Zero Sun No Point is a belated release of two performances by the Jarmanless version of the Art Ensemble, dating from consecutive days in October 1996. German writer/musician Hartmut Geerken composed the two interlinked scores performed here and participates in both performances. Though the liner notes call them “radio plays,” the pieces could more accurately be described as “musicircus” works in the tradition of John Cage. As with Cage, the sources are as much literary, conceptual and philosophical as musical. The first piece, Zero Sun, is a tribute to Salomo Friedlaender (“Mynona”), author of Creative Indifference and I-Heliocentre; the second, No Point, concerns Sun Ra, not simply as a musician but as a thinker and poet (Ra’s homemade etymologies and riddling wordplay are prominent components of the piece). But Geerken’s accretive, associative scores also find room for Kant, a prose text by Amiri Baraka, recordings of Artaud and Pound, the sound of a swarm of bees, and much else; the linguistic melange ranges from English, French and German to Korean and Djolla; the performances also involve live input from audience members and the broadcast and reception of messages via the internet.

Does all this add up to a curiosity or a satisfying musical event? Not an easy question to answer, in part because of the sheer disparateness of the materials and artistic personalities that went into the project, in part because the copious documentation in the accompanying booklet is more confusing than helpful. (Geerken’s text and reproduced score and Steve Lake’s live report on the second concert often contradict the recordings, so presumably further reworking occurred in the studio. For instance, the timings and ordering of events in No Point quite often disagree with both the score and Lake’s report.) Geerken is not a skilled player, but rather a conceptualist and a collector of musical instruments from around the world (especially gongs); large portions of both performances are, unsurprisingly, percussion workouts. This is very much in the Art Ensemble and Arkestra tradition, of course, but does require some patience on the part of the listener. Some passages on the discs are excellent, such as the opening of No Point, where the band riffs vocally on a Ra aphorism: “You made a mistake. You did something wrong. Make another mistake and do something right.” However, I can see no justification for Geerken’s most irritating and obtrusive intervention: on Zero Sun, a grooving jazz medley (which includes “I Didn’t Know What Time It Was”) has been shredded mercilessly in the editing booth. (Geerken’s liner notes omit even to mention this, let alone explain it.) If one ignores that act of defacement, Zero Sun is otherwise probably the more convincing of the two pieces, avoiding No Point’s occasional tendency to get bogged down in gong-banging. Certainly the Art Ensemble is in fine latterday form, with the late Lester Bowie superb even as the shades draw near.

Nate Dorward

Coda, July/August 2002