Entries associated with the tag "experimental music":

I didn't listen to much from young composer and musician Jonathan Chen, who graduated from Northwestern with a master's in violin performance in 1999, until after he left Chicago in 2004. But since then I've been repeatedly impressed by the consistency and rigor of his work. He's occasionally sent me pieces of music from Middletown, Connecticut, from Karlsruhe, Germany, and most recently from Athens, Georgia--all places he's lived since leaving. The recordings usually come in advance of return visits like the one he's making this week, and every time they reveal new facets of his output.

Tuesday Chen performs at Elastic and on Wednesday he's at Heaven Gallery. On both nights he'll play solo and with his project Patterns of Affect (pictured; the lineup currently includes Jamie Kempkers, Joe Mills of Haptic, and Peter Rosenbloom of Tiny Hairs).

The two pieces that Patterns of Affect will perform at each show push minimalist precepts to the breaking point, avoiding the usual incremental development of such music in favor of rich stasis. The piece that gives the group its name opens with loose banjo arpeggios, spinning and spinning, and then suddenly opens up with the addition of violin, cello, hurdy-gurdy, and electronics, all working over the same simple pattern and creating a luxuriant thicket of harmony. On "To Be Continued" Chen repeats the same series of chords on an acoustic guitar "for as long as he can make them meaningful (to himself)," accompanied by a music box that uses player-piano-like rolls that unspool onto the floor; the melody is never in sync with the guitar, and the slippages create lovely and unexpected juxtapositions.

Both nights Chen will also perform "Three Switch-Hitters," a pure electronic piece built from feedback created with a computer program for real-time sound synthesis called Supercollider. I don't know enough about the software to guess how he created this music, but I do enjoy the violent but balletic ebb and flow of its writhing, wriggling sounds.

Today's playlist:

Information, Biomekano (Rune Grammofon)
Noah Creshevsky, To Know and Not to Know (Tzadik)
Afrirampo, Kore Ga Mayaku Da (Tzadik)
Jacob Sacks, Eivind Opsvik, Mat Maneri & Paul Motian, Two Miles a Day (Loyal Label/Yeah-Yeah)
Vladislav Delay, Whistleblower (Huume)

Late last year New World Records issued a fascinating document of the work of the League of Automatic Music Composers, a Bay Area group that in the late 70s and early 80s became one of the first to use computers as real-time musical instruments. Few people have ever heard the brazenly experimental material produced by the LAMC--a group of largely self-taught tech geeks that included John Bischoff (pictured), Jim Horton, and Tim Perkis--but their canny exploitation of early microcomputers like the KIM-1 (which went for around $250 when it was introduced in 1976 and operated with a mere 1 K of user RAM) presaged whole worlds of music making that would open up in the decades to come. They formed an interactive band of networked microcomputers, wiring three or four separate machines to one another to produce spastic, unpredictable, and deliberately raw blasts of synthetic blubbering, squealing, squelching, and humming.

The new CD collects ten pieces recorded between 1978 and 1983, culled from 30 cassettes kept in an old shoebox. The music is unmistakably (and understandably) primitive, created by jerry-rigging crude gear, a la LAMC contemporaries Voice Crack (whose approach, while similar, was even more improvisational and low-tech) or countless subsequent bargain-bin hackers (like the Chicagoans in the defunct 8-Bit Construction Set). Joined for brief periods by important electronic-music figures like David Behrman and Paul DeMarinis, the LAMC developed strategies and programs that allowed their highly challenged machines a limited kind of artificial intelligence--one computer might react to specific pitches it "heard" by triggering rhythmic functions in a second device--but they left enough room for chance and randomness that the music was often essentially improvised. In their extensive liner notes, Perkis and Bischoff write:        

"A typical League session would consist of setting up our computer systems in a living room and laboriously connecting them together. With wires running everywhere and our computer programs finally debugged, after several hours we would eventually get the system up and musically running. Then we would play, tuning our systems and listening intently as our machines interacted. When surprising new areas of musicality appeared, we took notes on the parameter settings of our individual programs with the hope that recalling those settings in concert would yield similar exciting results."

The group ceased activity in 1983 due to the Horton's crippling rheumatoid arthritis (he died in 1998). Bischoff and Perkis eventually started another network band called the Hub, which has been active sporadically for more than two decades.

Bischoff, currently teaching music at Mills College in Oakland, has produced a small but strong body of solo work since the dissolution of the LAMC. His most recent album, Aperture (23five, 2003), uses current software (namely the fairly ubiquitous Max/MSP), but spontaneity and chance remain vital components of his music--the album was recorded in real time, and there are no overdubs. A beautiful piece like "Piano 7hz" uses piano notes as source material, but the sustained notes from the keyboard are not only processed but seem to be triggering other elusive sounds--pings, ringing bells, water drips. I won't pretend to know how all this stuff works, but I can say that the results can easily be appreciated without such knowledge. On Saturday night Bischoff gives a rare local concert at Lampo, where he'll perform four recent pieces. 

Today's playlist:

Anthony Braxton & Joe Fonda, Duets 1995 (Clean Feed)
Andy Moor, Marker (Unsounds)
Soft Machine, Volume Two (Water)
Mattin & Radu Malfatti, Going Fragile (Formed)
Antonio Sanchez, Migration (Cam Jazz)

This past spring Andrew Fenchel, the main man behind the invaluable experimental music presenter Lampo, announced that his little operation would be shutting down and returning in a new location this fall. For the eight years Lampo had presented concerts at 6Odum, on Chicago Avenue in Ukrainian Village, but sharing space with a recording studio (Semaphore) created increasing logistical problems. He asked supporters to contribute money for the upcoming move and an upgraded sound system. 

Now, finally, with just a few weeks left before winter, Lampo has returned. Earlier today Fenchel announced the new location—216 W. Chicago, on the second floor. The excellent German sound artist and producer Marcus Schmickler (pictured) will be the first to perform there, on Saturday December 15. A full schedule of events for this winter will be announced later.

Today’s playlist:

John Fogerty, Revival (Fantasy)
Brötzmann/Van Hove/Bennink, s/t (Unheard Music Series/FMP)
Bill Evans Trio, Explorations (Riverside)
James Carney, Green-Wood (Songlines)
Celia Cruz & Johnny Pacheco, Cecila & Johnny (Vaya/Fania)
 

This weekend the Gene Siskel Film Center is screening Sounds of Silence, an interesting documentary that explores the difficulties of making pop, rock, and hip-hop music in Iran today. Following the war with Iraq in the 80s—which took the lives of about a million citizens—Iran experienced a crazy population boom, and now almost 75 percent of the population is under 30. It’s no wonder with such a generational imbalance that the kids are thirsty for some cultural activity that speaks to them rather than their elders. The filmmakers present a wide variety of opinions from young Iranian musicians, most of whom talk about how hard it is to make music under such a culturally conservative, repressive regime, though they all seem fairly determined.

The storytelling is pretty good; the problem with the film is that the music is almost all bad. I’m sure if their limited exposure to outside music explains why so much of the rock music these musicians play evokes bad 80s memories, or if it's just that the filmmakers weren’t particularly interested in aesthetic concerns. A much more interesting example of Iranian music was released a couple of weeks ago by the great Belgian label Sub Rosa. Persian Electronic Music: Yesterday and Today 1966-2006 devotes one disc each to Alireza Mashayekhi, widely regarded as one of Iran’s most important and daring contemporary composers, and Ata Ebtekar (aka Sote), a musician in his mid-30s who’s made records for labels like Warp and Spundae. Both of these guys are older than the subjects in the film; Mashayekhi came of age well before the Islamic Revolution—studying in Vienna and Utrecht—and Ebtekar, who was born in Germany, spent his youth both there and in Iran before moving to California for college (he now lives in Tehran). Regardless, the music is far more interesting than the washed-up sounds you hear in the documentary.

Mashayekhi and Ebtekar both use traditional Iranian musical systems, instruments, and folk songs as loose source material or inspiration, but nothing on this two-disc set sounded distinctly Persian to me, though my grasp on the organizing principles and traditional Iranian music is admittedly anything but sure-handed. The pieces by Mashayekhi (which range from 1966-82) are more rigorous and use complicated methods for composition and organization, while the Ebtekar disc (credited to Sote) seems more ephemeral: “What if a master ney player, tar player, setar player, santoor player and kamanche player were taken hostage by extraterrestrial life—put in a camp with state-of-the-art musical machines—and were told to teach improvisation to artificial intelligence. The music of Sote is the sound track to this scenario.” Riiight. Luckily, the music makes up for that bit of silliness. I should note that his work here is decidedly abstract, with little in common with his more dance-oriented material.

Keyboardist Paul Giallorenzo is probably best known around town as one of the driving forces behind the eclectic performance space Elastic Arts (formerly known as 3030 when it occupied an old Humboldt Park church), but he’s also an active presence on the local free jazz and experimental music scene. Along with saxophonist Dave Rempis, cornetist Josh Berman, bassist Anton Hatwich, and drummer Frank Rosaly, he’s a member of the group Get In to Go Out, which has a forthcoming album due on 482 Music. But it's with his duo, Masul, which recently released its debut, The Arousal City (Creative Sources), that he's captured in a much more abstract light.

A collaboration with Swiss reedist Thomas Mejer (who enjoyed a fruitful Chicago residency a few years back as part of the Sister Cities program with Lucerne) Masul crafts subdued yet colorful electro-acoustic meditations, shuffling cycled melodic snippets, hovering drones, gently rippling noise, and all manner of sibilant breathiness (courtesy of Mejer’s whispery, unpitched columns of air). Giallorenzo is credited with piano, synthesizer, found samples, and computer, and it’s to Masul’s credit that the genesis of any given sound often remains hazy, both musicians managing to forge a rich entwined sound stream where the subtle interactions are clearly audible.

On Monday, June 30, Giallorenzo will collaborate at Elastic with another Swiss musician, sound artist Marie-Cecile Reber, who specializes in capturing the sounds and motion of nature (such as the swaying of flowers in the breeze) and translating them into abstract electronic tones.

Lampo, the quirky Chicago experimental-music presenter, celebrated its 100th concert last month with a performance by British turntable artist Philip Jeck at the raw Chicago Avenue space 6Odum. Lampo's been producing concerts at 6Odum since 1999, but Jeck's was the last; Lampo organizer Andrew Fenchel promises a new venue when shows resume in the fall. A fund-raising call recently went out asking for help with the costs of relocating, which includes buying a new sound system and building out the space. In a charming display of modesty, the suggested donation is just $9.99, although Lampo will happily accept more. Fenchel writes, “We don't have a space finalized, but I'm confident we will soon. We have a few good options that we're weighing. At one point late this spring I thought we were very close to a space, but it didn't pan out. The main challenge, of course, is money.” He notes that some past performers have already contributed, including Keith Rowe, Jerome Noetinger, Peter Rehberg, Lasse Marhaug, and Joachim Nordwall.

Lampo has been an invaluable presence in the city, bringing in musicians for exclusive performances—often to debut original works. The music is on the fringe, but the artists presented are some of the most original and important experimentalists in the world. If you’re interested in giving you can lay down your cash here.