Alt.music.2
26-28 July 2002
Alt.music.2 New Music Festival's lineup features three sound artists from Japan: Sachiko M, Toshimaru Nakamura and Tetuzi Akiyama; The Flirts from the Netherlands; Voice Crack and Günter Müller from Switzerland; David Watson from New York; Tony Buck from Australia. These international performers join artists from New Zealand, such as Sean Kerr, Phil Dadson, Rachael Shearer and Jeff Henderson.Toshimaru Nakamura works are a sonic equivalent of making an omelette with no eggs... just the pan. He uses a mixing board’s circuitry, to create new sounds through the subtle manipulation of feedback. Typically a mixing board operates like a sonic junction box, mixing sounds together however, sound artist Toshimaru feeds no sounds into the mixer. With a grillingly austere sound palette Nakamura’s work is a truly subversive use/misuse of sound equipment – akin to the experimentation with pure feedback on the electric guitar in the 1960s. Nakamura however, put aside his guitar in 1998 and has since concentrated on producing electronic music.
He formed the duo Repeat in 1998 with the American drummer Jason Kahn and has played and worked extensively in Berlin, Germany, Switzerland and France. He has recorded two solo albums entitled No-input Mixing Board. Part of the emerging Onkyo school in Tokyo, his work puts the focus of music back onto listening, rather than playing. In 1999 he collaborated on an album with Otomo Yoshihide, Artspace’s new music visitor in 2000, and he has worked extensively with Sachiko M and Tetuzi Akiyama who are both attending this year’s Alt Music festival. With Akayami, he has organised and hosted a monthly improvised music gathering, Off-Site.
Nakamura’s visit was made possible with the generous support of Asia 2000.
[http://www.japanimprov.com/tnakamura/index.html]
Sachiko M uses a sampler in a similar way, taking an instrument normally used to digitally record sound samples and play them back, and instead paring it back, using No Input techniques. Her unique performance style brings to the forefront the sampler's own test tones and noise, to develop nearly memory-free sampling works. Digital sine waves pierce, purr, pulse and pan in a fetishistic homage to the machine.
Her remarkable solos consist entirely of sine waves and have attracted a great deal of attention, resulting in a host of solo albums that carve out an almost aching minimalism. While many people have added to the sampling formula, Sachiko M makes it interesting by stripping everything away, using the raw identity of the sampler. Her pulsing ambient sounds emerge from it’s memory scrubbed clean of all samples.
Her Sine Wave Solo CD sleeve explains she's playing “100 percent free memory sampler.” No surprise then that she has little to add about her music that gazes so intently into the void. “These are my favourite type of sounds,” she will say. She has become one of the most sought after performers in the experimental music world, working with Otomo Yoshihide on the post-sampling project Filament, but also working in a huge variety of contexts, including film, theatre and performance. Active as a CD producer and distributor she founded the AMOEBiC label and started the private distribution system Chansa.
Sachiko M’s visit was made possible with the generous support of Asia 2000.
[http://www.japanimprov.com/sachikom/disco.html]
An avowed instrumentalist Tetuzi Akiyama adds a unique contribution to Alt.Music. He’s a highly unique and experimental guitarist heavily applying free improvisation and noise. Besides guitar, however, he also plays electronics, viola, and self-made instruments.
An enthusiastic hard rock fan at age 11, he started playing electric guitar at 13. But his later interest in free improvisation and classical music prompted him to form the improvised music band Madhar in 1987. He also started playing improvised classical viola, and formed the avant-garde Hikyo String Quintet in 1994. The band included world reknown cellist Taku Sugimoto and later that year, Akiyama and Sugimoto launched a guitar duo that played gigs in New York, the Midwest, Chicago and Detroit throughout 1995-1996. For about a year starting in early 1994, Akiyama was also a member of Nijiumu, one of guitarist Keiji Haino's bands.
With his experiemental credentials well established, Akiyama co-founded and organised the monthly performance meeting in Tokyo, called Off -Site, the unofficial home of the Onkyo style since 1998. Onkyo is a sonic movement that projects music into a space for musing and contemplation, rather than action and sensationalism. With “no input” mixer Nakamura, they are sonic improvisers with a Butoh consciousness. Akiyama has upcoming album releases in the USA, and is about to become a major international figure.
Akayami’s visit was made possible with the generous support of Asia 2000.
[http://www.japanimprov.com/takiyama/index.html]
The Flirts
“One could imagine this music serving superbly as a soundtrack to an especially dark film by some future Tarkovsky.” (All Music Guide)
Dutch residents Cor Fuhler and Gert–Jan Prins create rude, dirty electro-acoustic improvised music. Rarely pristine or pure, their sounds carry smudges, blurs, a patina of substances that would stain your fingers, abrade your nails. Emerging since 1997 as one of the freshest, most engaging acts in the experimental improvisation world, this energetic duo is able to move easily from virtuosic playing to brutal and naive atavistics.
In 1984 Gert-Jan Prins started an industrial-free-jazz group Gorgonzola Legs that kicked off a period of intense experimentation. It formed the basis of his current approach to percussion, environmental noise and electronics where his raw scraping and rasping sound is subtlety coloured and forged into idiosyncratic poly-rhythms.
A true innovator, he develops electronic installations structured around noise. In recent years he has worked a lot on his analogue radio-electronics or “ether loops”, processing diverse instruments – piano, double bass and saxophone – through his radio systems.
He works regularly at STEIM (Studio for Electro-Instrumental Music) in Amsterdam and plays in clubs and festivals in and outside The Netherlands. In addition to his solo projects he collaborates with experimental rockband Analecta, and in a string of improvised music combinations: a quartet with Fred Van Hove, Luc Houtkamp and Johannes Bauer; a trio with Misha Mengelberg and Mats Gustafsson; e-rax, an electronics trio with Thomas Lehn and Peter Van Bergen to name a few.
Cor Fuhler began playing the piano, organ, and self-made instruments at the age of six and graduated in 1989 from the Sweelinck Conservatory in Amsterdam. Exploring theatrical music groups such as Carduelis Carduelis and Wayang Detective he became attuned to the possibilities of extending piano sound and this interest led him to collect and build various acoustic instruments (keyolin) as well as his increasing work with electronics. He has performed live at festivals around the world including Konfrontationen (Nickelsdorf), Moers, Vancouver International festival, What is Music? (Sydney/Melbourne), Angelica (Bologna), Taktlos (Switzerland) and Empty Bottle festival (Chicago).
Together, their collaboration is one “whose interaction is in a constant state of flux, and one whose ideas flow so liberally, and create music which is at times so disorientating, that it feels as though one is listening to it through some sort of prismic filter.” They were both founding members of MIMEO (Music in Movement Electronic Orchestra), and fresh from a US tour, they have a new release on Erstwhile, a label known for spotting emerging talent. “The Flirts is a superb example of the rougher edge of electro-acoustic improv at the beginning of the 21st century. Highly recommended for adventurous listeners." (All Music Guide).
[http://www.euronet.nl/users/fuhler/theflirts.htm]
Voice Crack
Andy Guhl and Norbert Möslang are two parts of the Voice Crack duo. Starting out in 1972 the pair now has a long pedigree in electro-acoustic music. They play cracked everyday-electronics ¬– radios or dictating machines – adopting such found or recycled items as musical instruments. “We not only work with electronics from the garbage,” say the musicians, “we also use cheap new stuff: radios, calculators, computer games etc. Lots of lo-tech. Today’s hi-tech is the lo-tech of tomorrow.”
With almost metaphysical aplomb they create new sounds using magnetic and radio waves in a complex system controlled by movements of their hands and by light. These artists use consumer electronics as a harmonic resonator. The resonators pick up interference patterns from infra-red rays and sound waves; producing music made from the ambient environment and external factors.
Their sound works respond to the proximity of the player’s body; the physical characteristics of the player and the friction caused by his skin. Surroundings can play a role in their sound work, providing chance discoveries of interference amongst a jumble of random sound waves. Like a series of sound sculptures, their jumble of sounds waves is a continually changing interplay of atmospheric tones.
During the past 30 years researching sounds, Voice Crack has often collaborated with the trio Borbetomagus, however they are perhaps most famous for their recording with Günter Müller and Jim O'Rourke the pioneering track “table,chair and hatstand”. Voice Crack is part of the quartet poire_z with Günter Müller and Erik M.
[http://www.voicecrack.ch]
David Watson
Emerging as a guitarist and improviser in New Zealand in the early 1980s Watson is remembered for organising three national festivals of experimental music. He was a member of Braille recording collective and the Primitive Art Group. Since 1987 he has lived in New York where he’s a regular performer at New York bastions of experimental music: The Knitting Factory, Tonic, Merkin Hall and PS1.
Playing bagpipes since the mid 1980s, he launched a plan to take this idiosyncratic wind instrument beyond its stereotypical conventions. He has performed and recorded with Sonic Youth’s Lee Ranaldo and Thurston Moore. His group Endgame (which includes Philip Glass’ percussionists Jim and Christine Bard) has performed with luminaries such as John Zorn, Ikue Mori, Shelley Hirsch, Mark Stewart (from Paul Simon’s and Steve Reich’s ensembles), John Cage collaborator Chris Mann, and Christian Marclay. He is following up his bagpipe CD Skirl (released by Tzadick) with a release on Sonic Youth's SY label, and a double CD for Experimental Intermedia's XI label.
Günter Müller
Percussionist Günter Müller was born in München, Germany in 1954, but has lived in Switzerland since 1966. In some ways he’s the godfather of the new music scene, particularly of the subtle style often used by the players involved in alt.music.2, remarkably, he’s collaborated with almost all the musicians playing at this year’s festival. An artist that emphasises listening skills and sound quality over virtuoso drumming, his enormous experience in the European scene over the past 20 years has helped him develop great musical instincts. But he’s also a strong musical innovator.
He has been playing a unique drum set with a mobile pick-up and microphone system of his own invention since 1981. The system allows hand-generated sounds on drums and percussion to be modulated electronically. Müller makes a seamless mix of live percussion, electronically processing his live playing and pre-recorded samples. His performances are notable for extending his percussion set-up into an ambient and electronic sound scape.
He’s played and recorded with a large number of fine musicians, from Jim O'Rourke to Christian Marclay, from Butch Morris to Otomo Yoshihide and currently works in the electronic quartet Poire_Z with Erik M and Voice Crack. He’s also an occasional collaborator with Taku Sugimoto, Jason Kahn, and Vietnamese sound guru LêÊ Quan Ninh.
He has worked in a wide variety of contexts: solo; in ad-hoc groupings; and in regular playing bands, particularly Nachtluft, with Andres Bosshard and Jacques Widmer, which has produced a number of LPs and CDs. The trio, two drummers and live electronics, have also created sound installations and sound architecture such as Klangbrucke Bern and the satellite-linked Telefonia and an unreleased performance in 1987 using the dam of the lago di Sambuco, Ticino, as a sound reflector.