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| | I really enjoyed this. Wish I could have been there. . . Care to delinate Mr Meehan's "extended" technique(s)? What the hell is he doing with the little sticks???? |
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| | That's awesome that Joe Colley got mentioned. He's made the Sacto noise scene proud. |
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| | Colley can fuck it up. He had all these shurti boxes going, and was setting fire to transistors. It smelled like burnt hair. And he looks like he's studying victorian lit at like U of Chicago, or something. Nice guy/. |
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| | Beautiful review, thanks. I wasn't able to attend this at all, and I'm not even much of a fan of most of these people, but I recognize the tremendous importance of this circle of activity as a frontier in the path of music as a creative art form, so it's a real treat to get such knowledgeable descriptions. Really precise and clear prose. Also, you deserve praise for finishing it so quickly after the festival and getting it online while the event is still warm in people's thoughts.
One remark grabbed my attention so much, I have to say something about it.
[Joe Panzer] it was a refreshing set that makes the case for a paradigm-shift toward music that actively embraces breakneck jolts and high-contrast intensity.
[Mike] Yikes! That sounds like a description of the oldest paradigm in free improv! Split-second shifts and unexpected interjections are the stock-in-trade of the first few generations of free improvisors, and the activity of recent years heavily embodied by the folks in the ErstQuake milieu seem to me like a intriguing exploration of the opposite aesthetic. Being a big fan of frequent and dramatic juxtapositions in music who sees recent improv as its antithesis, the idea of this aeshtetic circularly appearing in the post-electronic improv scene is surreal to me to say the very least! I sure hope that people don't abandon the quiet, sparse, still style that's still in an early stage of development in my opinion.
For the person who asked about Meehan's techniques, I've seen him perform in the past, so I can comment on this, but I can't assure his techniques are the same circa 2005. He holds a wooden dowel vertically and positioned on a cymbal lying atop a snare drum, or sometimes just positioned directly on the drumhead without a cymbal. He gently rubs the dowel. The sounds are miraculous. Another techniques is gently scraping metal forks against the snare drumhead. These sounds are also startling in their rich sonorities, but somewhat squeaky and harsh compared to the clean, thin, resonant dowel sounds, and the contrast is deeply satisfying.
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| | Sorry, this is the first time I've used the Stylus comment interface, so my paragraph breaks, didn't show up, which is lame, but I guess next time I'll have to insert html paragraph tags or something. When I typed my comment, it was broken into five paragraphs, but it showed up all glommed together as one. Oh well.
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| | from Erstwhile Records:
so, we don't have a definite venue yet, but we do have dates which I
posted earlier (9/28-10/1), and 17 of the 20 sets have been confirmed,
as follows:
Kai Fagaschinski/Burkhard Stangl
Burkhard Stangl/Christof Kurzmann
Kai Fagaschinski/Christof Kurzmann
Ami Yoshida/Christof Kurzmann
Mattin/Tim Barnes
Cosmos (Sachiko M/Ami Yoshida)
Bryan Eubanks/Barry Weisblat
Jeph Jerman/Greg Davis
Jeph Jerman/Tim Barnes/Sean Meehan (or Jeph/Tim duo)
Michael R. Bernstein/Mike Shiflet
Aaron Dilloway solo
Aaron Dilloway/Lasse Marhaug
Jazkamer (Lasse Marhaug/John Hegre)
English (Joe Foster/Bonnie Jones)
GOD (Bryan Eubanks/Leif Sundstrom)
Scenic Railroads (Joe Panzner/Mike Shiflet)
Thomas Ankersmit/Phill Niblock |
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