jon abbey

http://www.bagatellen.com/archives/features/000407.html

the term comes from an abbreviation for Electro-Acoustic Improvisation, but has become a semantically meaningless term to group together a recent area of improvisation, mostly resulting from the collision of the post-AMM euro free improv aesthetic with the stripped down aesthetic of the Tokyo-based "onkyo" set of musicians (Otomo Yoshihide, Taku Sugimoto, Sachiko M, Toshimaru Nakamura, some of Tetuzi Akiyama's work, Ami Yoshida, etc).

"us", again with the "us"? what group of people is it that you think you speak for?

come on, man, just trying not to clog up the thread any more than necessary. any chance you're going to respond to my post above?

hahahaha, bingo! this wasn't what I found last time, but this'll do just fine given the current discussion... ballot for Strauss, D. Albums 1 Konono No. 1 Congotronics Crammed Discs http://www.villagevoice.com/pazzandjop05/ballots.php?cid=739

I think you're David Strauss. I'm actually pretty sure about it, from the last time we went through this. at least this time you remember who I am.

no real dialogue here, Chuck? it's a shame, Nessa was a pretty great label back in the day and George Lewis was front and center at the festival I put on at Tonic a few weeks back, even dropping some serious cash at the merch table. maybe it's not for you, but do you really not recognize the same spirit you had long ago? I hope you do, we wouldn't be working in the same way if it wasn't for you and others like you.

I'm not talking to "we" here, I'm talking to you, and I highly doubt many other posters here would care to be lumped in with you as part of "we". you've heard a lot of music in your life, you've got the sub-Byron Coley writing style down pat, and you've got enough pent-up anger from never getting a primo gig in the world of music criticism to rival LaMonte Young. but you've shown very few signs you know what's going on now, sorry, and I've read plenty of your posts. as for a discount, I sent you promos that you requested when I first started, which you turned around and dumped at Kim's pretty damn quickly. there's your discount, all-knowing one. that was seven years ago, though, the music's moved a lot since then. you might consider opening your ears at some point and checking it out, but probably not. it's all on SLSK if you're interested (although 192 MP3s are far from ideal), you know how that works.

come on, Chuck, you can do better than that. sure, a handful of artists improvised in real time using electronics in the seventies (and even in the sixties) and there's a classical electroacoustic history, but it doesn't take too much listening to figure out the differences. there are forerunners, certainly, AMM first and foremost. but Sachiko M isn't Alvin Lucier, for better or for worse (I'd say for better, but that's just me). anyway, I'm not really here to argue, just surprised that no one brought it up previously in nine pages, so I did. ep1str0phy's post was a good one.

yeah, that's obviously a very simplistic version of it, and each artist has their own specific lineage. EAI has become an increasingly worldwide music in recent years, with tiny knots of artists in many different countries, and obviously the Argentinians and the Austrians and the Australians are all going to be approaching things from different perspectives. but I do think there's a lot of truth to the basic lineage as I wrote above.

Mr. Strauss, nothing to be ashamed of, you haven't kept up with current music much the last decade or so. Congotronics might pass for cutting edge on ILX or Pitchfork, but not in the real world. luv, Jon P.S. Kan Mikami/Kazuki Tomakawa=totally different tradition. all Japanese people aren't the same, sorry.

wow, nine pages here, and no mention of EAI? impressively blinkered, people. the concept of "avant-garde" jazz in the semantic sense pretty much ended after Miles left the first time, post Agharta/Pangaea. Euro free improv carried the day for a while, but that also ended up in its own set of cul-de-sacs a while back. I suppose it's theoretically possible that something "new" could emerge from the jazz tradition, but we're going on three decades now and I'm not holding my breath. if there is an "avant-garde" in the jazz lineage in 2006 (and it's a pretty anachronistic phrase in and of itself), it's in the EAI world, which is two generations removed from sixties free jazz, and stems from the collision of the Japanese "onkyo" (another lame word) crew with the existing Euro free improv world around 1998-1999. the ideas of exploration and risk-taking, which were so crucial for so long in the jazz tradition and which have largely been ignored in the last 30 years, still exist here, in a tradition which has jazz as one of its primary roots.

the MEV trio is awful, the AMM trio (their last show together, I believe) is unmemorable (and possibly has Keith mixed down quite a bit, although I can't swear to this), and the combined disc is far less than the sum of its parts. Keith was right to not want it out, but the other five overruled him.

ugh, right, blocked that one out of my head. it's two CDs, one CD of sextet collaboration, one CD with the two trio sets from FOTC. it was released against Keith Rowe's wishes, FWIW.

that's all there are, the ones I listed above. the IRMLs are distributed by Forced Exposure, which is about as large as it gets in this world. like I said, 4 or 5 years ago when the first Alga Marghen release came out, the plan then was for them to do 10 MEV releases all together. my guess is that the material doesn't hold up so well (confirmed by the first Alga Marghen release), so maybe it's just been dropped. but along roughly similar lines, there's a new archival box set from Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza, two unreleased CDs of material plus a DVD: http://www.die-schachtel.com/html/ds13.htm

yeah, stay away from the BYG ones as mentioned. the Alga Marghen one is OK (Spacecraft/Unified Patchwork Theory), they were supposed to do 10 MEV CDs, but that doesn't seem to be moving along very fast. the best releases to come out on CD so far are the ones on Allan Bryant's IRML label: http://www.forcedexposure.com/labels/irml.html we have the first one of these on sale for $7, not sure if I pointed people here to our sale section or not, but it's here: http://www.erstwhilerecords.com/distro/sale.html

the formerly enterprising Trevor Manwaring, he passed away a year or two ago.

pretty sure he's just talking about the names on the CD label, and how I'm guessing there's only one instead of three, like there should be. what's your problem here?

I mean, honestly, is it that difficult to reconstruct a post you just wrote five minutes before?

no, we haven't met, and no one's bickering. I'm just saying you keep talking about wanting a piece of the guy, just go do it.

I don't think you really do. if you did, you'd post there periodically, continually egging him on until he re-emerged. as it is, you posted once and withdrew the bulk of it when you messed it up in editing. if you actually want a piece of him, go and get it.

hey, Chris, since you'd know much better than anyone on JC, do you think I'm right with my Damen=Gibson hunch?

I don't have extra copies of the artwork either, and I really don't think any Ersts are very hard to find.

a similar label I find more interesting is homophoni: http://homophoni.com/ I particularly recommend 004 and 013.

right, all I was saying is I'm not sure you realize just how few of "you" there are these days. maybe you do, but it doesn't make much sense for me to repress a disc that took 5 years to sell out of its initial 800 copies (not counting promos and musician copies). not saying I won't repress anything again, but it makes increasingly less sense in this marketplace.