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| | | w.m.o/r (germany) #w.m.o/r 29 cd michel henritzi “keith rowe serves imperialism” compact disc recordable - improvisation (10:12)
- feedback (10:17)
- independance (10:14)
- action directe (9:44)
| | click the play button to hear an excerpt of "independance" |
| the title aside (which seems to have done exactly what was intended :: get people buzzing away in their respective internet hives) this is a servicable record of discrete noise-improvisation, with michel henritzi’s turntable, guitar, hammer / electric saw / acoustic guitar, and “jack” solos in the right channel, while shin'ichi isohata, bruce russell, mattin, and taku unami offer separate solo improvisations recorded independently of henritizi’s material(s) on the left ...
you can take it as a quadrilogy of cage-lineage “happy accident” pieces (any events lining up in the “stereo” versions are purely by chance), or two individual mono recordings :: a solo michel henrizti album or a compilation of music by the contributors (simply acquaint yourself with the pan-knob on your stereo)
the improvisations are fairly interesting in and of themselves, with a prevailing attitude towards embracing guitar-noise / anti-music (henritzi’s “jack solo” should say everything here) - sensible given the titles (all cribbed from masayuki takayanagi recordings) ... |
| | michel henritzi
keith rowe serves imperialism
w.m.o/r 29 cdr with 8 p. booklet
1 - improvisation
right channel : michel henritzi - turntable
left channel : shin'ichi isohata - gibson johnny smith 1965, playing acoustical
2 - feedback
right channel : michel henritzi - guitar
left channel : bruce russell - guitar
3 - independance
right channel : michel henritzi - hammer, electric saw & acoustic guitar
left channel : mattin - guitar
4 - action directe
right channel : michel henritzi - jack
left channel : taku unami - computer...
taku unami's track had been recorded at hibari studio in tokyo (november 2006)
mattin's track had been recorded at the burger of christ in berlin (october 2006)
bruce russell's track had been recorded at the temple of music, lyttelton, nz (october 2006)
shin'ichi isohata's track had been recorded by md at isohata's house in kobe (september 2006)
michel henritzi's tracks had been recorded at the black room, theatre du saulcy, metz (october 2006)
dedicated to the memory of derek bailey and masayuki " jojo " takayanagi
...
keith rowe serves imperialism
" nowadays musicians are really protecting something that is far more than a tradition, which is really cool but also is in total contradiction with the form, that pagan bawling, which gave it birth. " lester bangs main lines, blood feasts and bad taste
" i have always known that some musicians used to work on some material a whole day long and dealed it as an improvisation on the same night concert. " gavin bryars from derek bailey's book improvisations
improvisation, as it is played since joseph holbrooke *, this face to face between two or several musicians as stuck inside the nakedness of acoustics as they are inside their own histories and strategies of playing, this all about asking and answering kind of playing which stays the basis of most of the improvisational music meetings, is still nowadays keeping on doing and undoing itself through that usual kind of horizontal relationship. since its origin, free improvisation - if we cannot pretend to lock it in a fixed terminology - is forced to reject everything that had been constituting itself in order to make it really happen. listener's hear has very quickly identified this practice as a style as sure as he was able to recognize a flamenco or a blues tune. linear relationships had to be broken as spatial relationships had to be torn to pieces so that each musician must become a middle central point. members of amm, since the 60's, will have been the craftsmen of this epistemologic rupture.
the improviser steps into a relationship with what he already knows about the other one, anticipating over his playing strategies. improvised music identity is deeply identified as the musician's own identity. each musician is culturally determined throughout the influence of his hands' memory and throughout the restraint of his own instrumental limits. if speaking of idioms about free improvisation is debatable, it is not yet possible to deny the fact that it is marked by the improvisor's idiosyncrasy. as an instrumentalist the improviser is progressively building his own language and own vocabulary all along his whole trip ; improvising is nothing but the stating of his own self built vocabulary, an in a real time construction or, to say it differently, it is a reflex determined by a renewed context. deep inside him there is like a temptation for drawing his own trace, for fixing himself, for letting us hear his own language. this is why the question will be never more the generic one : is it improvisation ? but it will be the acting one : when does appear improvisation ?
" if the main reason why we are listening to music stands in the fact that we can hear in it the expression of passion - as i believed it all through my whole life - how far then will this music be considered as good enough ? what this whole thing is really telling about us ? what kind of thing are we ratifying within ourselves through that worship of a so neutral kind of art ? and in the same time what are we destroying or at least are we belittling within ourselves ? " lester bangs main lines, blood feasts and bad taste.
keith rowe used to say about derek bailey that he was still stuck in an old language, in a stammering language. that he deeply was the gate keeper of tradition just because bailey was still making phrases. perhaps bailey has always tried to get in touch with the other one and has been trying to tell about himself so that he could be able to tell about the other one. but if bailey is kept prisoner by history then rowe poses as a post-modernist. history is then no more inhabited by men but is just an hazy matter thrown onto the screen of art. rowe's big find will not have been in putting the guitar on the table, a gesture that was just a following one to the cage's prepared piano or to the joseph kekuku's hula slide, but is to have introduced the radio in his own set : a ready made by which politics stepped inside the closed field of cultural avant-gardes. if the radio receptor opens up the very closed area of art to the social area, it is also very significant that this reality would become its spectacular mediation. this summoned reality is nothing but its negative, its faked performance. we do not stand within a relationship between an indoor and an outdoor to the musical area but within the representation of this relationship. what is then given through its listening is nothing but the gloomy songs of the socialite du spectacle. we have not yet stepped out of the world of art as radio waves are doing nothing else but just widening the concert hall.
bailey, stucked to his vertically held old technology, stands up with a more primitively political gesture : he entirely is within a social relationship between consumers who came there in order to listen to a piece of music and to him too as a musician solely paid for the price that was fixed before his performance. but through this symbolic exchange there stands a political gesture. that one that consists in telling a story or an idea throughout a syntaxic acoustical construction. if music is borrowing to language or painting in order to regenerate itself, that does not mean to cut off anything from its own gesture. both bailey and rowe deal with a gesture that is producing some exchange value, the one which founds the whole economy inside the cultural area.
its conclusion is lying in its recording, that reproductible merchandise that is endlessly repeating the very moment of its production and contradiction. the manufactured record is deifying the living moment of the performance into a finished work, into an object which is just feeding the market of art.
" i could say that if recordings seem to be by themselves a problem, it is because they generally produce some records. " derek bailey, improvisations.
" a commodity appears, at first sight, a very trivial thing, and easily understood. (...) the form of wood, for instance, is altered, by making a table out of it. yet, for all that, the table continues to be that common, everyday thing, wood. but, as soon as it steps forth as a commodity, it is changed into something transcendent. it not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of his wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than " table turning " ever was " karl marx, the fetishism of the commodities and the secret therof.
what really is a record of improvisation ? does improvisation happen each time ? these questions have from the very beginning of free improvisation always been the center of the reflexions from its authors, bringing back so many contradictory and passionate answers. but nowadays the question is keener because of the overproduction of improvisational records which is essentially due to the drop of production costs. the records that were closed followings to the company weeks were considered as documents that were keeping a close relationship to history. these famous records were like phonographies, like sound snapshots taken from artistic and cultural events which were radically modifying the musical history. but today things have changed as if records had even been recorded a long time ago before the meeting just took place. just as if music did happen in order to be sold as a consumable good. many musicians are obliged to put out recordings in order to promote their music which is really what promoters are needing so that these musicians could be able to estimate their weight only through their recordings where prestigious encounters would be able to be credited. those publications barely are a genuine artistical project outcome but have just been thought as an advertising medium and for home listening. those publications are standing without any kind of quality recordings and have only been chosen among several other similar live recordings. nowadays everybody's talking about improv music and this shift in meaning is very clearly announcing the codification of every kind of practice. recorded improvisation has just been ending in looking like wall paper where the only difference between one or another is marked throughout more or less skillful shades of colour. a drastic change had been operated within our relationship to improvisation : music is no longer regarded as an experience through dual listening but had just become an area to occupy. this is why it has to be comfortable, roughnessless and safely.
" the whole history of recorded sound is waiting for we could murder it. " coldcut
here are four duos of improvisation (of improv music) separately recorded in terms of time and of areas. each one of us has improvised his part in his home studio, unconnected to the other one. did he then really improvise ? listener will never know anything about it. i reassembled these 8 solo recordings so that i could edit them by pair. each recording is affected to a channel, left/right, in order to mime one more time the stage area but strictly through editing studio works. neither one or the other channel here has been recorded as improv meetings use to do it with this reactive act of playing to the other one's. we were all ignorant of the other one's music. but this is precisely where improvisation is taking place, just through this arbitrary collage between two distinct digital channels. each part has been interrupted as soon as it reached 10 minutes, a kind of temporal restraint aiming at being a proper answer to the restraints of live acting, just like a score used to do. we are the book-keepers of improv economy. we are not free with our choices. the record as an object gives us a restraint with which we must deal. the market is selling us its norms and we need the market to sell our cultural production.
this record has been conceived as an hommage to derek bailey and masayuki takayanagi, both of them were great erratics into the musical language. here are these 4 duos as 4 covers of the most symbolic improvisations belonging to that improvised music history. as an attempt to play one more time bailey and takayanagi. what would really be the fact of improvising while doing a cover of an improvisation ? maybe it would be as we had been playing within the memory of what led us to love a music and its own oblivion. the project contained throughout this present record will not be able to escape to political illusion.
" a record is something really magic, it makes enter into your room a person as he or she exactly was in 1957, then you find that nothing has changed with this person, that even the tinier trace of usually happening corruption did not affect this person... when we hear charlie feathers or elvis, they really are in the same room as we stand as sure as i am now talking to you. " the cramps
when listening to a sound, there is no difference between a composition and an improvisation
michel henritzi, july 2006
* joseph holbrooke was, between 1963 and 1965, a free improvisation band with derek bailey, gavin bryars and tony oxley. |
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