Sunday, May 07, 2006
Music Recommendations From The PLI #4
This week's reviews circle around the issue of minimalism vs. miminal.
1) Phill Niblock - Touch Three
Phill Niblock's music has a very direct, is what it is quality. I hate that statement "is what it is" but there are many cases out there, where there simply is no better way of defining the work. If you don't love what Phill Niblock does, you will most likely say if you've heard one piece you've heard thm all. All these statements aside, I don't know if I love Niblock's work, but I have purchased all of his Touch releases, and I have to say I enjoyed them all. His approach is basically this, record a musician playing a note, or frequency, then layer them, and slightly pitch shift. Though his technique may be minimal, his sound is monumental. He always encourages listening to his music at a high volume and I agree that there is a huge difference. Last week I was driving and I decided to blast this record. The music is all about the oddness of the overtones created by his layering techniques but when the loud frequencies caused distortion in my car's speakers, the music actually got a lot better, and it wasn't bad to begin with.
2) Keith Rowe and Toshimaru Nakamura - betweenElecro-Acoustic Improvisiation (EAI) fan need no introduction to the work made by these two. Keith Rowe, tabletop guitar surgeon and Nakamura, no input mix board player, make morse code like signals that float in the atmosphere. Weather Sky their previous pairing, was an amazing example of the possiblities of EAI. It's a record of such small minute sound events that most people may not even notice it, until one of Nakamura's outbursts. But the joy of this music is the examination of the interplay of minutia. Well, as hinted by their set on the Erstwhile balance box set, Nakamura has his outburst behind sticking closer to the microscopic movements that took up the spaces between explosions on Weather Sky. between's first piece, Vienna, Rowe lays it down with his squealing his, Nakmura drops tones in and out, but Rowe actually makes his presense more known by ever so subtley using his radio to bring in some odd samples. between is likely to be one of my favorites of this year, and it's nice to hear a record that's minimal, without being minimalist.
3) Ryoji Ikeda - dataplexIkeda has made some of the most schizophernic music, for being such an extreme minimalist. His Headphonics recordings on a pair of headphones could make you feel like your mind is broken. With dataplex Ikeda finds a place where he can use quick bursts of white noise, sine waves, and basically anything that sounds like a cd on fast forward to construct something that it almost funky. Mind you, it never actually forms into techno, but this record has the archeitecture of his work along the lines of techno, but made out of the most abstract sounds and challenging tones. I've loved most of his work and dataplex may be his best, it's definitely his best since matrix. It's worth it alone for Data.Adaplex, which features sounds and information that doesn't play back on every cd player.
