LMC 16th Annual Festival Of Experimental Music
COCHRANE THEATRE LONDON, UK
By Julian Cowley

FIAMME: Tony Buck, John Butcher, Burkhard Stangl

The best came last. The final performance on the third evening of this year’s well attended LMC Festival was an exceptional set by saxophonist John Butcher, Australian drummer Tony Buck and Viennese electric guitarist Burkhard Stangl. The trio’s music had vitality and a sense of purpose. It took improvisatory risks, displayed individual virtuosity and collective alertness. It was genuinely exciting and it sounded really good. Buck is a wonderfully oblique energiser, restlessly attending to texture and percussive colour as he generates momentum. Stangl’s clenched or splintering chords, pedal-swell and dramatic attack proved a great foil for Butcher’s intensity, inventiveness and clichefree expression. When Stangl opted for a tambura-like drone, Butcher felt at liberty to switch from concentrated tenor flurries to exultant soprano that summoned up overt shades of John Coltrane.
Was this ‘experimental’? Well, it had life, and in the arts that’s often what that term has essentially meant, in opposition to reified forms, commodification or mindless repetition. By no means all the music heard in the course of these three evenings was experimental in that sense. Or in any sense. 

SOUND OF MUSIC - Magnus Nygren

Plume

Saxophonist John Butcher is increasingly emerging as one of the most interesting musicians on the global improvisation map. Last year's solo album Bell Trove Spools is a gem and now he comes with two trios where percussionist Tony Buck is on both but where they play with guitarist Burkhard Stangl in one and pianist Magda Mayas in the other. Although these two trios differ, both are in the very essence of European impro (read mainly British) as it developed from the late 60s onwards.

What the productive John Butcher brought home with the participation of, among others, John Steven's British Spontaneous Music Ensemble and the Austrian Polwechsel, he generously shares here. My colleague Thomas Millroth often talks about how European improvisational music is largely about dismantling existing music and then reassembling it and creating something new. And like many other British improvisational musicians, John Butcher began in jazz. But it did not take long before he came in contact with other ways of approaching music. As early as 1989, he published the revolutionary News from the Shed together with guitarist John Russell, violinist Phil Durrant, trombonist Radu Malfatti and percussionist Paul Lovens. The revolution was that the group reshaped improvisational music and opened up to what later came to be known as London Silence, Berlin Reductionism and more.
But calling John Butcher a reductionist is wrong. To scale the sound and build silence into the music is of course included, but John Butcher moves in a much wider field. Great dynamics are rather a hallmark, as well as the ability to play polyphonic. There is an enormous wealth in his tone.

With the trio format, new voltage fields follow, even if the dense longitudinal sounds remain. In a little more than half an hour, Vellum  has time to visit many different areas. With a background in more rock-based music (Australian The Necks), I think I hear a slightly different drumming with Tony Buck than with other impro drum drums, a different attack, a different sound. With preparations, Magda Mayas gets an almost broken sound in the grand piano, she works a lot with repeated sound sequences and is very rhythmic. Together they create a very dynamic music, they build up high pressures but also allow themselves to dig into details. An incomparable music.

The trio with the Austrian Burkhard Stangl is different. Stangl's guitar playing undergoes a form of metamorphosis from picked sounds á la Derek Bailey to adding open chords. The latter is much more exciting. There are given lines in this improvisation as well, but they are not quite as clear. There are more harvests in the small sounds, bells and different percussion, individual tones guitar tones, smacking on saxophone. It's a bit into the improvisation that really exciting things start to happen: rising saxophone sounds, scattered guitar chords and frantic drumming. That Stangl so clearly stands outside the tradition is beneficial.

THE LIMINAL - Joseph Burnett

Plume

This lengthy album brings together two trios based around the backbone of saxophonist John Butcher and The Necks’ Tony Buck on drums.
The first, ‘Flamme’ sees the pair joined by Austrian guitarist Burkhard Stangl, who plays peppery acoustic notes in a style that evokes Derek Bailey, minus the Englishman’s acerbic humour and penchant for pure dissonance. Indeed, the thirty-minute epic is remarkably restrained, with Stangl and Butcher exploring the outer limits of their instruments’ potential for quietness and diffuse textures, the former plucking abstractly at his strings, the latter releasing bubbly or hissing tones that sound as much like air or samples as they do sax notes. On both tracks, Tony Buck takes as much pleasure in gently coaxing unexpected sounds from his kit using bows and brushes as he does in building up any precise rhythmic direction.
The second track, ‘Vellum’, another mighty, sprawling work, is the best of the two, as Buck and Butcher, joined here by pianist Magda Mayas, build up several heads of steam over nearly forty minutes, with Mayas countering Buck’s clatters and shakes and Butcher’s squalls with some righteous manipulation of her piano’s strings. These raucous passages are juxtaposed with several more intricate ones showcasing the trio’s ability to stretch out on each instrument in ways that are always both surprising and expertly balanced.