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PROMOS: I only accept physical promos, not downloads. If you believe your music fits my site, please send your tapes/CDs/vinyl to:

KILLED in CARS
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Evan Parker - Whitstable Solo (Psi, 2010)

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Given the impressive size of his back catalogue (measured both in depth and breadth), it is easy to approach a new Evan Parker album with trepidation. This reaction is understandable; it seems almost natural to expect that after decades of output, an artist or band must begin churning out steaming turds -- with age it all comes undone, or something like that. So then Mr. Parker's forty-odd (fifty?) year tenure should make him an octogenarian, or at least someone who you would not like to see behind an automobile. Yet Whitstable Solo, along with Evan Parker's other recent releases -- like Relevance, out this year with Dave Liebman and Tony Bianco, on Red Toucan --, stand up alongside the classics in this free jazz elder statesman's discography.

Psi records (see comments section for historical details) has made a name for itself (partly) by reissuing old and out of print free improv records, many on which Parker played. Whitstable Solo, on the other hand, is a collection of eight songs performed in 2008 at Whistable, UK -- seven of which were live and in front of an audience, while the remaining track was squeaked out before the crowd had arrived.

The jams start in typical Parker fashion, with a cyclic squall of soprano sax nonsense lasting nearly twenty minutes. This is definitive Parker, pioneered way back on Saxophone Solos, and now, to my ears, one of the most easily recognizable styles in jazz. The haze brought on by Parker's relentless upper register recedes in the midsections of this album, revealing a tender and uncharacteristically gossamer sound. The sixth solo is, dare I say, almost melodic! But purist shouldn't fret, for Evan Parker's shrill saxophone reemerges in the final two tracks, obliterating any lingering sense that this gent is softening.

Each passage may have antecedent within Parker's own catalogue. In the solo setting, it may be too much to expect truly unique and new material; however, in collaboration, Evan is still redefining the boundaries of his instrument (see 2009's C-Section, with John Wiese). Even so, this album is a delight; I would love as many "derivative" solo albums from Evan Parker as possible.

Peter Ablinger - Voices and Piano (Kairos, 2009)

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Here's another from docperkins (and I strongly recommend it):

Some people believe that a photograph captures the soul and fend-off a camera as if the essence of their being is about to be abducted at the imminence of a click. Ablinger atonal works operate along the same capturing principle, extracting the music of celebrities’ speeches, concomitantly to the celebrities uttering that speech. The phantasmatic Other of the utterance acquire shape, inasmuch as the meaning that fulfilled the utterance is discarded on behalf of a structure that dispenses with inner meaning, given that it is a derived musical form. And then some.

In 1968 Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes pronounced the author dead. The two Latino poststructuralist thinkers demonstrated that it was about time to stop considering authors as almighty producer of meanings and unique sources of signification. Along these lines authors should not bear the ultimate interpretations of works of art in general, not even of their own artistic productions. The death of the author proclaimed by Foucault and Barthes became a cornerstone for a radical understanding of modern aesthetical production and consumption of art.

I could see this radical des-authorisation coming in music. If one takes a close glimpse into the recent history of serialisms, one can perceive that the trend had been pulsating in-between the lines and as palimpsests in outrageously insightful works, e.g., Luigi Nono, Luciano Berio and Salvatore Sciarrino, these illustrious offspring of Anton Webern. However, no one had stared in the eyes of the issue as Ablinger is hereby doing.

The matter was not to aestheticise the death of the author in the best ‘middle-class tradition’ of celebrating losses with phoney messes, but rather to take the death of the author as a template for aesthetic practice and criticism. The word of order would be, therefore, to extract music from the supply of meanings that in modernity had been monopolised by the Author through spoken and written narratives. The point is that there is music in that monopoly; words in sequence can only come to being meaningfully in music. So, how this music would sound like if played side by side with the narrative, seemed to be an exciting working programme, which Ablinger takes up while killing the author, akin to Foucault agenda. The latter is radical: by killing the author playing music without a composer it displays, by the same token, the ontological limits of improvisation in music.

Come to think of it, how can music derived from spoken discourses be considered improvised if its structure is given by the author’s eagerness to make sense (to ‘make meaning’)? Furthermore, how can music derived from eagerness to make sense not be improvised, given that the authors of those discourses had no intentions to make music while talking sense? Improvisation in music, proves Ablinger, is the worshiping of an unsung god, or counting on help from an unknown, invisible hero. There will always be a hidden structure somewhere in the unconscious making sure that that which was deemed improvised is pure symptom. And what is a symptom but a field- marshal of desire, and what is desire but the ontological grammar of a subjectivity, and what is a discourse but an attempt to rationalise that symptom, and what is Ablinger’s aesthetics but the sound of the symptom?

Ablinger says that “actually the piano part is the analysis of the voice. Music analyses reality”. I beg to differ, and will hereby engage the same principle he, unbeknownst to himself, used, which is the one of the death of the author. Ablinger shall not have the ultimate interpretation claim over his achievement. He appears to be perfectly aware of what he did, but not at all of what he did does. The music is not analysing reality. The music at stake is the Real or, in other words, the unconscious non-symbolised counterpart of the reality of the discourses. Therefore, music could not analyse reality. What it does instead is to promise that without music ideas can neither be produced nor conveyed in spoken form. Consequently, the fear of this kind of music is the fear of making sense, and to stop making sense is the inability to perceive music.

Foucault asserts that once the death of the author is properly carried out “all discourses, whatever their status, form, value, and whatever the treatment to which they will be subjected, would then develop in the anonymity of murmur”. Ablinger brings up this funeral murmur to irreverent, mesmerising music. Let us rejoice, finally a modern requiem was composed to mourn the death of the Author and celebrate the re-birth of meaning. The requiem, alas, is atonal.

Rdeča Raketa - Old Girl, Old Boy (Mosz, 2010)

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Rdeča Raketa is a Vienna-based duo comprised of Maja Osojnik and Matija Scdellander, whose 2010 collaborative cassette, “Old Girl, Old Boy,” combines their admirable and respective training in electronic and improvised music composition. “Old Girl, Old Boy” is a contextual and exploratory digital/acoustic collage that demands: 1) literally putting yourself on the electronic device table to comprehend (or not) the complex fusion of these often abrasive, wacky, yet tremendously skillful sounds; and 2) freeing yourself to be a part of whatever adventure on which the entire 37-minute track might take you. In other words, like the composed improvisation itself, the listening experience simultaneously demands intensive focus as much as it does an ability to go with it, wherever the heck that might be.

The first half or so of this cassette appears to be a cry for help, but I don’t mean this in the sense that anyone or anything needs help. The abstract sounds created by the sub-bass recorder, e-bass, and a mish-mash of indistinguishable electronic trinkets appear to emerge from a deserted electro-acoustic island of sorts. The clicks, bumps, loops, drones, human voices, and bass tones, all underscored for the first ten minutes by a constant state of electronic panic, never seem to reach any grounding or final destination. The first half, in sum, is an uncertain and sparse call composed of choppy SOS signals (sometimes human, sometimes not, but always nature-culture). The first part of the latter half (“half” here is defined simply by time; the piece itself has no obvious starts or stops, never mind halves, quarters, etc.), however, sees these sounds reaching the mainland for the first time, a dark, somewhat hopeful, ambient land/soundscape where the panic subsides, even if temporarily, before a sense of uncertainty takes over again around the 25-minute mark, or around the time when a human joins us again for a few seconds, only to disappear rather unsettlingly.

“Old Girl, Old Boy” is brilliantly disconcerting, and, admittedly, will take a few more listens before I really get what might be going on. Spending more time with this album may or may not be a good thing, though, because those big jungle birds sound really fucking creepy.

Christopher Canning

Ido Govrin - Moraine (Interval Records, 2010)

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A Moraine is a geological phenomena; the accumulation of unconsolidated debris, soil and rocks compacted under glacial drifts. Over time these assemblages of loose matter form topographic features gradually exposed to the surface world by retreating glaciers.

Govrins' work evokes this process. Particles of sound are held in a state of suspension, encapsulated by frosty ambiance. Gradual drifts transform his soundscape, tracing subtle patterns of force and revealing contours over time. The naming of the tracks illustrates the variety of forces found in the formation of Moraine, thus mapping distinct processes of geological change; Ground, Push, Lateral, Terminal, Medial, Recessional.

Drawing on a sonic palette of processed cello and violin alongside digital sound synthesis, Govrin has created a work that feels compacted, cold and timeless. Through listening we participate in the process of glacial compression; to be buried deep beneath moving mountains of ice. There are moments that are stark, crystalline and beautiful as in Ground, where cello and violin weave elegiac tones through waves of distortion, and Medial which presents a world of crackling drones punctuated by ghostly and transitory string harmonics.

Comparisons can be drawn with Hildur Gudnadottir's Without Sinking, which is built around a similarly frosty, bleak and expansive use of cello and signal processing. At times reminiscent of the electro-acoustic music of Iannis Xenakis, Govrin engages in a comparable attempt to map features of the natural world through composed sound. Well produced and based on an engaging premise, this is a novel work that succeeds in subsuming our imaginations in geological phenomena.

Fíacha O' Dúbhda