Sunday 30 October 2011

reviewing @ london_resonance [part 4]

words _ gian paolo galasi

New stuff released by re:konstruKt from Istanbul. Connexions Gallery was founded in 1990 and held by Alice Kwiatkowski. Its purpose is to promote art encompassing media and style. Here in Easton, Pennsylvania, Gary Joseph Hassay recorded with different partners every time the three volumes of the "Live at the Connexions Galley" series. 

Actively performing since 1979, influenced by Hungarian gipsy violin music, R&B/soul, Albert Ayler, Jimi Hendrix, Peter Broetzmann and Evan Parker, and involved in Tibetan throat singing (as clearly audible at the beginning of this record), altoist Gary Hassay offers in this VOL. 3 a duo performance with drummer Tatsuya Nakatani while in the previous volumes people like reedist Biaise Shiwula and pianist Ellen Christi were featured. About 33 minutes of meditative, spacey music, in which Nakatani self-built percussions - drumset, bowed gongs, cymbals, singing bowls, metal objects, bells - offer something more than a meditative background for the altoist. The best quality of the interplay is that kind of independence through fluency that usually is the sign of extreme dexterity.


re:056 | Gary Hassay / Tatsuya Nakatani - Excerpt from Sonkei


I was discussing recently with Umut Çağlar via email about the recent konstruKt quartet release featuring Evan Parker, probably the only release of the label not  totally focused - as far as how much I was able to pick up from the catalogue - and, by Umut own admission, due the to lack of familiarity with London-based saxophone player technical command. 

Not a false step, since the first part of the record features a couple of beautiful soprano solos, while only in the second part of the group improvisation the quartet seems finally to find its own way - but improvisation is like that, the risky way. I wonder if the lack was in the band's skills or, more probably, in relating with such an important personality - but even self reliability is something that can be developed with time, while I'm listening to "Tactic", Umut Çağlar duo recording with Gunnar Lettow, originally member of the avant-rock band Nice Noise. A bass prepared with spears, clips, brushes, and a guitarist influenced by djing, computer music and improvisation give shape to 6 different tracks in which 'constructed parts', as Caglar would put it, are assembled in a coherent and varied musical speech.


re:055 | Gunnar Lettow / Umut Çağlar - D4


Julian Bonequi is a Mexican digital artist and real time musician (mostly relying on noise and improvisation). Curator of Audition Record, he has performed with the Berlin and the London Improvisers Orchestra, William Parker, Keith Tippett, Eddie Prévost, Islak Kopek, while as a young musician trained himself in different psychedelic band, rock in opposition and chamber music ensembles. 

"Sangre Azteca" is a solo record with Bonequi on drums and voice dedicated to the ancient poem 'Nikitoa' ('I wonder') by NezahualcÛyotl. An attempt to put 'emotional instability, semantic landscapes and cathartic explosions and even alienated as an act of concentration' as the main focus of his music, it has in some tracks as 'Kamayoukaui/Chokilitsatsi' a feeling similar to Antonin Artaud broadcast 'Pour en finir avec le jugement de dieu', also composed only by voice and percussions.

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