Takuroku Shooting Gallery: End-Of-Year Edition (Part 2)

Monday 28 December 2020

In Part 1 I mentioned the substance of Takuroku’s lockdown releases and the climate of discovery they encouraged. A perfect example of this is Leon, by the ensemble Jamaica! The description of Jamaica! (“a free music ensemble comprised of adults with learning disabilities… grew out of efforts to make the music sessions held there as inclusive as possible”) does not prepare you for the experience of hearing Leon, an hour-long still point of red heat, a glowing ember that radiates energy without movement. Their playing has a focus and economy that make AMM sound like dilettantes by comparison. Not quite an hour: the ending yields to dub, which feels all the heavier for what has gone before. The bass player is Leon, who died earlier this year.

I’m listening to everything here, even if it’s a sax and drums duet. This means I didn’t miss Lookbook by @xcrswx, with Crystabel Riley on drums and Seymour Wright on horn, the two of them sustaining the faintest of rolls and overtones for over half an hour. A remarkable feat, if not in technique then in holding the listener in suspense, even as they constantly retreat, dissapating as much momentum from their playing as possible without lapsing into silence. Wright’s solo release (If) I Remember Rites (2020) takes this approach in different directions. Taken from a live-streamed performance at Cafe Oto in August, his Natural Rite [angle] is in memoriam Scratch Orchestra member Carole Finer, who died in March. A single, high harmonic on alto sax is reiterated and gradually succumbs to brittle percussion improvised on fixtures of the cafe. The distillation of essences in these works is reversed in the concluding Knot Rite, where three saxophones are used as a vehicle to produce thick, flat panels of burred, overdriven feedback.

It sounds like there’s lots of feedback at work in amongst the home-made synths, quasi-guitar rigs and miscellaneous electronics in Killers in the Clouds, a pair of works recorded by Aquiles Hadjis and Nerve in Hong Kong (I think?) in 2019. It carries that same wild impression of unbridled electronic noise and anarchic fun that is so often the goal of electronic improvisation, yet too rarely succeeds as it does here. The restless, impulsive changes in sound and texture never feel forced and are often genuinely inexplicable to the more jaded noise fans. This should be in your go-to playlist next time you’re in a music war with the neighbours (you all have this problem, right?)

There’s feedback synthesis in ТЕПЛОТА’s HEAT/WORK too, but in a more mediated way. The duet of Grundik Kasyansky on feedback synthesizer and Tom Wheatley on double bass have worked and reworked live recordings from the previous year into something at once organic and formalised, using compositional processes, loops and the percussive effects of Wheatley’s bass to produce music that shifts between the atmospheric and the rhythmic, with a substratum of deep noise held in restraint.

More duets, where the line between improvisation and composition gets increasingly blurred: The Quiet Club’s Telepathic Lockdown Tapes presents two solo improvisations by Danny McCarthy and Mick O’Shea played back simultaneously without editing. Each allows space for the unheard other, producing a soundscape of tantalisingly obscure details that never becomes dense. Eclectic materials, audio verité and coincidence produce and effect of Cagean impassiveness. Shakeeb Abu Hamdan & Sholto Dobie’s It’s Worse mixes and matches live recordings from various locations, including some guest appearances by Arturas Bumšteinas’ Lithuanian Organ Safari project. Hamdan’s often blunt percussion and Dobie’s vacuum-powered homebrew organs sound better here than they often do live, where the queasy weirdness of the sounds take precedence over the sometimes cumbersome means of producing them. Lia Mazzari & Tom White’s Lettura di un’ onda is more of a collage, I guess. Field recordings of everyday urban sounds get recontextualised in incongruous ways that emphasise the isolation of city life in the past year. The strange disassociation of many people’s lives this past year is captured in an audio diary form, but Mazzari and White’s manipulations have a playfulness about them that adds some low-key absurdist humour. The grey backdrop of city recordings is also livened up by Mazzari’s cello playing and a few sweetly processed whip cracks.

(Continued in Part 3)

Senses of place: Takuroku

Wednesday 19 August 2020

Isolation drags on – at least it does for me. I’m vaguely aware of the passing of time, and kind of aware that I’ve been staying in one place for months, but a complacency sets in such that the sudden realisation of other times and places comes as something of a shock now. Cafe Oto’s Takuroku series of download releases continues for the foreseeable future, made by musicians coping with lockdown. As music made from necessity, it tends to fall into two categories, being either solo recordings at home or long-distance collaboration. The latter type is facilitated by online communication and typically takes the form of an exchange, or a series of exchanges between two or more musicians. The results are a type of montage, such as the decelptively complex sketches made up of multiple images by Ryoko Akama, Anne-F Jacques and Tim Shaw in their Takuroky album In Another Place. On the other hand, Otto Willberg and David Birchall have taken things further by exchanging the places themselves.

Willberg is a double bass player in London, while Birchall is a guitarist in Manchester. Their joint release Murky Sovereignty performs a rite of psychogeographical alchemy, by each recording a space near them and playing them back to each other. Each has scaled their playing back to forms of electronic treatment laid over the recordings, enhancing the audible space and layering them with acoustic tropes. The spaces chosen are liminal – the pair of works are titled walking about under junction 7 of the M60, singing and spending lunch time under the link road at Thamesmead a couple of times – concrete traffic overpasses with distinct acoustic characteristics yet also oppressive on a human scale. The baleful hum of traffic sets the tone for both works, a grey film that settles over every sound and darkens it. If this sounds too much like grim social realism, just remember that there’s a purposeful idleness at work in these recordings, in defiance of the utilitarian surroundings. An inadvertent performance takes place as people pass through the scene, in various guises. Willberg and Birchall are activist observers, finding life in supposedly dead spaces.

There’s a stark contract of place and time in Ute Kanngiesser and Daniel Kordík’s 5AM, recorded early one June morning not far from here, where I’ve been sitting for the past five months. I’m well aware it’s summer now, but everything I’ve been hearing this year suggests a perpetual British spring, slow and belated. Kordík’s recording of Kanngiesser playing cello on the Hackney Marshes began at 4:48 AM and it instantly reminds me that it was the right time of year to coincide with the dawn chorus. The piece is, in fact, a recording of birdsong gently accompanied by Kanngiesser adding faint sounds, usually harmonics. As an artistic statement, it’s simply an act of joining in with the surroundings, yet that simple act was both liberating and transgressive. Reading Kanngiesser’s notes reminds you of the evasive action needed to record this piece, at a time when “essential” travel was restricted. It seems later than I remembered, yet also so much longer ago than I thought. This release comes with writing by Evie Ward and is available in WAV format, as recommended by the musicians.

Tom Wheatley’s Round Trip returns to home, or stays at home, or both. The space itself becomes the subject as it encroaches upon his double-bass playing, at times disrupting it entirely. Or, the bass recedes into background noise amidst the domestic sounds that form the basis of this crowded landscape. With attentive listening, one hears musicianship frustrated by ambient obstacles; with casual listening one hears the bass notes merging into the space, a settled occupant, even if never fully at ease.