The disc in question is Teem, the recent duo disc by Olivia Block and Kyle Bruckmann on the either/OAR off shoot of the excellent and/OAR label. I like the word Teem, its one of those that just sounds nice when you say it… Strange that this disc should appear at almost the same time as Teeming, a different CD that I reviewed here. Teem is also Meet spelt backwards, which seems a fitting title for a disc of this type.

Before describing the music, some thoughts about how it was made. It appears that the four pieces here were put together over a period of five years, beginning back in 2003, soon after Bruckmann had contributed to Block’s Pure Gaze album. The two musicians live on opposite sides of the USA now, so with the exception of a recording session together in 2008 that produced material for two of the tracks, the majority of the music here was put together gradually by exchange of sound files. Both musicians are credited with mixing and editing, plus a long list of other instruments and processes, with both contributing field recordings, Block including piano and reed organ, and Bruckmann working with oboe, English horn, accordion and suona (whatever one of those might be). The truth is then, that given the mix of instrumentation and the method of production, its impossible to tell who is responsible for what, which adds a kind of mysterious quality to the music.

When I last wrote about the music of Seth Nehil, he kindly left a comment beautifully describing his working methods as “the back and forth between intention and chaos”. Seth wrote this as I had mentioned how fully formed his music sounded on his excellent Flock and Tumble album- for me, the music there had real character. Somehow, despite me being completely unable to find any description of the music to set it apart from many other electroacoustic compositions, it had felt like a thoroughly well defined and original set of recordings. This lead me to assume it had been the result of careful planning towards a specific end, but Seth’s words pointed out that this was not really the case.

Well the follow up to Flock and Tumble, a new release on the Sonoris label named Furl sounds just as original and just as individual to me, and again sounds like it has been planned carefully. Doubtless this is not the case again, but its how it sounds to me. Furl is just as infuriatingly hard to describe as F&T was as well. There are certainly a number of reference points in here, early tape music, a lot of mid-eighties musique concrete, but once again I struggle to think of anyone making music that sounds quite like this right now. Certainly Nehil takes an assortment of small sounds, percussive samples, bells, a piano, all kinds of human voices and who knows what else and collages it all together on a computer, but somehow the end result doesn’t like we might expect it to.

One of the most formative people in my creative life was Roy East, or Uncle Roy as he was known to me twenty-two years ago my sixth form art teacher. I’m not sure whether Roy would still be with us today or not, though I certainly hope he is. He was touching retirement age when he taught me, and one of my biggest regrets in life has always been losing touch with him when I left the school. One particular thing sticks in my mind from my time under his tuition. Often our art classes would end, but myself and one or two others would stay behind after school, or during lunch breaks and just carry on with whatever we had been doing. Roy always gave the impression that he hated teaching kids to draw and paint, but put a pencil or brush in his own hand and he was as happy as a man could be. Sometimes during these out of hours sessions he would sit down before a still life set-up we might have been working on and starting with a blank canvas draw on his own.

I used to love watching him. Whenever I did so, he would always begin by warning me to pay no attention to how he worked; “don’t copy me, I didn’t pay attention when I was at school”. He would then begin by studying whatever was in front of him for ages, and then suddenly, swiftly, he would make a single mark, with a flourish in exactly the right place. There would be another lengthy pause for concentration, before another mark would be added, away from the first mark. This would continue for a while, as Roy would plot out key points in the drawing/painting, each carefully chosen for its importance. In my mind I would try and make the same connections that Roy was making in his head between these marks. I learnt most of what I now value greatly about the use of negative space in art from Roy East, and much of this came from trying to follow the processes he worked with. Gradually the spaces would be filled, and the speed at which he worked would continually quicken, until, given that Roy was infatuated with the work of Alberto Giacometti, he would be grinding whatever medium he was using into the page at a rapid pace. Strangely, I never much liked the latter stages of this process. Stylistically my preferences in this kind of art were some way away from Roy’s, but the process of getting there, the movement from that first confident mark, through a period of intense study and small structural gestures into the meat piled onto the bones always enthralled me. These days I rarely sit down and draw something in front of me. I just don’t seem to have the time. If and when I do though, I know that my approach will remain very similar.

So as promised I wanted to do a bit of a first for these pages tonight and review an album that has already been reviewed here. Last week for his guest post Simon Reynell wrote about Neptretrganost, a CDr jointly released by Zavod Sploh in conjunction with the L’innomable label by the Slovenian/Japanese, Double bass/percussion duo of Tomaz Grom and Seijiro Murayama. Grom was one half of the TILT group that released a disc on L’innomable a couple of years back, while Murayama currently seems to be appearing on a new CD every other week.

Simon’s review of the CD intrigued me in that it raised the age old questions about the importance of instrumental craftsmanship, but also because he compared the CD to Bestiaries, the recent Cathnor release by Patrick Farmer and Dom Lash, another all acoustic bass/percussion disc. He made the point that while technological advances have changed improvised music in recent years, and while these developments are crucial for the continued growth of the music, they aren’t always necessary. Acoustic instrumentation can still produce inventive, forward thinking music. At the risk of being accused of “I’ll scratch your back, you scratch mine” tactics I would suggest that the new batch of releases on Simon’s own label point us to this (seemingly obvious to me) conclusion.

Home again, home again, jiggedy jig. A big thank you is due to all of the guest posters here over the past week, some thoughtful writing that puts mine to shame. We had a great time in Wales, thoroughly relaxing once the five hour drive there was out of the way. I was able to wind down in a manner I don’t think I have achieved for several years, and most interestingly I almost avoided listening to “serious” music entirely. One evening, as it was raining out, we cooked and ate dinner with a disc of Beethoven quartets playing quietly in the background, and on Friday night I stumbled across BBC Four’s TV broadcast of Shostakovich’s Leningrad symphony and I watched the last two thirds of that, but otherwise, beyond the pop music we heard on the radio each morning I escaped music, certainly of the more experimental kind.

This was a weird feeling. I spent some time trying to remember when I last went this long without listening to music and I just can’t remember. There have been periods of a day or two when away with Julie, but for an entire week without music I think I have to go back to a week spent unexpectedly in hospital aged seventeen, when an exploded appendix saw me listening only to hospital radio for five days. It really has been that long.