Blog: mapsadaisical

My review of the two day PAN festival, featuring ELi Keszler, John Wiese, R/S, Valerio Tricoli, Werner Durand and CC Hennix, has just gone up over at The Liminal .

Short reviews by me of new releases from BABs, Marcus Fischer, Daniel Menche, Perispsirit and Josef van Wissem: read them here .

55 years have passed since John Cage spoke about the freedoms afforded to the composer thanks to technological advances – in his case, the invention of high fidelity magnetic tape. Yet even as we passed into the increasingly sophisticated era of laptops and audio software, these freedoms did not always manifest themselves in the live setting. The sight and sound of the artist standing behind their laptop, doing very little to very little effect, barely attempting to disguise the pre-ordained nature of their construction was all too common. Much in the way that a certain number of restrictions can, paradoxically, [...]

Melnyk's recorded music has been frustratingly hard to get hold of in recent years. Whether any logistical or economical issues have played a part in this I don't know, but he doesn't seem all that bothered. A factor may be that he is a man who regards the live setting as being the only satisfactory way to experience his music. The precise characteristics of the piano, the acoustic properties of the room, even the atmospheric sounds of the venue, are all musical variables to Melnyk as much as the notes themselves. Given this, it a shame we don't get to [...]

I may have needed less convincing than most, but Broken60 (an offshoot of Ruairidh Law aka The Village Orchestra's Broken20 label) have published a manifesto of sorts which outlines the reasons why they feel they feel the need, in 2012, to start a cassette label. Dave Donnelly aka Production Unit, who runs the tape wing, rightly focuses not on the purely physical aspects of the object itself, even if a reference to licking the cassette's cover borders on the fetishistic, but on the interrelationship between the object, the sound that is produced, and the emotions that are evoked. The format [...]

On 17 July 2011, the minimalist musicians Stephan Mathieu and David Maranha performed an acoustic concert in the tennis court at the Fundação Serralves park in Porto. Stephan Mathieu played his virginals harpsichord with electromagnets, while David Maranha used violin and shruti box. The performance lasted 29 minutes and 20 seconds. The performance centred around a drone in the key of A. In February 2012 a recording of that performance is being issued on a single-sided LP by Cronica and Serralves under the name Strings . Read the rest of this review (it gets better, I think) over at [...]

On 17 July 2011, the minimalist musicians Stephan Mathieu and David Maranha performed an acoustic concert in the tennis court at the Fundação Serralves park in Porto. Stephan Mathieu played his virginals harpsichord with electromagnets, while David Maranha used violin and shruti box. The performance lasted 29 minutes and 20 seconds. The performance centred around a drone in the key of A. In February 2012 a recording of that performance is being issued on a single-sided LP by Cronica and Serralves under the name Strings . Read the rest of this review (it gets better, I think) over at [...]

It feels like it has been a particularly good year for live music in London - I saw a lot of shows, but missed just as many that I really wanted to see. A glance at the top 10 below shows, yep, as expected, a convincing Cafe Oto majority, with 6 of the top 10 places going to performances I saw in that most fertile of places. Judging by the shows they are already announcing, next year is likely to be just as good - I'll see you there, in the front row. [...]

My picks for this year were fed into The Liminal's hydra-headed beast of a list, along with my commentary about the year end process. You can read all that over there . The world would clearly be a far poorer place though without my own list getting an airing in its own right though, so I'm publishing that below. The nature of my involvement with The Liminal means that, for the first time, like, ever, I haven't actually reviewed all of my top 20, so some of the links are to reviews that someone else has written. [...]

As 2012 is the 30th anniversary of their first release, I recently interviewed Jon Wozencroft and Mike Harding from Touch for the Liminal. We discussed a wide range of subjects, including their genesis, principles, key relationships, attitudes towards technology, and plans for Touch 30 events. The interview is split into three parts - Ritual , Contact and Vectors .

At a recent concert at London's Vortex jazz club, Evan Parker described his co-performer for the evening, the trumpeter Peter Evans, as "a genius", and as "the future". Having heard him play several times now, including a dizzying solo set at 20102s Freedom Of The City festival, I let the first description slide without question. The second was more intriguing. The future of what, precisely? The future of jazz? Improvisation? Noise? Sound? The trumpet ? His live performances make notions of genre seem inadequate, while attempting to locate his approach on a temporal scale is equally problematic. His new [...]

More short reviews by me, of albums by Na Hawa Doumbia, Minamo, The Living Room, Hebden/Reid/Gustafsson, and Ravalico/Khroustaliov. Read them over at The Liminal .

The title of the sound recordist Chris Watson's new CD, borrowed from a Mexican film from the 1920s, translates as "The Ghost Train". The name makes reference to the fact that the recordings were made while he was working on the BBC show Great Railway Journeys, where he took a ride on one of the very last passenger trains which ran from Mexico's Pacific coast to the Gulf on the other side, a journey that since 1999 can no longer be made. However, as you listen to it while studying a map of the route, from Los Mochis in the [...]

I see the rhythm section of Steve Noble and John Edwards together in London quite often, but I've never managed to catch one of their rare appearances in Decoy, a trio which also features keyboard player Alexander Hawkins. As soon as you walk into the venue in which they are performing, the reasons for the infrequency of this combination are very tangible on stage: Hawkins plays an original Hammond B3 organ through an original Leslie cabinet. Those are some seriously big, seriously expensive, and seriously difficult to transport pieces of kit. However, they also make a seriously wonderful sound; particularly [...]

You're right – that isn't a photo of Marc Ribot. Or of anyone else named on the ticket to this event, which listed the following artists' names on it: Marc Ribot, Matthew Bourne, Mayming. However I wasn't at this gig to see any of those. It seemed a little odd to me just how little billing was being given to the presence of one Henry Grimes as part of Ribot's trio, given that his recorded – and unrecorded – history makes for a legend that would dwarf that of most jazz musicians on the planet. Read the rest of this [...]

Featuring reviews by me of new records by Cory Allen, Enrico Rava, Mike Weis, The Remote Viewers and Yves De Mey. Over here.

Birmingham may be the home of metal, but metal kids have to grow up some day. Now in its ninth year, there is a sense that the city's Supersonic festival is maturing. While it remains based in Birmingham's Custard Factory, this year it spread out further into this industrial sprawl, making more sensible use of the myriad of dark spaces beneath the railway arches. This attention to the design of the individual venues extended to the audio and the visual aspects of the festival: the new Boxxed and the reworked Space 2 areas in particular had some of the most [...]

As a follow-up to part one of our feature on three live drummer-plus-one duo performances, I've picked out ten recorded examples of the format. This is by no means a definite or representative list (I should maybe have plugged that 21 year gap), so I'd welcome any other recommendations. In fact, I doubt they are even all currently in print, but I do know that the curious will be rewarded with some precision percussion, and some intense interplay. I've listed the duos drummer first, regardless of their billing on the sleeve, in order to, you know, give the [...]

I typically listen to a lot of John Coltrane, but I've been increasingly drawn to his Interstellar Space of late, the duo with the drummer Rashied Ali. It is an oddity in his canon by virtue of its minimal instrumentation, but the result of that is that it affords the listener an opportunity to really hear the interaction and the dynamic between its two protagonists. In a duo, there really is nowhere to hide, no rest, you can't drop out while an another formation spontaneously assembles from within a larger group, and as a result, there is a [...]

"Since you went away the days grow long...and soon I'll hear old winter's song". No matter how often I've heard it, the switch from major to minor key in "Autumn Leaves" brings an icy chill, despite the lyrics being for the most part the sort of sentimental fluff that would float off in the slightest breeze. Suddenly, I feel that cold hand on my shoulder. The grey clouds that blow over the song are enough to cast that phrase about "old winter's song" in a Keatsian shade, you sense a recognition of mortality, the leaving of a lover (or in [...]