AGENCEMENT

Started by SILVUM, April 13, 2010, 12:17:22 AM

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SILVUM

Always admired his surgical delicacy and textures.

FreakAnimalFinland

Due hearing the band via Jap-noise compilations, I always thought it was "noise", although very quiet one. Some later works which are violin improvisations, perhaps wouldn't qualify exactly noise, but he is perhaps the best of experimental violin abusers I have heard. The sounds he can pull out from instrument are very good and one could say perhaps not typical.
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FreakAnimalFinland

Another good re-issue is AGENCEMENT "Viosphere + 1984-1991" CD.
Clamshell type packaging with small booklet. Could have plain jewelbox easily, but this label did mostly boxes like this. Includes 3rd CD material with assorted unreleased materials as addition. I like unreleased bonus so much, that don't mind basically having this album twice. I don't think Viosphere is particularly hard to find. Even now several copies at discogs, but I guess 200 copies of new version should move?

As mentioned my old message above, I got to know Agencement though various compilations associated with Japanese noise. However, his main influence was Derek Bailey and to my ears, Agencement violin / autoharp etc improvisations are even more interesting. He uses plenty of reel-to-reel tapes and processing of sound. Even if it doesn't get noisy, it gets busy. It is relaxing, but sort of hectic and dense texture. Very much recommended!
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FreakAnimalFinland

Agencement "six juxtaposed works" CD
Tochnit Aleph

Didn't even notice there was new album out! 2013-2017 recordings, where violins, viola, cello, electronics and tape are together, far more "art music" feel to it. Meaning more improvising with the strings, rather than creating textures and electronic noises. Not bad, though! Edition merely 300 copies, certainly good to grab for those who like abstract violin sounds.
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Zeno Marx

If Agencement had a collision with a minimalist and Iancu Dumitrescu, Morton Feldman, Walter Marchetti, or one of those cats.

https://youtu.be/qLTZ3AfdeVA
"the overindulgent machines were their children"
I only buy vinyl, d00ds.

Bloated Slutbag

Quote from: Zeno Marx on May 24, 2022, 10:10:08 PM
If Agencement had a collision with a minimalist and Iancu Dumitrescu, Morton Feldman, Walter Marchetti, or one of those cats.

https://youtu.be/qLTZ3AfdeVA

Incredible
Someone weaker than you should beat you and brag
And take you for a drag

FreakAnimalFinland

Some updates from mr. Hideaki Shimada.
https://sites.google.com/site/hsppico

Appears that the 2022 "October Variations" is so far published only as file. Glasgow-based SCATTER -label was for improvised music, run by Liam Stefani, which operated between the mid- to late-1990s. Since 2017, the label's roster has become available digitally.

So perhaps these new works are being only published as files. Bandcamp link:
https://scatterarchive.bandcamp.com/album/october-variations

QuoteIn this work, in addition to the violin I play, I also use viola, cello, contrabass, and even the piano. By electronic editing and some tape editing, the whole was composed as a montage work using musical instrument materials. Each instrument is given an electronic reverberation for each material or passage, producing a transformation of time. This method is the same as my traditional work style, but this time it reduces the duration of the instrumental layers and uses less electronic sounds (especially oscillator sounds). At the time of production last year, it overlaps with the time when my mother died, so it is possible to listen to it as a kind of title (programmatic) music, but by myself, I am focusing on imagining the shape of the individual instruments and listening to their tones.
However, when I listen to it now, I cannot deny that it contains a few thoughts of sadness from that time. It's rare for me, who has dealt with acoustics in a relatively materialistic way, but I recall that tendency started with my previous work in the studio (Six Juxtaposed Works).
agencement.bandcamp.com/album/six-juxtaposed-works
I have been improvising using the violin for a long time. But, it's far closer to making my own electronic music than an academy-trained performer, such as recording and editing it on magnetic tape from the beginning, but the electronic sound alone is not enough for a decisive texture. I had been thinking of that from the beginning and it continues to the present.
The work was requested by Liam Stefani of Scottish scatter Archive label in early summer last year, and I decided to make a new work, not an unreleased sound source.
I received a letter from Liam around 1994. He seemed to have been interested in my music since then. He was running the label at that time too, and his focus on improvisational music, such as releasing Derek Bailey's CD, seems to be the same today.
After long years, I am grateful to Liam for giving me the opportunity to present my work. (translated from the original)


I liked Six Juxtaposed Works, but perhaps this new 21 minute "mini album" might be even better!

Like his description says, this is no longer focused on electronic sound processing, but plenty of acoustic instrument sound and texture. In such genre, it is neat that he has no abandoned the electronic processing, and there is that element too. Often with improvised music, there is some sort of "purity" idea and almost amusing how little electronic effects are used for acoustic art music. Often focusing on purity of original sound. Agencement / Hideaki Shimada seems very fresh cross-over in that!
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Bloated Slutbag

#7
Agencement (and all things Shimada) is one of those perennial faves, like Keiji Haino or John Wall, that I'll get stuck into good and hard for a solid interval—I'm in the middle of one such right now—and then leave alone for pretty much the rest of the year. It's good stuff to get stuck into, and unlike Haino the releases are so sporadic that it is possible to pull out pretty much everything and go through it all in a couple sittings. Give it a week or so and I'll have gone through it all, several times over. It is the details that really hone the attentions and invite the getting-in-of-the-stuck, and here (in the details, in their precision orientation, not to mention the not-quite-academic hemorrhaging of the sound palette) I can say there would be affinities with the John Walls of the world.

But what also comes through, every time, is how singular the very first encounters had registered via, just as FreakAnimalFinland says, some of the earlier noise(ish) comps, specifically Sonic Exhibition 2, Come Again, Come Again II, Noise & Junk Omnibus, Land of the Rising Noise, probably in that order. I would in fact still hold aloft the Land of the Rising Noise track as the pinnacle in the Agencement-n-adjacent oeuvre. (OT. LotRN. A comp absolutely worth getting for the Haino track, which sounds like an outtake from Nijiumu PSF-7, and the Hijokaidan track, which ranks among their most vicious). Violin may be the principal tool but the meticulous reel to reel tape montage-ry scans in these holes as swarms of meticulously crafted glass-beaded insects forced through tightly constricted chromium apertures, subject to supreme heat and pressure, straining scritching squelching but never cracking. As FreakAnimalFinland notes, the willingness to allow the electronics-cum-tape to spool its way among the cracks can do wonders for those of certain auricular affiliations, the Spectralists notwithstanding. As far as the above comp tracks, auricularly speaking not, overall, so very far off the tape-processed side of Viosphere, but at a sufficient, and sufficiently singular, remove. That there is so little in this vein (the Come Again and Come Again II tracks are identical!) just belabors the breath at the possibility that more might somewhere be prized.

A brevity's more can in fact be prized in the Art-Into-Life reissue of Viosphere, via bonus-opener "Previosphere", which could be from the same sessions that produced the Noise & Junk Omnibus track. As I write this I am somewhat hopefully encouraged to note that the N&JO track is the most recent (2021) to drop on Shimada's bandcamp, so at least to suggest that interest in drilling down into similar veins might yet persist. And while some of the latest work under the Shimada name is not quite there, such as the October Variations FreakAnimalFinland linked, above, or the  chitinous15b also dropped on bandcamp (2019), there are some quite excellent live recordings on Shimada's youtube channel, and other youtube channels, a pretty solid (2008) collab with Kuwayama Kiyoharua (aka Lethe) & Kiyoshi Mizutani, and a collab with Evan Parker and Roger Turner that I have on order and for which comment will have to wait.

Except that it behooves me to mention Shimada's involvement in a 4-way with Mikawa, Nobuo Yamada (aka Artbreakhotel), and Katsuyoshi Kou, which easily ranks among the harshest damn things any of them (Mikawa included!) have ever been involved with.
Someone weaker than you should beat you and brag
And take you for a drag

FreakAnimalFinland

Soddy wrote so detailed description about Agencement on SI forum, that I felt tempted to listen some his stuff. On forum I linked some new digital-platform-exclusive new Agencement stuff, that was really good. Now listened Boxe Consonantique CD. All what this guy does is very unique sounding. Not HARSH noise, but in its weird electronically treated sound works, especially old stuff, was noisy to certain level. Not typical "improv" at all, in a way I tend to see it. Even if improvised sound would be at core of activity, it goes beyond in a way that I would be curious to hear from experts of that field, if there is in "that genre", something similar? That escapes the "live improvisation" and group session restrictions and processes material further? To noisier side, naturally.
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accidental

Stuff is pure gold. I was unfamiliar with this John Wall guy, i need to check him out. Without hijacking thread, any recommendations? I generally like to start from the beginning, is that a good idea?

Zeno Marx

Quote from: accidental on August 02, 2023, 04:27:19 PMStuff is pure gold. I was unfamiliar with this John Wall guy, i need to check him out. Without hijacking thread, any recommendations? I generally like to start from the beginning, is that a good idea?

I'd go Alterstill > Fractuur > Fear of Gravity > M - B >
"the overindulgent machines were their children"
I only buy vinyl, d00ds.

Bloated Slutbag

Quote from: Zeno Marx on August 02, 2023, 05:43:50 PM
Quote from: accidental on August 02, 2023, 04:27:19 PMStuff is pure gold. I was unfamiliar with this John Wall guy, i need to check him out. Without hijacking thread, any recommendations? I generally like to start from the beginning, is that a good idea?

I'd go Alterstill > Fractuur > Fear of Gravity > M - B >

Thanks for the hijack (and the follow-up)! For whatever perverse reason I never did get the Fear of Gravity, an oversight that is in the (immediate, no brainer) process of being corrected. Just goes to show, I woulda thought Zeno woulda gone with Alterstill > Fractuur > Constructions I-IV > M - B >

Every day around here an education.
Someone weaker than you should beat you and brag
And take you for a drag

accidental

Have too much stuff on my immediate want list, but couldn't help but become very interested in that Quasispecies Four. I'm not a sucker for 'oh that's so harsh'. But when a PhD of noise say it's "among the harshest damn things..." of a guy who played on Incaps first three Alchemy CDs, one can't help but become curious.

Now i'm a dropout who wouldn't know how to rate harshness with a guide in hand. Maybe those three CDs aint prime harsh? But they are where the gold is just like early Agencement.

FreakAnimalFinland

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