The Erstwhile catalogue contains much straightforwardly beautiful music, but the latest three discs from the label all come from the thornier side of the label’s output. It’s as if Erstwhile’s head honcho Jon Abbey asked some of his most trusted contributors (above all, Keith Rowe, the label’s most frequently featured artist) to present him with their most challenging work. In this context, the harsh noisescapes of Live at the LU seem almost comfortingly traditional, like a contemporary gloss on AMM’s 1968 classic The Crypt; by comparison, Good Morning Good Night and View from the Window are less tractable, more mysterious, and not a little forbidding.

The most intriguing release in this bunch is the two-CD set Good Morning Good Night, product of the first trio meeting between Sachiko M, Toshimaru Nakamura and Otomo Yoshihide, three mainstays of the Tokyo-minimalist (“onkyo”) improv scene. Though there are differences of emphasis, the four pieces are cut from the same cloth. Low-volume sine-wave drones stretch across these pieces like telephone wires across a landscape, occasionally pitched low enough to resemble a church organ, but more typically fearfully high in frequency, probing the ear like laserbeams: you can feel them creeping up and down the cochlea with every change in hertz. This austere canvas is gently grazed by pops and crackles from old vinyl, and occasionally spattered by the odd chirrup or blat. Soft clouds of static descend like mist; a single amplified pop rings out like a gunshot, or a string of them rat-a-tat-tats in succession. Harrowing and soothing at the same time, Good Morning Good Night is as anodyne as a doctor’s office, and sharp as a scalpel. The musicians have chosen to omit details of instrumentation from the packaging: presumably it’s Sachiko M on empty sampler, Nakamura on no-input mixing board, Yoshihide on turntables (but, really, who knows?). The omission is no accident: it’s clear they are attempting to step beyond the conventional instrumental techniques and musical practices that continue to inform even the farthest reaches of free improvisation.

A View from the Window is another trio disc, featuring guitarist Keith Rowe and the paired trumpets of Franz Hautzinger and Axel Dörner. As so often on his recent recordings, Rowe is everywhere and nowhere. For long stretches it appears he’s contributing little more than amplifier hum, yet every so often you spot him – a little string-rasp here, a twitter of song from the radio there – and realize he’s been there all along, half-camouflaged. “Magenta/Black” starts off quite busily, with Hautzinger and Dörner’s trumpets cheerfully bubbling and hissing away (it’s like listening to a friendly conversation between a gaspipe and a drainpipe), but by the track’s end the textures have been distilled to a soft buzz, flecked by the odd trumpet snort and snippets of period-instrument baroque music. The only other track, “Cadmium Yellow/Turquoise,” is quiet and remorselessly pared-down: drones and throbbing engine-noise, with the trumpeters contributing little more than drawn-out sighs and hisses. Like Good Morning Good Night this is difficult music – impossible, even – but it can’t be ignored: it is, in its own way, “as serious as your life.”

Live at the LU is a duet recorded in 2002 at the Nantes venue Le Lieu Unique, pairing Rowe and laptopper Christian Fennesz. Endless Summer it ain’t. The first sound is a metallic squall that tears through the air like a jetplane, then sinks into the background as a teakettle-whistle drone. The foreground is occupied by rich, clangorous noise that is always throbbing dangerously, and always changing: punching-bag thumps, slashes to the guitarstrings, crablike scuttles, crackles, unoiled bicycle-wheel squeaks, blasts of radio chatter, drum machine snippets, the occasional whitewater rush of flat-out racket. As with A View from the Window (and for that matter Duos for Doris – is this a trend?) the second half of the album becomes quieter and less active, until ultimately the music is squeezed down to the husky, multi-layered drone/buzz that wavers and wobbles through the piece’s last ten minutes, with Rowe and Fennesz confining themselves to subtle interventions – a pop here, some sandpaper guitar there. Live at the LU doesn’t pack the same alienating wallop as the other two releases under review, but it’s nonetheless a compelling listen. Aficionados of noise-improv will be right at home here, whereas Good Morning Good Night will likely give even hardcore experimental-music fans pause.

Nate Dorward

Coda, Jan/Feb 2005