Jack Callahan’s Bánh Mì Verlag imprint is necessary and fantastic by virtue of it’s consolidation of playfulness, formality, and fucking cool-ness. The “straight up” method of musical experimentation is rendered simultaneously fun, serious, important, and, occasionally, cataclysmically expressive [!]. The counterpoint developed by the label’s first split speaks volumes about the nuanced gradation occurring between DIY intentionality and Wandelweiser-core liturgy. CalArts vs. Berlin vs. “other places” — everyone is deeply concerned with the inter-spatiality of sound interacting IRL w/ various techne, catching the pan-temporal, indeterminate phenomena out of the singularity of moment-hood.
Michael Pisaro’s “Add Red” is a series of four pieces for two or three musicians. The piece treats noise as [a] determined, communicable understanding — the orientation of live bodies processing data, indeterminacy “marked” (macchiato) by instrument-playerz going hard to situate the characteristics of frequency within a synchronically formal and conversational tone. Now, Pisaro’s piece demonstrates the happen-stance of “noise” by valuing “contingency” as necessary in describing [everyone’s][possibly][spatially] shifting perception. In fact, “Add Red” is explicitly about when Michael Pisaro stared at TV-static screen and wondered “Where’s the bass-line?” Here, he adds the baseline (or “Red”) — we are given the opportunity to check out those frequencies.
Sullivan’s piece is extremely good. Here we have a “seagull-gong time,” of sorts, that’s potentially psychedelic. We need to see this piece as vast, “environmentally charged,” and illuminating the fact that mind is a small slice of totem that merely “stands-in” for a larger, atmospheric sort of consciousness. This one blows minds — wind, air, cool, chilly, formal, free.
Bánh Mì Verlag is giving us these things. So, just imagine — this split came out a few months ago — here it is, here, and so it will be…into our futures. Feel free to check out the other releases/splits over at the labels website!
• Bánh Mì Verlag: http://www.banhmiverlag.com
More about: Michael Pisaro
