Jason Kahn "On Metal Shore" // Editions 001

[Jason Kahn]

Jason Kahn

"On Metal Shore"

Editions 001 LP

Hear excerpts and purchase here:
http://jasonkahn.net/editions/catalog/o ... shore.html

Edition of 250
Heavy weight 180 gram vinyl.
Hand-painted covers on thick gray cardboard.

Composed and recorded 2008-2010 by Jason Kahn in Zurich and
Horw, Switzerland and Nodar, Portugal.

Cover artwork by Jason Kahn.

Side A: 18:19
Side B: 18:40

The idea for "On Metal Shore" goes back to the 2008 collaboration "Vista" with Boston artist Asher.
The genesis of this piece was early morning recordings I made on the shores of the Lake of Zurich
in 2007, where I played some very resonant steel railings with my hands. There was something
magical for me about being down by the water an hour or so before sunrise. My hands were freezing
and as I played a flock of birds in a tree nearby would fly away from my noise (even though I wasn't
playing very loudly) and then re-group again only minutes later, repeating the whole process over and
over again during the course of the recording. I had the sense that I was engaging with the environment
on several levels, from the give and take of the birds to the rising sound levels of my playing in response
to the incoming waves lapping at the concrete retaining wall below the steel railing.

I wanted to re-visit this approach with "On Metal Shore," which takes its title from this first experience on
the shores of the Lake of Zurich playing with metal railings. "On Metal Shore" was recorded from 2008-2010.
The composition uses not only recordings made of me playing found metal constructions outside but studio
recordings of various metal objects and percussion instruments being vibrated with sound waves played through
different types of transducers. In a sense, then, "On Metal Shore" is a composition about percussion, but not only.
It's also about the idea of "playing" with an environment and taking my percussionist's skills outside the studio
and into uncontrolled situations.

Some of the other location recordings for "On Metal Shore" were made at the Binaural Residency in Nodar, Portugal,
where I found some water tanks with good sounding metal ladders welded to them. More lakeside recordings were
made, this time on the shores of the Lake of Luzern, while on another residency at the Haus am See in Horw. In this
case, a small dock nearby the house where I was staying had a line of steel railings which were incredibly resonant
and played nicely with the water quietly splashing against the nearby boats and the dock's wooden piles. At a
construction site in Oerlikon, a suburb of Zurich, I found some long metal pipes which I recorded with the microphones
placed deep inside, tapping lightly on the pipes with my fingers. The rumble of passing trains running parallel to the site
provided a good juxtaposition to my playing. And at a school nearby where I live I found a drainage pipe closed off with
a large plate of steel, which responded to the lightest of playing with a soft mallet. In the distance, water running down
another pipe offered a strong contrast to the ringing tones of the steel plate.

In my studio I set up a mini version of my installation "Wires (2008)" and experimented with various frequencies of
sound waves vibrating the steel wires, recording this in front of tin can resonators attached to the wires. I also
made recordings of other metal objects and drums activated with various transducers, ranging from small piezo
elements to large "bass shakers."

I had never set out to compose a piece for percussion, but I guess in the end this is "What On Metal Shore" is,
though perhaps not just about the sound of percussion but about the idea of how and where I play it, be it outside
or in the studio, with my hands or without, set vibrating by the oscillation of sound waves or accompanied by a flock
of birds or the sound of water.

Jason Kahn
Zurich
November
2011

[yonhosago]

a beautiful project
thanks for the information

[fslmy]

very pleasantly surprised to see a release from you on vinyl, looks great!

[Jason Kahn]

Here is a new review of this on Richard Pinnell's "TheWatchful Ear."

This evening didn’t start so well once I got home from work. I don’t recommend
rubbing freshly chopped chilli into your eye. It hurts a lot and it takes about an hour
for the sting to subside enough to open your eye again. I also don’t recommend trying
to eat your dinner with your eyes closed either. Or at least, not with a clean t-shirt on.
Still, after tonight’s mishaps I spent time with a vinyl album I have been playing on and
off for a couple of weeks and enjoying a lot- the new solo, self released album by
Jason Kahn named On Metal Shore.

The album consists of two compositions, one on each side of the hefty 180g vinyl. Both
of the pieces are computer sequenced arrangements of percussive recordings made by
Kahn, but with a large amount of the contributing material recorded outside using found
metal objects- railings, water tanks, pipes etc. Many of these items were found on
beaches or beside lakes or other bodies of water, though not all of them, and various
other external sounds make their way into the compositions via these recordings,
birdsong, running water, passing trains etc. Kahn plays these found metal items with
mallets and other items, tapping out very simple repetitive figures, but also passing
sound waves through them using various transducers.

The end results are very fine indeed. There are three kinds of sound that seem to be
audible throughout the two works. We hear the rapid clockwork of Kahn’s metronomic
tapping, often on its own, on different metal objects, sometimes buried under other
sounds. Then there are all kinds of fuzzy, cloudy, hisses and purrs, layers of white noise
the origin of which I usually haven’t a clue. Then there are the environmental sounds.
Sometimes they hang around, sometimes they are carefully implanted into the composition,
like the second or two of a train passing over loose sleepers that is suddenly pitched against
a rapidly tapped metallic chime late in Side A. In his liner notes, Kahn mentions that the
inspiration for this album could be found in his duo album Vista that he made with Asher
in 2008. For that album he had worked with steel railings outdoors, and having enjoyed the
experience he set out to record similar sounds again. Certainly much of the feel of Vista
can also be heard here in that the sounds coalesce into clouds of highly detailed white noise,
dense and at their height hard to penetrate, but with the fizzing surface layers masking the
very simple percussive structures below. Where On Metal Shore differs from that earlier
collaboration is in the way the layers are often stripped back, sometimes gradually, sometimes
with sudden cuts away from one set of recordings to another, so revealing the elements,
often very simplistically beautiful parts underneath. The occasional recognition of other,
external, often natural elements in the midst of everything also adds another, very
welcome element again.

I wrote somewhere recently that I have enjoyed Jason Kahn’s last few releases a great deal,
and that, while he has appeared on a lot of CDs and I have enjoyed his work for more than a
decade now he seems to have really found a degree of musical craftsmanship and a sense of
clarity to his recent work that gives it an emotional, direct quality to it that I may not have
sensed so easily before. On Metal Shore is up their with his fine solo album Vanishing Point for
me as his best work yet. It has a physicality to it that really grabs you, a tendency to build to
obvious high points but in a way that still feels exciting, similar to how AMM performances did
for so many years. I works particularly well with the volume turned up high so that the layered
reverberations seem to rattle about the room and the lapping water and twittering birds seem
to appear in the space around you. This is a fine piece of work then, a record that makes me
very glad to have bought a turntable again in 2011 and one I heartily recommend. It also comes
in a lovely hand painted cover on thick grey card that just makes me mourn the loss of Kahn’s
Cut label. Hopefully there will be more like this soon.

Some copies are still available at:
http://jasonkahn.net/editions/catalog/o ... shore.html

[Dan Warburton]

Yep, gotta be careful chopping those chillies (images of Richard spilling Chardonnay down his T-shirt.. I know I shouldn't laugh but ) Thoroughly enjoyed this LP (on its first listen, it arrived along with the Tetras double LP last Friday) and delighted to see Jason back putting out records again. I treasure the Cut back catalogue.

[Jason Kahn]

Here's a new review from the March edition of The Wire. I still have some copies available.

If this holds true, then Jason Kahn's resources must be pretty deep. In more than three decades
of playing, Kahn has gone from releasing records on SST to composing graphic scores for the Dotolim
improvisors in South Korea and assembling radio works that capture the unheard sounds of cities like
Zurich and Delhi. This tangle of aesthetic experiences and social, geographical and personal histories
reveal much about the nature of improvisation.
On Metal Shore, the first release on his new label, is not quite a composition. Inspired by a resonant
metal railing he found while making field recordings around Lake Zurich, Kahn started to discover similar
instances elsewhere, and eventually started recreating some fo the same percussion effects in a studio.
The result is not so much a thought-out composition as an immersive accrual of improvised episodes
linked together in a loose, almost surrreal narrative. It teems with overtones, complex cross-hatchings
of rhythms (Kahn's own and stimulated natural reverberations) and sizzling static fields. Crucially, he
also captured glimpses of the locations he recorded in, so when morning birds and passin trains appear
in the mix, it forms a new temporal layer, a piece of Kahn's own spontaneous experience folded in
as aural memory.
>Matt Wuethrich

http://jasonkahn.net/editions/catalog/o ... shore.html