Gig #146: Of late 50: Susan Alcorn, Conflux Coldwell, Feminazgul, Ono, Luca T. Mai, Pumpkin Witch, Ron Nagle, Eyvind Kang, Kassel Jaeger, Christine Ott, BLÓM, chra, Sonic Boom, Aki Onda

Susan Alcorn
Conflux Coldwell
Feminazgul
Ono
Luca T. Mai
Pumpkin Witch
Ron Nagle
Eyvind Kang
Kassel Jaeger
Christine Ott
BLÓM
chra
Sonic Boom
Aki Onda

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Susan Alcorn The Royal Road
‘Susan Alcorn has taken the pedal steel guitar far beyond its traditional role in country music. Having first paid her dues in Texas country & western bands, she began to expand the vocabulary of her instrument through her study of 20th century classical music, visionary jazz, and world musics. Struck by the music of Messiaen she began transcribing classical music from recordings and scores on her instrument. Soon, she began to combine the techniques of country-western pedal steel with her own extended techniques to form a personal style influenced by free jazz, avant-garde classical music, Indian ragas, Indigenous traditions, and various folk musics of the world. By the early 1990s her music began to show an influence of the holistic and feminist “deep listening” philosophies of Pauline Oliveros. As her records gained a cult following she moved to Baltimore, MD. She performs internationally and is a key figure in the free improv scene in the US.’ — Ideologic Organ

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Conflux Coldwell Fantasmograph
‘The phantasmagoria was a form of photographic theatre that used magic lanterns to project ghostly images The music is Fantasmograph by Conflux Coldwell, created using tape loops of a 19th century-style penny toy tin music box.’ — Michael C Coldwell

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Feminazgul The Rot in the Field Is Holy
‘The patriarchal nature of rock and roll has been well and truly established for some time. Women have been unwillingly assigned a supporting role in the musical universe, but recent years have seen an increase in the number of artists standing up and stating plainly that they’re not going to take this bollocks. Maggie Killjoy of Feminazgul and Nomadic War Machine is one such artist. Amongst the endlessly male and violent world of black metal, she’s defiantly taken a frontline stance against the resurgent right-wing beliefs that seem determined to permeate everyday life in an age that should definitely know better.’ — ASTRAL NOIZE

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Ono I Dream of Sodomy
‘Red Summer, named after the period of anti-black white supremacist attacks in 1919, thus exists on the edge of a breaking point. As if a mind confronted with the continued (meta)physical violence towards black people splintered its own reality in which 1619, 1919, and the present overlap. It is an abstract, bizarre vaudeville of eternal strife. Like the band’s composer and multi-instrumentalist P. Michael Grego revealed in an interview to The Wire, it’s “a show meant for and put on by people who are insane, a litany of atrocities that are going on.” Under his baton and with the help of an array of musicians, fragments of heavy industrial noise find footing in funk, gospel, jazz, post-punk, techno, weaponised ambient soundscapes, and anything in-between. Idiosyncratic and anachronistic, this music is not of any time or form in particular. Rather, it belongs to a continuum – an endless thread of pivotal, different but same moments – in which the struggles and merry auctions of the first slaves in America depicted on the carnivalesque ’20th August 1619′ live forever alongside the deviously funky ‘I Dream of Sodomy’ and travis’s memories of abuse in the military.’ — Antonio Poscic

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Luca T. Mai Gazzeloni
‘Luca T. Mai is best known for his membership in the mighty Italian avantrock trio ZU. On his solo-debut album he is shifting his probing and powerful saxophone artistry from energetic sound scapes to celestial layered sax drones. Immersive and deep, including ‘Gazzeloni’, his performance of an Eric Dolphy composition.’ — deejay.de

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Pumpkin Witch Jack O’ Lantern Smasher
‘Three piece dungeon synth outfit centering around a story based around three mysterious figures who may be linked to the disappearance of children during Halloween night.’ — sputnik

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Ron Nagle Marijuana Hell
‘Ron Nagle is known for his intimately scaled sculptures, each made up of ceramic elements that are slip-cast, fired, and embellished with epoxy details. Some are glazed to a hot-rod finish, others textured like stucco and then airbrushed. Nagle is also cultishly revered for a series of psych rock albums, especially 1970’s ‘Bad Rice’. Your sample for the great Ron Nagle song is “Marijuana Hell,” with Ry Cooder sliding around on guitar. Like Zevon, Randy Newman and a few others, Nagle has the ability to stick his tongue out, or in his cheek. Is he laughing at the anti-marijuana bunch, or does he see the dangers? Or both?’ — xnyl

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Eyvind Kang Push Off
‘The point here is not to produce a drone but to delve into the question of life in sound. This apparent emergence of life is due to the apparatus, what Marx calls a “social hieroglyphic”, which brings forsythia and silk together in technique, cultivated by practices which are themselves sustained by the real relations of student to teacher to student. The recording engineer too, by placing one mic below and one above each Ajaeng, bifurcates the listening space; the mix, one Ajaeng in each speaker, again produces a bifurcated image of the sound. Thus the sound is split in four directions, to be reconstituted in the cochlea, but with the center of the body as the real target.’ — Eyvind Kang

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Kassel Jaeger River Wensum Roe Deers
‘Over the last decade, Kassel Jaeger, the moniker of the Paris-based composer, writer / theorist, producer, and director of the Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM), François Bonnet, has meticulously sculpted a body of multidisciplinary work that rests at the forefront contemporary electronic and electroacoustic practice. Rigorously experimental without sacrificing the intimacies of self, his efforts as a composer and musician extend across live contexts and numerous critically heralded solo releases, as well as collaborations with Jim O’Rourke and Lucy Railton, both contributing to the record, alongside Stephen O’Malley, Stephan Mathieu, Akira Rabelais, Oren Ambarchi, and James Rushford, and others.’ — Shelter Press

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Christine Ott Pulsar
‘Among the myriad futures waylaid by the unidirectional discourse of technological progress lies that of early electronic instruments that promised new worlds different to those we got. Such is the case of the ondes martenot, developed throughout the 20th century by Maurice Martenot in a bold, modernist attempt to power expression with electricity. It was not to be simply a piece of gear, but a fully-fleshed extension of human sentiment in an age of wires and radio waves. In parallel with other instruments like the théremin, the ondes martenot pointed towards an unexplored aural expanse unimaginable for (and unavailable to) the traditional universe of classical instruments. The myths they built in their wake are incomplete, withdrawn, lessened by the continued primacy of both the classical and a unified, settled form of the modern. Musicians like Christine Ott have become the keepers of faded histories, showing us, time and again, that their energy still glows beneath the dead weight of progress, waiting only for a spark to trigger strange, old wonders.’ — a closer listen

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BLÓM Be Kind
‘The more I try and brainstorm Newcastle trio Blóm’s position in rock’s hellish landscape, the less they sound like anyone else within it. Certainly they remind me of other groups, are analogous to others, can be talked of in the same breath as more again – all of which is different from sounding like them. On the face of it, there’s nothing especially unusual about how Blóm set up: Helen Walkinshaw, Liz McDade and Erika Leaman on vocals, drums and bass respectively, their guitarless status adding sharp focus to the bottom-end sludginess of songs which have precedence in punk, noiserock, no wave and psychedelia. Yet Flower Violence, their five-song debut album on local label Box, seems to harbour its own distinct tics of rhythm, arrangement and instrumental interplay.’ — Noel Gardner

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chra Let Sharks Sleep
‘Chra is the artist moniker for Austrian Christina Nemec (Bray, Shampoo Boy). SEAMONS is the latest missive in her ongoing exploration of suffocating abstract audio. At once designed and falling apart SEAMONS is rough and crude, a stumbling and staggering electronic expedition where nothing presents itself explicit in intent. It’s a tense obscure record that teases you into it’s peculiar vortex from it’s suggestive nature of exploring the enigma beyond it’s haunted facade. LET SHARKS SLEEP is not only a great title but a mind tickling adventure of descending/rising digital dance that builds in intensity with it’s relentless repetition.’ — Editions Mego

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Sonic Boom Tawkin Tekno
‘All Things Being Equal is Kember’s first album as Sonic Boom since 1990’s Spectrum, a sort of solo record made with his bandmates in Spacemen 3 as that legendary psych combo broke up. He followed up Spectrum with a new band called Spectrum, before heading into the noise lab with Kevin Shields and others for Experimental Audio Research and branching out through collaborations with Stereolab, Delia Derbyshire, and Beach House. In each case, the personnel was less the focal point than the sound and the equipment making it: vintage ’60s and ’70s analog synthesizers, the odd guitar, and racks and racks of gizmos to oscillate and phase and flange. All Things has all of these—some 11 machines are listed in the liner notes, including two vocoders and a toy called Thumbs Up Music—and they perform Kember’s pop songs but also become them, as veins both determine a leaf’s survival and define its shape.’ — Jesse Dorris

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Aki Onda For the Souls of The Dead
‘It’s a ten-minute video work. A requiem for NYC. During the lockdown due to the Covid-19 pandemic, this was shot with iPhone myself near the Hurricane Point along the Brooklyn shore of the East River on May 16, 2020.’ — Aki Onda

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p.s. RIP Keith Sonnier, Brigid Berlin, Emmitt Rhodes. ** Tosh Berman, Hi, Tosh. Super happy that you found his work of interest. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi. Tom Burr was almost included in that post, and I can’t remember he didn’t get in there ultimately. ** Misanthrope, I think all of my sexual fetishes are either components of a human body or must be worn by a human body to become fetishes. I can’t think of any external things that are sexual fetishes for me. There are a lot of things I’m obsessed with, but the interest isn’t sexual at all. A failure of my imagination, I guess. I think your compromise willingness re: David and the car seems sensible if you think you should help him out re: that. I only really know him through you, but I do kind of have this general feeling that trouble is part of the outcome of everything he does. ** David Ehrenstein, Bizarre is good. Everyone, Mr. E’s FaBlog pays tribute to the very great and extremely heroic John Lewis RIP here. Well, Had Mary Martin been my mother I wouldn’t exist in my current form, although, knowing my father’s ego, I would surely still bear his name (Jr.) ** Bill, I did, indeed! And excited to see it upon fruition. Glad you dug the trove. Jeff Burton’s commercial stuff is pretty yawn. Disappointing that he went that watered down route, but a guy’s gotta pay the bills, I suppose. Good weekend? ** h(now j), Hi. I’m happy you liked those works. I hope you do get to get away. That sounds so, so nice. It had been predicted that we would have a murderously hot summer, but, so, far, it’s been wondrously and almost shockingly mild. Yesterday was a hottie, but today it’s back to totally okay. In normal years, summer starts dying away in August over here, but I fear we’re in for a late summer murder-by-sun phase, though no sign of it yet. Good about their acceptance of your piece! I love editing. I enjoy editing about a million times more than I like writing first drafts. Good luck! ** Steve Erickson, Hey. Glad you liked the shebang. I do know Gaika’s work and like it, yes, but I wasn’t aware he’d dropped a new thing, which I will go gather up. Thanks! One has to hope that people and higher ups in and around Portland will fight what’s going on to its death, and it does seem like that’s happening so far. The latest completely shocking thing in the US’s daily menu of completely shocking government mandated things. ** Okay. I made a gig for you, as I regularly do, featuring mostly new music that I think would be highly worth your investigating, and I hope you will obviously. See you tomorrow.