joel stern / matt davis small industry l'innomable
joel stern: concrete sound, feedback, electronics matt davis: trumpet, elecronics
last copies available for purchase through Erstwhile
recorded at hackney, london, UK 12/1/03 mixed and edited in Ipswich, Queensland AUS 5/9/03
design and printed by grafika.bevk@siol.net
''Small Industry is another limited edition outing, this time on the new Slovenian label L'innomable. Joining Davis (on electronics but also back on trumpet this time) is Joel Stern, who provides "concrete sound, feedback and electronics". It's a single 33-minute span of music recorded in Hackney (London) in January 2003 and mixed and edited by Stern after he returned to Australia later that year. Compared to the crackle of Seen, it's more sedate - perhaps it's the breathy blast of the brass instrument, or Stern's chilly drone - but much more dramatic. There's a distinct sense of tension, even menace, here - what is happening at the six-minute mark? It sounds as if Stern is tearing up and setting fire to a polystyrene box (which he most likely isn't, as the musicians would probably have asphyxiated themselves) with Davis lurking in the background like some heavy breathing monster. Despite the stated intention of several notable contemporary improvisers to avoid expressivity - Keith Rowe's observations on atmosphere, the empty turntables of Otomo, empty mixing board of Nakamura and the empty sampler of Sachiko - music still communicates on an emotional level, and its inexplicable capacity to make the hair stand up on the back of the neck is not something to be sniffed at. The fragile strands of birdsong and wonderful distant cloud of Ligeti-like harmony that float into earshot about the 23-minute mark are simply gorgeous. '' Dan Warburton, Paris Transatlantic, 2004
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