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Organized Anarchy in OOIOO’s Nijimusi

March 10, 2020 By John Payne Leave a Comment

on Thrill Jockey
Reviewed by John Payne

What are we looking for when we listen to new music? What is most important? It’s not so much that each and every musical experience has to be formally groundbreaking and utterly unlike anything that has come before, though that rare occurrence certainly does help. Really, we’re talking about the same thing we ask of pop music or jazz or anything else, which is the element of surprise — surprise at how our assumptions about what music is and ought to be get a hefty boot in the booty; surprise at how our own pretensions toward being in whatever kind of vanguard get challenged, how we are forced to question our own orthodoxies, our own ways of breaking the rules. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Records, The Line

Gathering No Moss, Toh-Kichi’s Baikamo Wanders Freely If Not Ferally Through The Avant-Garde

February 7, 2020 By John Payne Leave a Comment

on Libra Records
Reviewed by John Payne

Since her 1996 duo set with Paul Bley on Something About Water (Libra), pianist-composer Satoko Fujii has led numerous groups in widely varied formats ranging from free jazz to avant-rock to new-music chamber works. The possessor of a most formidable set of playing chops, Fujii is an intellectually engaged and refreshingly progressive-minded musician whose idiosyncratically shaped and harmonized compositions have seen upwards of 80-plus releases on her and partner Natsuki Tamura’s Libra label (Tamura, who also goes by the name Kappa Maki, is on his own a beautifully unclichéd tone-warper with an equally brazen disregard for the hollow holys of his instrument). If you want a reference point for the kind of beyond-jazz musical freedom Fujii represents, you might think Carla Bley and Michael Mantler’s Jazz Composers Orchestra stuff of the early ‘70s. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Jazz, Records, The Line

Excerpt from Jaki Liebezeit: The Life, Theory and Practice of a Master Drummer

February 5, 2020 By John Payne Leave a Comment

by John Payne

Jaki Liebezeit: The Life, Theory and Practice of a Master Drummer
edited by Jono Podmore

Unbound, 320 pp., $16.94

The drum master Jaki Liebezeit pursued over a decades-long career an enduring fascination with the core truths of time as expressed via rhythm. Not just a musician who wished to perfect a technique or expand his range of drumming styles, Liebezeit took his fascination deeper, to realms in which the very whys and wherefores of rhythm’s true place in any musical mode were of paramount importance – as was by extension its metaphorical relationship to the human being’s role in larger collective society. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Books, The Line

David S. Ware New Quartet’s Théâtre Garonne, 2008

November 4, 2019 By John Payne Leave a Comment

Out November 15 on Aum Fidelity
Reviewed by John Payne

When David S. Ware passed away in October of 2012, the world lost a sound it’s never getting back again. That sound was revolutionary, it was a tough sound, a punk-jazz sound that asks a lot of questions and can’t wait around for answers. Ware’s sax tone was a raspy, ragged, haaard-blowing, Ayler-ish thing that frequently produced a kind of fear ­­– fear that the man was gonna explode, he’s blowing so hard. That concern is palpable on this live concert recording, Théâtre Garonne, 2008, the latest issue from the David S. Ware Archive Series on the ever-righteous Aum Fidelity label. The set showcases the fact that Ware had already been suffering the strains of the illness that eventually killed him. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Jazz, Records, The Line

CUP’s Hydra-Headed Spinning Creature

October 24, 2019 By John Payne Leave a Comment

on Northern Spy
Reviewed by John Payne

Wherein the husband and wife team up to rinse and shine the aural punchbowl, no squabbling. Nels Cline & Yuka Honda are Cup, co-cookers of rich, musically nutritious stuff packed with savory, skewed nuance that reflects their artistic differences and affinities. Guitar visionary Cline’s scope, skills and, yes, taste, are renowned of late. His fiercely inventive rock/jazz/other playing with Wilco has boosted his fame-o-meter quite a bit, as have his numerous collaborations with the multifarious likes of Medeski Martin & Wood, Deerhoof, Charlie Haden, Julius Hemphill and Mike Watt, and his own all-instrumental Nels Cline Singers. Keyboardist/electronicist/producer Honda of the late avant-pop duo Cibo Matto has played a vital role in Yoko Ono and Sean Lennon’s bands and is a crucial presence on the downtown NYC new-thing/non-genre/performance-art scene. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Records, The Line

Sound Itself As The Only Way Forward In Swans’ Leaving Meaning

October 11, 2019 By John Payne Leave a Comment

out October 25 on Young God Records
Reviewed by John Payne

Michael Gira founded/guiding-lighted the sort of no-wave / noise / spiritual-purification band Swans in NYC 35 some odd years ago, and, roughly, he’s made a career out of trying musically to express the inexpressible ever since. After a hiatus of a few years, during which he formed Angels of Light, Gira re-formed Swans in 2010 and proceeded to release a series of exceedingly, brutally beautiful double-CDs of mental mayhem-catharsis. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Records, The Line

Wounds Of Desire In Pedro Almodóvar’s Pain And Glory

October 4, 2019 By John Payne Leave a Comment

Reviewed by John Payne

Were you looking for such a thing, you’d be hard-pressed to find a more humanizing film than Pedro Almodóvar’s latest little miracle. The Spanish director/writer’s Pain and Glory is a story about an artist, who suffers, and remembers, and relives. This tale is only somewhat the story of people in general, though it’s easy and quite wrenching to project ourselves onto the life of Salvador Mallo (Antonio Banderas), a veteran film director afflicted by several physical maladies. His bodily decline brings him great pain, physical and mental. Of course he can’t work, can’t create, in this deteriorating state. He spends his days mostly prostrate in bed, having gobbled a vast regimen of pills and yogurts, and just recently has dabbled in heroin. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Film, The Line

Anthony Braxton’s Accessibly Antithetical Quartet (New Haven) 2014

July 12, 2019 By John Payne Leave a Comment

on Firehouse 12 Records
Reviewed by John Payne

This monumental four-CD box set photographs the one-time meeting of an avant all-star and super-like-minded foursome: The infamously abstruse saxophonist and conceptualist Anthony Braxton partnered with Nels Cline (guitar), Greg Saunier (drums) and Taylor Ho Bynum (brass). It is music that, because of the heavily theoretical predilections of its “bandleader,” might suggest a sound that reeks of a dry formality. It doesn’t. It does present a number of issues and questions. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Jazz, Records, The Line

Amon Tobin’s Fear in a Handful of Dust

May 17, 2019 By John Payne Leave a Comment

on Nomark

Reviewed by John Payne

On the occasions when he drops a new platter, the veteran producer/DJ-composer Amon Tobin can always be counted on to raise the sonic-magic bar several notches. From his early found-sounds ‘n’ beats productions such as Bricolage (1997), Permutation (1998), the magnificent Supermodified (2000) and Out From Out Where (2002), he progressed to things like Foley Room (2007), which explored the role of sound design and field recordings, and ISAM (2011), the titular acronym referring to “Invented Sound Applied to Music” and in which Tobin utilized advanced synthesis processing and production techniques traditionally reserved for sound design in film.  [Read more…]

Filed Under: Records, The Line

Matthew Shipp Trio’s Signature

April 12, 2019 By John Payne Leave a Comment

on ESP-Disk’

Reviewed by John Payne

The rather prolific Matthew Shipp is the most relevant jazz pianist of the last few decades. With more than 85 releases of bold ‘n’ brave music as a solo performer and in duo/ trio/quartet formats alongside the avantish jazz likes of the David S. Ware Quartet, Ivo Perelman, Sabir Mateen, Darius Jones, Joe Morris, Jemeel Moondoc, Mat Walerian and two tons of others, he hasn’t had time to take a vacation. Several years ago Shipp told me he was thinking of retiring from recording, because, he said, there was just too much music out there in consumer land. I’m glad he didn’t, because his recorded output since spouting such balderdash has only grown more profound — and truly electrifying. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Jazz, Records, The Line

The Literal Sounds Of Plastic On Matmos’s Plastic Anniversary

March 31, 2019 By John Payne Leave a Comment

Thrill Jockey
Reviewed by John Payne

In music, in general, combining high conceptual aims with what we call accessibility (a troublesome concept on its own) is not an easy thing to pull off. My no doubt annoyingly subjective list of musicians who’ve achieved a balancing in this equation (ear-friendliness + modernity) would include, say, Robert Wyatt, Lee “Scratch” Perry, Jon Hassell, Holger Czukay, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Terje Rypdal, Annette Peacock, Diamanda Galás, Coil and the Velvet Underground. This varied bunch shares the notion of basing the work on musical or thematic ideas, and in so doing not skimping on the soul; the goal is a kind of beauty. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Records, The Line

Xiu Xiu’s Girl With Basket of Fruit

February 15, 2019 By John Payne Leave a Comment

on Polyvinyl
Reviewed by John Payne

This all by way of passing comment on the challenging Xiu Xiu, never an easy thing to do. A couple of years ago I talked to the band’s main male Jamie Stewart. He was forthcoming and amenable, not a difficult artiste, and he talked about what he does with a seriousness that I liked very much. He thinks he’s a cranky, pretentious arsehole, but I don’t. Anyway, I do think it’s interesting that Stewart’s openly human persona doesn’t always reconcile with the often sonically and lyrically traumatized music he makes. There is some backstory: He told me about his father, a drug addict who died by suicide. It’s hard for me now to not project a lot of liteweight pop psychology upon Stewart’s musical madness. Like, a-ha [Read more…]

Filed Under: Records, The Line

Expansive New Work From The Necks: Body

November 4, 2018 By John Payne Leave a Comment

on Northern Spy Records

Reviewed by John Payne

The Necks: Body (reviewed at Riot Material magazine)How to better classify an improvisational unit such as the Necks? Since the Australian trio perform their music on instruments associated with jazz — acoustic piano, double bass and drums — they tease us with whether or not they ought to be aligned with the severely rule-bound world of jazz at all. Whatever the case, it is hugely satisfying to hear the group’s lack of reverence for the form’s many hallowed conventions. With a healthy, punky boredom about all that, the Necks poke all ye olde shopworn swinging jazz a certifiably new bumhole. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Jazz, Records, The Line

Yoko Ono’s Incomparable Warzone

October 4, 2018 By John Payne Leave a Comment

Reviewed by John Payne

A sort of a disclaimer here: I’ve known Yoko Ono for many years, or at least had the pleasure of interviewing her several times, as I have her son Sean. I like both of them very much. I’ve checked them out on different levels, tried to cut through any of the potential typical self-self-self-hyping showbiz bullshit or what have you, and they passed the tests with flying colors. They are real people, with good hearts and minds. (You’ll just have to trust me on that.) Thus my understanding of and sympathy for Yoko Ono colors my critical soul a little bit, I don’t mind saying it. I want to approve and feel enthusiasm about her music; this means I’m open to it. And I do feel that Ono’s latest and, one hopes, not final record,Warzone — a collection of 13 songs from her past work, spanning 1970-2009 — is the best album of her career. It is deep, and moving, unlike anything I’ve heard in a long time, and perhaps never have heard before. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Records, The Line

Jon Hassell’s Listening to Pictures (Pentimento Volume 1)

June 22, 2018 By John Payne Leave a Comment

Reviewed by John Payne

One perhaps unusual compliment we ought to pay to Jon Hassell’s new Listening to Pictures (Pentimento Volume 1) is that, like all of his music, one grows impatient having to write about it while listening to it. This music — which I want to never end when I put it on — is too seductive to be looking at a computer screen while trying to come to terms with its intriguing charms. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Records, The Line

Wajatta’s Wickedly Funky (And Fun!) Casual High Technology

May 24, 2018 By John Payne 1 Comment

on Comedy Dynamics
Reviewed by John Payne

As a way of potentially creating something genuinely new, or at least surprising, the time-honored but perhaps neglected artistic scheme of melding or juxtaposing multiple dissimilar aesthetic beliefs or conceptual visions in order to birth a third entity, independent of its parents’ genetics, might be the best way to describe the resonant thrills encoded within the grooves of Wajatta’s debut album. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Records, The Line

riot sounds

Into the Triangular Warp, Without Tether

New from Mandy, Indiana
“Injury Detail”

on Fire Talk Records

The Line

Louise Bourgeois: What Is The Shape of This Problem?

at University of Southern California, Fisher Museum of Art. (through 3 December 3, 2022) Reviewed by Margaret Lazzari Louise Bourgeois is widely recognized for her sculptures and installations, but Louise Bourgeois: What is The Shape of This Problem is a wonderful opportunity to immerse yourself in her perhaps-lesser-known prints, fabric work and writings. This exhibit contains over […]

Moonage Daydream Conveys More Myth Than Man

Moonage Daydream Dir. Brett Morgan Reviewed by Nicholas Goldwin As one of the greatest shapeshifters in the expansive history of rock music, it seems only fitting that the documentary with David Bowie as its subject never seems content to express the trials, tribulations and artistic triumphs of Bowie in any one fixed way. This is […]

The Artful Construction of The ‘I’

by Merve Emre NYR The essay form…bears some responsibility for the fact that bad essays tell stories about people instead of elucidating the matter at hand. —Theodor Adorno The personal essay is a genre that is difficult to define but easy to denounce. The offending element is rarely the essay as a form, but its […]

Carnación di Rocío Molina, at Riot Material Magazine.

On Binding: Notes from Venice

Bienalle Arte and Bienalle Danza, Venice 2022 By Allyn Aglaïa Chest bound, lips sealed, I walked through Venice alone, quiet, and: thought about narratives that bind us to erotic binds

Mohammad Barrangi's Guardians of Eden (Dreamscape #8), at Riot Material magazine.

Transcendence Beyond Erasure in Mohammad Barrangi’s Dreamscape

at Advocartsy, Los Angeles (thru 5 November 2022) Reviewed by Christopher Ian Lutz Fantasy requires a symbolic vehicle to transport a character from the real world into the imaginary realm, where the laws of reality are subverted or obscured to justify an otherwise absurd event. The artist might depict the vehicle as a real object […]

Idris Khan's The Pattern of Landscape at Sean Kelly Gallery, Los Angeles. An interview with Idris is at Riot Material magazine.

An Interview with Idris Khan

The Pattern of Landscape, at Sean Kelly, Los Angeles (through 5 November 2022) by Ricky Amadour Opening on the corner of Highland and De Longpre Avenues in the heart of Hollywood, Idris Khan’s The Pattern of Landscape is the inaugural exhibition at Sean Kelly, Los Angeles. Khan investigates color theory, text, and musical concepts through […]

Soul Crash: Our Slow, Inexorable Release Into the Metaverse

by Sue Halpern The Metaverse: And How It Will Revolutionize Everything by Matthew Ball Liveright 352pp., $18.89 NYR In October 2021, when Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook would now be called Meta and its business interests would be pivoting to the metaverse, there was almost universal confusion: most observers had no idea what he was […]

green tara

Pointing the Staff at the Old Man

A wisdom transmission by Samaneri Jayasāra Excerpted from —  Advice from the Lotus Born  from the chapter “Pointing the Staff at the Old Man” Translated by Eric Pema Kunsang Rangjung Yeshe Publications, 184pp., $21.95 . .

Margaret Lazzari’s "Shimmer." From the exhibition "Breathing Space."

Margaret Lazzari’s Luminous Breathing Space

at George Billis Gallery, Los Angeles (through 8 October 2022) Reviewed by Nancy Kay Turner “Things are not what they seem: nor are they otherwise.” –Buddha Margaret Lazzari’s luminous solo exhibition of paintings, entitled Breathing Space, were painted during the pandemic, and the exhibition title is indeed significant. It’s defined as a respite, a hiatus, or an […]

A Look Back on an Iconoclast: Art Critic Dave Hickey

by Jarrett Earnest Far From Respectable: Dave Hickey and His Art by Daniel Oppenheimer University of Texas Press, 141 pp., $24.95 The Invisible Dragon: Essays on Beauty, Revised and Expanded by Dave Hickey University of Chicago Press, 123 pp., $15.00 (paper) Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy by Dave Hickey Art Issues Press, 215 […]

From Phil Tippet's Mad God, reviewed at Riot Material magazine.

Nihilism Births Its Own Interminable Hell

Mad God Dir. Phil Tippett Reviewed by Nicholas Goldwin Technically astonishing and immersive to a fault, director Phil Tippett successfully demonstrates that thirty years of relentless dedication to your craft can lead to cinematic innovations even his old stomping grounds – the sets of Star Wars and Jurassic Park – have yet to catch up. […]

Eve Wood, "Ostrich Pretending To Be A Francis Bacon Painting." At Riot Material.

An Interview with Artist Eve Wood

Eve Wood: Hanging in There to Hang On at Track 16 Gallery, Los Angeles (opening reception: Saturday, September 10, 7-10pm) by Julie Adler I met Eve Wood at Holly Matter, an art gallery on Heliotrope in East Hollywood, 22 years ago now. I recall she got up and read some of her poems. Incisive, cutting, […]

John Lurie’s The History of Bones

Reviewed by Cintra Wilson The History of Bones: A Memoir by John Lurie Random House, 435 pp., $28.00 NYRB It was 1989 when I saw John Lurie on TV in a late-night advertisement for the new Lounge Lizards album, Voice of Chunk, which was “not available in stores” and selling exclusively through an 800 number. Operators were standing […]

Marlene Dumas, "Losing (Her Meaning)," 1988. At Riot Material magazine.

Marlene Dumas’ Masks of Inborn Gods

open-end, at Palazzo Grassi, Venice (through 8 January 2023) Reviewed by Arabella Hutter von Arx Four relatively small artworks greet the visitor in the first room of the Marlene Dumas exhibit, open-end, at Palazzo Grassi. D-rection shows a young man contemplating his rather large and purple erection. A bluish white face and a brown face unite […]

Clarice Lispector

Baffling the Sphinx: The Enigmatic World of Clarice Lispector

Reviewed by John Biscello Água Viva by Clarice Lispector New Directions Publishing 88pp., $14.95 Too Much of Life: The Complete Crônicas by Clarice Lispector New Directions Publishing 864pp., $29.95 The word is my fourth dimension –Clarice Lispector And on the eighth and endless day, where the bottomless hallelujah meets Ouroboros, God created Clarice Lispector. Maybe. […]

Donna Ferrato "Diamond, Minneapolis, MN 1987." At Riot Material magazine

Donna Ferrato’s Magnificent Holy

at Daniel Cooney Fine Art, NYC (through July 29 2022) Reviewed by Phoebe Hoban The small scale of Donna Ferrato’s snapshot-like black-and-white photographs belies their personal and political power. Whether they document the medical sinks and shelves in a now-shuttered Texas abortion clinic, or hone in on the badly bruised face of a domestic violence […]

Darcilio Lima Unknown Lithograph, 1972. At Riot Material magazine.

Magia Protetora: The Art of Luciana Lupe Vasconcelos and Darcilio Lima

at the Buckland Museum of Witchcraft and Magick, Cleveland OH (through 30 September 2022) Curated by Stephen Romano Gallery Reviewed by Christopher Ian Lutz The extension of a lineage occurs not merely by the repetition of form, but by the intersection of conservation and revolution. Transformation is fundamental to preserving the essence of a given tradition’s rituals and […]

Eve Wood's A Cadence for Redemption, written in the fictive voice of Abraham Lincoln, is excerpted at Riot Material magazine.

Songs For Our Higher Selves

A Cadence for Redemption: Conversations With Abraham Lincoln by Eve Wood Del Sol Press, 46pp., $5.99 Employing the fictive voice of a former president, Eve Wood shifts the perspective on the happenings of our times – where all indicators point to the slow, inexorable collapse of the American Experiment – to the one man who […]

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