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Noah Creshevsky & If, Bwana Track 1. Noah Creshevsky – Mari Kimura Redux (2007) [5:46] Pogus has risen like Mount Kaskapakte out of the rocky terrain of contemporary art, over the years earning the reputation as one of the most unconventional, alive and poetic record labels of new music of our time, alongside Empreintes Digitales. Each new release has something new to say, sheds light over some obscurity in the cosmic mind, and this is the case also with their most recent issue; Noah Creshevsky’s and If, Bwana’s (Al Margolis’) Favorite Encores. I went to my archives, which I haven’t had the time to keep in perfect order for a few years of active living(!), and located my copy of Noah Creshevsky’s earlier CD Hyperrealism (mutable 17516-2) (2003). I listened through it once more to get in listening order for the new Favorite Encores CD from Pogus, which is a joint venture; a cosmic swirl of sounding intent, a travelogue logging Noah Creshevsky’s and Al Margolis’ journeys into quantum space, out of which anything can rise as space-time events, and does! Let me quote directly from Creshevsky’s own liner notes of the earlier release on mutable, to explain his methods: “Hyperrealism is an electroacoustic musical language constructed from sounds that are found in our shared environment […], handled in ways that are somehow exaggerated or excessive […]. Hyperreal music exists in two basic genres. The first uses the sounds of traditional instruments that are pushed beyond the capacities of human performers, in order to create superperformers – hypothetical virtuosos who transcend the limitations of individual performance capabilities. […] In some ways, Creshevsky’s talk of hyperrealism reminds me of Stockhausen’s term trans-realism, by which he meant those ‘impossible’ instances in his music, for example in his sound scenes, where sound events follow each other in all unlikeliness, or a sound moves across the room at a speed that the origin of that sound in the ‘real’ world couldn’t have done: trans-realism.
Noah Creshevsky (1945) is Professor Emeritus at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York. He has studied with Nadia Boulanger in Paris and with Luciano Berio at the Juilliard School of Music in New York City. Al Margolis, who uses his musical pseudonym If, Bwana, is the head of the Pogus label. It is his spirit, shining with curiosity and stubbornness and original artistry that make CDs such as this one possible. He also handles other labels of interest, like mutable music and Deep Listening. He is a touring electroacoustic musician, as well as a typical studio composer, splicing all kinds of things together, while also working with other musicians, both directly and indirectly. The atmospheres he creates cannot be allotted some set genre, but they sure as hell open up worlds and take us across the illusionary voids of time and space, to a here and a now where everything is possible. I don’t know who came up with the idea to pair Margolis and Creshevsky on this CD, but it works. Seen as a whole, the CD has expeditious hoquetus flair about it, which is rare, and in which the two artists shed light on each other, the one dancing his wild ancestors’ dances against the fire of the other’s temperament. Track 1. Noah Creshevsky – Mari Kimura Redux (2007) [5:46] One of my first associations on hearing this first track is Vermont and Montreal violinist Malcolm Goldstein under the influence of speed substances… In reality this is violinist Mari Kimura being sampled and shoved through the Creshevsky alteration contraption… which lays her fiddle shreds down in a surprisingly seamless mosaic of sound, that pleases your ear more than stirs your mind. Even though various, very different sounds are pasted together, there is nothing that hurts; no sharp cracks or violent transitions. This is true for all Noah Creshevsky’s works on the CD. Her is a master of this sampling and puzzle laying, done with a sort of magic that avoids the cracking and crevassing that would be the dubious result for most of us, if we tried Creshevsky’s studio art. In Mari Kimura Redux you initially hear these dry, wooden sounds of the bow pressed hard against the strings – or rather one string – of the violin, and moved just a fraction. Soon the violin talks in spurs of cartoonisms, imperceptibly sliding over into a world of impossibilities, the notes played at such a break-neck speed as can only be achieved in the panickiest of fears, and even then only in the farthest corner of mortal dread. Without even as much as mentioning, Creshevsky reaches out and brings Mari Kimura back into the world we know, in which she plays a little melody, Eastern-Europe-sounding, which, however, is spiced up and dusted with imaginary top-speed little whirlwinds of fiddling unrealities. Beautiful! Track 2. If, Bwana – Xyloxings (2007) [10:52] After Creshevsky’s gnat and mosquito dance through the last light of a Northern summer’s night, Al Margolis opens up a more mystical view, as you find yourself sitting on the steps of a temple in an Eastern cloudscape, in a flowing sonic mirage of a gamelan orchestra – lovingly veiled in fingertip electronics - in the back of your mind, or hidden somewhere in the amnesia of a dream, so soft it nurses every wound. It’s slow and full of vibrant overtones; purple and white, the clouds seen from a summit, below you, at the interface of spirit and matter, where everything is born: where time and space seeps out to make the scenery of this world almost possible. This is a masterwork, glaring at dawn in the East, moving across the terrain of your dream in the middle of the night in your Western bed. I bow! Track 3. Noah Creshevsky – Shadow of a Doubt (1999 – 2000) [15:06] The second Noah Creshevsky entry brings you stumbling into a world of tumbling shreds of sonic mirrors, reflecting various, ever-changing moments from the classical concert world, measures of violin and piano concertos and symphonies and lightly electroacoustically treated lieder, stages with orchestras flipping past in your Western Culture like dream world cut-ups of your cultural ancestry, which you’ve either abandoned and left for newer horizons, or which you might still love, like an old, comfortable leather arm-chair in your Somerset home… but it’s just that this romantic concert culture with all its associations to certain clothes and perfumes and politics and wars dances by here in a ghostly guise, in loose moments that last only a couple of seconds each, as if you saw the dead in a hopscotch dance in a graveyard as you walk by a foggy night in Crewkerne… and that little giggle in there brings red satin and the half promise of sexual encounters up the stairs… all in a past dream world… The wizardry on the part of the composer lies in his ability to connect these minute falling shreds of an entire Western musical culture into a flowing, flawless stream that you, after a while, even accept as a musical work unto itself. That is magic! The initial havoc of plunderphonics orders itself into a non-order that moves gracefully through music history, and though it gets you nervous, it is beautiful and soaring, in spite of the ill prerequisites! The longer pianistic pearl beads that Creshevsky lets curl and coil through the disorder like lianas in the jungle help bind events together. Track 4. If, Bwana – Scraping Scrafide (2006) [10:37] Al Margolis lets thin, rough sounds spin their candyfloss along a rail that disappears into an abandoned industrial lot in the Appalachians, in a linear motion that defies any frame of sonic experience that I have. Different color floss is spun in the different stereo channels, while, deep inside the moment, a piano – or several pianos (or even a harp!) – puncture the flossy duration with little blue bouncing Glenn Gould balls of rubber. Track 5. Noah Creshevsky – Intrada (2007) [3:45] This is the shortest piece on here, but perhaps the funniest, and well out of the vicinity of what I’ve heard before! We have these string parts ordered in a nice, 12-tonish sequence, orderly, but moving around a bit in the sound space. Chris Mann’s voice comes in short, fast, guttural, speech-imitating spurs, also shifting position. This is like a moment on the cement steps of a pavilion in an on old apple orchard where time has stopped and only an occasional sparrow steps on the grass, talking to itself outside of time. This piece is that sparrow moment outside of time. Brilliant! Track 6. If, Bwana – Cicada #4. Version Barnard (2006) [10:06] Cicada #4, the Barnard version, is an uncanny discipline of spurting wordlessnesses across a slow swell of electronic fondling, fingers stroking down your back as Lisa Barnard takes up residence in your hair and speed-reads aloud from the top of your forehead out of the passing moment. Margolis has arranged the Barnardisms into here and there functions, several Barnards choking and panning at the same “time”, as a kitty at times, horny and clawing through the layers of semi-transparent candy bands of frequencies. Margolis works with Lisa Barnard’s vocal samples much the way Noah Creshevsky handles his instrument samples, wringing them slightly out of whack, into realms not accessible without deep meditation or peyote (into the feverish non-verbality of the post-political glare of Ulrike Meinhof, as she took on the whole German society) – but if you start at the quantum space level in the dark everness of pure potential, the music of Al Margolis becomes a space-time event – and we’re lucky to gain this access! Track 7. Noah Creshevsky – Favorite Encores (2001) [6:45] Noah Creshevsky concludes this amazing Pogus CD with yet another example of his hyperrealism. Again – like in track 1 – he uses violinistic samples, but doesn’t mention whom it is that he brings over the hill here. He, nonetheless, throws together a flurry of fast bowings and a smidgen pizzicato feel too, into a lustful, yet absentminded fury that surely will fascinate any listener with some experience of both romantic and semi-modern violin literature. To sum this CD up, nothing but total surrender is possible. I’ve listened with my full attention throughout, and I’ve enjoyed every second. This is brilliant sound art.
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