Skylark Quartet's Live in Tokyo

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.

Lori Goldston & Judith Hamann's Alloys

One of my favorite musical pieces of all time is Arvo Part's Fratres. It's such an emotional and edgy piece, full of sadness yet so ethereal that it sounds like it was captured by some ancient, primitive recording device. Fratres can be performed with all types of ensembles--everything from a violin and piano duet to, and this is my favorite, a dozen cellos. That sound, of a gathering of cellos, is a wondrous thing, all full of odd textures and subtle shifts in melodies that may or may not have taken place in real time. Perhaps that's why I responded to Lori Goldston and Judith Hamann's new CD, Alloys, in such an immediate and positive way. We have just two cellos here, not a dozen, but the actual numbers are obscured, just like they are in Fratres, because so many different layers of sound emerge and intertwine.

Alloys is one of those mystery discs that came out of nowhere. While Goldston is a noted cellist--she's toured with Nirvana, for instance, and can be seen on that incredible MTV Unplugged performance--there are many untested variables here such as a new recording label, Marginal Frequency, which is aiming its recordings at both audiophiles and music lovers who embrace the avant-garde. (That's me.) Alan F. Jones, a sound engineer who is based in Tracyton, Washington, handles mixing, mastering, audio restoration and sound design for film projects, so there's plenty of attention to the sonic details deep within Alloys. Working under the aegis of Laminal Audio, Jones seems to be the impetus of this project--he's the one who originally contacted me to listen to this unusual and satisfying duet.

Alloys is, among many other things, a full dissection of the cello and how it interacts with its human counterparts. There's the sounds I usually discuss, the human cues that occur simply by standing next to a musical instrument and to resonate with it. Goldston and Hamann, who hails from Australia, are like most skilled players of string instruments in the way they manipulate the angle of the bow to produce a wider canon of sound--not unlike the embouchure of a trumpet player. That's why Fratres is so hypnotic and mystical. Sounds come from the stage and you wonder where they are coming from since that was no cello, or was it? In these two extended compositions, which are largely improvised despite their exacting structures, the two cellists dig deep into the wooden caverns of their instruments and extract strange sounds you might not have heard before. It's not noise, though--it's something deeper and more guttural. It's haunting.

The cello is one of my favorite musical instruments. It has a warm, lush and romantic sound most of the time but it can take you down dark alleyways and leave you there, wondering what's going to happen next. Alloys is more dependable than that--this is a raw, windswept landscape that isn't for the passive or fearful, but Goldston and Hamann are there, holding your hand, telling you to stick close. It's a trip worth taking, even if you keep looking back over your shoulder.