Outside the Honky Tonk Dream Syndicate, Vol. 3
featuring music from Roland Kayn, Tony Oxley and Phill Niblock
The very first Honky Tonk Dream House transmission of 2024 is upon us! Thank you for continuing to read my dumb newsletter talking about my dumb radio show into the new year. I spent the end of the year back home in DC for a few weeks, and I spent my time listening to a lot of early experimental electronic and improvised music. Those two umbrella terms obviously account for a lot of my all-time favorite music, and it was great to dive really deep into it all. As an aside, this is easily the best mix I’ve done in terms of transitions between tracks. I had a number of “oh shit” moments putting this together and hearing totally different sounding tracks flow into each other, which I think is for most people one of the most fun aspects of doing a radio show. Huge thanks as always to the good folks at Beloved for letting me do this once a month.
Roland Kayn - Cybernetics III
Roland Kayn’s life and work is full of mystery, and one of those mysteries is how the hell he ended up with a record on Deutsche Grammophon, the record label known for releasing basically every classical record your grandparents own. The closest answer would be that, in the 60s and 70s, the label released a number of records documenting the avant-garde music that was exploding at the time. This included not only pieces by composers such as Mauricio Kagel, Luc Ferrari and Cornelius Cardew, but even releases by improvising ensembles such as Iskra 1903 and Gruppo d'Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza - the latter of which included an organ player by the name of Roland Kayn. Still, even compared to composers such as Ferrari and Luigi Nono (whose piece “Contrappunto dialettico alla mente” takes up the second side of the record), Kayn was way out of left-field, and he was ignored, if not outright shunned, by New Music academia. The very first article I wrote as a freelance writer was about Kayn, and none of the people I interviewed (which included Jim O’Rourke and Kayn’s daughter Ilse) had any information on how this record came to be. Regardless, after decades of being out of print the Deutsche Grammophon Avant-Garde series was reissued recently, making “Cybernetics III” the first and only Roland Kayn piece on streaming. I spent a good chunk of my time at home over the holidays listening to these records, and this one is easily my favorite of the bunch. The piece is one of Kayn’s most immediate and gripping works, and serves as a great introduction into what has now become one of the most vast - and rewarding - discographies in electronic music.
AMM - Generative Theme II
I was particularly amazed at how well the Kayn piece flowed into this track from the legendary free improvisation group AMM. The three founding members of AMM - guitarist Keith Rowe, drummer Eddie Prévost and saxophonist Lou Gare - each came out of the UK’s hugely underrated jazz scene in the 60s, but AMM never sounded even remotely like jazz. The closest comparison would be to the burgeoning free jazz movement of the time, but Ornette Coleman’s influence is as audible to me in this music as that of Mike Westbrook, the British big-band leader that Rowe and Gare played with prior to AMM, in that I’m sure it was there in some capacity, but I can’t really hear it. AMM are often considered to be among the first ever free improv groups; whether or not this is accurate is a distinction that doesn’t interest me, but their first album, 1967’s AMMMusic, doesn’t even really sound like any of the music that came after free improvisation became an idiom either. The closest comparison might be actually be the Velvet Underground’s infamous 17-minute blowout “Sister Ray,” on which each member of the group attempted to play louder than everyone else, but “Sister Ray” still registers both as rock music and as an actual song (at least for a few minutes), two forms of music that AMM have zero connection to. The album is drenched in shortwave radio noise (courtesy of Rowe and legendary British composer Cornelius Cardew, who was a member of the group in its early years) to the point that almost none of the instruments are audibly recognizable as themselves.
AMMMusic seems to be their most famous album by far, which might be in part due to its reputation as a “difficult listen,” but it captures an ephemeral moment in the group’s history, and as a result it’s pretty unrepresentative of the group’s sound. AMM has had sort of an open door membership policy over the years, and Lawrence Sheaff, who played cello and clarinet on AMMMusic, was only in the group for a year. The group entered a sort of wilderness period in the 70s; Cardew disavowed the avant-garde entirely as self-serving bourgeois drivel in a fun piece of light reading titled Stockhausen Serves Imperialism, and dedicated the rest of his life to making bizarre Maoist pop tunes seemingly designed to confuse as many people as possible. Rowe, a fellow Maoist, briefly left the group, presumably for similar reasons. The only album AMM released in the 70s was a drums/saxophone duo recording by Gare and Prévost (the one constant member of the group), and by the time it was released in 1978, Gare had left the group and Rowe had rejoined. In 1983, the group released Generative Themes, their first album with pianist and close Cardew collaborator John Tilbury. This became the closest thing to a stable lineup of AMM, and the majority of the group’s recorded output consists of this key trio. With Generative Themes, gone were the layers of noise, and in its place were meditations on dynamics and texture within collective improvisation. This particular portion of the album heavily centers around Prévost's attentive, deeply textural approach to the drums. The interplay between the scraping and clinking noises of Rowe’s guitar and the delicate timbres of Tilbury’s piano is sublime. The records AMM would make from here on out would end up setting the stage for the radically sparse forms of improvised music, such as Onkyo and Reductionism, that took hold in the 90s and the 00s.
David Toop - Sea Slug
If David Toop isn’t already considered a hero of experimental music, he definitely should be. Well before our current era, in which genre is pretty much meaningless and people listen to a little of everything (and a lot of nothing), Toop seemed to understand the ways in which all music - popular and unpopular, avant-garde and club-oriented, studio creations and field recordings, etc. - is connected, to an extent that no one else could. If anyone else was playing with The Flying Lizards, improvising with Evan Parker, playing flute on one of the best dub albums ever (Prince Far-I and The Arabs’ Cry Tuff Dub Encounter Chapter III, for those who don’t know), putting together formative sound art pieces with Max Eastley, and collecting field recordings in South American rainforests, I’m certainly not aware of them. And, as someone doing the kind of work that I’m doing, it should go without saying that his book Ocean of Sound was foundational for me.
I’m not quite sure how I was introduced to his music, but it was most likely through his work as an improviser, alongside luminaries such as Toshinori Kondo and the aforementioned Evan Parker. Toop’s been pretty productive over the past few years, putting out a bunch of albums on the venerable Room40 label. I listened to the first of these albums - 2016’s Entities Inertias Faint Beings - for the first time very recently, and it blew me away. “Sea Slugs” is very brief, but in less than two minutes it shifts between tense, delicate electroacoustic soundscapes and wistful acoustic guitar. I overuse the term a lot, but it’s a deeply hypnotic album, and one that will stick with me for a while.
Tony Oxley - Song of the Soil
Legendary British percussionist Tony Oxley passed away very recently, and considering the impact his music has had on me as a listener, I had to include some of his work in this mix. Much like the AMM lads, Oxley had a background in the UK jazz scene. He was the house drummer at the legendary Ronnie Scott’s venue in London, where he played with the likes of Sonny Rollins, Lee Konitz and Bill Evans. He also played on a number of my all-time favorite UK jazz records, including albums by John Surman, Alan Skidmore, and John McLaughlin. If the story ended there he’d already be in my personal hall of fame, but he also happened to play with Derek Bailey in the Joseph Holbrooke Trio, which was were Bailey developed his signature style of guitar improvisation that would end up throwing down the gauntlet for free improvisation as a musical practice. Along with Bailey, Oxley co-founded the legendary Incus label, and throughout his life he was a regular collaborator of Cecil Taylor and Bill Dixon, who, gun to my head, may very well be my two favorite jazz musicians.
So yes, Tony Oxley was very important to me. I was introduced to his style of playing, which is about as densely textured as improvised percussion can be, through his work with Taylor and Dixon. However, I’d argue the albums he released under his own name are every bit as important and rewarding as his playing with our aforementioned heroes. This is from the 1977 Incus LP February Papers, and features Oxley alongside violin player Phillip Wachsmann and guitarist Ian Brighton. I had assumed for the longest time it was Bailey playing guitar on this album, but I was totally wrong! Even I learn something new from writing this. Anyhow, I believe Oxley was one of the first improvisers to incorporate electronics into his playing, and he had to have been one of the first to utilize them without making it his main instrument. Those electronics are very prominent on this particular track, and they lend a lot of character to the music. There’s a somewhat playful feel to it that reminds me of Christian Marclay. I think one thing Oxley had in common with Bailey was that his music felt like a full embodiment of his character, which, to me, is the true mark of a brilliant musician.
Earle Brown / Gentle Fire - 4 Systems
Here’s a completely overlooked group whose music perfectly captured the revolutionary spirit of the 60s avant-garde explosion that so much of this mix is centered around. Gentle Fire were a British music collective who performed a combination of graphic scores by composers such as Cage, Stockhausen, Christian Wolff, and Toshi Ichiyanagi, as well as their own compositions. Because the pieces they performed often left so much up to the interpretation of the performer, their work sort of straddled the lines of New Music and the emerging free improv scene in the UK. They were also another early example of improvised music that heavily incorporated electronics, alongside homemade instruments, amplified objects and tape loops.
This is a performance of a piece by noted Avant-Garde composer and Cage associate Earle Brown. The instructions for the piece state that “the composition may be performed in any direction from any point in the defined space for any length of time and may be performed from any of the four rotational positions in any sequence,” with the only true directive being “that no further preliminary defining of the events, other than an agreement as to total performance time, take place.” As such, this piece can differ dramatically based on interpretation. Gentle Fire’s treatment of the piece is a slow crawl, driven by tense strings and a repeating refrain of electronics from Hugh Davies, who was a member of Derek Bailey’s Music Improvisation Company. The electronics sound as though they are filtered through a wah-wah pedal, and for me the whole piece calls to mind some of the more sparse, ominous electric organ-driven tracks from Miles Davis’s otherwise heavily groove-driven electric period (specifically “He Loved Him Madly” and “Little Church”). This is essential listening not just for people who are interested in the 60s Avant-Garde, but also fans of more psychedelic groups like the Taj Mahal Travellers.
Toru Takemitsu / Ayako Shinozaki - Stanza II
Toru Takemitsu is an absolute giant of New Music, in my eyes. I first became familiar with him through his soundtrack work, as is the case with many people I’d imagine. Takemitsu scored the 1964 Masaki Kobayashi epic Kwaidan, a film that completely blew me away the first time I saw it. But the scope of Takemitsu’s work and influence goes far beyond any other film composer, other than maybe Ennio Morricone. His work was heavily influenced by Cage, but his compositions built upon Cage’s philosophies in a way that made them feel more open. His work often incorporated traditional Japanese instruments such as the biwa and the shakuhachi, rightfully drawing a continuum between Japanese classical forms such as Gagaku and Avant-Garde composition.
This is a recording of a piece titled “Stanza II” for harp and magnetic tape, performed by Ayako Shinozaki on the wonderfully-titled LP Music Now For Harp. The tape includes plinky electronic sounds, bird calls and other inscrutable noises, which Shinozaki plays along with. The sonorities of the instruments are so intertwined that it almost sounds as if the tape is an expansion of the harp, opening up the instrument to new sonic depths and possibilities. The piece ends with the tape fading into indistinct chatter, perfectly capping the dreamlike nature of the piece.
Phill Niblock - Dijeridoos and Don’ts
The mix concludes with a tribute to yet another dearly departed icon of the Avant-Garde: composer Phill Niblock, who passed just a few days ago. I was first introduced to his music - like so many artists I play on this show - through Jim O’Rourke, who was hugely influenced by Niblock and released one of his guitar pieces on his Moikai label. He was another one of those artists who blew my world open, as I hadn’t heard anything with the kind of psychoacoustic effects his music utilized before. I’ll likely have more to say about him in an upcoming review I’m working on, but in short, we all owe him a huge debt of gratitude for his contributions to experimental music and for teaching us all to hear things we didn’t know we could hear.
I chose this particular piece largely because it’s fairly short by Niblock standards - most of his pieces would take up a whole third of this show’s running time at the very least. But “Didjeridoos and Don’ts” does speak to one of my favorite qualities of Niblock’s music, which is the shear heaviness of it all. The drones continually layer over each other on this piece, to the point that it feels like you’re being buried in sound. Niblock famously insisted that all of his pieces be played as loud as possible - I think I read once that part of the reason it took a while for him to start releasing recordings of his music more frequently was that he didn’t like that the listener would have the option to not hear his music at an insanely loud volume, unlike the performances in his loft. So if you listen to the mix and make it to the last 15 minutes, pay tribute to Phill the only right way and be sure to crank the volume to 11.