Recommendation require comments. I begin with some comments on three albums that's on my list above. The first being some spontaneous lines (Corner), the next is actually a review I did in 2004 (Wolfman CD by Ashley).
Philip Corner
Gong+ CD
Metal Meditations LP
Gong! is an extraordinarily effective and simple piece. It uses instruments of rich resonances, long resounding and more than a single pitch. This recorded version has a gong and the strings inside of a piano. The gong is struck with different intervals producing a deep sound of long duration. Half into the piece the strings are joined in - while getting strucked, producing a reverbrating mass of clusters. Against the end the piano strings are hit alone. This is modified balinese court music if reducing the instrumentation to the deep percussive elements of gongs (and equal timbral inst.). Or atleast to me as far as my musical references goes.
Corner has produced a series of works called Metal Meditations. Gong! is linked to these pieces, however has its own name and history. Metal Meditations are the result of experience and experiment with resonant metal objects (musical or not). There's a score that defines the actions and results. However they seem very open and the results are endless. Some of these works has a listening centre – a metaltube with microphone to be fit in – constructed by Bill Fontana. It's pretty fascinating listening to these pieces. There's a definite attack and a series of reverbrations. At times it's got an arpeggio structure – very mental. The LP has four different takes on the piece, all sounding very different. The various metallic objects are struck and – to my ears – to some degree investigated throughout the recordings. We find our selves somewhere between Cage and Young, between Atlas Eclipticalis and Arabic Numeral. Less control oriented than those chaps.
Robert Ashley
The Wolfman CD
Alga Marghen has been digging deep into the experimental music field recently, releasing hitherto unavailable or long-deleted recordings by Philip Corner, Anton Bruhin, Juan Hidalgo, Maurizio Bianchi, David Behrman and Robert Ashley, of which The Wolfman is the second outing (following String Quartet, which contained the compositions "String Quartet Describing the Motions of Large Real Bodies" and "How Can I Tell the Difference"). The opener, "The Fox", Ashley's first electronic music work dating from 1957, consists of a text, a "crime pays" ditty popularised by Burl Ives, but rewritten here by Ashley to be more "noir", and a pre-recorded tape. Ashley recorded piano clusters, reversed the tape and did the same in the opposite direction, mixing both versions together and cutting off the attacks to match the structure of the text (and determine how it was to be performed).
The highlight of the album is "The Wolfman", composed in 1964, for tape, voice and feedback. The tape used can either be the six-minute "The Wolfman Tape" (1964) or, as is the case here, the eighteen-minute "The 4th of July" (1960), in which a recording of a party in Ashley's neighbours backyard - the composer was experimenting with a parabolic microphone - blasts into a layer of tape loops and tape-head feedback. The vocalist intones soft vocal sounds (not screams, as Ashley is at pains to point out), each phrase consuming one full breath, which produce a steady layer of acoustic, eruptive distortion. When the singer pauses to breathe the listener is sucked into grinding feedback, as fragments of screeching, distorted sound rush through space, breaking new ground in direct contact with the nervous system. The Japanese noise scene has been doing the same kind of thing since the early 1990s - but Ashley beat them to it by a quarter of a century.
"The Wolfman Tape" appears here as a separate piece (free jazz aficionados might recognise it as the last track on Bob James' ESP album Explosions), and its manipulated found sounds, including a hilarious beer commercial, provide much needed light relief between the harsh, uncompromising "Wolfman" and the quiet, sustained 43 minutes of "The Bottleman". Composed in 1960 as music for a George Manupelli film of the same title about a bottle-collecting vagrant wandering through a desolate landscape (which I'd like to see), Ashley contact-miked a surface six feet away from an open-circuit humming loudspeaker whose pitch is raised through tape manipulations and mixed with vocal and other found sounds and played back at various tape speeds. It's an unobtrusive excursion where you experience the world as the Bottleman hears it - no communication, just wandering around in circles. Years ahead of its time, its release here is to be welcomed.
