Jason Kahn - Circle

Jason Kahn

Circle

AUSTRIA  Editions  008  DL  (2018)

Voice and resonator guitar from the prolific US-born Zürich-dweller.  But if you’re expecting something like Charlie Parr, you should probably look away now.  Neither is this project bathed in sepia-toned cod-“authenticity”, thankfully.  For those not familiar with Kahn’s activities over the last twenty years or so, his recorded output has most often been concerned with field recordings and associated recording techniques.  He began his music career as a drummer, spent many years practicing improvisation and making field recordings while simultaneously developing his art practice, but more recently has toured using analogue synthesiser, or voice.  (STOP PRESS! I’ve just seen a short film on social media promoting Jason’s current duo with guitarist Beat Keller wherein Jason is perched behind a drum kit!  You heard it here first!)  I attended a recent duo performance with Jason in vocal-only mode in collaboration with master percussionist Christian Wolfarth last year which was absolutely breathtaking, if you’ll excuse the pun.

“Circle_1” is cranking away nicely until at 7 and a half minutes, Kahn’s voice begins to sound like static.  It’s unique, I think, in the field of vocal improvisors; at least I’ve not heard anything quite like it before.  It’s my favourite sound Kahn makes, I think.  On “Circle_2”, his vocal shifts pitch and key; exploring microtones.  Quieter, beautiful.  For me, the beginning of “Circle_3” creates a desolate atmosphere not unlike Nico’s Desertshore.  In mood - not sound or instrumentation, but mood.  This may or may not intend to denote a similar kind of disconnection or disunity with ones surrounding or situation.

On “Circle_4”, “Circle_5” and “Circle_6” I particularly noticed that Kahn plays his Resonator guitar with a slide.  Probably these pieces are the nearest to a “traditional” approach; or at least, the tradition can be heard in Kahn’s playing.  A sharecropper’s blues lament abstracted through the 21^st century mind-set prism.  You could almost say it could be an emotional tribute to musicians like Tampa Red and Son House.  “Circle_6” is actually the last piece of recording from this session at Zürich’s Kunstraum Walcheturm arts space.  Kahn utilises the natural reverb of the hall with his skilful microphone placement really nicely.

Kahn talks about Circle in this way: “…Guitar was actually my first instrument, a few years prior to beginning music in earnest on drum set. Returning to the guitar after all these years is in a sense coming full circle for me over my musical lifetime of forty years.”

All six tracks have a duration of between nine and ten minutes, so at nearly an hour of material, there’s plenty to get immersed in.  Kahn is as rigorously experimental, perhaps searching is a better word, as is usual on Circles so it’s best to get comfortable and treat this album as an intimate concert in your own front room.  I would have liked to set this album in some kind of context and mention certain other experimental musicians known for utilizing Resonator guitar.  But outside of Sherry Ostapovich, whose superb album The Red Thumb was released under the name Musicforone back in 2008, there aren’t many other avant-resonatorists, at least that I’m aware of.  BJ Cole has used one, I’m led to believe, when he isn’t playing pedal steel.  So, it seems here, Jason Kahn is currently working in a very small field.  Not a bad place to be.  As with all of Kahn’s endeavours, this one rewards careful listening.

https://jasonkahn.bandcamp.com/album/circle

Rapt

Rapt

Rapt

UK  Self-released / Bandcamp 008  DL  (2018)

Brighton Books closed this month.  Hot on the heels of other Brighton institutions such as record shops Borderline and Rounder.  Sticky Mike’s and The Haunt are next.

Before there was Greggs, there was Forfars.  Before there was Graze, there was Real Food Direct and Infinity Foods.  Before Terre à Terre, there was Food for Friends.  Before the Vans Store there was Vegetarian Shoes.  The Eagle was the Eagle, then it wasn’t; now it is again.  Before there was The Eagle, there was the Basketmakers Arms.  Long before Phoenix Residents Association there was The Freebutt.  Before Brighton Pier there was the West Pier and look what happened to that.

Food for Friends abides.  Vegetarian Shoes abides.  Infinity Foods abides.  The Basketmakers Arms abides.  Before the Gladstone there was the Kenny.  Before the Kenny there was The Eagle.  The Prince Albert abides.  Jump The Gun abides.  The Cowley abides.  The Verdict abides.  At The Coachhouse abides.  The Metway abides.  The Fish Brothers abide…probably.  The Labour Party Conference, Sussex Heights, St Peter’s Church, that weeping silver lime tree in Queen’s Park…

I’d like to think that they’ll still abide long after all the Great Escapes, Moshimos, Nero’s, Costa’s, Gresham Blake’s, The Ivy’s franchises and FatFace have all gone.

Before Rapt, there were any number of electronic process/drone-based projects and after Rapt there will be any number more.  “Inspired by music concrete/insomnia/thought loops.  'Rapt' is the product of a search for mental headspace and the desire for a world to get lost in.”  Rapt is the alias of Jacob Ware, a Brighton-based mastering engineer.  His stated influences are “…Wolfgang Voight, Brian Eno, William Basinski, Magnus Alexanderson, David Toop, Phillip Glass, Arvo Part…”  You will hear the Basinski and Voight influences straight away.  This is GAS without Voight’s beautiful aimlessness and nostalgia; Alexanderson without the rigour; Disintegration Loops without the ennui.  An ocean of sound set to the ubiquitous 4/4 beat.  A monumental piece of sound engineering, Ware’s warm production creates an environment I didn’t want to leave.  Five tracks, all seemingly derived from the same sources, considered very differently; simply titled as Roman numerals.  Pressure builds.  Like emerging from the darkness of the labyrinth of Knossos, into the clear bright light of a southern European mountainside, the weighty synth pads of Rapt will cleanse your mind and your soul.  Particularly in the early hours of the average Sunday morning.  It’s a clear day, there’s no clouds in the sky and the sea and the coast seem within easy reach of a day’s walk.  Have fun.

https://rapt.bandcamp.com/releases

a pair from Infrequency Editions

Lance Austin Olsen and Jamie Drouin have been releasing interesting artefacts on their Infrequency Editions imprint for a fair while now.  At the time of writing, there are twenty-eight releases available via the Infrequency Bandcamp account, mainly the work of Messrs Drouin and Olsen, but also with items by Johnny Chang, Sabine Vogel, Thomas Anfield, Yann Novak, Jeffrey Allport & Chandan Narayan.  Infrequency concerns itself with “…new forms of electroacoustic improvisation and documents of conceptual sound installations”.  This Canadian imprint was established in British Columbia in 2001 “…as a platform for artists to experiment with sound…” and “…focuses on new forms of electroacoustic improvisation and documents of conceptual sound installations.”

Lance Austin Olsen has represented Canada in a number of biennials with his large-scale painting and drawings.  Also in 2018, Dark Heart was released on Another Timbre featuring three of Olsen’s scores realised by Apartment House, Terje Paulsen, Ryoko Akama, Katelyn Clark, Isiah Ceccarelli and Patrick Farmer, plus Olsen himself performs a score by Gil Sanson.

Jamie Drouin describes himself as an “…electronic sound composer and visual artist”.  His minimalist works highlight the unique perceptual experiences which can emerge from reduced palettes, and the confluence of tones over time.”  Drouin has collaborated with several international artists, including projects with Christian Weber, Lucio Capece, Crys Cole, Olaf Hochherz, Karl Kliem, Hannes Lingens, Yann Novak, Mathieu Ruhlmann, and Sabine Vogel.  Also worth a mention is the Simon Reynell-organised concert recently immortalised on disc by Mikroton; The Holy Quintet featuring Drouin along with Johnny Chang, Dom Lash, Dimitra Lazaridou-Chatzigoga and David Ryan.

Jamie Drouin

Paysage

CANADA  Infrequency Editions  no number  CD-R  (2018)

A drone work, of sorts.  Different elements arrive and depart, ebb and flow, come and go in this single 40 minute piece.  With this kind of “constructed” work, I often find myself trying to imagine how the piece was built.  A clue is given on the inside of the sleeve; “recorded and composed between 2005-2009”.  So, Drouin made the recordings before he composed the piece.  .  Drouin himself describes the piece thus; “Paysage is an album of several viewpoints upon an ever shifting landscape – an ‘exquisite corpse’ of sounds which combine in the listener’s mind to form a singular experience of a place.”

Aside from the omnipresent sine tones associated with any synthesiser system, Drouin coaxes some very untypical sounds from his “traditional Moog-style 5U modular” analogue synthesiser.  Gaseous bass-heavy drones, static-y growling, choral whines, hollow tube-like, voltage hum, heavy electrical devices being switched on and off, a waterfall…  Over my shoulder, in the kitchen, the refrigerator is failing; loudly grumbling away to itself for the last four days as I wait for the repair man.  In combination with playback of Paysage, this is the first time I’ve been able to bear it.

At 10 minutes, the piece becomes a kind of slowed down Morse code message, although the transmission of a message like “JOQ90” repeated is unlikely to be deliberate on Drouin’s part, and reflects only my own obsession with looking for hidden meaning in the unlikeliest of places

At several points, the bass information induces rattling activities of objects in the room, which puts me in mind of David Velez’ excellent Unaware from 2015, whose stated purpose was to set up an orchestra of noises derived from the contents of the listener’s space through sound waves when played over domestic hi-fi speakers.  At 27 minutes a series of short hits of bassy static, becoming overlaid.  A propulsive drone paired with drip-like sounds emerges only to be subsumed by a spiky return of the object-rattling bass artefacts, reducing the heat toward the very end.  A grey cloud passes overhead without precipitation.  This is an environment you inhabit.

Lance Austin Olsen

Plato’s Cave

CANADA  Infrequency Editions  no number  CD-R  (2018)

Lance Austin Olsen is a painter who also operates in sound.  On this single piece of music, he presents an intriguing artefact - you could almost describe it as a picture rendered into sound.  The piece consists of a series of interesting bumps and crashes as if the artist recorded himself dropping things while moving around his studio one morning.    Perhaps unsurprisingly, being a painter, Olsen carefully presents the sounds of things you would expect to find in an artist’s studio; paintbrushes stored in tin cans, the ironwork innards of an old upright piano.  A flash of tremelo’d guitar one minute; a minute later Olsen plucks a curtailed staccato out of one of the bassier piano strings.

Olsen supplies the following to put the work in context:

“The philosopher Plato posited that, a person chained inside a cave, and unable to see the outside, would formulate their ideas of the physical world based on the shadows projected onto the cave walls.  To a large extent, our individual views on almost everything are based upon shadows and fragments, and each of us constructs a world to our own liking based on the same fragments, yet experienced in endlessly new combinations.  Each moment, or grouping of sounds in a performance, creates a visual map in our mind that would bear no resemblance to the map produced in another listener’s mind. The performance is being experienced in the form of audio shadows, filtered through that individual’s particular life and viewpoint.”

Glassy synthetic washes are gradually introduced.  Seasons change, spiders build their cobwebs in the corners of the studio, life goes on.  Olsen paints.  The piece is dynamic and robust.   At 26 minutes I was left wanting more, but Olsen is prolific and there is plenty more work to explore.

http://infrequency.org/