Described as a “musical poem”, Mount Analogue is a lengthy meditation on the works of avant-garde poet and writer René Daumal that’s passed from Bill Laswell and P.St (plus an ensemble featuring Nils Petter Movaer, Anna Clementi, Hideo Yamaki and others) to guitarist Henry Kaiser.
Mount Analogue is named after Daumel’s most well-known book, the self-styled “Novel of Symbolically Authentic Non-Euclidean Adventures in Mountain Climbing” that emerged almost a decade after his early death at just 36 in 1944. That text is excerpted here on the album-length title composition, that Czech experimental sort P.St leads on electronics alongside Laswell, Kaiser, vocalists Clementi and Percy Howard, percussionist Yamaki, cornet player…
Tag Archive: Sub Rosa
Uzed is the fourth album by Belgian band Univers Zero. It was released three years after ‘Ceux du Dehors’, due to a change in line-up and a new repertoire, although the EP ‘Crawling Wind’ had been released in the meantime. The album marked a turning point for the band. Univers Zero explored new electric colors, giving it a more rock feel with the addition of new musicians such as Jean-Luc Plouvier, who introduced the synthesizer, guitarist Michel Delory, who played a memorable solo in ‘Célesta (For Chantal)’, and André Mergen on electric cello and alto saxophone, who enriched the orchestral texture. Dirk Descheemaeker on clarinet and soprano saxophone, the return of Christian Genet on bass, this evolution can also be explained by the arrival of new musicians.
Pieces for Broken Piano turns a weather‑wrecked 1916 Gebrüder Stingl grand into an accidental “prepared” instrument, as Miroslav Beinhauer navigates new works by Terry Riley, Philip Glass, Milan Knížák, Gordon Monahan, Elliott Sharp, Milan Gustar and Yoon‑Ji Lee written specifically for its fractured voice.
At the centre of Pieces for Broken Piano lies a single, stubborn object: a 1916 Gebrüder Stingl grand that has been left to the weather until it could no longer be tuned, its action compromised, many of its keys only partially functioning, some not responding at all. By 2021 the instrument had effectively drifted out of standard pianistic usefulness, living outdoors in a garden, exposed to sun and rain. Rather than writing…
Nature is a collaborative album by guitarist/composer Fred Frith and drummer/percussionist Karen Stackpole, focusing on improvised soundscapes featuring gongs and guitar. The 4-track, 45-minute album blends avant-garde, modern classical, and ambient styles.
…Stackpole has spent decades exploring the expressive potential of gongs, scrap metal and resonant percussion, developing a highly personal language of texture, dynamics and extended technique. Her work draws rich harmonics from tamtams and metal surfaces using an array of custom and unconventional implements, producing soundworlds that move fluidly between abstraction, rhythm and atmosphere. Alongside solo performances, Stackpole has…
Since leaving Dutch band The Ex, GW Sok – real name Jos Kleij – has spent the last two decades channelling his muse through various projects. His dry wit and often caustic worldview can be heard in collaborations with Oiseaux-Tempête, Lukas Simonis, and King Champion Sounds, to name a handful. The GW in his stage name stands for geitenwollen, and here geitenwollen sok, or sokken (‘goats wool socks’) are the Dutch equivalent of the hair shirt, or the socks with sandals brigade. An implied morality Sok has been happy to subvert this past forty-odd years.
Sok’s new collaboration, Sopa Boba, with dramaturg Jean Vangeebergen and musician Pavel Tchikov, is something else again. In the project’s record, That Moment, Sok narrates…
Founding work of minimalism, Music with Changing Parts is a piece with free instrumentation. The musicians choose which part to play among the 8 staves of the score. At each indicated cue, the musicians can change part, which produces an abrupt change of instrumentation. While the music is based on a melodic material limited to a few notes that are repeated in patterns that expand or contract, the changes in orchestration refresh the listening experience by producing sonic contrasts. These techniques at work in Music with Changing Parts, written in 1970, will lead Philip Glass to renew his language and move from the monochromatic works that precede it to more dramatic works such as music in 12 parts and especially…
In 2009, the Triton venue (near Paris, France) was sold out to celebrate the 35th anniversary of Univers Zero, an iconic band of the Rock in Opposition movement.
These two exceptional concerts highlighted a radical and unique style of music, at the crossroads of new music and chamber rock, skilfully blending acoustic and electric instruments, as heard on the cult album ‘Ceux du Dehors’.
Around Daniel Denis (drums), Michel Berckmans (oboe, bassoon), and Andy Kirk (keyboards and guitar), three historical figures of the group, complemented by four other talented musicians, offered an intense multimedia show, intertwining a condensed version of key pieces from the repertoire with more recent compositions.
Unreleased material composed by Bernard Parmegiani in 1992.
Lac Noir – La Serpente is part of Emmanuel Raquin-Lorenzi’s Lac Noir, a composite work inspired by a serpentine female creature or ‘snake woman’ that he saw in Transylvania in 1976, with a total of 33 pieces using various media, 24 by himself and 9 by other artists. All the materials used in Lac Noir were gathered on the land of the snake-woman between 1990 and 1992. The first coordinated broadcast ran from June to October 2019, like a theatrical display of media.
At the end of May 1992, in Provence, in his Summer studio not far from the Montagne Sainte-Victoire, Bernard Parmegiani played me the first musical moments he had worked on from…
…Counting members of Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Exhaust, Hanged Up, Avec Le Soleil Sortant De Sa Bouche, and more; Pangea De Futura consolidate aspects of motorik krautrock, drone, ambient, and noise under the banner of post-rock – aka the Future Sound of Montreal – with a pent up but disciplined sense of instrumental expression in the 4-part arc of War Milk. Operating on well-trodden ground, they still manage to make a virtue of that classic Constellation thrust into the future, which, if their moniker is anything to go by, is roughly 250 million years from now, when continental drift will reshuffle tectonic plates to a Pangea de Futura.
Their sound is follows thru on that expansive temporal promise with a proper big band’s…