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Dear music friends joyce |
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Year in Review:
A list of Cuneiform's 2012 releases
[JUMP TO: Jazz & Jazz-Rock: New Recordings | Jazz: Archival/Historical Recordings
Avant/Rock/Beyond Recordings | Obtaining 2012 Promos]
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Living By Lanterns According to some versions of String Theory, ours is but one of an infinite number of universes. But you would need to dig deeply into the cosmological haystack before encountering a project as extraordinary and unlikely as New Myth/Old Science, which brings together an incandescent cast of Chicago and New York improvisers to explore music inspired by a previously unknown recording of Sun Ra. In the hands of drummer Mike Reed and vibraphonist Jason Adasiewicz, who are both invaluable and protean creative forces on Chicago’s music scene, Ra’s informal musings serve as a portal for their cohesive but multi-dimensional combo, newly christened Living By Lanterns. The ensemble illuminates new musical possibilities in dimensions distinct from but connected to Ra’s self-invented universe. Living By Lanterns is:
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Wadada Leo Smith "Ten Freedom Summers is one of my life's defining works." – Wadada Leo Smith Trumpeter/composer Wadada Leo Smith’s Ten Freedom Summers is the work of a lifetime by one of jazz’s true visionaries, a kaleidoscopic, spiritually charged collection of 19 compositions inspired by the struggle for African-American freedom. Triumphant and mournful, visceral and philosophical, searching, scathing and relentlessly humane, Smith’s music embraces the civil rights era’s milestones while celebrating its heroes and martyrs. Blending improvised and notated music in a synthesis of European classical, African American, and creative music practices, the music speaks in a singular, clear and powerful voice unlike any in contemporary music. This four-CD set features Smith's Golden Quintet as well as the nine-member, LA-based contemporary classical group, Southwest Chamber Music, under the direction of Grammy-winning conductor Jeff von der Schmidt.
stream: @SOUNDCLOUD / @BANDCAMP |
Jason Robinson A ubiquitous and often pivotal figure in the stories and myths of ancient Greece, the blind prophet Tiresias was blessed and cursed by the gods, experiencing life as both a man and a woman while living for hundreds of years. In Jason Robinson’s polydirectional masterpiece Tiresian Symmetry, he doesn’t seek to tell the soothsayer’s story. Rather, he’s gathered an extraordinary cast of improvisers to investigate the nature of narrative itself in a jazz context. The music’s richly suggestive harmonic and metrical relationships elicit a wide array of responses, but ultimately listeners find their own sense of order and meaning amidst the sumptuous sounds. For Robinson, a capaciously inventive artist who has flourished in a boggling array of settings, Tiresian Symmetry represents his most expansive project yet. The ensemble features:
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Pixel Pixel, the powerhouse indie-jazz ensemble from Norway, makes an indelible first impression with Reminder, an audaciously creative debut. Led by the remarkable bassist/vocalist Ellen Andrea Wang, the protean quartet, including saxophonist Harald Lassen, trumpeter, Jonas Kilmork Vemøy, and drummer Jon Audun Baar, is the most alluring band yet to explode out of Norway’s burgeoning improvised music scene. Combining indie rock energy with the improvisational flexibility of a post-bop combo, Pixel breaks down familiar musical elements and recombines them in a succession of startlingly original soundscapes. Earthy and ethereal, wistful and aggressive, sensuous and pummeling, the band refuses to settle into one mood or sonic space for long.
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Positive Catastrophe Mad, obsessive and beautifully reckless, the avant Afro-Caribbean little big band Positive Catastrophe returns to action with Dibrujo, Dibrujo, Dibrujo…, a sophomore session featuring extended suites by the band’s co-leaders, alchemist cornetist Taylor Ho Bynum and iconoclastic percussionist/vocalist Abraham Gomez-Delgado. The album documents a band that has devised a wondrously idiosyncratic musical vocabulary built upon raucous Puerto Rican rhythms, extended instrumental techniques and gleeful disregard for distinctions between inside and outside blowing. “This raucous 10-piece ensemble…nails its distinctive blend of Afro-Cuban rhythm and freewheeling improvisation.”
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Ergo Whitney Balliet famously described jazz as the “sound of surprise.” For the experimental electro-acoustic trio Ergo, jazz is a forum for surprising sounds, startling textures, and gently enthralling improvisation. With the ensemble’s third release If Not Inertia, Ergo continues to astonish, delivering music that investigates strange and unexpected spaces while inviting listeners into the process. Equally inspired by Sun Ra and Sigur Ros, the trio is devoted to exploring the push and pull between structure and freedom, density and spaciousness, and electronic and acoustic timbres. Their music unfurls in uncharted territory, a vast sonic realm defined by loops, improvisation, brief composed motifs, and constantly shifting interplay. w/ guests: Mary Halvorson & Sebastian Kruger (of Inlets)
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Forgas Band Phenomena Composer/drummer Patrick Forgas has been hailed as “the French answer to the Canterbury scene” ever since his debut 1977 release Cocktail (recorded with members of Magma and Zao). Since the late 1990s, as leader of the Forgas Band Phenomena, he has helped ignite interest in Canterbury-infused jazz-rock among a new generation of young French jazz musicians and fans. For Acte V, Forgas leads a 7-piece ensemble (sax, trumpet, violin, guitar, keyboards, bass and drums) through complex, melodic and epic compositions that mix ambitious progressive rock structures and intense jazz soloing. Fusing new jazz directions with the most adventurous rock of the 70s, the music should appeal to fans of Frank Zappa, Soft Machine, National Health, as well as fans of Magic Malik and other new jazz-rock/fusion bands.
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Joel Harrison, Lorenzo Feliciati, Cuong Vu, Roy Powell, Dan Weiss Full of foreboding and existential terror, the abyss resides in the darkest corners of the human imagination. Holy Abyss, a collaborative project between New York guitarist Joel Harrison and Italian bassist Lorenzo Feliciati, is an antidote to angst. Flowing from a deep communion between the artists, the album turns dread on its head, offering a series of expansive soundscapes full of lustrous harmonies, searching melodies and knowing interplay. The musicians are united by a passion for modern jazz unbounded by stylistic conventions. Open to sounds from around the world, they have all created music infused with electronics, odd meters, and uncommon timbres and tonal palettes.
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Jazz: Archival/Historical Recordings
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Michael Gibbs and the NDR Bigband With a career spanning more than half a century and at least three continents, trombonist, composer and arranger Michael Gibbs is a jazz giant who has spent recent decades writing arrangements mostly for other artists. Documenting his tremendously rewarding collaboration with the vaunted 18-piece NDR Bigband, Back In the Days is an invaluable addition to Gibbs’ fascinating but unfortunately sparse discography as a leader. While the album’s title smacks of nostalgia, there’s nothing sentimental or backward looking about Gibbs’ music. Making full use of the NDR’s vivid soloists and finely honed sections, he supplies the orchestra with a series of luscious settings, marked by gracefully swooping lines, exquisitely detailed cross voicings, and an expansive harmonic palette.
stream: @YOUTUBE / @SOUNDCLOUD |
Avant-Rock & Beyond
[AVANT-PROGRESSIVE / POST-ROCK / AMBIENT / ELECTRONIC / NOISE / SPACE / 21 C. GLOBAL]
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Ahleuchatistas With a moniker that nigh on screams “enigma,” Asheville, North Carolina instrumental rock duo Ahleuchatistas belong to the beyond-category sector of such iconic, genre-flouting combos as John Zorn’s Naked City, Captain Beefheart’s Magic Band, Swans, Tortoise, and Sun City Girls. A duo armed only with guitar and drums, Ahleuchatistas combine wicked precision with intense abandon, droll humor with analytical construction, and a sly gregariousness with uncompromising vision. This pair interweaves elements of punk rock, jazz, classical music, speed metal, grindcore, progressive rock, noise, folk musics from Asia and North Africa, electronic music, and ambient aesthetics, along with volatile, unpredictable improvisation, flowing organically in a virtual world of their own. With a devoted international cult following, Ahleuchatistas is considered by many to be one of the most innovative and ever-developing instrumental groups of the past decade. Cerebral but never ponderous, Ahleuchatistas make immediate music that reaches for the mind, heart, and gut.
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Christian Marclay, Toshio Kajiwara, DJ Olive: World-renowned multi-media artist Christian Marclay may be best known these days for his globally embraced film collage piece “The Clock,” but he began by redefining the roles of “musician,” “DJ,” and even “artist” itself. Since the late ‘70s, Marclay has created art by masterfully mistreating both vinyl and phonographic equipment, using them both in a manner more consistent with the way an abstract sculptor employs raw materials in the service of a larger vision. He was one of the earliest musicians to make an art form out of the turntable, using the device as a tool to make surprising juxtapositions. This album is an aural document of a September 21, 2002 performance at Washington D.C.’s Hirshhorn Museum, in which Marclay was accompanied by two fellow travelers, Toshio Kajiwara and DJ Olive. Together, the three turntablists turned the museum’s auditorium into a combination laboratory/playground/dreamscape, in which the three men manipulated mixers, decks, and vinyl to create a sometimes funny, sometimes fearsome, endlessly exploratory kind of collective audio hallucination.
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Steve Moore A “light echo” is the reverberation of light, as opposed to sound. There are flashes of light that become visible from the Earth’s vantage point that are actually from suns and stars that exploded hundreds of years ago, thousands of light years away. It’s clear that space is the place Steve Moore had in his mind’s eye when putting this album together. And the spiraling synth sequences and interstellar atmospheres of the tracks will resonate with anyone who ever hopped aboard with the likes of Tangerine Dream, Vangelis, or Klaus Schulze for one of their classic, analog-only cosmic journeys. But even though Moore’s antecedents go back a few decades, the electronic escapades of Light Echoes are made for the here and now. Even if the album title was inspired by the eruption of a stellar system from 170 years ago. Synthesist Steve Moore is one half of the noted 70s-inspired, synth/prog duo Zombi. In addition to the five albums released by Zombi, he has a prolific and thriving solo career, releasing music that ranges from electronica/dance to trance music.
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Alec K. Redfearn and the Eyesores Alec K. Redfearn and the Eyesores have been surprising audiences with their hypnotic, gently explosive rock music for more than a decade. Never one to follow trends, Redfearn’s kaleidoscopic visions, anchored by his extraordinary accordion work and sonorous vocals, exist on the fringes of pop music, songs that are as familiar and individual as snowflakes. Sister Death explores the mysteries of life, death, love, loss, creation, and destruction, subjects that have informed Redfearn’s songwriting since the early 90s. Sister Death continues Redfearn’s penchant for music that’s profound, primeval and cinematic, with echoes of folk influenced melodies still drifting through the mix. Spellbinding, and tantalizing, Sister Death is a rich, complex work that gradually reveals its musical and emotional mysteries over with each listen.
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Janel & Anthony Janel and Anthony is the collaborative venture of two of the fastest-rising stars in DC’s burgeoning experimental music scene, Anthony Pirog, an omnivorous guitarist, and Janel Leppin, a conservatory trained cellist steeped in North Indian and Persian classical music, free improv and jazz. For Where Is Home, the duo have created a lush, orchestral work investigating the treacherous emotional terrain at the hyper-mobile heart of 21st century America. Drawing on everything from Hindustani ragas and surf rock licks to Appalachian laments and post-bop harmonies, the album alternates between intricately lapidary, electro-acoustic soundscapes and brief improvised dialogues. Transcending music genre as well as geographic locale, Where Is Home is rooted equally in the 21st century’s global village and in DC’s vanished past.
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Lars Hollmer The Talmud teaches that the loss of a single life is like the destruction of an entire world. But the passing of the prodigiously productive, beguilingly creative Swedish musician Lars Hollmer, who died at the age of 60 after a brief and sudden illness, is more like the end of a steadily expanding galaxy. The posthumously complied album, With Floury Hand (Sketches) makes a compelling case for the vast scope and idiosyncratic humanity of Hollmer’s kaleidoscopic musical vision. A composer of astonishing range and depth who combined earthy folk forms with a wide torrent (rock, jazz, film scores, carnival and circus music, classical and more!) of contemporary musical currents, Hollmer’s music transcended any single musical genre and evoked the heart and soul of traditional Scandinavian music.
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Thinking Plague The end is near and it’s never sounded so good. With the release of Decline and Fall the seminal Colorado avant-prog rock band Thinking Plague captures the tenor of the times with a caustic look at our troubled state of affairs in the 21st century. Decline and Fall dissects contemporary woes, delivering a bracing jolt of apocalyptic imagery set to intricately driving rhythms and incantatory melodies. Inspired by avant-art rock bands like Arts Bears and Henry Cow, as well as by contemporary classical composers, Thinking Plague has earned an avid international following by forging a singular synthesis of prog-rock with 20th century classical, folk, and jazz. Rigorously constructed and passionately played, the music makes a compelling case for rock’s relevance as a forum for creative composition.
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