Alan Courtis & Aaron Moore / Church Car / Andi Stecher & Eliad Wagner /
COURTIS/MOORE European/UK Tour March 2014
The experienced improvising duo of Alan Courtis and Aaron Moore tour Europe from March 10th to March 23rd, 2014. To coincide with the tour they have recorded a new album ‘KPPB’ to be released as a limited edition CD on Moore’s own label Earbook Recordings. Like its predecessor ‘Brokebox Juke’ the new album is a postal collaboration consisting of two long tracks.
Alan Courtis and Aaron Moore met in Paris in 2004. Eventually they began a long distance recording project that resulted in the highly acclaimed LP ‘Brokebox Juke’ released on No-Fi in 2009. The album appeared in The Wire magazine’s top 50 albums of that year. They have toured the UK and France and released the live album ‘Courtis/Moore’ (Earbook Recordings) in 2010.
Like the work in their respective groups Reynols and Volcano The Bear, one knows not what to expect from Courtis and Moore’s strong musical personalities and inventive improvisations when they take to the stage together.
BIOGRAPHY
Alan Courtis (RA) was born in 1972 in Buenos Aires , Argentina . He was a founder member of Reynols who spawned over 100 releases. He also has more than 100 solo releases and collaborations on labels like: P.S.F., Blossoming Noise, No-Fi, Porter, RRR, Riot Season, Kning Disk, Beta-Lactam, Sedimental,Alt.Vinyl, Feeding Tube, etc. He has toured extensively in Japan , Europe, USA , Australia , NZ & Latin America and has collaborated with musicians like: Pauline Oliveros, Lee Ranaldo, Jim O’Rourke, Phill Niblock, Otomo Yoshihide, Francisco López, Daniel Menche, Yoshimi, Eddie Prevost, Makoto Kawabata, KK Null, Mats Gustafsson, Rick Bishop, Toshimaru Nakamura, L.A.F.M.S., Thomas Dimuzio, Tetuzi Akiyama, Lasse Marhaug, Ashtray Navigations, Nihilist Spasm Band, Rapoon, Birchville Cat Motel, The New Blockaders, Kaffe Mathews, Jaap Blonk, Jazkamer, C.Spencer Yeh, Okyung Lee, Avarus, & Kemialliset Ystavat.
His music always has strong experimental sense and usually based on high-skilled techniques of prepared sound, tape manipulations, processing of field recordings, live electronics, objects, cymbals, synthesizers, computer tools, playing traditional (both acoustic and electric) instruments as well as self-built, strange and unusual instruments (eg. unstringed guitar). Courtis has composed music for films by directors like Claudio Caldini, Sergio Subero, Guillermo Ueno & Pablo Mazzolo. He currently coordinates a Field Recordings Workshop at Centro de Investigaciones Artisticas and Cobra Libros in Buenos Aires, and he has also ran workshops in Sweden, Norway, Switzerland, Belgium, Denmark, Germany, England, Mexico, Peru, Chile, United States, Australia, New Zealand & Japan.
Aaron Moore is an Englishman residing in Brooklyn, New York who plays music with instruments & devices. His primary instruments are drums, voice & trumpet but he generally considers any instrument (or object) playable in one way or another. Moore is a founding member of the English experimental music group Volcano The Bear. Formed in 1995 VTB have been critically acclaimed as one the leading lights on the UK experimental music scene. A music consisting of both composition & improvisation, a music difficult to describe but one that is always seeking change & taking new directions both accidentally & on purpose. In a 2006 article on the group the Wire magazine described them as “producing some of the finest, wildest British music of the last 10 years on record & on stage”.
Since moving to Brooklyn in late 2006, Moore has been developing his solo work under the name Invisible Sports in a number of ways using drums, voice, melodic percussion, trumpet, tapes & loops. From songs based around melodic percussion & multi-tracked voice to sprawling epics of progressive looping & ritualistic improvisation. In 2008 he performed his first solo concert in Oslo, Norway followed by shows in France & New York. He continues to play sporadically as a solo artist and with Volcano The Bear performs on a regular basis in Europe and the UK.
Moore has appeared on over 40 albums with various groups & toured extensively in North America & Europe; performing at such prestigious venues as the Pompidou Centre in Paris. He has collaborated/performed with Boredoms, A Hawk & A Hacksaw, Paul Dunmall, Mark Sanders, Michael Snow, Bill Drummond, Mats Gustaffson, Alan Courtis, C Spencer Yeh, Thierry Muller, Tom Recchion, The Nightingales, Andrew Liles and Steve Mackay (The Stooges).
Moore’s other musical projects past & present include Gospel Of Mars, Wizards Of Oi, Muller-Moore-Music, Dragon Or Emperor, Amolvacy, Songs Of Norway and Textile Trio/ Textile Orchestra.
Links:
http://invisiblesports.com/
http://earbookrecordings.blogspot.com/
Reviews
Brokebox Juke
If only all postal collaborations sounded as alive as this one, Anla Courtis (Reynols) and Aaron Moore (Volcano The Bear) have put together beautifully organic effort for NO-FI. The most important characteristic of the album is the scintilla of sunlight-drifting dust that settles over Brokebox Juke, the kind of barely there unifier that makes this LP seem like a real-time recording. From the fly-tipping pastoral charm of “One” to the duo-do-four-piece krautypsych of “Seven” Courtis/Moore have created finely-formed and textured arrangements across the record. Junk grooves, trumpet parts and acoustic guitar notes are layered like cross-fire breezed melodies from open studio windows looking out on city streets and open fields, this manages to be one of the most engaging, and naturalistic collaborations in recent years – and these guys didn’t even meet! Imagine one piece of gatefolded vinyl that is the summation of everything the Last Visible Dog label has ever promised to deliver. This is it. 9/10 (Foxy Digitalis)
Courtis/Moore
This eccentric and inspired collection of live improvisations between Reynols’ Alan Courtis and Volcano the Bear’s Alan Moore is the debut release on Moore’s own Earbook imprint. The five pieces were culled from concerts in France and the UK and employ a varied arsenal of strings, cymbals, brass and wind instruments, electronics, and tapes collages. To their credit, Courtis and Moore almost never use any of their instruments in an expected way or allow the music to unfold logically, resulting in some rather deeply aberrant and disorienting work that sounds like no one else.
The opening track (“E=1”) is built upon a very uneasy drone that is constantly threatened by a strangled trumpet or buried snarls of feedback. As it progresses, it grows increasingly weird and erratic, being violently interrupted by clattering percussion that sometimes sounds like a box of pots, pans, and silverware falling down a flight of steps. Then for its last third, the droning morphs into what sounds like someone distantly trimming a hedge accompanied by chirping birds, an ineptly-played harmonica, quasi-sacred voices, and occasional blurts of space noises.
That first track, as it turns it, is a very representative microcosm of the whole album. The duo doesn’t ever repeat themselves, but they pretty reliably traffic in wobbly drone music that is continually disrupted by eruptions of anachronistic sounds. On rare occasions, things get unexpectedly musical, like the mournful trumpet solo at the end of “P=1” (albeit amidst a flurry of metallically grinding harmonics). Much more often though, the interruptions will sound like a monster devouring an entire train, the wails of dying animal channeled through a trumpet, an avant-garde steel band, Mongolian throat singing, industrial rhythms forged from human breathing, or just some guy mowing his lawn. As such, it makes for quite a challenging listening experience, but it is so unpredictable and so defiantly, triumphantly “wrong” that it makes for quite a compelling one too. 8/10 (Foxy Digitalis)
Church Car is the Berlin-based duo of Ian Douglas-Moore (guit, electronics, vox) and Big Daddy Mugglestone (drums, electronics, vox). Fluctuating focus between slow rhythmic drones, layers of fractured melodies, and eruptions of mangled language, they create music somewhere in the intersection of rock, minimalism, improvisation, and text-sound composition.
http://soundcloud.com/id-m/sets/church-car/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YvXzHPenm2o
Andi Stecher – Drums/Perc./Objects
Eliad Wagner – Modular Synthesizer/ Feedback
Brokenbeats Polyrhythmic Drumming plus Shifted and Layered FeedbackElectronics.
ANDI STECHER Austrian born Drummer/ Performer / Composer currently living in Berlin.
Works in a wide Variety of Genres of Music/ Sounds/ Performing Arts. After 10 years of classical teachings, Stecher started finding his own Voice/Style in different Formations/ Bands/ Projects, always trying to push the limits of drumming and finding new ways of expressing and playing. Right now his main Focus lies on doing research for his Solo works (Drums/ Electr./ Voice) and playing/ producing/releasing with different free improv/ noise Collaborations. His style of playing involves a very melodic and polyrhythmical approach to the Drums, spiked with straight forward beats.
ELIAD WAGNER was born in Israel in 1979 and currently lives and works in Berlin, Germany.
At the moment he is busy with free improvisation in electronic music, using (mostly) modular synthesizer / feedback systems, composing work for various mediums, lecturing in schools and giving workshops around Europe.
he has been recording music for C-sides, Digital Kranky, Concrete plasic and my own label ±g6pd recordsand presented work at Computer Music Journal, Haus der Kulturen der Welt (Berlin), Rotterdam International Film Festival, Shoot Me film festival (Den Haag), Guggenheim New York- “youtube play”, Zaal 100 (Amsterdam), WORM (Rotterdam), Unheard film festival (Amsterdam), Binyanei Ha’Uma (Jerusalem), Notations Festival (Amsterdam), Shift festival (Basel), Inter/Arts Center (Malmo), DIEM Royal Academy of Music (Aarhus), Network Music Festival (Birmingham) and more.
AUDIO LINK: https://soundcloud.com/andistecher/andi-stecher-eliad-wagner-live
