RUTHERFORD / WACHSMANN / GUY - ISKRA 1903 – Live At The Western Front 1992, Vancouver (1995)

Label: Maya Recordings – MCD9502 

Format: CD, Album; Country: Switzerland - Released: 1995 

Style: Free Improvisation

Recorded on 5 October 1992 live at the Western Front, Vancouver, Canada
Cover art: Empress, 1982 by Albert Irvin (courtesy of the Tate Gallery, London)
Digital mastering by Tony Bridge at Finesplice, London

Iskra is a free music trio comprised of trombonist Paul Rutherford, violinist Phil Wachsmann, and bassist Barry Guy. The word "iskra" is Russian for "spark." The band named themselves after the first Bolshevik newspaper that came after Lenin led the split from the Social Democratic Labor Party in 1903 — hence the title of the album. The performances here, four sections of one concert, were recorded at Western Front in Vancouver in 1992. Labeled "903," the concert reveals itself as a study in complete communication rather than of phrases half-parsed or ideas partially realized among two of the three players. Here, as Rutherford  offers tonal variations on the trombone's chromatic body of timbres, Wachsmann extrapolates from them and Guy underscores them for a full, three-dimensional sound effect. Lines are long, longer, and even longest, offering a view not of free improvisation as anarchy, but of free music as a system of disclosures and articulations along tonal, harmonic, dynamic, and even in places chromodal grounds. There are numerous interpolations around diminished sixths and minor fourths, creating an almost intervallic sense of play and exchange, but these give way to open fields of timbral exploration and microphonic phrasing on Rutherford's part, which are articulated across the spectrum by Wachsmann, who will do everything from bow a series of drone strings to pizzicato his way onto the platform with Rutherford. But it is Barry Guy who is the man to listen for here, with his wealth of arco techniques and his deep wood plectrum pizzicato, carrying octave striations where they have no regular business going. This is exciting as process-oriented improvisation since the order of things is established but the result is completely up in the air and down in the instruments. We're lucky to have had this one captured on tape.



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GUSTAFSSON / SANDELL / STRID / WACHSMANN – Gush Wachs (1996)

Label:  Bead Records – BEAD CD002
(Bead Records was a musicians collective label set up in 1974 in London, UK.
Specialised in experimental/improvised sound/electronics.)
Format: CD, Album; Country: UK - Released: 1999
Style: Free Improvisation, Free Jazz
Recorded at the Swedish Broadcasting Corporation 18 May 1994, in Studio 2 at the Broadcasting House, Stockholm, Sweden.
New Design by ART&JAZZ Studio, by VITKO
Drawing by Geoffrey Winston

1994's GUSHWACHS finds Phillipp Wachsmann engaged in an early round of electro- acoustic improvisation with Gush, the Swedish free-music trio of Mats Gustafsson, Sten Sandell, and Raymond Strid. This outing, which prefigures Evan Parker's well-received Electro-Acoustic Ensemble, is a particularly multiphonic exercise in the extension of instrumentation through live electronic processing. Gush employs such unusual voices as Sandell's prepared piano, harmonium, and analog synthesizer, Gustafsson's shrieking French flageolet and invented fluteophone (a flute played with a saxophone mouthpiece), and Strid's assortment of amplified "instruments and objects."

While Wachsmann's classically inflected viola and violin lines integrate well with the established ensemble, it's his use of electronics to break down and simultaneously reconfigure sounds that makes GUSHWACHS so exhilarating. Gustaffson's excitable brass prattle, often multiplied and amplified by Wachsmann, communes with gurgling oscillations and showers of Strid's tabletop percussion and instrumental scrabbling. Sandell and Wachsmann float delicate phrasing through the commotion of sound. The intricate, multi-tiered strategy of processing and performance liberates the players, sparking spectacularly combustible free improv that pays off in a riot of sonorities both natural and unnatural.



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