Tones that Seethe, Morph, and Blossom
John Butcher, Alvin Lucier, John McCowen & Madison Greenstone
Honoring the Still-Evolving Artistry of British Saxophonist John Butcher
Blame it on my long career in journalism—trained largely on-the-job by my old friend and peerless editor Kiki Yablon when I worked at the Chicago Reader—I have a pretty consistent antipathy toward birthdays being a good reason for public celebrations. Everything gains a year annually, and in this feting business such occasions are usually marked in increments of 5, as if somehow ten is better than nine or eleven. On the other hand, no one seems to care what I think in this regard, so I will not hold a grudge against the folks who have organized a big three-day festival this week saluting the artistic power of British reedist John Butcher, who will turn 70 on October 25. Sadly, I won’t be in Berlin this week to attend the concerts happening at KM28 between September 12-14, each featuring the esteemed reedist in two different groupings nightly.
The new issue of the Wire features an exhaustive guide to Butcher’s vast discography penned with febrile passion by [Ahmed] member and fellow saxophonist Seymour Wright, tracing his development and conceptual expansion over the last four decades. It’s hard to imagine anyone topping this as the definitive primer on Butcher’s recorded output, but I will nevertheless discuss some more recent offerings that feel connected to this week’s festivities. Not long after we moved to Berlin in the summer of 2019 Butcher visited for a multi-night residency at Ausland, where he performed in a very similar fashion to what he’ll be doing this week, playing a pair of disparate sets each night. The excellent Ni-Vu-Ni-Connu label recorded those sets and in 2021 it released a series of five albums mostly from that visit, including duos, trios, and quartets in which the saxophonist remained singularly recognizable in a variety of remarkably dissimilar contexts. Butcher is a fully formed musician who finds little need to fuck with his practice—although he has deftly and imaginatively incorporated subtle electronic treatments on his saxophones here and there—but that ignores the fact that he seamlessly adapts his playing to each situation he performs in, modulating volume, aggression, tone, and techniques, among other parameters, impressively devoting his choices to making the most of every encounter, even when he’s playing solo, in which the space he’s playing in usually determines his quicksilver adjustments.
The assortment of collaborators for this week’s performances brings back quite a few musicians from the Ausland concerts, albeit in slightly tweaked contexts, along with some long-running partnerships, such as the opening night set from the Contest of Pleasures, in which Butcher is joined by trumpeter Axel Dörner and the French clarinetist Xavier Charles. Thursday’s other set is a duo with pianist Magda Mayas, who appears on the excellent glints —along with drummer Tony Buck, as the trio Vellum— from a memorable Ausland set. On Friday Buck goes tete-a-tete with Butcher, while the second set includes trumpeter Liz Allbee—who was part of a bracing quartet with turntablist Ignaz Schick and tape wrangler Marta Zapparoli captured on lamenti dall'infinito—and the terrific Berlin-based vibraphonist/percussionist Emilo Gordoa. Finally, Saturday’s program includes a duo with the astonishing Welsh violinist Angharad Davies, and a trio with inside-piano virtuoso Andrea Neumann, percussionist Burkhard Beins, and double bassist Werner Dafeldecker. The latter two are both members of Polwechsel, the expansive ensemble that Butcher also spent many years working in. They also joined the saxophonist for performances included on the album induction, which was recorded earlier in the summer of 2019 at KM28 and KulTurnhalle in Leipzig. You can check out the opening piece from that record, “circulation,” below.
Butcher continues to release music at a prodigious clip, and I’ve really enjoyed how he managed to corral and organize the large ensemble on the recent Fluid Fixations (Weight of Wax), where he’s joined by 13 excellent players, including Allbee and Davies. Ni-Vu-Ni-Connu has just released two new titles that feel more germane to the small groupings happening this week. Lower Marsh is a series of duos where one can pinpoint how adaptable and interactive Butcher can be, whether unfurling a liquid churn of tight intervals, lightning-fast trills, percussive pops, and abraded drones through the viscerally abstract electronic splatters of Pat Thomas, or blowing more jazz-related tenor sallies through the rambunctious toggle of arco striations and pizz thwacks of double bassist John Edwards. Below you can check out “This Vivid Strain,” the remarkable, richly dynamic duo with Davies, who shares Butcher’s masterful ability to double down on a terse gesture and somehow transform it into a mesmerizing spray of texture and color. The album also includes a duo with drummer Mark Sanders, who, like Davies and Thomas, also played together on the tracks that comprise the quartet album Unlockings. Both recordings serve as a loving farewell to the London arts space Iklectik, which was shut down in late 2023, a victim of gentrification, where all of the music was performed.
Celebrating the Undiminished Legacy of Alvin Lucier
Alvin Lucier died in December of 2021, age 90, and like his cohorts in the Sonic Arts Union (Robert Ashley, David Behrman, and Gordon Mumma)—which opened up new frontiers in the experimental music explosion of the 1960s and 1970s in the US—the enduring importance of his legacy seems assured. But it’s hard to think of another figure who not only managed to attract new listeners and collaborators over such a long career, right up until his passing, but one whose work only seems to gain resonance and prescience with each subsequent year. This week Extended Spaces - Resonant Bodies: Alvin Lucier, a significant festival celebrating his impressive body of work and contemporary iterations of his influence upon other artists, opens in Berlin. Lucier’s simple but elegant designs consistently illustrated the magical wonders of acoustic phenomenon with unmatched clarity, and now that sound qua sound has regained primacy in experimental music circles, there’s never a bad time to be reminded of the composer’s peculiar genius. The multi-venue retrospective includes numerous sound installations, a symposium, and a slew of concerts, most helmed by the Swiss ensemble Ever Present Orchestra—which was formed exclusively to perform Lucier’s work—with Berlin’s Ensemble KMN and a variety of guest musicians. I’m super bummed that I’ll miss the exciting program slated for this coming weekend, but I’m already looking forward to what I’ll catch during the following weekend, as the endeavor wraps up.
The opening reception happens on Wednesday, September 11 at CLB Berlin at 6 PM, where new sound installations by Yutaka Makino and Hugo Esquinca will complement the European premier of “Solar Sounder 1,” Lucier’s 1979 work created with engineer John Fullerman, which was originally installed in a Middletown, Connecticut bank. Its square wave output, powered by solar panels, changed according to weather patterns, time of day, and time of year, and what may have seemed esoteric and confusing 45 years ago now feels like a very powerful symbol of our evolving relationship to the changing climate. The opening concert takes place the following evening at 8 PM at the Parochialkirche, with David Behrman playing Lucier’s iconic 1965 brainwave piece “Music for Solo Performer”—check out the video of the composer performing it himself, below—and cellist Charles Curtis will perform the 2007 piece “Slices,” in which the musician sounds a 53-note chromatic scale against a pre-recorded orchestra, with all of the instruments playing those same 53 notes in sustained long tones, each one of them vanishing as Curtis plays the corresponding note on his cello until all fall silent, at which point the cellist begins another of seven different sequences of the same notes. The program is rounded out by a new work by percussionist Robyn Schulkowsky called “Dear Alvin,” performed by her and the great jazz drummer Joey Baron. A second exhibition of sound installations opens at 6 PM in the same space on Friday, September, including Lucier’s wonderful “Music on a Long Thin Wire,” mounted by local Lucier expert Hauke Harding. Finally, yet another assortment of installations mounted at the Projektraum Kunstquartier Bethanien will open with a reception at 5 PM, with a mix of his own works and a couple from Harder.
Kunstquartier Bethanie presents two-part programs on both Saturday and Sunday evenings, beginning at 7:30 PM, with the second half starting at 9 PM. The Saturday concert features Ever Present Orchestra focusing on late Lucier works, many of which feature sustained tones produced on electric guitars played with e-bows, including “Double Helix,” for four guitars, which you can hear below. It’s taken from the superb 2020 double album Works for the Ever Present Orchestra (Black Truffle), which also contains versions of “Semicircle,” to be played Saturday, and “Tilted Arc” and “Two Circles” from Sunday’s concert. Saturday’s program also includes Curtis playing a work by Tashi Wadi called “Landslide” and Trevor Saint performing his signature Lucier glockenspiel piece “Ricochet Landy.” As much as next weekend’s performances focus on late work, the Sunday program will feature a performance of his key early piece “Vespers.” For full info check out this page from Singuhr Projects, which is the main presenter of the whole shebang.
John McCowen’s Unveils a Fresh Batch of his Mundanas Series Alongside Madison Greenstone
Regular readers of this newsletter probably know about my adoration for the music of reedists John McCowen and Madison Greenstone, both of whom have devoted significant energy and rigor to expanding the possibilities of their instruments. The former has pushed his contrabass clarinet into the furthest reaches of low-end terror, creating bruising yet enveloping long tone environments where sound becomes a deeply physical, tactile presence, while the latter generates deliciously and dangerously unstable waves of internal feedback within their clarinet that’s no less daunting and jarring in its primeval sophistication and heft. Individually they stand as two of the most original and fearless explorers of their instruments at work today, conducting research with ruthless efficiency and total commitment. McCowen enlisted Greenstone, who switches to contrabass clarinet in this duo, to meld their juddering tones for a series of pieces called Mundanas, sharing their first fruit of their labor on a fantastic 2019 album on Edition Wandelweiser. Next month the duo will finally release its follow-up, Mundanas VII-XI, on the Icelandic label Mengi. The pair will offer a sneak peek at this music when they perform at KM28 on Wednesday, September 11, sharing the bill with Departure Duo—singer Nina Guo and double bassist Eddie Kass.
While the first five iterations of Mundanas from the first album are loaded with richly varied beating patterns and other psychoacoustic effects, with palpable intervallic movement here and there, the new batch of pieces somehow feels even more austere and reduced. In his typically sharp liner note essay, Nate Wooley observes that the instruments “operate as a single organism,” and, indeed, these four new compositions reveal a more seamless fusion of the two voices. These new pieces emerged during a series of ongoing earthquakes in Iceland which preceded the Fagradalsfjall volcanic eruption in March of 2021. The vibrations made it impossible for him to make home recordings at the time, but the physical sensations helped shape this latest batch of Mundanas pieces, translating that somatic experience into a sonic one. As you can hear on the opening piece, “Mundana X,” there is a subtle play of shifting tones and densities, where it seems like sine tones swell and recede with vibrato and rheumy wheezing, but beneath that slowly undulating motion we can feel our guts rumbling. Subsequent tracks subtly blossom, with internal harmonic action, scuffed by leaked air and the incidental inhalations required by circular breathing, mutating like that “single organism,” two streams of air blending, colliding, and resisting.
Recommended Shows in Berlin This Week
September 10: Katinka Kleijn, cello, Carina Khorkhordina, trumpet, Lorena Izquierdo, voice action, and Joel Grip, double bass; International Nothing (Kai Fagaschinski and
Michael Thieke, clarinets), 8 PM, Richten25, Gerichtstraße 25, 13347 Berlin
September 11: Nakul Krishnamurthy, Maarten Visser and Jeremy Woodruff play Laya Constuctions, 8 PM, Jugend[widerstands]museum Galiläakirche, Rigaer Str. 9/10, 10247 Berlin
September 11: John McCowen & Madison Greenstone, BBb contrabass clarinets, play McCowen's Mundanas; Departure Duo (Nino Guo, soprano, Eddie Kass, double bass) play Haukur Þór Harðarson’s Poems for the Fire and Tomás Gueglio's Murmelszenen, 8:30 PM, KM28, Karl Marx Straße 28, 12043 Berlin
September 12: Exaudi, James Weeks, conductor, and Phace, Susanne Blumenthal, conductor, play Isabel Mundry, 8 PM, Philharmonie Berlin, chamber music hall, Herbert-von-Karajan-Straße 1, 10785 Berlin
September 12: SSRF (Taiko Saito, vibraphone, percussion, Ignaz Schick, alto & baritone saxophones, Jan Roder, double bass, Martial Frenze, drums, percussion), 8 PM, Terzo Mondo, Grolmanstraße 28, 10623 Berlin
September 12: Extended Spaces – Resonant Bodies: Alvin Lucier with David Behrman, performer, Charles Curtis, cello, Robyn Schulkowsky, percussion, Joey Baron percussion (Alvin Lucier, Robyn Schulkowsky), 8 PM, Parochialkirche, Klosterstr. 67, 10179 Berlin
September 12: The Contest of Pleasures (John Butcher, saxophones, Axel Dörner, trumpet, and Xavier Charles, clarinet); John Butcher, saxophones, and Magda Mayas, piano, 8:30 PM, KM28, Karl Marx Straße 28, 12043 Berlin
September 12: Camila Nebbia, tenor saxophone, Marta Warelis, piano, Vinicius Cajado, double bass, and Steve Heather, drums, 8:30 PM, Sowieso, Weisestraße 24, 12049 Berlin
September 13: Ensemble Modern, David Niemann, conductor, with Nina Guo, soprano, Amanda Becker, soprano, and Keren Motseri, soprano (Ruth Crawford Seeger, Johanna Magdalena Beyer, Tania León, and Katherine Balch), 8 PM, Philharmonie Berlin, chamber music hall, Herbert-von-Karajan-Straße 1, 10785 Berlin
September 13: Bex Burch & Laurel Pardue; Teresa Allgaier, violin, plays Sophia Jani, 8 PM, Betonhalle, Silent Green, Gerichtstraße 35, 13347 Berlin
September 13: Maulwerker (Christina Kubisch, Adrian Mocanu, Miika Hyytiäinen, Sagardía, Alison Knowles), 8 PM, Ballhaus Ost, Pappelallee 15, 10437 Berli
September 13: Ruth Goller’s Skylla (Ruth Goller, electric bass, vocals, Alice Grant, vocals, Laura Kinsella, vocals, Max Andrzejewski, drums); the Magic I.D. (Margareth Kammerer, guitars, vocals,Christof Kurzmann, lloopp, devices, vocals, Michael Thieke, clarinet, and Kai Fagaschinski, clarinet), 8:30 PM, Ausland, Lychener Str. 60, 10437 Berlin
September 13: Anna Kaluza, alto saxophone, Nikolaus Neuser, trumpet, Christoph Thewes, trombone, Martial Frenzel, drums, 8:30 PM, Kuhlspot Social Club, Lehderstrasse 74-79, 13086 Berlin
September 13: Tony Buck, drums, and John Butcher, saxophones; Liz Allbee, trumpet, Emilio Gordoa, vibraphone, and Joh Butcher, saxophones, 8:30 PM, KM28, Karl Marx Straße 28, 12043 Berlin
September 13: Camila Nebbia’s the Hanged One (Camila Nebbia, tenor saxophone, Julia Biłat, cello, Arne Braun, guitar, Andres Marino, electronics, Vinicius Cajado, double bass, and Lukas Akintaya, drums), 8:30 PM, Donau115, Donaustraße 115, 12043 Berlin
September 14: Ensemble Modern, David Niemann, conductor (Ruth Crawford Seeger, Johanna Magdalena Beyer, Tania León, and Katherine Balch), 4 PM, Philharmonie Berlin, chamber music hall, Herbert-von-Karajan-Straße 1, 10785 Berlin
September 14: Ensemble KNM Present Back and Forth (Lin Fang-Yi, Cao Thanh Lan, Ana María Rodríguez, Juliana Hodkinson, Tania Candiani and Rogelio Sosa, Beat Furrer, Solange, and Philippus de Caserta), 7:30 PM, Radialsystem V, Holzmarktstrasse 33, 10243 Berlin
September 14: Extended Spaces – Resonant Bodies: Alvin Lucier, Ever Present Orchestra with Charles Curtis, cello, and Trevor Saint, glockenspiel (Alvin Lucier, Tashi Wadi), 7:30 PM, Kunstquartier Bethanien, Studio 1, Mariannenplatz 2, 10997 Berlin
September 14: Liudas Mockūnas, saxophones & clarinets, Tom Blancarte, double bass, and Christian Windfeld, percussion; Isabel Rößler, double bass and Vojta Drnek, prepared accordion, 8 PM, Richten25, Gerichtstraße 25, 13347 Berlin
September 14: Angharad Davies, violin, and John Butcher, saxophones; Andrea Neumann, inside piano, Burkhard Beins, percussion, Werner Dafeldecker, double bass, and John Butcher, saxophones, 8:30 PM, KM28, Karl Marx Straße 28, 12043 Berlin
September 14: Devin Gray Quartet (Camila Nebbia, tenor saxophone, Keisuke Matsuno, guitar, Felix Henkelhausen, bass, Devin Gray - drums), 8 PM, Peppi Guggenheim, Weichselstrasse 7, 12043 Berlin
September 14: The Vampires (Jeremy Rose, saxophone, Nick Garbett, trumpet, Mike Majkowski, double bass, and Alex Masso, drums), 9 PM, Zig-Zag Jazz Club, Hauptstraße 89, 12159 Berlin
September 15: Ensemble Modern (Ruth Crawford Seeger), 11 AM, Philharmonie Berlin, chamber music hall, Herbert-von-Karajan-Straße 1, 10785 Berlin
September 15: September 14: Extended Spaces – Resonant Bodies: Alvin Lucier, Ever Present Orchestra with (Alvin Lucier, Alberto de Campo + Hannes Hoelzl +Jiawen Wang + Anne Wellmer, ), 7:30 PM, Kunstquartier Bethanien, Studio 1, Mariannenplatz 2, 10997 Berlin