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Microvising



Got the following from the "News" section of the site for Erstwhile
Records (http://www.erstwhilerecords.com).  Thought I might pass it on,
see what people think.

G.


+++++++++++++

Young Improvisers at the Far Reaches of Jazz
The New York Times
Ben Ratliff
5/7/00

In art, one ought to be skeptical of the idea of newness as a guarantor
of importance. But the upswell of young musicians playing a new kind of
electronic improvisation in the last few years has begun to feel
important -- and what they're doing is still so new that they will be
entirely absent from this summer's Vision and Bell Atlantic Jazz
Festivals, the two major New York events of improvisation's outer
limits.

Electro-acoustic improv, as some of it is called, involves one musician
playing a noncomputerized instrument (guitar, saxophone, drums,
whatever) improvising alongside another "playing" a computer or a
sampler. There's also plain old electronic improvisation, with a similar
search for personal, abstract improvisatory languages. It's not entirely
new: electronics and jazz-based improvisers like Steve Lacy were
ad-libbing together on stage in the early 1970's projects of Musica
Electronica Viva; in the English group AMM, founded in 1965, the
guitarist Keith Rowe folded short-wave radio sound into his
improvisations. And Iannis Xenakis used acoustic sounds in his composed
tape manipulations.

So if it's already been done, why is this new phase of electro-acoustic
improv spreading so rapidly? Because computer technology has radically
changed what computers can do in real-time situations: with digital
signal processing, someone controlling a laptop can take what someone
else is playing, alter it and feed it back with all sorts of
modifications in real time. Getting music out of computers involves a
process of writing and compiling codes, and people are doing that on
stage; it's a new form of improvisation. Needless to say, the range of
sounds one can get is wider, and this has made the new music more fluid,
less dry, less dorky. But also, real-time signal processing gets someone
working a laptop much closer to the condition of being a musician -- one
who can immediately act or react and do so with an individual sound.

And whereas one previously needed a university post to access the latest
computer-music technology, since the mid-80's that technology has become
increasingly cheap and sophisticated.

The music has got more varied, because musicians from different
backgrounds are coming to it. Jim O'Rourke and Christof Kurzmann have
rock, among other things, in their backgrounds. Turntablists -- Otomo
Yoshihide, Martin Tetreault and others -- are getting involved: their
language, noises from records and from the stylus itself, is as
infinitely wide as that of the laptop-wielders. The guitarist Burkhard
Stangl was involved in contemporary classical music; Kevin Drumm, a
guitarist from Chicago, was a floor reporter at the Chicago Board of
Trade before he started experimenting with the guitar as an instrument
of pure sound in the early 90's. Since many of the musicians are using
sampling and electronic percussion, hip-hop is often there as a
subliminal influence. But so are lots of other kinds of music: these
musicians are not yet invested in advancing and protecting theories of
what their music should accomplish.

Günter Müller, based in Itingen, Switzerland, is both a musician and a
producer; his record label, For 4 Ears, is an imprimatur of the new
music. He works with a small drum-set -- a snare, floor-tom and cymbal
-- as well as synthesizers and prerecorded samples.  Recently he
explained how this music departed from jazz. "As I understand jazz, the
soloist is very important," he said. "And very often the soloist has to
be a virtuoso, playing very complicatedly and very fast. I understand
music more as a sound-field, where playing around silence can also be
important. Perhaps you can imagine improvisation as I'm doing it as an
open discussion with full risk, where you have to decide at each moment
if you want to support what's going on, contradict, play beside, put
some other material on top of it or underneath, break things, imitate,
etc."

Or envelop it, pan it across the acoustic field, snip it off, turn it
into a sonic monolith. Here, eventually, we have to stop talking about
"music" -- melody, harmony, rhythm, song-structure -- and start talking
about sound. One goal of the music is that you really can't tell who's
playing what. This is the case on a new record featuring Mr. Müller and
the guitarists Keith Rowe and Taku Sugimoto, "The World Turned Upside
Down." A similar melding of sound, but more immaculate, less aggressive
and with a minute sense of quiet, is heard on "Polwechsel 2," by the
Viennese group Polwechsel: it's the type of art that the British
magazine Wire has started to call "microvising."

One of the most extreme examples of this real-time intertwining is a
self-titled disc by the Japanese trio I.S.O. -- a circumscribed range of
electronic scratches, sine waves and turntable sounds which has an eerie
sense of control and focus. And, to contradict Mr. Müller, there is a
place for virtuosity in this music: the saxophonist Evan Parker, a
virtuoso of his own wavy, delirious idiom, has created an important body
of electro-acoustic work in the last decade, recently culminating in
"Drawn Inward."

The closer it sounds to "sound research" -- with its academic overtones
of the early 60's experiments at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music
Center -- the more it fails; two CD's in particular, "The Magic Sound of
Fenno'berg" by Christian Fennesz, Jim O'Rourke and Peter Rehberg, and
the, uh, cleverly titled "Dafeldecker/Kurzmann/Fennesz/O'Rourke/Drumm/
Siewert," are as stimulating, funny, aggressive and euphoric as anything
I've heard lately in rock 'n' roll. (All these discs are available from
sources like Forced Exposure, at www.fe.org, or Downtown Music Gallery,
at dtmgallery.com.)

I can't say I like it all: glitchy data-transfer tones are deadly dull
unless you really know what you want to do with them. I know I don't
like it all the time: headphones are nearly essential, unless you live
by yourself and create an environment to hear all the panning and
layering of sound properly. But I find myself continually going back to
it, listening to it with all senses open as if walking in the darkness,
looking for the language of each work, and usually, with delight,
finding it.