jon abbey

I'd recommend these two Takayanagi discs over the collaborations with Abe (plus they're cheaper): http://www.fe.org/artists/takayanagi.new.d...n.masayuki.html

no worries, you don't have to hold your tongue around me. I really just never heard that kind of take on Ami before, and don't know how to react to it.

"Tokyo crew" is shorthand, you know precisely what I mean.

because the tastes of the people on this thread seem generally to be rooted in Euro free improv, or US artists following in their footsteps, and what the Tokyo crew do is a decidedly different thing. you don't hear anything exceptional about what Ami does with her voice? hmm, I don't even really know how to respond to that. FWIW, there's no electronic manipulation involved, just her singing into a microphone. bringing this sidetrack full circle, Sainkho sat in for one of the sets of the Evan Parker Electroacoustic Ensemble night Nate and I saw in Victo a while back.

maybe you caught them on a bad night, they've told me that Filament is really a studio project, not a live one (although they sometimes do shows when they're invited still).

Sachiko is one of a handful of the most sensitive and compelling improvisers in the world today, although obviously high-pitched electronics aren't to everyone's taste. did you see her solo or in collaboration? her solo sets are basically conceptual at this point, "Bar Sachiko", she just plays one or two or three constant sine waves, there's almost no changing. I'm not a fan of this solo stuff (she has done more interesting solo work in the past), but she's a brilliant collaborative improviser.

here, perfect example, I love schnee_live and am not so crazy about the Fuhler/Prins disc. I'd say file under S.

well, there are a few categories, sometimes it's just that I know they could have been even better if the musicians had taken my suggestions (Bits, Bots and Signs, the Dorner/Drumm), sometimes it just didn't work as "magically" as I'd hoped, and then there are some of the earliest ones before I really established an aesthetic. there's nothing in the catalog I'm even slightly embarrassed about, though, especially considering I had pretty much no contacts in this world when I started in 1998, I was just a hardcore fan like pretty much everyone reading this now. but if I had to go back and retroactively delete a couple of titles, I'd probably go with the Earl Howard/Denman Maroney and the Dean Roberts/Werner Dafeldecker. not that either of them is bad, and Earl ended up being my mastering engineer and a key part of my label, but that one has solo tracks as well as duos, I haven't put out anything solo since (that was the first disc I commissioned), and the Dean/Werner disc was their first meeting, we all got a little too excited and we should have waited a year or so for them to gel, I think. also, I try to keep Erst a bit broader than my own taste, specifically with the Marcus Schmickler records and a couple of others. those aren't really my personal faves, but for some people, they're the best part of the catalog.

of course, most of any genre is crap. I'd like to hear your specifics regarding Erstwhile, though.

yeah, the ECM electroacoustic ensemble releases are all ECM-ized in terms of smoothing out the production. I asked Parker about it once, and he said that's the way he wanted it, but the Victo set was much more exciting (and successful), to my ears. Parker was in the avant-garde of combining electronics with free improvisation, but he seems to still be stuck where he was when he started, and the rest of the world has moved on and past him. it's a little hard for me to believe at this point that there was a time when I considered him one of my couple of favorite musicians in the world.

pretty sure the request was for opinions about Parker's electroacoustic work, Steve.

hehe, almost exactly what I thought about posting in response there.

rap has been far more creatively alive over the last 25 years than jazz. worry about your own house, Mr. Drew.

I haven't heard the new triple disc Niblock yet, but I've heard the bulk of his earlier work. it's pretty similar to itself, I don't think you need too much. the release I like is called A Young Person's Guide to Phill Niblock, it compiles some of his seventies work, not sure if it's in print or not. he'll be in this year's ErstQuake, in the matinee in duo with Thomas Ankersmit (profiled in last month's Paris Transatlantic).

well, it depends on the listener. the One Too Many Salty Swift group is arguably the one that "fit" Cecil the best, but I'll agree that there are others I personally find more pleasurable to listen to. ones closer to Winged Serpents are Olu Iwa and Always a Pleasure, I personally enjoy all three of those more than anything from the One Too Salty Swift group.

do you like other Cecil group records, or is that the first one you've heard?

sure, that's the beauty of the internet. one problem is it's very muddily recorded. there's one nice long track in the middle, but even that one is frustrating to me because of the lack of sonic clarity.

I've never heard that personally, sounds like a classical geek opinion. I know dozens of people who consider this set one of their favorite recordings of any music. Discrete Moments is a pretty awful record (IMO), Norwich is decidedly better. you can hear much more Tilbury on the recently released duo with Marcus Schmickler, Variety (A-Musik), which is about 80 percent Tilbury, a very nice record.

FWIW, I think the Sachiko/Toshi Ersts (do, Weather Sky, Cosmos, Good Morning Good Night) are some of the strongest releases on the label, those would probably all be in my personal top 10 or 12. I wouldn't expect them to be big favorites around these parts, though. Cosmos will be making their US debut in late September at ErstQuake 3 in NYC, I'm really excited about that, haven't seen them since 2002.

that Feldman Tilbury box is among the most essential items in my collection, the last two CDs are as good as music gets. I doubt Amazon.de actually has one, they're hard to find these days, although I believe you can still get them from Matchless directly. wow, there's a new one. her sudden illness and subsequent death, all in the few days before this recording session, was obviously a pretty large part of John's mindset during these recordings (we cancelled one of the originally planned two days, and probably would have cancelled both if myself and Brian Olewnick weren't already in France), so afterwards Keith and I suggested dedicating the record to her. so those guys chose the album name, and John wrote the dedication. maybe the word "respectfully" was chosen because John knows she wouldn't really like the specific music so much, but it's not some kind of rebellious thing, it's genuine. as for "What is the importance of Doris being in her 96th year?", it's a mini-obituary, for crying out loud. do you realize you're critiquing the word choice made by a son (and an accomplished writer, his Cardew biography is supposedly nearing completion) in his mother's memory, a woman you know absolutely nothing about? do you really feel comfortable doing that?

I never liked this one too much, and when it came out, I was a much bigger fan of Parker than I am today.

yep, looking forward to that Polwechsel disc, it's supposed to be out next month sometime. glad you're enjoying that stuff! any specifics, pro or con, yet? once you go eai, you can never go back.

sure, Staalplaat is huge, probably hundreds of releases on their various labels, although I'm not really a fan of most of them. I believe Soleilmoon is still affiliated with them somehow, and the prices should be lower for US buyers: http://www.soleilmoon.com/

what's that mean exactly?

more than slightly, and I'm not normally much of a fan of either. but both of them almost completely rein themselves in here to play Dixon's music, they get that this session isn't about them.