Matthew Goodheart and Broken Ghost Consort

Canaries on the Pole
It Isn’t Really What It’s like
Acheulian Handaxe AHA 2306

An adaptable standard bearer for creative music Köln-based Austrian Georg Wissel is always ready to use his skills as an alto saxophonist and clarinetist in a variety of creative settings. Opposite sides of the electro-acoustic demarcation on these discs, the other players besides Wissel also come from opposite sides of the Atlantic. Together for almost 20 years Canaries on the Pole is an all-acoustic quartet featuring German violinist Christoph Irmer and two Belgians, Jacques Foschia playing clarinet, bass clarinet and shakuhachi and percussionist Mike Goyvaerts, as well as Wissel. Despite its lofty name the Broken Ghost Consort is actually a trio with Wissel, Prague-based U.S. bassist George Cremaschi and American Matthew Goodheart playing piano and transducer-actuated metal percussion. With aleatoric, improvised and algorithmic compositional tropes, the distinctiveness of the performance is confirmed because the small speakers attached to each instrument creates re-embodied sound.

More dauting in description than demonstration, the Consort’s five “Apparitions” range from those voltage laden to the near-acoustic. Additionally, although there are times when it seems that the collective pressure expelled may turn into a nearly impenetrable flat line drone, individual interjections fracture enough if it to prevent the program becoming robotic and opaque. The exposition reconstitution isn’t just the result of Wissel’s spit tones and reed stutters or Cremaschi’s arco stings and pizzicato thumps either. When he isn’t key clipping or reverberating textures from the piano’s soundboard, Goodheart is able to mold metallic scraps and corrosive stings in such a manner that the results take on an airier quality. Often these processes meld with Wissel’s lighter timbres including clarion vibrations and reed trills.

Besides multiphonic hisses, tongue slaps and shrill whistles, the clarinetist contributes to sound scrambling with vocalized murmurs from within his horn’s body tube which meet up and soften some of Goodheart’s embedded metallic stridency. However it’s only during the near acoustic respite of “Apparitions #3” that Cremasch’s bass is prominent. String thumps and stops work into a three-way dialogue with Goodheart’s stopped piano keys and Wissel’s mid-range whistles and snarls.

Remove the electronic interface and multiply the textures with augmented instrumentation and you’d get Canaries on the Pole’s session. Sharp, strident and shrill, the broken octave creativity exhibited by the quartet is based around spiccato violin pressure, blaring, snuffling or sometimes harmonized elevated saxophone and diminishing low clarinet pitches and clip-clops or sudden stops from the drums.

Throughout, the percussionist’s numerous strategies are used to color the sonic canvas. Goyvaerts for instance will highlight triangle pings, metal bowl rubs or other idiophone emphasis to counter reeds twittering split tones and squeaks as Irmer’s angled string sprawls preserve the theme. Or he’ll emphasize the blasts and squeaks from squeezed plastic toys as further amplification of the slide whistles, throat gurgles and trills Wissel and Foschia hocket and pull from their horns, before all three join crunches and shuffles with Irmer’s narrowed string expositions.

Inventive contributions from all the quartet members are expressed to their greatest extent on the nearly 26½ minute “Really?”  Moving on from arco string strains, altissimo reed flutter tonguing and drum chops, the narrative exposes background wood-rending pulls and metallic clatters as snaky and slinky reed stops meet string pivots to produce motifs of varied tempos. As that section fragments into percussion cascades, string stops and dual reed trilling and matched modulations, the sequence is then redefined enough so that soaring violin turns and clarion reed trills create a climax of near melodic connection. Each fascinating in its own way these discs are instances of how sound explorers like Wissel continue to move the music forward with new sounds and strategies.

–Ken Waxman

Track Listing: Apparitions: 1. Apparitions #1 2. Apparitions #2 3. Apparitions #3 4. Apparitions #4 5. Apparitions #5

Personnel: Apparitions: Georg Wissel (clarinet); Matthew Goodheart (transducer-actuated metal percussion and piano) and George Cremaschi (bass)

Track Listing: Really: 1. Isn’t it 2. Really 3. What is It? 4. Like it?

Personnel: Really: Jacques Foschia (clarinet, bass clarinet and shakuhachi); Georg Wissel (augmented alto saxophone and clarinet); Christoph Irmer (violin) and Mike Goyvaerts (percussion)