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Sweet Cuts, Distant Curves (CD, Balloon and Needle, 2008)

Recording of improvised music quartet of Choi Joonyong, Hong Chulki, Sachiko M and Otomo Yoshihide in May 2006 in Seoul.

Reviewed by Massimo Ricci

Despite the above positive review of Hum And Rattle I’m not the least envious of artists expressing themselves with CD players and turntables these days; how can they find innovative ways of making music without producing the same results from a record to another? Most times a success is not waiting behind the corner, all those skip-click-fizz-and-buzz practices often turning into a litany for the destruction of the residual hopes of listening to a cleverly conceived recording. Luckily, this one (“recorded during Sachiko M and Otomo Yoshihide’s trip to Seoul for concerts organized by RELAY”) doesn’t belong to this category, especially in virtue of its rather interesting combinations of colours. This stuff is only for the well-versed, of course; not sure that the melange of maniacal sputtering, vituperation of harmonic construction, bizarrely hesitant oscillations and unsympathetic hiccups is going to appeal to those who love to hear some old-fashioned consonance in their wine-influenced evening sessions; in the final track, Otomo is even heard torturing an electric guitar. In general, nothing memorably new under the sun, although the sonic concoctions generated by this quartet tickle the nerves quite efficiently. With headphones on, in front of a muted TV set airing Criminal Minds, the session made for an experience halfway through occult encoding and electrophysiological stimulation. Alternatively, you may be willing to listen to Mozart or Vivaldi and get brainwashed for real.

Reviewed by Brian Olewnick

Trying to elucidate what makes a release like this one stand somewhat apart from many other worthy recordings might be something of a fool's errand, but one thing that I kept thinking about was how the pitch range used here, high to low and in between, oddly resembled that which one might get from a "standard" quartet, rock or jazz--maybe even a vocal group, with soprano, alto, tenor and baritone. Not that these musicians stay in parts but that there's usually a fullness here that's a bit unusual in these realms. They also mitigate between dronage and short, harsh bursts, finding a juicy middle ground with regard to those choices, a fine balance among brief hums, sharp scratches and gentle pings. The music is "full" as opposed to sparse (again, relatively speaking), with an airiness between sounds more often found in acoustic settings. Whatever, an excellent disc, certainly one to hear.

Reviewed by Frans de Waard (Vital Weekly)

The releases by Balloon & Needle from Seoul, Korea always look nice without being too fancy or over the top, like some others sometimes do. The releases often, but not exclusively includes the work of Choi Joonyong (CD players) and Hong Chulki (turntable, electronics), who team up with Sachiko M (sinewaves) and Otomo Yoshihide (turntable, guitar) in this concert recording of 2006, when M and Yoshihide visited Seoul. If the work of the Japanese part of this CD is in anyway familiar with you, then you know what to expect. Sachiko M's sinewaves are the very bottom, or foundation if you want of the music. Things buzz in the front, in the back, below and above, high and low, but they buzz. On top of that the three men add their own blend of cracks and cuts, from the media players at hand - what the guitar is unclear, but no doubt he fits into this in a clever way - either sounding like a sinewave or like another crack or hiss. This is a work that is great, but but but its also something that we heard before, mostly in the work of the Japanese two involved here. That perhaps makes things less of a surprise, but the total concentration involved by all four players requires full concentration on the side of the listener. Only then it will reveal its true beauty.

Reviewed by Dan Warburton (Paris Transatlantic)

Having thoroughly enjoyed other Choi Joonyong / Hong Chulki releases that have recently come my way - the final chapter of the 5 Modules series on Manual, the Expanded Celluloid, Extended Phonograph DVD with Lee Hangjun, reviewed here last time round - I have to admit I'm having problems with Sweet Cuts, Distant Curves - though not with the album title, which is terrific. There's something about this particular assemblage of clicks, rips, crackles and hums (yes, once more I'm afraid we're stuck with this vocabulary, until anything more musicologically coherent comes along, which I suspect might be a while) which fails to keep my attention, and I've tried six times now; and I think it's to do with the pacing of the material and the event density. The other abovementioned offerings from the Koreans (Choi on modified CD players, Hong on turntables and electronics) are busy, even boisterous affairs, while my favourite discs of recent times with Otomo (turntables, guitar) and Sachiko (sinewaves) - most notably the majestic Good Morning, Good Night on Erstwhile with Toshimaru Nakamura - have been quite the opposite: slowmoving and spare, but the five sweet cuts here seem to lie somewhere between the two, in a strange midtempo - if we can speak of tempo - limbo, neither quiet and intense enough to draw you in, nor rough and feisty enough to thrill to. I'll keep trying, but I haven't cracked it yet.

Reviewed by hatta

Like many of the EAI scenes the Korean contingent welcomes outside voices and frequently hosts musicians from all over. With it’s near proximity there have been many collaborations with Japanese musicians and there seems to have been a bit of cross pollination between the two groups. In 2006 Sachiko M and Otomo Yoshihide came to Seoul and played as Filament and in various ad hoc groupings with local improvisers(4). This included the quartet of Sachiko and Otomo with Choi Joonyong and Hong Chulki who subsequently made a studio recording which was released as this disc.

And there was no Korean noise-related music back then. So discovering Japanoise like Merzbow and Masonna was a big influence for starting Astronoise.(1)

Choi and Hong moved into improvisation from an initially noisier background and it seems to have been collaborations with visiting musicians that moved them into the more deliberate and less aggressive forms of improvisation they seem to focus on now. They still incorporate a lot of those harsher sounds into their work, but with a much greater emphasis placed upon the sounds then upon the energy that is often more of the focus in noise. In a large part I think that the tools that these two in particular, but also many other Korean improvisers, seem to favor shape what they do.

I think we’re likely to use sound reproducing machine because they are easy to find, and maybe because we’re not that good at playing real musical instruments (laugh). If any machine has an input and output, we just plug it onto itself and make a feedback loop, or open it to mess with it. As for me, I got inspired by turntable artists like Otomo Yoshihide and Christian Marclay. I had the idea to use a CD-player like a turntable, but not the way you would use a CDJ-machine. (1)

Appropriating consumer electronics in this fashion leads to unpredictable and often out of control results. While this is fairly easy to shape into a barrage of noise it is much more difficult to sculpt into the precise ultra-controlled realm of EAI. This also seems like a further iteration of the use of electronics in this realm, first it was instruments that were approached differently (prepared guitars, feedback saxophone and the like) then it was tools of music production that was subverted (mixers, turntables, samplers), then appropriated electronics (circuit bent guitar pedals, homemade synthesizers, open circuit manipulation) and now the application of many of these principles to consumer electronics.

I do little bending or making short circuit of CD-players, but I often end up breaking it (laugh). Yes, I touch the print board with tiny screwdrivers, but these days I’m trying to use CD-players’ innate sound such as the spinning sound or the sound of lens pickup moving.(1)

This subversion of electronics is quite clearly in the lineage of their collaborators on this disc, Sachiko M and Otomo Yoshihide. There has been a long tradition of using the turntable beyond how it is used in DJ and hip-hop circles and Otomo has been a major figure in this movement. Combine this with his use of guitar in a post Keith Rowe fashion he really represents a fairly long continuation of adventurous exploration of musical tools. Likewise Sachiko M is an influential pioneer of electronics repurposing beginning with her unorthodox, though more standard, use of the sampler with Otomo’s Ground Zero project eventually abandoning its essential nature by just using its sine wave test samples. As progressive as this pair has been there has been a certain listlessness in their work for the last couple of years. This was reflected differently from the two of them, Sachiko just seeming to lose interest and not foraging ahead in new projects or collaborations, while Otomo threw himself into more and more work that seemed less and less creative and thought through.

Sachiko I feel has returned to form as evidenced by her excellent solo Salon de Sachiko (Hitorri) which was recorded a year after this collaboration. Sachiko is such a meticulous improviser that even during this somewhat listless period she would play in established groups (such as Filament and Cosmos) and the music would always be rock solid, often fantastic. After this release though she seems to be back in force as evidenced by the performances she put on at the Amplify festival this fall. Otomo, on the other hand, seems lost in work, playing more music then ever but so much of it seeming disjointed with odd collaborations, seemingly incoherent choices (such as all the work in pseudo-jazz forms) and a genuine lack of restraint. His interests seems to have moved on from quiet, sensitive explorations and yet he seems to still be able to pull them off when the need arises.

Filament, especially in recent years, seemed to be about fluctuations in stasis. As evidenced in the fantastic box set they released in 2004 they had pared their sound down to absolute essentials, fluttery whispers from Otomo’s turntables, long tones from Sachiko with perturbations coming in the form of simple amendations to these basic units. Adding additional players to this spartan affair is always fraught with risk and I’d say there are few collaborators that would work with this as opposed to transform it into something else. Their collaboration with G?nter M?ller for instance, while a fantastic trio, wasn’t really Filament anymore. Given how chaotic a lot of Hong and Choi’s work seemed at the time this was certainly something that one would expect could go in the direction of becoming something else. However this collaboration turned out to be absolutely amazing, producing music that one evokes much of Filament and yet goes quite beyond the finite limits that that project seems to have set for itself.

The disc is made up of three pieces, the first in three parts (1/1, 1/2, 1/3) the second a short interstitial track (2), the third in two parts (3/1, 3/2). The trademarked stasis of Filament is strong in the first piece, with Otomo layering whispers of sound from the turntable, perhaps just the lead-in track of a record, or the needle brushing over a soft surface. Sachiko lays back for quite some time in this piece and then carefully places soft, short twitters from her sine wave generators. But along with this are short bursts of tattered feedback, never loud but a low stutter rising out of this soft bed. This along with electronic hums, mechanical rattles, short rumbles and hisses of static, come in and say for only the shortest of visits. This creates a fascinating, multi-layered effect, one that obscures any sort of mental assemblage - it doesn’t lend itself to easy systems of structure. There are no major dynamic shifts, though there are louder and softer bits, it just seems to become such. There isn’t a rapid fire run through of numerous sounds and techniques, but likewise the sounds aren’t overused and never become predictable. No this music is slippery, complex and yet constructed of the barest minimum of parts. The middle track seems to work with the fewest parts, left to stew for a bit but over its short six minute length there does seem to be a building toward something that never arrives leaving us again with a fragmented vacuum. The final piece seems to be led a bit more by the Koreans; it is they who setup a grinding mechanical bed that the other sounds work in. Here Sachiko leaves a single tone running for long periods of times, merely backing it off and changing it to different frequencies at various times. Even with the greater sound density of the Koreans mechanical apparatus they space it out, bringing these sounds and waiting to switch them to another. The final moments of this track is some of the most post-industrial sounding and works as an endcap to both the piece and the disc. Not a climax in any sort of traditional way but an ending, closure.

This collaboration was certainly never a certainty and I have to say the results probably exceeded my expectations. This was one I’d heard about right when it was performed and with my love of Filament and my increasing interest in the Korean scene I was highly anticipating it’s release. But I had no idea which direction it would go and I couldn’t be more pleased with the results. It is fitting I think that the disc is not Filament + Hong Chulki and Choi Joonyong but that it is an equal collaboration between Sachiko M, Choi Joonyong Otomo Yoshihide and Hong Chulki. As for the title, well your guess is as good as mine.

References
1) Choi Joonyong interview at Foxy Digitalis
2) Hong Chulki page at Balloon & Needle
3) Choi Joonyong page at Balloon & Needle
4) Review by Joe Foster of the 2006 concerts.

Sweet Cuts, Distant Curves (CD, Balloon and Needle, 2008)

Recording of improvised music quartet of Choi Joonyong, Hong Chulki, Sachiko M and Otomo Yoshihide in May 2006 in Seoul.

Reviewed by Massimo Ricci

Despite the above positive review of Hum And Rattle I’m not the least envious of artists expressing themselves with CD players and turntables these days; how can they find innovative ways of making music without producing the same results from a record to another? Most times a success is not waiting behind the corner, all those skip-click-fizz-and-buzz practices often turning into a litany for the destruction of the residual hopes of listening to a cleverly conceived recording. Luckily, this one (“recorded during Sachiko M and Otomo Yoshihide’s trip to Seoul for concerts organized by RELAY”) doesn’t belong to this category, especially in virtue of its rather interesting combinations of colours. This stuff is only for the well-versed, of course; not sure that the melange of maniacal sputtering, vituperation of harmonic construction, bizarrely hesitant oscillations and unsympathetic hiccups is going to appeal to those who love to hear some old-fashioned consonance in their wine-influenced evening sessions; in the final track, Otomo is even heard torturing an electric guitar. In general, nothing memorably new under the sun, although the sonic concoctions generated by this quartet tickle the nerves quite efficiently. With headphones on, in front of a muted TV set airing Criminal Minds, the session made for an experience halfway through occult encoding and electrophysiological stimulation. Alternatively, you may be willing to listen to Mozart or Vivaldi and get brainwashed for real.

Reviewed by Brian Olewnick

Trying to elucidate what makes a release like this one stand somewhat apart from many other worthy recordings might be something of a fool's errand, but one thing that I kept thinking about was how the pitch range used here, high to low and in between, oddly resembled that which one might get from a "standard" quartet, rock or jazz--maybe even a vocal group, with soprano, alto, tenor and baritone. Not that these musicians stay in parts but that there's usually a fullness here that's a bit unusual in these realms. They also mitigate between dronage and short, harsh bursts, finding a juicy middle ground with regard to those choices, a fine balance among brief hums, sharp scratches and gentle pings. The music is "full" as opposed to sparse (again, relatively speaking), with an airiness between sounds more often found in acoustic settings. Whatever, an excellent disc, certainly one to hear.

Reviewed by Frans de Waard (Vital Weekly)

The releases by Balloon & Needle from Seoul, Korea always look nice without being too fancy or over the top, like some others sometimes do. The releases often, but not exclusively includes the work of Choi Joonyong (CD players) and Hong Chulki (turntable, electronics), who team up with Sachiko M (sinewaves) and Otomo Yoshihide (turntable, guitar) in this concert recording of 2006, when M and Yoshihide visited Seoul. If the work of the Japanese part of this CD is in anyway familiar with you, then you know what to expect. Sachiko M's sinewaves are the very bottom, or foundation if you want of the music. Things buzz in the front, in the back, below and above, high and low, but they buzz. On top of that the three men add their own blend of cracks and cuts, from the media players at hand - what the guitar is unclear, but no doubt he fits into this in a clever way - either sounding like a sinewave or like another crack or hiss. This is a work that is great, but but but its also something that we heard before, mostly in the work of the Japanese two involved here. That perhaps makes things less of a surprise, but the total concentration involved by all four players requires full concentration on the side of the listener. Only then it will reveal its true beauty.

Reviewed by Dan Warburton (Paris Transatlantic)

Having thoroughly enjoyed other Choi Joonyong / Hong Chulki releases that have recently come my way - the final chapter of the 5 Modules series on Manual, the Expanded Celluloid, Extended Phonograph DVD with Lee Hangjun, reviewed here last time round - I have to admit I'm having problems with Sweet Cuts, Distant Curves - though not with the album title, which is terrific. There's something about this particular assemblage of clicks, rips, crackles and hums (yes, once more I'm afraid we're stuck with this vocabulary, until anything more musicologically coherent comes along, which I suspect might be a while) which fails to keep my attention, and I've tried six times now; and I think it's to do with the pacing of the material and the event density. The other abovementioned offerings from the Koreans (Choi on modified CD players, Hong on turntables and electronics) are busy, even boisterous affairs, while my favourite discs of recent times with Otomo (turntables, guitar) and Sachiko (sinewaves) - most notably the majestic Good Morning, Good Night on Erstwhile with Toshimaru Nakamura - have been quite the opposite: slowmoving and spare, but the five sweet cuts here seem to lie somewhere between the two, in a strange midtempo - if we can speak of tempo - limbo, neither quiet and intense enough to draw you in, nor rough and feisty enough to thrill to. I'll keep trying, but I haven't cracked it yet.

Reviewed by hatta

Like many of the EAI scenes the Korean contingent welcomes outside voices and frequently hosts musicians from all over. With it’s near proximity there have been many collaborations with Japanese musicians and there seems to have been a bit of cross pollination between the two groups. In 2006 Sachiko M and Otomo Yoshihide came to Seoul and played as Filament and in various ad hoc groupings with local improvisers(4). This included the quartet of Sachiko and Otomo with Choi Joonyong and Hong Chulki who subsequently made a studio recording which was released as this disc.

And there was no Korean noise-related music back then. So discovering Japanoise like Merzbow and Masonna was a big influence for starting Astronoise.(1)

Choi and Hong moved into improvisation from an initially noisier background and it seems to have been collaborations with visiting musicians that moved them into the more deliberate and less aggressive forms of improvisation they seem to focus on now. They still incorporate a lot of those harsher sounds into their work, but with a much greater emphasis placed upon the sounds then upon the energy that is often more of the focus in noise. In a large part I think that the tools that these two in particular, but also many other Korean improvisers, seem to favor shape what they do.

I think we’re likely to use sound reproducing machine because they are easy to find, and maybe because we’re not that good at playing real musical instruments (laugh). If any machine has an input and output, we just plug it onto itself and make a feedback loop, or open it to mess with it. As for me, I got inspired by turntable artists like Otomo Yoshihide and Christian Marclay. I had the idea to use a CD-player like a turntable, but not the way you would use a CDJ-machine. (1)

Appropriating consumer electronics in this fashion leads to unpredictable and often out of control results. While this is fairly easy to shape into a barrage of noise it is much more difficult to sculpt into the precise ultra-controlled realm of EAI. This also seems like a further iteration of the use of electronics in this realm, first it was instruments that were approached differently (prepared guitars, feedback saxophone and the like) then it was tools of music production that was subverted (mixers, turntables, samplers), then appropriated electronics (circuit bent guitar pedals, homemade synthesizers, open circuit manipulation) and now the application of many of these principles to consumer electronics.

I do little bending or making short circuit of CD-players, but I often end up breaking it (laugh). Yes, I touch the print board with tiny screwdrivers, but these days I’m trying to use CD-players’ innate sound such as the spinning sound or the sound of lens pickup moving.(1)

This subversion of electronics is quite clearly in the lineage of their collaborators on this disc, Sachiko M and Otomo Yoshihide. There has been a long tradition of using the turntable beyond how it is used in DJ and hip-hop circles and Otomo has been a major figure in this movement. Combine this with his use of guitar in a post Keith Rowe fashion he really represents a fairly long continuation of adventurous exploration of musical tools. Likewise Sachiko M is an influential pioneer of electronics repurposing beginning with her unorthodox, though more standard, use of the sampler with Otomo’s Ground Zero project eventually abandoning its essential nature by just using its sine wave test samples. As progressive as this pair has been there has been a certain listlessness in their work for the last couple of years. This was reflected differently from the two of them, Sachiko just seeming to lose interest and not foraging ahead in new projects or collaborations, while Otomo threw himself into more and more work that seemed less and less creative and thought through.

Sachiko I feel has returned to form as evidenced by her excellent solo Salon de Sachiko (Hitorri) which was recorded a year after this collaboration. Sachiko is such a meticulous improviser that even during this somewhat listless period she would play in established groups (such as Filament and Cosmos) and the music would always be rock solid, often fantastic. After this release though she seems to be back in force as evidenced by the performances she put on at the Amplify festival this fall. Otomo, on the other hand, seems lost in work, playing more music then ever but so much of it seeming disjointed with odd collaborations, seemingly incoherent choices (such as all the work in pseudo-jazz forms) and a genuine lack of restraint. His interests seems to have moved on from quiet, sensitive explorations and yet he seems to still be able to pull them off when the need arises.

Filament, especially in recent years, seemed to be about fluctuations in stasis. As evidenced in the fantastic box set they released in 2004 they had pared their sound down to absolute essentials, fluttery whispers from Otomo’s turntables, long tones from Sachiko with perturbations coming in the form of simple amendations to these basic units. Adding additional players to this spartan affair is always fraught with risk and I’d say there are few collaborators that would work with this as opposed to transform it into something else. Their collaboration with G?nter M?ller for instance, while a fantastic trio, wasn’t really Filament anymore. Given how chaotic a lot of Hong and Choi’s work seemed at the time this was certainly something that one would expect could go in the direction of becoming something else. However this collaboration turned out to be absolutely amazing, producing music that one evokes much of Filament and yet goes quite beyond the finite limits that that project seems to have set for itself.

The disc is made up of three pieces, the first in three parts (1/1, 1/2, 1/3) the second a short interstitial track (2), the third in two parts (3/1, 3/2). The trademarked stasis of Filament is strong in the first piece, with Otomo layering whispers of sound from the turntable, perhaps just the lead-in track of a record, or the needle brushing over a soft surface. Sachiko lays back for quite some time in this piece and then carefully places soft, short twitters from her sine wave generators. But along with this are short bursts of tattered feedback, never loud but a low stutter rising out of this soft bed. This along with electronic hums, mechanical rattles, short rumbles and hisses of static, come in and say for only the shortest of visits. This creates a fascinating, multi-layered effect, one that obscures any sort of mental assemblage - it doesn’t lend itself to easy systems of structure. There are no major dynamic shifts, though there are louder and softer bits, it just seems to become such. There isn’t a rapid fire run through of numerous sounds and techniques, but likewise the sounds aren’t overused and never become predictable. No this music is slippery, complex and yet constructed of the barest minimum of parts. The middle track seems to work with the fewest parts, left to stew for a bit but over its short six minute length there does seem to be a building toward something that never arrives leaving us again with a fragmented vacuum. The final piece seems to be led a bit more by the Koreans; it is they who setup a grinding mechanical bed that the other sounds work in. Here Sachiko leaves a single tone running for long periods of times, merely backing it off and changing it to different frequencies at various times. Even with the greater sound density of the Koreans mechanical apparatus they space it out, bringing these sounds and waiting to switch them to another. The final moments of this track is some of the most post-industrial sounding and works as an endcap to both the piece and the disc. Not a climax in any sort of traditional way but an ending, closure.

This collaboration was certainly never a certainty and I have to say the results probably exceeded my expectations. This was one I’d heard about right when it was performed and with my love of Filament and my increasing interest in the Korean scene I was highly anticipating it’s release. But I had no idea which direction it would go and I couldn’t be more pleased with the results. It is fitting I think that the disc is not Filament + Hong Chulki and Choi Joonyong but that it is an equal collaboration between Sachiko M, Choi Joonyong Otomo Yoshihide and Hong Chulki. As for the title, well your guess is as good as mine.

References
1) Choi Joonyong interview at Foxy Digitalis
2) Hong Chulki page at Balloon & Needle
3) Choi Joonyong page at Balloon & Needle
4) Review by Joe Foster of the 2006 concerts.