Gratkowski, complimentary food, Berkeley
I was at three shows tonight. First was TrioMetrik at RML. The show seemed to be free, and it was even catered. But, “Beware of whores who say they don't want money. The hell they don't. What they mean is that they want more money; much more...” (--WSB). This was a fundraiser for TrioMetrik, which presumably had an invocation for financial assistance later in the evening. Enjoyed complimentary hors d'oeuvre and beer. Couldn't hang with the promotional video and following powerpoint, and was compelled to leave before the music began. I actually heard a few violin notes on the way out, but I had enough of that scene by that point. I'm interested in their ideas about having this computer system respond to the live performance with specialized notation and other elements, but there was just too much to wade through to get there. This grand organization seems like so much a part of this trio that I don't feel too bad talking about it in what is ostensibly a music review.
I needed to be part of something on the opposite end of the organizational spectrum, so I biked over to ATA to catch some LA brutal noise. DIY through and through, and almost no money involved. Pedestrian Deposit and Haircut Mountain Transit (I believe) are both harsh noise acts with primal screaming processed through tabletops full of delay and distortion pedals. The sounds were nice, especially through the full wall hodge podge of amps and speakers, but I couldn't help thinking that this stuff all sort of sounds the same. The same, but good. Punk rock intensity, which is a fun and inspiring thing sometimes. HMT played an extra short set (in the vicinity of 2 minutes), which seems to be typical of many of these LA noise dudes. There's something to be said for keeping things tastefully short, but two-minute sets always seem like a bit like a cop out to me. It would be hard to make those two minutes so awesome that stretching it out would be pointless. Working things further and further brings things to an exponentially higher level, and super short sets don't allow this to happen. Better than long and boring though. Maybe prolonged sets with continual development should be left to the “improvisers”, but I've seen “noise” musicians like Tralphaz really work it just as well as anybody with an acoustic bass or whatever. As soon as Pedestrian Deposit's wall of distortion started up, a bunch of guys started bobbing their heads pretty hard to the music as is typical at an intense show. They were all bobbing at a different tempo, and I couldn't figure out what they were synching up with. That sort of thing always seems weird to me. But not long afterward I found myself doing the same thing, unconsciously nodding away to the harsh drone. Different tempo from everyone else. Rhythmic response to intense audio with rhythm ambiguous enough that no two people relate to it in the same way. Someday perhaps I will figure it out.
Moseyed over to the Hemlock in time to catch about half of Lair of the Minotaur's set. Metal from former members of 7000 Dying Rats, including Weasel Walter on drums. Most of this was fairly sludgy metal with rhythmically barked vocals. Surprisingly a little too close to the kind of metal that would have a “-core” somewhere in its name for my tastes. The vocals were influenced a little too much by rap, and not enough by tortured screams of the damned. A few blast beat sections were the most satisfying to me. Low levels of kick drum in the PA watered down the sound to a somewhat disappointing level. Maybe that made all the difference.
Wednesday at 1510 8th Street, Charity Chan and Simon Rose opened things up with a piano and sax duo. Chan kept things inside the piano with the sustain pedal pressed down. Dark ambient style. Rose was frequently repeating the same group of notes in free time while circular breathing... sort of a raga sort of thing to put it really crudely. A fairly droney/static set. I closed my eyes and relaxed. At one point a sax blast excited sympathetic vibrations from undampened piano strings. Rose milked this for a while in a pretty satisfying way. Gratkowski/Nordeson/Looney/Smith played next. This was my third time seeing Gratkowski in four days, so I was starting to get a little worn out, but more relevantly my listening circumstances were slightly compromised, so it's hard to really say what went down. A lot of fairly intense timbral playing, as you would expect from these guys. Gratkowski was playing the best kind of intense energy music on his horns. Looney had his usual pile of junk rattling around on top of the piano strings. Nordeson worked in some subtle rhythmic patterns on his drum set, notably on his collection of bells. These patterns were just another element floating through the chaos, though, not a unifying rhythm. Despite this music being largely “textural” (a term I can't quite endorse), it had a strong soulful element, especially during the last piece. Something really reminded me of “Lonely Woman”.
The previous night at CNMAT, I saw Gratkowski perform with two different sets of musicians. First was the FPR Trio with Phillip Greenlief and Jon Raskin. I've enjoyed the latter two's playing together at their 2+2 series for the last year or so. I also saw this same trio perform the last time Gratkowski was in town (last September). The two locals are great, and this trio really showcases Gratkowski at his best. Almost all of the pieces they performed tonight (as at their previous show) were compositions by the members, which I think was one of the things that really pushed Gratkowski. As great as his improv is, he's into playing notes and seems to work best working with compositions. Greenlief's two contributions were my favorites of the evening. “No Name” (for György Ligeti) had a lot of Ligeti-like trilly tone clusters as well as some staccato Braxton-style angular attacks. The general idea of the piece seemed to be to play something like one of these ideas, then move on to another specified strategy, etc. “Florence” had some notated tonal material with a lot of room for improv suggested by the mostly graphic score. Whatever the scores specified, they worked really well and brought out the best playing of the evening. The other really memorable composition was an older one by Gratkowski, “Three Vegetables for Double Happiness”. This had a lot of notated material very much in the vein of Braxton's quirky, happy and angular mid-Seventies stuff like Comp. No. 40 O and the like. Proggy and energetic. A repeating motive was a short phrase at the end of a tonal phrase in which a note was repeated with increasing speed, moving through the cycle of eight note, eight note triplet, sixteenth note, sixteenth note quintuplet, etc. (or something like that). This idea played a larger role in the other composition by Gratkowski, which had just been written the previous day. Some great solos in this set. I think it was in Gratkowski's own piece where he played his first solo way up in the altissimo range and a later solo way down in the low notes only he can get out of an alto sax (this shit is really kind of mind boggling and also sounds really great). Anyway, this trio is great -- Gratkowski at his best. Rumor has it there is a CD in the works, which I am excited to hear and remember the live shows. Next Gratkowski played with David Wessel. Wessel made tasteful use of CNMAT's 8-channel sound system – not overdoing it at all, but shifting things around in a subtle and interesting manner rather than the hyperactive approach I frequently hear less experienced people employ. The sounds themselves were a bit corny to me -- a little too much reverb and delay, and the samples were also strange. The jazz band samples used frequently in the first piece sort of indicated a mistaken idea that Gratkowski had something to do with jazz. Doesn't seem like the case to me, and to whatever extent he does have something to do with jazz, it is not helped by chopped up hot jazz samples. Gratkowski was working hard, but seemed to have trouble fully blending in with the electronics. The second and final piece with Wessel was significantly better. They operated in more of a dark ambient realm, which made Wessel's corny reverb sounds entirely forgivable, even appropriate. Dark sustained sounds from Wessel encouraged more subdued timbral playing from Gratkowski rather than the more intense stuff I usually hear him play. It was nice hearing him pulled into this weird sound area. They were also joined by a violist from UC Berkeley who contributed a lot of great creaking sounds, and reinforced Gratkowski enough that the acoustic sounds were able to hold their own and blend in more evenly with the electronics. Both pieces were kept quite short, which was probably for the better.
Monday night was sfSoundGroup at ODC. Similar program to their 3/11 show, which I previously reviewed. Things opened up with an improvisation. Good stuff, as usual -- one of the highlights of the night, actually. They were working in the musical language they have established for themselves, which seems to be rooted in the 20th century compositions they play. The group also showed appropriate restraint for a quintet, with players frequently laying out and letting trios and other grouping run their course. Not as fierce or on point as the great previous show, but no real complaints. Well, my one complaint is that the pianist did a lot of playing with his forearms, but it didn't end up sounding nearly as brutal as it seemed he wanted it to. Maybe he was overthinking it. The improv stretched out pretty long as new ideas kept emerging. It seemed like it was probably longer than they had intended, but each new development made the piece that much more interesting. Matthew Goodheart's “Study No. 6b”, written specifically for this group, was next. The basic idea was that the component tones of a clarinet multiphonic were spread out among the whole ensemble so that the other instruments reinforced these tones while fighting their timbre and such with their own sound. This idea worked really well in a few places, but I felt like the piece didn't have much going for it beyond this harmonic aspect. More interesting rhythm or melody sections might have made it seem more complete to me. Grand Duett by Galina Ustvolskaya closed the first set. Fierce piano and cello duet with intense, incessantly repeated phrases. I found myself wanting much more intensity and thought it would probably work a lot better for me if performed by a rock band like Zs or the Flying Luttenbachers – more volume and thicker, heavier sounds. This really was in the same vein as the stuff those bands normally do anyway. Iannis Xenakis' “Akanthos” opened the second set. It was nice, but seemed to lack the intensity I expected from a Xenakis piece. That seemed to be my complaint about the whole evening, actually. Was it actually the group, or just my mood, or did Fred Frith, Frank Gratkowski and Randy Yau set the intensity bar too high in the preceding days? Two Wadada Leo Smith pieces, the same one performed 3/11, closed the program. Great stuff, but again not quite up to the experience of the previous week. If I seem a little down on this show, it's mostly because the 3/11 show was so fucking good. It would be hard to match that, especially when repeating most of that program. The pieces still sounded very good. “Tawhid”, the first of the two, was my other favorite piece of the evening. After hearing Smith talk about his graphic scores the week before, I really don't understand how or why the group structured these pieces so much. There were definitely recognizable and pre-determined sections happening, and the pieces were easily recognizable as the ones I had previously heard. I'll need to investigate.
Sunday night was the first Gratkowski show in the Bay Area. Here he performed at Maybeck Studio with Fred Frith and Charity Chan. This was my first time at this venue and I kind of alternated between enjoying the very nice setting and being slightly repulsed by it. Overall, it seemed like a pretty cozy and comfortable place to enjoy some music. And the music was sublime. Chan and Gratkowski set up a smooth flow on their piano and sax, while Frith continually disrupted things. Banging and scraping on his electric guitar with an anarchic, haphazard attitude, and seemingly rather detached from, and oblivious to, the other musical stream happening. And turned up a little too loud. This is not a complaint in any way – it worked really well and sounded really great. Fred Frith can make detached offensive noise sound really good, and all the better that the good music was resulting from such a strange approach. Gratkowski was meanwhile fighting to make his contribution and Chan seemed to know enough to lay low and let these two masters steer the ship. Not like Gratkowski ever really fully got that chance. This set was at least as good as the FPR Trio set, but I can't say it was Gratkowski at his best, since he was really just struggling to be present. A pretty interesting thing to witness.
Earlier in the day was noise pancakes at CCA. Sharkiface started things out with Nord tones and other nice sounds. It resonated with me a little better than her 21 Grand set from about two weeks previous, though it was pretty similar. Late Severa Wires played a more abstract set than at their show with Ettrick a week before. For a little while they had an Open City vibe going with minimal free rock on their drums, guitar and bass (augmented by turntables). Later, things heated up a little and Sun Ra records went on the record player. Ended up with a free spazz blowout. Telepathik Friend... I really couldn't get over how intensely influenced by Caroliner these kids are. Similar neon tapestries, amp covers and full-body costumes. Similar falsetto echo vocals and crowd-abusing antics. Music was much more formless, and largely based on feedback and other sounds through delay pedals. But I was scratching my head to much to really pay attention. Mini amp got thrown around a lot by the singer. The most amusing part was when an abused audience took charge by unplugging the amp and kicking it across the room. I would've liked to see that line carried a bit further. RHY Yau closed things out with a typically excellent set. Really fantastic, even though it had its shaky moments. Test oscillator tones, feedback, mangled voices and brutal screams. A really full and intense sound. The sound elements were kept pretty simple, which lent a lot of clarity to the music – same sort of reduced approach as Romero, Wiese, etc. The oscillator was a nice variation on the set I've seen him perform numerous times. Similar set-up and ideas, but implemented/improvised differently each time. Great stuff, as usual.
The two Berkeley venues, Maybeck and CNMAT, were new to me and really improved my impression of that city. I guess there are hidden gems in that place if you can avoid the punks and college students, and cut through to something more unique and intelligent. Also, nearly every show I attended provided food. Pancakes at CCA. Wine, cheese, etc. at Maybeck. Cheese and wine at CNMAT. A whole spread of hors d'oeuvres at 1510, and catered treats at RML. Nice supplement to my diet of rolled oats and rice. Let's keep this going.
I needed to be part of something on the opposite end of the organizational spectrum, so I biked over to ATA to catch some LA brutal noise. DIY through and through, and almost no money involved. Pedestrian Deposit and Haircut Mountain Transit (I believe) are both harsh noise acts with primal screaming processed through tabletops full of delay and distortion pedals. The sounds were nice, especially through the full wall hodge podge of amps and speakers, but I couldn't help thinking that this stuff all sort of sounds the same. The same, but good. Punk rock intensity, which is a fun and inspiring thing sometimes. HMT played an extra short set (in the vicinity of 2 minutes), which seems to be typical of many of these LA noise dudes. There's something to be said for keeping things tastefully short, but two-minute sets always seem like a bit like a cop out to me. It would be hard to make those two minutes so awesome that stretching it out would be pointless. Working things further and further brings things to an exponentially higher level, and super short sets don't allow this to happen. Better than long and boring though. Maybe prolonged sets with continual development should be left to the “improvisers”, but I've seen “noise” musicians like Tralphaz really work it just as well as anybody with an acoustic bass or whatever. As soon as Pedestrian Deposit's wall of distortion started up, a bunch of guys started bobbing their heads pretty hard to the music as is typical at an intense show. They were all bobbing at a different tempo, and I couldn't figure out what they were synching up with. That sort of thing always seems weird to me. But not long afterward I found myself doing the same thing, unconsciously nodding away to the harsh drone. Different tempo from everyone else. Rhythmic response to intense audio with rhythm ambiguous enough that no two people relate to it in the same way. Someday perhaps I will figure it out.
Moseyed over to the Hemlock in time to catch about half of Lair of the Minotaur's set. Metal from former members of 7000 Dying Rats, including Weasel Walter on drums. Most of this was fairly sludgy metal with rhythmically barked vocals. Surprisingly a little too close to the kind of metal that would have a “-core” somewhere in its name for my tastes. The vocals were influenced a little too much by rap, and not enough by tortured screams of the damned. A few blast beat sections were the most satisfying to me. Low levels of kick drum in the PA watered down the sound to a somewhat disappointing level. Maybe that made all the difference.
Wednesday at 1510 8th Street, Charity Chan and Simon Rose opened things up with a piano and sax duo. Chan kept things inside the piano with the sustain pedal pressed down. Dark ambient style. Rose was frequently repeating the same group of notes in free time while circular breathing... sort of a raga sort of thing to put it really crudely. A fairly droney/static set. I closed my eyes and relaxed. At one point a sax blast excited sympathetic vibrations from undampened piano strings. Rose milked this for a while in a pretty satisfying way. Gratkowski/Nordeson/Looney/Smith played next. This was my third time seeing Gratkowski in four days, so I was starting to get a little worn out, but more relevantly my listening circumstances were slightly compromised, so it's hard to really say what went down. A lot of fairly intense timbral playing, as you would expect from these guys. Gratkowski was playing the best kind of intense energy music on his horns. Looney had his usual pile of junk rattling around on top of the piano strings. Nordeson worked in some subtle rhythmic patterns on his drum set, notably on his collection of bells. These patterns were just another element floating through the chaos, though, not a unifying rhythm. Despite this music being largely “textural” (a term I can't quite endorse), it had a strong soulful element, especially during the last piece. Something really reminded me of “Lonely Woman”.
The previous night at CNMAT, I saw Gratkowski perform with two different sets of musicians. First was the FPR Trio with Phillip Greenlief and Jon Raskin. I've enjoyed the latter two's playing together at their 2+2 series for the last year or so. I also saw this same trio perform the last time Gratkowski was in town (last September). The two locals are great, and this trio really showcases Gratkowski at his best. Almost all of the pieces they performed tonight (as at their previous show) were compositions by the members, which I think was one of the things that really pushed Gratkowski. As great as his improv is, he's into playing notes and seems to work best working with compositions. Greenlief's two contributions were my favorites of the evening. “No Name” (for György Ligeti) had a lot of Ligeti-like trilly tone clusters as well as some staccato Braxton-style angular attacks. The general idea of the piece seemed to be to play something like one of these ideas, then move on to another specified strategy, etc. “Florence” had some notated tonal material with a lot of room for improv suggested by the mostly graphic score. Whatever the scores specified, they worked really well and brought out the best playing of the evening. The other really memorable composition was an older one by Gratkowski, “Three Vegetables for Double Happiness”. This had a lot of notated material very much in the vein of Braxton's quirky, happy and angular mid-Seventies stuff like Comp. No. 40 O and the like. Proggy and energetic. A repeating motive was a short phrase at the end of a tonal phrase in which a note was repeated with increasing speed, moving through the cycle of eight note, eight note triplet, sixteenth note, sixteenth note quintuplet, etc. (or something like that). This idea played a larger role in the other composition by Gratkowski, which had just been written the previous day. Some great solos in this set. I think it was in Gratkowski's own piece where he played his first solo way up in the altissimo range and a later solo way down in the low notes only he can get out of an alto sax (this shit is really kind of mind boggling and also sounds really great). Anyway, this trio is great -- Gratkowski at his best. Rumor has it there is a CD in the works, which I am excited to hear and remember the live shows. Next Gratkowski played with David Wessel. Wessel made tasteful use of CNMAT's 8-channel sound system – not overdoing it at all, but shifting things around in a subtle and interesting manner rather than the hyperactive approach I frequently hear less experienced people employ. The sounds themselves were a bit corny to me -- a little too much reverb and delay, and the samples were also strange. The jazz band samples used frequently in the first piece sort of indicated a mistaken idea that Gratkowski had something to do with jazz. Doesn't seem like the case to me, and to whatever extent he does have something to do with jazz, it is not helped by chopped up hot jazz samples. Gratkowski was working hard, but seemed to have trouble fully blending in with the electronics. The second and final piece with Wessel was significantly better. They operated in more of a dark ambient realm, which made Wessel's corny reverb sounds entirely forgivable, even appropriate. Dark sustained sounds from Wessel encouraged more subdued timbral playing from Gratkowski rather than the more intense stuff I usually hear him play. It was nice hearing him pulled into this weird sound area. They were also joined by a violist from UC Berkeley who contributed a lot of great creaking sounds, and reinforced Gratkowski enough that the acoustic sounds were able to hold their own and blend in more evenly with the electronics. Both pieces were kept quite short, which was probably for the better.
Monday night was sfSoundGroup at ODC. Similar program to their 3/11 show, which I previously reviewed. Things opened up with an improvisation. Good stuff, as usual -- one of the highlights of the night, actually. They were working in the musical language they have established for themselves, which seems to be rooted in the 20th century compositions they play. The group also showed appropriate restraint for a quintet, with players frequently laying out and letting trios and other grouping run their course. Not as fierce or on point as the great previous show, but no real complaints. Well, my one complaint is that the pianist did a lot of playing with his forearms, but it didn't end up sounding nearly as brutal as it seemed he wanted it to. Maybe he was overthinking it. The improv stretched out pretty long as new ideas kept emerging. It seemed like it was probably longer than they had intended, but each new development made the piece that much more interesting. Matthew Goodheart's “Study No. 6b”, written specifically for this group, was next. The basic idea was that the component tones of a clarinet multiphonic were spread out among the whole ensemble so that the other instruments reinforced these tones while fighting their timbre and such with their own sound. This idea worked really well in a few places, but I felt like the piece didn't have much going for it beyond this harmonic aspect. More interesting rhythm or melody sections might have made it seem more complete to me. Grand Duett by Galina Ustvolskaya closed the first set. Fierce piano and cello duet with intense, incessantly repeated phrases. I found myself wanting much more intensity and thought it would probably work a lot better for me if performed by a rock band like Zs or the Flying Luttenbachers – more volume and thicker, heavier sounds. This really was in the same vein as the stuff those bands normally do anyway. Iannis Xenakis' “Akanthos” opened the second set. It was nice, but seemed to lack the intensity I expected from a Xenakis piece. That seemed to be my complaint about the whole evening, actually. Was it actually the group, or just my mood, or did Fred Frith, Frank Gratkowski and Randy Yau set the intensity bar too high in the preceding days? Two Wadada Leo Smith pieces, the same one performed 3/11, closed the program. Great stuff, but again not quite up to the experience of the previous week. If I seem a little down on this show, it's mostly because the 3/11 show was so fucking good. It would be hard to match that, especially when repeating most of that program. The pieces still sounded very good. “Tawhid”, the first of the two, was my other favorite piece of the evening. After hearing Smith talk about his graphic scores the week before, I really don't understand how or why the group structured these pieces so much. There were definitely recognizable and pre-determined sections happening, and the pieces were easily recognizable as the ones I had previously heard. I'll need to investigate.
Sunday night was the first Gratkowski show in the Bay Area. Here he performed at Maybeck Studio with Fred Frith and Charity Chan. This was my first time at this venue and I kind of alternated between enjoying the very nice setting and being slightly repulsed by it. Overall, it seemed like a pretty cozy and comfortable place to enjoy some music. And the music was sublime. Chan and Gratkowski set up a smooth flow on their piano and sax, while Frith continually disrupted things. Banging and scraping on his electric guitar with an anarchic, haphazard attitude, and seemingly rather detached from, and oblivious to, the other musical stream happening. And turned up a little too loud. This is not a complaint in any way – it worked really well and sounded really great. Fred Frith can make detached offensive noise sound really good, and all the better that the good music was resulting from such a strange approach. Gratkowski was meanwhile fighting to make his contribution and Chan seemed to know enough to lay low and let these two masters steer the ship. Not like Gratkowski ever really fully got that chance. This set was at least as good as the FPR Trio set, but I can't say it was Gratkowski at his best, since he was really just struggling to be present. A pretty interesting thing to witness.
Earlier in the day was noise pancakes at CCA. Sharkiface started things out with Nord tones and other nice sounds. It resonated with me a little better than her 21 Grand set from about two weeks previous, though it was pretty similar. Late Severa Wires played a more abstract set than at their show with Ettrick a week before. For a little while they had an Open City vibe going with minimal free rock on their drums, guitar and bass (augmented by turntables). Later, things heated up a little and Sun Ra records went on the record player. Ended up with a free spazz blowout. Telepathik Friend... I really couldn't get over how intensely influenced by Caroliner these kids are. Similar neon tapestries, amp covers and full-body costumes. Similar falsetto echo vocals and crowd-abusing antics. Music was much more formless, and largely based on feedback and other sounds through delay pedals. But I was scratching my head to much to really pay attention. Mini amp got thrown around a lot by the singer. The most amusing part was when an abused audience took charge by unplugging the amp and kicking it across the room. I would've liked to see that line carried a bit further. RHY Yau closed things out with a typically excellent set. Really fantastic, even though it had its shaky moments. Test oscillator tones, feedback, mangled voices and brutal screams. A really full and intense sound. The sound elements were kept pretty simple, which lent a lot of clarity to the music – same sort of reduced approach as Romero, Wiese, etc. The oscillator was a nice variation on the set I've seen him perform numerous times. Similar set-up and ideas, but implemented/improvised differently each time. Great stuff, as usual.
The two Berkeley venues, Maybeck and CNMAT, were new to me and really improved my impression of that city. I guess there are hidden gems in that place if you can avoid the punks and college students, and cut through to something more unique and intelligent. Also, nearly every show I attended provided food. Pancakes at CCA. Wine, cheese, etc. at Maybeck. Cheese and wine at CNMAT. A whole spread of hors d'oeuvres at 1510, and catered treats at RML. Nice supplement to my diet of rolled oats and rice. Let's keep this going.
Labels: live performance reviews
posted by Jacob Felix Heule at
3/23/2007 10:44:00 AM
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