Jon Rose - Fleisch: Hyperstring 2 (Saucerlike)
Jon Rose has a ridiculous faculty for concept and an unusual way of working out his ideas. Over the course of a few cds and concerts, and sometimes inventions or installations, he'll see an idea through several presentations before moving on to the next. Sometimes it's a brief affair: The recordings he made at a violin factory in China were the basis of a sound collage (1999's China Copy) and a self-released cassette, then a full orchestra-with-samples piece released as Violin Factory two years later. Other projects can be prolonged, as with his multiple discs dedicated to shopping and capitalist culture. Two new discs represent sophomore installments in two more recent of Rose's many fixations.
Fleisch is the second of his "hyperstring" recordings, in which sensors are attached to his bow and arm that react to speed and pressure, triggering samples based on changes in the physical dynamics of his playing. Controlling what the sensors pick up from his movements would be all but impossible thus forcing him to react to and play along with whatever his movements cause to happen. Playing along will, of course, trigger other samples, so he must continue to improvise against an ever changing situation.
The first record using these sensors, which were designed to be used on airplane wings, was The Hyperstring Project: New Dynamics of Rogue Counterpoint. It was a schizophrenic listen: fast, unpredictable and difficult. But on Fleisch he seems to have harnessed the mechanical dervish and creates some engaging music. The samples are mostly strings, but include some found vocals as well. The results are noisy at times, but generally quite musical. While volume one was a near-painful recording (the ever cheeky Rose even suggests in the notes that it should not be listened to in a single sitting), volume two is an easier listen.
Much of Rose's work is laced with eccentricity, if not overt humor, but in 1998 he released a record that was downright harrowing. The Fence used recordings of bowed fences on contested or otherwise tense borders (North Ireland, Korea, Cyprus, Australia, Mexico, the Golan Heights, East and West Germany, Bosnia and Hong Kong) laid over news broadcasts from the same regions. The result was a frightening survey of people's inability to get along, a meditation on violent struggle.
Instrumental technique, of course, betters with practice, and on Great Fences of Australia he and fence duet partner Hollis Taylor actually make music by bowing barbed wire. Instead of a BBC documentary on ethnic turmoil, this is a Discovery Channel story about fences and the people who play them in the wide open countryside. It's light and melodious, filled with tone and harmony and booming, ringing percussion. The disc is even packaged like a piece of docutainment in an oversized box that holds the disc and a small piece of barbed wire and features bright, sunny photos of the players at their craft.
In these projects, Rose has given up the role of fabulist (see his dubious histories of the violin and his family) in favor of genuine examinations of some odd takes on his instrument. There's less to laugh at, but a surprising sort of integrity takes its place.
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