küchen - rowe - wright

Martin Küchen   alto saxophone
Keith Rowe   electronics
Seymour Wright   alto saxophone

total time:  35:40
recorded in Midhopestones, near Sheffield, June 2009

Reviews

“Another Timbre's new series of discs on the guitar in improvised music gives us two alto saxophonists at the table of the veteran guitarist Keith Rowe. Seymour Wright has previously played with – amongst others - Eddie Prevost, so we are roughly in AMM-territory. And it suits Martin Küchen excellently, one of the very few Swedish saxophonists who works without dramatic gestures, focusing on small sounds and a deconstructive music. The dryness of his playing has been its real coherence and strength (and this is meant as praise).

Keith Rowe's guitar is on a table surrounded by radio equipment and various other electronic devices. It is a sound body, a bringer of unexpected sounds, especially those which disrupt ordinary rhythms and expectations. Rowe's music is not open in the usual sense. He is absorbed in his own soundworld, exploring and following through different pathways. This can clearly be heard here: as if in a trance he offers up a few notes that actually sound like a guitar, then listens, and then tries again, this time involving a radio tuned to whatever programme is on so that a voice draws in and drifts through the electronic sounds. So the saxophonists can appear like intruders, reworking the long tones of their instruments into short pops and scratches so that it's hard to tell whether the sounds I am hearing are coming from reeds or the body of the guitar.

Rowe's presence is good for the saxophonists; they can allow themselves to become infused within his sound world. They drop inside the body of their instruments to marvel at its hollow, lonely sound. Together they construct a sound tunnel within which Rowe can play out his fragmented dadaistic games. And they take liberties, detonating and challenging Rowe's self-imposed limits. A continual process in which melancholy breaths form little scraps of melody until a flow is suggested, teasing, irritating and touching but never trapped by Rowe's electronics, moving around as if by coincidence. It is a heady mixture: an utterly abstract music which is broken up and yet still flows over me as a listener in a safe and cohesive way.

But I can also hear Rowe's absolutist approach to music. No compromise, no bargain, no ingratiation. A music that applies the same harshness and severity both to the outside world and to its constant flow of commercial music. Rowe is a musician who is equally critical from an ideological and a moral perspective. The music must never be compromised; it is broken, fragmented and pulled around constantly, sometimes bouncing out into the outside world.

The two saxophonists broaden his soundworld, subjecting it to the same process of critical interruption to which his streams of sound often subject the outside world. It's a process of give and take, occurring in slow motion, needing time to unfold. And this process of three musicians carefully negotiating with each other produces one of Rowe's most absorbing discs, and a great moment for Martin Küchen. It's an album where friction and heat are the key words.”                                                                     
Thomas Millroth, Sound of Music

“Keith Rowe  has a long and distinguished career as an improvising guitarist, dating back to the mid 60's and before. But over recent years he has steadily reduced the role of the actual guitar and correspondingly increased the role of electronics to the point where they are now dominant. At the time this recording was made, the only vestigial trace of a guitar in Rowe's set up was a finger trainer, a device used by classical guitarists to train their fingers. It was joined by various pedals, contact mikes, shortwave radio, face fans and assorted paraphernalia; hence Rowe is credited with "electronics" rather than "guitar."

Rowe is joined by alto saxophonists Seymour Wright and Martin Küchen on the album's one 35-minute piece. Given Rowe's belief that the room is an important component of any performance, it is important to note that this recording was made at the church of St. James the Lesser in Midhopestones near Sheffield in June 2009, not live at the concerts the trio played that month in London and Leeds. Rowe has said that in concert there is a sense in which the audience actually produces the music, so that raises the question of who produces it when three musicians are alone in a large resonant space such as a church.

The three begin tentatively, with lots of silence punctuating their occasional brief quiet sounds. If anything, they sound very small in the space, not knowing whether to try and fill it, or how. Gradually, momentum gathers as the sounds become less sporadic and the players begin to respond to each other. Plenty of Rowe's trademark sounds appear, most noticeably his hand-held fan and shortwave radio. The responses from Küchen and Wright are subdued, with their emphasis less on blowing than on electronics and tinkering sounds. In this respect, they are drawn into Rowe's orbit and his approach to making sound. Uncharacteristically, despite that finger trainer, there is a greater role for guitar sounds in Rowe's playing than of late, with the occasional strummed chord appearing. As the piece proceeds, the two saxophonists become more outgoing, not playing "solos" but progressions of notes that act as backdrop and accompaniment to Rowe and each other.

Depending on the volume at which it is played, this can actually feel like two different albums. At normal playback volume, the majority of the sounds are compatible with the kinds of ambient sounds found in daily life and so they easily merge in or are camouflaged; occasionally a more prominent sound is clearer, leading to reactions such as: "Is there something wrong with the fridge?" or "What are those neighbors up to?" At higher volume, the album's sounds emerge clearly from the background and so they can be better heard in their own right and the players' interactions can be appreciated fully.”    John Eyles, All About Jazz

“Automatically it is Borbetomagus who come to mind when you hear the unusual combination of saxophone – guitar – saxophone.  These three instruments are equally maltreated by the three improvisers here, though their techniques are quite different, with a full-frontal onslaught being  replaced by strategies that are as oblique as subtle.   

Inevitably you draw connections between the three musicians and the culinary image on the cover:  a piece of roast beef, a spoonful of mashed potato and a watercress leaf.  But who then is the carnivore?  And who plays like a potato?  None of these questions is answered in the almost non-existent liner notes:  the title 'additional notes' stands above an empty double-page in the cd booklet, speaking volumes about the desire to preserve the mysteries of this holy trinity.   You are left to try to work out for yourself who is who and who does what in this complex entanglement of sounds in which multiple levels of interferences are both generated and scrambled.  The veteran of electroacoustic improvisation, Keith Rowe (guitar) is surrounded by two alto saxophonists of the rising generation:  Martin Küchen, a member of the Swedish free music scene for some ten years, and Seymour Wright, with whom he has worked here or there, and who is releasing his third album on Another Timbre.

It is somewhat misleading to define the identity of the instruments used as they are eviscerated according to surgical techniques that require both the right tools and the most precise instructions.  And this is true not just for Rowe (which you'd expect), but also the others, who employ electric tools, sharp objects, and – most importantly – radios, which play a crucial role here.  The radio waves are evidently British, to judge by the snatches of voices heard amidst the white noise, the fragments of baroque music, and even the sensual voice of Sade (the pop singer, not the Marquis) which briefly occurs at 25:47.  These chance fragments count as focal points amidst the unstable rustlings, the striking of metals, little jackhammers and other dangerous-sounding noises which can be tamed within a second.   

The constant overlaying of shifting materials, the crossings of sounds moving in different (though never opposing) directions, and the building of small temporary moments of climax create a strange unity which is deconstructed as soon as  you try to examine it.    As if under the effect of a spell, a captivating musical discourse emerges from from the chaos.”      
Jean-Claude Gevrey, scala tympani