Gig #168: Tony Conrad & Jennifer Walshe, Kee Avil, Chris Corsano, Lolina, Elaine Mitchener, Gordan, British Murder Boys, Pollution Opera, Greg Saunier, Hideous Figure, Marco Baldini & Apartment House, Morgan Garrett, Sunburned Hand of the Man, Innode

Tony Conrad & Jennifer Walshe
Kee Avil
Chris Corsano
Lolina
Elaine Mitchener
Gordan
British Murder Boys
Pollution Opera
Greg Saunier
Hideous Figure
Marco Baldini & Apartment House
Morgan Garrett
Sunburned Hand of the Man
Innode

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Tony Conrad & Jennifer Walshe In the Merry Month of May
‘Few artists have managed to exert such a wide influence over the musical landscape of the last sixty or so years as Tony Conrad, and probably none have done so while retaining an unwavering commitment to experimentalism. Conrad collaborated with John Cale, La Monte Young, John Cage and Faust. He was a member of Fluxus and the Theater of Eternal Music. He helped define the parameters of drone and minimalism as we know them today, while his visual art and film has been exhibited in the MoMA, the Whitney and the Louvre.

‘Conrad died in 2016 from prostate cancer but was active throughout his later years. One of his most fruitful collaborations was with Dublin-born composer and experimental vocalist Jennifer Walshe. Walshe’s pedigree is hardly less impressive than Conrad’s: she is Oxford University’s Professor of Composition, her works have been performed all over the world and she has collaborated with or performed the work of dozens, if not hundreds, of the contemporary music scene’s leading lights. The pair’s final piece of work, and the last thing Conrad recorded before his death, In the Merry Month of May, was made over seven years ago and is finally seeing the light of day.’ — Thomas Blake

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Kee Avil do this again
‘With a strong background in improvisation, but a knack for unconventional arranging, it seems fitting that Kee Avil has cited both This Heat and Jenny Hval as inspirations. She describes her relationship with music as visceral, although her output is as hushed as it is razor-sharp. “I don’t really question the music that I write” she once told Fifteen Questions. “Often there is no concept behind it—it just has to feel like something.” When held up next to the shadowy records that preceded it, Spine still comes across particularly bone chilling—a whispered secret of grave importance.’ — Ted Davis

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Chris Corsano The Full-Measure Wash Down
‘Chris plays each part of this arrangement, drawing himself upward and onward in an organic enigma of chicken-egg communication — where does the tale begin, and who’s following who in this enervating flow of throbbing rhythms and compulsive heat?’ — Drag City

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Lolina Unrecognisable
‘“Unrecognisable” is a story about a city where buildings are used as weapons in a war between the government and the people. The initial chapter, “Eiffel Shard”, was published as an online graphic novel with an interactive soundtrack. It depicts a phone call between Paris Hell and Geneva Heat, two members of the resistance group Unrecognisable. On this concept album, Lolina performs the role of both characters, her own voice often made unrecognisable by pitch-shifts and distortion. It was recorded almost exclusively on a Casio SK-200 sampling keyboard boasting 1.62 seconds total sampling time. No beat preset (total of 20) is left untouched, unchopped or unlooped. Not one of the 49 mini keys is idle. Retains samples when turned off.’ — Relaxin’ Records

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Elaine Mitchener stretchedwoundspeaks
‘Elaine Mitchener is a vocal contortionist. The performer and composer may start by singing melismatic melodies, but in a second she can transform them into gurgling throat calls or hushed whispers. In every motion, she extracts the underlying meaning of her words, using extended techniques to illuminate their power. It is a skill Mitchener has developed over the last fifteen years while also maintaining her movement practice and collaborating across disciplines and with fellow experimental musicians such as George Lewis, Matana Roberts, Moor Mother and Apartment House. On Solo Throat, she exemplifies her vocal skill with twelve concise pieces that each examine poetry from all angles, breaking it down and piecing it back together again.’ — Vanessa Ague

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Gordan Seediq Song
‘Svetlana Spajić has spent the last twenty-five years visiting villages in the Balkans, absorbing the words passed down from generation to generation, as well as the decasyllabic cadences of traditional folk tunes. Hers is a voice of such unique power that spiritual uplift and deep pathos simultaneously imbue the listener when she’s in full flight. It’s an album that defies classification and bursts with existential meaning, with all the death and pain that go hand in hand with that percolating out of its ancient verses. But perhaps the most extraordinary thing is that tradition and modernity cohere so effectively, an arrangement that rarely augurs in real life.’ — Jeremy Allen

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British Murder Boys Now, This Is You
‘Many, many years into their thing, Surgeon (Anthony Child) and Regis (Karl O’Connor) finally unveil their debut album as British Murder Boys, two decades on from their ‘Learn Your Lesson’ debut for Counterbalance in 2003. “Renowned for their explosive live performances, British Murder Boys released a slew of influential 12″s in a short intense period between 2003-2005 on Surgeon’s Counterbalance and Regis’ Downwards labels, before reuniting for a 12” on Mute’s Liberation Technologies imprint in 2012. Recent releases have been sporadic, and include a cover of Lou Reed ‘Real Good Time Together’ and a limited-edition cassette documenting their residency at Dutch studio Willem Twee.’ — Love Collective II

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Pollution Opera Cairo???
‘Elvin Brandhi and Nadah El Shazly refuse to turn away from the horror. The intercontinental duo’s Pollution Opera album is an uncompromising futurist depiction of our disfigured, dystopian, and dying reality. Facing hell in full defiance, the experimental noise album catapults itself through a volatile compound of breathless shouts, screams, and screeches, in collision with vocal samples, environmental recordings, and acousmatic sounds. Ten tracks cover the spectrum of electroacoustic fragments and vocalizations, treacherously suspended between the roar of engines and synth distortion, of evocative intonations or guttural retching.’ — Danse Noire

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Greg Saunier Grow Like a Plant
‘It seems almost unbelievable that Greg Saunier never released a single record under his own name before 2024. The Tucson-based drummer and composer has an almost absurdly vast list of credits as a producer and collaborator, from mixing records for small indie bands to producing some of Xiu Xiu’s best albums (The Air Force, Always) to playing in bands with a head-boggling list of luminaries from Joanna Newsom to Mike Watt to Sean Lennon. His place in underground rock history would be guaranteed even if all he’d done was founded the great Bay Area band Deerhoof. It’d also probably be guaranteed if he’d never founded Deerhoof in the first place but had still done everything else he’s done in his three-plus decades as an active musician.’ — Daniel Bromfield

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Hideous Figure Last One Left
‘Rotten harsh noise inspired by Texas, reflecting childhood psycho-geography triggered by Indiana landscapes. Local radio, scrap metal feedback and microphone purgatory. An exploration of space, memory, and sound.’ — No Rent

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Marco Baldini & Apartment House Plutone
‘The piece is based on a symphony from Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo. Favola in musica (1607). In this composition the original score is as if sent on a loop and each time some harmonic element dissolves until only a distant echo of the initial harmonic structure remains. At first the piece was to be called Caronte, because in the score the symphony is located near the beautiful bass aria O tu ch’innanzi morte sung by the character whom Orfeo meets at the beginning of his catabasis. But the sound of the title didn’t convince me much, so I opted for Plutone, whose character appears in the opera shortly afterwards.’ — Marco Baldini

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Morgan Garrett Suck
‘From the fierce opener of ‘Alive’, Purity moves through fragmented songs, unnerving background noise and cathartically mangled riffing. On ‘Tearful Life’, an acoustic ballad gets interrupted by feral glossolalia. ‘Suck’ is like Primus with the bass virtuosity muted and the sense of a Lynchian circus ratcheted up. ‘Cost Of Living’ is death metal taken to cartoonish extremes, as though Garrett is desperately trying to treat crippling ambivalence with melodramatic bombast.’ — Daryl Worthington

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Sunburned Hand of the Man The Lollygagger
‘At its core Sunburned is both a familial and mercurial entity. There’s not a fixed lineup, yet those within its borders are fervently committed. There’s not so much a consistent sound as a spiritual throughline, straddling god-loves-a-drunk mysticism, bombastic basement show ethos, the far reaches of post-hippie underground esoterica, and making the gallery world scratch their heads instead of their chins.’ — Three Lobed

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Innode Splitter
‘A new methodology to make the album is applied yet again from the trio of Bernhard Breuer, Steven Hess and Stefan Németh. The approach is more an anti approach where the trio let the process of creation itself steer the development of the recording, without any prior conceptual agenda. Irregular rhythmic patterns often served as the initial springboard for each piece with Breuer creating a loop either by playing drums or with the aid of a modelling percussion synthesizer. The results often bypass existing formulaic grids. The outfit embraced these anti-precision steps building shapes around the tarnished templates. The process of building upon the core structures laid forth alters throughout. In the case of „Splitter“ you can hear an example of Bernhard´s core loops dominating a skeletal audio sphere.’ — Editions Mego

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p.s. Hey. ** ted rees, Hi, Ted! I just got your new book yesterday, and I’m excited to read it. I hope the release is going as well as releases can go. I’ll go find that podcast. So nice to see you. You’ll be inputting wordage into my eyes and brain any moment now, what a pleasure. ** Katalyze, Holy moly, Kat! Wow! Amazing to get to see you. Well, talk with you at least. I’m okay, I’m good. Fantastic about the show you curated. And especially and obviously about the upcoming one where you’ll perform your own work! Any chance there’s work by you online somewhere where I can hear it? Sure would love to. Awesome, so sweet and great to have you here. Warmest hugs and etc etc., xo, me. ** Tosh Berman, Thanks a lot for the info for Harper, sir. ** Mark, ‘Tour de France’, nice pick. I hope they bring the multi-part show over here. Maybe just maybe. Holy crap, there’s a Pikme-Up documentary? Which I’m told is not available for viewing in my territory, grr. But there’ll be a way. Have big fun and success at the Zine Fest. Wish I could wander around in that, duh. ** PL, Hi. I’m okay, thanks. Oops about the guy, well, … you live and you learn or something? My favorite Fassbinder is ‘In a Year of Thirteen Moons’. I’m not sure if I’ve read ‘Uzumaki’, I’ll have to check. Good luck acing French. Well, yeah, I do enjoy gathering the slaves. You’d be amazed how labor intensive that process is. May greatness encompass you. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi. ‘Moonraker’, yeah, that was a wacky one. You want to know about wacky, my fave was the ridiculous non-official, star studded, self-consciously weird ‘Casino Royale’. Which probably hasn’t aged well at all. ** Lucas, Thanks, Lucas. The rest of my day was just a horrible meeting aftermath, but it was survivable. And now it’s today at long last. Even though I’m not young, I never looked at Livejournal, I don’t know why, it’s weird, that doesn’t made any sense. Nice geese, thank you! Here’s a not very interesting photo of the giant crane that moved in next door to my apartment the other day. It looks better when it moves. Good day, pal. ** Dominik, Hi!!! Happy the books sang to you. Oh, god, way too long and complicated to explain about the current producer problem except just to say that the same fuckhead whom I have been complaining about here for years just managed to fuck everything up for the millionth time, and now we’re trying to fix and survive his new mess. Hm, I’m guessing the forest is the part that has the clues? Love forcing me to catch up on my emails today, or at least four or five of them, G. ** Oscar 🌀, I really love duck quacks, how did you know? An animatronic Emo with a fake knife “carving” the words ‘Hi Oscar’ into its ‘thigh’, a feat accomplished via tiny red, gradually illuminating led lights imbedded in its ‘skin’. (No actual Emo was harmed during this demonstration). Wow, congrats on freeing yourself. Surreal congrats. So, what now? The meetings sucked, but thank you, and we’ve gotten very used to surviving little hellish things re: our film, so we’ll be okay. I would be kind of surprised if there isn’t already a tumblr novel, although I can’t think of one. Huh. It used to be a helluva locale, yep. Someone told me that when ducks are mean that’s how they express their intelligence, so mean ducks would be okay as long as I remember to, err, duck, sorry. I hope your day feels like a fairytale in retrospect. ** Steve, Film stuff, as almost always, yeah. Thanks. Hang in there ’til Thursday. Of course you will. You’re a serious trooper. I tried to do a Shu Lea Cheang Day a while back, but there was nowhere near enough of her work on line to make that possible. But I’ll see if anything has changed on that front. Sigh, I so wish Criterion Channel was EU friendly, but it most certainly is not. That array sounds very interesting. ** HaRpEr //, Hi! So sorry about the back and forth with your dad. Dads are hard, or mine was. If it’s any consolation, which I know it isn’t, I’m going through hell with our film producers who are behaving like they’re Zac’s and my dictatorial fathers. I’m glad you and your actual dad are quelled at least for now. I feel the same about whining about our producers, but sometimes you have to in order to feel sane. Great you liked ‘Duelle’. They don’t make ’em like that anyone, as they say. I’m reading Cindy Carr’s Candy Darling bio too and similarly pleasured. Cindy’s great. Her bio of Wojanarowicz is also very good. Cool! ** Nicholas., Howdy to you. Your science = magic spiel was lovely. I’m on board. That’s funny: I have two lighters, one new, and one nearly dead, and I brought the nearly dead one and not the new one out with me, and it died within a minute of my leaving my apartment. Dinner: cold sesame noodle, my favorite food, kindly made for me by Zac. When you said you just watched ‘Gattaca’ everything made much more sense, yes. ** Uday, Oh, good! Uh, hm, maybe I could sign a ‘Flunker’ when I eventually get mine for you? Amphetamine Sulphate is in Texas, and I’m in Paris, so I don’t know how else that could happen. Ha, I think it’s going to be more like kidney stones, but I pray you’re right. That makes sense: back when I used to get depressed I would slap a Nico album or Leonard Cohen’s ‘Songs of Love and Death’ on the turntable, and I think that worked? I can’t remember. I hope you feel good by now. ** Right. Today I made one of my gigs featuring music I’ve been into lately, and it’s a pretty eclectic gig, so maybe you’ll find something or somethings that suit you therein. One hopes. See you tomorrow.