Epsilon, ash, maple, plum

more sketches

music of the week: I have always the same problem with Radiohead: their music can be on the edge of genius but I find Thom Yorke's voice immensely boring (a little bit like Björk or Tim Buckley). I like the guy, his words, his compositions, his style, his presence, even the way he dances, but not when he's singing - too bad he's a singer… 

Still I think I will eventually buy The King of Limbs since I listened to Bloom, maybe just because there is a lot to learn about music in what they do… 

more sketches and CD reviews

It's been for ever since I last posted a CD review here! Like I said before, call me old school but I insist on buying my music on CDs - I've seen enough music formats, supports and online hosts disappear over the last decades, and killed enough computers and various players, to want to store the music I buy on passive standard physical support… Anyway, these are the last CDs I bought:  

Body/Head - Coming Apart: Like everybody, I was pained when I heard that Sonic Youth had split up but to be honest I didn't buy their last albums, and I listen mostly to their 1990s stuff. I heard here and there what Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo are doing with their current bands, but I wasn't convinced - that's different with Kim Gordon's new project Body/Head with guitarist Bill Nace. I was already a fan of Free Kitten since Unboxed, but now I'm sure that Gordon has always been the soul of Sonic Youth, even if Moore and Ranaldo were more visible - well, they play guitars and, you know, rock music is still a macho world… 

Anyway, Coming Apart is quite minimal and radical - just two guitars and a voice, none very melodious or harmonious - this album would probably never have been released and listened to if Gordon was not already famous, but this time it's a good thing! Gordon's fragile voice is poignant, and let subtle tiny things go through, just like the guitars let you hear vibrating strings, electricity, skin and nails combined to produce a strange musique concrète with notes… Having worked a long time in the dance field, I always looked for dancers whose dance don't hide their bodies - something rare - and I have this feeling here with Body/Head: their music isn't made to hide something, there are no tricks, no pretending, no showing-off. And I feel that what I can reach through their music is… just me!

Melanie de Biasio - No Deal: But a certain minimalism and a female singer, these two albums have little in common! Melanie de Biasio is a Belgian jazz singer and flutist - I love flute and even more jazz flute - and No Deal is a perfect mix of cool jazz, blues, trip-hop and pop. I first heard her live on the radio and I was afraid that the album would be overproduced and lose the simplicity and straightness I enjoyed but it's just perfect: voice, flute, drums, piano, clavinet/synth, and a lot of silence… I just regret that the texts of the songs are not as deep as the music, but that's being very demanding!  

There are many ways of being emotional in music - de Biasio does it by playing with familiar blues/jazz patterns - in sound and composition - and gently twisting them, removing everything that is unnecessary - that leaves a lot of room for acoustic and electronic resonances and harmonics, and there we are in pure physical aural pleasure! The musicians sound like they listened to every kind of music and distilled them in something very plain and dense, more based on honesty than genius or originality, and performed this with great care and feeling. It's the kind of album I'll certainly listen to when I don't feel like listening to anything!

And as I was playing these two albums again to write my reviews, I was imagining what it would be to merge them into one - to have Kim Gordon's experimental uncompromising roughness combined with Melanie de Biasio's creative suavity - it would be the best music of the 2010s! Let's hope Portishead will released their next album soon!

more sketches

Music of the week: I listened to so many different things in the last days that I didn't now what to pick, until I started this post while listening to a live jazz radio program, and discovered the Emile Parisien Quartet, some highly talented young French musicians - and I just can't stop listening! 

Epsilon template

Here we go! Andreas from Deutsches Tonholz started to work on the Epsilon - this is the template… The guitar itself will have a maple neck through ash body and a plumtree fretboard. Just received this picture and it makes my day!

Soft Power Ensemble of Vienna, concert in Fluc, Vienna

Here is a video of my first band project for many years - the Soft Power Ensemble of Vienna, with no less than 9 guitarists! It is still quite chaotic - it's improvised music after all - but we have plenty of ideas and will to improve our music. This song was the finale of last week's concert, everything was not so  rhythmical and assonant, there were some moments of raw noise but also more melodic pieces…

You'll find a short review and some good pictures here. Now we're looking for concerts!

Line-up: Eric Arn (guitar), Bertram Dhellemmes
 (guitar), Johanna Forster (guitar), Vincenzo Granato (guitar), Marcin Ł. Morga (bass), Diego Mune (guitar), Pailander (drums), Markus Reiter (guitar), Markus Steinkellner (guitar), Margaret Unknown (guitar), Christoph Weikinger (guitar).

more sketches

music of the week: my next CD will for sure be the last album of Melanie de Biasio, a belgian jazz singer/flutist playing a minimalist bluesy jazz bordering on trip-hop, with a little bit of electronics on top. Not the most radical music, but smart, emotional and well done.

miscellaneous

Next Wednesday I will play with my new band, the Soft Power Ensemble of Vienna, in Fluc, Vienna, the same venue where we performed with Yuri Landman. The band comprises 9 guitarists, plus drums and bass, and is not far from reaching sonic heavens. 

Didn't have a real band for 10 years, as I was busy with dance, multimedia performances and electronic music - it feels really good! I will post some music here soon.

These are the handwound pickups Jaime Campbell at The Creamery made for the Epsilon. We chose blade humbuckers with alnico 5 magnets for versatility and warmth. 

For some stupid marketing reasons, not-overwound pickups are called 'vintage' - that is in electric guitar business if you don't play metal, you play old school rock… the Epsilon will prove that wrong!

more sketches

music of the week: well, the music that thrills me lately is the one I play in my new music projects, the most advanced being the Soft Power Ensemble of Vienna, a many guitars improvisation orchestra that will play its first concert on January 29th in Fluc, Vienna. We gathered a fine bunch of guitarists - supported by a rhythm section - and figured how to combine sonic mayhem and musicality. Or a least we try...

The other project - with electronics, voices and guitars - still requires a lot of work so I will talk about it later, but we're on it!  

more sketches

music of the month: it's been long since my last post so I heard a lot of music, and it's not easy to chose. What actually stood up are bits of Astor Piazzolla songs I heard here and there - at the music school where I take my kid every week, practiced by a piano/violin duo in the studio next door, or in a metro station performed by a busking Russian band with accordion, hammered dulcimer and contrabass balalaika… I love Piazzolla, at some part of my life I've been listening exclusively to his music - I guess at the time I was myself playing the most hardcore noise music…

Otherwise even though I couldn't draw so much, I did many things - I started a new band called the Soft Power Ensemble of Vienna with many guitarists, and we play our first concert at the end of January.  I joined the Neu New York/Vienna Institute of Improvised Music sessions - that's how they call the monday evening improv jams at the Celeste jazz club -, and had the opportunity to play with very fine musicians there - more free jazz than noise improv but it's good to explore new areas, that's what I need right now. I learned how to use the Volcas I acquired a few weeks ago and I start to know what I can and want to do with them - though I still have to test them in a studio at high volume. 

And of course the Epsilon project goes on - though it's not in my hands anymore for the moment - and further projects are in discussion, we should build the Alpha next, and we are considering creating a company…  

pedals for sale

I have to sell a few pedals to fund my new project (I first considered selling a guitar - it would have been quicker - but I just can't do it, one day I'll probably die of starvation hugging my guitars). They are all in very good state - I'm quite maniac with my gear - and I picked these ones to sale mostly because they are too good for what I do with them! 

Take the Empress Tape Delay, it's a Rolls Royce and I use it like my MXR Carbon Copy, when there are many mods, sounds, tap tempos and stuff… It deserves to be used by someone who needs something sophisticated… Same with the Boss Loop Station, it has a lot of functions, layers, memories, when I just need a one switch TCE Ditto.

The Boss Metal Zone is incredibly powerful and more versatile that one could believe, but I'm so much into fuzzboxes now that I never really used it - and the Boss FZ-5 Fuzz emulates the Maestro FZ-1A, the Fuzz Face and the Octavia - it's perfect to explore fuzz sounds at a reasonable price before switching to a favorite - mine is now the Sovtek Big Muff - or to gig without having to carry a ton of precious pedals…

If you're interested, please ask me in comments for the prices (suited to European market).

You can check some reviews and demos here, here and here.

Korg Volca Bass and Beats

Finally, after I pre-ordered them 5 months ago (I wanted to have them as soon as they were released, but Korg distribution in Europe kinda sucks), I received my new Korg Volca instruments - the Volca Beats and the Volca Bass. I didn't read the user's manual yet but I already had a lot of fun with them last evening! They're very house oriented but there are many other ways to use them if you explore a little bit...

You probably noticed that in the last months I acquired and built several electronic music devices - and I have a serious project with them. I never felt comfortable to bring a computer on stage, but very soon I will have adapted my computer compositions to these analogue machines - and also I will learn to improvise with them… Of course I don't give up guitars, I just increase my music practice. I always hated sleeping.

more sketches

Vienna Improvisers Orchestra @ 21er Haus

Last week I went to see the Vienna Improvisers Orchestra in the Viennese contemporary art museum 21er Haus. I went there without knowing what to expect - I just knew one of the musicians - and the evening started with poems reading in German, that I mostly didn't understand (except, for some reasons, some erotic poems - gotta check on my learning German method).

The VIO comprises about twenty musicians and plays directed improvised music, conducted by Michael Fischer in Butch Morris style, with a made to measure gesture code. I've actually been a longtime member of a similar orchestra in France - the acclaimed La Pieuvre - I'm quite familiar with this, and I have to admit that the music resulting of this method is roughly always the same... It's powerful the first time you hear it, but once you know the tricks it's quite limited - the vocabulary is too narrow and the musicians' focus being always split between following the director, listening to the other musicians and improvising, they can't really produce something interesting more than a few minutes in a row...

The VIO is saved by its instrumentation and its musicians - the flutes and cellos give it its specific color, as do the female voice trio and its beautiful long modulated drones. Electric guitars are a good counterpoint with original sounds like detuned chords and a general well mastered minimalism. Drums are also quite well placed, that can be difficult. There was sometimes some text readings added to the music, quite cliché but not unpleasant, and even enjoyable when it slipped to theatrical.

picture by Christian Kurz

My feeling about the 21er Haus concert is that ultimately this kind of orchestra should be able to play without being directed. It would take a lot of practice and deeply involved musicians but I'd love to hear the music it would produce. I always believed that a music piece is always contained in its first seconds and that a good improviser is the one who can understand the underlaying structure and bring it to its 'logical' conclusion: to reach that as a collective is a grand achievement!

That makes me think that the ultimate purpose of Communism was supposed to be the disappearance of State, once the People has reached Political Maturity...

more sketches

You've seen the Epsilon whose prototype is about to be built, at first we planed to have two models built, the other one being the Alpha… I think that we will try to have its prototype crowd-funded once its big sister is ready and proves that our ideas are good… The Alpha is our ergonomic take on the telecaster - that's how bold we are!

Music of the week: for some reasons I managed to dismiss Hanni el Khatib and never listen to any of his song - though I heard a lot about him… I fixed that mistake in the last days and listened to a lot of his live videos on YouTube. I wish I could see him on stage but it seems that Vienna is not on the tours route, nothing I want to see ever passes here!

more sketches

Couldn't draw so much lately, but we've been busy with the Epsilon, and there's been many e-mails exchanged about it between me, Goran - who started the whole project - in Sweden, Andreas from Deutsches Tonholz in Germany, who will build the body, and Jaime from The Creamery in the UK, who will make the pickups… in a few weeks our baby will be born!

Tonight I play in literature café Carioca in Vienna, together with Ines Birkhan reading excerpts of her novel Chrysalis. It's about being enslaved by giant butterflies and I keep exploring noisy drone music with just a theremin and plenty of effect pedals… 

Music of the week: I just ordered the new CD of Kim Gordon's new band Body/Head, I'll tell more about it next time. Otherwise, I really love the single of Dirty Primitives I talked about yesterday, I listen to it all the time!

Dirty Primitives Go No Pop

Dirty Primitives just released a new single that is quite surprising in many ways - though not betraying the sound we've discovered on their first album. Obviously they don't play by the rules - that's probably why their music is good - and we like it. No Pop Music is a joyful tribute to David Bowie's late "Berlin period", a tongue-in-cheek anti-pop manifesto with a cheerful beat and plenty of heavily effected guitars - otherwise it wouldn't be Dirty Primitives!

There is so much music that is just recycling boring clichés while pretending to be to be sincere and free that the directness of their homage to Bowie is truly rejoicing, and was worth their putting aside their dirty sweaty blues sound for one song (I was told that it was a one-off project). And of course Bowie being the Prince of Thieves, absorbing, processing and rejuvenating all kind of music, is just asking to be looted!

You know what, I'm proud of these guys, they are old timers who've been on stage for over 20 years, playing all kind of crazy music with many bands (I've seen David sawing his guitar next to me while we were disconstructing Prince's Purple Rain - opening for Otomo Yoshihide) and they can create such a cool and catchy song just on a whim, then they put their heads in boxes and share the fun, and it's good.

Epsilon project

In the last months I've been busy with the Epsilon project. I was contacted by a guitar maker in Sweden who proposed me to conceive an ergonomic guitar and have a prototype built - and if things work create a company to have it released… We took plenty of time to exchange about what we really wanted and settled on this model, that I roughly built out of foam. The model should go to a luthier soon... More information on this project when things evolve!