This is a John Cage Event, Milano, Adi Design Museum, 09.30.2023

With the end of the summer one hopes for more live appointments and in a city like Milano there is plenty of occasions if you’re a classic or pop/trap music lover. There’s also an intriguing JazzMi Festival that features live performances of Ibrahim Maalouf – I got tickets for him so you’ll read a review as soon as I get there – and of unreachable, if you live outside the town and need to take a train ride late at night, concerts by the likes of a trio led by Hamid Drake, another trio with Andrew Cyrille and William Parker, plus a Halloween exhibition of the Sun Ra Arkestra at around 10.30 pm.

Obviously I will not attend such venues, and I’m really sad about that, but the God of music, if any, decided to leave me the opportunity to follow, for some saturday afternoons, a beautiful and intriguing marathon of contemporary music live performances titled “Back to New York: Downtown Music Sketches”. This way, this saturday I had the opportunity to attend to a performance by pianist Franco Venturini and dancer Giacomo De Luca, centered around three beautiful pieces by John Cage: The Seasons, Ophelia and In A Landscape.

We don’t need to introduce the multi-faceted figure of John Cage with more or less quick prefaces, also because here in my country the Milanese publishing company Shake Edizioni Underground is issuing all the writings by the Maestro – the second volume is just ready to be printed and it will be presented to the audience next Tuesday. If you’re curious about the piano performer, Franco Venturini, you can find an incisive bio at the following link. 

More interesting is the performance in itself, inspired by the longtime collaboration between Cage and Merce Cunningham, one of the most important dancers and coreographers of the last century. Between the creators of the postmodern dance, Cunningham was a long time friend of Cage, sharing his concerns about formal rules in the art world. Also contemporaneously both started studying the possibilities of chance and I-Ching in particular, events that led to pieces like Sixteen Dances for Soloist and Company of Three (1951) where the nine emotions (or rasas) of the Indian aesthetic were presented in an order determined by chance.

The performance we attended this afternoon started with recordings of Cunningham’s voice diffused through an old analogic tape recorder, positioned over a metal box in which a transparent plastic bag was containing the music sheet for the performance. The most interesting part of it, to tell the truth, were the ones where the two, pianist and dancer, were percussing or crawling the strings of the piano because the chance generating the sounds was cagean in all its effects.

If I have to find out a defect in the piano performance, I would find two. The first one: too much emotion and melancholic coat in part of the performance, the one where the piano arpeggioed a music that, more than Cage, was resembling the one by a sentimental composer. The second one: too much will and power in the overall performance, as if the composer was Beethoven and not Cage. Unluckily the pianist were dealing with music composed by a Zen composer, that means surprise for the listener, not deep emotion by the performer.

At a certain point I remember vividly I was bored by the arpeggios, but at a certain point I was shaked by some attack, and so I thought “mmmh ... dynamics, you know what to do, right?”, but even if Venturini knows his work better than Thom Yorke – The Smile is a futile project, badly orchestrated and cooked worse – for sure the effect was that of a Romantic piece of music, full of drama and sense of resistance to a fall, which is far from the feelings Cage wanted to transmit to the audience through music.

As far as the dancer, I can’t criticize it since I’m training as an actor since a couple of years and if it weren’t for my feet – I broke the left in the last months – I would have trained myself yet into the contemporary dance world not to become a dancer myself but to know better what to do with my own body onstage, so the only thing I can say is that I couldn’t find so much postmodernism in De Luca, whose attitude is overtly sentimental as the one by the pianist. The circles he was drawing in the air with his own body after playing with small compass over a blue book is an example of what I’m saying.

I can’t tell who influenced who, but the mix between the two performers is as far as results interesting enough if you want to see two artists interacting together with a common goal, but unsatisfying as far as an attempt to take Cage and Cunningham attitude back to us. I know it is a way long discussion in the world of classical music, the diatribe between conservatorship and will to innovate, but as far as myself I want to point out that first you have to undestand what you’re handling and only after that you can do something new if this is your path to glory.

Frankly, this afternoon I missed the part in which the performers were elaborating all the spurs coming from the music sheet, the possible old recordings of the pieces, the videos if any of Cunningham performing with Cage, in order to give us something more contemporary than the music and the dance of 70 years before; as far as it seems, they passed over all of it with no that much grace and gave to the audience an essay about their sensitivity, and what is wrong to me is that your sensitivity need always to grow and face with what you’re handling, instead of being like a tank.

 

 

Tinariwen – Amatssou (Wedge 2023)

Things are becoming weirder and weirder if you’re a music lover in the present times. I was looking for a copy of Tinariwen’s new album since when it was released earlier this year. I ordered my copy last April through a bookstore who also sells records in Milan, and at a certain point I came back since no message for the order was sent to my phone trough SMS as I was told it would have happened.

Once at the bookstore, I canceled the order since the guy there told me that the Italian distributor for Wedge was not sending to the physical shops the CD version of their albums, and I don’t own a stereo system through which listen to vynils. At a certain point, Tinariwen came to Milan, near where I’m living, for a live exhibition, so I hoped to grab a copy of their album in that occasion, but I had to let it go since that night I had a special lession for my theatre workshop: in one week we would have been onstage so I needed to rehearse more.

Finally today I was skimming through the shelves of that bookstore again coming from a cinema, and, before Tool, i found out a section for Tinariwen – and the CD was there! I suppose the distributor changed his own mind, or maybe simply the physical CDs came from California where the label is located and the distributor needed to finally honor his commitment. It doesn’t matter anymore: Tinariwen’s last CD, Amatssou, that means ‘Beyond the Fear’, is now spinning on my old PC where I’m writing this review and I’m happy about the purchase. 

The story of Tinariwen is more adventurous than the story of how I obtained my copy of their last album, as it happens to many intriguing forms of art. All started when a young Ibrahim Ab Alhabib, orphan and exile in Algeria started listening to rai and chaabi music, along with Touareg melodies and the blues. He tried to reproduce such styles with a self-built guitar, with which he performed in Touareg refugee camps from the 1980s on.

At the end of the 1990s Ab Alhabib and his acquired friends and fellow musicians Alhassane Ag Touhami and Inteyeden Ag Ableine met at the Festival Au Désert in Mali Justin Adams, a musician who at the time was part of Robert Plant, the ex Led Zeppelin singer, band. The two produced Tinariwen’s first album, The Radio Tisdas Sessions (Wedge, 2001), and in few years, also thanks to the diffusion of Mali musicians in the Western world – the likes of Toumani Diabaté, Ali Farka Touré and Rokia Traoré amongst the many others – they became one of the best new sensations from that musical environment.

Tinariwen, as it happened to the most famous guitarist Ali Farka Touré, is the kind of group who produces almost always the same kind of records without becoming manieristic or cloying. It is obviously a matter of accents – as an example this last album sees an important presence of violins to flank the notorious electric guitars – but this music always sounds fresh and thrilling to the listener, maybe also because of the experience of the musicians involved.

Anyway, from Amassakoul (World Village, 2004), their second album and the one I listened to the most in the past years, and this last Amatssou, the evolution is evident. The production by Daniel Lanois (U2, Depeche Mode, Bob Dylan among the many others) help sounds to be fresher and more vivid than in the past, and the many musicians and featured instruments involved – lute, pedal steel guitar, piano, banjo, violin – help the music to sound as renewed from its inside.

The album is divided in three parts by two interludes played by an African fiddle with only one string and this division helps the music to be more sharp and precise at the same time. Ken Alghalm, the opening track, is a three minutes ride that leads us in the middle of Tinariwen’s world. Tenere Den is the first track with the add of the violins, and as in many other occasions we hear the voice and the melody backing each other creating a nice and intriguing unison: when the voice leaves, the guitars and the violins are free to express themselves giving you an intense sense of freedom.

Obviously this is hypnotic music as the music produced by musicians coming from a desert can be. Not that much telluric as the music by the Master Musicians of Jajouka, but nonetheless psychedelic. Arajghiyine has as a base this nice interlocking between guitars and percussions, where melodies and rhythm mix together perfectly, whereas Tidjit with its almost limping strut represent at perfection the music of the band, thanks to a guitar sound that electrifies the air filling it with circular melodies.

Jayche Atarak is another immersion into the deepness of the desert’s vision, one of the most slowed down and relentless tracks of the entire album. Even the hand claps will give you that sense of needing to take a rhythm with your own body since the musical instruments aren’t enough. Imidiwan Mahitinam is a choral singing for the union of all Touareg people to give life to the revolution.

Ezlan is a song where at the beginning the violin creates a small wall of sound for the guitar to cling on it, and with moments of decline and expansion it procedes along the track creating an intense emotion into the listener. A guitar solo erupts from the sound mass creating a link between the Touareg music and the most classic American blues. Anemouhagh is driven by small percussions and a potent choir exalting another time spiritual unity for all Touaregs in order to prevent their soil to be exploited. 

Iket Adjen has another classic intro of electric guitar followed by percussions, a true trademark by this band, while the final Nak Idnizdjam, beginning also with a nice, long guitar solo, talks about the Touareg people once united and now dispersed “by this whirlwind of confusion”. Possibly this division and loneliness is what’s “behind the fear”, as the title of the album states. The Outro is for percussions and a female voice.

Far from being a product for the Western listener to consume, as it happened in the past decades where there was a need, at least during the 1980s, to prepare people to listen to new kinds of music, after the 1990s there was an original and sincere interest for styles coming from all over the world with their own specificities and characteristics, and Tinariwen are a vivid example of how a music group can be himself and at the same time mix his style with instruments coming from other parts of the world without misrepresenting himself.

We live times in which we’re almost forced to disappear, while at the opposite we need to learn from minorities how to rethink ourselves, our false privileges, and to ask ourselves what we really want. Music stories like the one of Tinariwen can help us, but also their music, with this psychedelia that can open our minds again – I wonder how they can sound live, after appreciating on me the effects of a live version of Riley’s In C – and let us free to use that openness for whatever we want.

A free gift maybe not that much welcomed due to the period in which we’re living and the tricks power uses against us, but nonetheless this gift is here for those who will be able to take advantage of it. Ethnic music is more than a music genre, is a state of mind. Experimenting with a tradition means starting with love and going wherever you want to go. And this is a lesson worth learning.  

 

Maruja – Knocknarea (self produced, 2023)

There are times in which you wander (on the internet, in physical places like record stores, etc.) just asking yourself if you’ll find out what you’re looking for. And there are times in which you ask youself if what you have find out is what you were looking for. This is the case of this EP by the Manchester based band Maruja. At a first listening I was skeptical. Too much similar to the post punk – and post rock – I love, something I have listened to yet in the past.

Actually, they’re reminding me through the last song of this mini album issued last March, Kakistocracy, of one of the bands I loved the most at the end of last century: Goodspeed You! Black Emperor. Then there are the effected guitars, the groaning saxophones, everything in its right place. So I skipped and I quit, looking for something more unsettling. Until yesterday, while I had the opportunity to watch them in a video playing live and I was hooked.

Now, don’t take me too much literally. Apart from the last release by Algiers last April, that album titled Shook that is a reprocessing for the modern times of the music created at the end of the 1970s by the likes of the Pop Group, I don’t have listened to so much original post punk bands in the last months. Someone would say post punk ended in 1982, or 1984, to be more precise, but the new wave from the various Interpol and similar during the last decades makes you simply ask youself if there’s the opportunity for a defined artistical shape to give life, if not to something new, at least to something good in the present times.

Anyway, Maruja are Harry Andrew Stanley Wilkinson (vocals, guitars), Joseph Alfred Carrol (alto saxophone, guitars), Matthew John Buonaccorsi (bass guitars) and Jackob Patrick Hayes (drums). A classic line up for a good ole punk rock band, with no use of electronics – a minus, I’d say, but not all of you would be with me in this – but with a discreet collective writing and a nice potential to be developed in the future, maybe with the help of a good label and producer.

For the moment we can enjoy these four tracks, the beginning of Thunder with its guitar drones and sax lines intertwining before the entering of nice syncopated drums and a killer groove, Blind Spot and its circular rhythms setting some interesting alto sax twirlings, The Tinker, an atmospheric track where the effected guitars and the saxophone are introducing a more classic dynamic piece, and finally the hymnodic and last Kakistocracy.

We don’t actually know if the promises will fluorish in the future into something more interesting – but the live act leave us with a nice feeling as far as high hopes – but is something we want to monitor is the future development of this four elements band. On their bandcamp page, where you can buy this self produce and self published digital EP, you can also find updates on their future live act in order not to miss what seems to me at every level a promising young ensemble. 

 

Sparklehorse – Bird Machine (Anti-, 2023)

There WAS a time when creating music was as intense as giving shape to your own feelings, emotions, memories. To an image of yourself you wanted to give to the world for all to see. A time when music wasn’t only business, but also something purer. Not by chance a musician like Daniel Johnston was loved by many successful artists such as Kurt Cobain. I attended to a festival in Italy where Johnston was supposed to play, but in the end he refused for health reasons.

Those were the days. You were entitled to risk not to listen to one of your idols, but in the end you had anyway a music that was a pure ode to love. On the other hand you had musicians that, as Bono sang many years before, had to “kill their inspiration and sing about the grief”. It wasn’t so easy to choose, but in the end the choice was there for you to grab it. The world was full of musicians similar to Johnston.

Another one was Vic Chestnutt, a singer/songwriter who released his first proper record – not the self produced tapes of Johnston – in 1990 and happy, so to speak, to give life to his musical vision until his death in 2009. Someone else has survived to his own demons, like Mark Oliver Everett, leader of the band Eels. Mr. E’s music is possibly the most similar to the music of Mark Linkous aka Sparklehorse, today’s hero.

Just one year after Chestnutt death, in 2010, Linkous passed away shooting himself directly into the heart. He not only suffered for many years of a severe form of depression, not only was a heroin addicted, but he also saw his marriage gone into pieces, and sometimes things are too much. We thought so that the posthumous Dark Night of the Soul, a record produced by Danger Mouse and with a cover designed by David Lynch, was his last release,.

But time has many surprises for everyone, and for us it’s the time for a new album by Sparklehorse. Bird Machine is its title. The recordings found at his home were almost complete, and they needed only some slight retouch. Notes on Linkous diary were almost impeccable, near perfection, so one of three Mark’s brothers, Matt, had no difficulty in issuing with the label Anti- a record faithful to Linkous’ will.

Opened by It Will Never Stop, with his drum machine and a computer filtered guitar, the album starts with a surreal mood where restlesness and a certain humour are mixing together. Kind Ghosts is filled with kindly reversed sounds sparsed through the melody along with other strange sounds that remind of Radiohead’s most experimental music, even though the melody is well defined.

Evening Star Supercharger is for many one of the best songs of the album. A “perfect” pop song whose atmosphere makes you ask yourself why for someone is so difficult to heal themselves since they’re so good at exorcising your demons: it’s just a mystery. I had to listen to a couple of time the arpeggioed guitar and the melodies since they’re simply too chrystalline just to have been given birth by a tortured soul, but they’re here to remember us that reality is not black and white, simply.

O Child, for piano and a softly blown of voice, ends with a coda made of sounds that seem to come from another dimension and a field recording of a baby in it and it is possibly the most intriguing song on the album. Falling Down, with its Waitsian title and a perfect pop countenance it’s almost a hymn for all those moments when we see things get worse and unable to stop it, with a use of the metaphores that start with marvel and ends with concreteness.

I Fucked It Up is another song as we heard at the beginning, and the most similar to Eels’ most straight r’n’r pieces. Hello Lord, with its acoustic guitar and a filtered, doubled voice, it’s the peace before or after the storm, whereas Daddy’s Gone it’s pure Beatles in their essence of songwriting. Chaos of the Universe is a song built around an interesting wall of sound made of guitars and various keyboards.

Listening to the Higsongs, Robyn Hitchcock’s cover, with its jangling guitars, makes you realize that for the entire record Albini gave life to a production respectful of the will of the artist instead than producing a record with drums and bass deep and resonating as it happened to In Utero and Rid of Me, showing how flexible it is as a producer. Everybody’s Gone to Sleep is another beautiful ballad full of a ‘reversed sadness’, with everybody’s sleeping but the main character of the song, deprived of his love.

The Scull of Lucia is a melody for a music box, that type of found sound that Linkous can’t miss in its own music, Blue is basically a bassline nurtured with some sparse guitars over the main line and finally we arrive to Stay, a melancholic ask for proximity. In many songs the most used and intriguing device is to reverse the feelings expressed by both the lyrics and the music, before leaving come out the real imagines from Linkous fantasy.

A record created around contrasts and the feeling of a bitter sadness mostly transfigured as if music can really save yourself from harshness of life, nurtured with a faith in the art, that means ultimately in men, Bird Machine is Sparklehorse last gift to our world, with the hope to give someone in need a ray of light through the darkness.