Arcane Candy

Warning: If you push “Play” on a track by Sanhedrin, you may have to pop a couple of Excedrin! Another power trio boasting Yoshida Tatsuya and Nasuno Mitsuru of the Ruins with that ashen-haired electric noise elf, Keiji Haino, Sanhedrin offers up another very necessary eight-track dose of wild and wooly intensity. We’re talking scalding, distorted, mangled electric guitar perfectly meshed with manic bass and drum workouts that are as taut as a Private’s bed sheet. This stuff could easily send Jane Fonda sulking all the way back to Golden Ponda with her fingers in her ears. What it all amounts to is improv rock from Hell, Heaven and Purgatory combined. And it comes sheathed in an attractive three-panel foldout cardboard cover with a half-circle of animals, electric appliances and musical instruments floating in a sea of black. Now, that’s just what the doctor ordered!

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Another Intensity? Wait! What? Is this CD a follow-up to redneck rocker Ted Nugent’s Intensities In 10 Cities album from way back in 1981? Ah, well, um…..definitely not! In fact, you could not find an artist or album more diametrically opposed. Philip Blackburn is a British-born, St. Paul, Minnesota-based composer who has been active since the 1980s, when he earned degrees at the Universities of Cambridge and Iowa. Best known as the director of Innova Recordings since 1996, for whom he most notably rescued Harry Partch’s long lost personal archives and released them as the Enclosure Series, Philip left Innova in 2020 to run the Neuma record label. In addition to producing over 650 albums for other composers, Philip is also an environmental sound artist, releasing several solo CDs over the past two decades, the latest being the aforementioned Another Intensity.

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New Releases

• Sir Richard Bishop – Hillbilly Ragas LP (Drag City)
• Les Rallizes Denudes – Citta’ ’93 3-LP and ’67-’69 Studio Et Live LP (Temporal Drift)
• Angus MacLise – Tapes 3-CD box set (Art Into Life)
• Kali Malone + Drew McDowall – Magnetism LP (Ideologic Organ)
• Sun City Girls – Extra-Sensory Defection / Graverobbing in the Future 2-LP (Three-Lobed)
• Sun City Girls – Famous Asthma / Tibetan Jazz 666 2-LP (Three-Lobed)
• Various Artists – The Alien Territory Archives: A Collection Of Radical, Experimental, & Irrelevant Music From 1970s San Diego 4-CD box set (Nyahh)
• Various Artists – Tsapiky! Modern Music From Southwest Madagascar LP (Sublime Frequencies)

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The Force For Good is a short 28-minute EP containing two pieces performed by the chamber ensemble Hypercube. Brandishing saxophone, guitar, piano, and percussion, the group has commissioned and premiered over 100 new works since its formation in 2014. The 10-minute “Hout” (1991) by the Dutch composer Louis Andriessen (1939–2021) sounds quirky, hyper and sometimes even a lil’ spooky, what with its frantic start-stop-start rhythm that implies a team of methed-up aunts rushing to build an ant farm in Antarctica. “The piece embodies a unique balance of rigorous structure and spontaneous energy, evoking influences from jazz, Bach Inventions, Stravinsky, and Minimalism.”

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Virtuoso percussionist Christopher Clarino’s Parlando is an uncompromising work of contemporary percussion, featuring compositions by Igor Santos, Anthony Donofrio, Barbara Monk Feldman, Thomas DeLio, and Michael Pisaro-Liu. This album immediately signals its academic and experimental intentions by redefining the boundaries of conventional listening. The opening title track by Igor Santos sets a highly cerebral tone, utilizing vibes and synth to create a microtonal “plink-plonk” sound organized via a staggered, non-linear rhythm that demands the kind of close attention that few outside the academy can muster. Clarino, as the sole performer, navigates this challenging repertoire with precision, establishing an aesthetic rooted in both the meticulous placement of sound and the profound use of negative space. This is music that rewards an engaged, patient ear, pushing far beyond conventional melody and beat toward the abstract.

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Composer, improviser, and music technologist Thomas Ciufo used the stillness and disruption of the COVID-19 outbreak to return to his solo studio practice, creating the deeply contemplative work, The Rising Moon. Rooted in the electro-acoustic and ambient traditions, the album is a colossal sonic structure built from meticulous processing: Ciufo heavily layered recordings of acoustic instruments and voices, stacking them up into a 700-layer burrito of sound. This dense foundation was crafted using a combination of analog gear, rebuilt vintage tape machines, and a modern digital workstation. The blend of nostalgic, unpredictable analog texture and digital precision results in an Andromeda-esque ambience—a vast, powerful soundscape that invites listeners into a cathartic yet cerebral space. The philosophy underpinning the music, which Ciufo studied under his late mentor Pauline Oliveros, centers on deep listening and embracing the paradox of impermanence, finding clarity even within chaos.

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After decades spent translating the intent of others as an international orchestral conductor, pipe organist, and jazz pianist, Jeannine Wagar steps forward as a composer with her debut album, Into the Night. Released in her seventh decade, this is not a retirement project but a radical, late-career exploration into her own “dream world,” utilizing sampled acoustic instruments, chorus, and electronics to craft an extremely smooth and relaxing ambient category all its own. The album serves as a fascinating statement on creativity and freedom, showing an artist unbound by the practical logistics of a live orchestra, instead shaping her music with the precise hand and emotional depth only an experienced conductor could achieve. The result is a sound that moves gracefully between classical intimacy and spherical drift, proving that decades of live experience can meet the limitless possibilities of digital composition to deliver something truly fresh.

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A complete collection of all 35 issues of Arthur Magazine is now available for your perusal or download in PDF form. The PDFs include every page of every issue! It’s all free, but why not PayPal a few bucks to help with labor and hosting?

The Rova Saxophone Quartet, or Rova for short, has been operating in the realms of post-free jazz and new music since 1977. One of the more recent releases in their rather large catalog is a CD called Resistance, belched forth in 2003 by Canadian improv label Victo. It features three long tracks and nearly an hour’s worth of purely acoustic music played with, as you may have guessed by the group’s name, four saxophones, a pretty good amount of reverb and nothing else. The title track, by Rova, dives headfirst into a lively crossroads jamboree where jazz and avant-garde classical meet, with its quasi-lyrical lines punctuated by squeaks and squawks; shrill, sustained clouds and raspy drones. The second track, “The Drift” by Larry Ochs, is considerably more jaunty and playful, while the album’s closer, “The M’ad-Din” by Wadada Leo Smith, is imbued with a somewhat more thorny and homely hue. Clearly and cleanly recorded with plenty of nuance and detail, this partly composed, partly improvised music breaks the rules of both forms in a most invigorating way.

Label: Victo Catalog Number: VICTO CD 086 Format: CD Packaging: Jewel case Tracks: 3 Country: Canada Released: 2002 More: Discogs

Text ©2009 Arcane Candy

Released in 2002 by Canadian improv label Victo, L’Oasis pushes nearly an hour’s worth of improvised guitar music out of your speakers from two longtime practitioners of the form, American Eugene Chadbourne on acoustic guitar, banjo and vocals, and Canadian René Lussier on acoustic and electric guitar. Culled from two separate live performances, one in October 1998 at Instants Chavirés in Paris and the other in May 2002 at the Festival International de Musique Actuelle in Victoriaville, Canada, the material alternates rather starkly between traditional song-based picking and total free form freak outs–sometimes even offering a combination of both. But, despite housing two seemingly opposing musical poles, this disc has a consistent flow and feel, thanks to the similar recordings and a smooth editing job.

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