Articles
Death Blues
Questionnaire II

Albums
36
Daniel Bachman
Blevin Blectum
Ulises Conti
Ian William Craig
Dakota Suite & Sirjacq
Death Blues
Yair Etziony
Fade
Hammock
Imagho & Mocke
Kassel Jaeger
John Kannenberg
Martin Kay
Kein
Kontakt der Jünglinge
Akira Kosemura
Land Observations
Klara Lewis
Oliver Lieb
Lightfoils
Machinefabriek
Nikkfurie of La Caution
Pitre and Allen
Pjusk
Michael Robinson
Sawako
Seasurfer
Slow Dancing Society
Tender Games
Tirey / Weathers
Tohpati
Tokyo Prose
The Void Of Expansion
wild Up
Yodok III
Russ Young

Compilations / Mixes
Dessous Sum. Grooves 2
Silence Was Warm Vol. 5
Under The Influence Vol. 4

EPs / Cassettes / Mini-Albums / Singles
Belle Arché Lou
Blind EP3
Blocks and Escher
Dabs
DBR UK
Fracture
Sunny Graves
Ligovskoï
Mako
Paradox & Nucleus
Pye Corner Audio
Sawa & Kondo
Slpwlkr
Swoon
Toys in The Well
Versa
Marshall Watson

wild Up: Feather & Stone
Populist Records

wild Up's Feather & Stone makes for a natural companion recording to Populist Records' other recent release, gnarwhallaby's [exhibit a]. Both recordings feature ensembles committed to the performance of provocative new music and programmes that mix works by less established composers with others more familiar, such as Morton Feldman and Olivier Messiaen; an additional commonality is the presence of material by Nicholas Deyoe on both releases. Like his pieces on [exhibit a], Deyoe's aptly titled “A New Anxiety” is an unsettling and boldly declamatory work that exploits the outfit's instrumental resources to the maximum degree—uneasy listening, to be sure. As complementary as the recordings are, Deyoe's piece highlights the key difference between them, which is that the quartet size of gnarwhallaby is dwarfed by wild Up's orchestral scale (forty musician names are listed on the CD sleeve).

Founded by conductor Christopher Rountree in 2010, wild Up is a Los Angeles-based contemporary music collective committed to challenging audiences with works that are visceral, powerful, and provocative. That the group has no compunctions about toppling genre boundaries is evidenced most clearly on the recording by Andrew Tholl's “Still Not a Place to Build Monuments or Cathedrals,” whose raw and scrabbly electric guitar playing by group members Tholl and Chris Kallmyer suggests a stronger connection to Sonic Youth than Julian Bream. In similar spirit, Rountree's “Stand Still Like the Hummingbird” is as much a bluesy jazz setting as it is a rapidly shape-shifting new music piece. The album is also very much a portrait of wild Up as not only an instrumental ensemble but also a composer-based project, given that five of the album's eight pieces are credited to four group members: Rountree, violinist Tholl, guitarist/bassist Kallmyer, and bassoonist Archie Carey.

Ornithological content lends the album a unifying quality: the opening piece, the aforementioned “Stand Still Like the Hummingbird,” not only incorporates bebop passages but literally references Charlie (“Bird”) Parker's “Ornithology,” while the closing setting, Carey's rather saturnine “Bird of Paradise in Paradise,” uses Parker's classic rendering of “Bird of Paradise” as a melodic blueprint. In addition there's Kallmyer's “This Nest, Swift Passerine,” which threads field recordings of birds into its arrangement, and “Oiseaux exotiques” by Messiaen, well-known for his fascination with birdsong and incorporation of it into his compositional practice. On the fifteen-minute setting, the immediately identifiable sonorities of Messiaen's evocative sound world are realized effectively by wild UP, with pianist Richard Valitutto's impressionistic ruminations prominently featured alongside fluttering woodwinds and percussion.

Drawn from three separate concerts (“Ornithology,” “The Armory,” and one inspired by Stan Brakhage films), the eight settings are live performances that don't coddle but instead challenge the listener with material that's both delicate and abrasive—a theme also conveyed, of course, by the album title and its feather and stone cover photos. wild Up's own characterization of its music as “(s)ometimes brutal, sometimes serene” is as accurate as it is succinct.

August-September 2014