Blog: mapsadaisical

Some more short-form reviews over at The Liminal , including my take on new releases from Badun / Icarus, Phillip Marshall, Master Musicians Of Bukkake, Part Wild Horses Mane On Both Sides, Joe McPhee and Chris Corsano, Ben Vida / Keith Fullerton Whitman, as well as the wonderful Brass Pins and Match Heads compilation on Mississippi Records.

Despite the phenomenal amount of material that the composer and guitarist Loren Connors has released over the years (too much surely for anyone apart from the most committed completist to have kept track of) there remains something ghost-like about him. His public performances are relatively rare these days, which is perhaps unsurprising given the fact he has been suffering from Parkinsons disease for some time. The contribution that this condition has in fact made to his guitar playing is a moot point, though it is perhaps too easy to draw parallels between the undoubted fragility of his playing and his [...]

The chimeric Raster-Noton label was formed in 1999 when Rastermusic, founded by Olaf Bender and Frank Bretschneider, merged with Carsten Nicolai's Noton.archiv für ton und nichtton. In a recent interview for this very website, Nicolai attributed the label's success over the years to the consistency of their aesthetic. And it is true, the label has become deservedly well known for its consistently innovative minimalist electronica. However, as oxymoronic as it sounds, there is a lot going on within their particular brand of minimalism. For one thing, there is a world of difference between the spindly rhythmic lattices of [...]

Last week, the Guardian named Dalston's Cafe Oto and the Vortex as two of the ten best music venues in London, and given how these two stand (so far) apart from the rest thanks to their laudable commitment to adventurous programming, I'm almost surprised that they managed to find eight more, to be honest. Cafe Oto was pretty full tonight for the sort of lineup you really wouldn't find anywhere else in the city: the artists Stephan Mathieu, BJ Nilsen and TSU (Robert Curgenven and Jörg Maria Zeger). It led me to wonder whether anyone had come along to Cafe [...]

Ever the contrarian, there were in fact eleven members of Peter Brötzmann's Chicago Tentet for their three day residency at Cafe Oto. Eleven. This was more than an attempt to simply be "one louder": in an interview conducted for the BBC beforehand, tentet member Ken Vandermark was rightly insisting Brötzmann's reputation as the crazy shrieking sax player was - at least in part - a lazy journalistic invention. There is so much more to him than this; even when paired with Japanese noise guitarist Keiji Haino at Oto the previous week, the subtler side of his talents was still apparent. [...]

This was a show to make the head spin. In some ways, this was to be expected; the art of Ryoji Ikeda is quite an extreme audio-visual event. The sounds he uses go right to the very limits of human perception, while the images are of starkest black and white. Sections of seeming quiet and inactivity slam into thunderously loud strobe-lit passages which contain far too much for the brain to comprehend. In a sense, this is an art installation with rock show dynamics, which probably explains the excitement engendered in some members of the Barbican crowd, who whooped deliriously [...]

The Luminous Ground is the concluding part of the architect Christopher Alexander's four volume treatise The Nature Of Order, a project which took him from considerations of architecture right through to musings on the intersection between matter and spirit, between order and chaos, between logic and emotion. John Chantler has borrowed the title for his new album for the Room40 label, an album which sees him explore some of the issues Alexander raises via the medium of his modular synthesizer, in particular the notion of machines making music, music which is somehow imbued with life. And he [...]

"I'm still down there where the seams are deep Digging a hole, away in the coal, go down...go down" Ewan MacColl, The Big Hewer The opening of Jóhann Jóhannsson's latest album features the sound of a church organ playing huge, slow, mournful chords, rising in volume as if asking a question in increasing desperation. The call goes out into a huge and seemingly empty chamber, echoing and gradually falling away into a dark silence. After a few minutes, it finds an answer, a two note response from a [...]

"I'm still down there where the seams are deep Digging a hole, away in the coal, go down...go down" Ewan MacColl, The Big Hewer The opening of Jóhann Jóhannsson's latest album features the sound of a church organ playing huge, slow, mournful chords, rising in volume as if asking a question in increasing desperation. The call goes out into a huge and seemingly empty chamber, echoing and gradually falling away into a dark silence. After a few minutes, it finds an answer, a two note response from a [...]

Through their four collaborative projects to date, the German experimental artist Carsten Nicolai, operating under his Alva Noto pseudonym, and the Japanese pianist Ryuichi Sakamoto, have explored the space between the acoustic and the electronic, and between music and noise. In doing so, they have not just invented a language, but continued to refine its grammar and syntax. After their last release _utp saw them expanding their tonal palette, by working with Frankfurt's Ensemble Modern, they have pared the sound back to its basic elements for their new piece S . In advance of its premiere at [...]

In the run up to this show, someone told me that Keiji Haino once insisted upon playing so loud that the sound engineer at the gig quit in disgust. Someone else told me that, despite the volume he plays at, he thinks earplugs should be banned at his shows (Oto, having somewhat more sense, dispensed them for free). What is the purpose of this merciless pursuit of maximum volume all? And why does the audience willingly submit to it? Despite the forewarnings, I parted with my cash for the first of two sold out nights of a mini-residency which were [...]

The name of the Entr'acte record label translates as between acts : the gap between parts of a play, the precisely measured silence, the purposeful incidental. The label shares that mixture of the seemingly unassuming with the highly designed, inviting the listener to pay close attention to a microscopic level of detail. Just look at the releases: the typography may initially appear like an unremarkable monospace font, but examine it more closely: it is a customised version specifically created for the job by label boss Allon Kaye. The packaging too is unusual, vacuum-sealed so that the foil and plastic [...]

Half a dozen short-form reviews by me went up recently in a post over at The Liminal: new albums by Eleh, Julia Hulsmann Trio, Grails, Seasons (Pre-Din), Russell Haswell and Tape. Also features reviews by Rich, Matt and Andrew of some great albums by the likes of Phaedra, Ekoplekz and Cleared. Read them here .

The London public's appetite to be challenged knows no boundaries: here we had two consecutive sold out, well-received nights of avant garde music from relatively unheralded French musicians. Michel Chion (who played the previous night in what I've heard was an immersive ten speaker musique concrete experience) and Ghédalia Tazartès are two outsider figures who have been known to each other for decades, if not necessarily to the wider public. Thanks to a reissue programme by the Italian label Alga Marghen, Tazartès, the more obscure of the two, has had an increased level of attention in recent years, but I [...]

This may be the audiovisual artist Carl Michael von Hausswolff's first solo album for Touch, but that isn't to say he hasn't been an integral part of their community for some time: indeed, he recorded with The Hafler Trio (in his Sons Of God collaborative guise) as far back as 1993. My own first encounter with von Hausswolff was in 2006, when he played after Fennesz and Philip Jeck as part of Touch's 25th birthday celebrations, which shows you just how highly they rate his work. And quite rightly too: his performance that night was the one that I still [...]

The Japanese trumpeter Toshinoro Kondo was supposed to be at the Vortex this evening, but for understandable reasons, he couldn't it make it. The venue offered refunds on the tickets, and some seemed to take them up on it, judging by the empty seats dotted around the place. Those people are fools. For in Kondo's place, the superb improvising trio N.E.W. were given two sets. After his duo with Arthur Doyle at Cafe Oto, this meant I'd be seeing Steve Noble play drums for the second night in a row. That probably isn't the first time that has happened to [...]

Noah Howard's 1969 album The Black Ark begins with a bouncing bass and piano groove, before massed horns assemble loosely around a melody. It doesn't last long, as a succession of solos lead the track "Domiabra" into increasingly free areas. However, nothing can prepare you for the extraordinary entrance of Arthur Doyle five minutes in, cutting short the trumpet solo with a devastating solo which builds on the more brutal developments made by the likes of John Coltrane, Albert Ayler and Pharoah Sanders. In the liner notes to the Bo'Weavil reissue of the LP, Oren Ambarchi describes his playing on [...]

"It is a good thing there isn't a microphone up here," said saxophonist Matana Roberts early on in this performance, "as if you've seen me before you'll know it can be dangerous to give me a microphone". Indeed - for Matana Roberts has a lot to say. Her live sets will be interrupted with stories, with Q&A sessions, with calls for comments, and requests for requests. But her music too feels like a continuation of this side of her personality. Solo, she is a raconteur, telling tales from her Chicago roots and her Harlem home. In a group setting there [...]

So many words associated with the process of patination have such negative connotations: the act is a tarnishing, a corrosion, a corruption. Yet in certain circumstances, the formation of a patina is welcomed, sought after, even encouraged. Just down the road from where I sit right now, there are some new houses which have been there barely a couple of years, but their roofs are a bright green, copper having been used with the clear intention that it would oxidise this quickly. Likewise, new timber structures are designed to change in appearance prematurely, to silver, or to attract moss; as [...]

Perhaps I'm overthinking this, but the decision to call this new Editions Mego offshoot label Spectrum Spools seems just too perfect, almost unavoidable even. Though it is going to be issuing LP-only editions, the reference takes in recordings which use tape as part of the creative process, as well as things which are actually issued on a format which continues to have such persistent relevance in certain musical scenes. The spectrum aspect, as well as the allusion to that vivid display of colour (as beloved of psychedelia as much as its more recent musical cousin, hypnagogia) is surely a reference [...]