Faust - 'Rien' (Table of the Elements)

Table of the Elements – now that's a great label, one that managed to make the compact disc form beautiful and desirable, while emphasising an axis of musical experimentation that embraced the past and present. And what could be a better fit for that aesthetic than Rien, the 1994 'comeback' album from Faust, or at least two of the members. This is a fucking impressive collection of dark juju improvisations, with a few guests (Michael Morley, Keiji Haino, and Steven Wray Lobdell so that's an impressive mix of guitar gods, too) and a thick, spacious roar that burns throughout (even during the quiet parts). While the classic Faust albums all had some sort of songforms present here and there, this abandons that in favour of pure horizontal sound painting. This rages with a focused intensity, hardly the sound of nothing as the title indicates, and it moves in often spellbinding ways. This is still, at times, rock music; the long jam whose title is just symbols is built around a pounding drumbeat and has some vocals, chanting 'listen to the fishes' (which makes sense given the symbols); it's the most Faustesque track, the link to the 70s, as there's that ragged kosmische structure that provides a basis for mega-psychedelic layers on top. The last few minutes gel into a high-level drone piece, where the industrial basis emerges; losing oneself in this is a quarter-hour well-spent. There's a heavy sense of dynamics throughout Rien; 'Eroberung Der Stille, Teil II' spends its first half building up around layers of metallic scraping, until the bottom suddenly drops out and allows space for a new, nocturnal malevolence to emerge, with a guitar/theremin interplay that screams for understanding but offers none. The second track, '?', likewise drops to nothing near the end and with a sudden straining to make out detail, attains transcendence. Closer 'Eroberung Der Stille, Teil I' builds a foundation before turning, as if to look at adjacent scenery, and finding a conclusion in some neoclassical strings, melodic yet uneasy. Rien may or may not be classic Faust – I'm not sure how to grasp the lineage of the band, since the original was a market-based assemblage by a marionette-pulling producer, and was always implied to be a freeform collective anyway – but it's a fantastic accomplishment, a very different flavour to the 1970s records but as rewarding. There's still the same sense of the studio as instrument here, which maybe is thanks to Jim O'Rourke's production; it's hard to know what he contributed and what was the vision of the musicians, but a perfect balance is felt between live instrumentation and creative editing. The bilingual, spoken credits at the end remind me of old Robert Altman films, and that's sort of controlled chaos is a nice metaphor for Faust's greatest work, which this definitely ranks up there with.

Chöying Drolma & Steve Tibbetts ‎– Chö (Hannibal)

Drolma is a Buddhist nun who sings devotional melodies over Tibbetts's guitar ambience, and it's occasionally mesmerising; 'Kyamdro Semkye', for example, has her voice shimmying in every direction and threatening to pull itself apart, while a plaintive, plucking melody of strings rotates underneath. Throughout the numerous short pieces on this disc, the duo keeps establishing an unreliable sense of stability; with the language impenetrable to me, I can only focus on the abstract qualities, which is what we like music for anyway. I guess this is really experimental for a Buddhist singer; though it's mostly an organic core, there are accents, such as backwards skipping studio trickery and searing, post-newage guitar melancholia which would surely be out of place in a traditional setting. Without any real background in whatever traditions are being dismantled here, I'm unable to say much of value. But with a background in the 80's 4AD label, I can hear a lot of similarities; 'Ngani Tröma' is basically an early His Name is Alive cut with a Tibetan vocalist instead of a Michiganite. I put this on every once in awhile without really knowing how to feel about it. I'm not so interested in it from an ethnomusicological standpoint, so it becomes ear candy to me. It's delicious ear candy, but ear candy nonetheless; I try not to approach this intrigued by the exotic 'other', but it's a presence I can't escape from. Tibbetts is clearly in the driver's seat and his textures run the gamut from pedestrian to curiosity-inducing. He doesn't overdo anything, but I don't know why he would, except that I have a bias against these hybrid "world music" projects, so I'm always on guard in defense of good taste.

Peter Brötzmann Chicago Tentet - 'Stone/Water' (OkkaDisk)

Coming on the heels of that first Die Like a Dog blastfest, the Brötzmann session here at Cinderblock HQ continues with this. Stone/Water starts out suggesting a severely intimidating stage (which was the Victoriaville festival, 1999). Three tenor saxes, with Brötzmann and Vandermark also on clarinet at times and Gustafsson as well -- makes it pretty impossible for me to distinguish who is playing what when - but that's really not the point, right? Sometimes I long for the old style of jazz liner notes where they tell you who is playing what solo when, and stereo panning is also nice but there's too many musicians here and it's also a live recording. There's a double rhythm section as well, though I'm not saying these musicians should be confined into traditional roles! But this is not the "big ball of sound" approach at all - over its 38 minutes, we get a hella grab bag of different sounds happening. Early on there's a lot of sawing of the strings - Parker and Kessler on basses, but also Fred Lomberg-Holm on cello, which gives the band this really interesting lifting up feel, like a series of slowly emerging plateaus. The earth starts to shake when both drummers really kick it in - Hamid Drake's playing is usually quite distinct but it's difficult to distinguish him from Michael Zerang. What a great surname 'Zerang' is -- I just want to append an exclamation point to the end whenever I type it. Anyway, this isn't all ten people playing all at once for 40 minutes. There are a few miniatures buried within. About fifteen minutes in there's this strangely medieval courtly jig, except not really, but it is quite woodsy and weird. FL-H is playing violin here and angling off into all sorts of different directions, creating something quite dissonant and lovely. Halfway through it's a 5-man horn solo, or whatever you call that - a quintet? The absence of bass or percussion gives things this really clarity and it's awesome to lose yourself in it, but also to single out one musician and 'follow' their zigzags. Toshihori Kondo is on this recording but his electronics, while present, mostly take a backseat except for one long call and response part (also somewhere in the middle). Soon after, you think it's all gonna come back together for a crashing finale, with the full band exploding into a raging balloon of pure fire, except it doesn't actually end, instead trickling down into this super amazing fucked up string part (about two minutes from the end) where the recording quality sounds like some lost 1950's outsider electroacoustic record and everything is weirdly hairy and then it trickles to the end. A great, great outro from what is overall a very strong recording (and quite aptly titled, as it's rocky and fluid at the same time). I've seen the Brötzmann Tentet twice with a similar lineup (never with Kondo but once with McPhee, and I think I remember Mars Williams being there once) and it never had this much clarity.