'from the shoebox to the harddrive' : an idealstate sampler, and a lee noyes showcase

from his beginnings as a media studies student and noise experimenter on late-night student radio in New Plymouth, through the sonic nadirs of Nelson toward his eight years of quietly catalytic collaborative activity in Dunedin and an increasing attention to off-shore internet based collaborations, Lee Noyes' singular musical presence has, to date, been a poetics of focused contradiction, ranging from cacophonous psychedelic percussive maelstroms to astringent electronic sparsities. join avant gardening for an eclectic trawl through the output of Noyes' own label, Idealstate Recordings, a platform for his own collaborative activity, as well as his many and varied other releases on labels such as A Beard of Snails, Last Visible Dog, re:konstrukt, and con-V. we begin the show with the radio debut of three new idealstate releases slated for public distribution in January 2012, and culminate with an interview with the artist recorded at his home in Dunedin, as well as a recording of one of his final live performaces in the city before leaving for Sweden, a graphic score composition for two acoustic guitars written by Alex Wolken.

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Playlist:

1. Lee Noyes, track two from Xiazhi, (ISR1-12), Jan 2012
2. Lee Noyes & Radio Cegeste, 'ion and bird', from to orient themselves with coastlines (ISR2-12), Jan 20123. And/Also (Lee Noyes & Stuart Porter), 'Like Also and Any', from Like Also and Any (ISR3-12), Jan 2012
4. Lee Noyes & Motoko Kikkawa with Radio Cegeste, No. 3 Wave Magnitude, from Kinematics of the Sky, (ISR4-10), June 2009
5. Lee Noyes & Crude, 'Incarcerated Butterfly' from Crude Transactions, Artless Intent 2011
6. Je Serai Une Tombe, So What, from 19 X07, (ISRCD1-08), February 2008
7. Lee Noyes and Richard Neave, 'Mauled' from Unrepent, (ISR1-10), May 2010
8. Je Serai Une Tombe, 'Nihil est Nihil', from 19 X07, (ISRCD1-08), February 2008
10. Bury my Heart, 'Skull Death Dive' from Crows of the World vol. 2, Last Visible Dog (LVD 124). 2009
11. Lee Noyes & Phil Hargreaves, 'Smile for You', from A Present from the Pickpocket, Whi Music, 2005
12. Lee Noyes, Bruno Duplant, & Paulo Chagas, 'one hidden green pepper away from the birds' from as birds (re:konstrukt), 2011
13. Lee Noyes & J. C. Combs, 'Encrypted Note' from Confessions of a Deviant Machine, con-V, 2011
14. Lee Noyes & Barry Chabala, 'Yang' from The Shade & The Squint, idealstate, October 2009
15. Interview with Lee Noyes, 20th November 2011 (backed with Xiazhi, (ISR1-12))
16. Lee Noyes & Alex Wolken, live performance of 'In a Breath' at Threave, Dunedin, 9th December 2011

come night / the departing of a dream : loren connors

"The landscape of the modern solo guitar is dominated by two monumental peaks, each looming on opposite sides of the horizon. One peak is John Fahey, his accomplishments representing the zenith of what happens when you combine robust technique, folk forms and modern compositional ideas. The other peak is shared by Keith Rowe and Derek Bailey, their literal as well as figurative dismantling and reassembling of the guitar bringing new levels of abstraction and visceral impact to the instrument. Each of the above has hordes of devotees plumbing their innovations for inspiration.

Shadowed by these peaks, and with seemingly very few followers of his own, is the figure of Loren Connors, who for close to thirty years has played the quiet heretic, going against the orthodoxy without ever sounding the call to revolution. He neither flashes virtuoso chops nor overtly mines folk forms. He tempers his abstraction with intimacy, and his noise soothes rather than agitates. He is, above all, a poet, one who has pared down the classic language of the blues guitar, fleshed it out with bits of his Irish heritage, fused both these ideas with a subtle and less rigorous minimalist dialect, and given the world a body of work that explodes our notions of the traditional and the experimental" -Dusted

Originally trained on the trombone and the violin, Loren Connors - also known as Loren MazzaCane, Loren Mattei and Guitar Roberts at different points - has also trained as painter and won prizes as a haiku poet. He played in his first band as a teenager in 1966, and has in more recent times collaborated with the likes of John Fahey, Jim O'Rourke, Keiji Haino, Alan Licht and Christina Carter, but the great majority of his prolific output has been a singular and solitary take on electric guitar.

Avant Gardening presents a diverse sampling of this elusive master, ranging from the small, polished minimalist blues "airs" through cracked, trebly mutations of traditional folk-blues with Kath Bloom to the densely powerful psych-rock of his band Haunted House.

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Playlist

1. Loren Connors, 'Suzanne's Rain' from Night Through (recorded 2000, released 2006)
2. Loren MazzaCane Connors, 'In a Street Full of Rain' from split 7" with Roy Montgomery (1996)
3. Guitar Roberts w/ Suzanne Langille, 'Horses Blues' from Bluesmaster 2 (1988)
4. Kath Bloom & Loren Mazzacane, 'How It Rains' from Restless, Faithful, Desperate (1983)
5. Kath Bloom & Loren Mazzacane, 'Sand in my Shoe' from Sand in my Shoe (1983)
6. Loren Mazzacane, edit from Unaccompanied Acoustic Guitar Improvisations vol 3 (1979)
7. Loren Mazzacane, 'Blues#10 (Fallen Son)' from Fallen Son (1990)
8. Loren Mazzacane, 'The McCaffrey Playground' from Hell's Kitchen Park (1993)
9-18. Loren Mazzacane Connors, 'Stations of the Cross pts 1-9' from Stations of the Cross dbl 7" (1996)
19. Loren Mazzacane Connors, 'Flames' from Harmony of The Spheres compilation (1996)
20. Loren Mazzacane Connors, 'Gathering' from Harmony of The Spheres compilation (1996)
21. Loren Mazzacane Connors, 'Revolt!' from Harmony of The Spheres compilation (1996)
22. Loren Mazzacane Connors, 'Fand (A Tear)' from Harmony of The Spheres compilation (1996)
23. Loren Connors & John Fahey, 'Dark is the Night, Cold is the Ground' from Sails (2006)
24. Christina Carter & Loren Mazzacane Connors, 'Smoke pt 1' from Meditations on the Ascension of Blind Joe Death (2005)
25. Christina Carter & Loren Mazzacane Connors, 'Smoke Pt 6' from Meditations on the Ascension of Blind Joe Death (2005)
26. Christina Carter & Loren Mazzacane Connors, Mirrors pt 3 from Meditations on the Ascension of Blind Joe Death (2005)
27 Loren Connors & David Grubbs, 'The Highest Point in Brooklyn' from Arborvitae (2003)
28. Loren Mazzacane Connors & Alan Licht, 'Block That Nixon' from Hoffman Estates (1998)
29. Smog, 'Sweet Treat' from Knock Knock (1999)
30. Loren Connors & Jim O'Rourke, 'Most Definitely Not Koln' from Two Nice Catholic Boys (rec 1997, released 2009)
31. Haunted House, 'Thomas Paine' from Blue Ghost Blues (2011)
32 Loren Mazzacane Connors, 'Airs #1' from Airs (1999)
33 Loren Mazzacane Connors, 'Airs #2' from Airs (1999)
34 Loren Mazza Cane, 'Moonyean #3' from Moonyean (1994)
35 Loren Mazza Cane, 'Moonyean #7' from Moonyean (1994)
36 Loren Mazzacane Connors, 'Art of the Blues pt 7' from The Little Match Girl (2001)
37 Loren MazzaCane Connors, 'Evangeline' from Evangeline (1998)
38 Loren MazzaCane Connors, 'Ships' from Evangeline (1998)
39 Loren MazzaCane Connors, 'The Bridegroom of Snow' from Evangeline (1998)
40. Loren Connors, 'Little Earth' from Red Mars (2011)
41. Loren Connors, 'Sails' from Sails (2006)

[the defeat to minimalism on the outside of any communication is inconclusive] : omit

"The feel remains deeply homemade, with analogue synths, primitive drum machines, hi-jacked electronics, tape loops and a boatload of effects, combined with sad assemblages that cross moments of documentary-style field recordings with beautiful processionals that recall the more austere Ambient works of Asmus Tietchens and Klaus Schulze. Other parts are a little more schlocky, like music for a 1960s BBC sci-fi serial, but even here there's something supremely melancholy about the lonesome play of analogue codes around little signs of synthesized melody."

-David Keenan, The Wire

Electronic sound exploration probably doesn't get any more hermetically personal than the work of Omit, a mysterious figure who has been transmitting cryptic audible missives to us since the 1980s. Filled with harsh beauty, melancholic austerity, and a deep understanding of the organically creative potential of technological failure, Omit's recordings evoke the colder reaches of the universe and Kafka-esque industrial alienation, filtered through a glacial sensibility which is private, enclosed, and self-generating, much like the all-encompassing graphic-linguistic-sonic packages which comprise the releases themselves - they can sound like lost electronic / concrete experiments of the early decades of the 20th century, outtakes from the colder sessions of Krautrock minimalism, or missives from some obsolete vision of the future. It's a mystery which hasn't been at all dispelled by the gradual coming-in-from-the-cold of Clinton Williams, the person behind the persona, in a series of recent live appearances, although it is perhaps helpful to know that Williams' notion of the sonic object, and sound in general, was largely shaped by growing up in a provincial New Zealand where lack of knowledge of sound as a live, performed medium necessitated more hands-on obsessive and imaginative appreciations, via record collecting, the awareness of small mail order labels, and fine tuning the ear to the detritus of consumer technologies - those things that other people throw away. As he himself says : "I can get clicky noises out of almost anything."

Avant Gardening's Sally Ann McIntyre and Campbell Walker took the time to visit Clinton in his hotel room during the artist's recent Dunedin sojourn, organised via the distributed networks of the Audio Foundation's Alt Music series, and talked to him at length about the nebulous entity that is Omit, making noise in the New Zealand provinces, ignoring technological fashions, why doing electronics is like gardening, the distinction between hardware / software and live / studio modalities, why mixers are "designed wrong", the importance of the 'shake test', tape music culture in the 1990s, the importance of graphics, and why he's not a 'musician'. Join us tonight on Radio One, where you will also hear rare and unavailable selections from the Omit back catalogue, ranging from the obsessively worked multimedia zine-structures of the earliest tapes, passing through the collaborations with Bruce Russell and K Group, to the most recent releases on his own label Deepskin Conceptual Mindmusic, as well as a few bootleg live recordings.

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Playlist:

1. Omit, 'Failer', from Transistor Rhythms (Transformations for the TR606), Deepskin Conceptual Mind Music, 2011

2. Omit, 'Second Divider', from Quad, Corpus Hermeticum, 1997

3. Omit, '8:30pm', from Quad, Corpus Hermeticum, 1997

4. Omit, 'The First Self-Less Reflection', from Quad, Corpus Hermeticum, 1997

5. Interview with Clinton Williams, recorded in Dunedin, Saturday 19th November 2011 [backed with 'Rundowns Type Three', from Rundowns, 1995, 'Turner' from Transistor Rhythms, 2011, and HorZtial Tracking SySyem, from Interceptor, 2005]

6. Dust/Omit, 'Black Shaft Depletion', from Deformed, Corpus Hermeticum, 1996

7. K-Group/Omit, 'Format', from Storage, 2001

8. K-Group/Omit, 'Flow & Strain', from Storage, 2001

9. Omit, 'Quarter to 12 on a Saturday Night', 1989 from Intromit, 1993

10. Omit, 'Small Angry Insect', 1988, from Intromit, 1993

11. Omit, 'The Repetitive Industrial Nightmare', 1989, from Intromit, 1993

12. Omit, 'OutPut Bender / Sideband / Transmitter LoGGer', from Interceptor, 2005

13. Omit, 'Signals' (pts. 1 & 2), from Signals (excerpts), 1990

14. excerpt from live set at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery, November 2011

15. Omit, 'Bloated Swollen Liquid Vessels', from Fluid, 1992

16. Omit, 'Rejector', from Rejector, 2002

17. Omit, 'The Misrepresentation / Defusing the Infection of Control / The Beginning of Compression Amplified', from Transmogrifications, 1993

18. Omit, 'Din Shader / Slip Link', from Tracer, 2003

19. Omit, 'Solitary Disembarkment' from Interior Desolation, 1999

the roots of / rooted apocalyptic folk

...after a somewhat bleak New Zealand election result last night, an overseas friend posted Bill Fay's Pictures of Adolf Again on a social media website, with the words :

“Oh NZ please tell me it's not true... John Key for another few years??? You were meant to remain the promised land. Welcome to the dark hole... hopefully its just a quick passing nightmare.”

Well, yes. NZ does seem to be somewhat rooted... and feeling in an apocalyptic mood ourselves, we decided to dive down the bad-trip rabbit hole, with a show dedicated to the murky 70s English roots of what David Tibet described as “apocalyptic folk” - that's 'folk' as in 'people', not 'genre', but the description works both ways.

Led by the Tibet-rediscovered dark religious-ities and avant-gardisms of Bill Fay and Simon Finn, this is a post-election Apocalypse Blues and Downer Folk special.

[with many thanks to Helga F. for the inspiration]




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Playlist:

1. Bill Fay, 'Pictures of Adolf Again', from Time of the Last Persecution, 1971
2. Bill Fay, 'Time of the Last Persecution', from Time of the Last Persecution, 1971
3. Simon Finn, 'Jerusalem', from Pass the Distance, 1970
4. Simon Finn, 'Accidental Life', live in Paris, 2007
5. Kevin Ayers, 'Song from the Bottom of a Well', from Whatevershebringswesing, 1971
6. John Cale, 'Leaving it Up to You', from Helen of Troy, 1975
7. Robert Wyatt, 'Sea Song', from Rock Bottom, 1974
8. Bridget St. John, 'Broken Faith', from Ask Me No Questions, 1969
9. Bridget St. John, 'Ask Me No Questions', from Ask Me No Questions, 1969
10. Roky Erickson, 'Bloody Hammer', from Demon Angel, 1994
11. The Index, 'You Keep Me', from The Index ('the Black Album'), 1967
12. Michael Yonkers Band, 'Boy in the Sandbox', from Microminature Love, 1968
13. Rocket From the Tombs, 'Life Stinks', from Take the Guitar Player for a Ride, 1975
14. V-3, 'Negotiate Nothing', from Negotiate Nothing, 1992
15. Vertical Slit, 'I Remember Nothing', from Under the Blood Red Lava Lamp, 1986
16. Suicide, 'Frankie Teardrop', from Suicide ('the First Album'), 1977
17. Alexander 'Skip' Spence, 'War in Peace', from Oar, 1969
18. Bob Desper, 'Darkness is Like a Shadow', from New Sounds, 1974
19. Perry Leopold, 'Cold in Philadelphia', from Experiment in Metaphysics, 1970
20. Dave Bixby, '666', from Ode to Quetzalcoatl, 1969
21. Dana Westover, 'Song to Sally', from Memorial to Fear, 1972
22. Current 93, 'All the Pretty Little Horsies' from All the Pretty Little Horses, 1996
23. Current 93, 'Time of the Last Persecution', from Time of the Last Persecution 7", 2004
24. Current 93, 'In the Courtyard', from Jerusalem 7", 2004
25. Sibylle Baier, 'Tonight', from Colour Green, early 1970s
26. Kan Mikami, '銀河の裏街道', from Hoi, 1973
27. Kim Doo Soo, 'Bohemian', from Free Spirit, 2004
28. Morita Doji, 'Horizon', from Good Bye, 1975
29. Patty Waters, 'Moon, Don't Come Up Tonight', from Patty Waters Sings, 1965
30. John Prine, 'Paradise', live-to-air on WFMT, 1970
31. Townes Van Zandt, 'Highway Kind' from Highway Kind, 1997
32. Boots, 'City of Fear', from Boots, 2006
33. Pin Group, 'A Thousand Sins', from The Pin Group Go to Town, 1982
34. Peter Jefferies, 'White Prole' from Electricity, 1994
35. Plagal Grind, 'Receivership' from Plagal Grind, 1990
36. The Terminals 'In and Out of My Mind' from Touch, 1992
37. This Kind of Punishment, 'Words Fail Me', from In the Same Room, 1987

[plus a bunch of bonus tracks for those who were still up listening, or tuning in from other countries... because we just couldn't manage to leave the studio...]

sine music and sound constructions : the music of jack ellitt and richard maxfield

--> -->"The strings, wood-wind, brass and percussion which are used in European orchestras are only a few components in the gamut of world sounds. And the ensemble of colour, however experimental or futurist it may be, is limited to the choice of these few components. It is therefore apparent that those who are experimentally inclined toward sound should now leave the old musical means of expression, and get hold of newer means which will allow fuller development and realisation to their restricted urge."-Jack Ellitt, 'On Sound' (from Life and Letters Today, pp. 182-84, December 1935)
"Ellitt died in 2001, less than 18 months after Doris had passed away. The couple had no children and maintained little contact with other relatives. Tragically, many of Ellitt's recordings and documents were disposed of after his death. The three complete recordings that were salvaged by Roger Horrocks (Journey #1, Interlude and Homage to Rachel Carson #2) join Light Rhythms to form a frustratingly-small yet fascinating body of work from a hidden pioneer of twentieth century electronic music."

- Clinton Green, September 2011

Working in the early 20th Century on the optical soundtrack of film, British composer Jack Ellitt (b. 1902, Manchester) may have constructed some of the first pieces of Musique Concrete, well before that term was coined to describe the possibilities the new technology of tape lent to music construction in the 1940s. The fertile working relationship Ellitt, then living in Sydney, had with New Zealand filmmaker Len Lye produced a dynamic and experimental modernism that embraced the potential of new technological mediums, a conversation segueing from film, to sound, and back again, which would mark both artists for the rest of their lives, long after their collaboration had ended. Ellitt's pioneering status as an Australian experimental composer has only recently been codified, thanks to the archival attentions of Clinton Green of Shame File Music, and the interest of film historian and Lye biographer Roger Horrocks, whose foresight in securing various reel to reel taps from the composer has meant that these tapes have survived. The tantalising glimpse these few extant recordings, set alongside Ellitt's essay 'On Sound', give us is of a thinker working largely outside the canon, a reticent and isolated composer (who Stockhausen once wrote to, but who didn't reply to the letter), a pointer, perhaps, to the many alternate stories of modernity that are yet to emerge.

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"It seems to me that pure electronic music
is self-sufficient as an art form
without any visual added attractions or distractions.
I view as irrelevant
the repetitious sawing on strings and baton wielding spectacle
we focus our eyes upon during a conventional concert."

-Richard Maxfield, 'Music, Electronic and Performed' (from An Anthology of Chance Operations, edited by La Monte Young, New York, 1963)

“If Richard Maxfield had not committed suicide in 1969, and if his electronic music pieces were not so difficult to find or to hear, then our ideas of how music has changed and opened out during the past thirty-five years might be very different…. At the heart of avant-rock, hybrid electronics, and plunderphonics, yet completely obscured by the vagaries of history, is Richard Maxfield.”

-David Toop, Ocean of Sound, 2001

A precocious early history of scholarships and prizes attended Richard Maxfield's (b. 1927, Seattle) youth before the U.S. composer's first exposure to electronic music in the early 1950s, via contact with Luigi Nono, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Pierre Boulez on his first foray to Europe. By 1957, he had met David Tudor and John Cage, and enrolled in the latter's course at the New School, although unlike the many other illustrious pupils concurrently under Cage's tutelage, he then went on to teach the course in 1959. The previous year, he had composed his first purely electronic work, 'Sine Music (a Swarm of Butterflies Encountered over the Ocean)', an astounding piece of minimal pointilism unplaceable within American music at the time. As La Monte Young, who was to become Maxfield's teaching assistant and one of the major performers of his work in the early 1960s, later wrote, Maxfield was the first American composer to build his own equipment for the purpose of generating electronic tape music, and was also possibly the first American to compose purely electronic music as distinct from Musique Concrete, or music composed of non-electronic pre-recorded sounds. Works which obviously use taped recordings of performers playing, then cut up and re-composed using an aleatory method of blind selection, include the incredible 'Piano Concert for David Tudor' of 1961, when Maxfield was regularly performing works in the burgeoning downtown loft scene, starting with the first series directed by La Monte Young in Yoko Ono's loft in 1960-61, alongside works by co-experimentalists, minimalists and fluxus artists such as David Tudor, Dick Higgins, Terry Riley, and George Maciunas. Maxfield's tape music, scores, and equipment (some of it built by the composer) were placed in the care of Walter De Maria before Maxfield's tragically early death in 1969.

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Playlist:

1. Jack Ellitt, 'Journey #1' (complete version) (8.59)

2. Jack Ellitt, 'Interlude' (7.23)

3. Jack Ellitt, 'Light Rhythms' (5.12)

4. Jack Ellitt, 'Homage to Rachel Carson #2 (Len Lye)' (1987) (16.26) (all tracks from Jack Ellitt - Sound Constructions, Shame File Music (sham066), 2011)

5. Richard Maxfield, 'Sine Music (a Swarm of Butterflies Encountered Over the Ocean)' (1958)

6. Richard Maxfield, 'Pastoral Symphony' (1959), from An Anthology of Noise and Electronic Music: Fifth A-Chronology, 1920-2007

7. Richard Maxfield, 'Night Music' (1960), from New Sounds in Electronic Music (also featuring Pauline Oliveros and Steve Reich)

8. Richard Maxfield, 'Piano Concert for David Tudor' (1961)
9. Richard Maxfield, 'Piano Sonata 2' (1948/49)

10. Richard Maxfield, 'Perspectives II for La Monte Young' (1961)
11. Richard Maxfield, 'Bacchanale' (1963)12. Richard Maxfield, 'Amazing Grace' (1960)

13. Richard Maxfield, 'Cough Music' (1959)

rural colours sampler

"home taping is killing music", ran the music industry slogan in the 1980s, when you and everyone you knew regularly swapped mix-tapes and ran from the dinner table to record music directly off the radio. Digital downloading has proved much more successful in killing music as a commodified object, but whether your stance is to 'give up on the object' entirely or to embrace obsolete formats and one-off hand drawn covers, those 80s kids and their aesthetic descendents are still quietly doing other things in their rooms with laptops and guitars, music boxes, old books, stencils, bird feathers, pressed flowers and string.

Despite the expense, the work, and the lack of recognition beyond your immediate circle of peers, non-profit labels continue to thrive as curatorial frameworks for particular, personalised visions of what music is. Take Rural Colours, for example, a label run by Jonathan Lees from Hebden Bridge, Calderdale, West Yorkshire, England. Lees' stated aim is "to create a beautiful handmade product with a personal touch as well as to promote independent musicians." He does this with generosity : with 46 releases to its name since its founding in June 2010, Rural Colours, sitting alongside its sister label Hibernate, is prolific. The two labels work in tandem, with Rural Colours being based around shorter length limited editions of 3" CDs with accompanying free mp3 downloads (making this a 'hybrid label'). The artists on the label are global in origin, with commonalities based around a use of drones, natural sounds, indie-classical, improv, film soundtrack, and folk-inspired sonic elements.

The notion of an EP based label makes perfect sense in an era when there is a lot of information available. But don't believe the received wisdom of the overwhelming info-glut - that you hardly grasp any of it for long enough to really listen - because that's really something that the individual listener has to negotiate via their own listening and collecting habits. Building such strategies of limitation into ways of presenting - and eventually listening - to music is, at the moment, often a matter of tapping into the alternate strategies and formats which have worked well in the past, as we can see in the current resurgence of tape labels. And as Lees says, "A lot of my inspiration comes from the 7" labels that were around during the '90s such as Earworm and Wurlitzer Jukebox. I collected 7" singles for many years and some of my CD releases especially the more limited ones reflect this."

From the Pastoral drift of The Listening Mirror's 'Venice Boxhead', to the vaulted drones and microtonal guitar scribbles of Gareth Davis, Jan Kleefstra and Romke Kleefstra's 'Sielesklyk', this is the first in a series of Avant Gardening shows that will focus on small labels around the world.

some quotes above taken from an interview with label founder Jonathan Lees here

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Playlist

1. Listening Mirror: 'The Leechpool' from ...after the briefest of pauses... (rc002)

2. Listening Mirror: 'Venice Boxhead' from ...after the briefest of pauses... (rc002)

3. Quinn Walker: 'The Weight of Care' from The Weight of Care (rc030)

4. Anna Rose Carter & Pleq: 'A Mirror Sitting' from My Piano is Broken (rc041)

5. Anna Rose Carter & Pleq: 'My Piano is Broken' from My Piano is Broken (rc041)

6. Arkhonia: 'Snow' from Another Dispatch into a World of Multiple Veils (rc033)

7. Beginnings: 'Not Yet Ready for the Day' from Waiting on the Weather (rc001)

8. Beginnings: 'Heritage of Splendor' from Waiting on the Weather (rc001)

9. Gareth Davis / Jan Kleefstra / Romke Kleefstra: 'Sieleslyk' from Sieleslyk (rc031)

10. Dentist: 'Spirals' from Accidents (rc037)

11. Talvihorros: 'Solo Guitar Improvisation II' from Solo Guitar Improvisation II (rc026)

12. Talkingmakesnosense: 'Coruscates' from Coruscates (rc042)

13. Talkingmakesnosense: 'Diffuse' from Coruscates (rc042)

14. Celer: 'Hell Detoured' from Rural Colours Subscription Pack 3 (rc008) (excerpt)

15. D_rradio: 'Summer' from Seasons (rc014)

16. D_rradio: 'Winter' from Seasons (rc014)

17. The Inventors of Aircraft: 'Matter and Vacuum' from The West Country (rc046)

18. The Inventors of Aircraft: 'Calling Out My Goodnights' from The West Country (rc046)

'to play and to arrive at the state where you no longer need to play' : keith rowe & amm.

About to arrive in Dunedin as part of his Alt Music-sponsored 2011 New Zealand tour, Keith Rowe's influence on what has come to be known as electroacoustic music is deep and far-reaching, as anyone who has ever laid a guitar horizonally on a tabletop and played it with a small hand-held fan, or contact-mic'd a coffee cannister can attest. What better, then, than to explore selected longer pieces from his oeuvre, all the way from 1966 until this year, in loosely chronological fashion. We began with the initial two tracks from AMM's first album, AMMMusic, released a year after the group began playing together as participants of a weekly experimental workshop at the Royal College of Art in London, then moved on to the stunning longer piece "Combine and Laminates", recorded at a concert given at the Arts Club, Chicago, on 25th May 1984. Rowe's use of the shortwave radio as instrument is a fascinating component of most of these pieces, with its seemingly uncanny ability to channel snatches of etheric commentary which both illustrate and 'talk back to' the musical threads being woven around it, for example on AMMMusic, towards the end of the cacophonous 'Ailantus Glandolusa', a speaker announces via radio that "We cannot preserve the normal music." Rowe's recent solo direction has been supplemented with collaborations outside the AMM fold, and so we include one of them here : from his 2011 album with Austrian-born composer and trombonist Radu Malfatti. Two tracks, one of which is 'composed', one 'improvised', invite the listener to think through what these terms might actually mean.

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Playlist

1. AMM, 'Later During a Flaming River a Sunset' from Ammmusic, 1966
2. AMM, 'Ailantus Glandulosa' from Ammmusic, 1966
3. AMM, 'Combine + Laminates' from Combine + Laminates + Treatise, 1984
4. Radu Malfatti & Keith Rowe, 'Pollock '82' from album on Erstwhile, 2011
5. Radu Malfatti & Keith Rowe, 'Improv 2' from album on Erstwhile, 2011

trees are spring / beauty without mercy : the music of kazuki tomokawa.

“ Tomokawa has inhabited an utterly unique world very much of his own making for forty years now. A world where the most limpid of minor melodies and symbolism-inspired natural imagery can happily rub shoulders with EXTREMELY peaked torrents of pained screams over the densest of acoustic noise-scapes. What welds it all together is Tomokawa's self-evident to desire to take himself and his audience through the wall with every performance. Forget any image of the sensitive folkie, Tomokawa's music is as violent and cathartic as anything in the underground rock or free jazz canon. For anyone at all still concerned with the possibilities of words, voice, and acoustic communication, Tomokawa is an unparalleled contemporary touchstone [...] Hearing Tomokawa for the first time more than a decade ago in Tokyo was one of those moments of musical epiphany rare in a lifetime. A wiry middle-aged Japanese man, handsome in a vaguely dissolute way, neck tendons taut, and bent double over his acoustic guitar, strummed with a force manic enough to snap strings while howling out lyrics rich in puzzling imagery, yet delivered as an unconscious cry of anguish ripped from an uncomprehending throat. Between songs Tomokawa passed the guitar to people in the front row to restring or retune it, as he downed pint glasses of whisky and water, or rummaged in his satchel for decades-old songs, all the while regaling listeners with stories of his alternative lives as a day labourer on Tokyo building sites, actor, poet, artist and more recently, successful bicycle race pundit. He told these tales in a thick north country brogue rarely heard in a city that habitually stripped its immigrants of their native voices. Here was an antidote to mainstream J-pop, an “authentic” Japanese singer who existed in a self-created dimension, able to awaken language's innate musicality, and even more unusually, transmit a message with the power to transcend linguistic boundaries...” - Alan Cummings

In a 40-year career that dives from from an early 70s folksinger scene membership increasingly deeper into the arcane and personal, Tenji Nozoki, who performs as Kazuki Tomokawa (literally translated as Friend River) has built a body of work that is both immediately recognisable and completely singular. On first listen, the most distinctive element is an intensity and power of voice – extended techniques combining with an unrelenting commitment to cathartis, a leap right down into deep emotional textures, a full and alarmingly dramatic inhabiting of the song.

Around this swirls a seemingly contrary musical world. The constant is always Tomokawa's own acoustic guitar, ranging from plangently dissonant picking through to a string breaking strum und drang – his guitars frequently bear the visible physical scars of the fury of the attack. Long term collaborators percussionist Toshiaki Ishizuka and pianist Masato Nagahata stretch the music to encompass ecstatic jazz-psych-noise and European cafe music respectively, often simultaneously.

Avant Gardening's Campbell Walker presents highlights of the long, strange career of one of the legends of the Japanese psych folk world, charting Tomokawa's progress from 70s pop star to elder statesman of the underground c.2011.

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Playlist

1. 'Ikiterutte Ittemiro' (Say, I'm living) (Say with Conviction I Am Living) from Hoshi No Process (The Process of Stars) (1998, rec live 1976)
2. 'Pisutoru' (Pistol) from Satoru (2003)
3. 'Ki-gi wa Haru' (Trees are Spring) (Trees Are Spring Itself) from Umi Shizuka, Koe (Tamashii) wa Yami (Sea is Silent, The Voice's Soul is Suffering) (1981)
4. 'Kaze no Shinya' (Storms in the Dead of Night) from Fault of Flowers (1993)
5. 'Muzan no Bi' (Beauty without Mercy) from Beauty Without Mercy (Muzan no Bi) (1985)
6. 'Ojiccha' (Grandpa) from Nikusei (Human Voice) (1976)
7. 'Boya' (Little Boy) (sonny boy) from Hoshi No Process (The Process of Stars) (1998, rec live 1985)
8. 'Dorobou-Neko Yoru Hashiru' (Sneaky Thief Runs at Night) (A Sly Thief runs through the night) from Yatto 1 Maime (Finally First Album) (1975)
9. 'Todo o Korosuna' (Don't Massacre our Stellar Sea Lions) from Nikusei (Human Voice) (1976)
10. 'Shinizokonai no Uta' (An ode to a failed death) from Inu Akita (live) (1979)
11. 'Hodoukyou' (A Footbridge) from Nikusei (Human Voice) (1976)
12. 'Inu' (Dog) (A Dog) from Within the Country of Falling Cherry Blossoms (Sakura No Kuni No 'Chiru Naka' O') (1980)
13. 'Issai Gassai Yo-mo Sue-da' (It's the End of the World at All) (Nothing Left But The End Of The World) from Umi Shizuka, Koe (Tamashii) wa Yami (Sea is Silent, The Voice's Soul is Suffering) (1981)
14. 'Satsujin to Ao Tenjyo' (Homicide and Clear Blue Sky) (Sky's The Limit and Murder) from Umi Shizuka, Koe (Tamashii) wa Yami (Sea is Silent, The Voice's Soul is Suffering) (1981)
15. 'Kare ga Ita Souda! Tako Hachiro ga Ita' (He was there. Yes!, Tako Hachiro was there.) from Beauty Without Mercy (Muzan no Bi) (1985)
16. 'Moesakaru Ie' (Burning house) (A Blazing House) from Live-MANDA-LA Special (1994)
17. 'Maboroshi To Asobu' (Playing With Phantom) from Playing With Phantom (Maboroshi to Asobu) (1994)
18. 'Hitori Bonodori' (Dance a Bonodori Alone) from Hitori Bonodori (Dance a Bonodori Alone) (1995)
19. 'Sky Fish' (Sora No Sakana) from Sora no Sakana (Sky Fish) (1999)
20. 'Watashi no Hana' (My Flower) from Fault of Flowers (1993)
21. 'Mata Kon Haru' (Spring Comes Again) (Again a spring that doesn't arrive) from Sora no Sakana (Sky Fish) 1999
22. 'The Eyes of Erice' (Erise No Me) from Erise No Me (The Eyes of Erice) (2001)
23. 'Hoshi Wo Tabeta Hanashi' (A story about swallowing a star) from A Bumpkin's Empty Bravado (Inakamono No Kara Genki)(2009)
24. 'Wake no Wakaran Kimochi' (Strange Feeling) (Can't comprehend the feeling behind these emotions) from Satoru (2003)
25. 'Chichi o Kau' (Buy Father) (Gaining a Dad) from The Eyes of Erice (Erise No Me) 2001
26. 'Waltz' (Warutsu) from Live 2005 At Osaka Banana Hall (2005)
27. 'Yamauta' (Mountain Song) from Playing With Phantom (Maboroshi to Asobu) (1994)
28. 'Sakura No Kuni No Chiru Naka O' (Within The Country of Falling Cherry Blossoms) from Within the Country of Falling Cherry Blossoms (Sakura No Kuni No Chiru Naka O') (1980)
29. 'Satoru' (II) from Hoshi No Process 2 (The Process of Stars) (1998, rec live 1985)
30. 'Ikiterutte Ittemiro' (Say, I'm living) (Say with conviction, I am alive) from Live 2005 At Osaka Banana Hall (2005)

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[this show is dedicated with fondness to the late Richard Neave, noise guitarist, amateur ethnomusicologist, and true Tomokawa obsessive.]

old souls wearing new cloths : charlemagne palestine.

The opportunity to witness Charlemagne Palestine in long-durational live collaborative interchange with Tony Conrad (and just a day later, with Oren Ambarchi) at the 2011 Melbourne Jazz Festival really crystallised the structural rigour and trance-inducing sublimity of the artist's long involvement with music. During the Conrad/Palestine duo evening (which was more like a "happening" in various respects), a solo drone piece on the Melbourne Town Hall's pipe organ, in which Palestine literally "pulled out all the stops", and whose crescendo lasted at least 40 minutes but it could have been an hour, or perhaps five, elicited striking responses : one friend described it as "all music played at once", another left the building because he felt an overwhelming sense of "primal terror". Curator of the event Joel Stern also organised an offshoot screening of Palestine's 1970s video works, tracing early durational pieces which tested the limitations of physical space and the body in relation to the 'physicalised' camera toward exhaustion, eventually evolving toward giddy mantric celebration.

A two hour radio programme is particularly inadequate for an artist such as Palestine, whose music almost requires the live presence (of both artist and audience) in order to evolve - but that being the usual faustian bargain with recorded media, we still hope you enjoy this show.

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Playlist

1. Strumming for Harpsichord (from 'Strumming Music for Piano, Harpsichord and Strings Ensemble', Sub Rosa, 2010)
2. One Fifth in the Rhythm Three Against Two for Bosendorfer Piano (from 'Four Manifestations on Six Elements', Sonnabend Gallery, 1974)
3. Surrealistic Studies I (from 'Voice Studies', Alga Marghen, 2008)
4. Surrealistic Studies II (from 'Voice Studies', Alga Marghen, 2008)
5. Surrealistic Studies III (from 'Voice Studies', Alga Marghen, 2008)
6. Cataclisma 3 (from 'Etudes to Cataclysms', Sub Rosa, 2008)
7. Schlongo!!!daLUVdrone (from 'Schlongo!!!daLUVdrone', Cortical Foundation, 2000)

six feet under the radar : the enigma of jandek.

"The longest-running, weirdest, loneliest enigma in popular music is a guy from Texas who calls himself Jandek."
- Douglas Wolk, Providence Phoenix, 1999.

...Has been the traditional starting point for talking about Jandek, the Houston based genre-defining "outsider musician" who's self-released 67 albums since 1978, but only played his first live show in 2004.

This is the next most frequent port of call:

"Jandek, alone with a guitar and a microphone, sounds like a muttering sleepwalker aimlessly plucking amplified bicycle spokes. His music is dark and gloomy; but it won't make you sad-it will make you tense and uncomfortable. Here is the Ultimate Disconnect. You love it or hate it-and for every one of the former, there are one million of the latter."
- Irwin Chusid, 'Songs in the Key of Z'

"When it comes to idiot savants with mystique, no one can beat Jandek...He's an authentic human satellite, orbiting in a chilly weightless dimension thousands of miles from earth."
- Richie Unterberger, 'Unknown Legends of Rock'n Roll'

And just sometimes you get to here:

"Jandek is a living, breathing example of what you can get away with in the name of art...Jandek's is completely fraudulent art, exactly the kind of thing that people are talking about when they say that they don’t like modern art...Tonight is a swindle of the highest order, and every single one of us in the audience who does not register their disgust is responsible for allowing it to happen."
- Steven Rainey, CultureNorthernIreland.org live review, 2010.

But past the rhetorics of enigma and oddity, those 67 albums constitute a pretty amazing soundworld, unlike anyone else's... But not in terms of fraud, enigma, incompetence or psychosis, but rather in terms of things like technique, approach, detail. Over the 67 albums, there's many more variations than anyone gives him credit for... but it requires attention and patience, it requires commitment.

And this IS a strange and difficult world in many ways. The music of Jandek can be distant and detached, but also grippingly immediate in quite uncomfortable ways. A large amount of the canon consists of extremely solitary-sounding versions on a blues-based singer-songwriter theme, based around a specific variation of guitar tuning and the possibilities of sound and voice that can be structured around it. And it is quite a voice - a Texan-sounding high moaning whisper, often filled with despair and loneliness.

Despair and loneliness is often reflected in the incredibly lengthy corpus of words too. Again possibly reflecting a poetic, minimal and incredibly microscopic take on the blues tradition, Jandek returns again and again to themes of isolation, loneliness, despair and depression.

But this is the reductive party line in a corpus of work that also includes spoken word, noisy electric free rock, jokey novelty numbers, lengthy piano excursions, and since 2004, an array of live albums recorded with a variety of experimental musicians, including Richard Youngs and Alex Neilson (a fairly regular UK unit now), Loren Connors, Chris Corsano, Alan Licht, Heather Leigh Murray, John McEntire, Josh Abrams, Susan Alcorn, Ian Wadley, C. Spencer Yeh and Mike Watt, playing a wide array of instruments, in a wide array of settings, from chamber music to funk.

Join Avant Gardening this week where Sally McIntyre and guest host Campbell Walker explore some of the complexities of this rich and often misunderstood artist's work over the last 33 years.

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Playlist

1. 'Throw Me Away' from Austin Sunday (2006)
2. 'Blues Turned Black' from I Threw You Away (2002)
3. 'Lavender' from You Walk Alone (1988)
4. 'Carnival Queen' from Modern Dances (1987)
5. 'Come On Through With A Smile' from Somebody In the Snow (1990)
6. 'Where Do You Go From Here (Pt. 5)' from Where Do You Go From Here?(2011)
7. 'God Came Between Us' from Lost Cause (1992)
8. 'I'll Sit Alone And Think A Lot About You' from On The Way (1988)
9. 'Janky' from Graven Image (1994)
10. 'Hey Mister Can You Tell Me?' from Glad to Get Away (1994)
11. 'Point Judith' from Six and Six (1981)
12. 'Sailors' from Living in a Moon So Blue (1982)
13. 'European Jewel' from Chair Beside A Window (1982)
14. 'Birthday' from The Rocks Crumble (1983)
15. 'Governor Rhodes' from Telegraph Melts (1986)
16. 'Afternoon of Insensitivity (Pt. 6)' from Manhattan Tuesday (2007)
17. 'Blue Plastic Mat' from Chicago Wednesday (2010)
18. 'What Things Are' from Raining Down Diamonds (2005)
19. 'Front Porch Shimmy' from Not Hunting for Meaning (2009)
20. 'There's No Door' from The Myth Of Blue Icicles (2008)
21. 'Worthless Recluse' from Worthless Recluse (2001)
22. 'Crazy' from The Living End (1989)
23. 'Om' from Somebody in the Snow (1990)
24. 'We're All Through' from Follow Your Footsteps (1986)

sounds in between : sib radio gowanus #1.

this programme was dedicated to the first of two 2-hour broadcasts of SiB Radio Gowanus, a four hour edit of a multi-artist narrowcast radio installation project curated by U.S. based colleague Maria Papadomanolaki, initially sited in Cabinet Magazine's Gallery Space in Brooklyn, 17th-19th of March 2010. I (as Radio Cegeste) was one of the contributing artists to the original show, with a piece called The Book of Margins, recorded in None Gallery in 2009. it was a pleasure to host its return to the Dunedin airwaves alongside a veritable cornucopia of expanded-radiophonic sounds and musics.

curator Maria Papadomanolaki writes :

"Around the mid-1950s, Guy Debord coined a new genre of city mapping and exploration under the alias of Psychogeography. The serious “academic” model of creative expression was refined into a playful, intuitive and inventive quest of unseen and undiscovered urban cues and layers. “Postcards from Gowanus” and its radio exhibit “Sib Radio Gowanus” find a significant point of reference to the Debordian state of mind and suggest a new eye, ear and psyche to the landscape of Gowanus. The actual exhibits in the gallery claim a physical presence while the ethereal soundscapes create a new intimate locale inside the listener’s mind and psyche. “Sib Radio Gowanus” echoes the idea of radio as a wunderkammer. However, it surrogates this notion to an organic sonotopia that inhabits the audiovisual exhibits in a process of associative interaction. On a final note, the exhibition, as its title reveals, offers fragments of the artists’ audiovisual expeditions in the form of postcard-artifacts that encapsulate, in the best possible and “timeless” manner, the essence of the experienced urban environments. “Postcards from Gowanus” is a short but dense time travel to the heterogeneous manifestations of the surrounding area as encountered in snapshot mode by the different participants."

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Playlist

1st Hour

1. Amir Husak – Gowanus United Static of America
http://www.nocommercialvalue.org/

2. A.G – Polygon:08|3
http://agpolygon08.blogspot.com/

3. Jeremy D. Slater – Floating Point
http://www.jeremyslater.com/
http://www.parenthesismedia.com/

4. Myke Dodge Weiskopf – Dark Radio
http://www.myke.me/wordpress/

5. Radio Ruido – abowl
http://radioruidotriangulation.blogspot.com/

6. Bitcrush – Raltech
http://www.bitcrush.net/

7. David Smith and Heidi Prenevost – Double Helix
http://www.thedavidsmith.com/
http://heidiprenevost.com/

8. Todd Merrell – As March Times On
http://www.toddmerrell.com/

9. murmer – freon
http://www.murmerings.com/frameset.html

10. Knut Aufermann – avi5
http://knut.klingt.org/

11. leaf loft – night still stills
http://www.myspace.com/leafloft

12. A.G – Polygon:08|2
http://agpolygon08.blogspot.com/

13. Radio Ruido – all artifacts
http://radioruidotriangulation.blogspot.com/

14. Sublamp – LetterlensToKidEyes
http://sublamp.com/
http://soundcloud.com/sublamp

2nd Hour

1. Last Days – Walls
http://www.lastdaysmusic.co.uk/

2. Myke Dodge Weiskopf – Helicopter
http://www.myke.me/wordpress/

3. Jonny Farrow – Gowanus Walk

http://jonnyfarrow.net/

4. Dimitris Papadatos – Wagonsun Spectral Fragment
http://dimitrispapadatos.blogspot.com/
http://kulttofthesilent.blogspot.com/

5. Myroslaw Bytz and Nick Heiling – Third Sight Gowanus
http://www.nickheling.com/
http://www.mbytz.com/

6. Maria Papadomanolaki – Union Street Bridge Pt. 1 & 2

http://www.voicesoundtext.com

7. verdi_spirali – on_earth@in_space
http://www.myspace.com/verdispirali

8. Mark Peter Wright – Vent

http://markpeterwright.com/

http://soundcloud.com/mark-peter-wright

9. near the parenthesis – Gowanus
http://www.neartheparenthesis.com

nathan thompson & david haines, live in the studio

in the studio @ radio one, dunedin, around midnight, early jan 2011, hosting a show featuring nathan thompson and david haines playing rare and unheard material from sun valley research, sandoz lab technicians, eye, and associated etc.

also out of shot : joyce hinterding, james kirk (both asleep), campbell walker

photo by david haines.