Hubble, "Hubble Drums:" Ben Greenberg's Trance-Drone Psychedelia for Electric Guitar

It is interesting to trace the advent of drone and trance in modern music through the initial influence of Indian music on the psychedelic electrics of the classic late-'60s. From that has come many things, and the "soundscape" today is one of them. This is not the place to name the particulars, but it does serve to introduce today's musical selection.

We have guitarist Ben Greenberg as Hubble and his 40-minute album Hubble Drums (Northern Spy CD or LP). Don't let the title fool you. This has nothing really to do with drumming (though some electric drums can be heard in the mix on occasion) and everything to do with electronic drones and guitar.

Ben has been the guitarist with Zs and Pygmy Shrews. For Hubble Drums he goes it alone. The music owes much to Fripp and Eno's landmark recordings of the '70s and what has been dubbed Frippertronics. Like their No Pussyfooting, Hubble Drums takes a trance-repetition-drone minimalistic soundscape approach. Where Fripp and Eno were spaciously sprawling, Hubble is more terse and busy. Most musical moments are filled with rather dense, noteful cycles of energy. The result is not as spaced as it is manic. The guitar work is well thought-through. Each piece relates to the others but simultaneously carves out a distinctive note cluster cycle and pace of its own. And there are times when classical psychedelic guitar leads come to dominate, in a repeated and chopped sort of way.

It's quite engaging music, consistently so. Shredmaster Greenberg has managed to come up with his own take on this kind of soundscape, with impressive results.

Northern Spy and Ben Greenberg have been kind enough to upload the track "Nude Ghost" for you to hear. Audition it at http://soundcloud.com/northernspyrecs/01-nude-ghost-hubble/.

The Necks' "Hanging Gardens": Play it Again Sam, and Again, and Again

Australia produces its share of music worth hearing. The Necks are one of its more interesting exports in recent times. They are a keys-bass-drums trio that specializes in a kind of jazz-rock minimalism with long trance-like grooves that owe something to the early, more rock oriented minimalist endeavors, like Riley and Cale's Church of Anthrax. Yes, and the classic first phase of electric Miles Davis too.

Their 1999 Hanging Gardens (Fish of Milk 02677) shows all that pretty clearly. It's a one-hour-long cut. It begins with a high-hat tatoo and bass riff that pretty much continue through the piece. Chris Abrahams comes in on Hammond as well as piano, electric piano and various other keys. After a while I realized that the whole project took more than a little something from Miles Davis's In A Silent Way, especially the Hammond work combined with high-hat pulse. The differences are just as dramatic though. Of course there's no ravishing Miles, but really no solos at all. The riff and the drums continue ad infinitum and the level of the music gradually raises through the sound color ambiance of the keys and, sometimes, some counter riffs.

It's looking to develop a trance-through-repetition effect. That's what the Necks do so well. In spite of the fact that an hour is a rather long time to keep up a particular schtick, the Necks' strong suite is they sustain it by various event clusters, an additional variation on the riff, for example, a section where the drums lay out, prepared piano rattle-drones, and so on.

In the end, the Necks create a musical world you can inhabit gladly, provided you do not impatiently await some sort of foreground (soloing). It's a long mesh of background complexities brought forward. But it would fail utterly if it didn't evolve over time in ways that keep one's interest. It does not fail!

Christopher Adler, A Bright-Light Composer

January 29, 2009—From the evidence of his latest CD Ecstatic Volutions in a Neon Haze (Innova), composer-pianist Christopher Adler is one of bright lights on the West Coast today. The minimalist style of modern concert music has been a large contributor to the new music heard in the past 30 years, sometimes to mixed results. The key to Adler and his success in this idiom is probably contained in the classic idea of VARIATIONS. This can be opposed to the “process” favored by the early work of Steve Reich and others. With Mr. Adler there is periodicity and repetition, but the forms of change in his music seem to be driven by a non-mechanical musical sensibility not always at the forefront in other similar musics. How can the set of transformations undergone in any particular piece be understood? Adler’s solution is always to create musical interest by letting the variations follow an inspirational path guided by pure invention. What could be a snooze becomes just the opposite.

The five pieces represented on this disk vary also in the ensemble colors available with the instrumentation at hand. The larger group pieces, “Iris” for flute, guitar, cello and marimba, and “Ecstatic Volutions” for acoustic and electric guitars, oboe, bassoon, and piano, create sound color-texture and nicely wrought, idiomatically conceived parts that mesh together for a very interesting aural experience. But this is no less true of the smaller ensemble writing. For example the long standing duet of Adler on piano and Alan Lechusza on winds, here soprano sax, puts in one of the more exciting performances of the disk, “I Want to Believe.” There is a jazz-like attention to velocity and color and a drive to the music that engages. The title cut stands out for me as well in its effective use of guitars and its ability to unveil an arsenal of musical ideas in a relatively short time period. This is music as essential as it is essentialist, no doubt as interesting to play as it is to hear. Listen and you’ll learn as well as enjoy. You might even get the urge to dance. Get this CD at www.innova.mu.

Peter Garland and His Presentational Sound Events

Originally posted on October 30, 2008

If my revised blog heading [that is, for my other "guitar" blog, see www.gapplegate.com/musicalblog.htm] seems a little whimsical, it is. I wanted to make it clear that the daily entries are guided by open-ended attention to any or all aspects of music today, not just related directly to guitars. There are bass players out there, other instrumentalists too, obviously, and all kinds of music. I don’t know of any kazoo players worthy of mention right now, but if I did I might mention them [my heading whimsically referenced Kazoo cadenzas for a few days, but I ditched that in the sober light of a Monday morning].

Guitar-related topics will still hog a large portion of the subject matter. I am not forcing the issue though to make this blog an adjunct to guitar sales. If something comes up related to that, fine. If not, not. If there was somebody over me calling the shots they would probably get rid of this blog. There isn’t, so it stays, a conduit to some thoughts and free for you to read or not as you choose. . .

John Zorn’s non-profit Tzadik label is one of the most far-reaching and adventurous concerns today. Literally all possibilities can be and are represented by their disks. So I’ve grabbed some of the summer-fall recordings and will be taking a look at them on and off in the next couple of weeks.

First up is a disk by composer and music conceptualist Peter Garland. Three Strange Angels is a 1992 recording long out of print which represents the early work of this minimalist oriented music maker. It varies from solo harp to small ensemble pieces. There are Amerind and Mexican traditional influences, adapted to Garland’s eclectic palette of presentational sound events.

I can’t say that this recording will convert anyone to experimental minimalism. It has moments of sheer aural tapestry that can intrigue, sometimes in a purely musical way, sometimes with an only-to-be-guessed semantic agenda. It is challenging music, even to those used to challenging music, because Garland’s vocabulary is his own (in a quasi-"ethnic" way) and you must learn it to “read” the meaning.

Like a few other modern american composers of the old-fashioned Yankee pioneering sort, Lou Harrison, for example, there is a bricoleur-like accessibility that is juxtiposed with a certain esotericism that transforms the music to another plane and causes the listener to think. Good. Where this music stands becomes clearer only after a bunch of listens. It's music that is difficult because it turns out to be easy and you didn't expect it to be that. It's easy only after you've gone through figuring out what it IS. Does that makes sense?

Richard Crandell's Thumb Piano Music

Originally posted on March 20, 2008

If you are a fan of the African thumb piano (mbira) or of musical minimalism, or you just like grooves, you probably want to sample Richard Crandell’s Tzadik album Spring Steel.

Crandell is a modern west coast composer man, not an African mbirist per se. He nevertheless has mastered the instrument and offers a CD length series of attractive numbers with percussionist Cyro Baptista. The music has a lyric touch but it rocks out in an African sort of way. It is one of those disks that just puts you in a nice frame of mind. It did to me anyway.

Burton Greene, Shinedown, Steve Reich

Originally posted on December 21, 2007

Free jazz is a music that came out of the US beginning in the early-to mid-sixties and spread over the planet. It survives today among dedicated musicians and an equally dedicated audience. Probably the first record label to cover the music in depth was ESP-Disk, a New York based company that had an open view of what people might want to hear. Around 1965 they recorded Burton Greene’s Bloom in the Commune. It has been out of print for many years and recently, with the revival of ESP, has been reissued. Now you either like free jazz or you don’t.

Those that do and those looking to experience it, can do no better than with this release. Burton Greene was and is a pioneering pianist of the music. He coaxes all kinds of sounds out of the piano, getting inside it and playing it like a harp, percussively assaulting it with a two-fisted heartiness, quieting down for a lyrical moment. This first release of Greene’s features Marion Brown on alto sax, who wails and warbles his way through the cuts. He is joined by tenor saxman Frank Smith, adding a deeper tone to the proceedings. Henry Grimes, the bassist, is a volcano of sound and brings an especially rugged edge to the group texture. He was an incredible bassist and he has come back on the scene after disappearing for many years. Here he is in his prime. There are two different drummers depending on the cuts, and they apply a smeared free tempoed wash behind the soloists. This is not music for everybody. Nonetheless it still sounds completely contemporary. There is a timeless quality to the music, in more ways than one. And the reissue features some bonus tracks consisting of interesting retrospective interviews with Greene and ESP-Disk founder Bernard Stollman. The remastering is well done. Go to www.espdisk.com if you want to order a copy.

Changing gears, I am also checking out an alternative rock band that released a CD called Us and Them a few years ago on Atlantic. I refer to Shinedown. Listening to the CD, I fail to have much to say about it, except that there are memorable melodies and a thickly applied musicianship. It’s just likeable.

One more CD for Friday. The music form sometimes called “minimalism” had its heyday in the ‘70s, but continues on in some form or other today. Many of the absolute classics of the music were written by New Yorker Steve Reich. Up there among the few absolute knockout pieces is his Drumming which was appealingly recorded a few years ago by So Percussion (Cataloupe), although there have been others as well. This version has a kick to it. Basically, the piece involves four percussionists, plus flute and vocals, driving through a cyclical, post-African set of ever-evolving rhythmic figures. They start on tom toms, move to marimbas, then glockenspiels, and finally combine all four instruments. It certainly could be called toe-tapping music, and all musicians can learn from listening to it, I have no doubt! Have a good weekend.