DEREK BAILEY & EVAN PARKER LIVE INCUS FESTIVAL 22.04.1985

Year: 1985

Time: 48 mins

Music: Derek Bailey & Evan Parker

Eye of Sound: To conclude our Incus '85 concert series, Evan Parker takes a seat with Derek Bailey for an extended duo session. A dialogue in which both interlocutors listen to each other and a rare opportunity to see these two gentlemen play together.

DEREK BAILEY & EVAN PARKER 1985

DEREK BAILEY LIVE INCUS FESTIVAL 22.04.1985

Year: 1985

Time: 22 mins

Music: Derek Bailey

Eye of Sound: Just before Parker's solo performance posted below, Mr. Derek Bailey opened the concert with an impressive session, now with amplified guitar and pedal. If you ask me, it's always the blues. The final section, joining Parker and Bailey on stage, will be posted soon.

DEREK BAILEY 22.04.1985

EVAN PARKER LIVE INCUS FESTIVAL 22.04.1985

Year: 1985

Time: 30 mins

Music: Evan Parker

Eye of Sound: In 1985 the legendary Incus label hosted a concert featuring Derek Bailey and Evan Parker, first playing solo and then as a duo. This is the Evan Parker solo set, with tenor and soprano saxophones, at a time when he was refining his circular breathing technique. The remaining sections will be posted in the next few days.

EVAN PARKER 22.04.1985

COIL COLOUR SOUND OBLIVION I: LIVE IN LONDON 24.08.83

Camera: Cerith Wyn-Evans

Year: 1983

Time: 24 mins

Music: Peter Christopherson

Eye of Sound: To celebrate the news of Peter "Sleazy" Christopherson's demise yesterday, a recording of Coil's performance at the Air Gallery in London in 1983. Entitled A Slow Fade to Total Transparency (How To Destroy Angels), it features John Gosling, John Balance and Marc Almond, while Christopherson provides the sound input on tapes. Samples from Pasolini's Salò set the tone for Almond's reading of a bitter-violent text apparently addressed to an ex-lover and for Balance's and Gosling's disturbing ritual of self-mutilation. As an esoteric ritual performance, the procedures elude the understanding of the non-initiate, and, much like in TPY's First Transmissions act, we are only allowed to know that it is located at the intersection of pain, sacrifice, control, art and magic. If the abundance of blood, smear and dejects is reminiscent of Muehl and the Aktionist posse, the slow, pseudo-ritualized gestures of the performers lend it a different, possibly more deranging effect, and certainly carry a different signification for the artists and their followers.

COLOUR SOUND OBLIVION I

DEREK BAILEY PLAYING FOR FRIENDS ON 5th STREET (2004)

Director: Robert O'Haire

Year: 2004 

Time: 50 mins

Music: Derek Bailey

Eye of Sound: The camera's movements are casual, and the post-production efforts meagre. But that is just part of the narrative strategy to convey the sense of intimacy implicit in the title: a small friendly circle of amicable ears and eyes, casually enjoying the music of someone who just happens to be the most celebrated guitar player in the history of adventurous music, but who behaves as if he were just playing a few chords while waiting for his dinner to cook. In between, a few funny stories about the man's past as a guitar teacher in London, some interactions with the "public", and even Django-like interludes and a Penthouse Serenade quote to boot. Both the performance and film-production were designed as an intimate portrait: of Bailey and his music, of course, but also of the DMG (Downtown Music Gallery) store in Downtown NY, where several such performances by avant and not-so-avant musicians have been hosted before. The camera effects used to spice up the film are absolutely superfluous and risible, but the sound capture is close to optimal: Bailey's surgical attacks on the strings sound as clear as in any other good recording you may have, and probably as close to the listening experience you'd have there as possible. Bailey's performance is unsurprisingly entrancing: twisting notions of tonal and atonal, at times hectic but also placid and meditative, his acoustic guitar playing covers the sometimes irreconcilable values of emotionality and artistic adventurousness. Of course, one may legitimately ask how free these improvisations actually are, given the unmistakeable "baileyness" of the performance; but I'd say that in view of this 2001 performance's impressive technique, passion and inventiveness, such issues sound like mere theoretical trifles. 

PLAYING FOR FRIENDS ON 5TH STREET

EDWARD QUIST / PAN SONIC KUVAPUTKI (2008)

Director: Edward Quist

Year: 2008

Time: 3 X 38 mins

Music: Pan Sonic

Eye of Sound: Still known as Panasonic among old friends, Vainio and Väisänen are known to produce some of the most intensely cold music since the glorious days of NDW. Their blend of glacial pulse-beat aggression (inherited from their early weirdo-techno experiences), white-noise static and hi-fi aural spatialisation (closer to "avant-garde" concerns)  has given the Finnish duo some notoriety both in the experimental music circuit and among the ultimately conservative electronica crowd, creating a rather heterodox support basis for the band. Inspired in the imagery of the cathode (something which seems to be acquiring some currency in the past years), american artist Edward Quist offers a "multi-angle" reading of Panasonic's music by drawing on a 1999 live performance in New York (these "angles" being here divided in separate files). The screen space is mercilessly invaded by violent graphics designed to translate, or respond to, Panasonic's static washes and often brutal pulses, its unembellished black and white compositions aptly reflecting the band's bleak soundworld. Its strobing punctuations, though obviously inspired by the obsolete tradition of techno videography, can be physically deranging and mentally exhausting, miles away from the flat landscapes offered by those standardised forms of mindless pseudo-psychedelism that are still served as a visual accompaniment to beat-oriented music. In fact, Quist's sinister waveform designs are systematically distorted and pushed to their own figurative limits, aiming, much like the duo's aural excitement, to implode rather than to contain source materials and to afflict rather than soothe the viewer. Strangely enough, the duo's excursions into the radiances of the body electric are often labeled as "minimalist" or other adjectives that seem designed to spare readers and writers further thought instead of trying to expand our understanding of Panasonic's vision. Indeed, despite their typically self-restrained management of their materials and far from rich chromatic palette, Panasonic's audio design is one of excess, hyperbole and exaggeration of microscopic events, rendering the "minimalist" description absolutely absurd. Perhaps guilty of an excessively literal and predictable rendering of Panasonic's analog soundscapes, Quist's Kuvaputki videos can nevertheless, in their fruitful tension between stasis and implosion, boast of faithfully documenting both the duo's aural vision and their live performances by the end of the century, making this a rather unique "tour doc".

This post is a collaboration between SOE and Double Avenue.

The "angles" are here rendered as separate files.

KUVAPUTKI

CATHODE RAY TUBE

SET

RYOJI IKEDA / SHIRO TAKATANI FORMULA (2002)

Video: Shiro Takatani 

Year: 2002

Time: 65 mins

Music: Ryoji Ikeda

Eye of Sound: By the mid-90s Ikeda offered the audio world a violent, but quiet, revolution. Others would follow his trail and get all the credit, Ikeda being left with only a few crumbles of the goldmine he had located for the (often uninspired) laptop generation. Of course, the test-tone/high-pitched frequency turn in electronic music could perhaps have happened anywhere else at the time: all revolutions seem, a posteriori, to have been bound to happen, just waiting for someone to pull the first trigger. But it's probably a good thing that Ikeda was the one who first stepped in into this relatively unknown island, since his clarity, simplicity and almost eugenic approach to his materials left us with an almost complete topography of this newly-found territory, leaving copycats the burden of sheer emulation or trivialisation and forcing creative artists to push forward in new directions. Formula documents concerts and installations recorded between 1998 and 2002. The first section includes audio installations recorded in Europe and Tokyo, featuring excerpts from albums like 0º or Matrix over a dark screen. The second section comprises a 2001 Tokyo concert in which Ikeda's gelid pulses and frequencies are synched against video-patterns designed by Dumb Type's Shiro Takatani, revisiting material from the 1996 classic +/- and other works. In their stark strobo-geometry and perception-bending force, Takatani's designs are probably the most accurate visual renditions of Ikeda's music. No matter how large your tv-set is or how clean and powerful your speakers are, this can't replace or come close to the unique experience of actually attending Ikeda performances. But if you hadn't had the chance to see and hear them in loco, the Formula collection and a bit of imagination may take you somewhere near. 

Link removed under DMCA threat

OTOMO YOSHIHIDE LIVE AT THE ICC, TOKYO 09.03.2008

Year: 2008

Time: 30 mins

Music: Otomo Yoshihide

Eye of Sound: To celebrate its 10th anniversary, the Intercommunication Centre in Tokyo (ICC), one of the leading experimental art locations in Japan, organised a free-entrance series of concerts featuring several cutting-edge performers from the local scene. The main attraction was Otomo Yoshihide, who delivered a tremendous 30 minutes performance on his prepared turntables. Almost completely rejecting the use of vinyl surfaces, Otomo uses amplified microphones and distortion devices to explore the possibilities of the turntable - not the record - as an instrument. The result is an impressive construction in which Otomo masterfully oscillates between serene, placid designs (refined in other projects such as Filament) and  the violent feedback bursts for which he became known, all created in the electric interstices strategically placed between the record-player, the needle and the deck.

OTOMO ICC 2008

JACQUES GOLDSTEIN ERNST REIJSEGER: DO YOU STILL? (2008)

Director: Jacques Goldstein

Year: 2008

Time: 42 mins

Music: 

Ernst Reijseger

Larissa Groeneveld

Frank Van De Laar

Eye of Sound: Some artists choose, or are forced, not to jettison whole portions of their selves in the course of their work, embracing seemingly contradictory strands and sometimes succeeding in integrating them and diluting their apparent contrasts in a continuous spectrum of beauty. Dutch cellist Ernst Reijseger stands out as a musician who manages to go down this road the hard way: without resorting to collage, counterpoint or wasted irony. The fact that he's worked with such opposite visions as Derek Bailey's and Yo-Yo Ma's, not to mention his regular excursions into musical fields lazily stringed together as "world" music, is perhaps the best possible description of his music: lyrical but fractured, his work disrespectfully transgresses the borders of jazz, improv, avant-garde, contemporary composition and popular music - all in a single note, with a single stroke. Jacques Goldstein's Do you Still? is a beautiful homage both to Reijseger's music and genre ambiguity. Though based on a trio live performance that focuses mostly on the lyrical side of the musician's soul (from his homonymous 2008 Winter & Winter release), it tries, and mostly manages, to balance the picture by capturing private solo improv sessions, both indoors and outdoors, that display Reijseger's mastery over different colours and tones - with the same astounding technique and soulful commitment. Interspersed with beautiful country- and city-side footage that evokes his ever contemplative music, Do You Still? also features intimate and sometimes bitter-sweet statements by Reijseger on his early years, "career" choices, mannerisms, anxieties and shortcomings. These different approaches, however, are seamlessly integrated into a serene, contemplative whole: neither a live-film nor a bio-doc or a visual essay, but all that and more.

 

http://www.fileserve.com/file/p2raUSn

OR

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=KZPO7ON7

FRANK ZAPPA / ENSEMBLE MODERN THE YELLOW SHARK (1993)

Director: Egbert van Hees

Year: 1993

Time: 90 mins

Music

Frank Zappa

Ensemble Modern

Eye of Sound: Recorded in 1992 in Frankfurt before an ecstatic audience, The Yellow Shark features a less popular facet of Zappa's repertoire. His commitment with avant-garde and "modern classical" composition was evident since his first albums with the Mothers, but chance, market cruelty, and questionable aesthetic options by Zappa himself condemned him to be remembered mostly as a prankster and a "guitar-hero" for stoners with a penchant for difference. But Zappa was much more than that, of course, and this concert, combining new compositions and new arrangements for older material, must be considered as essential as his first Mothers adventures or his 80s incursions into synth-based musical utopias. Tremendously difficult to play, Zappa's compositions are here performed with an alarming ease, rigor and focus by the renowned Ensemble Modern: just have a listen at G-Spot Tornado, composed for Synclavier and part of the magnificently surreal Jazz from Hell synth-album, and see how technically demanding changes of tone, breath and color are dealt with by this strangely swinging Ensemble. There are (only) two typically Zappaesque takes on brechtian satire, but throughout the concert it is rewarding to see a contemporary music ensemble that not only knows how to swing but also to tackle Zappa's theatrical antics. More lively, organic and "real" than Boulez's take on FZ's universe, this Yellow Shark just might be the definitive orchestral Zappa experience.

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=6JLOSZWL

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=3W4ZDR9J

THROBBING GRISTLE RECORDING HEATHEN EARTH (1980)

Director: Monte Cazazza

Year: 1980

Time: 62 mins

Music: Throbbing Gristle

Eye of Sound: An analog video for biological people. Part of the limited edition TGV box-set, this live studio performance was originally released on VHS and was the basis for their famous Heathen Earth LP. It documents the band's later characteristic blend of synth expansion, guitar noise and cold-hearted beats, resulting in an uncanny balance of electronic/electric ambiances and distortion with a penchant for improvisation (which Chris & Cosey would later refine and tame, ironing out "excessive" distortion and improv elements). The film was shot by Monte Cazzaza and features overlapped images of the concert and assorted modern tragedies: war, murder, public disorder, urban desolation, etc - characteristic of both the band's visual output and the forthcoming decade's aesthetics. The world is a war film, so they say, in this case one with the glorious blotted colors of VHS mind-warping distortion, magically preserved in the aseptic surfaces of dvd frailty.

film kindly offered by sudasy via e-mail. many thanks.

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=FDUGW8YB

STEPHEN BECK ILLUMINATED MUSIC 2 & 3 (1973)

Director: Stephen Beck

Year: 1973

Time: 28 mins

Music: Warner Jepson

Eye of Sound: A classic in audiovisual experimentation, Illuminated Music was a series of live performances by Stephen Beck (visuals) and Warner Jepson (music) in which the artists reworked pre-made compositions directly before an audience. While electronic video adventures were still a novelty, live experiments, both in the visual and musical arenas, were even rarer. Beck used the Direct Video Synthesizer, designed by himself, which - so the narrator claims - allowed him to "control precisely" the visual output in the performance (the myth of control in electronic media) and, still noteworthy at the time, to create pictures without a camera. Jepson used the now famous Buchla audio synthesizer, first explored by Subotnick in his 1963 piece Silver Apples on the Moon. Though I'd that say that Jepson's music is far richer and more engaging than the visuals (perhaps as a result of the greater possibilities of the Buchla synth and the deeper theoretical and practical range of electronic music at the time) Illuminated Music is unsurpassable in its historical significance as an early experiment in live electronics. I never could get hands on Part I, nor do I know if there are further installments in the series. 

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=576OA1BM

ICP ORCHESTRA: ON DREAM LIVE IN NOISY-LE-SEC 2003

Director: Guy Girard

Year: 2003

Time: 41 mins

Music

Misha Mengelberg

Mary Oliver

Tristan Honsinger

Ernst Glerum

Ab Baars

Michael Moore

Wolter Wierbos

Thomas Heberer

Tobias Delius

Han Bennink

Eye of Sound: Sometimes Duke, sometimes duck. A broken ballad will quickly morph into a spinning waltz of dissonant melodies and then build into harmonic skyscrapers that were not made to last. Fluid, fast, seductive, sometimes even glamorous cascades of sound; intensely psychedelic, fractal patterns of bliss that are nevertheless human and soulful; radiant and joyful as the few happy sundays we have in our lives - the ICP will settle for nothing less. As for the film, it is filled with liquid effects distorting the image, a welcome "innovation" in concert-films that adds to the fractality of ICP's music (although the excessive focus on Bennink is rather unjustified, given the Orchestra's philosophy and the abounding excellency of the remaining players). An excellent concert displaying some of the best jazz music in Europe today. And watch out for an incendiary hyper-textual take on Monk's Criss-Cross. 

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=KAFPX7IC

ART ENSEMBLE OF CHICAGO& CECIL TAYLOR LIVE IN PARIS 1.11.1984

Director: Frank Cassenti

Year: 1984

Time: 91 mins

Music: Art Ensemble of Chicago & Cecil Taylor

Eye of Sound: I think it was Matthew Shipp who once said that jazz is like a curse for black musicians. The Art Ensemble of Chicago would probably be one of the best examples of this. Throughout their long career, the Ensemble has explored uncharted sonic territories, creating a world of their own where contemporary sensibilities, tropical rains and otherworldly research joyfully share the same boat. No doubt, they have frequently invaded the ever-expanding jazz provinces but mostly as a stop on their way elsewhere. It could be argued, then, that except for these jazz interludes, the only thing that separates them from being considered as an experimental or contemporary ensemble is the color of their skins. But skin is thicker than water and the Ensemble is mostly thought of as a jazz outfit. This excellent concert in Paris will, I think, prove this point. There are jazz sections throughout the performance, but they rarely fail to crumble and are frequently guided by a desire to reach unsafer waters and explore possibilities in sonic abstraction. Cecil Taylor's intense performance unsettles this wide spectrum even more, turning the tables with his piano, vocal and percussion agitation. And maybe Taylor, in his incredible ability to switch codes and move from lyricism to broken rhythm and atonality in one second, is the Ensemble's best possible accomplice.

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=U1ICB3NA

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=9K4INJ5F

KEN VANDERMARK RESONANCE PROJECT LIVE IN ZAPOROZHYE 2009

Year: 2009

Time: 75 mins

Music

Ken Vandermark - reeds

Dave Rempis - saxes

Steve Swell - trombone

Tim Daisy - drums

Michael Zerang - percussion

Mark Tokar - bass

Waclaw Zimpel - reeds

Mikolaj Trzaska - reeds

Per-Ake Holmlander - tuba

Magnus Broo - trumpet

Eye of Sound: Vandermark's popularity outside the usual circle of modern jazz consumers is something of a mystery. Unlike Zorn, Vandermark never produced a single record that could attract surf guitar, thrash, klezmer, or pan-music lovers. His work has been tightly focused and circumscribed and yet, despite his uncompromising stance, his name remains as one of the most popular in modern jazz music. The Resonance tentet project, although fairly accessible for KV's standards, will not provide any answers. The compositions seems to draw inspiration from a desire to contrast two worlds that we all tend to think of as opposite: the so-called "free jazz" tradition, and the classic big band heritage, perhaps most notably in its suite form (cf. The Duke). Pushing forward the method of knitting together different structures for improvisation, KV's Resonance compositions are based on "modular pieces" - modules that can be rearranged and reassembled for a given performance, thus extending possibilities on the eternal struggle between the call for structure and the need for ample improvisation room. This concert features the tentet in top shape, building muscular but lyrical sound-cascades. Although dominated by a strong horn section, rhythms are never swallowed by its frenzy, Zerang and Tolkar being given the responsibility to keep the locomotion swinging and palatable. The result is an intense but delicate music, powerful but never inform, warm but always aloof from the easy, cheesy, boring antics of mainstream jazz. Still, despite this odd combination of attributes, there's no clue as to the aforementioned KV mystery.

http://rapidshare.com/files/400094191/vanderres.mkv.001

http://rapidshare.com/files/400082774/vanderres.mkv.002

http://rapidshare.com/files/400080241/vanderres.mkv.003

http://rapidshare.com/files/400080229/vanderres.mkv.004

http://rapidshare.com/files/400080271/vanderres.mkv.005

http://rapidshare.com/files/400080244/vanderres.mkv.006

JOELLE LÉANDRE STONE QUARTET LIVE IN MANS 2009

Director: Jean-Marc Birraux

Year: 2009

Time: 54 mins

Music

Joelle Léandre - Bass

Marilyn Crispell - Paino

Roy Campbell - Trumpets, Flute

Carlos Zíngaro - Violin

Eye of Sound: There is something different about Léandre's projects, something that distinguishes it from most strands of improv. Though "accepted" in some modern jazz circles, her music seems to constantly avoid coming into close contact with the genre's conventions. This exciting concert recorded last year in Mans for the Europa Jazz Festival seems to prove the point. The quartet floats around a "chamber music" setting and despite the intense energy of the instrumentation, it rarely seems to border on jazz territory. The alternation between solo, duo, trio and quartet formations creates different landscapes, allowing multiple contrasting possibilities. Most importantly, this a spacious performance, in that each instrument is allowed enough room to breathe on its own without intruding on one another's acoustic space. As George Lewis once said, a musician who forgets to listen is just as good as a blind painter.

http://rapidshare.com/files/387811227/leandre.avi.001

http://rapidshare.com/files/387811209/leandre.avi.002

http://rapidshare.com/files/387811256/leandre.avi.003

http://rapidshare.com/files/387811302/leandre.avi.004

http://rapidshare.com/files/387811232/leandre.avi.005

MUSIC ON CANVAS: MORTON FELDMAN SESSION (2003)

Concept: Eric de Nie

VJ: Jérôme Sieglaer

Year: 2003

Time: 75 mins

Music:

Morton Feldman: For Bunita Marcus

Kees Wieringa - Piano

Eye of Sound: Dutch painter Eric de Nie pays tribute to the music of Morton Feldman by drawing on the composer's most notorious passion: painting. De Nie composes on the canvas an abstract relation of colors in vertical lines while renowned Feldman interpreter Kees Wieringa plays For Bunita Marcus (1985). Nine cameras follow the performers' movement, controlled by the elegant vision of Siegaler. The apparent simplicity of Feldman's composition, its serene contortions of time and the interplay between sound and silence are gracefully displayed in this fortunate meeting of music, painting and video-art.

http://rapidshare.com/files/382933431/musiconcanvas.avi.001

http://rapidshare.com/files/382924324/musiconcanvas.avi.002

http://rapidshare.com/files/382924311/musiconcanvas.avi.003

http://rapidshare.com/files/382924305/musiconcanvas.avi.004

http://rapidshare.com/files/382924286/musiconcanvas.avi.005