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The Necks, Weasel Walter, Butch Morris & Lou Reed

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The Necks

Issue Project Room

January 27, 2010

There was a moment right at the brink of The Necks starting up their first set, where the notion hit: what if they can't think of anything? What if they can't begin? What if, finally, after more than two decades, this same familiar familial trio can't conjure up anything to say? When improvisers launch off into free space, there is frequently the concern that they might not be empowered on some particular occasion, but in the end they usually manage to pull something worthwhile from their collective sac.

So, as The Necks girded themselves for their customarily hour-long exploration (a Necks piece is always lengthy and is always constructed around a gradually growing linear pulse-flow), there was a moment that felt much longer than the standard instant. There was what could only be described as a long silence.

Of course, the concern evaporated once they started to sculpt. These three Australians have a composite sonic character, a set of techniques that frequently allow them to bypass the conventional expectations of their instruments to the extent that it sometimes becomes difficult (or even undesirable) to unthread their contributions into the sonic categories of piano, bass and drums. Indeed, without any accustomed use of electronic effects, individual Neck vocabulary can sometimes suggest the mimicry-nature of loops, delays, processed patterns and other digital interventions.

Pianist Chris Abrahams fingered his keys in a fashion that built up resonance and reverberation, creating repetitive blocks of progression, scintillating veils of ripple. He could have oscillated all night, and he actually appeared to be doing so, but when a small adjustment was made, it had the impact of radical change. He was deeply involved, peering sternly into the piano's inner space, brows furrowed, head tilted.

Until halfway through the piece, Tony Buck could have left most of his drum kit down under. It was a tantalizing degree of restraint, to work mainly across the cymbal array or tickling bells and tiny metal plates, scraping glanced puffball strikes. After a while, a more active rhythmic pattern emerged, once again investing the music with a gravid tease—the goods eventually delivered, if the goods could be viewed as some kind of release.

Lloyd Swanton's bass set up a primitive repeat cycle; it shifted its shape at an almost imperceptible rate. He even removed one hand periodically, as if to leave his instrument to its own resonant devices.

As they elected to play two sets with a restorative intermission, each of the evening's improvised journeys lay around 50 minutes, instead of the hour or 70 minutes The Necks might reach were they delivering a single festival-style set. Yes, there might be some kind of rulebook governing a piece—the length, the pulse, the development, the patterns, the repetitions. The cumulative effect could be, in a very positive sense, described as cultivating a numbing sensation. As with the cream of minimal and repetitive music, a state of boredom was never a pitfall consequence.

For the second segment, Buck found a sound that he could repeat with great control, as he revolved an antique bell-chime device around the rim of a drumhead, on which was placed a gong. The result felt disembodied, and it was frequently the case that the source of a Neck sound might have been, at first, unfathomable. The second piece utilized the social energies of the intermission, and where the first piece was exploring the acoustic subtleties of the Issue Project Room's austere, white space, the second was more aggressively rhythmic, led by Buck's full engagement with all parts of his kit.

No other unit could reach into a remotely similar sonic area. The Necks might have been very comfortable in each others' spaces after all these years, but their predictable methods never produced predictable results. It's almost as if their music was disembodied from conventional human touch, arriving from some unknown abstract source. A shimmering excellence was achieved.

The Weasel Walter/Marc Edwards Group

The Wharton Tiers Ensemble

The Knitting Factory

January 31, 2010

Drummer and guitarist Weasel Walter moved to New York City in December 2009. Originally hailing from Chicago, he'd been settled in Oakland, California, for six years. He hasn't taken long to grapple with the NYC scene, immediately playing a plethora of gigs in a variety of settings. This six-piece combo was jointly led by Walter and his fellow sticksman Marc Edwards, who churned up a thundering foundation alongside the savagely-thrumming bassist Adam Lane, providing a tensed muscle for the horn section's severe lacerations.

Sporting a Norwegian Black Metal T-shirt, long lank hair plastering his face, repeatedly gobbing on the stage (spitting, to all you non-punks), Mister Weasel was visibly in thrall to the trappings of rock 'n' roll. Surely his Cecil Taylor LPs are nestled right next to his Stooges records. The band specialized in the hardcore essence of free jazz, excising all the slow parts and banishing all of the quiet stretches. After all, they didn't have much more than 30 minutes before the next act took to the stage. Time was short, and there was too much energy to dispel.

Boston's Forbes Graham is making an increasingly noticeable trumpeting impact on the New York (and beyond) scene. He was phosphorescent here. Philadelphia's Elliot Levine was ripping out savagely on tenor saxophone. Also on tenor, and similarly rugged, was Aaron Burnett, substituting for an absent Darius Jones. Burnett emphatically filled those heavy boots. All three horners were frenetically switching roles from ensemble blowing to solo blurting, rising up, scything across and raging with a beautifully sculpted excess. Meanwhile, Walter and Edwards were maintaining a constant blur of drum-thunder undercurrents.

This combo was followed, very sympathetically, by the Wharton Tiers Ensemble, who operated from within a No Wave rock framework, but dealt with similar ideas of sonic build-up, even if within a riffing format rather than affecting a howling-freedom levitation. Born in Philadelphia, Tiers moved to NYC in 1976, where he began playing drums and percussion for Laurie Anderson and Theoretical Girls. From the early 1980s onward, Tiers has been primarily known as an engineer/producer, working with Sonic Youth, Swans, Pussy Galore, Royal Trux, Unsane, Helmet and Glenn Branca. His own music stands closest to that of the latter artist, emitting a strong odor of late 1970s/early 1980s NYC soiled-urban attitude.

It was sheer ecstasy to reel in front of such a guitar-loaded band—five, including bass, plus a mewling alto saxophone. The instruments thranged in unison, interlocking and snagging a mutoid-funk groove, steadily striving for an almost unbearable accumulation of clustered strokes, driven obsessively by the pounding syncopations of Tiers. The sound may have been oddly nostalgic, but it still seethed with present power.

Butch Morris

The Nublu Orchestra

The Stone/Nublu

February 1, 2010

Unlike many birthday celebrators, Butch Morris had elected to mark the very day that his conduction process reached its 25th anniversary. He'd printed up some explanatory cards, which were distributed on the night of these two complementary gigs in two contrasting East Village venues. Let's hope that the slightly funereal look of the cards doesn't herald his special technique's passing. Instead, we anticipate many more years of seeing and hearing this vital process in action.

There are other artists who have been working in this general signal-prompt zone—John Zorn and Walter Thompson among them—but it's Morris who has enjoyed the most significantly long-standing presence. In the words of his explanatory card, conduction is "a sign and gesture structure- content exchange utility to construct or modify sonic possibility in real-time." Let's say that it's a hierarchical form of improvisation. Because Morris is in the position of prompting his massed playing force, he effectively has the last word on the nature of an unfolding piece (at least more so than any individual musician who's a part of the given performance's ensemble.). Also, some of Morris' already existing conductions have a pre-ordained set of parameters.

Even so, as it became clear at The Stone's early evening seminar, Morris always allows freedom of content in terms of what each player creates. He might shape the attack, duration, volume, repetitive quotient, stereo- spreading or active-player permutations (to name a few possibilities), but the actual sound that issues from a member's instrument is usually at the discretion of that individual. Morris might be an improviser, but his instrument is the entire ensemble, albeit with a large degree of unpredictability feedback, which is very likely to influence his next real-time direction.

This was an inspired evening, beginning with the seminar, which also felt like an actual gig for much of the time, even if in a more informal manifestation. For this lecture/demonstration Morris chose to use a string octet, ranging from violin to upright bass. This highlighted a particular sonic area, but was a useful tool for illustrating how a multitude of possibilities can spring from even a single family of instruments. One of the main revelations was how much of a memory facility was demanded from the players, once Morris moved into the area of snatching motifs and then requesting repeats, complete with their original phrasing dynamics.

Then, at 10 pm, Morris sauntered up Avenue C a few blocks to the Nublu club, an inspirational joint that regularly invites jazz onto its thinking-person's dance floor. Morris has had a long-standing Monday night residency (which comes and goes) employing the Nublu Orchestra as his conduction pawns. This is a very different prospect from the string octet set-up. The agreed vocabulary is The Groove, and the band's house sound is pretty much in sympathy with the sonic terrain that Miles Davis was stalking during the first half of the 1970s.

There were two drummers (Kenny Wollesen was one), two guitarists (Doug Wieselman was one) and a horn section that included trumpeters Graham Haynes and Kirk Knuffke. Nublu's owner, Ilhan Ersahin, was also in the ranks, blowing tenor saxophone. Morris always makes a point of segueing out of and into whichever platter the night's DJ is spinning, and this must certainly have affected the rhythmic motion of each extended set-piece. Band sections were melded together into shifting plates of riff, as conduction proceeded.

The Nublu Orchestra was arrayed on their usual high plateau, even if the first set took 15 minutes or so to connect and stabilize (or destabilize?) its elements. There was a point where the piece locked into a shambling groove, as Wieselman strafed out jagged, fragmented guitar chords. The second set leapt right into heavy business and proceeded to pulse with a disconnected funk limp, syncopated with broken interlocking sounds. The true joy of this evening spent with Morris was its long movement from attentive seminar moderation to late-night club swirling, all of it inscrutably reflecting the many facets of conduction's mirrorball potential.

The Fireworks Ensemble: Lou Reed's "Metal Machine Music"

Miller Theatre February 5, 2010

The last time that I saw the Fireworks Ensemble, they were presenting a program of cartoon music. This concert in Miller Theatre's Composer Portrait series offered a rampantly contrasting platform, as they set about reproducing the sonically excessive, scorched wasteland of Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music. When it was released, back in 1975, a folkloric tale took hold that the guitarist had offered his four sides of vinyl extremity to RCA as a cynical, contractually-imposed maneuver. A present-day airing of Reed's four-part overtone-feedback epic reveals this as complete nonsense, of course. In reality, he was laying the groundwork for bands such as Sonic Youth and naturally extending concepts born with The Velvet Underground. The work was revived in 2002, with a transcribed and scored version by saxophonist Ulrich Krieger (with help from Luca Venitucci). The music was performed live and subsequently released on disc in 2007 by the German moderne classical ensemble Zeitkratzer.

For this Miller Theatre show, conductor and musical director Krieger presented his score to the Fireworks crew. The process was implicitly Reed-approved, and the composer/creator was actually in the audience for the duration, without any visible earplugs. The first observation to make was that the expanded ensemble ended up being a multi-instrumentalist impersonator of the interior sound of a howling electric guitar, or even several such beasts, overdubbed into a layered cataclysm. The second observation was that it would be a willfully perverse act to actually insert the earplugs offered up by the Health & Safety folks at the door.

The eight-piece Fireworks core was augmented by a further octet that included accordionist Guy Klucevsek. The full spread included flute, saxophone, trumpet, tuba, piano, bass, percussion, viola, violins, cellos and even a sole guitar. Instruments were grouped shiftingly, forming battalions that would rise and fall as the four parts progressed. The accumulated onslaught was initially brutalizing, but as the ears and body and mind adapted, an uncanny sense of tranquility grew. It was as though the effect was similar to the buildup common to minimalist music, even though this was maximalist music to the max. Shimmering shifts of prominence were made, and the ongoing morass would lull or numb the listener periodically, before violinist Esther Noh would (mostly) direct the rhythmic staccattack-o, wielding the entire band in a swooping release before a fresh crescendo would be born. Sometimes, an accordion or a saxophone would sound like themselves, having a jarring effect as they emerged from the overall howling.

The natural acoustic sound of the instruments was subjected to heavy amplification. Sometimes their original qualities shone through. At others, they shape-shifted into new, unholy sonic cowls, what lay under encrusted, opaque, gnarly and half-gobbled. There wouldn't be much point to this exercise if it was attempting some kind of facsimile reproduction. The proud aim was to use Reed's original improvisations as a lodestone for orchestrated elaboration, which was at once detailed in construction and primitively blunt. I think that Reed surely enjoyed hearing his own work magnified into something other, but still keeping its spirit intact.

Now, he has remastered the original album for reissue on double gatefold quadraphonic vinyl (oh, these are the days!), DVD and Blu-Ray. It will be coming out in April 2010 on Reed's own Sister Ray label.

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