What we wrote about them at the time…

Rauhan Orkesteri

Adding a pure fire music/free jazz branch to the recent and impressive blossoming of Finnish experimental music, and doing so with joyous wonder, Rauhan Orkesteri seem to be sprung from pure earth.

Their playing seems to capture the creak and rustle of the forest, but always with an exhilarating tension let loose in some of the most unconfined maniacal and bare-knuckle group thinking currently on offer. Their intense group communions, full of brash and unpredicatable turns, earth-pounding rhythms and stratospheric cries, horns, stuttering and vocalising, never seems less than in pure service to the joyous soul of their uncompromising musical freedom. This was their first show in the UK.

Angharad Davies & Rhodri Davies

Within the small number of improvising harpists in the world Rhodri Davies is quite distinct. He uses an extended battery of techniques to further his sound; preparing his instrument, detuning, bowing and e-bowing strings; amplifying the sound board to produce both clipped precise notes of minimal details and otherworldly glistening drones, rich with sustained metallic timbres that breathe with the scrapped pulse of bowed metal.

Angharad Davies’ is one of the most interesting acoustic improvisers in the UK at the moment. Her work for prepared violin is stunningly beautiful, a delicate and ethereal evocation of ghost tones that, for all its restraint, is seething with passion. And her performance with her brother Rhodri at the recent Sotto Voce fest in London was one of the best things we’ve seen in ages. Gritty in its gritty texture, organic but abstract sound colours and short fractured juxtapositions of sound, complete in themselves and interspersed in half breaths, which made for a sort of dynamic flux in the improvisation that allowed sounds to be constantly reborn in new relationships.

Jandek

Closing the gap between art and life destroys art and at the same time universalizes it. With no frame of reference for the creation of what constitutes one of the most remarkable bodies of work in music, it’s hard to find a place to start with Jandek’s music, other that on a purely emotional level.

For me, the first time I listened I heard a series of jarringly beautiful and often maniacal expression of hallucinatory and very personal visions via a musician’s voice and limbs. However, in this void of reference there’s nothing to pin that vision to and when the boundary between art and life dissolves and the work (at its best) looses itself from anything personal, those visions come to articulate something deeply strange.

The audio and video recordings of this performance, called No Mind was a Good Mind, were released as London Tuesday (Corwood 0793) and lists the tracks as

No Mind was a Good Mind

Part One (9:25)

Part Two (7:19)

Part Three (6:59)

Part Four (8:05)

Part Five (7:25)

Part Six (7:19)

Part Seven (9:35)

Part Eight (11:04)