i don't have the parker/bley/phillips drew mentions tho it apparently gets the slight thumbs up over the one i do have, sankt gerold.
i agree with taylor that the super souped-up sound is never well-applied in one-size-fits-all manner. same hold true for the CIMP folks, whose production values are perhaps the polar opposite of ECM: straight off the mike, no boosting no compression no fiddlin and twiddlin of any kind.
which in some settings is exactly what you want, but like anything this kind of rigorous purity can be self-defeating. i have a CIMP recording of a marc edwards trio with drew's friend sabir mateen on reeds and hilliard greene on bass -- it might as well be a reeds/drums duo recording for all intents and purposes as hill is virtually inaudible for most of the disc.with the evan parker electro-acoustic ensemble tho, i wonder if some post-performance production enhancement isn't entirely appropriate on some level: i mean there's already live electronics and electonic processing of acoustic sounds going on from the get-go...
i guess garbarek's dis is the classic ECM cliché, or so the penguin guide would have it
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"Who wants to go out and get whipped? And if you do, aren't you just being entertained, really?" --Bob Dylan (1965) in the midst of bereating a Time magazine reporter in Don't Look Back
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i'm really wishing that when magnolia electric company played at the black cat a few weeks ago, and after realizing that secretly canadian was selling its songs: ohia CDs for ten bucks apiece, that i had not mistakenly hit "$20" on the ATM instead of the "$40" that i had intended to withdraw so that i could buy four songs: ohia CDs. the two i bought, axxes and ace and didn't it rain, have been playing wonderfully lately. but i want the others -- all of em.
3 comments:
no, i know, the ECM/CIMP dichotomy is something of a strawman relative to what yr saying taylor.
i'd love to see that piece on hunter's tape delay effects with sun ra -- that's early sixties, cosmic tones for mental therapy and art forms of dimension tomorrow stuff right?
i'll be listen to the parker e/a ensemble recordings i have again (drawn inward and memory/vision only so far) in the short run. what yr saying is interesting and i've never listened to them this way, but it strikes me that part of what is at stake in this stuff -- and this goes alltheway back to the music improvsation company stuff and even AAM i suppose -- is the profound ambiguity they produce or reflect with respect to the nature of sound, sound production and sound continuity. it often becomes difficult to tell what instrument is producing what sound, especially when sounds are enhanced through live processing or extended technique. (parker talks about adding circular breathing to his repertoire of techniques in part as a way to compete with the sustained tones of guitar, bowed bass, electronics, etc in the music improvisation company.
so that dumping everything in the ocean and letting it all wash around seems to me a perfectly commensurate production gesture. but llike i say i'l listne again...
t.
(p.s. dig drew's comments to the previous post -- reminds me of what alvin lucier has done with recording and composing using the "acoustic signatures" of given interior spaces...)
The Lucier thing I am Sitting in Room is interesting in this set of questions - it an extreme sports vers of the room eq- the harmonic resonance of the room, reinforced repetitively until only those voice frequencies that the room eq (and this is related to the reverb but the same thing) reinforces are left. So his voice becomes the musical representation of the space he's in - pure musical information about space and voice, literally. You could also think of that as a radical collaboration between poetry and space where music is the result.
cool , I do have the Scout CD-ROM - it's been sitting on my desk waiting to be opened- I'll check it out...
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