Though the punning title of French electroacoustician Hervé Boghossian’s CD is inelegant, it takes us straight to the heart of his concerns: structure and texture.  Archi.Texture Vol. 1 consists of three compositions.  In “Pour Piano & Ordinateur”, John Tilbury holds down the sustain pedal and plays entirely in the piano’s bass register.  As improvisation it’s atypical Tilbury and, quite frankly, not terribly interesting.  One can’t help wondering to what extent Boghossian’s guidelines helped or hampered him.  What Boghossian does with this material is gently emphasise aspects of the piano’s shimmering harmonics.  His computer processing turns them into gaseous clouds that momentarily bloom before dissolving into the aether.  It’s a delicate procedure, one he manages with great subtlety.  The higher register, drone-based cello track that Mark Wastell provides for “Pour Violoncelle and Ordinateur” is more immediately interesting, and Boghossian’s edits and electronic enhancements do it justice.  The final composition layers the Tilbury and Wastell tracks, seemingly without embellishment.  Satisfying though it is, it never amounts to more than the sum of its parts.

The enigmatically titled Body and Limbs Still Look to Light is a powerful solo set by Australian percussionist Will Guthrie, recorded at Apo33 in Nantes, France, during 2005.  Guthrie isn’t a ‘pure’ percussionist in either the classical or jazz tradition, he’s just as likely to work with electronics and found sound, and much of “Peak” the second of the CDs three tracks, involves a dense montage of sounds sourced mostly from radio.  The raw material of these pieces is the result of improvisation and chance, but Guthrie carefully sculpts the sounds and arranges them in intriguing ways.  The electroacoustically adjusted gong tones and bass drum booms of “Taken” are strung along a line of swift, skittering percussion (muted metallophones and small drums) that sounds remarkably like the work of Paul Lovens.  The final track, “Withdrawal”, charts a withdrawal from, rather than into, silence.  It’s fairly quiet during the first five of its 17 minutes, but as the volume gradually increases so too does the intensity.  Deep chiming figures are thickly overlaid with percussion of all kinds, together with electronic and electroacoustic sounds, and the pace of the piece, despite the different speeds at which some of the material comes and goes, remains stately throughout.

Brian Marley

Cath001 ParisTransatlantic

If you're wondering why the inaugural album on a new improv label – Richard Pinnell's Cathnor – featuring notable improvisers John Tilbury, Mark Wastell and guitarist / laptopper Hervé Boghossian is reviewed here in the "Contemporary" section as opposed to "Jazz / Improv", it's because Boghossian, in his liner notes, specifically refers to himself as "the composer", and the three tracks as "composed by" H.B. He also provides them with rather dry New York School-y generic titles – "For Piano and Computer", "For Cello and Computer" and "For Piano, Cello and Computer" (en français dans le texte) – which, along with the rather drab punning album title and the added information that this is just the first of three projected volumes, certainly sets a serious, even ascetic tone. Tilbury fans expecting some of those exquisite Feldmanesque droplets might be somewhat disappointed to find the pianist confined to the bottom octave of his piano in the opening track (much as Maurizio Pollini's prodigious talents were for the most part restricted to low end thuds in Luigi Nono's Como una ola di fuerza y luz), but if that's what you're after you can always slip one of his AMM CDs into your machine instead. Boghossian's interest lies elsewhere (in point of fact Tilbury's contributions could have been recorded by just about any other pianist of modest technical ability with a sense of touch), namely in an exceedingly careful and subtle recrafting of timbre. Improv aficionados, EAI connoisseurs included, might find the music somewhat lacking in relief, but that's about as daft as complaining that Mark Rothko can't draw as well as Arshile Gorky or comparing Eliane Radigue (a Boghossian hero, and it shows) to Pierre Henry. Apples and oranges. Boghossian's exploration of the upper partials of Mark Wastell's looped cello drone is meticulous and exquisite. And if that's not good enough for you, "the composer invites the listener to use tracks 1 & 2 to create his own composition" (or her own composition, he might have added).

Dan Warburton

Cath002 ParisTransatlantic

If distortion and overload are the grit that leads to the pearl in the oyster, Will Guthrie's incisive editing hand offers a resolute knife-hold to separate the gem from its clammy casing. Anyone who's seen Guthrie live in recent times would be aware of how brutal his performances can be, maxing the volume while unleashing rough, unruly swarms of detourned electronics and manhandled percussion that move the air in the room. More interested in grain than drone, privileging volume and physicality over undemonstrative reductionism, Guthrie edits and arranges for maximum impact. He's interested in dirtied sound, dropping chunks of asphalt-texture feedback through Body and Limbs' opening tracks "Taken" and "Peak", the latter of which opens with the pedalling of the dial of a radio, the broadcasts swathed with static. Towards the end of the disc's final piece "Withdrawal", Guthrie scours away layers of sediment, allowing a recording of raspy breathing to briefly assume centre stage. This gesture personalises the tension in proceedings: though it sounds meticulously planned and obsessively edited, Guthrie hasn't sucked the lifeblood out of these three compositions, which lends them an exploratory, sometimes anxious air. Indeed, as has been noted elsewhere, its searching nature initially comes as a surprise after the brutish swagger of 2005's musique concrete masterpiece Spear, released as a limited CD-R on Guthrie's own Antboy Music label. I can't help but think of Body and Limbs as content to Spear's form - the latter as the decisive formal shift that allowed for the exploration and elaboration of the former.

Jon Dale

Cath002 Bagatellen

Will Guthrie’s “body and limbs still look to light” does indeed have a more luminous character than the listener might have expected given the rather brutal nature of recent work such as “Spear” or his fine collaboration with Ferran Fages, “cinabri”. The three pieces on this disc are more contemplative and even airy, less slab-like in nature.

Each piece is also very different from the other in the basic sound palette employed. “Taken” contrasts skittering, small percussive sounds with soft, deep gongs and smatterings of electronica at its start. It’s relatively brief, stays on a single, gentle track and works quite well as a self-contained examination of a given area; terseness as a virtue while hinting at larger spaces. The second track, “Peak”, concentrates on radio usage and, while it has moments of sharp, concise, beauty, it also serves to illustrate how difficult it is to plow this particular field. The line between the arbitrary and serendipitously revelatory is a tough one to negotiate and, too often, this teeters into the first territory, at least to this listener’s ears. When, about midway through the piece, the radio steps aside to act as companion for some Muller-esque electronics, things gel enticingly into a slithery, warm plasma. “Withdrawal”, the longest track here at about 15 minutes, is my favorite work on the disc. After an initial ultra-quiet section, Guthrie spends the bulk of the performance contrasting eerily similar pitches culled from very different sources, overlapping them in irregular waves. It’s a beautiful idea, beautifully realized as ship horn-like toots, thin sine waves, rough percussive scrapes, and other tones from who-knows-where that sound oddly related (some radio too, I think) weave and slide over and beneath each other. It’s like a rug made from varicolored and differently textured strands of the same thickness. If it loses a bit of steam 12 or so minutes in, well, it’s been a great ride up until then.

The disc has a something of a searching quality to it, perhaps surprising after the overt confidence of previous Guthrie works, but encouraging as well. It’s a solid, rigorous, sometimes probing recording, one that significantly whets one’s appetite for future endeavors.

Brian Olewnick

Cath001 Bagatellen

The first release from our own Richard Pinnell’s Cathnor label (and, caveat emptor, I know Richard and, for that matter Tilbury and Wastell as well), presents us with something of a problem. Three tracks—first, a solo performance by Tilbury, then an equal length one by Wastell (on cello) and finally the two recordings simply layered atop one another. Actually, that may not be entirely accurate, as I believe Boghossian, whose project this is, adds faint washes of computer-generated tone to each recording though they’re subtle enough to easily be mistaken for acoustical artifacts. Apparently, he also requested the musicians to work in a specified general area and exercised some discreet editing as well. That said, the Tilbury is, as far as I’m aware, unique in his recorded oeuvre. He remains at the extreme lower end of the keyboard throughout, troubling the same octave or so of notes in a steady, moody rumble. I’m admittedly a sucker for virtually anything that drips from Tilbury’s fingertips but I did find this particular example to begin wearing on me about halfway through its 20 minutes. Wastell’s cello excursion holds greater interest in its own right, a drone piece awash in itchy overtones that has more than enough depth and interior graininess to hold interest.

Here’s the problematic aspect: Had I been presented with the third track knowing nothing about it, I’m pretty sure I would’ve enjoyed it fairly well, a solid combination of drone-y piano and cello with some subtle electronic augmentation. However, knowing it’s “only” a layering of the previous two tracks and, furthermore, having just listened to those pieces of music, a certain expectation is forced upon me, namely that the whole will somehow be greater than the sum of parts, that the two performances so combined will manage to produce some unexpected sonic moiré that could only have been achieved by just such a layering. So I tend to fluctuate between enjoying the actual sounds well enough and feeling disappointed that the conglomeration fails to produce an unexpectedly fascinating result. This leaves a slight taste of an arid science experiment. When Lucier integrated sine waves with similarly pitched percussion, the “musical” element may have been minimal, but a certain amount of interest could still be maintained as ear witness to a particular sonic phenomenon. Here, there’s really only the music we’ve already just heard which, attractive as it may have been, achieves no added level of profundity, acoustical or musical. Again, not “bad” by any means, just disappointing.

Brian Olewnick

Cath002 Vital

How to set yourself apart as a label, a very good lesson: make a package that nobody has, and make it look good. Cathnor, a new UK label, does that. Their first two releases come in what looks like oversized digipacks, and will surely be a pest to both your collection and the shop displays. But they stick out of the majority and that is a great thing.
The first release is the first of a trilogy to come, by Herve Boghossian, who plays computer (on the cover in the beautiful french word 'ordinateur'). He asked John Tilbury of AMM piano fame and Mark Wastell on cello to play a composition he made (each solo) and which he would use in his computer processing to 'focus on the textural qualities'. In the first piece it is piano and computer, then cello and computer and in the final piece both together and computer. In the first piece it is clearly the piano, playing clustered and sustaining piano sounds, and the computer treatment seems far away. It may or may not add environmental/reverb like sounds, but it's done in a more or less secret way. In the Wastell piece this is different. The cello is heard, but arrives through a web of sustained sine wave sound/feedback like sound. It moves almost without any flaw into the third piece. I might be entirely wrong, but it seems that this piece is just a mix of the previous two pieces, includingwhatever was processed on the computer, but it's a quite nice, almost sinister atmosphere that hoovers around in this piece. Although I am not sure what is to follow in the next two parts of this trilogy, I have a keen ear to explore that.

Franz de Waard