notes on Michael Pisaro

[jon abbey]

Michael Pisaro / Taku Sugimoto - 2 seconds / b minor / wave (erst 061)

'2 seconds / b minor / wave' is a collaboration CD by the two composers/guitarists Michael Pisaro and Taku Sugimoto who had never worked together before, composed and recorded separately in the summer and autumn of 2010. The CD consists of three 20-minute tracks: '2 seconds', 'b minor' and 'wave', each based on one of the three keywords 'pulse', 'pitch' and 'wave' that Pisaro and Sugimoto had decided beforehand. After they finished recording each part, both parts were superimposed on each other and mastered by Pisaro.

'2 seconds' consists of their two pieces composed with pulses, pauses, frequencies and timings of various sound materials in intervals of 2 seconds or multiples of 2 seconds as the basis. Sugimoto makes simple sounds with some common household items (like striking clappers, hand clap, metronome, alarm sounds, pencil sharpener or coffee bean grinder, from my guess) to create rather acoustic, detached tones with a constant regular rhythm. Pisaro plays a wide range of tones and frequencies of electric guitar and electronic devices, in various lengths of sounds and silences that seem to be based on multiples of 2 seconds, with more flexible, fluent rhythms than Sugimoto. There is a strong contrast between Sugimoto's coolness using the solid sounds in linear rhythm and Pisaro' warmth using rather soft and round textures of sounds in a more elastic rhythm. While their sounds cross each other without melding and continually sustain a spatial boundary in between, there is almost a miraculous balance between the two sharply distinctive flows of sounds, which brings a mystic nuance and sense of harmony to the whole piece.

'b minor' originates from the pitch both musicians chose together as a theme. Here, Pisaro composed and played a melody, and Sugimoto composed and played chord progressions, both based on b minor. While Pisaro plays a soft, pure electric guitar sound note by note in a long interval in slow motion, as if trying to stretch time and space, Sugimoto plays his chords on acoustic guitar quietly with a feel of retreating into a small private space. Pisaro's sounds evoke in me the distant light from stars reaching within a clear dark sky, while Sugimoto's sounds evoke in me some fragments of a philosopher's quiet inner self-talk. The contrast between their textures of sounds gives different dimensions to this piece at the same time - with Pisaro's sounds turning outward and broadening the world while Sugimoto's sounds turning inward to the small universe of his inner self. This contrast brings a unique sense of space and depth in this piece.

Sugimoto's guitar sounds are notable here - his simple and straightforward guitar chord progressions based on b minor is touching. However, it is not his emotional attachment or sentiment that will move listeners. The reason why Sugimoto's guitar sounds here will touch listeners' hearts is because he lets the sounds and chords appear in the purest forms - sounds as sound, chords as chords – not as his personal statement or expression of ego. In this track, Sugimoto seems to play each chord with an innocent mindset like a boy who is fascinated with the guitar and playing the instrument for the first time, carefully listening to each chord to enjoy and cherish the pure sound in every detail - a mindset which most grown-ups seem to have forgotten. Instead of depending on frills such as technique, personal statement or showmanship, he presents a complex and rich world of guitar sounds that is born from a chord and its progression, eliminating any elements that may cloud the purity of the sounds. Careful listeners will notice the pureness and the depth of the sounds here, with glimpses when his chord and a silence overlap. Sugimoto adheres to his humble approach throughout this piece, staying behind the chords, as a transparent medium to let the chords be born as they are. It is this humility that touches a listener's heart with a fresh surprise, together with the pureness of the sounds and chords which are made the focus by his modest approach.

In 'wave', each musician chose free sound materials from anything associated with the word wave, such as ocean waves, sine waves and sound waves, and again composed their parts entirely separately. The result of this juxtaposition is quite different from the previous two. While Sugimoto plays quiet, continuous drone sounds that evoke the sounds of an organ, Pisaro repeatedly inserts his field recordings of ocean waves. The contrast between Sugimoto's stillness and Pisaro's motion works beautifully. The sound of ocean waves seems to me to be a symbolic representation of the distance between the two musicians - Pisaro and Sugimoto, who had been working on this collaboration from across the Pacific, relying on the spiritual bond with each other. Pisaro's field recordings of ocean waves also let me visualize the images of the winds blowing over the sea between the two continents. The waves wash over repeatedly as if he were trying to communicate with his distant collaborator Sugimoto who is on the other side of the Pacific, trying to build a bridge between two artists who are standing in different positions not only physically, but also musically. The two distinctive worlds of Pisaro and Sugimoto, that have been interacting without fusing throughout the first two pieces, have finally integrated into one world in this track. At the moment when the two worlds fuse completely, the music ends with a crisp cut.

Despite having never worked together in the past, and even though each part was composed and recorded separately, in the end their parts synched with each other perfectly in incredible harmony from start to finish. Their deep understanding, respect and faith in each other's artistic strength and musicality brought this duo collaboration to a miraculous balance beyond their physical distance, and that must be the main reason for the success of this duo. Pisaro's mixing and mastering work, which bonded two musicians' sounds close to create an intimacy, is also remarkable. This is a completely new world of music - different from either Pisaro's past works or Sugimoto's - that could only have been born from the encounter of these two fantastic, unique individuals.

Having rather different musicality and directions, both Pisaro and Sugimoto seem to stick to one common attitude in this collaboration - pursuing the absolute purity of sounds and chords as often seen in many Wandelweiser pieces. In order to let a sound and a chord be as genuine as possible, both of the musicians have tried to restrain their personal egos as composers and performers as much as possible. This is a beautiful album in which you can observe the pure souls of two composers/musicians, devotedly concentrating their minds with humble attitudes for the sake of the birth of music.

--Yuko Zama, 12/17/10

[jon abbey]

Michael Pisaro - Fields Have Ears (at37)

I have been particularly fascinated with piano sounds since I was a young child. However, at the same time, I have always felt some sort of tightness in most of the piano performances I have heard in the past. I did not know why I felt that way until recently, when I realized that what slightly bothered me was something to do with the composer's or the performer's particular color directly attached to the piano sounds. The rather solid and vertical impression of the appearance of a piano sound, and the way it vibrates when resonating, tends to be easily in tune with the composer and the performer's strong statements or artistic vibrations. But of course, a majority of music listeners prefer the opposite way - to appreciate the distinctive colors (or personalities) of the composers and performers in piano pieces as one of the main purposes of their music listening (and perhaps that is supposed to be the common way to listen to music in a conventional sense). But for some reason, I often felt a little uncomfortable with that, regardless of how deeply I was moved by the music.

Michael Pisaro's piano pieces have never made me feel that way. His piano compositions contain a feeling of freedom, and have no particular color of the composer or the performer attached to the sounds. Instead of confining a listener within a small individual universe of the composer or the performer, Pisaro's piano pieces seem to take the listener to another dimension or another space - with some mystic power of induction, beyond the limited space that the solid, vertical texture of the piano sounds generally tend to create. In Pisaro's piano pieces, the composer and performer's personal voices are not on the center stage. Instead, the landscape of the piece that is woven with elastic time and space becomes a leading part, given a new life by means of the performer's piano sounds, and begins to breathe like a vital organism. The landscape becomes music.


Michael Pisaro's 'Fields Have Ears', just released from Another Timbre this November, consists of Pisaro's three compositions, each featuring piano. The first track, 'Fields Have Ears 1', a 20-minute piece composed for piano and tape in 2008, consisting of a piano, field recordings, sine tones and noises. The piece starts with Pisaro's field recordings of some peaceful nature scene with chirps of birds, distant low-key sounds of a landscape, muffled noises of airplanes over the clouds, with quiet hiss noises from tape underneath. In the midst of this calm, horizontal soundscape, Philip Thomas plays piano tones one by one, slowly forming a lyrical melody like gently dropping watercolors in tranquil water - with thoughtfulness for leaving each color as pure as possible without causing a chaotic cloud. While containing a firm core in each note, Thomas' piano sounds are never too hard nor too soft, and seem to be blended into the field recordings with remarkable naturalness like a wind, as if they are gradually stretching the landscape to many directions. When the piano stops and a silence prevails in the middle of the piece, the sounds of the fields - the rhythmical chirps of the bird and the continuous low-key sounds of the distant landscape - start to feel as if they have imperceptibly become crucial parts of the music. The quiet piano sounds and their long resonances, combined with the ample time of contemplative silences, seem to affect how the flow of time is perceived and impart an infinite profoundness to the music.

Thomas' piano playing seems to have a silent power to draw a listener into the landscape of the music before he/she knows. Breathing together with the landscape, his pure, delicate piano tones gradually penetrate deep into the listener's mind, without impetuousness to cut through the landscape with a sharp edge, or forcefulness to try to move the music forward. While listening to his piano amongst the field recording sounds, I found myself being deeply involved in the soundscape that was woven with somehow unrealistic senses of time and space. The stillness of the power in this piece makes an impressive contrast with the dynamic power in Pisaro's 'July Mountain' in which the thick layers of various soundscapes intertwined with percussion sounds grab the listener into the music instantly and intensely, while both of the pieces involved similar field recording sounds.

The second track 'Fade' is a 20-minute piece composed for solo piano in 2000. This is a very simple piece, in which Philip Thomas plays a single piano tone several times with a lengthy silence in between. The volume of the piano tones slowly diminishes over the course of each sequence. The pattern of the sequence is repeated with different pitches and a different number of keystrokes each time, followed by a silence of different length. Sometimes, the single tone is layered with another tone during the sequence. In spite of this simple structure in which just single piano tones and silences are repeated alternately, there is a strong, silent magnetic power, pulling the listener gradually into the music. The way each piano tone fades, one after another, while overlapping its long resonance subtly toward the fade-out ending of each sequence, creates a surreal sense of a changing distance as if the landscape I am watching in front of me is slowly receding.

The silence between each sequence of piano sounds seems to contain some sort of extraordinary pureness of the air - which evokes in me the solemn clean air after hearing the midnight temple bells on New Year's Eve in Japan. In the depth of the contemplative silence, time feels stopped momentarily. As time goes by while the piano tones are played repeatedly, the memories of the previous piano tones are gradually piling up in my brain, just like snowflakes pile up slowly, making each silence feel even thicker.

The third track 'Fields Have Ears 4' was composed in 2009 originally for four performers but realized by an ensemble of 14 performers in this piece, including Philip Thomas (piano), Patrick Farmer (natural objects), Sarah Hughes (zither) and Dominic Lash (double bass). The ensemble starts to play after 30 seconds of silence, making various sounds and noises for 40 seconds, and then pauses for 20 seconds. After the pause, another sequence is repeated with a slightly different combination of musicians for a different duration, followed with a different length of pause. This sequence is repeated 17 times in 27 minutes in the whole piece, with the duration of each sequence ranging from 5 to 150 seconds, and the duration of each pause ranging from 5 to 60 seconds.

Even though there are 14 instruments and tools involved in this piece – piano, natural objects, zither, double bass, laptop, conical blow horn, slide whistle, spring drum, trumpet, cymbal, melodica, cello, frog guero and clarinet, the resulting sounds from the whole ensemble are incredibly delicate and quiet. Even when a different combination of the musicians starts to play, the tone and the volume of the whole sounds are consistently sustained at the same level - with the obscurity of a hidden stream of underground water, containing complex subtle nuances from different instruments at the same time. The mystic atmosphere of the soundscape reminds me of Robert Ashley's 'Automatic Writing' where reality and unreality seem to cross over. The whole body of the sounds, which resembles the sounds of fields, is so perfectly fused together that it starts to feel as if they have one life. With great subtlety and discreetness, the ensemble's sounds gradually seem to become transparent like the wind or the subtle moves of air, which emphasizes the intense presence of each silence. The surreal feel of inversion between sounds and silences - as if the sky and the ground were flipped - is an impressive characteristic of this piece.

As the CD title seems to hint, the landscapes (field recordings and silences) in these three pieces seem to be given life like a living organism, while the performers stay behind the landscapes as if they became parts of the scenes. Not like conventional pieces in which the performer takes the main role and the landscape becomes a background, the boundary between two distinct positions - performers and the landscape – becomes vague in these pieces, and sometimes their positions are flipped. It is very interesting to observe how all the elements - performed sounds, silences, field recording sounds, and hiss noises from tape – start to form one landscape where every element is equally present to breathe together. Philip Thomas’ and the ensemble’s performances on this CD are both brilliant. They have succeeded in expressing the elastic feel of time and space and mystic nuances of Pisaro’s compositions with extremely delicate touches and thoughtfully restrained expressions that have never gone too far. The careful work in sound engineering by the label owner Simon Reynell is remarkable, too - it brings out the simple beauty of each piece in a natural manner. This is a CD that may not leave you with a vivid impact during the first listen, but will pull you into the music as you listen to it repeatedly - gradually seeping into your subconsciousness with a silent, strong magnetism.

--Yuko Zama, 12/20/10

[jon abbey]

Yuko didn't write as much about Michael's work in 2011, but she did write a few pieces, which I will post here when I have a chance.

in the meantime, she just finished a massive project:

"As my year-end project of 2011, I made a visual chart of Michael Pisaro's 'Hearing Metal 3' from his 64-page score. It looks small here, but actually consists of 30 pages of A4 papers.

I made the timetable sheets with Excel first, then printed them out to fill the cells (each cell is 4 seconds unit) with color pencils by hand, then scanned them into my computer to patch them together in one big chart, using Illustrator.

One thing I could not reflect in the chart was the fact that these 16 players set their cymbals on 7 different materials on the flour - tile, metal, wood, paper, ceramic, leaves, res (drum-like surface) which must affect the sounds of falling rice or grains on each materials on the flour - the complexity of the sounds made by the force of gravity, rice or grains and the 7 different materials at the moments of contacts. I may try to figure out how to incorporate that into the chart, perhaps by adding some different colors under the streams of each rice/grain fall." (12/18/2011)



the full size image is much too wide to post here, but you can see it at:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/13715378@N ... otostream/

[ongaku]

Wow, I almost never poke around in the IHR section but I thought I would pop in here and write a "review" of sorts. Taku Sugimoto and Michael Pisaro played each others' music at The Wulf in LA a couple Sundays back. I was really excited to hear them both since 2 seconds / b minor / wave was one of my favorite releases of 2011. This was my first time at this venue which is located on the second floor of an older 4-floor warehouse converted into art spaces/studios and open-floor apartments with a nice rooftop lounge and view of downtown (as well as the all-nude strip club across the street...). Nice and relaxed atmosphere with a few chairs scattered around and I was surprised at the turnout, maybe 30 people or so.

I should state that I've seen neither of them perform live, but familiar with both artists from their recordings...more so Sugimoto I suppose. Taku played first performing Pisaro's "Music, Silence" which, according to Pisaro's introduction, was the first time they had been publicly performed (may be hazy on the exact details of this). When Taku began playing, I was struck at how little amplification he was using. Granted it was just a tiny Roland amp, and the space really didn't call for much in the way of volume, but still it seemed to be on the lowest possible setting in order to just give it a little more harmonic richness. I wonder if his Gretsch hollow body requires less in the way of amplification by nature or whether this is his typical performance style (would be interested to hear from more seasoned vets of his shows). The set of pieces consisted of single tones of varying lengths, some of the string resonance was stopped abruptly or occasionally let to vibrate until the note completely decayed. All the wonderful elements of his playing that I enjoy, the extreme precision of how the note is attacked, the careful consideration of when to sound the note, the equal importance given to the silences, all of these were evident throughout his performance. An interesting element of the performance was that we've been enjoying some unseasonably warm weather (even by southern California standards) here, and the open window introduced the drone-like curtain of singing tire sounds, big rig jake brakes, random horn blasts from the I-10 freeway a couple blocks away.

Pisaro's set of Sugimoto pieces stood out in stark contrast by comparison. I can't remember the name/s of the pieces he performed (if they even had names at all), nor if they had ever been publicly performed. His use of amplification meant the set was notably louder, of course, but it also became slightly distracting as I found his playing to be a tad too "literal." Numerous times the guitar string was sloppily attacked resulting in an unintentional buzzing or worse, with the note not ringing out at all. There was a palpable tenseness about the set with things unfolding a little too quickly that perhaps was intentional or maybe I'm just reading too much into his style of playing. The I-10 freeway acoustic backdrop was not so much in evidence during this set, and judging from the number of sighs from the audience neighbor on my right, it seems to have added a bit of frustration to the performance.

[Jesse]

thanks, ongaku.

[drip]

interview with michael pisaro on brainwashed:

Michael Pisaro: A Conspiracy Against the Ordinary

"Experimental music opens up our ears. Should we become too rigid or inflexible in our thinking, sound can point us toward broader avenues and unexpected possibilities. This, says Michael Pisaro, is one way that experimental music reaches out into the world. But, he says, it doesn’t just reach out, it invites listeners in and asks them to interact with what they hear. Over the course of several emails, I talked with Michael about his sense of time in music, complexity in modern composition, why silence matters as musical material, and how sound is never exactly what it seems"


http://brainwashed.com/index.php?option ... &Itemid=91

[Antoine]

http://youtu.be/jsLbz4IyK0c