his box set presents a unique experience for fans of electro-acoustic improvisation. Over the course of seven CDs and a (phenomenal, educational, brilliant) DVD, this set meticulously documents and recreates the experience of Erstwhile Records' 2002 AMPLIFY festival, held that year at Tokyo's Star Pine's Café. The music contained within this gorgeous, elaborate package—featuring lovely photos from the events by Yuko Zama—is nearly without exception some of the finest material these performers have to offer; rough, raw, lacking perhaps the clarity and precision of a studio recording, but very much possessed of those elusive qualities that can make good improvisation something almost magically affecting.

Although, as Erstwhile's Jon Abbey rightly points out in the accompanying booklet, nothing can completely recreate the experience of seeing this music live, this set goes a long way towards capturing the sounds, sights, personalities, and emotions that doubtless made the original event so worthy of documentation. Essays from the participants range from the humorous (Taku Sugimoto's gloriously ambivalent reaction) to the anecdotal (Gunter Müller's hiking trip) to the mouth-watering (Oren Ambarchi's analysis of Tokyo eating establishments). These insights into the surroundings of the music—along with the wealth of fascinating DVD footage—provide a valuable glimpse into the context in which this music should be absorbed. It is, fittingly, a very human atmosphere, dependent on complex relationships between the musicians and a spirit of true exploration: musical, philosophical, and interpersonal.

Ultimately, this sense of context is what makes the box work as a whole experience. Although most of the actual musical performances are good on their own merits—and a few are particularly noteworthy—the cumulative effect of the box is far greater than that of its constituent parts. Placing these performances into this broader context reveals (for the first time to many listeners) some of the broader implications of electro-acoustic improv, bringing this largely abstract music fully to life. Indeed, from beginning to end, this box is brimming, bristling with life and activity, a celebration of music and community that is as vibrant and exciting as the musicians who are represented here.

[Ed Howard]

Disc One – Outside Shows

The four sets culled for the opening disc capture highlights from the shows before and after the festival—intimate affairs more relaxed than sets from the main event but no less focused. Modeled after the Meeting at Off Site series, the four lengthy engagements documented here center around no-input mixing desk wizard Toshimaru Nakamura, with one track featuring fellow Off Site regular Tetuzi Akiyama on amplified acoustic guitar. Recorded in the quiet confines of Gendai Heights, Appel, and Off Site itself, the sparse musical language and somber tone on display bear the hallmarks of the Tokyo scene of recent years—sharp ticks, clicks, and feedback fissures spark in the spaces between almost tangible silences.

Thomas Lehn and Nakamura open the disc with a hushed assemblage of dry squeaks and twitters, before settling into a rich purr of feedback punctuated with reverb pops and sputters. While Nakamura’s whistles and grainy snaps feel oddly familiar to listeners attuned to his previous work, Lehn’s nuance-laden palette of low-volume sounds is likely to surprise those more familiar with the twitchy synth wizard’s high-velocity fare. Hovering just below Nakamura’s fragile feedback webs, he coaxes a wealth of variations from low-level electric hum and rattled reverb tanks, arranging them into flickering constellations of interference and static. The trio of Akiyama, Nakamura, and Günter Müller stretches out into more lengthy drones atop Müller’s minidisc loops and treated percussion. Müller works up softly throbbing drones and quasi-melodic loops while Nakamura channels slivers of feedback that stand in contrast to Akiyama’s earthy guitar interjections. After pursuing disparate directions at the onset of their performance, the trio settles into a common grammar at the ten-minute mark, coalescing into a relaxed exchange of sustained tones pocked with gritty interjections.

The pairing of Nakamura and Viennese laptopper Christof Kurzmann adapts the languid pacing and bass-heavy rumble of the latter’s recent solo effort to the duo setting. Kurzmann dictates much of the pacing and texture with subdued yet meaty drones, leaving space for Nakamura’s loops and sparkles to crackle in subtle, rhythmic counterpoint. Like the previous sets, the duo’s offering hits its stride after a brief bit of groping, but the rolling collection of buzz, sub-bass growl, and sferics that gather in the final minutes are well worth the initial frustration. The final trio of Lehn, Nakamura, and guitarist Taku Sugimoto, however, offers nothing but continual pleasure from the first wiggles leaking from Lehn’s synth. Sugimoto abandons his recent tendency to stretch silences to tedious, unrewarding lengths in favor of languidly paced playing that balances lingering moments of concentrated silence with sensuous, complex guitar tones. He conjures glowing bell-tones and ringing bowed drones as Lehn and Nakamura trade glitches in the background, and the group’s interactions grow increasingly patient with each rapidly passing minute. They recede into silence after thirteen scintillating minutes, leaving the ear keenly tuned to the demanding, high-concentration music in the discs to come.

[Joe Panzner]

Disc Two – tint

Conceived as a regular Erstwhile release within the AMPLIFY box set, tint teams Toshimaru Nakamura and Günter Müller—both of whom represent master collaborators in their own right. Working in other groupings, Müller and Nakamura tend to lead from behind by gathering pressure behind the musical gestures of their partners. Together they create well-balanced dialogues of reciprocal interaction, pushing and pulling sounds into a blended whole that is every bit as subtle—and perhaps a little more forceful—than one might expect from players known for seeping into the sonic canvas. Like the blurred photographs of neon lights against a dark backdrop that adorn its sleeve, tint alternately shines and smokes as it leaps between grainy noise flashes and deep, unsettling drone. Recorded in the studio five days before the festival proper, it’s a crisply produced document of an inspired first meeting, one that deserves individual release after the AMPLIFY box is no longer available.

Nakamura mixed the first two tracks, which aptly reflect much of the character of his own music: edgy, mutating loops that intersect with sharp blasts of noise and gurgling metallic pulses. Fizzles and pops abound, marked by the characteristic rounded click of tweaked delay devices and are often blown into drifts of static and silt. Müller’s “selected percussion” (credited as his third instrument, behind “iPod” and “minidiscs”) sink beneath the bubbling sonic tics and twitches at the surface, yet his array of processed loops push processed voices and unidentifiable instrumental tones into a subliminal rhythmic framework. Paired with Nakamura’s almost dub-like echoed feedback hiccups and clicks, Müller’s forward-driving electronic squelches imbue these tracks with surging momentum and enough doses of scratchy noise to dispel any notions of an ultra-polite outing from a pair of team players.

The latter three tracks, mixed by Müller, are darker and more slow-burning affairs that revel in a particularly saturated low-end drone that has its nearest aural equivalent in smoldering coals. A weighty hum marks the first of these tracks, gathering in woofer-shaking intensity until diffusing into a fog of jittery, almost-funky rhythms and otherworldly peals of wobbly feedback. The following track finds the duo reprising the formula by placing Nakamura’s mixer in the foreground and accreting flecks of noise and swells of bass around an unraveling static strand. Always hinting at a full-fledged noise climax that never quite arrives, Müller and Nakamura stretch the threat of speaker-wrecking calamity to delicious extremes, allowing the snaps and sputters of overloading signals to take on an ominous life of their own. Tint concludes with a stellar medley that ties the previous musical threads into a tightly-wound knot; Müller’s scraped cymbal and floor tom feedback prod Nakamura into tightening spirals of click-heavy squeaks, culminating in a majestically dense signal storm and its subsequent dispersion.

Delivered with the care typical of Erstwhile’s studio releases, tint makes for an ideal entrance point for music from the festival itself—it’s as distilled and potent as Cosmos’ brittle moonscape and as immediately gratifying as the rambunctious fare from the Lehn/Schmickler or Rowe/Nakamura sets. Rich in detail and filled with subtlety and surprise, it’s a particularly essential component to a well-conceived whole.

[Joe Panzner]

Disc Three – Cosmos & Rowe/Lehn/Schmickler

The duo of Sachiko M and Ami Yoshida—collectively known as Cosmos—begins the festival proper in the absence of the set from Taku Sugimoto’s guitar quartet, a group whose sparse plinking loses its stark theatricality in the transfer to CD. While the quartet’s colored silences (best appreciated on the included DVD) surely made for a challenging open to a festival marked by relative accessibility, its demands seem slight compared to the ascetic gasps and whines loosed from Cosmos’ sine-wave sampler and strangulated windpipes. Compared to their Erstwhile studio release, this twenty-minute gem is harsher and more vertical—Sachiko’s sine waves hang unbroken, like frozen electrical arcs, throughout the set while Yoshida harmonizes with eerily vulnerable squeaks pulled from the throats of tin birds. Astoundingly, this third recorded performance from the duo finds them uncovering yet another austere world crafted from their barest of materials.

Mixed reports followed the Cosmos performance at the time of the festival, and it’s not difficult to see how their quietly devastating music could go unnoticed or unappreciated on the first pass. Their music brims with activity, but its cut from materials so pure, faint, and dry that they’re easily absorbed by slightest disturbances in the room—perhaps the only thing that requires more concentration than actually making such difficult music is listening to it. On record and in the privacy of a quiet room, however, the music comes alive; its whisper-thin tones and cracked exhalations teem with inner life and intersect at odd angles, its sharpness and purity turns from repellent to magnetic. Tiny events become monumental as the ear gradually attunes to the severity of the materials—one becomes acutely aware of the varying density of events and the introduction of new elements, as when Sachiko’s rubber-band-bound contact mike crackles like a miniature earthquake midway through the set. Cosmos works like alchemy, turning the raw and base to the sublime by equal parts stress and calculated combination.

The trio of Keith Rowe, Thomas Lehn, and Marcus Schmickler offers considerably more immediately accessible, visceral thrills as they reprise the three-way blowout of 2003’s Rabbit Run. Arguably one of the most versatile groupings in the electro-acoustic improv kingdom, the trio offers a considerably darker and more foreboding workout than their recorded work, preferring here to swell storm cloud drones into high-energy vortices rather than spluttering like a malfunctioning reactor core. Lehn’s agitated synth work dominates the opening while Rowe and Schmickler harmonize his “ping-pong ball in a reverb tank” outbursts with creeping growls and muffled metal-on-metal scrape.

Eventually the trio takes a more egalitarian stance, with Rowe’s steel wool scrapings and restless abrasion trading jabs with Lehn and Schmickler’s livewire twitching. Bristly events stretch back into cavernous drones that the trio trails back into silence, troubling the already uneasy calm by lobbing spiky chunks of debris through the murky amp hum and digital mist. As densely textured as the Cosmos’ set was stark, the Rabbit Run crew’s encounter provides a physical, dramatic foil to its intensely cerebral counterpart.

[Joe Panzner]

Disc Four – Yoshihide/Müller & Lehn/Schmickler

AMPLIFY 2002 marked the world premiere of the duo of Otomo Yoshihide and Günter Müller, who recorded the lush and grainy Time Travel for Erstwhile just days before their festival appearance. Whereas their studio work featured impressionistic, subliminal interplay between shifting layers of crackly textures and dangling guitar notes, their intense thirty-six minute live duel traces out more conventional and dramatic narrative arcs that owes much to Yoshihide highly visual performance style. Lashing out at turntables with mallets and fists or hunched over his bowed guitar, Yoshihide pushes Müller into his most physical—and most overtly percussive—playing of the festival. For a festival devoted to granulated, atomized, and processed, the Müller/Yoshihide pairing bubbles with decidedly analog intensity, all warm gritty smears and dark thudding beats.

Opening with the scratchy, muffled wail of bowed guitars and cymbals, the duo quickly seizes on a collection of itchy turntable scratches and disembodied thumps from Müller’s processed percussion. The tide of crackles and thumps rises to a torrent before receding suddenly into dry crackle and fizz, under which Müller strings together an industrial march that grows more menacing with each passing repetition. Müller and Yoshihide explore a groove of errant buzzes and looped percussion to a point just shy of exhaustion before reaching a natural caesura near the exact midpoint of their set. From the brief silence emerges more propulsive pacing and a more rigorously physical host of sounds—Yoshihide draws metallic depth charge booms by pounding cymbals on tone arms, Müller draws overdriven feedback from his drums and hammers his headphone mics to nerve-rattling effect. The fist-pounding climax draws blood, both figuratively—there’s no moment more dramatic on these seven discs—and literally from Yoshihide’s mangled hands. Again, Müller defies expectations, pulling out gripping new textural and formal schemes, never lapsing into comfortable habits or clichés.

Thomas Lehn and Marcus Schmickler bring another sort of intensity to the festival; too fractured and frenetic for even the suggestion of narrative, their firestorm volleys and knob-ripping synth wrangling succeeds on the merits of its own unstoppable, hyperactive energy. Like frazzled supercomputers spluttering out hunks of ingenious code, they tumble through more ideas in minutes than many groups do in years without losing focus or degrading into senseless blurting. Saw-toothed waves dash from channel to channel, sprinting over absurd belches of fuzz and clatter before lurching to breathtaking stalls and stutters, only to reform in new and often startling configurations. Which is not to say that Lehn and Schmickler are strangers to lower extremes—much of their dialogue thins to almost-delicate exchanges between wrecked modems and high-tension power lines. Their gentler wobbles and warps, however, work best when juxtaposed with their hell-bent flurries and rapid-fire pointillism, casting their manic energy as hilariously violent and more than a little unsettling. Like all mad scientists, the experiment draws to an apocalyptic close—an ear-bending drone heaved from silicon guts, melting to a buzzed slur and then staggering to a fizzled stop. Simultaneously more refined and more warped than Bart, its studio predecessor, this incarnation of the Lehn/Schmickler synth explosion turns oddball syntax and fractured logic into something both frantic and enduring.

[Joe Panzner]

Disc Five – Sugimoto/Stangl/Kurzmann & Rowe/Nakamura

The disc opens with a barely audible static hum, over which float scrapes, chiming notes, and other sounds that seem inextricably tied to the guitar, though also several paces distant from anything traditionally associated with the instrument. As guitarists, both Burkhard Stangl and Taku Sugimoto have long stood astride this odd dialectic, always pushing the limits of their chosen instrument while simultaneously retaining a fondness for tonality and recognizable string plucking that tabletop guitar practitioners like Keith Rowe have all but abandoned.

On this set, the pair’s explorations have the familiar crisp, spacious sound—half sound, half silence—of much onkyo guitar music, while Christof Kurzmann’s gently murmuring laptop fills in the spaces and keeps everything tied together. But even with the constant presence of Kurzmann’s long sustains, this music hovers on the limits of audibility, creating an ambient wash of sound that could easily trickle away in the background like a gently bubbling stream.

In keeping with Sugimoto’s increasing preference for silence over sound, the interaction between him and Stangl is significantly more open than their comparatively busy (though also quite sparse, in absolute terms) Old Fashioned Duet on Slub. The addition of Kurzmann—though his contribution could at first easily be mistaken for tape hiss—adds a subtle, abiding presence to the mix; his drones are a blank canvass onto which the two guitarists throw their light, splotchy noises. There’s a point at around five minutes in which the pair comes close to establishing a forward-moving groove, with Stangl (presumably) producing a rhythm of scraped strings, against which Sugimoto provides some percussive accents. For much of the set, however, their conversation is a much more intermittent affair, as short, sharp statements by one guitarist are answered (and sometimes overlapped) by a similarly brisk reply from the other.

The duo of Toshimaru Nakamura and Keith Rowe is much more fluid. Of course, considering Rowe’s working methods, it’s also a lot more difficult to pick out who is producing which sound here; Rowe’s electronics-augmented guitar rig is capable of producing sounds very similar to the rough, grainy feedback loops of Nakamura’s no-input mixing board. Their half-hour set revisits the territory of their previous Erstwhile release Weather Sky, with long drones dominating the sound. However, Rowe makes his presence known a great deal more than he did on that album, punctuating the crackling soundscape with his familiar bevy of rattles, buzzes, and occasional pure tones. These contributions are never nearly as prominent as his often abrasive, frantic playing with more loquacious collaborators, as on his AMPLIFY-closing set with Günter Müller and Sugimoto.

Instead, Rowe is entirely attuned and sympathetic to Nakamura’s peaceful mood, keeping his sound stable, a parallel comment on his collaborator, the two partners’ music smoothly running together into one all-encompassing drone. Pulsating rhythms take hold momentarily and then dissolve, and the harsh clatter of Rowe’s guitar occasionally bursts up from the fog, but overall this is not as intense and oppressive as the overwhelming, room-rattling Weather Sky.

[Ed Howard]

Disc Six – Stangl/Müller & Nakamura/Sachiko M

The final of the four festival discs opens with a “world premiere” from Müller and Stangl, and it’s rather surprising that this pair, who seem like such a natural fit for each other, had never played together as a duo prior. Just as Stangl treats his guitar somewhat more conventionally than most of his electroacoustic peers, Müller is one of the few improvisers who doesn’t shy away from rhythm and pulse: not just rhythmic looping like Nakamura, but an active forward drive that’s seldom heard in the generally abstract, beat-less world of electro-acoustic improv.

This 33-minute set slowly drifts through a spectrum of moods and tones, from the meditative interlude towards the middle of the set (Müller’s looping industrial rhythms and gurgling noises provide a base for Stangl’s clanging guitar) to the foreboding mood that hangs over the end of the performance like a black cloud. Towards the very end, Müller creates a hesitant rhythm from bits of static shrapnel, beating out an ear-knifing pulse over Stangl’s scraped guitar tones.

Müller tends to keep the music—though consistently on the quiet, subdued side—dense with nuance, always moving and is always ready with something to contribute. In contrast, Stangl seems to carefully ponder each note for a long moment before he plays it, savoring the silences in between his sounds; he’s not nearly as extreme as Sugimoto has become in this respect, but he’s still a much more measured and quiet improviser than Müller.

But the wonderful thing about Müller as a collaborator is that his tendency to fill up the soundfield never becomes overbearing, and on this set he crafts subtly layered rhythms as a gentle background for Stangl and himself to engage in a fluent conversation. Even when the track briefly begins to build up steam around 18 minutes in—with fusillades of contact mic taps from Müller dueling against Stangl’s steady tones—the energy never disrupts the balanced tension of the performance.

A far different duo features the Japanese onkyo stalwarts Nakamura and Sachiko M. Their high-pitched, low-key explorations of sonic extremes have been well-documented elsewhere—not least on their Erstwhile duo release do—but seldom has either musician been quite as fastidious and carefully honed as they are on this stark, minimalist recording. Rather than being pitched against one another, Nakamura and Sachiko’s sounds are joined in contrast against the hushed, expectant silence of the room; only against such a profound stillness could these austere sounds seem as full and rich as they do. Sachiko’s sine waves whistle and twist through the barren air, retaining a distant beauty that is only deepened when joined by Nakamura’s rough-edged scrawls of feedback and gentle tapping rhythms.

The audience throughout is blessedly quiet, but the fact that this music was played in front of a filled room of people, all with ears straining to catch each delicate bit of noise, adds a subtle tension to the recording. In the long spaces between sounds—chasms much wider and emptier than anything previously heard from either performer—there is a clear sense of patient waiting, especially since the improvisation progresses over its course towards ever-shorter blips with longer gaps. It’s an endlessly fascinating and rewarding set, one of the strongest (along with Müller and Nakamura’s tint and a few of the outside-festival shows on the first disc) in the box. Both Nakamura and Sachiko have long been inexplicably capable of making meaningful, compelling music from the starkest of means, so it seems only logical that by stripping their collaboration down even further, they’ve come up with their strongest statement yet.

[Ed Howard]

Disc Seven – Seven Guitars

The final disc of balance was recorded the day after the actual festival ended, with the six guitarists who had been featured during the festival plus Oren Ambarchi, who’d arrived primarily as a spectator. The septet split their 70-minute set into three parts. The two documented here were the final two: a rendition of three pages from Cornelius Cardew’s graphic score Treatise and a subsequent free improvisation—though, methods aside, the two pieces don’t actually sound much different.

The box’s DVD has an enlightening discussion with Keith Rowe on how best to interpret Treatise, and this segment enhances appreciation of this group’s performance, especially since the “score” itself—a sparse collection of sweeping lines and symbols that presumably represent notes—is hardly apparent in the music that results. The group’s 38-minute version of pages 82-84 of the score sounds a good deal like what you’d expect a free improv session from these guitarists to sound like: dark, moody, and free of clutter despite the presence of seven players. Because of the variety of approaches—from Keith Rowe’s tabletop set-up to Taku Sugimoto’s un-augmented acoustic to Otomo Yoshihide, who appears (on the DVD) to be bowing a spring that’s threaded through his guitar strings—traditional guitar tones sit comfortably next to electronic twitters and slow-building feedback. The diversity of the sounds, and the easy way they all fit together, makes this a gorgeous and somehow logical piece, never sounding like a random assemblage of guitar-like sounds. Whether that is a result of Treatise’s subtle innate structure or merely the intuitive improvisatory skill of the musicians involved is nearly impossible to determine.

However, the second track on this CD, which is a free improvisation, does suggest a tentative answer to that question. Although, of course, any such evaluations are subjective, this track somehow feels less structured than the preceding Treatise performance. The elements are all the same—atonal guitar plucking, wavering feedback drones, and electronic interjections—and the track even sounds, on its surface, like the previous one, but the layering and juxtaposition of the different guitar styles doesn’t seem as natural or as meaningful this time around. Here, the seven guitarists, after a lovely and understated introduction, slip into some aimless meandering towards the middle of the piece, with too little of interest happening; there’s none of the tension or sense of progression that characterized Treatise.

[Ed Howard]

Balance Beams DVD

Ah, seeing is indeed believing. While Keith Rowe’s theory about approaching the guitar and Günter Müller’s extremely rich accent are both quite interesting, they are little more than parsley compared to the full meal that is Balance Beam’s visual representation of the elite artists Erstwhile fans have been enjoying on disc for so long. Extremely tight shots of Otomo’s turntable, Sachiko M’s samplers, Rowe’s hands and the accessories he prepares his guitar with; these are what really make the disc worth repeat viewing. Erstwhile’s history is practically built on seamless editing, but here the visual cuts are sharp and blatant. Sets are offered in short segments and it is made purposefully clear where they have been trimmed. Not surprisingly, the audio still flows magnificently and, were the visuals not making it clear, it’d be quite the task to pick out the splices.

The Cosmos, Rowe/Lehn/Schmickler trio, and Yoshihide/Müller sets are the highest of the numerous peaks on the disc. Though all three performances are fully represented elsewhere in the box, the visual element brought new insight to each. The duos of Lehn and Schmickler and Astro Twin are also favorites. The only performance I could do without is Taku Sugimoto’s Guitar Quartet. Mercifully excluded in its entirety, even the six minutes shown are an endurance test.

Besides performances, the feature is filled with incidental footage of everything from performers mingling to the Tokyo subway. Sometimes these work really well, but when they cut in mid-set, I can’t help but wonder what I’m missing, rather than focusing on what’s actually being shown. Jonas Leddington work overall, though, is exemplary.

The other highlight of the few extra features is definitely the Seven Guitars portion, in which Rowe goes into great detail explaining his good friend and occasional collaborator Cornelius Cardew’s Treatise to his fellow performers and (indirectly) his audience. The playful pairing of “Old-fashioned Duet” Burkhard Stangl and Taku Sugimoto and “New-fashioned Duet” Christof Kurzmann and Toshimaru Nakemaru is both visually and audibly pleasing in nine minutes of comparison/contrast. 5.1 Surround mixes of the Rowe/Schmickler/Lehn and Yoshihide/Müller sets are also available. I’d like to comment on them, but I can’t afford to. Based on the rest of the DVD and the box as a whole, it’s hard to imagine them as anything short of detailed perfection.

[Mike Shiflet]