/composer Jon Wesseltoft. The title of this album is Hiranyagarbha, (literally "golden womb" in Sanskrit) which is the name of the Soul of the Universe in various branches of Hinduism. While the textures are certainly somewhat evolving and changing throughout the album's roughly forty minute run time, this thematically ambitious aid to meditation comes up short. Far from the greatest works of either performer, Hiranyagarbha fails to measure up to the thematically related and slightly shorter runtime of Alice Coltrane's 1971 classic Universal Consciousness.
Anahita - Tourmaline
Released May 12, 2017
Named for a classical Iranian goddess, Anahita are something of a two person supergroup of 2000s era free folk, consisting of Tara Burke (better known as Fursaxa) and Helena Espvall (best known for her work in the group Espers). Both women are fairly prolific multiinstrumentalists in music composed and written as well as improvised. On this most recent album titled for a much beloved gem, Espvall treat us not only to their cello, guitar, harp, and synthesizers once again but also their gorgeous voices. Whereas in the past they have sometimes felt more like plaintive folk singers, in this instance they treat us to more of a madrigal this time around and what a welcome change it is! Tracks with names like "Nascent Wings", and "Mabon" (the pagan name for the autumnal equinox) continue this faerie like atmosphere. The names of tracks and albums has always been one of Tara Burke's specialties. A further example of this the second track, "Spirea of Ulmaria", a reference to a lovely aromatic plant known as the meadowsweet. This plant has had many uses over the years, including perfumed garlands, flavouring Scandinavian meads, treating gout, producing a natural black dye, and was used to produce salicylic acid. In fact, it was through extracting acetylsalcylic acid from the meadowsweet, along with its old name "spirea" that Bayer derived the well known trade name aspirin.
As of the writing of this review, the pair have released three wonderful documents of their collaborative powers:
- 2006's Arcana en Cantos
- 2009's Matricaria
- 2017's Tourmaline
I sincerely hope they have more within them to give us more still. There may have been eight years between the last two but as I write this it has been only been seven since the most recent. Or perhaps a new supergroup with another luminary, maybe Sharron Kraus whose duet with Tara, Tau Emerald, gave us 2008's lovely Travellers Two.
Reviews from 2021
Reviews from 2022