PIERRE HÉBERT THE TECHNOLOGY OF TEARS (2005)

Director: Pierre Hébert

Year: 2005

Time: 14 mins

Music

Fred Frith

Tenko & John Zorn

Eye of Sound: Fred Frith once lamented that the dancers for Rosalind Newman's 1987 choreography The Technology of Tears complained about the music he had written for the piece: it was thought to be too rigid and mechanical for the fluidity of movements the dancers aimed at. Nevertheless, Frith's homonymous piece survived its original setting as one of his most beautiful scores, presenting an uncanny blend of musicianship, rhythmical accent, virtuosity, timbrical vigour, and emotional spunk that distinguishes it from most of its contemporaries. It was perhaps as an act of justice that Pierre Hébert decided to revisit Technology, for which he had designed the video sections (and the LP cover) and offer an overtly choreographed reinterpretation of the piece, one in which the fluidity of movements does not seem hindered by the invasive pulse of Frith's score. This decision was all the more justified as the project was originally conceived as an intimate collaboration between the three artists, in which the three artists would make their contributions evolve along with the others' and none would be condemned to be foreground or a mere scenic servant of the remaining elements. Hébert's Technology uses animations produced much later "to fill in the black hole in the continuity that had served the scenography for the dance piece", not being, therefore, a simple transposition of the choreography into animated drawings. For some sections, Hébert had Newman repeat the main solo dance of the piece in a studio and repeatedly drew it on film (as he often does in live performances), creating a visual "explosion of the solo itself" by means of a technique that bears the obvious influence of Len Lye, quoted by Hébert as the founding father of the relationship between animation and body movement. 

THE TECHNOLOGY OF TEARS

MUSTAFA EMEK GÜL FOE (2007)

Director: Mustafa Emek Gül

Year: 2007

Time: 9 mins

Music: Barkin Engin

Eye of Sound: Winner of the Best Experimental Film Award at the Naoussa Short Film Festival, Emek Gül's Foe is a film-essay that aims to explore issues of human displacement, challenging the construction of abnormality and the accommodation of monstrosity both within the self and the social body. According to the director, a metaphorical monster is seen to bridge gaps between the categories of normal and abnormal, a creature who also mimics traits of (normatively) pathological behaviour, namely "somatoform and dissociative disorders". This "overdramatic" creature also aims, Gül says, to act the out freudian theory of the child's psychosexual stages in several sequences: the "I am Defiant" section, for instance, purports to explore the anal retention phase, while the "I am Unique" sequence deals with the effects of the phallic phase on the construction of narcissism. While it is not clear whether such complex problematics flow through Foe's elusive narrative, even to viewers reasonably acquainted with classic psychoanalitic theory, the film's stark, sometimes brutal design, supported by cirurgical computer graphics and an impressive physical performance by Cenk Kurt, offers an intense viewing experience, heightened by a diverse and carefully composed soundtrack that weaves together hiss, grain, frequency and drone.

FOE

GEORGE CRUMB MAKROKOSMOS I & II: SCORES (2004)

Year: 1973/2004

Time: 63 mins

Music:

George Crumb

Margaret Leng Tan

Alex Nowitz

Eye of Sound: Notation naturally underwent the same ruptures that its signified did throughout the 20th century, not only in the attempt to find technically suitable illustrations for unprecedented forms of sonic expression, but also, as it was often the case, as a deliberate attack on the conventions of the graphic representation of sound. In the process, scores became increasingly idiosyncratic, more conscious about their arbitrary (i.e. semiotic) nature, and concomitantly assumed the status of art objects in themselves. Crumb once said that he tries to make scores "as simple and conventional as possible", pointing out that economy and clarity are vital to the performer's understanding of the composer's work; and, when asked to comment on his well-known penchant for elaborate notation designs, the composer simply justified them as "flights of whimsy". There is much more than whimsy to his scores, however, and besides their immense beauty and obvious symbolic import, they are complex enough to have inspired several research essays by well-known musicologists and art historians, not to mention modern mystics of different sorts. As a companion to Leng Tan's performance of George Crumb's zodiacal Makrokosmos I & II, we are lucky enough to be offered the possibility of watching the piece's original scores unfold as the music progresses, allowing us a few glimpses of the composer's aural graphism as well as insights into his verbal understandings of his own compositions ("as if suspended in time" in Agnus Dei/Capricorn, "like a cosmic clockwork" in Magic Circle/Leo); precise indications ("depress white keys silently" in Prophecy/Aries); corrections; dedications (for David Burge and Robert Miller); and humorous remarks ("excellent first piece!" in Primeval/Cancer). A beautiful and enlightening experience in the art of augenmusik, as fascinating as watching Tan and Nowitz play.

MAKROKOSMOS SCORE

GEORGE CRUMB MAKROKOSMOS I & II (2004)

Director: Evans Chan

Year: 2004

Time: 63 mins

Music: 

George Crumb

Margaret Leng Tan

Alex Nowitz

Eye of Sound: Perhaps downplaying their obvious esoteric dimension, Crumb once commented on his two Makrokosmos "books" as an attempt to survey and catalogue all playing techniques and possibilities for the piano. And while no single work can claim to exhaust possibilities in any given domain, Makrokosmos undoubtedly stands out as an impressive survey of the acoustic capabilities of the instrument and the myriad approaches a player can resort to when trying to go beyond conventional playing techniques. Crumb's most notorious compositional trait, his concern with timbral dynamics, is perhaps nowhere else as evident as here; by combining amplification and pedals, Makrokosmos ranges from the barely audible to the dangerously loud, perhaps evoking the creational dynamics implicit in its zodiac-like score design. This chromatic palette is widened by the introduction of foreign objects and the extension of the playing arena: metal chains, drum brushes, paper sheets or simple whistle blows are thrown into the piano to further expand and pervert the instrument's conventional possibilities. Margaret Tan, one of Cage's most renowned performers, delivers the piece with a combination of musical rigour and theatrical performance which seems appropriate for Crumb's choreographic leanings. Finally, Alex Nowitz's contribution is mostly centred on a powerful whistling technique. Despite its apparent freedom and de-structuredness, Makrokosmos is  a work of tight compositional design whose immense rigour surfaces only after repeated listenings, and the fact that Tan's performance is the only one that can boast of having been supervised by Crumb himself has lead critics to consider it  definitive. Otherworldly, radiating with vitality, at times nocturnal and quasi-lyrical, it is a tapestry of intricate modes and colours as diverse and contradictory as life itself.

MAKROKOSMOS I & II

ANDREW PEKLER HORROR SALVAGE (2010)

Director: Andrew Pekler

Year: 2010

Time: 6 mins

Music: Andrew Pekler

Eye of Sound: In his classic piece on screamscapes, Gregory Whitehead defined the scream as a primal outburst of the "pressures of the unspeakable" within an individual body. But the way this manifestation of the unfathomable has been represented in cinema follows a strictly codified language in which invention is replaced by convention, therefore stripping it of its potential for derangement. Andrew Pekler's Horror Salvage perhaps doesn't go as far as presenting an exhaustive "taxonomy of screams" in cinematic forms, but by editing a collection of such disruptive events out of context and sequencing them according to a rhythmical and "grammatical" design, it exposes both their syntagmatic void and part of their paradigmatic logic. Pekler thus divides his study in three short sections that reflect the internal organisation of the kino-scream: intensification and acceleration, followed by a "reflection punctuated by shocks" and concluded with deceleration and/or relief. The piece is accompanied by left-over fragments from Pekler's last album, craftily editing different electroacoustic soundscapes to great effect. While it is unlikely that Horror Salvage will prompt viewers to track down all the horror and sci-fi films from which it was made,  it will at least relieve them, as Pekler himself says, of the task of watching the 100 sub-B flicks it condenses. 

HORROR SALVAGE

THE OUTSIDER: THE STORY OF HARRY PARTCH (2002)

Director: Darren Chesworth

Year: 2002

Time: 59 mins

Music: Harry Partch

Eye of Sound: His obsession with the subjective human voice and the musicality of speech; his partly relativistic deconstruction of the twelve-note scale as an arbitrary straitjacket; his ethnographic sensibility towards different modes of conceiving language, tuning and existence; his need to create channels suited for his new microtonal chromatic universe; his expansion into convergent fields of expression such as film, theatre and dance; and his desire to capture the vernacular as a locus for the textures of being - all these probably make Partch's the most encompassing of modern creative utopias. Such an overarching  project of existence and creation, obviously, could hardly be comprised in an one-hour documentary, and it would take a considerable amount of creativity and an unflinching focus to cast a shadow of justice over Partch's vision in such a short time. One aspect that could have been jettisoned is, as usual, the biographic mode, the linear movement from A to Z that suggests apparently logic explanations and connections for processes and objects that are far from logical and linear, supported by an invisible voice-over narration that simulates contextualization and sequence. Narrative becomes a form of containment and disambiguation: Partch's struggle with devitalized modes of composition and the 12-tone octave is all of a sudden brought into light by the reading of one single book, On the Sensation of Tone by H. Helmholtz, and his "discovery" of the arbitrary nature of the Western scale smoothly harmonised with his several inner and outer "deviances", sexuality included; inversely, Partch's long-celebrated and romanticised decision to follow a hobo trail for almost a decade is simply glossed as a reaction to the Great Depression and left strangely disconnected from the surrounding acts. There are the usual statements by friends, patrons and composers, such as Lou Harrison, Gavin Bryars, John Schneider, Phillip Blackburn, and Phillip Glass, adding very little to our understanding of Partch's universe, and it is from biographers and archivists that the most illuminating comments stem from. While the focus on the apparent eccentricity of the man seems to be a fruitless compromise with the conventions of current personality cults - including a minor polemic with Cage to boot -, it is not surprising that the most rewarding sections focus on the technical aspects of his work, microtonality being efficiently summarised bur perhaps not fully explored in its symbolic reach. The eclipse of "the truth of just intonation" was seen by Partch as a conspiracy in which "pure" musical structures had been corrupted and dilluted by a powerful but stifling hierarchical model, one that curtailed freedom and fostered forms of conformism. This supposedly pure tuning of ancient Greek tradition, which Partch tried to build into his microtonal edifice, and its promises of a wider access to the the truth that is supposed to inhere in the human voice, holds some of the keys for the composer's universe: a romantic search for a temps perdu, thought to be found both in ancient traditions and non-Western contemporary societies, guided, as ever, by a subversive desire to implode homeland strictures.  

THE OUTSIDER

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

GRANULAR SYNTHESIS RESET REMIXED (2003)

Directors: Granular Synthesis

Year: 2001

Time: 20 mins

Music: Granular Synthesis

Eye of Sound: Commissioned for the Venice Biennial in 2001, Reset was an audiovisual installation addressing problems in the relation between colour and sound, and was here "remixed" for home consumption. The Austrian duo (Kurt Hentschlaeger and Ulf Langheinrich) have in fact focused much of their output on definitions of synaesthetic processes through creative uses of synthetic technology. In the Biennale, Reset was composed of two semi-giant screens, each exhibiting one basic looped visual track. These "tracks" comprised a succession of synthesised audiovisual samples produced, according to Langheinrich, through the "consecutive synthesis of individual samples" rather than through "a pre-arranged sound-image relation". Reset Remixed fuses these two separate tracks in order to create an alarmingly intense audiovisual experience in which the throbbing parade of visual and sonic chromatic tonalities results in a coherent composition that does not betray the fractured nature of its materials. Each colour is associated with a given sound (or vice-versa), thought to be warmer or colder according to a idiosyncratic scale, resulting in a dazzling chain of colour pulses and aural throbs. Each frame is thus a perceptual object vibration in itself, but their succession results in an immersive, seamless whole that affords no discontinuity.

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RESET REMIXED

HUGO VERLINDE GÉMINGA (2003)

Director: Hugo Verlinde

Year: 2003

Time: 9 mins

Music: Hugo Verlinde

Eye of Sound: A "sequel" to Verlinde's 2001 work Aldebaran, Géminga continues to explore relations between surface and projection, light and dark, body and environment. Surrounded by a carefully crafted cascade of environmental recordings, a body is used as a surface for the projection of chromatic textures and images of unrecognisable provenience: abstract light-designs that find a temporary resting point on skin. In its visual elusiveness and absorbing function, this body is given a strange sense of frailty, as if powerless before the aural and plastic siege within which it has been placed. At the same time, its own carnality seems to be overcome, rendered both insignificant in its role as a reflection surface for subtler realities and almost shapeless in its task as a mere vessel or host for more fluid levels of being.

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GÉMINGA

SABRINA RATTÉ MIRAGES (2010)

        Director: Sabrina Ratté

Year: 2010

Time: 18 mins

Music: Le Révélateur
Eye of Sound: One of the most promising names in Canadian experimental film today, Sabrina Ratté has been exploring the mysteries of colour, contour and shape in moving images for nearly a decade. Not afraid to frame filmic experiments as such, her films usually convey a sense of discovery and risk but also of conceptual focus and matured observation of materials, often betraying an acute awareness of video-art history and sources. Mirages was born of an ongoing collaboration with Montréal-based musician Le Révélateur: having been projected at several of his live performances, it evolved and metamorphosed in a concert immersion context which is, I believe, hinted at throughout the film. Working, as in other films, with relatively simple materials and a contemplative stance, Ratté begins by exploring the flickering movement of light and its distortion as it is translated into the digital realm, using chromatic excess as a means to corrupt her sources' integrity. These somewhat inform images of natural events slowly morph into geometric grids with which moving human silhouettes are later juxtaposed before we are finally sent back to the abstract shapes that opened the film, now harmonised with these colour-looms and figurative forms. Perhaps intended as a veiled tribute to the video-art tradition of the 70s (a connection which could be said to be reinforced by Révélateur's "library"-reminiscent soundtrack), Mirages is an aptly chosen title for this work, as its optical explosions seem to be built like an inquiry into some of our perception habits and a test to their limits.

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MIRAGES

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. 

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IMERY WATSON SLOUP (2006)

Director: Imery Watson

Year: 2006

Time: 5 mins

Music: Susumu Yokota

Eye of Sound: Perhaps falling within the inform "music video" category, Sloup was somewhat hermetically defined by Imery Watson (who is credited as the concept artist behind such mainstream works as Batman Begins and, er, Harry Potter) as a reflection on mythology, geometry and man-made structures. What at first seems to be a travel film, tinged with the apparently unavoidable melancholy generated by expanding industrialisation, quickly morphs into more abstract visual compositions in which aeroplanes crossing the skies are assimilated to the jumbled wires connecting electricity towers along a railroad line. These are then given a clearer anthropomorphic shape and motion, and made to literally run along with the camera's train, using 3D graphs, till they finally join the planes we'd seen earlier in the sky. The point is rather unclear, despite some vague allusions to problems on the relation of space and time, travelling speed, and the anthropomorphising instincts of perception. Susumu Yokota's soundtrack, released in 2002, is composed of a few loops apparently taken from Balinese recordings, resulting in the clean ambient soundscape that made him relatively well-known in recent years, with a "fourth-world" ambiance that could have come from the vaults of Zoviet France if they had kept away from drugs and existential issues. 

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SLOUP

JACQUELINE CAUX & OLIVIER PASCAL PRESQUE RIEN AVEC LUC FERRARI (2005)

Directors: Jacqueline Caux & Olivier Pascal

Year: 2005

Time: 50 mins

Music:

Luc Ferrari

Nouvel Ensemble Contemporain

Elise Caron

Claude Berset

Christof Schlaeger

Erik M

Eye of Sound: The decision to retain the original title of this documentary, instead of following the rule of translating all film names, can be justified by the fact that anyone familiar with Luc Ferrari will recognize the reference to some of the composer's most famous works, the Presque Rien series, and particularly his 1989 piece Presque Rien avec Filles (Almost Nothing with Girls). Much more than a mere music-documentary, Caux's and Pascal's Presque Rien is possibly the definitive Ferrari doc, not only because of the composer's willingness to play along with the directors' playful design but mostly because of their creative assimilation of his artistic and philosophical mischievousness. Although comprising several different sections that use different aesthetical and narrative strategies, Presque Rien almost seamlessly flows between these often contradictory approaches, its multifarious form being in itself an implicit tribute to the chronic deviancy of Ferrari's career. The film's narrative linchpin is a series of autobiographical notes taken from an homonymous book by Caux herself. But the use of these fragments is far from conventional, since Caux and Pascal decide to pull a narrative trick rarely seen outside Chris Marker's works: to subvert the tradition of the "voice of god" documentary voice-over by having an actress, Elise Caron, deliver Ferrari's most intimate confessions and remembrances - perhaps to reinforce the association between the composer and the Filles allegedly lacking in his life but so deeply present in his music, as well as to multiply the myriad personas emerging from his oeuvre. Ferrari also plays himself, but mostly on more "technical" notes (in which, nevertheless, his generosity and inability to take himself too seriously are absolutely transparent). There is the more conventional melange of live and backstage footage, including rehearsals for his Cahier du Soir "opera" with Elise Caron and the Nouvel Ensemble Contemporain, live collaborations with Christof Schlaeger and Erik M (this one using old Ferrari raw materials), and short excerpts from a 2003 Claude Berset performance of the 36 Enfilades piece for piano and magnetophone. Some of the most beautiful moments, however, stem from an audiovisual installation Ferrari produced between 1995 and 2000: entitled Cycle de Souvenirs (Cycle of Remembrances), it was composed of footage captured in key locations of Ferrari's personal and artistic life, supported by a random composition in which six discs comprising recordings of anodinous urban and domestic soundscapes were constantly shuffled and rearranged, bearing the mark of the composer's concern with chance events and the relations between memory and biography. Several other events contribute to the narrative's richness and density: the perhaps surprising election of John Cage as his major aesthetic and philosophical influence (upon whom Ferrari's early escape from serialism and life-time commitment with non-alignment are implicitly predicated), the identification of the soundtrack for Honegger's classic Pacific 231 (soon on SOE) as a decisive moment in his aural formation, or the jocose justification of his early involvement in concrète explorations as the most barbaric possibility available at the time. If forced to choose one single highlight, however, I'd go for Ferrari's hilarious audio stroll through a parisian suburb amusement park: surrounded by excessive chromatic and sonic stimuluses, the composer's posture betrays neither the shyness of the guilt-ridden voyeur nor the blind aggressiveness of the artist ready to devour his source materials at the cost of their dignity; like a child in a candy store, his is a gaze of sheer delight, immersed in the overwhelming and unembellished pleasures of his senses.

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PRESQUE RIEN AVEC LUC FERRARI

PHIL HOPKINS AMPLIFIED GESTURE (2009)

Director: Phil Hopkins

Year: 2009

Time: 56 mins

Music: Eddie Prévost, Evan Parker, Fennesz, John Tilbury, Keith Rowe, Michael Moser, David Sylvian, Otomo Yoshihide, Sachiko M,  Toshimaru Nakamura, Werner Dafeldecker.

Eye of Sound: The subtitle for this suspenseful documentary, An Introduction to Free Improvistation: Practicioners and their Philosophy, could perhaps be criticised for being misleading or, at least, for failing to deliver its promise. But it would probably be unfair to blame director Phil Hopkins for all its shortcomings: Amplified Gesture was commissioned as a visual companion to David Syvian's Manafon and, as such, the director was forced to interview all the musicians participating in the project. Strangely enough, improv is not an area in which "practitioners" have developed an acute sense of theoretical and critical creativity: except for Tim Hodgkinson, whose theoretical polemics sometimes draw close to absurdity and fundamentalism, and a few others thinkers, the "scene" seems not to have an articulate spokesmen to explore its mysteries, dilemmas and "philosophy". Nevertheless, there is a clear generational divide in the cast for Amplified Gesture: on the one hand, old-school British giants such as Evan Parker, Eddie Prévost and Keith Rowe; on the other, younger Japanese luminaries and miscigenators like Sachiko M, Otomo Yoshihide and Toshimaru Nakamura. It is perhaps sad to note that the old folks win by a landslide, discussing pertinent issues on the politics and practice of improv, while the kids usually have nothing to say but such platitudes as "I wanted to do my own thing" or "I started playing because I wanted to get a girlfriend". John Butcher rightfully comments on the progressive standardisation and narrowing down of improv musical practices, but also notes that this is concomitant with a more detailed analysis of materials. Prévost discusses the political implications of technique and composition, and briefly alludes to the art of listening in playing as well as to the creative role of audiences and their input on performance. Evan Parker, perhaps the most solid thinker in the cast, explores the dynamic "bio-feedback" relation between musician and instrument, the wills and destinies of the instrument when in charge of the musician, and the need for "estimation" abilities in the context of the ideals of control over the improvised event; he also touches on the humanist dimensions of music communication, and tries to place improv in the context of a continuing resistance to commodification that also extends to other fields of expression. Overall, as an essay on the art of memory and forgetting as condensed in the always expanding field of "free improv", Amplified Gesture falls short of the expectations it creates. Nevertheless, it is a enticing work for anyone interested in improv or the musicians involved.

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AMPLIFIED GESTURE