I have to tell you a story about the first time I listened to this CD. Just after it arrived in the mail, I stuck it in the CD player and pressed play and then walked into the next room so I could give it a cursory listen while I worked. Minutes before, I had started the dishwasher in the kitchen on the other side of the house. Suddenly I heard a huge crashing sound, like glass, and I thought maybe the dishwasher was busy destroying our drinking glasses. I stopped the dishwasher, opened the door and looked around and found nothing out of the ordinary. Then it occurred to me--was that crashing sound on the CD? I went back to the beginning and listened and there it was, a sudden crash, followed by a series of low mechanical sounds. Skylark Quartet? Live in Tokyo? Did someone stick the wrong CD in its case back at the publicist's office?
Suffice it to say that you haven't heard music like this before, much less jazz. I have to go back to the fact that this came from the Marginal Frequency record label. My first taste of Marginal Frequency was Alloys from Lori Goldston and Judith Hamann, which I reviewed just about a month ago. I called that recording "a full dissection of the cello and how it interacts with its human counterparts." Shortly after I received that release in the mail, I nearly deleted an email from recording engineer Al Jones simply because I wasn't sure if he was talking about music or not. Marginal Frequency takes such a novel, off-road approach to experimental music that I thought I was being offered a course in some long-forgotten science. Marginal Frequency is so intriguing and strange that I've talked to Al about writing an article for the summer issue of The Occasional. (Yes, we're still trying to get the Spring issue out as I write this.)
The Skylark Quartet consists of Orlando Lewis on clarinet, Franz-Ludwig Austenmeister on keyboards, Hayden Pennyfeather on bass and Roland Spindler, but you wouldn't know that from merely listening to these eleven tracks, all titled "Skylark," which of course is the classic song written by Hoagy Carmichael and Johnny Mercer. You won't know that by listening, either. These tracks, recorded live but without audience response, are deconstructions in the most dramatic sense, a supreme reduction in the sounds of each instrument until they resemble a series of random noises recorded in a haunted, vandalized factory. The clarinet is defined mostly by the sound of air passing through the reed, the keyboards sound like random beeps and blips from a computer and the bass is so austere that you'll forget it's there until you hear a single plucked note. The drums, of course, are equally spare, a minimal amount of percussion and no beat, other than the occasional smashing of more glass on that factory floor.
Does this sound too weird for you? It doesn't for me. I can dive into my LP and CD collection and pull out all sorts of weird recordings, ones I heard once and swore never to hear again, ones I put on when I want the party to break up and ones I actually truly love because they touch something rusty and dark in the corners of my soul. Live In Tokyo is fascinating, however, for a couple of reasons. First, the music slowly appears and evolves as you progress through the tracks, and you start to recognize the strains of "Skylark." Secondly, it's "permanently archived here, and available for a time in a limited pressing of 150 CDs from glass master," according to the Marginal Frequency website, which adds to the mystery. "Documentation of this rare performance is limited to the recorded audio, and what could be gleaned from observers Kanji Nakao, Sam Sfirri, Taku Unami, and Reiji Hattori."
In other words, I don't possess all of the puzzle pieces yet, but as I chat with Al Jones and prepare for an article about Marginal Frequency, I hope to solve that mystery.
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