Tag: strings

Fernando Falcão – Memória Das Águas, 1981

The first of three records by Paraíba-born poet, percussionist, and composer Fernando Falcão, recorded in Paris in 1979 and released independently two years later. I realize that I’m a broken record, but this one is truly uncategorizable–and while that word can frequently connote records that are too challenging to be fully enjoyable, too ambitious for their own good, or just plain incoherent, Memória Das Águas is an utter pleasure from beginning to end.

“What?” you will think to yourself when you listen to it, which you should. “Who is this guy? Had he been quietly making music for decades under a pseudonym before releasing this? How else does something this orchestral in scope spring out fully formed on the first try? Why does he share a name with a Northeastern municipality?” you will ask after you’ve Googled him. “How’s his poetry? Is this a hoax? When is this getting reissued?” These are all questions I also have, which is to say, I’m sorry, I have no answers. All I have for context is that Fernando Falcão makes an appearance on the very good Outro Tempo compilation, which I suspect is how I landed here in the first place, but I’m not sure, as this record has been sitting in my “things to listen to” folder for months.

Memória Das Águas is a trip, moving seamlessly between swathes of avant murk, African polyrhythms, cinematic ambient flecked with field recordings, exuberant Brazilian jazz, maybe some Balinese Kecak influence, and a stripped down percussive number that, even in 2018, still sounds like the future. (I’ll say it again: 1979.) Instrumentally, that means cabasa, tumba, pandeiro, ganzá, contrabass, horn, flute, piccolo, piano, sax, timpani, violin, jug, and several different vocal ensembles. Functionally, it means this isn’t background music. Sometimes it feels like Geinoh Yamashirogumi; at others, it brings to mind the outside-of-time alien quality of Nuno Canavarro–and it is very much unlike either of those things. Try it–if you’re here, you’ll probably love it.

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Motohiko Hamase – Reminiscence, 1986

Peak malletcore, except here fretless bass gets a little closer to center stage, dripping all over dense towers of avant-classical synthetic strings. A die-hard fretless enthusiast, Hamase has written several books about the subject and is perhaps most famous in Japan as a coveted session bassist. He’s worked with a daunting lineup including Jimmy Murakawa, Yasuaki Shimizu, Seigen Ono, Isao Suzuki, and Yas-Kaz.

Reminiscence was recorded at Tokyo’s Sound Design Studio, famous for being the home base for most of Kitaro’s giant catalogue. Despite its reputation as an ambient record, Reminiscence doesn’t adhere to stillness in the way we might expect. It moves freely and often in steep, vertical shapes, pulling just as much inspiration from avant-classical experimentalists as from gamelan and its subsequent American minimalism devotees. Though there are many moments of unflinching beauty, Hamase is unafraid to wade out into the deep end, moving seamlessly between woozy, noodling dissonance, transparent puffs of synthesizer rising like early morning fog, and tunneling tonal percussive segments. It’s a bit disorienting, in a good way. There’s a lot to chew on here, and thankfully Reminiscence only continues to open up with increasing generosity upon further listens. This is a longtime favorite of mine, but I only recently got ahold of a good quality rip, so I’m thrilled to be able to finally share it. Enjoy!

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David Casper – Crystal Waves, 1984

Another gem from private issue new age icon David Casper, one of the later follow-ups to his excellent Tantra-La. Like that record, Crystal Waves manages to blend a laundry list of instruments (cello, played by Jami Sieber; marimba, played by Scott Cossu; ch’in [yuequin, aka moon zither, played by T’ao Chu-Chen], h’siao [Chinese bamboo flute], ocarina, crystallophone) into something that never sounds at all busy. That unhurried spaciousness is even moreso the case for this record than for Tantra-La. While a very careful and thorough use of acoustic environment brings to mind open landscapes rather than large rooms, and while there’s definitely some highly detailed multi-tracking going on, the precision and directness of the sounds seem to belie their numbers–which is to say, Crystal Waves masquerades as a very effective minimalist line drawing until you stare at it for awhile and realize it’s a full-color impressionist oil painting. It’s rendered in tones that are so delicate, translucent even, that you might not realize right away that they’re there.

This is particularly the case on the second side of the cassette, which, for our purposes, is the “Crystal Waves I-IV” tracks 4-7. It’s composed entirely of tuned crystal glasses:

Each glass was played individually with meditative attention and recorded, grouped, and re-recorded in a lengthy blending process. In order to attain a broad spectrum of sound from a simple source, tape speed, equalization, and harmonic balance were changed to produce sounds reminiscent of bass and cello, flutes and horns, organs, bells and gongs, and other sounds suggestive of electronic synthesis. Sometimes as many as thirty glasses may be heard at once, each with its own pulsation and timbre, produced acoustically by finger on glass.

The depth of field and texture Casper achieves with glass alone is remarkable, as is his gift with drawing heat out of sounds that might otherwise be predisposed towards frostiness. He’s just as skilled with his treatment of strings as he is with glasses: in spite of the wide openness of these songs, there’s a direct suggestion of reassuring warmth that I find myself feeding on over and over in the wintertime. I also just realized that it’s been a year almost to the day since I posted Tantra-La, so clearly these records are seasonally significant to me. I hope you love this as much as I do.

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Ichiko Hashimoto – Mood Music, 1987

Odd that this is my first Ichiko Hashimoto post, given how much I admire her work–though her catalogue covers so much ground that it’s hard to know quite where to start. A trained jazz pianist, composer, and singer, Hashimoto was one half of Colored Music (friendly reminder that this record is so great), made a slew of ambitious solo records, performed with YMO, collaborated with Belladonna of Sadness composer Masahiko Sato, and scored an anime series, all while establishing herself as an powerful and singular composer, arranger, and producer. Though she’s worked across many genres, she’s maintained a signature proclivity towards gently sinister and avant-garde arrangements, and lugubriouis, pillowy vocals (her love of chanson-style singing pops up all over her discography, not just here).

Mood Music might not be her most canonical record, but it’s a personal favorite and has been on repeat recently. Comprised mostly of jazz standards, the record cribs heavily from bossa nova, samba, and exotica, but Hashimoto quietly subverts these textures into something darker, and at times, less familiar. Her quavering, syrupy-swoony orchestration suggests a Scott Walker-esque approach to sentimentality, particularly on thick and headier arrangements like “Poinciana” and “Night and Day.” The record’s two original compositions, “Flower” and “Île De Étrange,” are its most interesting, with the former a white-knuckled, percussionless tower of taut-string urgency, and the latter a hypnagogic, dubby piece of acid jazz. Mood music indeed.

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Carl Matthews – Call For World Saviours, 1984

Weightless, shimmering ambient; sometimes dark and sometimes cosmic. A Steve Roach-esque floatiness, but stringier and more pastoral.

This was re-released by Sandpiper Records in 2003, but the label seems to no longer be active and has put all its releases up for free download on archive.org — there are a few other Carl Matthews releases available there if you’re interested.

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[RIP] Kelan Phil Cohran & Legacy – African Skies, 1993

I was deeply saddened to hear of the passing of legendary jazz trumpeter (and occasional zither player) Kelan Phil Cohran at the age of 90 on Wednesday. While his accomplishments are too significant to fully do them justice, he played trumpet with Sun Ra and His Arkestra, co-founded the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), was a respected educator (one of his students was a young Maurice White), opened the Afro-Arts Theater in Chicago, and invented the Frankiphone (aka space harp), an electric mbira. He also recorded extensively with The Hypnotic Brass Ensemble, a group composed of eight of his sons. Cohran was still regularly performing live until quite recently.

Though African Skies was recorded a later stage in his career (by which point he had already been given the honorific Kelan, meaning holy scripture, by Muslim scholars during a trip to China), it’s considered by many to be a cosmic jazz masterpiece and one of his finest works. His first record since his 1969 Malcolm X memorial, this was recorded live at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago as a glowing tribute to Sun Ra, Cohran’s mentor and friend who had recently passed away. African Skies is mostly acoustic and fairly minimal, but for all its sparsity, it’s hypnotic, deftly expressive, and all the more powerful for doing less. Trumpet, harp, frankiphone, congas, violin uke, guitar, flute, bowed string bass, clarinet, trombone, and vocal riffings by Aquilla Sadalla that, whenever I’ve put this on in social settings, have invariably prompted at least one person to ask what we’re listening to. If the back cover is any indication, this performance looked just as incredible as it sounded.

Though I’ve always considered myself a jazz idiot, this record has been an ideal gateway drug into the worlds of cosmic and spiritual jazz, and I can’t think of a better tribute to Cohran’s legacy than giving this some airtime this weekend. Out of respect for his family I’ll be taking down the download link in the next few days, so if you want it, get it now. Thank you for everything, Kelan Phil Cohran!

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Yumiko Morioka – Resonance, 1986

Guest post by Matt Nida (London)

Sometimes the music tells its own story. I bought Yumiko Morioka’s Resonance last year in Tokyo (on the recommendation of someone who knew I’d been devouring records by the likes of Hiroshi Yoshimura, Toshifumi Hinata, Haruomi Hosono and many other names who’ll be familiar to readers of this blog) knowing nothing more than what my ears were telling me – that this was a very beautiful slow-burning piano album; Satie-esque ripples through a tranquil sea of crystalline digital reverb, equal parts Sakamoto, Budd, and the Eno brothers. I fell in love with this album on its own terms, with no real sense of how it fits into the wider story of 1980s Japanese ambient music.

As someone who can neither speak nor read Japanese, piecing together the background of this album is its own adventure, relying a lot on shaky auto-translate services and reasonably intelligent guesswork. Yumiko Morioka was born in 1956, and studied at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. She spent much of the last three decades in the United States; Resonance is her only solo release, although she later released a collaborative album with Bill Nelson called Culturemix in 1995. Under the pen name of Satoshi Miyashita, she wrote a number of hit songs for idol acts throughout the 80’s including Toshihiko Tahara and other performers from the notorious Johnny & Associates stable.

Dig further into Resonance’s credits and associates and some familiar names start to appear. The album was produced by new age keyboardist Akira Ito, formerly of the Far East Family Band, and was the only LP released on Ito’s Green & Water label that wasn’t one of his own efforts. Morioka herself occasionally played piano for Miharu Koshi, and receives a “special thanks” credit in the liner notes to Hosono’s Omni Sight Seeing.

So it’s tempting to view Resonance primarily as another link in the dense latticework of interconnecting artists and albums from 70s and 80s Japan that enthusiastic Western listeners are only now starting to piece together through blog posts, YouTube algorithms and curatorial mixes. Another piece in the puzzle. But you really don’t need to know any of this stuff. Resonance really is nothing more than a very beautiful slow-burning piano album, one whose exploratory pieces gently unfold in a way that slows time and, in the best Eno tradition, pleasantly colour any environment in which they’re heard. It’s an honest, open record, and one that I hope you will love as much as I do.

Priscilla Ermel – Campo De Sonhos, 1982

A stunner. Priscilla Ermel is a Brazilian anthropoligist, video artist, and musician based at the Laboratório de Imagem e Som em Entropologia in University of Sao Paulo. If you’ve heard Music From Memory’s extraordinary Outro Tempo compilation, you’ve heard two of her songs, one of which is included on this record. You can watch some of her video work on Vimeo. Also–a cool fact that I was unaware of until just now courtesy of 20 Jazz Funk Greats:

In her ethno-musicological researches, she has studied the indigenous Tupi Mondé people of Brazil, as well as the Dogon in Mali- yes, the same Dogon who, as myth has hit, descended from the Sirians, and were soundtracked by Craig Leon in his Anthology of Interplanetary Folk Music.

Campo de Sonhos (“field of dreams”) is a collection of cinematic instrumental textures that lean alternately towards jazz and classical. There are a few gorgeous, guitar-centric tracks that employ both acoustic (viola caipira) and electric, but the electric moments are more sparse, moody, and textural; almost Durutti Column-esque. Elsewhere, a laundry list of instruments: kalimba, berimbau, viola-de-cocho, chirimia, ocarina, nepalese flute, Jew’s harp, piano, saxophone, cello, violin, synth, and a slew of drums including congas, surdo, bombo, gongs, cultrun, and cajón. And while there are moments of uninhibited percussive joy and spiritual jazz, these songs feel focused, elegant, even stripped back at times. Thank you Kosta for the reminder to share an old favorite!

Also, if things look a bit rough around here, it’s because I’ve just switched to WordPress and am still finding my way around–am hoping to have more user-friendly navigation and archive up soon. Please bear with me in the meantime! (I’d also like to thank a very nice reader named Kenji who spent a solid hour and a half writing and tweaking code and holding my hand through learning about plug-ins to fix a few hundred broken links. Thanks Kenji!)

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John Clark – Faces, 1981

Another gem from the ECM catalogue. Brooklyn-born jazz horn player John Clark hasn’t made many records as a bandleader, but has been hugely prolific and has recorded and performed with Miles Davis, Jaco Pastorius, Chick Corea, Frank Sinatra, Aretha Franklin, and Leonard Bernstein, among many others. He’s still a faculty member at Manhattan School of Music.

Faces is disarmingly beautiful in ways that I don’t typically expect to hear from a jazz record (though I’m admittedly a jazz idiot). The cover image feels very apt: in addition to much of this being a very quiet record, it also has a ghostly quality, suggesting faint impressions from a carbon copy done too lightly. That vaporous, trailing-behind sensation is echoed in the generous reverb on both the horn and the electric cello, suggesting watercolors or streaks of neon in street puddles. Despite all these murky descriptors, there’s joy to be found all over it: “Silver Rain, Pt. III” is a nod to steel-drum tropical sunshine, and closer “You Did It, You Did It!” is almost baroque in its exuberance. There are some really nice notes about Faces on ECM Reviews, which, incidentally, is an excellent resource if you’re as daunted as I am by the ECM catalogue. Thank you Gil and Matthew for bringing me here!

(download removed as reissue is forthcoming)