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When I first looked at Noé’s score I was puzzled by the title. The first meaning of “harrow” that came to my mind was that of the frightening or terrific experience, associated with katabasis—e.g.Christ’s “Harrowing of Hell”, Orpheus underworld journey—and after after a few emails, when I discovered he rather meant something more like a plow, I was intrigued and set myself to the task of capturing something of this mysterious doubleness of meaning. Whereas Karolina rather interpreted the lines in a literal way, musically, matching actions sensibly to the score, even marking the print-out of Noé’s original with her own annotations, I felt had to find a different door into the compound, so to speak.

Many times, during interpretation, as in our existence, much depends on how we value a word or a thing. When I read the map of Wu Hsing recently (the cycle of elemental changes in I-Ching) it was easy to see that wood feeds fire, but fire feeding earth didn’t make immediate sense to me. I then realized I had had too literal a sense of fire—when you transpose fire into sun however, the way in which the sun feeds the earth is plain as day. Then earth brings forth metals, and so forth. The Chinese have one word that means Earth the Planet and different one for earth the soil or “stuff”. So, how to reveal opposing elements inside Harrow to contrastive ones Dormant? One interesting detail is that I couldn’t operate at all the way I do while improvising, when I have to keep my eyes on my gear most of the time. I had to come up with an action plan that allowed me to also maintain a visual relationship to the score, I had to be reading those lines somehow.

The stone that lays on top of my guitar is from New Mexico. I traced the wavy line of the score using another stone from New Mexico while using the vertical lines as “event markers”, these events were realized here with strokes of the small rasp on the guitar strings. The dramatic tension dealt entirely with the harrow/dormant paradox…What is whispering in the sleep (so to speak) is simultaneously being roused to wake for the labor for which it is designed or destined (but which, it turns out, had been going on all along). The stone is a secret language. And Harrow/Dormant contains words that seem arcane at times, at times seem part of the stone’s arcanum.

While the violin is an instrument of two opposing parts (the bow and the violin itself), the guitar is traditionally played with plectrum or primarily the fingers, that is to say, the guitar and the body are almost always more directly engaged with one another. and therefore the guitar and I are more directly opposing/supporting. When stone meets stone there is both sameness and difference, sparks!, secret languages whispering, fire even. Metal strings, metal rasp… the metal and the earth in the constructive and deconstructive relations.

Jeff Gburek
Poznań, Poland, June 2011

Radius, a Chicago-based experimental radio broadcast platform, will transmit Noé Cuéllar’s Quiver 1,coinciding with the summer solstice on June 21 at 8pm CST. The program includes Panthalassa, performed by Kristin Hayter, and the graphic score Harrow/Dormant (2010) performed as a prologue by Jeff Gburek (guitar & electronics), and as an epoligue by Karolina Ossowska (violin), sound artists and musicians currently based in Poznań, Poland.

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Timur Kuyanov comes from Siberia and lives in Berlin. Wearing a pair of sneakers and a vintage tracksuit jacket, he is busy manipulating tiny instruments that have been installed on what looks like an upside-down green plastic bin. This is drone music with a spaceward gaze. Through imperceptible movements, he draws sound lines with patience and uses the full potentialities of each drone. As in the music of Philip Jeck, there is a great thoroughness and care for sound. In the end, you’re surprised by looking at his instruments: an iPhone, another even tinier device and a series of knobs organized like numbers on a clock. « No samples? » asks someone. « No… » — « All sounds come from the iPhone? » — « Yes. I think that’s enough » he answers with a smile. ‘Less is more’ is not dead apparently.

Hervé Boghossian is a French guitarist/laptoper, also running the small label List (take a listen to the excellent compilation ‘Instruments’ featuring Werner Dafeldecker and Janek Schaefer among others). Using both laptop and guitar in a configuration that recalls Fennesz, Boghossian delivers a very personal set. Although seeming to be bothered by the sound (or the sound engineer), his nervous musicality is impressive at first. The set is presented like a series of studies. It begins with sharp and motoric riffs, then you hear dense waves, noisy pieces sculpted through various effects, and ambient soundscapes falling to glitchy bits — a melody often showing just beneath the surface. The day after, I had the chance to have coffee with him. He first told me that the set I have been listening to last night was probably the last of its kind. He appears to hate music making routine and plans to use the computer more like an instrument, focusing mainly on feedback—another reason to follow the work of a singular musician.

Polish musicians Jeff Gburek and Rafał Iwański are performing their set under the respective monikers }e{nigmaplasme and X-naVI:et. Gburek studied percussions and gamelan music before playing on various instruments with lots of top class improv artists like Keith Rowe, John Tilbury or Eddie Prevost. The young founder of a trance-gong-drone music trio named Hati, Iwański is used to appearing with many ethnic instruments including gongs of course, handbells or balalaika along with objects and toys. Tonight he uses electronics too, and so does Gburek, who also brought his table top guitar onstage. From the beginning, the music has got a physical presence and creates a sonic world as beautiful and strange as some tongue of remote and ethnically uncertain origin. The melting of sounds is a fertile ground for the imagination, and when Iwański throws unregular haunting bass drones, music has been given new shapes to grab you tighter. Later on, Gburek stops playing and lets Iwański finish the set alone: « Sorry, I don’t feel well » he apologizes. At that point, half of the audience (36 people including staff) is drinking and chatting loud in the corridor, coming and going in the room, seeming to care more about beer than music. Maybe this is not the reason, but a couple of days later you could read the following lines on Gburek facebook page: « I only thought for a few years that one had to have a ‘conceptual’ relation to audience (as spectacle) because mainly of the obvious triumph of banal and backward musical thought that prevails in every arena of ‘presentation’. There are other means of approaching the audience: communicating the art of listening, for one. »

The art of listening is something Joke Lanz seems to know how to dictate (more than communicate). People are still talking and laughing in the distance when he turns off the light and throws repeating alarm beeps. Lanz is a kind of Dada punk with attitude and charisma. His face looks clever and gentle but can be threatening and intimidating as well. After a couple of minutes, the lights are on and all 36 people are in the room shutting up. Lanz can play with turntables and other instruments but today he plays the mad man, talking, humming, counting (that’s how I knew we were 36), reciting pater noster in German (with a slight change in the text: ‘Tod’ (Death) instead of ‘Brot’ (Bread)), watching you and making shock sounds by hitting again and again his forehead against the microphone until blood comes out—bits of all this is being recorded on tape and live repeated in the background. Then he takes big scissors and begins to cut and tear his white shirt off while the speakers are vomiting loud electronic snow. Near me, I see a couple looking at each other with an uncomfortable grin saying ‘what the hell are we doing here?’: they should cherish the unsecure feeling, for they won’t get it for ever. There’s nothing like the first time.

By Antoine Richard (Source)

05/03  Jeff Gburek with X-naVI:et & solo  live at the Blurred Edges Festival, Hamburg, 20:00, info here
05/04  Jeff Gburek with X-naVI:et  live at Gallerie Co-Op, Hamburg, 20:00
05/06  Jeff Gburek with Wolfram  live at Chlodna 25, Warsaw, 21:00, info here
05/29  Jeff Gburek live at the Dromosphere Festival, Galeria On, Poznan, 19:00, info here