IF, BWANA / Assemble. Age!
Trio Scordatura; Lisa Barnard Kelley (voice); Monique Buzzarté (trombone); Tom Hamilton (nord modular synthesizer); Jacqueline Martelle (flute); Al Margolis (computer, processing)
"This is strange, haunting, serious music, hardly the kind of stuff you're going to rave about in the pub with your pals, but something best appreciated alone, in a quiet corner of your life."–DW, Paris Transatlantic
Modern classical music meets industrial meets musique concrete.
The music of If, Bwana (Al Margolis) represents a vigorous, original and informed continuation of the experimental traditions of American music, responding as it does to the sounds and materials of late 20th and early 21st century American life with a keenly sensitive ear and a marvelous feeling for form, balance, and texture in music.
The five works on this recording all utilize and reprocess the performances (both studio and live) of the musicians and vocalists. Their work has been processed, edited, selected and assembled into strange and mutated pieces which in many cases are quite some way removed from the realms of the familiar.
TRACK LIST
Ringing the Bell (8:32)
DTTO Lisa (8:53)
Death to the 8 Notes (15:22)
Cicada #1: EHG Version (9:15)
Six Minus 6 (10:00)
REVIEWS
Al Margolis career as If, Bwana has been going strong for more than twenty-five years now and it has making strange turns. Originally, to put it crudely, If, Bwana was an industrial group, using raw sound collage/montage techniques, but it has grown over the years in a way that not many others do. While many of his peers took the route to more musique concrete, Margolis went into the serious avant-garde direction. Working with small ensembles and soloists with various instruments, he now composes that are seriously modern and, at other times, sounding improvised. The role of Margolis is that of the conductor. Not in the traditional sense, raising a baton, but the organizer. He tapes the music and then fiddles it about using the computer. Maybe the 'organizer' is a better word, or 'assembler', to stay in tune with the title of the CD. Sometimes he receives sound material, such as by Trio Scordatura, which he then organizes into a piece of music, such as the nicely woven drone like sounds of 'Ringing The Bell', and sometimes they all team up to play live, as in 'Cicada #1: EHG Version'. Its here that the music sounds more improvised, an 'real' instruments (voice, trombone, flute) collide with a nord modular and computer. In 'Six Minus 6' and 'DTTO' it seems we are dealing with a composed piece of music and its hard to say what the role of Margolis is. His working method seems to differ within each piece he does and that's something that is surely great as it makes a very release. Different approaches to a similar working ground. A fine work, yet again, of various interests (composed music, improvisation, musique concrete techniques) merging together. Quite a unique voice in this music.
François Couture, Monsieur Délire
With this new album, Al Margolis (If, Bwana) presents five electroacoustic works using acoustic instruments: Lisa Barnard Kelley’s voice, a string trio (Trio Scordatura), Monique Buzzarté’s trombone, and Jacqueline Martelle’s flute. Tom Hamilton also contributes synthesizer. “Ringing the Bell” (with the string trio) is overlaying microtonalities. At the other end of the spectrum, “Death to the 8 Notes” is a reconstruction of a quintet improvisation. In-between, we have musics blending improvisation and computer composition - real sounds and virtualized sounds. Perhaps If, Bwana’s most accomplished and overall most elegant record to date.
Dan Warburton, Paris Transatlantic
Al Margolis's work under the moniker of If, Bwana has always been a great example of the kind of music that falls through the cracks between those ever so arbitrary and increasingly irrelevant genres – though he's worked frequently with improvisers, you won't find it in the Improv section of your local record shop, and despite its considerable compositional intricacy you're not likely to come across a Bwana album in the Contemporary Classical bin either. By rights, since Margolis makes extensive use of electronics both to produce and organise his sound material, you should be able to find his discs filed away under "musique concrète" – the human voice features prominently in Michel Chion's work too, and there's never been any doubt about where to find his stuff – but Margolis's early background in post-Industrial cassette culture and tough, gritty early work ("welcome to difficult listening hour") has somehow led to his exclusion from the ranks of, cough, serious composers. If he'd started Bwana five or six years before he did, I'm sure he'd have made it to Steven Stapleton's Nurse list and would have been assured alt.music stardom ever since. Maybe that's why this review has ended up in the "Electronica" section, my kind of fourre-tout for odds and ends.
But, apart from the opening minute of gloomy synthesizer there's nothing "electronica" about the opening "Ringing the Bell", sourced from samples of the work of Amsterdam-based microtonalists Trio Scordatura (Elisabeth Smalt on viola, Alfrun Schmid on voice and PT correspondent Bob Gilmore on keyboards). Nor is the second track, "DTTO Lisa", collaging spoken and sung fragments featuring the voice(s) of Lisa Barnard Kelley, very likely to correspond to what you might consider "electronic music". The two central pieces, "Death to the 8 Notes" and "Cicada #1 : EHG Version" also feature Kelley, along with Monique Buzzarté (trombone), Jacqueline Martelle (flute), Tom Hamilton (modular synth), and Margolis himself on computer. The electronics are more in evidence, as you'd expect, but it's the multitracked acoustic instruments – the distant yelps and growls of Buzzarté's trombone, Martelle's twittering flute – that grab the attention, shooting through the dark foliage of strange queasy drones like shafts of late afternoon sunlight. The texture thins out somewhat in the closing "Six Minus 6", which features just trombone and voice, both extensively multitracked and pitchshifted once more (a Margolis speciality) – but the mood doesn't lighten. This is strange, haunting, serious music, hardly the kind of stuff you're going to rave about in the pub with your pals ("fuckin' wicked that new Bwana CD, innit mate?") but something best appreciated alone, in a quiet corner of your life.
Massimo Ricci, Touching Extremes
Al Margolis started If, Bwana decades ago, when the cassette was a suitable medium for an idiosyncratic research. Even now that the latter is spelled out by talented musicians and released in technically improved media, it’s good to see that an element of slight weirdness – in turn defining a typical feel of unsettlement – still lies at the basis of that craft. The five tracks comprised by this CD represent a partial summary of Margolis’ versatility, and a valid illustration of the creative currents pushing his “mutant music” forward, usually via processes of deconstruction and re-assemblage of specific materials.
A remarkable aspect is the ambiguous nature of the selections in which Lisa Barnard Kelley is the obvious protagonist, her tone – natural or modified – embodying chapters such as “DTTO Lisa” and “Death To The 8 Notes” with a mix of anxiety and sarcasm which renders the pieces akin to certain avant-garde of the sixties, minus the museum’s dust smell. It almost seems that If, Bwana is mocking some of that era’s conventions, though one’s not really able to perceive intentionality. What transpires as a certainty is the usual predilection for the lower frequencies, and the mastery in gathering organically droning structures complemented by a clearly detectable improvisational factor. My favourite in that sense is “Cicada #1”, which juxtaposes Barnard Kelley’s pitches with Monique Buzzarté’s trombone, Tom Hamilton’s Nord Modular synth, Jacqueline Martelle’s flute and the principal’s computer to achieve a totality whose biotic jaggedness is pure pleasure for the ears.
Another terrific affair is the initial “Ringing The Bell” – performed by Trio Scordatura – which adds Alfrun Schmid near-cadaveric voiced emissions to a marvellous meltdown of viola (Elisabeth Smalt) and keyboards (Bob Gilmore). An essential discordance characterizing a crepuscular commentary for the decadence of classic counterpoint, just an alternative way for this restlessly impassive gentleman to emphasize a highly individual style.
He's back to delight lovers of more "purist" experimentation. Al Margolis - aka If, Bwana – is an acrobatic audio-artist, active since the eighties, who remains effective and calibrated in the production of concrete techniques, weaving improvisation and deliberation, combining acoustic instruments, eccentric vocals and delicate dissonances. Sequenced organic drones, not free from the influence of certain avant-gardes of the sixties, highlight deep vibrations between the piercing notes of the trombone, synth, flute and computer, in refined atonal passages and overlapping layers of sounds and audio emergences. The project involved a number of musicians including vocalist Lisa Barnard Kelley, Monique Buzzarté, Tom Hamilton, Elizabeth Smalt, Bob Gilmore and Jacqueline Martelle, just to name a few – all of whom are experienced in moving between hard passages. Listeners are presented with atmospheres that are often gloomily hypnotic and prone to surreal and thoughtful collages, sophisticated in their textures but accessible to anyone willing to pay attention to non-conventional and poetic harmonies.
If, Bwana, the member-shuffling electroacoustic ensemble led by Chester’s Al Margolis, was last covered here in October 2008, via a review of Favorite Encores (Pogus Productions), a split release with composer Noah Creshevsky. The following year saw the release of the project’s similarly daring 31 on New York’s GD Stereo imprint. And now, with Assemble.Age!, those on the hunt for weird sounds should again prick up their ears, as the new disc finds Margolis’s sonically surprising adventures continuing just as intrepidly as before.
Margolis is a musician who straddles the rock and experimental worlds: When he’s not clicking away at the programs and processors that collate and mash up the samples used for his If, Bwana guise, he plays bass for long-running art-punks the Styrenes, a band rooted in the same 1970s Northeast Ohio avant scene that birthed Pere Ubu and Devo. Like If, Bwana’s last outing, Assemble. Age! draws on the leader’s ties to Kingston’s forward-thinking Deep Listening Institute to once more feature the voice of DLI artist Lisa Barnard Kelley. The extended centerpiece “Death to the 8 Notes” is a dark tour de force, interweaving Kelly’s sinister snickers and unsettling narrative (“I was cut in half at the waist”) and Margolis’s samples with Monique Buzzarté’s swelling trombone, Jacqueline Martell’s creepy flute, and Tom Hamilton’s squelching synth. But perhaps most revelatory is the all-vocal “DTTO Lisa,” in which Kelly’s rambling spoken and wordless improvisations are chopped up and reworked into a nine-minute kinetic epic.
