If, Bwana, The Rationale for a Space Telescope

The If, Bwana group has been making some unpredictable and interesting avant music for decades now. It is a loosely shifting configuration of players headed by Al Margolis, who generally constructs the compositional frameworks and gathers together musicians best suited to playing them. A more or less recent download-only album, The Rationale for a Space Telescope (Pogus, Bandcamp) gives us a new set of sounds to contemplate and get inside of. I've been doing that.

Five different compositions are featured on the album, making good use of Daniel Barbiero on contrabass especially, but also Nathan Bontrager on cello, and Viv Corringham on voice. The studio situation is made good use of via multi-tracking and overdubbing to create ensembles of bass, bass with cello and the two with voices. Margolis operates in the realm of bowed sonorities both tuned and using quarter tones, harmonics and such. Some have a drone-based sound, others activate shifting sound colors born of strings, especially the bowed contrabass, still others create landscapes of gradually encompassing continuousness with both vocals and strings collaging in a sort of spatial clustering that occupies its own world.

Barbiero's rich bass tone predominates through much of the music and sounds especially well. But then Bontrager's cello and Corringham's vocals add much when called upon, depending on the work. The effect is a sort of organic electro-acoustics born of Margolis's keen sense of recombinatory logic. There is both a spontaneous feel and a use of full string sonority in this music. It is not as much formal as it is experimental, which is in keeping with the If, Bwana ethos.

It's music that provokes a response, willy nilly. Listen and be carried away by the sounds you must do or leave it alone, for there is no passive middle ground with this kind of sonics. If, Bwana has always been on the more adventurous side of avant music congregrations. The adventure continues here, quite nicely at that. To find out more or to buy a download go to http://ifbwana.bandcamp.com/album/the-rationale-for-a-space-telescope

If, Bwana; Water, Flowing

If, Bwana is an avant garde new music conflagration formed by Al Margolis in 1984. They have a couple of new releases out, and we cover today the 23-minute EP Water, Flowing (Pogus, DL only). It is an exercise, a poem in long tones that suggests flow. Single tones alternate with unisons where one of the voicings is a microtone off to create a beating of the sound.

Actually there are two parts, "Flowing" and "Water". The latter thickens the texture with more multi-voiced tones that form complex dissonances in minor seconds. They are juxtaposed with long, single tones and unison beating tones depending on the moment. I hear saxophones and clarinets in the mix. The dissonant clusters give off multiple-beatings that transform the sound so that you get the feeling you are listening to electro-acoustic components in the clouds of tone. But this I believe is created wholly out of conventional acoustic instruments and the acoustic properties of the tones themselves sounding together--without being subject to any acoustical processing.

It gets one's attention and holds it there with the deceptively simple means from which it begins and out of which it grows.

If you revel in unusual avant music that has singular purpose and a trajectory of realization that gives you sound elements to ponder and internalize, this one will give you something to do that with. If, Bwana can always be counted upon to be provocative, experimental, and a force on the avant new music fringe. They continue that here. Is this for everybody? Probably not. It's more for the confirmed avant listener.

If, Bwana, Red One

Almost nothing worthwhile retains exactly the mental picture you get of it on the first hearing, at least in the realm of the "modern." If, Bwana's new one, Red One (Pogus 21068-2) is no exception. First time through for me I knew the music was of interest. Only in subsequent hearings did that music come together in my head as a total presentation.

What we have are the compositions/sound assemblages of Al Margolis, six of them. All six were, based on what I am hearing, built up of different, distinct instrumental and vocal performances of a single performer or a duet between two performers. The artist(s) created sounds under Al Margolis's direction, and then Al assembled, edited, and collated those sound worlds into cohesive essays, thick sound clusters of chordal sustains and/or bursts of sound that ever flow and evolve, electro-acoustic music created out of live artists and their initial single-layered creations.

Each work has its own sound and logic, gained by creatively orche-strizing the initial sound moments. The first creates a universe of Nate Wooley's trumpet and Al Margolis's toy trumpet, the second from the singing and vocalizing of Ellen Band. Then there is Monique Buzzarte's trombone, Leslie Ross's bassoon, the fifth a duo electro-orchestration of Lisa B Kelley's voice and the flute of Veronika Vitazkova. And the final work builds from Al and his toy trumpet, this time by itself, to complete the sound cycle.

The making of it is something of fascination, but it is the completed results that stay with you after you've heard the album a few times. Each work-within-the-work hangs together yet relates to the others and constructs a complex whole when the entire sequence is heard.

You end up like someone visiting a planet of sound in some far-away exotic land. You cannot live there permanently, but every visit becomes increasingly like a vacation you take again and again because the locale gives you pleasure and re-creates you and your listening being. That's a good feeling and Red One gives it to you in a strong way. Listen.