Josephine Foster
Hazel Eyes, I Will Lead You
Locust (L 68)
Chicago-based Josephine Foster’s Hazel Eyes, I Will Lead You has a lot in common with various shining stars of the current new folk scene, such as Devendra Banhart, Joanna Newsom and Coco Rosie. At first the singing sounds affected, and one is distracted by the mannerisms and deliberate archaisms. Then one notices how beautiful Foster’s voice is and how gorgeous the songwriting here is, and all the isms start to disappear. A classically trained singer, who’s also been part of two other Locust acts, Born Heller and The Supposed, Foster accompanies herself here on acoustic guitar, the vocals sometimes multitracked into delicate lovely tonal spirals. The sound is warm and intimate, displaced in charming ways by the addition of a variety of string instruments, castanets, bells, kazoos and other sonic incidentals. There’s a nostalgia at work here in these songs, that feels like a very far off radio station broadcasting old songs. But the person singing these songs is in fact very close by, and this makes hearing her sing all the more heart-breaking.

originally published in Signal to Noise, 2005.

Jon Gibson – Visitations I & II + Thirties (New Tone, NT 6747)
Jon Gibson – Two Solo Pieces (New Tone, NT 6756)

The archeology of the 1970s downtown New York minimalist music continues apace with the reissue of two LPs by one of the unsung heroes of the epoch, Jon Gibson. Gibson, composer, keyboard and woodwind player was a key figure in this scene, playing with La Monte Young, Steve Reich, Terry Riley in various groups, and as a founding member of the Philip Glass ensemble. Both of these disks are the equal of anything being done by Gibson’s better known collaborators – which is to say that they are remarkable.

Visitations I – II collects two “16 Multi Track-Textured Environmental Soundscapes” from 1973, mixing percussion and flutes with a variety of field-recordings of water, wind and so on. These are lovely sprawling pieces, gently pulsating sound fields, and among the most effective recordings that integrate water sound that I’ve heard. Even better is Thirties, a previously unissued sprawling keyboard driven piece that was a key part of Gibson’s oeuvre in the 1970s. With strong connections to Glass, Reich and Riley’s keyboard works, and showing the influence of Indonesian gamelan, African polyrhythms and Indian raga rhythm cycles that marks many of the key minimalist works of the time, Thirties is a delightfully laconic piece of minimal electric funk, featuring Gibson on keyboard, and a great ensemble including Gavin Bryars on percussion and David Rosenboom on electronic violin. Perhaps the closest comparison is mid-1970s Miles, without the trumpet, guitar and drums.

Two Solo Pieces collects two tracks from a 1977 LP, Cycles, a beautiful 22 minute solo pipe organ drone with a warm, drifting tone, and an untitled raga-like solo flute of great charm. Three previously unissued pieces of great interest follow. Melody IV Part I from 1975 is a David Behrmann-like systems piece of interweaved harmonic clusters performed by the SEM Ensemble in 1975. Melody III from the same year features Gibson’s solo organ in a Glass/Reich systems mode. Song 1 from 1972 is a gorgeous, looping melodic minimal piece that features a young Arthur Russell on cello and Barbara Benary on violin. Truly a treasure trove.

Originally published in Signal to Noise, 2006.

Henry Flynt and Nova’Billy
Locust CD
From 1974-75, New York based fiddler, philosopher and conceptual artist Henry Flynt had a full working rock band called Nova’Billy that cranked out a remarkable blend of country, soul, rock and blues jams mutated and abstracted in various ways through Flynt’s compositional techniques and ferocious improvisation. The band folded after a year due to lack of interest in the few gigs they played at downtown art venues like The Kitchen – and, according to Flynt, various members deciding to jump onto the punk bandwagon that was setting up shop at places like CBGB at that time.
Several songs here first appeared on the excellent Flynt collection Graduation, but this stands as the fullest record of the existence of Nova’Billy, and for those new to Flynt’s music and inexplicably averse to 40 minute Coltrane-like free-fiddle and drone explorations, probably the most accessible and enjoyable disk yet issued of this American master. Quite simply, the disk rocks from beginning to end, and, despite Flynt’s aversion to punk, resonates with other marvels of 1975 such as the New York Dolls and early Pere Ubu, though frankly it also sounds at times like vintage Grateful Dead or Allman Brothers. And that is not a bad thing at all.
Having said that, the strange, abstract compositional structures which Flynt uses, while working within recognizable country or soul idioms produce a ferociously complex, ecstatic groove that sounds like absolutely nothing else. The band, which includes Peter Gordon, who was later involved in the Love of Life Orchestra, and Don Christensen, who became drummer for James Chance’s Contortions, are terrific, as is Flynt’s scorching fiddle sound. If there’s a weakness, it’s Flynt’s voice, which sounds weak when he tries to hold a tune, but amazing when he begins to holler and howl, as on the stunning “Sky Turned Red”. It’s unfortunate that there were few or no takers when Nova’Billy were around, back in 1975. Flynt’s vision of what is valuable in music, set out in his 1980 essay “The Meaning of My Avant Garde Hillbilly and Blues Music” is increasingly vindicated by the turn of younger improvisers to “free folk” and other mutant idiomatic musics. Still, Nova’Billy set out a blazing trail which few so far have been able to follow.

Originally published in Signal to Noise, 2007.

Keiji Haino and Sitaar Tah! – Animamima (aRCHIVE/Important)

Drones have been a major part of Keiji Haino’s repertoire for a while, a potent weapon in his eternal war/love affair with a universe which at various times he seeks to dissolve into, manifest inside himself, refuse entirely, and, for the rest of the time, play and explore – all through sound. Animamima, released on aRCHIVE’s excellent imprint in a beautiful book-like package designed by Sun O)))’s Stephen O’Malley, was recorded in Tokyo on June 26, 2004 and documents a collaboration between Haino, with a full armory of drone makers including electric tambura, electric shruti box, electric hurdy gurdy, as well as rhythm box, flute and voice, sitarist Yoshidaikiti, throat singer Fuyuki Tomokawa, and Sitaar Tah!, supposedly a 20 piece sitar orchestra.

The first disk begins with a drone similar to those found in some of Haino’s previous works – “Abandon all words at a stroke” or “So, Black is Myself” and the mini-CD “Shruti Box” for example – serene, majestic, crackling with latent energy. The sound gradually thickens as London born voice performer Fuyuki Tomokawa, throat singer and winner of the Avant garde khoomei singer award in Tuva for two years running, contributes overtone laden vocals that weave in and out of the mix, until it reaches a dense swirling, mostly beatless maelstrom of sound reminiscent of Can’s Tago Mago or Tony Conrad period Theater of Eternal Music with top notch recording equipment and pharmaceuticals. Haino contributes some spectacular flute and gorgeous forelorn falsetto vocals. It goes on for ever and you don’t want it to stop.

The second disk further intensifies the roaring, joyful vortex of sound with Haino’s screaming hurdy gurdy work, before receding after 25 minutes into a throbbing dense mass of slowly shifting resonant strings. The whole 98 minutes is as remarkable as anything Haino has done in a long illustrious musical life. At a time where drone-based music is in danger of sinking into generic cliché, Haino and company have made something bracing, free, yet very accessible, and finally not like anyone else at all.

Originally published in The Wire, 2006.

Nothing is True Everything is Permitted: The Life of Brion Gysin
John Geiger
Disinformation HBK, $27.95

Marcus Boon

In recent years, Brion Gysin, best known as the inventor of the cut up, has begun to step out from the shadows of his co-conspirator William S. Burroughs. While Gysin’s ideas, originally conceived as Moroccan magical techniques applied to post World War II art, literature and music, can be recognized just about everywhere in contemporary culture, as the act of cutting, pasting and reconfiguring found materials becomes an almost universal gesture in all media, Gysin’s own work is being excavated and resurrected, in a retrospective show of his visual art projects mounted by the Edmonton Art Gallery, along with an accompanying book, Brion Gysin: Tuning In To the Multimedia Age, CDs of his sounds works on Sub Rosa and other labels, Back In No Time: The Brion Gysin Reader, edited by Jason Weiss, which gives a solid overview of Gysin’s writings, and now, finally, the impeccably researched, astute biography that Gysin’s life and work has long demanded, by John Geiger.

The book tracks Gysin’s line of flight from Edmonton, Alberta, to London, to New York, Paris and Morocco, where Gysin encountered the Master Musicians of Jajouka and started up a nightclub in Tangiers where they performed nightly. He was always on the make, but never quite making it, his list of friends and associates a who’s who of the post World War II international art scene — writing novels, producing sound poetry, an aborted film script for Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, paintings, performances, yet rarely receiving any real recognition for his work, aside from Burroughs’ enduring support. Although the cut up, which was popularized by Burroughs in books like Nova Express, was originally conceived as applying a montage technique from the visual arts to the written word, it became most influential in rock music, and it was finally in the rock world that Gysin got some recognition, as generations of rockers, from the Beatles and Rolling Stones in the 1960s, to Iggy Pop and Bowie in the 1970s, to the industrial pioneers Throbbing Gristle and Cabaret Voltaire, applied the cut up to song lyrics, and to looped recordings of voices, breaking apart received meanings in phrases in an attempt to “rub out the word”.

Geiger’s last book, Chapel of Extreme Experience, was a fascinating look at scientific and artistic experimentation with flicker and strobe effects in the 1950s and 60s, including Gysin’s dream machine, a revolving, trance inducing stroboscopic sculpture. Geiger’s other trade is writing biographies of explorers – and in a sense, this book continues that work, describing the life of one of the pioneers of the exploration of inner space, an explorer who, at the moment where the planet itself appeared to hold no more outer frontiers (think H Bomb experiments in the Pacific in the 1950s, or the Space Program), turned inwards. Drugs, trance inducing machines, games of chance, Islamic mysticism, sound as a universal principle: Gysin played with, and in some cases invented, the whole deck of cards of the post war avant garde. An untimely presence in his lifetime, perhaps we can finally hear and see his full stature today.

Originally published in The Wire, 2005.

Georges Gurdjieff – Harmonic Development: The Complete Harmonium Recordings 1948-1949
Basta DVD with mp3s plus 2 CDs.

Armenian mystic Georges Gurdjieff (1866-1949) placed considerable emphasis on music as a spiritual tool, a manifestation of his ideas regarding cosmic law, and an accompaniment to the various dance/movement exercises that he encouraged his disciples in Europe and America to practice. Gurdjieff was best known for his piano music, scored and arranged by his Russian disciple Thomas de Hartmann. Although Gurdjieff was not himself a professional musician, he also improvised and composed on the harmonium after his famous, well attended talks. In the last two years of his life, his disciples recorded a number of these improvisations, many of which receive their first public hearing on these disks.

Harmonic Development is an exemplary archival production, executed by Dutch musician and producer Gert-Jan Blom. The centerpiece is a DVD with 20 hours of mp3s, containing intelligently restored copies of all of Gurdjieff’s harmonium recordings. An attached 2 CD set includes selected highlights from the recordings. The whole thing is encased in a 140 page book with photos and numerous reminiscences of the circumstances under which Gurdjieff played – in particular at the Hotel Wellington in New York where Gurdjieff took over a suite and made dinners for 50 to 150 people, copiously watered with top-notch armagnac, conducting numerous toasts to all the types of “idiots”, as he liked to call them, in the room, before retiring to the salon to play the harmonium.

The testimonials to the effects of this music on his disciples range from ecstatic to indifferent, though it’s notable that there are few attempts in the documentation to solidly link the “noo moosics” heard to Gurdjieff’s philosophy. While devotees will be moved by these material traces rescued from sonic oblivion on paper tapes stored in a small shed by a pool in a villa in Southern Spain (amongst other places), to the non-devotee the recordings sound like sad Caucasian folk music, improvised around slowly building, simple forms. Or La Dolce Vita-style film music. Or, as a friend said to me, “some dude playing an accordion in a bar”. But there’s something going on that makes you linger with these sounds – contemplative, emotionally rousing, lacking in gimmicks or distractions – music perhaps for concluding something: a dinner, an investigation, a life.

Originally published in The Wire, 2005.

Group Inerane – Guitars From Agadez
Sublime Frequencies LP
Guitars from Agadez is the second of two recordings of extraordinary electrified guitar music from various parts of the Saharan diaspora issued by Sublime Frequencies this year. Like Group Doueh’s startling Western Saharan fusions of Hendrix and Sahrawi music, Group Inerane will be filed under “ethnic” music, and indeed they are strongly related to traditional musics, in this case Touareg music from Agadez in northern Niger. But setting aside the trademark feminine north African ullulations which explode whenever things really get going, these disks sound not unlike vintage Sun City Girls — amplified, turbulent, complex, abstract while at the same time, hard and funky. In other words, as “modern” as anything made in Europe or America today.
Touareg guitar music was born when these nomads of the Sahara inhabiting a vast desert area spanning parts of Mali, Niger and Algeria were exiled to refugee camps in Libya during political unrest in the early 1980s. Amplified guitars, songs containing otherwise banned political commentary and bootleg cassette tapes became a cultural/political rallying point for performers such as Abdallah Oumbadougou, who also hails from Niger, and the better known Tinariwen, from north east Mali.
Those familiar with Tinariwen will recognise the sound here, but Hisham Mayet, who also made the terrific DVD of music from Niger released by Sublime Frequencies (which also features a performance by Group Inerane), gives a rougher, more lo-fi sound to the group, which threatens to distort and at times disappear entirely in ways that are refreshing after the slickness that still dominates “world music” recording.

Originally published in The Wire, 2007.

Give Me Love: Songs of the Brokenhearted – Baghdad, 1925-9
(Honest Jon’s CD)

We are living in a golden age of archivists and curators, from which are coming music that eclipses in interest most of what individual musicians and artists working today are producing. While recent CDs such as Dust to Digital’s Black Mirror and Victrola Favorites are built around the eclectic tastes of particular collectors of 78s, Honest Jon’s is issuing a series of disks drawn from The EMI archive in Hayes the second of which, Give Me Love is drawn from recordings made by the company (then known as The Gramophone Company) in Baghdad between 1925-9. These disks offer a fascinatingly specific look into the history of the recording of the musics of the world: the sound quality is excellent and there is the promise of much more to come.
Iraq in the 1920s was under British control and recording engineers traveled several times through Baghdad, making over a thousand recordings which were issued in Iraq on the Company subsidiary His Master’s Voice, where they were eagerly bought up by coffee house owners who played records for customers until the advent of radio in Iraq in 1936. The city itself was a complex, cosmopolitan place where many histories and cultures intersected caught in the enormous rupture created by European colonialism. Indian movies, Egyptian music, British marching bands all fed into complex network of Kurdish, Shiite, Jewish folk musics which were eagerly consumed even in places like the holy cities of Najaf and Kerbala, where public sale of such recordings was virtually impossible.
The history of this archive and the process by which these recordings were made, issued and consumed is so complex and fascinating that it almost overshadows the actual music which, despite its topnotch quality, and intelligent documentation via copious sleevenotes, translations and reminiscences might sadly remain opaque to listeners unfamiliar with the many styles of music collected here. There is music from Bahrain and Kuwait, Hebrew hymns of praise featuring hearty cries of “Allah!” courtesy of local Jewish musicians, terrific Kurdish fiddle improvisations, gorgeous laments by Baghdadi chanteuses some, we are told fulfilling dual roles in nightclubs as courtesans, while others sang a religious repertoire for women-only gatherings. Still, lyrics like the following from Mulla Abdussaheb’s “Ya Yumma Weya Baba” – “Ooh, just look at her black headband, so ‘a la mode’ …/You’re trouble — I have abandoned my family for your sake/ The tribulations of your love have turned my black hair into grey/ My family and tribe persecute me because of you” also go to show that some things never change.

Originally published in The Wire, 2008.

FM3 + Dou Wei — Hou Guan Yin
Lona CD

The Beijing based duo FM3’s popular Buddha Machine distilled improvisations and sounds shaped in the course of several years of live explorations down to a series of thirty second loops, set to infinitely repeat. As disks like Staalplaat’s Mort aux Vaches testify, American born Christiaan Virant and Szechuan native Zhang Jian’s live improvisations have a real strength to them, that goes beyond concept and packaging. Zhang Jian began his career as a live musician, playing keyboards in various Beijing based rock ensembles in the mid 1990s. Dou Wei, who plays drums on Hou Guan Yin, is a key figure in the Beijing rock scene, dating back to the early 1990s when he had a goth band called The Dreaming. He’s collaborated with Zhang before in the Bu Yi Ding (“Not Sure Yet”) Band, and with FM3 on 2004’s Story of Flowers in Mirror.

Recorded live in Beijing in 2004, the sound on Hou Guan Yin (Guan Yin being the female Buddha of compassion in China), is firmly ambient, slow repeating loops, with a film soundtrack feel to them that connects with Zhang’s other musical career as a composer for Chinese film and television. Virant contributes some moody guitar lines, while an array of samples from all over the map chatter in the background. The drums are sparse, atmospheric, minimal, often playing an ornamental or improvisatory role while the loops keep up a throbbing rhythm. On other tracks, the extensive use of dub effects starts to sound like Vladislav Delay or vintage Chain Reaction. The whole has a strangely gothic atmosphere, like music for a particularly dark and forlon sequel to celebrated Hong Kong mystery films like A Chinese Ghost Story.

Originally published in Signal to Noise, 2006.

Henry Flynt — Purified By The Fire
Locust CD

Purified By The Fire is the latest installment of Locust Records program of previously unissued recordings by philosopher and fiddler Henry Flynt. A colleague of La Monte Young and Tony Conrad, who revolted against modern classical music, developing his own avant garde hillbilly sound, Flynt made a remarkable series of recordings from the 1960s to the 1980s when he abandoned music for lack of any audience. In the 1970s, Flynt studied with Hindustani classical vocal master Pandit Pran Nath, and in 1980-1 made a series of recordings with fellow Pran Nath student Catherine Christer Hennix supplying tambura drone tapes. These are gorgeous sprawling pieces that, aside from their debt to Pran Nath, fuse sarangi master Ram Narayan’s elegance, with classic hillbilly riffing and the ecstatic quality of early 1960s John Coltrane. That of course is no small achievement. A single 41’ 41” track, Purified By The Fire, holds up well in comparison to the more trebley, tart C Tune and the explosively psychedelic You Are My Everlovin’. The sound is warmer, more meditative perhaps – and along with its siblings, it remains utterly remarkable, 23 years after it was recorded.

Originally published in Signal to Noise.