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Excepter: Streams 01 [Fusetron; 2007]
If ever a band could be served by a good live album, it's Excepter. The John Fell Ryan-led Brooklyn collective (no, the other one…no, the other one) earned their reputation outside NYC via internet streams of their performances made available on their site, and often sounding at least as interesting as their studio work. Part of that was down to mystery: if sound fidelity and track names yielded few clues about what was going on, the sum total of "noise" was all the more alluring for it. Streams collects many of these performances, and sees them edited together into a continuous mix of music (though indexed as separate tracks). The overall effect is unsurprisingly similar to hearing the band live, though since all the tracks are from different times (from 2003 to 2006), the variation from song to song seems greater. Sometimes, this works wonders: the bouncy, ska-ish techno break in "Silence (Except Her)" comes as a godsend after the extended, super-haze opening of "F Sound/BB+B2", while the suddenly lo-fi sound on "Burgers (Live)" breaks up the consistently good (though sometimes a bit antiseptic) sound on the previous tracks. Other times, the constantly churning (--> amorphous --> sickly) batter of electronic tones and moaning voices make for a queasy ride. But then, I'm not sure that's actually a criticism with this band.

On the (slightly) less queasy second disc, "Entrance" opens with the upward wave of a sine-y synth chord, and even after settling into its dirge-march figure, it sounds metallic and wiry, like the dead insides of scrapped computers and assorted communication devices. As on the first disc, all the tracks are mixed into a continuous set, and "MC 333" carries over the dirge beat from the opener, but drops the brash synth for much subtler tones and a relatively restrained vocal from Fell (?). In turn, this segues into "Stairwells", with the beat condensed to a kick drum pulse, and a rapid series of warning-tone patterns that remind me of parts of Hosono & Yokoo's electro-tropical gem Cochin Moon . Like that record, the appeal of Streams is in the gradual progression through the sets, blurred transitions, buried beats and all (though isolated moments can yield odd rewards, like the great, abstract techno opening of "Who's There 2", or hyper, stuttering fuckery on "No Songs"), and though I'm tempted to recommend various (un)controlled substances in conjunction with this record-- despite that the band allegedly doesn't need them-- it probably makes more sense just to allot an undisturbed hour or two and get lost in swirls of dis/organized sound.

Melt Banana: Bambi's Dilemma [A-Zap; 2007]
I can always depend on Melt Banana. After many albums of techy post-hardcore, all featuring Yasuko Onuki's immediately recognizable yelp-vox and Agata's array of effects and siren-riffs to beat the band, it's easy to take MB for granted. However, albums like 2003's Cell Scape and this year's Bambi's Dilemma also make it hard to stop listening for long, as the band's dedication to evolving their formula is easily apparent. Take "Type: Ecco System": the tidal overflow of heavily processed guitar chords and distant, wailing vocal from Yasuko sound like something you might hear on an eYe remix, or even on a Stereolab record if they rolled with industrial strength electro-percussion. The riff that opens "Spider Snipe" is so straightforwardly "rock", it's hard to believe the band (almost) manages to transform it into something more typically "Melt Banana"; and I say "almost" because the chorus is so (gasp) catchy. It's entirely possible detractors and die-hards alike may protest these kinds of moments, though I'd urge them to skip to track 11 and behold the machine-gun burst of theremin+drums+vox of the next six or seven "songs". Yep, I can always depend on Melt Banana.

Remember, Everyone Loves Classical Music

Sylvie Courvoisier: Signs And Epigrams [Tzadik; 2007]
I first heard Swiss pianist Courvoisier several years ago with her trio Abaton (also featuring Tzadik regulars Erik Friedlander and Mark Feldman), playing modern chamber music with rounded edges and lush, almost mystical sonorities. And because "lush, almost mystical sonorities" are part of the reason non-classical-head people avoid "modern chamber music" like the plague, I should point out that her music is hardly as arch as you might think. Signs and Epigrams is a solo piano recording, and though it should resonate with lovers of contemporary piano performance, one of the coolest things about Courvoisier is her ability to craft (and improvise) music with much harmonic tension while still seeming, er, harmonious. On "Confins de Lueurs", phrases pass slowly, with the sustain pedal applied to almost everything, giving the otherwise very dissonant (though reminding me more of Messiaen than, say, Schoenberg) figures a cloudy edge. Likewise, on "Ricochet", what the pianist describes as a "study on the rebound," seems grand and stable, even as the dynamics of her piece veer wildly from the hard pound of a high chord to contemplative, barely audible figures in the lower register. Perhaps this is "mood music", but then isn't everything?

Out Goes to the Movies

Otomo Yoshihide: Multiple Otomo [Asphodel; 2007]
The year is 1997. Gas is affordable, "The Simpsons" is still good, and at any random moment you might overhear me proclaim, "Otomo Yoshihide is the coolest guy ever." And he was: destroying peoples' CD players with The Night before the Death of the Sampling Virus , beating Zorn's Naked City at their own game with the early Ground Zero records, inventing a whole new game with the later Ground Zero records, playing genre-mash noise with Optical*8, or writing surprisingly accessible scores for Japanese films-- the guy was as creative and prolific as they come. He still is, of course, but in the last ten years, his sound has crystallized: many records of improvised performances (including those with Filament, I.S.O. and others featuring just about anyone remotely affiliated with Improvised Music from Japan), solo compositions and a running series of his New Jazz groups, playing music greatly influenced by his love for 60s free jazz (plus Jim O'Rourke songs).

However, the mainstay of his repertoire, and what I think is his greatest contribution as a performer is his work on turntables. Not content to spin records or concoct mash-ups, Otomo uses the turntable as an instrument unto itself (like, say, Christian Marclay). Asphodel's new DVD/CD set Multiple Otomo captures just about every "trick" up his sleeve-- from cutting up records in hyper-speed, to playing melted vinyl, to using a rubber band as stylus needle, to pounding on the turntable like a drum-- as well as featuring some of his trademark guitar+feedback improvisations. However, the DVD visuals make this set pretty extraordinary; Otomo's performances are filmed close up, with heavy editing to transform them into abstract (but often strikingly awesome) patterns of light, color, static and the hypnotic revolutions of records. Sometimes it's not even clear what is being filmed, but then the best part of Multiple Otomo is that it works just as well with the sound off as on. Bonus points for yellow and red records.

Alejandro Jodorowsky, Don Cherry & Ronald Frangipane: The Holy Mountain OST [Abko; 2007]
Prepare yourself. Infamous cult director Jodorowsky (born in Chile, but currently a French citizen) has done it all: psychotherapy, tarot, graphic novels, alternative spirituality, films and massive, massive amounts of psychedelic drugs. He has also hobnobbed with various celebrities, including his current street team president Marilyn Manson, though it was John Lennon and Yoko Ono who helped fund 1973's The Holy Mountain (La Montaña Sagrada ), arguably his best movie, and part of a recent box set issuing several of his films on DVD for the first time. And my advice is to get that right now.

The box set also contains soundtracks for The Holy Mountain and 1970's El Topo , neither of which had been released before. The latter is a nice, though fairly conventional late-60s/early 70s orchestral score; the real show is on THM, where Jodorowsky, hallowed out-jazz trumpeter Don Cherry and conductor/arranger Ronald Frangipane team up to provide sounds that somehow manage to keep up with the surreal, trans-religious mysticism of the movie. Fittingly, the music is all over the place: fuzzed out psych-rock, Tibetan monk chants, sitar-laden exotica, analog synth whirls, jazzy trumpet ballads, South American flutes and even the occasional string orchestra to play the serious parts. As a listening experience, it's disjointed, incoherent, cheesy-- a lot like the movie. But also like the movie, it's strangely addictive, mysterious, Dadaist, and surprisingly accomplished. (Note: conquistador frogs not included.)

Bring the Prog

Sleepytime Gorilla Museum: In Glorious Times [The End; 2007]
Grouping SGM with fellow northern California bands Secret Chiefs 3 and Mr. Bungle (or UKers Miasma & the Carousel of Headless Horses) seems easy because they share an affinity for bizarre, carnivalesque sonic imagery and quasi-metal riffs-- and because SGM's first record appeared on Trey Spruance's Mimicry Records. However, the Oakland, CA-based band (featuring vocalist/guitarist Nils Frykdahl, vocalist/violinist Carla Kihlstedt, bassist Dan Rathbun, drummer Matthias Bossi, and multi-instrumentalist Michael Mellender) reminds me more of avant-prog flagship bands like Thinking Plague, 5uus and Art Bears. Indeed, songs like "Formicary" or "Ossuary" are constantly shifting, not only in the music being played or textures created by any number of unusual percussion and stringed instruments, but in intensity. The songs often begin unassumingly (sort of), say, with a Frykdahl soliloquy, but soon explode into pieces increasingly denser and more grotesque. The theatrical element to this music is hard to miss (especially if you've seen their shows), as is the generally dark mood (and in this respect, I hear a lot of Oingo Boingo in SGM), but if you can handle the thick soup of drama and surrealism, bands don't get much more ambitious than this.

Alamaailman Vasarat: Maahan [Wolfgang; 2007]
Finnish klezmer/metal/prog band plays a hybrid of, er, klezmer, metal and instrumental prog, and should find easy converts with fans of Secret Chiefs 3, Volapuk, or even some of John Zorn's Masada work. Like Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, Alamaailman Vasarat (translated as "Hammers of the Underworld") revels in a carnival atmosphere, though sounding hardly as macabre as the American band. Led by woodwind player Jarno Sarkula, AV usually plays up the folk-ier elements of Scandanavian and Middle Eastern music, especially in dance rhythms (as in folk dance), and shares a fondness for whimsy with first-line Swedish avant-proggers Zamla Mammaz Manna. Maahan is their fourth record (including a collaboration with vocalist/guitarist Tuomari Nurmio), and though it's not quite as heavy as its predecessors (see especially some of the double-amplified-cello dirges from their first two records), the tunes are great and the horn lines are their best on record. And yes, this band = I bet they kill live.

Reissues Go Last

Pauline Oliveros: Accordion & Voice [Vital; 1982; r: Important; 2007]
Pauline Oliveros: The Wanderer [Lovely; 1984; r: Important; 2007]
Houston-born new music composer and performer Oliveros writes expansive, often meditative electronic and acoustic music, was an early member of the San Francisco Tape Music Center (which eventually morphed into Mills College's Center for Contemporary Music) along with Morton Subotnick, Terry Riley and Steve Reich, co-founded the Deep Listening Band with Stuart Dempster and Panaiotis, has written several books, plays accordion in just intonation, and has been at the forefront of textural, highly nuanced experimental music for more than forty years. Her pieces take advantage of her own concept of "deep" or "quantum" listening, wherein performers and audience should immerse themselves in sound to the point of picking up on things (from both the music and the outside world) otherwise imperceptible; indeed, as Oliveros says, "Hearing is involuntary…Listening actively directs one's attention to what is heard, to the interaction of the relationships of sounds and modes of attention."

If that sounds a bit dry, check out the records. Important's reissues of Accordion & Voice (Oliveros' first recording as a soloist) and The Wanderer (featuring ensemble works) are godsends for anyone enamored of staring (sonically) into nothingness, and still managing to see a million things. The 1984 LP features a duet with the late, renoun pianist/composer (and frequent performer of John Cage's pieces) David Tudor, playing bandoneon on "Duo for Accordion & Bandoneon", a piece originally written for the same duo twenty years prior. The piece is often sparse, and the occasionally accented entrances by one of the instruments can seem all the more jarring when your ears become attuned to the quasi-stasis of the music-- it actually reminds me of some onkyo music in this respect, though the accordion and bandoneon offer a little more sonic richness than a sine wave. "The Wanderer" is an uncharacteristically rollicking piece for accordion ensemble; when the percussion enters about eight minutes in with the 9/8 break, it seems closer to Eastern European folk dance than contemporary classical. The performance of "Horse Sings from Cloud" is for an accordion/bandoneon/harmonium/concertina quartet, and is right at home with the sustained-tone ambience of Morton Feldman, Stockhausen's vocal overtone study Stimmung , or even some of György Ligeti's microtonal pieces. Neat!

The performance of the same piece on Accordion & Voice is much different: literally, Oliveros plays accordion and vocalizes long tones "until there is no longer any desire to change it." The piece is one of Oliveros' "sonic meditations", pieces wherein "scores" are communicated orally, and ultimately, anyone can participate-- as long as they're down with deep listening. The performance here certainly requires some pretty intense focus, though its glacial phrases (which were borne from the breath control of both human voice and accordion) give ample opportunity to settle into the sound. "Rattlesnake Mountain" is a solo accordion performance, composed while Oliveros watched wind blow through meadows near the namesake mountain. The modal melody strikes me as both solemn and mystical, somewhere between an Indian raga and a bagpipe funeral hymn. In any case, like all of the music on these CDs, it rewards open ears.

Lubomyr Melnyk: KMH [Music Gallery Editions; 1979; r: Unseen Worlds; 2007]
Canadian (his parents left the Ukraine in the early 50s) pianist and composer Melnyk makes music that's lush + minimal, which could be a contradiction were it not for the often-gorgeous evidence on KHM. Composed in Melnyk's self-described "continuous mode", the near-50-minute piece (broken into five tracks on the CD reissue) is all waterfall arpeggios and repetitions that sound like Terry Riley channeling Messiaen. Other easy reference points are Steve Reich's rhythmic phasing pieces or Philip Glass' piano music, though Melnyk's music sounds more romantic than rigorous-- which is a bit deceptive, considering the focus I'm guessing it takes to pull off an uninterrupted performance of this stuff. The piece was originally written to accompany dancers (choreographed by onetime Igor Wakhevitch associate Carolyn Carson), and it's easy to envision lots of continuous, fluid motion taking place alongside KMH . It's also easy to imagine this soundtracking raindrops falling over each other on the window, washing away splashes before they have much of a chance to expand their initial impact.