[Being an attempt at communicating my unabashedly subjective experience
 in a way which might be interesting and informative to the hundreds
 of thousands of participants in this forum.]

Jeez.  Crunched all those numbers an it turns out to be a tie.

1-2:    Sun Ra:  Sun Song  (Delmark reissue, orignally issued 1957)
        Konrad Bauer:  Toronto Tone  (Les Disques Victo, 1992)

Picked up this CD reissue the other day for $6 (hi, Larry).  Although
last year's Evidence reissues predate this material Sun Song was Ra's
first "official" release.  The model, of course, is large ensemble
swing but the bizarre arrangements are already mature here and there
is at least one experiment completely removed from any genre.  Even
the more straight-ahead cuts are completely irresistible and swing
with a vengeance.  From the pure Chicago strut to the synthesizer
music from Saturn's latin quarter this is a delightful album.  I'd
be wondering how extraordinary it must have sounded in 1957 if I weren't
so busy wondering how extraordinary it sounds today.

What's really remarkable is the way in which the most original and
creative material is introduced so subtly and without the slightest
overstatement, as in the brief but remarkable piano intros in which
Debussy and Art Tatum struggle for control of Ra's brain.

And anyone who thinks that Coltrane's sound of the early 60's was
without precedent ought to take a listen to John Gilmore.

Please don't hit "n" when I tell you that Konrad Bauer is a German free
improvisor who performs solo on processed trombone and tape loops.
Toronto Tone is a lovely and accessible album that is likely to appeal
to New Music folks even more than to jazzbos and could be a revelation
to rockbos of the Fripp/Eno school.

There are four longish cuts from this solo concert (very well recorded
and without any audience noise, thank you), all of which feature only
Bauer with his trombone and tape loops and sparse use of some effects.
Bauer literally improvises with himself, trading phrases, reshaping
material, and briefly playing a stunning "solo" brass choir.  Although
Bauer shows considerable improvisatory imagination there's nothing
particularly difficult here and extended trombone techniques are used
sparingly and to great effect.

A beautiful album without a dull moment.  Now I read that Bauer recorded
a solo acoustic album inside an empty water tower with a natural 45-
second delay.  Off to the import bins for me.

-- Clay
          "Existence is existence throughout all of existence."
                                -- Stephen Grossman

Actually, I'm fairly certain that this isn't a tower, but an underground
reservoir of some 2.5 million gallon capacity located in Port Townsend,
Washington. The interest in improvising in sites wherein the acoustics
provide the presence of a "second" player is an interest Bauer shares
with Stuart Dempster. Those of you who are interested in hearing what
45 seconds of natural reverberation *sounds* like might also be profitably
steered to the album that Stuart Dempster (trombone, digeridu), Pauline
Oliveros (just intonation accordion) and Panaiotis (percussion, voice)
have recorded as "The Deep Listening Band". There are two albums of
this amazing space available on the New Albion label: "Deep Listening"
and "The Ready-Made Boomerang" (which adds Thomasa Eckert and some
other players). I'm almost positive that the Bauer recording (which may
not be quite as interesting to you as the one you've described) comes
from the same place. Of the two, the latter is, for me, the more
adventurous and interesting.

There's also an album from Paul Giger (who is, I believe, the concertmaster
of the Stutgartt orchestra?) on ECM of solo violin performed in the
crypts and spaces of the cathedral of Chartres....on the Solstice,
no less.

--
The law moves quickly in the rain/and chokes the world with memorials./The
courts accept the lowest superstition/into evidence. And we embrace quickly in
the rain,/conceiving a hale infant with hands to wrinkle/the bedsheets toward
it, wave by trough by wave./Gregory Taylor/Heurikon /Madison, WI/608-828-3385

No, no, no!  I'm quite sure that it was a tower.  In fact, the cover
photo shows Bauer scaling the thing, trombone strapped to his back,
green expanse of Olympic National Park in the distance.

(Hmmm.  Now that I've poked fun at myself I see that the Cadence review
*does* say it was a watertower.  They also say that the album title is
"Fluchtiges Gluck" on Riskant, if you feel you can still trust them
after the watertower/reservoir fiasco.)

Hmmm.  I've been curious about this but thought, for some reason, that
it was on HatArt.  Did Giger do something for them as well?

And I believe that this was recorded in a revolving cocktail lounge
overlooking Lake Tahoe, rather than at Chartres.  But I could be
wrong on that one.

-- Clay
          "Existence is existence throughout all of existence."
                                -- Stephen Grossman

Not to add this as an entire album, but the first few minutes of the Rush tune
"Natural Science" includes acoustic guitar and vocals that were echoed off of
a natural canyon wall - gives a very deep echo effect before the metallic
crunching to follow stops it.

UUCP: {amdahl!bungia, crash}!orbit!pnet51!tmadson
ARPA: crash!orbit!pnet51!tmad...@nosc.mil
INET: tmad...@pnet51.orb.mn.org

Hmmm. Now there *is* a recording on les Disques du Crepuscule of Gavin
Bryars' "The Sinking of the Titanic" which is done in the inside of a
water tower in southern France. I might be being a trifle hasty on this
one, fastening on the numerical figure (45 seconds) rather than the
possibility that I might have a watertower recording in my collection.

There is also a piece on the compilation of experimental music from
Australia "Austral Voices" which uses a bowed psalter recorded in a
storm drain of some kind of culvert or underground parking lot as raw
material, but there's just not that kind of reverb.

Nah. ECM. Giger's made an appearance on a HatArt disc too, I think. Can't
think which one. In my opinion, the Oliveros/Dempster/Paniotis stuff on
"The Ready Made Boomerang" really outdoes the Giger. While Chartres is
a nice space and it's really cool that it's done on the Solstice and
that stuff, The playing doesn'ts really get much outside of sending
wildly varying volumes of stuff out into the void at a rate pretty much
dictated by the size of the resonant cavity. The reverb time is such that
Giger can build something like what you called the "brass choirs" only
with difficulty, and they're just not as interesting. However, there's
some really lovely playing that alternates between high register and
artificial harmonics that really sound *wonderful*. I know - maybe for
me, the space is more interesting than what's done in it in this case.
I do think it's clear that Giger is a pretty extraordinary violinist,
however.

And as long as we're talking about interesting recorded spaces, there's
a Dempster trombone disc (also New Albion) recorded in the abbey of
Clement VI that's more or less the equivalent of the Giger, using a trombone
and a digeridu. Based on what Bauer I've heard, I think that perhaps KB
might have done music of slightly greater interest to me in the same
place. Still, it really *is* lovely (one of the things I treasure CDs
for is the ability to turn them up and listen to those echoes roll away).
Also, David Hykes and the Harmonic Choir managed to make their first
Ocora recording "Hearing Solar Winds" in the Abbey of Theleme, which
(at least I don't *think* so) is yet another old French acoustic space
that fills really well. Hykes' variations on Hoomi (or throat) singing
really *need* big spaces to really work, and I tend to prefer this particular
disc to the stuff they tried in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine on
the Celestial Harmonies disc "Current Circulation".

Now isn't this just the sort of net foolish that all those young men
were pissing and moaning about? A whole posting about nothing but
"rooms", containing not a single CD that ever made the charts. Shameful.

And where on earth did you find that Hatobe disc, Clay? Sounds really
interesting.

--
The law moves quickly in the rain/and chokes the world with memorials./The
courts accept the lowest superstition/into evidence. And we embrace quickly in
the rain,/conceiving a hale infant with hands to wrinkle/the bedsheets toward
it, wave by trough by wave./Gregory Taylor/Heurikon /Madison, WI/608-828-3385

Joan of Arc was burned for claiming that gtay...@vme.heurikon.com (Gregory Taylor) said:

Speaking as someone whose tolerance for space/trance music is rather
limited, I must say that I found "Deep Listening" surprisingly
interesting and active.  Despite this amazing reverberation, there
is no "slap-back" at all -- the reverberation seems like a sound all of
its own, with a very long attack.  One of these days I'm gonna pick
up "The Ready-Made Boomerang", too.

-- Stewart
--
"The same guy who was telling me how Neil Pert was the greatest living
 poet later sanded 1/4" of skin off his fingertips on the belt sander."
                                -- bigs...@u.washington.edu
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