Jerry Gordon / Sink: Songs For These Ends

This is the second of two recent releases from the Osaka-based musician and poet Jerry Gordon, both of which are quietly compelling and beautifully realised in up-close recordings that bear the dampening acoustic imprint of a small room of wood and tatami....but maybe I'm projecting.

'Sink' begins with its most satisfying piece, 'Slouching Away From The Womb', which emerges slowly from a shallow well of brushed drum circles and tubular mouthpiece spittle, and builds into a dry and insistent pulse of Togashi-like tapped toms and brushed snare beneath overdubbed & understated, and largely descending & centering, tenor sax phrases - these are attentively co-joined and developed melodic fragments that feel more thematic than look-at-this soloing. Gordon's hushed and contemplative tone is attractive throughout, more poetic and damaged than didactic or defiant skronk. 'Trips, Taps & Torn Maps' journeys further in its dynamics and phrasing, but the components of drums and tenor sax remain - or saxes, as two are included here in dialogue). 'Wolf At The Door' is darker in tone and more fitful in progression, with some fantastic flights of deviant rhythm. In the closing track, 'Taken Down A Notch', the drum patterning is gently oblique and played with great feeling, matched at every measure by tenor soliloquies that move organically from a lamplit pre-bop mood, via mid-century modalities, to the kind of extended technique and controlled overblowing that only a deep listener and deeply sensitive artist could deliver this purposefully and present this plainly. A real find.  

Lori Goldston / On A Moonlit Hill In Slovenia

A quick and careless survey of cellist Lori Goldston's career (yep, guilty) reads like that of an itinerant jazz sideperson of yore, how else to account for someone who studied under Maxine Neuman and Milford Graves at Bennington, played with Nirvana, Earth and David Byrne as well as with and for a host of composers ranging from Terry Riley to Ellen Fullman but who seems most at home and at rest improvising with others (Lonnie Holley, Dana Reason, Jaap Blonk to name a few) or alone as evidenced in these two beguiling and unhurried solo improvisations recorded with crickets and night air on the Slovenian moonlit hill of the title. This set consists of two extended pieces that both unfold with the kind of melodic and thematic unity that seems like an impossible feat of forethought and online thought to a non-musician or a musician who cannot improvise at this level, which for all her claims of being "rigorously de-trained" after a period of classical training, is very much the result of an extreme facility as well as the kind of musical intelligence and bold melodic and timbral invention that owes as much to Garrison as it does to Gorecki. The first piece (Side A of this cassette release)  moves from a beautiful opening of plucked and picked figures of descending verse-like lines - largely tonal, some dampened, most allowed to ring. This is followed by a short bowed section that echoes some of the picked descents in a shifting modal orbit and a quieter section of folkish lament, that serves as a rest before a rapturously-intoned ascent of bowed intensity in which a drawn and redrawn motif is worried into strips of umber, atonal bark. Side B is underlit by the spirit of Carpathian folk song and later art song, gradually disassembled into a  circling flight of its own constituent elements, less resolved and distinct than the first piece but it still offers a welcome proximity to a live performance of invention and character at a time when that is sadly absent.  

Calineczka / What Is Music And What Should It Be

As abstract paintings on white gallery walls are nudged from abstraction into another weave of discourse by the presence of a title, so too the worldess drone is rendered a new agency in the bestowal of a name. Here Calineczka (the Spanish based artist and label owner, Michal Stanczyk), plainly puts an otherwise polite and rather humble (in all but duration) drone into a position of opposition and provocation which ultimately helps the mental effect of listening and anticpation of listening. Over two 40 plus-minute sides of refrigerated hum and microbial progression, this cassette release affects a pleasing, arms-folded defiance of inaction and then repeats the feat on side B which is literally the piece played in reverse. It all fascinates in its non effect. As a lure to listening of the deep well variety, it is extremely effective in provoking the best kind of long drone thoughts: "Is this happening on the tape or in my head?"

  

Caroline McKenzie / Citizen Of Nowhere

The non-auratic elements of this piece by the sound artist Caroline McKenzie (aka Beth Gripps) are its title, which refers to a notoriously callous statement made by the British Prime Minister Theresa May, and its alternative title 'More Music For Drowning'. It is interesting the damp shadow this casts on what might ordinarily drift along in that most bourgeois and comforting of forms: the ambient mist. As ambient mists goes, this is a fine and vital example. Separated tiers of shifting gauze ripple in a pleasing co-dependance with tiny grains of static. The whole is artfully controlled with more subtraction and absence than presence. For the still and attentive listener, there is a sad drama in the flagging cadence that emerges, a bobbing figure at mid-distance, mouth and ears at the water line. 

Kiki & The Cosmic Egg / Guided Visualization

 

OK...I live in California...not native...so not native...and therefore I have seen this stuff up close...even dabbled at the fringes but I had absolutely no fucking clue whether this was a sincere arrow of truth or some crooked hipster pastiche with a red rubber sucker on one end. Kinda glad to find that on closer examination this is actually completely humourless and irony free...cos..you know what...the 33 minutes 33 seconds does slowly accrete some tincture of wonder in its cycles within cycles of cotton wool synths and later interlocking chimes. The opening gambit from the liner notes only make me love it more "The inpsiration for this tape came during a session given by reiki master Turita Madireddi in which faeries began to appear...from there I was directed to meditate and meet with them." Got through my filter as though I had been hypnotised....wait a minute...

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