Environmental improv: composition by temperament & inheritance, playing as one walks in a group, conscious of sound, economics and disdaining The Jam.
rev. 99 pairs two duos: Akio Mokuno & 99 Hooker who have been performing out of NY for the last [+]Environmental improv: composition by temperament & inheritance, playing as one walks in a group, conscious of sound, economics and disdaining The Jam.
rev. 99 pairs two duos: Akio Mokuno & 99 Hooker who have been performing out of NY for the last three years and Chris Forsyth & Ernesto Diaz-Infante who have just released their second CD Wires and Wooden Boxes (Pax Recordings/Evolving Ear).
Environmental improv begins in fact: recorded music differs essentially from live performance. The "improv world" has never resolved spontaneous concert experience with mechanical reproduction. It wants to, but it won't. The two cannot be reconciled. CDs are objects, concerts are experiences. rev. 99 is an objectified experience. To bring this fact home, the presence of the mix was emphasized with engineer Ross Bonnadonna. The mix was also part of the performance. Each heard in headphones the fixing of their sound. Therefore each player could respond to the very process of production that 99% of all "music" ignores: musicians don't make music, technology makes CDs. To avoid over-Romanticizing this effort with ideas of purity, Ross and 99 did insert a few obvious overdubs. rev. 99 may make conscious of the problem of fixing improvisation and intuition into product, it does not claim to "solve" it.
In recording, musicians increasingly are often minor asides in the production of music. In the pop world from Phil Spector to Britney Spears the traditional conceits of music such as technique, talent and personal feeling are little more than distractions trumpeted to hide the grim sound of the "star-making machine" (including anti-stars, avant-garde stars, noise-stars, etc.) The sounds of social production, those hums and grunts of technology that technology wants to efface, from the linoleum jazz of Steely Dan to the well-placed post-punk-alternative turd drop; these are sounds rev. 99 amplify and/or strip-mine. rev. 99 is the sound of the outtake. These sounds are not specific. It is the approach that references but does not mimic the two story air-conditioner at Madison Square Garden that cools Aerosmith fans with a deafening hiss, or the rumble in the belly of Garth Brook's tax attorney; the sounds of the world that produce the rattle of a subway or imposed silence
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