AMPLIFY 2020: quarantine (III of III)

By Keith Prosk, Eyal Hareuveni, Nick Metzger, Nick Ostrum

Read: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part III

John McCowen - [12​]​[​A​]​123​|​123​[​F]

Clarinetist John McCowen continues experiments in drone, microtones, and overtones with the 22-minute synthesizer piece, [12​]​[​A​]​123​|​123​[​F]. According to McCowen, the sine waves of this piece are “a digital map of the available partial for an acoustic composition on the contrabass clarinet,” the title of which is the fingering for the acoustic piece. Typical of McCowen’s work, there are multiple undulations occurring simultaneously here, creating polyrhythms and synthesizing to form new beatings. There’s some glassy resonance. And low, corporeal rumblings. The timbre is electric but the movement feels natural, as if you’re listening to one of McCowen’s mundanas on clarinet. An interesting view into the process of composition and overcoming performance barriers. Anticipatory of the ever-growing mastery McCowen displays on the clarinet. Invigorating for listeners of sine wave music or microtonal drone. Though certainly not as satisfactory as hearing the breath, the instrument, the human element. - Keith Prosk

Valerio Tricoli - Angolazioni Inusuali Della Tua Camera Da Letto

Valerio Tricoli presents his characteristic concrete music created with his Revox tape recorder on the 25-minute Angolazioni Inusuali Della Tua Camera Da Letto. Similar to his live performances, inputs include field recordings, found sounds, contact microphones, feedback, and FM synthesizer; however, recording at home allowed him to layer three improvisations from one day, resulting in an environment that’s especially alive and writhing. Tricoli is able to terraform glitched, dark atmospheres that feel like a more authentic take on the post-apocalyptic noir Portishead or Nicolas Jaar try to create. Cavernous clicks and rumbling throbbings provide a substrate for passing memories of melancholy violin and piano melodies, mewing cats, and night bugs. True to the name, which can be roughly translated as “unusual angles of your bedroom,” pornosonic snippets pepper the night-like landscape; seductive coos, moans, laughs or cries or both, exclamations of “Ah just like that” and “You like that?” As is often the case with Tricoli, it’s so well-played it sometimes seems composed or heavily post-produced. - Keith Prosk

Julia Reidy - vestige one

vestige one is a seven-minute fantasia from guitarist Julia Reidy. A kind of slow electric freak folk. With heavy finger picking recalling John Fahey circa Red Cross, each note hanging in the air, reverberating. Detuned melodies accompanied with synthesizers evoking a kind of peace and sorrow, or solemnity, that serves as a proxy for spirituality. Not as timbrally or conceptually exciting as many of the other recordings here, but Reidy is always a treat to listen to. - Keith Prosk

Shira Legmann - The Ganges

German born, Israel-based concert pianist Shira Legmann turned in a masterful performance on last year's album Barricade, her release on Elsewhere Records with Michael Pisaro-Liu and so I was excited to see her contribution pop-up on the festival's Facebook feed. On The Ganges Legmann composed and arranged a piece based on a graphic score by fellow Israeli artist Matvey Shapiro on which she plays accordion and cello. Slowly building over the first several minutes, Legmann plays in long swelling chords that tremble like light over water. Her notes join and depart like the tributaries and distributaries of India's holiest river. The cello only plays a supporting role here, buffeting some of the more delicate sounds. Another gorgeous piece from an artist that is rapidly coming into her own, Legmann has just recently released her second album with Elsewhere which comprises her interpretations of selected works by the distinguished Italian composer Giacinto Scelsi. - Nick Metzger

Sergio Merce - Pendulum Movement

Saxophonist Sergio Merce blends his uniquely-valved microtonal alto with synthesizer to create stunning waveforms on the 11-minute Pendulum Movement. The synthesizer creates a low, deep, bodily purr, providing some foreground beatings. The saxophone creates more longform beatings from higher-frequency tones, moving to compliment the movement of the synthesizer, which starts, accelerates, slows, and stops frequently (sometimes sounding like a four-on-the-floor club beat as it slows). A sideways pendulum stopped and pushed again, mapping waves as it moves through time. The blended sound nearly mimics a fan, with the synth actually sounding like the blades and the sax providing that glassy resonance you might hear in the vent as it slows. A satisfying listen extending Merce’s explorations into the microtonal capabilities of his saxophone. - Keith Prosk

Otomo Yoshihide - Guitar and Turntables

The significance of guitarist Otomo Yoshihide to Jon Abbey's AMPLIFY festival cannot be overstated. In Abbey's own introduction for this piece he acknowledges the influence that Yoshihide's own Mottomo Otomo had on the philosophy of his AMPLIFY festivals and the importance of the artist to the first decade of the Erstwhile label. Otomo needs no introduction and his excellent piece for AMPLIFY, simply titled Guitar and Turntables, is a volatile change-up to the more subtle festival material. Separated into three tracks, the first mixes clean electric guitar figures with piercing turntable noise, contrasting the full natural sound of the guitar recording with the spiky intermittent turntable squall. The second track does away with guitar altogether, focusing on the satisfyingly harsh metallic textures of Yoshihide is so good at coaxing from his turntables. On the third track the noise turns towards the ecstatic. Turntables scream in anthropomorphic phrases as the maestro cooly teases jagged figures from his guitar. The squeals give way to scrapes and crackle textures, plucked guitar harmonics and abused stylus lamentations. Excellent. - Nick Metzger

Clayton Thomas - All Things To All People

Beyond the stressors of the pandemic, there’s a lot of extramusical inputs wrapped up in this release. It’s dedicated to Sean Baxter and Cor Fuhler, two Australian improvisers who died this year. To the Eora Nation, the indigenous people from which the land this was recorded on was stolen, a land ravaged by bushfires at the time of recording. And to DJ Screw, the late HTX beatmaker whose mixes Erstwhile labelhead Jon Abbey posted AMPLIFY’s facebook page with frequency to provide inspiration for the musicians involved. The result is a building canon of contrabass technique reset by a gong, like a groundhog day in which you take a step further each time. The total sequence is something like deep woody arco > percussive preparation > hairy buzzing scraping > fishtailing bowing > furious flailing plucking > detuned inside-piano > a noirish plucked line > nails-on-chalkboard bowing > creaking wood > freight train > rapid descending glissandos > piano-like clusters > funk groove. Apparently whatever rules there are kept breaking down and this is just a conceptual sketch to practice overcoming performance or compositional barriers, but it’s a fantastic display of Thomas’ prowess and process-based approach. - Keith Prosk

Sarah Hennies - Bed of Nails

Percussionist Sarah Hennies’ Bed of Nails is a menagerie of objects and extended technique on the kit. Scraped metal squeals and squawks like some wetland aviary. Bowed cymbals create almost inaudible drones. Sometimes a wood block pops. And there’s a gong whose waves are so longform it doesn’t even feel percussive. This kind of percussion, with movement more parallel than perpendicular to objects and with hits deemphasized, emasculates the kit by stripping back the violence and pomp of drumming while upping the emotivity of it with its increased timbral possibilities. Eventually Hennies introduces a mass of second-hand store bells, chimes, and trinkets; waifs cast out like social others (see Sound American’s excellent The Alien Issue ). Here, it seems, a sound is allowed to be a sound, and this is a rich ecosystem of sounds. In this way, and with a run-time of five minutes, Bed of Nails provides a digest of queer percussion, masterfully accomplished by Hennies’ eye for the symbology of percussive performance. The cover art might suggest this is somehow related to Hennies’ The Reinvention of Romance from this year. - Keith Prosk

Clare Cooper - Y’s Clocks and Radios

Clare Cooper, usually found playing harp or zither, presents a spokenword story backed by metallophone pulses on the brief, five-minute Y’s Clocks and Radios. The text is a bit silly, highlighting a surreal, absurd, comical thread strung through some of Cooper’s work. And there’s a focus on mimickry and blurring sometimes found in echtzeitmusik’s headier projects. The title suggests a clock or clock parts; the text mentions a xylophone, vibraphone, and glockenspiel (and clocks); it’s unclear if the beat is created from these or something else entirely. The text speaks of language, and translating tik and toks to binary (maybe morse too), and the listener might begin to wonder if there’s just two texts. And it speaks of love, so often physically associated with pulse, the fluctuations of which the listener might relate to the affections of characters in the text. Musically, this is simple and dull. Conceptually, it’s a powerful demonstration of psychoacoustics, or how the introduction of a few different variables can change the listener’s perception of even a simple sound. - Keith Prosk

Áine O'Dwyer - Stone Sketch

Áine O’Dwyer, perhaps most famous for her organ and harp work though certainly familiar with the realm of field recordings, makes sounds with a stone for nine minutes on Stone Sketch. What’s astounding is how familiar the materials sound, despite being used in unfamiliar ways, and how O’Dwyer unfolds the listener’s understanding of the materials they’re hearing. There’s a tap of stone on wood before it scrapes. The taps reverberate, as if in a church, perhaps on a pew. Eventually, a stone tap rings so loud it vibrates strings, so an instrument. And then it scrapes across the strings, enough to be a piano or harp. The stone explores the strings, dull across the pins and massaging out glissandos. The wood and gut sound so rough the stone must be smooth, a river stone. It’s rhythmic with rich textures, though not very musical. An interesting piece of sound for sound’s sake and investigating the listener’s relation to and interpretation of it. - Keith Prosk

Ilan Volkov - Melodyharp

Ilan Volkov trades in his usual violin to shred on a melody harp for ten minutes on Melodyharp. Similar to some of his violin work, he explores the sounds of the whole instrument. Rubbing and scraping the body, the strings. It’s amplified, drenching the simple, often blithe instrument in ominous distortion and feedback. Volkov plays the strings with sustain unusual for the instrument, though perhaps with scraping fingernails, since no sound here is so mellow to suggest a bow. And he plucks delicate, detuned, spiderlike, spindling unmelodies, both close and far from the pegs, and sometimes so strongly the strings slam the soundboard. The melody ascribed to the instrument becomes evident, but I’m not familiar with it. And again similar to some of his violin work, he teases out beauty and catharsis from the maelstrom. - Keith Prosk

Reinier van Houdt

drift nowhere past (22 March 2020)

friction sleep maze (22 April 2020)

horizon without traveler (22 May 2020)

sky waves trails (22 June 2020)

bardot for Cor (22 July 2020)

mystery of erasure (22 Aug 2020)

Composer/pianist Reinier van Houdt contributed a series of pieces to the festival which were created on the 22 of each month, offering the listener an evolving window into his world, a sonic journal. As mentioned previously I’ve really enjoyed van Houdt’s collaborations with Michael Pisaro-Liu the last several years and his record with Bruno Duplant on Elsewhere last year was another favorite of 2019. On drift nowhere past (22 march 2020) van Houdt’s playing accompanies a woman’s talking, humming, and singing. The voice is comforting, maternal almost, and complements the plaintive piano melody. Various recordings are juxtaposed, voices, passing vehicles, the tolling of a bell. The mood of the track evolves from a warm coziness into a slight foreboding towards the end. On friction sleep maze (22 April 2020) undulating electronics mingle with piano and percolating rhythmic sounds sourced from field recordings. Dialogue, again a comforting presence ushers out the early drear as screeches and grima provide a tense, decomposing culmination.

The third piece, horizon without traveler (22 May 2020) begins with elegiac, garbled speech, footsteps, bits of orchestral music, all mixed in with the kind of noises that my brain associates with David Lynch movies. The track shifts into a synth-driven haze that incorporates additional domestic recordings, piano, cradlesong, water sounds, and a voice repeating “she was a visitor.” The next piece (and the longest of van Houdt’s contributions) skies waves trails (22 June 2020) begins with thin, high pitched tones that quiver against each other as lower pitched drones encroach causing difference tones and interferences. The sound sources are harmonium and piano played with glass and ebow, but the feelings they are sculpted into are all Reiner van Houdt, as he also wrote this piece as a dirge for his father who passed 18 years ago.

His fifth piece entitled bardo for cor (22 July 2020) is in tribute to the composer Cor Fuhler who passed away this year, and is comprised of what van Houdt “recorded, played, played back, read, and heard in my surroundings after I learned Cor had died.” Included are snippets of Fuhler’s playing among harsh noise, electronics, and field recordings. This may be the most experimentally electronic of his pieces but it still fits within the arc that he has created with his contributions. The final piece is titled mystery of erasure (22 Aug 2020) and closes shop in ethereal fashion, layering all manner of sounds in thin wisps of strata. As the track develops the concrete sounds dim into a cavernous banging before receding into impersonal spoken word, piano fragments, and whining drone. - Nick Metzger

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AMPLIFY 2020: quarantine (II of III)

By Keith Prosk, Eyal Hareuveni, Nick Metzger, Nick Ostrum

Read: Part 1 | Part II | 

Delphine Dora - lost in my dreams, a nightmare maybe

It begins with chirping grasshoppers, and a hazy buzz. A quiet piano nudges in, followed by a variety of vocal, water, wind, and unidentifiable sounds. Indeed, the fabricated and the “natural” sounds blend into a single slowly churning morass. Polyphonic voices lend the piece an air of ghostliness, or of fractured memories. Other more musical elements (keyboards, synth) likewise lend some humanity to the track, but also strangely elevate it from the birds and splashes. It is difficult to pierce the veil, here, but maybe that is the point. Lost in my dreams, a nightmare is all veil. It is all blur and dream. Dora calls this a nightmare, and the track certainly progresses into heavier, more menacing territory including a mimicked a dog growl. Presumably this is a reference to the chimerical figure in the included artwork. Then again, the piece concludes with soothing sounds of water dropping onto a tinny surface. Maybe the nightmare is itself is lost in the dream and is therefore diluted. Maybe the rain actually washes it away. Either way, lost in my dreams, a nightmare is appropriately eerie (and what dream is not), but ultimately serene. - Nick Ostrum

Jérôme Noetinger - “The day will come when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you strangle today”

The title is taken from the words of Chicagoan anarchist and radical labor activist August Spies when he faced his death on the gallows. French electro-acoustic improviser and Revox tapes master donates all contributions to ADA, a non-profit organization working in Grenoble to help Asylum Seekers. The five pieces, composed at Noetinger’s home on April 25-30 attempt to be the soundtrack for the last moments of the short life of Spies and to serve as a sonic testament for activism and social consciousness, especially in times of crises. As a sonic anarchist himself, Noetinger borrows, without permission, samples from the British punk rock band Crass and the proletariat trance collective Henry Flynt & Nova'Billy and offers a chaotic, noisy and explosive - literally - narrative for this era, where all the familiar political and economic paradigms shatter and better ones have not arisen yet. It ends with twisted, down to abstract, white noises blended into the version of Henry Flynt & Nova'Billy to “The International”. These are the real sounds of our times. One of the best releases of Amplify 2020. - Eyal Hareuveni

Toshimaru Nakamura - NIMB #61

No input mixing board (NIMB) innovator Toshimaru Nakamura's contribution NIMB #61 is an incandescent sonic sculpture of prickly redlined mixer feedback. To this listener the melodic undertones of the overdriven maelstrom nod to shoegaze genres or albums like Belong's October Language as much as the minimalist EAI sounds from his past work, and are consistent with the sound established on his previous solo release, 2018's NIMB #9 though maybe slightly less rhythmic. He was also a part of Magnus Granberg & Skogen's enchanting Let Pass My Weary Guiltless Ghost which I've really been enjoying this fall, in part due to his contributions. I don't think I've ever heard anything he was involved in that I didn't like, even his early experiments in high frequency tones are unique and intriguing, if not exactly easy listening. - Nick Metzger

Lance Austin Olsen - I woke up this morning and Richard Penniman was gone

 

Lance Austin Olsen is an intriguing musician. Although he frequently collaborates with Jamie Drouin among many others, there is something eminently solitary about his work. Sometimes this is unmistakable, as in his exploratory audio-visual project Craig’s Stroke. Sometimes, it comes across more in his cut-and-paste technique that captures sounds in stilted time, and sequences them into newly imagined and newly compiled soundworlds. I woke up this morning and Richard Penniman was gone is one of the latter. As the title indicates, this track speaks of loss, but in a curious and contemplative rather than emotive way. And, it bears all the hallmark subtlety, graininess, and inventiveness that much of his other work carries, even if it examines space and isolated sounds more than oscillating hums and layers that characterize his busier works. - Nick Ostrum

Matthew Revert - Duo for Ulcer and Throat

Multidisciplinary artist (and another AMPLIFY 2020 co-conspirator) Matthew Revert is another alumni of both Kye as well as Erstwhile and may be known as much for his excellent graphic design chops as for his unique music. His pieces are mainly populated with the sounds of highly processed field recordings and it seems to be his M.O. to make each of his creations sound completely unique from the rest. That's definitely the case for his three contributions to the virtual festival of which this second one really caught my ear (and eye). Duo for Ulcer and Mouth is populated by an orchestra of gruesome cakehole sounds. Grunts, coos, gurgles, raspberries, murmurs, cackles, wreching, you name it have been chopped up, processed, and arranged into a 20 minute collage that serves as one of the more unique a capella pieces of the year (this is anti-ASMR). - Nick Metzger

Steve Beresford & David Toop - No Relation

 

On No Relation we have a blind collaboration between the legendary English musicians Steve Beresford and David Toop . Only the duration was agreed beforehand, and then each participant recorded their piece and sent them to Taku Unami who dubbed them together. The piece works marvelously well, blending Beresford's spare piano travels with Toop's busily eclectic sound field. Many happy coincidences such as early in the track as Beresford seems to perfectly time his stabbed chords or at just past the seven minute mark when his tone darkens just as Toop expels eerie vocalizations with the combined effect giving off ominous overtones. Toop fills out the piece out with his multi-tracked bombardment, his sounds continuously shift and change in intensity, density, and variety. A thoroughly enjoyable experiment. - Nick Metzger

Claire Rousay - im not a bad person but…

Fantastic piece here from blog favorite Claire Rousay, as a confessional takes the form of machine generated speech. Her confessions range from the darkly humorous to those she really does feel badly about. It's extremely candid and honest and ultimately very human. As the confessional progresses a field recording swells from the background. Soft melancholic piano chords drift in. All the while Rousay's confessions continue, tragic and humorous, of guilty pleasures, drug use, sex. Crowd noises drift into the field, people passing, talking then onto quiet footsteps. The album thumbnail is hilariously perfect. Another piece Rousay released this year called it was always worth it could perhaps be considered a companion piece to this one so you might want to pick that up too if you enjoy what you hear. - Nick Metzger

Michael Pisaro-Liu - Tai Pi

If forced to pick a single favorite piece from the AMPLIFY 2020 set it would be Michael Pisaro-Liu's contribution Tai Pi. I have to first admit my bias, as I've probably listened to Pisaro-Liu more consistently than any other composer in the last several years. His projects are consistently fascinating, both musically and conceptually. In the last several years though, he has really issued some special releases. His collaborations with Reiner van Houdt, The Earth and the Sky (which initiated Abbey's ErstClass sub-label) and Shades of Eternal Night (on Pisaro-Liu's own Gravity Wave) are incredible; I really can't recommend them highly enough. Then there is his 2019 opus Nature Denatured and Found Again , a multi-year endeavor based on his flussaufwärtstreiben (floating upriver) project that I'm still working on fully absorbing almost two years later. Also released last year was his excellent Barricades album with pianist Shira Legmann. The album's terse, grayscale piano and spectral electronics blew me away while I was still wrapping my head around Nature Denatured…

On Tai Pi the haunting takes on a cinematic scope with a multipart suite of ethereal fragments and hints of melody that feel as familiar as they do strange. I’m not even sure of the source material of some of the sounds here, there is definitely piano, some guitar I think, field recordings, strings, samples, but other than that I’m at a loss, though the how doesn’t really matter. Pisaro-Liu’s sounds drift across the stereo field, gauzy ambience, piano doublets, crickets, delicate electronic floats, cavernous groans, almost impossible to do justice with the written word. Beautiful, that’s a word for it. The title references I, Ching hexagrams 11 (Tai, Peace) and 12 (Pi, Standstill), alluding to the sentiment that in order to know peace, one must experience discord. The desire for Peace and the familiar can lead from further growth and lead to a stagnation (Standstill), which reminds us that all life changes and moves towards growth. The song concludes with a melancholy Satie-esque piano epilogue that will stick with you long after you’ve stopped listening. I've just starting digging into his recent release Asteraceae with Zizia (the duo of Amber Wolfe and Jarrod Fowler) as Pisaura on Sedimental Records and look forward to spending some time with it in the coming weeks. - Nick Metzger

Catherine Lamb - fragment study of inter-spatia

Dense layers of strings out of which slowly emerge streams of notes that elongate, suspend, and fall in and out of tune. There is more sound and obvious movement than Viola Torros, her duo with Johnny Chang, but the focus on excavating melody from creeping drones seems a continuation of that project. At an hour and twelve minutes, this one of the longer pieces in the AMPLIFY catalog. And, I know, an hour of an incrementally drifting wall of sound may sound daunting, but fragment study of inter-spatia is a wonder. At times, one gets lost in the music. At others, one wanders from the music. But, in its deceptive monotony fragment study of inter-spatia is quite captivating. Something is always moving, even if in no detectable direction. It’s like time, or, as the title hints, the spaces between eventful moments. Sometimes those spaces fade into the background to be forgotten. At others, they dramatically and tenaciously persist. - Nick Ostrum

Anne-F Jacques/Tim Olive - Sur Place/Staying

What is more solitary, and more reassuringly so, than soft scratches, gravely churns, and wrinkly crackles that slowly coalesce into a cohesive unit of off-centered and out-of-sync loops and occasional crescendos? I mean that only partially in jest. Jacques and Olive have stumbled upon a unique blend of woodshed noise that plays more with incremental changes in timbre and resonance than the plodding linearity that so often characterizes lower-spectrum EAI. Jacques and Olive have been working in this medium for years, but rarely under such circumstances (isolated sound-file sharing). The lack of real-time responsivity has lent this piece a more sinister and somewhat less delicate air than some of their other work. Rather than just an observation, that point actually means something in this context (staying in place, per the title). Despite the cyber-optic mediation, this literal depersonalization and missing interaction does not betray a lack of connection. Instead, these are two recordings made for each other and overlain by visionary practitioner of noise production (Taku Unami). Sur Place/Staying nevertheless embraces a different kind of intimacy, a simultaneously remote and claustrophobic intimacy with which we have all become more familiar. - Nick Ostrum

Taku Sugimoto - Lines 2

Highly influential guitarist and composer Taku Sugimoto's contribution to AMPLIFY 2020 is a graphical score for guitar and field recordings calledLines 2. It's the second part of his graphic score Lines that was interpreted by the Tokyo Bagabond Collective (of which he's a member) and is available on the artist's Bandcamp page. The track begins with the whirr of a transformer, dogs barking in the distance, cars passing quietly, birds singing, all accompanying a long ebow-generated drone of guitar strings whose frequencies overlap and dance. Sugimoto's spare acoustic guitar figures accent the din as do the periodic swells of feedback that complement the droning strings. Sugimoto has been a favorite of mine for a long time now and was instrumental in the early development of this type of music, the AMPLIFY festival, and Erstwhile Records and it's a pleasure to see him continue to evolve and expand his sound. - Nick Metzger

Keith Rowe - GF SUC

This is the second of Keith Rowe's contributions, and I really could have written up either to be honest. I chose this because it's a little more straight forward to explain, but do listen to both . For this piece Rowe arranges various radio/news snippets related to our current situation over a recording of Shostakovich's 25th played by the Taneyev Quartet, all the while teasing amazing little sounds from his tabletop guitar and electronics. The snippets are with regards to hospital PPE shortages, the uncertainty of high school and university graduations, the shutting down of professional and college sports, the stock market crash, the uncertainty of the newly unemployed, George Floyd's murder and institutional police violence against African Americans and communities of color, the failures of leadership, and many other themes related to the pandemic and subsequent fallout, sometimes in series, sometimes layered as if simulating the bombardment of all the troubling scenes playing out around the world day in and day out. It is a brilliant synopsis from one of the great treasures in all of experimental music and a keystone of the Erstwhile/Amplify esthetic. If you didn't follow along with the festival on Facebook, Jon Abbey did hint that Rowe might be scheduled for an upcoming release on his ErstClass sub-label which I think we can assume will be brilliant. - Nick Metzger

Rhodri Davies - For Simon H. Fell

Rhodri Davies freely plays the harp on the hour-long For Simon H. Fell. Recorded two days before and released on the day of the late bassist’s death, the dedication is particularly powerful because of the mentorship Fell provided to Davies. It’s worth noting that all proceeds Davies receives from this release are forwarded to Fell’s wife, Jo. This is true play, flitting freely across timbres and techniques. Mimicking gongs, percussive plucking allowed to hang in the air like vibraphone, hitting high-tension strings sounding like shooting space lasers, his characteristic dual-bowing, detuned lullabies, creaking mastheads, a giant mbira complete with circular rhythm, a ringing gamelan, zimbelstern twinkling, grandfather clocks chiming, and hurdy gurdy are just some of the associations his playing might resemble. Nearly a catalog of harp sound but never sounding rote. True to his style, much of it seems folk-inflected or informed by traditional musics. And particularly commendable is Davies comfort in silence, with large swaths of it throughout the hour. - Keith Prosk

Charmaine Lee - SAL’s Nu Edition

Vocalist Charmaine Lee can produce sounds you would probably never associate with a human and, on SAL’s Nu Edition, she seems determined to demonstrate quite a few about as fast as she can. Across four minutes, you can hear at least flapping, sucking, breathing, popping, gasping, and gargling, chirps, purrs, quacks, raspberries, and cheek play, and suggestive, seemingly commercial phrases like “it’s so big,” “mmhmm,” “look at the size.” This is hyperactive.Fast-forwarded. Heavily post-produced. Kaleidoscopic. Chopped up catalog of vocal extended techniques. Like Aronofsky’s hip hop montages. Fun. - Keith Prosk

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AMPLIFY 2020: quarantine (I of III)

 

By Keith Prosk, Eyal Hareuveni, Nick Metzger, Nick Ostrum

Read: Part I | Part II

Erstwhile labelhead Jon Abbey has organized AMPLIFY festivals intermittently for 20 years, bringing together some of the brightest minds in improvised and new music and often curating inspired first meetings, but this particular festival might be the most significant yet. The COVID pandemic crushed improvising musicians’ already fragile livelihoods, stripping them of traditional live performance opportunities for most of the year. Myriad efforts to subsist arose. Musicians released a deluge of digital solo efforts and previously unfinished archival recordings. They streamed performances, sometimes even well-curated series of them as in Ken Vandermark’s OPTION interviews and quarantine concerts. Some musicians overcame the solitude of lockdown by sharing and overdubbing home recordings to simulate interplay and instant communication. Abbey, with help from Vanessa Rosseto and Matthew Revert, brought together over 100 musicians to record and release 240 works spanning 80 hours as part of AMPLIFY 2020.

We briefly review forty-five recordings here, over a three days. There’s so much material to enjoy, we regrettably don’t cover many musicians that are blog favorites, and many more that deserve to be. Releases range from a few minutes to hours. Unmixed and unmastered to surprisingly superb audio quality. Sketches, vignettes, and brief views of ongoing projects to what may as well be finished products. Solo to duets to overdubbed orchestrations. There’s enough variety that there’s something for everyone. Listeners familiar with these musicians will often find these pieces illuminate the essence of these musicians’ approach; as such, they also provide excellent entry points for listeners new to these musicians. We’ve ordered reviews chronologically by release date, which doesn’t necessarily correspond to recording date, to perhaps provide insight on project growth, and maybe changing perceptions of the pandemic and other (seemingly always unfortunate) events of this year. AMPLIFY 2020 has a bandcamp page at which most releases are available, all for free, and we’ve included bandcamp embeds for ease of listening, but we ask that you visit their blogspot page if you intend to download these works, to avoid bandcamp fees. All proceeds of bandcamp and blogspot donations go to the musicians, except in cases where the musicians choose to forward funds to other, often charitable, ends. Jon Abbey and every one of the musicians. involved in this project have been marvelously generous in giving us so much. It would only be neighborly of us, in a time when these musicians need it most, to give them our ears for a time and, if you can spare, some funds that might otherwise go to enjoying music anyway. We hope you enjoy the constant discovery this project encourages; we know we will for a long time to come. - Keith Prosk

Mazen Kerbaj - I Swallowed A Modular Synth

A 14-minutes solo trumpet of the Lebanese trumpeter Mazen Kerbaj, recorded on the night of 18 to 19 March 2020 in his home in Berlin, with no overdubbing and no use of electronics. Apparently, Kerbaj did not swallow a modular synth but he incorporates into his vocabulary the lexicon of such vintage electronic instrument. With subtle use of extended breathing techniques and what may be a gurgling of water, he creates a compelling soundscape comprised of a quiet rustle of abstract, bubbling noises that patiently intensifies and gains more nuances. - Eyal Hareuveni

Grisha Shakhnes - the lesser the water the firmer the jelly

The Tel-Aviv-based sound artist recorded the lesser the water the firmer the jelly in his home on March 18 during the COVID-19 lockdown, trying to capture what it felt like being at home during the onset of this whole thing. This 21-minutes piece is an almost silent and quite unsettling soundtrack of loneliness and anxiety, made of mundane, random home-made sounds, with no glimmer of hope in sight, and ends abruptly with a slamming of a door. - Eyal Hareuveni

Judith Hamann - days collapse days collapse night

Cellist Judith Hamann incorporates voice, field recordings, and feedback for a contemplative piece reflecting the gravity and doom associated with the pandemic and solitude of lockdown on the nine-minute days collapse days collapse night. Hamann’s hymnic ooos and aaas harmonize with glassy feedback and melancholy arco. There’s something like waves but it’s not clear if its tape whirr or a field recording of waves, wind, or drawing. Something like a motor purring that could be feedback or a pencil stumbling across a surface. Something creaking that might be the cello or a chair. A child’s voice. Things blend together. Despite its heaviness there’s a certain hopefulness to it, lullaby-like, with an atmosphere similar to Grouper’s Dragging a Dead Deer Up A Hill. A rewarding sketch certainly related to this year’s Music for Cello and Humming , her debut solo. - Keith Prosk

Vanessa Rossetto - perhaps at some time you have acted in a play, even if it was when you were a child 

This is the first of two album-length contributions by the American sound artist (and AMPLIFY 2020 co-organizer) Vanessa Rossetto. Layering domestic recordings with electronics, objects, and acoustic instruments she creates an ambience that blends the familiar day-to-day sounds of life with 'the other'. She's highly innovative and isn't afraid to take risks or go in new directions. I've followed her work since she released a trio of albums on Graham Lambkin's since retired Kye imprint and it always stands out in an increasingly crowded field. Perhaps at some time… has a sort of cottony delirium about it, as the various field recordings are sometimes muddled beneath the layered sounds. It's like hearing waking life through the veil of a dream. Towards the middle the piece opens up into a pretty melodic drone of bowed strings and electronics before the next wave of scenes and sounds. The latter half of the piece ratchets up tension in the form of an ominous, buzzing din before dissolving it into an effervescent cloud of heavy reverb. - Nick Metzger

Ivan Palacký - Sanctuary

This is a document of electromagnetic sensor recordings aimed at uncovering “all the ‘hidden’ sounds of everyday electronic devices” in Ivan Palacký’s flat in Brno. It was recorded on April 2, the first day of the quarantine. Already, the origin of this piece seems the embodiment of the AMPLIFY project. It reflects the solitariness of such confinement, but also the continued desire to engage with others, even if only to detect their electronic traces. It reflects the strange stultifying effect of the quarantine (and this is terribly strange) while attesting to the time that such solitude can give us to pursue projects of no monetary value and certainly no value to our employers, but that are for some untapped reason important to us. Then, there are the impulsive dimensions. After three weeks, Palacký recorded a performance with three sewing machines over the music and the result is the recording we have here. Theoretically, Sanctuary opens many doors. Aesthetically it is fascinating. I would not have considered this, even just the background hisses and crackles, as a field recording had I not read the description. I certainly would not have guessed that at least some of these crackles are the result of sewing machines, which, incidentally, I first heard as instruments on a century-old prison blues piece fittingly described as a “field recording.” The sounds on Sanctuary, of course, are not blues, even if one can hear the same confinement, loneliness, desire for shared experience and sheer expressiveness that characterize the blues-as-feeling behind this synthetic clatter. The result is a minimalist piece of electro-acoustic sound-art that reminds me of some of the solo production of D’incise. That is a high complement. - Nick Ostrum

Lucio Capece - Raum als Zeit

This 40-minutes minimalist drone of Argentinian, Berlin-based musician is made of a filtered cardboard tube, recorded in the outside room, ring modulator recorded in the inside room, plus analog synthesizer with filter and delay effects and bass clarinet, recorded in Berlin on April 4th. The title, Raum als Zeit, Space as Time in German, captures faithfully its essence. Capece creates a distant, atmospheric drone that suggests a sense of stasis, being out-of-time. Or if we address the COVID-19 pandemic, outside our conception of time before the pandemic and our dark, melancholic perception of the shrinking dimensions of time and space, as we are more than ever locked in our homes since the eruption of the pandemic. - Eyal Hareuveni

Burkhard Beins - Outside In

German percussionist and sound artist created a detailed, 10-minutes sound play which anticipates an imminent doomsday catastrophe, with analog synth, samples, field recordings, and treatments, recorded in his home in Berlin on April 7. The chaotic and fractured flow of industrial sounds mixed and contrasting natural sounds stresses how much we - the human race - has exploited nature without investing too much thought about the plight of future generations. It comes with rare cover art in the AMPLIFY 2020 series that actually depicts such a troubling scenario. - Eyal Hareuveni

Graham Lambkin - Snails in Clay

Lambkin’s AMPLIFY 2020 contribution, Snails in Clay (also his first new solo piece released since 2017's Two Points on the Angle), plays like an aural treatise of early quarantine. The piece opens with the heavy clip-clop of a passing horse drawn carriage on a quiet street. The track continues with languid field recordings as Lambkin's voice intrudes, reading bits of deconstructed text, stammering, slurring words. Lambkin is all of us improvising a way through with the leftover shards of a broken reality. The track then drifts into swells of warm room resonance, ending in a haze. Of course I'm probably projecting some, and I think part of the reason this piece struck me so heavily is due to its stark contrast with Lambkin's previous album, a collaboration with Joe and Charlie McPhee. Live at the Batcave was released last year on Oren Ambarchi's Black Truffle imprint and is a collage of Lambkin's archival recordings of he and his son Oliver partying and jamming with the Brothers McPhee. The overriding sentiment of the record is of friendship and good times, so perhaps you can see what I mean by stark contrast. However grim its association, Snails in Clay is an amazing piece that deserves a close listen, especially for those already inclined. Also be sure to check out his record with Bill Nace, The Dishwashers , out on Open Mouth records. And finally, RIP to Charlie McPhee who passed away in June, our thoughts go out to Joe and his family in a year that didn't require additional heartache. - Nick Metzger

Sean Meehan - Souvenirs

Percussionist Sean Meehan’s Souvenirs typifies the foci of his style: spotlighting one aspect of the kit at a time; the relationship of sound and space; beats almost imperceptibly transforming into new beats; performance bordering on performance art. The first six minutes are all zimbelstern creating twinkling, chiming polyrhythms. The next 11 are body-mounted cymbals, shaking and rattling as he moves around his apartment. There’s great control here; the play is more sustained than chance would allow. Different frequencies of rattling heard at different distances from the recording device create the movement, as do resonances and barely-there melodies that emerge from the cacophony. There’s seemingly distant, greater clangs like church bells. The sound is corporeal. And like a shifting tremolo. As always, the complexity of layers Meehan can tease out of a single, simple instrument is profound. - Keith Prosk

Peter Rehberg - Piece for AMPLIFY2020 quarantine Parts I & II

The head of Editions Mego label, author, and electroacoustic musician created this 30-minutes piece at Twisted, Berlin on April 13. This is a chilly, layered electronic drone. It sounds like its detailed and varied, high-pitched, and noisy layers always hover above a threatening and highly resonating, dark, and deep abyss. These ethereal, lighter layers sound as clinging with their last resorts to the upper layers, where air and light are still abundant. A clever reflection of this era, when we all are facing this or other, metaphoric or real abyss. - Eyal Hareuveni

Nate Wooley - Primary Material for Failure One

 On composer and trumpet player Nate Wooley's piece Primary Material for Failure One an ocean of low frequency rumble is pierced by long held trumpet tones that bring to mind LaMonte Young's The Second Dream of the High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer… More electronic tones are superimposed over the undulating backdrop setting up interferences that gave my subwoofers a workout. Wooley's solo work is some of the most exciting in all of free improvisation, he truly is an exceptional artist and this makes a great companion piece to his other 2020 solo release Three Studies for Future Uncertainties . Also, if you hadn't heard it yet check out his collaboration with Paul Lytton, Known/Unknown , which is excellent as is the exhilarating sixth chapter in his Seven Story Mountain cycle which came out in mid-October. - Nick Metzger

Joda Clément - A Sea-Minded Man

Joda Clément is a sound artist from Vancouver, who is part of a wave of musicians/composers who specializing in cutting, pasting, layering, and twisting field recordings through a variety of digital techniques and acoustic overlays. The two pieces on A Sea-Minded Man were recorded over the course of a few days in March and April. The first was “assembled” and the second, “mixed.” I am not sure the distinction Clément is drawing, but these are both thoroughly conceived and executed sound collages (field recordings of an airport, train, boat, bicycle, false creek [?]) with some limited “musical” elements (harmonium, acoustic synthesizer, electromagnetism). They offer glimpses of times past, folded and shuffled over time in a manner that reflects how remembrance functions. This is compelling sound art a la fellow Canadians Lance Austin Olsen and Jamie Drouin, even if Clément’s work is much busier. In fact, it seems Clément and Olsen collaborated with Mathieu Ruhlmann and Daniel Jones on Caduc album that I somehow missed. A curious and delightful listen that makes one ponder the new importance that fragmented and faded memories of insignificant everyday events has assumed. - Nick Ostrum

Lasse Marhaug - April 15th 2020

I am not sure whether he was inspired by the quarantine or if he just was in the right mood, but on April 15, 2020, Lasse Marhaug laid down 26 minutes of captivating woody and metallic (but, really, synthetic) textures enveloped in a swaying soundworld. Had I not known the instrumentation, I would have thought he was actually playing with bells, symbols, and other objects, lopping off and looping the sounds he produced later on when he compiled the piece. As the piece progresses, the listener is exposed alternately to angelic hums, persistent crackles, periodic metallic ruptures, and a heavy, foreboding undertone. Although this fluctuates, too, this is the one element that seems most persistent and grounds the composition in a rather heavy and foreboding situation. And then, in the last few minutes, comes the storm, followed by a slow, pulsing bass tone to drag the piece to its conclusion. Although the characteristic rumbling, metallic elements and oscillating heavy drone are there, April 15, 2020 is somewhat warmer and more restrained than some of Marhaug’s other work. For that, it is all the more intriguing. - Nick Ostrum

Aaron Dilloway - Chicken Traces

Chicken Traces was recorded at home with his two chickens, apparently just a few days before Aaron Dilloway (Wolf Eyes, Universal Eyes), Wrench, and Bloowie gave their epic performance for the Experimental Sound Studio Quarantine Concerts series. And, Chicken Traces is fittingly wild. Conceptually, I absolutely love it. Dilloway has rigged a selection of metal plates, guitars, and other clangy surfaces to some sort of sound processor. To get his bandmates to participate, he has thrown feed around the installation and, sometimes, even jostles the performers in one direction or another. (They are chickens, after all.) For his part, Dilloway lays some electronic layers and further manipulate the sounds that Wrench and Bloowie create. Despite the demystification of explanation (sorry!), hearing this recording (and watching the live version on the ESS Youtube page) is still a mysterious, exciting experience. This might be my favorite of the bunch. - Nick Ostrum

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Ivo Perelman, Matthew Shipp and Joe Morris - Shamanism (Mahakala Music, 2020) ****

By Sammy Stein 

Ivo Perelman, Matthew Shipp and Joe Morris have worked together to produce a CD, part of a series where Perelman works with 3 guitar variations, the acoustic, (with Pascal Marzaon on Dust of Light/Ears Drawing Sounds), oud (with Gordon Grdina on the upcoming The Purity of Desire, which also includes the impressive Hamin Honari on Tombak and Daf) and here, the electric guitar.

'Prophets and Healers' is a superb, almost classical opening to the album with Shipp peeling back a layer just enough to reveal his inner Beethoven. Not so with 'Shamanism', which is more of a quick-fire conversation with piano and Perelman's sax in gloriously chipper altissimo mode. There are some intriguing turn abouts as the trio establish shifting shape formats of sonic objectivity, their capacity to instantly compose and listen resolutely resulting in some sonic sculpting and challenging harmonics. A glorious blast from the tenor in lower register indicates a shift in tempo and key at one point, whilst a chordal flurry from Shipp in another results in a helter-skelter career down the ascent form all three players. Shipp's gentle caress of the keys in the last few bars is beautiful.

'Spirit World' is darker, deeper and rumblings emanating from the piano strings contrast exquisitely with the rise and fall of the tenor tone. The trio paint soul-searching imagery which fires the mind as well as the soul and this time it is Perelman who shows a decidedly sensual side during the middle sixth whilst the last portion has the guitar sliding slickly into every gap imaginable. 'Trance' is mesmerising due to the complexity of the interactions. A thundering chord section from Shipp just before the half way point provides a shocking awakening before a gradual quietude descends and the sax sings, sighing over a set of punctuated, heavy chords.

'Altered States of Consciousness' is a sleepy, intoxicating, short number with Shipp again peeling back another layer to reveal his effusive, melodic twin. This sets up nicely for the delicious, wildly evocative 'Spiritual Energies' which sees the trio flying musically around each other, like ethereal banshees, occasionally weaving a portion of music around another but mostly flying in their own orbit, yet somehow linked inexorably to the other players, especially in the (almost) repeated harmonic sections in the first and final thirds. Beautiful.

'One Who Knows' sees Morris coming forward sound-wise on the guitar in the opening section, with the others revelling in the leadership shown, Shipp providing deep, emotive chords and Perelman stutting and flowing across the top. Punchy rhythmic patterns are offset by moments of near tranquillity in this shifting, contrast of a track. The final build out is superb, the angry piano complimented by the light touches of the guitar strings and the fade out leaves a sense of being stunned.

'Divination' is a lyrical, poster painted picture of a number with dashes of colour, a touch of grey and some dark shades of blue and black in there as well. Shipp is rumbling under the singing sighs of the sax whilst the guitar skips fluently across its 6 strings over the 88 of the piano. Even the final cheeky sax blast is perfect left in as it brings a smile.

'Supernatural Faith' is spiritual, celestial and carries within a sense of wonder and reverence whilst 'Religious Ecstasy' is crazily good with lots of interconnected developments, the musicians picking up and taking each others' offered themes and spinning them into something very beautiful.

This album is listenable and the imagination of the three musicians can be heard and felt as they circle each other and interact. What is noticeable is that every gap - even the tiniest half bar is immediately filled, as if it was a sin to leave any space un-played. At times the strings of piano and guitar meld and form a base upon which Perelman's sax builds and ricochets from but mostly this is three musicians improvising as they should, composing on the spot and producing something quite special.

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