David Moss Dense band : "Live in Europe"

(Ear-Rational, 1988)

In 1985, David Moss released ''Dense Band,'' an album that distilled downtown noise improvisation into song-length chunks and added a funk beat now and then. It was a showcase for Mr. Moss's precise, clattery drumming and his peculiar specialty: improvised vocal gibberish that can evoke anything from a newscast in Lithuanian to a soprano wrestling a hyena.
Two years later, he is touring with a group called Dense Band; the group made its American debut Wednesday at the Whitney Annex.
The current Dense Band includes Wayne Horvitz on keyboard, Jean Chaine on electric bass, Christian Marclay on turntables and John King on guitar. It was a showcase for both Mr. Moss and Mr. Chaine, who made an impressive New York debut with ultra-fast funk patterns, whizzing melodies and strummed and plucked chords that took the innovations of the late Jaco Pastorius a step further.
Nearly a dozen concise, varied pieces used stop-start patterns, rock and funk riffs, bursts of loud noise and relative quiet, and Mr. Moss's own sense of timing and timbre -part funk, part slapstick. He uses a drum kit that features bent-up, clanking cymbals as well as conventional ones, so a steady beat can sound like it suddenly collided with a garbage truck.
Mr. Horvitz's bell-like keyboard sounds, Mr. King's guitar twangs and Mr. Marclay's selections from records - mostly swelling orchestral chords and operatic voices, rendered silly by their context - also contributed to the poised, cheerful cacophony. The only problem was the Whitney Annex's acoustics; the echoing concrete-and-glass room muddied the music.

Jon Pareles (New York Times, 1987)

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A confederacy of dances vol. 1

(Einstein, 1992)

Based in New York City since the late '70s, the Roulette collective has been sponsoring new music events for years. By the time this compilation was released in 1992, Roulette had organized nearly a thousand performances, many featuring some of the most outrageous cutting-edge music. This CD collects excerpts from some of the best concerts during a seven-year period, and unsurprisingly, the uniformly stellar performances sparkle with excitement. Whether a Billy Bang solo violin tribute to Albert Ayler, the premiere of one of John Zorn's game pieces, David Weinstein's deconstruction of national anthems, or the shimmering beauty of vocalist Jeanne Lee and trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith in tandem, the 14 tracks should delight anyone open to adventurous sounds.

Steve Loewy (All Music)

notes :

*1) : Bill Frisell, guitar & effects (16/04/1988)
*2) : Christian Marclay, turntables (14/03/1987)
*3) : Tohban Djan : Ikue Mori, drums & drum machine. Luli Shioi, voice & bass. Hahn Rowe, violin. Davey Williams, guitar (12/11/1989)
*4) : Zeena Parkins, electric harp & electronics (22/03/1990)
*5) : Billy Bang, violin (26/02/1988)
*6) : Anthony Coleman, sampling keyboards. Jim Pugliese, drums & sampler. Don Byron, clarinet. Guy Klucevsek, accordion (30/03/1990)
*7) : David Weinstein, sampling & electronic keyboard (27/04/1989)
*8) : Chris Cochrane, guitar (14/11/1987)
*9) : Ron Kuivila, home-made electronics & microcomputer (25/10/1987)
*10) : John Zorn, reeds. Vicki Bodner, oboe & english horn. Carol Emanuel, harp. Wayne Horvitz, electronic keyboard. Robert James, tapes & sfx. Arto Lindsay, voice & guitar. Christian Marclay, turntables. M.E. Miller, drums. Ursula Oppens, piano. Robin Holcomb, prompter (27/04/1984)
*11) : Mary Rowell, violin. Erik Friedlander, cello. Jonathan Storck, doublebass (23/03/1991)
*12) : David Weinstein, sampling & electronic keyboard (27/04/1989)
*13) : Shelley Hirsch, voice. Ikue Mori, drum machines. David Shea, turntables. Jim Staley, trombone (18/07/1991)
*14) : Jeanne Lee, voice. Wadada Leo Smith, trumpet (21/10/1989)

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Butch Morris : "Current trends in racism in modern America"

(Sound Aspects, 1986)

Alessandro Cassin: What does the improvising conductor do, provided words like conducting, arranging, composing, qualify to describe the work ?
Butch Morris: The improvising conductor arranges the extemporized material of improvisers. He has a vocabulary of signs to instigate the events: I'm not conducting in the traditional sense, I'm provoking or asking for certain things to happen, but even of those things I have no idea until I hear them.
AC: Would you say of what you do that it's something between arranging and composing ?
BM: Actually I wouldn't truly call it composing, but I could call it arranging, yeah, granted that you cannot start to arrange anything before you hear the material, before you have the material at hand.
AC: As to the simultaneous process of listening and doing something with what you've listened to, how different is it from what a regular conductor does, and what about the risks of speed in this process, and the power trip which I guess shaping a whole ensemble should entail ?
BM: At certain times it does create a sensation of power, yeah. The power trip didn't start with me, it started with the idea that someone had to stand before an orchestra. There is a certain kind of aura, of position of authority that conductors themselves have created over the years. However, what I'm doing is similar and different. It's similar in the sense that I'm keeping a number of people in line and I'm giving my view of direction, particularly direction of music. Of course with me you have no idea what direction the music will take. The traditional conductor instead knows the direction of the music, what it's going to sound like. I have no idea of what a person is going to do, or play, or what the first sound is going to be, the second sound or any sound. But I know that as soon as I hear it, if it needs a certain kind of care I have to shape it.
AC: How is chance at stake here ?
BM: Chance is a word John Cage has used a lot in his writing. I don't like to see it as chance, I like to see it as risk. I think risk insinuates also a certain kind of challenge. Chance doesn't necessarily do that to me.
AC: Do musicians resist your method, what are the most common questions raised by people at work with you ?
BM: I have had resistance to the method, though that's generally when I'm called to work with an existing ensemble that doesn't know quite what I'm doing or why I'm doing it. One of the most common questions or statements is, yes — why am I doing it ? and — if you want me to do it why don't you just write it down ? What I'm trying to bring about is ensemble spontaneity; there are still a lot of people resisting any kind of total improvisation.
AC: Would you rather work with the same musicians on a regular basis, or do you envision being so familiar with the method as to be able to conduct improvisation with little or no rehearsals?
BM: I do have a core group in New York of about five or six people that I use all the time not only for conductions but for notated compositions and other kind of projects. It makes my ensemble more flexible when I hire people that read music well. Believe me, I like a lot of different kinds of music, and I like to write it, and I also like to improvise. One of the reasons I even started thinking of this conducting was really to control, make more flexible and lucid my notated music.
AC: Let's get to the second part of the question, do you envision being so familiar with the method as to be able to conduct improvisation with little or no rehearsals ?
BM: I would like that very much, I hope it's coming to that. That I could call up three people in every country I've ever been, but there is not really that kind of familiarity at this point and I feel obligated to at least run through the vocabulary one more time.
AC: You have been conducting for twenty years. How does progression in your work contemplate evolution ?
BM: It still feels very young to me and it still feels very fresh, Conduction #1 is completely different from Conduction #31. I think there's a long way to go... I want to take it a lot further, a lot. There's only been one composer to write for my particular talent, that was Misha Mingelberg in '87. He wrote a piece for me to conduct and it really worked quite well. His identity was still in the music, it didn't sound like me, I think this could be a problem with some composers thinking they are bound to loose their musical identity.

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Christian Marclay-Ikue Mori-Elliott Sharp

This disc is a treasure simply because new material by any one of these three artists is always worth hearing ; improvising together, they create soundscapes that are by turns eerie, amusing, dense, and pointillistic. Sharp's approach to his instruments is completely unbounded by any traditional considerations, and the noises he produces are otherworldly ; Marclay is a pioneering virtuoso of turntable manipulation, skilled at using the decks to take familiar sounds and twist them beyond recognition ; and Mori spends at least as much time using her drum machines to produce pitches and textures as to produce beats. Highly recommended.

Rick Anderson (All Music)

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Nicolas Collins : "100 of the world's most beautiful melodies"

(Trace Elements, 1989)

This album is played by an all-star downtown group: Nicolas Collins, Pippin Barnett, Anthony Coleman, Tom Cora, Peter Cusack, Shelley Hirsch, George Lewis, Christian Marclay, Ben Neill, Zeena Parkins, Robert Poss, Ned Rothenberg, Elliott Sharp, Davey Williams, John Zorn, and Peter Zummo. A tongue-in-cheek title, perhaps, depending on your idea of "beautiful melody," as the sounds range from electronically and physically modified instruments with a definite edge to the barely perceptible, awakening the ear. Collins is also part of the Impossible Music group (with David Weinstein, David Shea, Ted Greenwald, and Tim Spelios) who, performing live, manipulate CD players in the spirit of Plunderphonics and rap-scratch style, creating a new style of electronic ensemble with works like the spatial and surreal "Simulcatastrophy," a performance of Collin's "In CD" (a title pun on Riley's "In C," of course) often humorously re-thinking Beethoven and Mozart cadences and form (he has made some recent work with Ben Neill along this same line), and the dense work "Salvador Dali's Digital Cinema".

"Blue" Gene Tyranny (All Music)

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