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The Trummerflora Collective - "No Stars Please"
Trummerflora music is collective improvising: a pool of players immersed in the unfolding of a continuous present, egos submerged inthe sound stream. The stream's currents tug towards free jazz, the extremities of rock, the 20th century chamber avant garde and electroacoustic strangeness. On the second disc a core Trummerflora quintet gets spaced out in Carmel Valley, locking into an eccentric approximation of the Krautrock freak 'n' roll orbit. These live recordings were made at five events in four venues last year in California; the sound is often dense, at times murky, but it can suck you in. The hub of the group is formed by percussionists Marcos Fernandes, Nathan Hubbard and Robert Montoya, Hans Fjellestad on keyboards, Jason Robinson on woodwinds, bassist (and producer) Marcelo Radulovich and guitarist Damon Holzborn. Guests are made welcome: guitarist Mike Keneally, percussionist Le Quan Ninh and trombone ace George Lewis romp energetically through a steamy swamp of unruly funk that comes to the boil towards the end of the long piece closing the first disc. Playing such unpredictably meshed music must be a totally absorbing experience. Listening to it at a distance, a degree of detachment is inevitable. Hearing No Stars Please is like taking a walk and noticing things, with room for noticing other things when taking the same walk later. The musicians are not out to flaunt their technique, but to enjoy the plurality of options available when they get together to organise sound. It's not a showcase for virtuosity but a record of shared investigations and an auditory environment for occasional use. - Julian Cowley, The Wire
"No Stars Please" is a double album culled from live performances surveying the collective's diverse activities in the area. "From the Waste Up" starts out as a gutsy free rock blowout, 70s Miles meets Flipper, raining sonic bombs down onto the dancefloor of San Diego's Casbah and then pausing to see what mutant weeds spring to life. These musicians make no attempts to hide their diverse backgrounds in rock, jazz and world music and things really cook, almost making up for the rather roug live recording. The three "Nonets," recorded at KPBS, which despite their titles only feature five musicians, are fine examples of the no-frills approach to free improvising that makes the American scene so refreshing. It's got the same fuck-you-this-is-what-we-like buzz as Ian Davis' Micro-East Collective (operating on the other side of the country). The second disc takes up where the first leaves off, with Marcos Fernandes and Bob Montoya's percussion to the fore laying Afro-minimal percussion licks on top of spacious washes of electronics. It's fresh and original even if it can't quite matchthe closing track on disc one, "Frosty the Snowman/Silent Night," which features show-stealing guest appearances from trombone/electronics pioneer George Lewis (a local as it turns out - he's a professor at UCSD), ex-Zappa guitarist Mike Keneally and French anarchist percussion whiz Le Quan Ninh, on the final leg of a solo US tour at the time. The Ronette never sounded like this. - Signal To noise
The woman I live with, she mistook 'em. I was playing this set and she walked in: "Oooh... Smegma." She don't like Smegma, see, but she don't like much of anything -- she thought Damn, improvised noise...turn that off. Some people don't know noise from, well, dense, complicated RITUAL MUSIC. I played it again and this time SMEGMA mistook 'em for Smegma. Rick Stewart of Smegma, sensing somethin' simpatico in the dense complication, said: "That's us, right?" Wrong! But close. "The Trummerflora Collective is an independent group of musicmakers dedicated to experimental and improvisational musics. The collective embraces the pluralistic nature of creative music as an important means of artistic expression for the individual and the community" -- y'took the words right outta my mouth. The music on this 2-disc set is QUITE MAGNIFICENT SHIT. Cock an ear to the last cut on disc one, "Frosty the Snowman/Silent Night." George Lewis is on there, you might recognize him, but beyond that there's just so much shit going on you could LIVE IN IT. It would be a viable place to live! How many bands in the fucking WORLD, in conservative navy towns and elsewhere, do anything remotely similar to what Trummerflora does, a hundred? Eighty? Fifty? Seven, including Smegma? The number is SMALL. Trummerflora Collective! In our merry midst! Treasure 'em, people! - Richard Meltzer
Here's the question: After hearing really good spontaneous improv and listening to Sun Ra's "Magic City," how does one figure out what is and what is not extemporaneous? Well, it doesn't matter. When it sounds as good as these guys, who cares? Shifting from five to nine players, the ensemble is hardcore committed. You just can't play like this without being topped out. A bit lo-fi, the sound is quintessentially live and almost dangerous: there are just too many flipped-out ideas flying around. Two discs of mind-altering truly progressive music.Sloppy, tight, tribal, spaced, schizophrenic, enlightened, alien...hell, just listen to those percussionists on the first track and you'll know all. Oh, and Mike Keneally too (one cut). - Marc Tucker
No Stars Please is a collection of live recordings, with tracks ranging from 3 to nearly 30 minutes in length. Disc 1includes the heavier, full band music. "From The Waste Up" brought to mind the Frith/Laswell/Maher power trio Massacre with horns. Or maybe W.O.O. Revelator with a thudding bass line and organ. I really loved Hans Fjellestand's organ from the his solo and Donkey CD's and it sounds great within this fuller band context. But this is 23 minutes of avant rock and jazz, and experimental sound explorations that don't let the listener snooze for a moment. Even the quieter subtle passages are busy and full of life and intensity. Dark droning guitars compete with birdsong flutes and chaotic percussion to create a primordial soup of pure sonic beauty. I even hear a gorgeous horn sound that reminds me of George Cartwright in Curlew or the more contemporary Smokin' Granny from North Carolina. Parts even bring to mind a noise-jazz version of Univers Zero. Do you get the idea that there's a lot happening here making it hard to describe? "Nonet" (parts 1-3) was recorded live on San Diego radio. Straddling the razor's edge between abstract and accessible (though leaning heavily toward the later), the music blends avant garde rock and free-jazz, forging confidently through a thicket of varied sounds. "Where's The Entrance" is an electro-acoustic excursion with a decidedly cosmic infusion. Dark, theatrical, highly dramatic, and intense. And Christmas will never be the same after listening intently to "Frosty The Snowman/Silent Night", a 27 minute glom of beautiful chaos. Mostly a noise-jazz and sound exploration, there are brief moments of the recognizable "Frosty The Snowman" and "Silent Night", though in forms you've unlikely ever heard before. For the most part the Trummerflora's get down and dirty in-the-trenches tripped out funky on this tune... rocking hard and including some mucho freaky electronics and samples. Disc 2 is a bit different, with all 3 tracks on being taken from the same performance and following a similar theme. There's lots of heavily atmospheric music and percussion, and throughout the disc we hear more of a showcase for the percussion members of the collective than any of the tracks on disc 1. I enjoyed the contrast and cooperation between the somewhat minimalist space ambience that develops, and the percussion which is sometimes busily clanging and banging, but also gives an orchestral quality to the music. Music and sound share the spotlight, dueling and interacting, and along the way creating an interesting and enjoyably hectic ride. "Punch Press Pull" is my favorite from disc 2, the electronics being more overtly spacey, though the percussion is still in the forefront. Harsh tones, drones, and noise give an edge to the spacey atmosphere, with the percussion once again providing an orchestral intensity to the proceedings. This get delightfully wacky as this lengthy track develops, and at one point I felt like I was at a surrealistic carnival in a altered conscious. "The Break Invasion" a 27 minute epic excursion that is still a busy percussion piece, but communicates a crowded urban feel, like an avant garde representation of the everyday happenings in the city. There's LOTS going on that only the most attentive listening with reveal. The percussion develops steadily as set electronic patterns provide the canvas on which the drummers lay down their brush strokes. An excellent set of improvised music. - Jerry Kranitz , Aural Innovations
No Stars Please lanzamiento doble producido por Marcelo Radulovich nos muestra parte de la trayectoria del colectivo de creativos TRUMMERFLORA de San Diego California. Este est compuesto por 2 Cds que nos ilustran presentaciones en vivo y sesiones realizadas en varios lugares de estados unidos. No Stars Please es una coletanea de improvisaciones dando espacios infinitos a la creatividad del ser, no como un ser arametrado a ciertas tendencias sino ms bien como un ser altamente creativo pluralista y natural que rompe esquemas y construye nuevas formas de expresion artstica. el disco es una mezcla de sonidos y estilos variados desde aires de Jazz raspando el cielo deciblico con un ambient trance y golpendo con cortes de noise psicodlico. - Undernews
- François Couture, All Music Guide
The second disk is all taken from a single gig on one night (11/11/2000 - a redolent date for Australians - and one where the US matches the rest of the world - why do you go month/day, when most of us are day/month?), and features just the 5 principals. The range of instruments is reflected in the music - primarily percussive with some electronica and keyboards - and there is a sense of wholeness. Again there is the movement between periods of gangbusters intensity shifting into light tentative explorations, many different tone colours (tuned percussion, drums, shakers, scifi tones, squirling electro, pulsing, radio extracts, guitar, bells and on and on), varied moods and moments, which all add up to an engrossing album, probably more rhythmic than melodic, but paced to keep you listening. It would have been a great night at Artisan's Hand Gallery. I can remember a time when a live double album (let alone a triple, Leon Russell, ELP, Yes) was considered an indulgence. Yet a full length cd is close to the capacity of a double album (most of Living in the Past fits on a single cd: and to show my age, I remember ordering that before it came out). In a similar way this is something of an indulgence on the part of the collective, and its not surprising I don't get it all. But, I enjoyed it: being taken in new directions is always a pleasure. And pleasure, fun is the feeling that you get from this - the collective enjoys playing together. Vital used the old fashioned term 'Jam' to describe it (or jelly, as Norman Gunston once offered to join Frank Zappa in, knowing that stateside jam is jelly) which does suggest some of the joy in playing that you feel coming through. Anyway, this is a great live experimental freeform set, something to stretch yourself. - Jeremy Keens, Ampersand Etcetera
The booklet continues: "The Trummerflora Collective is an independent group of music makers dedicated to experimental and improvisational musics. The collective embraces the pluralistic nature of creative music as an important means of artistic expression for the individual and the community". "No Stars Please", which comes on two impressive, stark black CDs with white print, features a collection of live concert recordings by the Trummerflora Collective and a few guest musicians. The first track - "From the waste up" - was recorded at the Casbah in San Diego. It's a fairly long piece with its almost 23 minutes. It's hard to know what to expect as the noisy, "Ascension-Coltrane"-like beginning hits you, but sooner than later the music gathers structure as the musicians line up and deliver a mighty modern jazz kind of event, forcefully and speedily mangling down the line in a steady beat flowering with meandering adventures of the wind instruments. It is indeed very "live", this piece, and it feels just like you're in that smoky domain when you listen in, in a sweaty group of listeners standing up on the floor, swaying and swaggering to the carnival beat, in which you can detect accents from The Band, The Mahavishnu Orchestra, Jean-Luc Ponty and whatnot... A few minutes into the piece an experimental, almost electroacoustic atmosphere is let in to color the fix, and events slow down considerably, even hinting at Ensemble Modern-like renditions of impressionistic 1960s Charles Lloyd love-in-seductions. At this point the instruments are chatting wildly, making fruitful conversation, sort of overheard by an eavesdropping audience, and I can envision the instruments on tha smoky stage, leaning towards each other, shooting that good old breeze, completely oblivious of the concert situation! The venture picks up speed, going right into a funk tradition of Chicago and the Mid West, changing costume and style just like that, in a chameleon behavior! Jason Robinson and Ellen Weller really get down to basics here, growling and screeching madly on a backdrop of steady rhythm & blues rhythms, hammering on down that path of residue and leftovers, into a junk yard filled with happy metallic finds! Go! Go! Go! A continuous wall of sound, worthy of Dror Feiler and The Too Much Too Soon Orchestra, saws its way through your skull, eventually evaporating in mouthpiece kissing sounds of the wind, while hammer head war time drums march you ahead towards the conclusion in Allan Pettersson-symphonic vulnerabilities... Before the end you're rounded up by the crew, which now - with vocals added - sounds like something out of the bag of Dutch villains Willem Breuker Kollektief or German desperados Einstrzende Neubauten performing "Halber Mensch"! Simultaneously the percussion is a mimicry of Balinese gamelan, and it's a pleasure to be here! The following three pieces are all called "Nonet", simply numbered 1, 2 and 3. The title brings back memories of transparent chamber pieces by Hanns Eisler. These pieces also sport durations fitting that notion, running from 2:40 to 5:06. They were recorded at The Lounge, KPBS, San Diego. This is a more complex sound world, voices permuted through electronic devices at the outset and staccato rhythms planning for watery, bulging sounds off of a swell from died-down musical storms... but in the smaller format the storm gathers power once again, hitting populated areas in the audience head-on, and I duck behind the rubble as the improvisers pour their intense rage over my circumstances... In the second "Nonet" the musicians play around with a little riff, possibly - probably - paying homage to some legendary piece of old, but insane scrapings out of Marcelo Radulovich's electronics and sawtooth frictions out of Jason Robinson's woodwinds plus jolly bubbles rising from Damon Holzborn's guitar take the wind out of all old stuff, and it's the seriously present NOW which rules, as Stockhausenesque "Piano Piece XIII"-showers are fingertipped out of the piano by Hans Fjellestad. Edgar Varseian or George Antheilian sirens, portrayed by an inspired Jason Robinson, take the entourage on a roller coaster ride as the final minute of "Nonet 2" sets in. A short piano section of calm Diaz-Infante solos urges everyone to sit tight until the piece has come to a complete stop, and the whole tapestry of sound gets a wobbly tilt, as if perceived through crystal glass... and in the unfocus of the moment all that remains is a blur of swaying shapes and beautiful colors... "Nonet 3" gushes forth madly from the very beginning, with a Conlon Nancarrow piano speeding head on into a wall of saxophone growls and insanely gesturing graffiti musicians. There is a tonal and rhythmical argument brewing, but it all seems to boil down to nothing much through acoustic guitar and bass, and on that note we leave the nonet stage of this double CD. "Where's the entrance" was recorded at The Luggage Store in San Francisco. This starts on a Theremin key, but that's an illusion instilled by electronic means. A sparse, see-through curtain of woody events, interspersed with sharp, hissing and grinding sounds, allowing also for lithophonic percussion and guitar, whisks the music ahead, arms outstretched, gaze directed forward, legs barely obeying the multitude of intentions of the moments, of the "moments musicaux". A thundering bass enters, rumbling like brown infra-hoses beneath the floor, as synthesized rats gnaw at the cables before encountering a fabulous electrocution by crude amplifier-destined electricity from nuclear power plants thrown out across the prairies like doomsday ice-cream cones of infertility... The last piece on CD 1 was recorded at The Casbah in San Diego. It's "Frosty the snowman / Silent night"... It winds up like some machinery of a workshop that really is... winding up! The guys turn the levers and operational devices of a steel business workshop of some kind, perhaps in a division of Bethlehem Steel! Machines are gearing up, pneumatic tools are turned on, overhead cranes start moving under the roof... break is over! Even though The Trummerflora crew only utilizes musical instruments and machinery, this desperate piece still sounds like The Too Much Too Soon Orchestra drilling through pieces of rock with pneumatic drills on stage, as fumes of kerosene and gasoline spread dangerously across the audience, smokers and non-smokers... creating sudden danger fields of improvisation... Forlorn voices from the local insane asylum tune in to the general mess of things, and nave little melodies out of the most shallow layers of social life are integrated with this mad breaking-down of values and structure, where musical residue is spread across the Casbah like the dust of concrete from the World Trade Center or the flying debris from bombed out makeshift brick houses of villagers in Afghanistan... It's all in the game... and the game is frantic... oblivious of calm moments in the garden, at the white table with a glass of lemonade... because this is a social and mental stone crusher of limitless brutality... and it remains to see if a Phoenix bird will rise out of these hot ashes of musical implosion! CD 2 begins with "Third time", recorded at the Artisan's Hand gallery in Carmel Valley, live as everything else on this double-CD set. All three works on this second CD are recorded at that same place, on the same night. Short, arching trajectories of whining sounds begin "Third time". This is reminiscent of water and birds, droplets and jungle chirps; rain forest music; gentle, animalistic and animistic; electroacoustic. The music doesn't sound live in the beginning, but arranged on hard drives, even though I know it's not. Some of the percussion sounds North African, Moroccan; like big maracas used in Moroccan healing rites. Some of the more illustrious instruments are used in the triptych on this CD, like radio, melodica and rub-a-metatron, and I think accordion appears only on this second CD too. The long durations of the pieces on CD 2 give the players enough time for ample deliberation and natural evolution of emerging tendencies, without anyone having to feel pressured or hurried. The wind instruments well forth, at times, like a choir of air raid sirens being tested.Brittle metallic percussion diffuses shrill, golden vibrations through the air, and humming dynamos roll everything up in neat packages of humdrum bulkiness. Half hidden conversations are reduced to just one characteristic of the sound web, and it gets denser, like a New York street on a Friday afternoon, with all those individuals moving without bumping in to each other, in an eerie likeness of red blood cells moving up a blood vessel. Like those individuals on the street, who can be perceived either as individuals or as a mass of meat, a mass of blood and bone and tissue, this music can also be viewed in two ways, as you can shift focus every second if you wish, from the concentration on one instrument or one separate occurrence, to an over-arching view of the whole web of sounds, enabling you to take in the colorings, the shadings, the diverse tilts and tendencies of the whole body of sound. This is a rewarding exercise in connection with Trummerflora's music. "Punch press pull" sounds like a workout at a gym, but it's track 2 on CD 2. A repetitious drum figure, slowly evolving and extending itself is persistent in the foreground, while cityscape mixes of emergency vehicles and heavy machinery at building sites provide the basic environment. This is as far away from a meadow in the woods asyou can get; it's certainly city music in serious identification with bricks, asphalt, street signs, enormous walls of glass and steel reflecting the sun that shines through the muggy smog, and sidewalks enduring the warm gushes of moist air out of subway ventilation shafts... and the cement mixers rule! Winches pull and lift heavy blocks of matter, lowering them elsewhere, as workers pry them into position. Big city life and improvisational music have many characteristics in common, so Trummerflora's explorations of the cityscape is a natural occurrence in all its intricate noisiness, and San Diego and Los Angeles highway circuits are hot hell for a visitor from fresh air Scandinavia... Let me just add, to make things clear, that Trummerflora does not work with musique concrète, meaning that they do not insert for example concrete cityscape recordings into their music. They simply sound metroplex-like through their creative utilization of their instruments! When glissandos of iron wire screeches transform into Giacinto Scelsi-like string etudes, you know you're into something good! The last entry is "The break invasion", constituting the longest piece on the whole set; 27:16. Subdued but intense rhythms - as if heard through the wall - are mixed with a bluesy female song on the radio, as the thudding rhythm gathers more strength and develops its timbres, adding sharper, scratching high pitches to its fanatic rogression, which - I suddenly realize - lends its basic formula from Pauline Oliveros' "The Wanderer"! The female blues singer returns for a while, until a hypnotic standing wave sound is allowed to completely dominate momentarily, in a stillness hitherto unknown on this set, with just a few fork-knife rattles added for your listening pleasure... Chopstick percussion and drawling bass gestures ooze and brew, with a certain amount of short-wave menace inserted... ...and so it goes on, in ever-changing nuances, as the sounds move like the shado clouds over the plains, in constantly changing patterns; Trummerflora music! - Invar Sono Loco |
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