Jon Rose - Perks (1996)

"Space is not the final frontier, nor is it cyber-space... it's the brain, or at least, our understanding of how it actually works. Jon Rose presents a simple analogy, the Badminton court represents the brain, the two Badminton players play out the roles of the left and right hemispheres. The brain belongs to one time Australian musical genius and deviant, Percy Grainger, a man who created some of the most inspired and beautiful innovations in 20 century music while at the same time being capable of the most depressing racial bigotry. This piece is a satirical celebration of the 'Jekyll & Hyde' in his mind... and perhaps in all of our minds. The 'thoughts' of the players are heard periodically loud and clear throughout the performance (the voice belonging to Elise Lorraine). They react to each other (as sports people do) with personal comments, spurious philosophical assertions, occasional abuse, and observations on the evolutionary struggle.

On each of the rackets and the net are mounted contact microphones and accelerometers, these access musical material. The movements of the rackets then further control tempo, rhythm, panning, volume, etc. The information from each racket confronts, complements or cuts off the material generated by the previous racket stroke.

The role of Percy Grainger is taken by a midi controlled player-piano. There are parts for Hurdy-Gurdy (Stevie Wishart) and other improvising guest musicians (in the CD version Phil Minton & Butch Morris are the extra Badminton players and Grainger's Free Music machines are realized by Rainer Linz). Texts and video images are derived from recently discovered (?) letters by the composer and pianist.

When not providing a violin commentary on this piece of revised music history, Jon Rose umpires the way through Grainger's musical pre-occupations. PERKS celebrates the technology and physicality of music; from the latest interactive technology developed at STEIM, Amsterdam to original 1908 Grainger field recordings of Rarotongan music. Like Grainger himself, PERKS deconstructs a wide range of music vocabularies based on often disparate elements... from a traditional Irish melody to a chaotic version of the Grieg piano concerto. The interactive sounds used in PERKS are digital representations of keyboard, percussion & homemade electronic instruments found (or imagined) in the Grainger museum, Melbourne.

Humanity's brain seems to remain fundamentally flawed".

Jon Rose

concept, composition, texts, samples (based on instruments found in the Grainger museum), violin, 19 string cello, voice, arrangements

Elise Lorraine

piano & harmonium sequences, voice, sung samples.

Stevie Wishart

hurdy gurdy

Phil Minton

voice

Butch Morris

cornet

Rainer Linz

additional research & realization of Graiger's Free Music with computer controlled analogue synth.

Tiame Te Tupé, Ngeri & Nawina Hane Kamu

raratongan songs, recorded by Grainger in 1908.

Frank Baldé & Tom Demeyer

steim software design, badminton players.

Jorgen Brinkman

interactive badminton rackets.

Matsubara Sachiko

japanese badminton samples.

Recorded at Steim, Amsterdam, in 1996.
Released by ReR in 1996.

link [megupload@320]

link 1 : link 2 [rapidshare@320]

Sachiko M, Günter Müller, Otomo Yoshihide - Filament 2 (1999)

"Filament, normally comprised of the duo of Otomo Yoshihide and Sachiko M, is joined here by Swiss percussionist/electronicist Gunter Muller for a series of calm, sparse improvisations which are eerily evocative and strangely beautiful. By "limiting" themselves to fairly low-tech electronics and by simply relaxing and taking their time to investigate each sound-world encountered, this trio succeeds brilliantly in keeping the listener extraordinarily interested and focused, as the sounds tumble forward in logical yet surprising fashion. There tend to be high and low frequency borders established by Sachiko's sine waves and low, throbbing drones (presumably supplied by Otomo), sandwiching all manner of midrange activity by Muller on delicate percussion and Otomo's turntablism. Throughout, there's a warm and inviting quality not always found on recordings in this genre, the various hums generally taking on a consonant nature and the rhythmic patterns muted instead of harsh. But it's the non-stop inventiveness of the musicians involved which make this such a success and a superb example of the heights this type of music can achieve". Brian Olewnick, All Music Guide

"A post-Ground Zero Yoshihide and Sachiko Matsubara square off against For 4 Ears proprietor Gunter Muller in this superior sequel to 1998's Filament 1 (Extreme). Matsubara again works solely with the sine wave emissions of a sampler emptied of all memory. Her choice of sounds may be limiting, but she resourcefully bends and tweaks the clean, shrill frequencies in sympathetic response to Muller's ultra-sparse freeform percussion and spattering of electronic crackle. An uncommonly restrained Yoshihide, acting anything but the plunderphonic dervish, supplies the tiniest fragments of sampled CD and vinyl grooves. Throughout the first two pieces, the trio's improvisation is surgically precise - an exacting, controlled performance that produces just enough audible information to suggest the memory traces of music and maintain a peripheral conscious presence. An infrequent blip quickens the pulse; a frugal drum-machine tattoo or the ghost of a recorded voice pricks the ears like a lance. The busier "Filament 2-3" and "Filament 2-5" are genuinely exciting. Matsubara and Muller's electronics fall in unpredictable anti-patterns, sounding on the former like the enigmatic growlers and whistlers heard in VLF-shortwave spheric recordings and mimicking Xenakis-like packets of compressed computerized sound-data in the latter. Yoshihide isn't quite as stingy with his well-chewed sound-bites in these later "Filament"s, and the plentiful bits of microscopic sound begin to form macroscopic clumps. Muller, an experienced improviser whose seemingly haphazard and disposable contributions here are in fact the backbone for the process of cohesion, is the key to Filament 2's success. His dry clicks, so prominent as to suggest an almost techno-minimalist grid on "Filament 2-4," corral the dispersed sampledelic debris. Like a vigilant sheepdog, Muller drops a percussive signal or an admonishing bleep to redirect the flow of the improvisation whenever he senses that Matsubara or Yoshihide has strayed from the instinctive course". Gil Gershman

Sachiko M - sampler with sinewaves
Günter Müller - electronics, selected drums
Otomo Yoshihide - records, cds

part1 : part2 [@320]

Ground Zero - Consume Red (1996)

"It's easy and maybe even cool to say "to hell with copyright." But of course, things aren't really that simple. What exactly is the difference between someone using your performance on their own CD without your permission and making a load of money, and GROUND ZERO sampling a revolution-era Pekinese opera to make a CD that DOESN'T make money? It burns me that a Japanese television network rotting in money can use my music without my knowing it, and I still don't get a cent out of it. But as long as a TV network is paying JASRAC (the one and only copyright organization in Japan) I'm told it's not illegal. So am I allowed to sample that TV channel without paying a cent, and make a CD from it? And then, what happens when that CD is sampled yet again by Stock, Hausen and Walkman?

The two main reasons for the existence of copyright are this. When a work is created by someone, there is ownership in that work. And, if such ownership exists, there is the question of how to justifiably turn that into money. My problem is about the fact that not all forms of creativity can be accredited to a single entity. And if I'm correct, what about copyright?

In the general flow of things, which do not consist of mere solitary products bobbing along but of things sampled and re-sampled, how can anybody say for sure who created what? The first question needs to be directed to the idea that an artistic work is born from a single entity's creativity. And so forth and so on. So rather than to go on talking about it, the idea is to go ahead and do it.

So it comes to this. GROUND ZERO samples the musical performance of a Korean national treasure, Kim Suk Chul. Any artistic purist should fly into a rage right there. His superhuman playing is without question a product of his own creativity, but it could also be that he is in fact a vessel for the voices of gods or ancestors. So GROUND ZERO takes and samples this brilliant music sacred enough to blow away any puny ideas about copyright. Then we will have this remixed by a number of unique sampling artists and place the two versions on a "chopping board" of consumption and sampling. Call it public sampling if you will. It's up to you how you cook with it. Mke it techno or enka or anything you like. What we want to see is not style or perfection but something beyond that (that is, if there is such a thing). The jumble of criticisms and questions that may emerge should outbalance today's definition of copyright together with its messy problems and questions of creativity. Go ahead and butcher this with your own hands. We can talk later". Otomo Yoshihide

Otomo Yoshihide: turntables and guitar
Sachiko Matsubara: sampler
Yumiko Tanaka: futozao-shamisen
Masahiro Uemura: drums
Yasuhiro Yoshigaki: drums
Naruyoshi Kikuchi: soprano saxophone
Mitsuru Nasuno: electric bass
Uchihashi Kazuhisa: electric guitar, effects

Sampling guest: Kim Suk Chul (hojok)

link @224

Cassiber/Ground Zero - Live in Tokyo (1997)

"This recording documents Cassiber's first and only visit to Tokyo, where they gave concerts on two consecutive evenings in October 1992. There were to be only two more appearances - both at the Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon that December - before the band, after ten years of continuous work, quietly ceased to exist. Just before they left for Japan they invited Shinoda Masami to join them for the concerts, a collaboration that was both rewarding and pleasurable. A little over a month later he suddenly died at the age of 34, leaving the promise that he and Cassiber had exchanged for a second collaboration never to be fulfilled.
The second CD is a collection of pieces by Otomo Yoshihide and Ground Zero, which takes the live recordings of Cassiber's live performance in Tokyo as source material and reworks them by way of sampling, remixing, addition, and re-performance. It is an expression of Otomo's respect and homage to Cassiber and to Shinoda Masami and, as the last recording under the name Ground Zero, marks the end of the group which has been the main project for the past seven years". Noda Shigenori and Chris Cutler.

Personnel:
Disc 1
Christoph Anders: vocals, guitar, samples.
Heiner Goebbels: vocals, guitar, violin, piano, samples.
Chris Cutler: drums, percussion.
Shinoda Masami: alto sax.

Disc 2
Otomo Yoshihide: turntables, rhythm box, guitar, hard disk, CD-J.
Masuko Tatsuki: DX7
Mizuhiro: mono-poly
Nagata Kazunao: ARP 2600
Haco: vocals
Yagi Michiyo: 21 string koto, teeth clack
Sachiko M: sampler
Uemura Masahiro: drums
Hirose Junji: tenor sax
Naruyoshi Kikuchi: tenor sax
Yasuhiro Otani: computer
Chino Syuichi: piano, organ.
Otani Yasuhiro: computerNasuno Mitsuru : bassYoshigaki Yasuhiro: drums.

Check comments for details

link @320 (here again)
link @320 (here again)

Check some other records by members of Cassiber here, there, elsewhere and in this location, courtesy of Lucky's Cut-Out and Spring's Spring Any Day Now.