Phosphor - Phosphor

Burkhard Beins: percussion
Alessandro Bosetti: soprano saxophone
Axel Dörner: trumpet, electronics
Robin Hayward: tuba
Annette Krebs: electro-acoustic guitar
Andrea Neumann: inside piano, mixing desk
Michael Renkel: acoustic guitar
Ignaz Schick: live electronics

This outing features a consortium of Berlin, Germany-based musicians who tend to explore the outer limits of abstraction via live electronics, acoustic instruments, and subversive dialogue. Less in your face than similar productions of this ilk, the instrumentalists create an air of suspense amid subdued moments and sparse frameworks. Andrea Neumann utilizes her stripped-down piano parts (strings, resonance board, metal frame & EFX) to counteract tubaist Robin Hayward, percussionist Burkhard Beins, and others for a set teeming with sparsely concocted themes. The octet provides a series of illusory effects in concert with moments of tension and surprise, due to its shrewd amalgamation of peculiar backdrops and concisely executed improvisational episodes. On Part 3 (no song titles), you will hear low-pitched gurgling noises and plucked strings. However, trumpeter Axel Dorner’s atonal hissing sounds cast a strangely exotic spell throughout many of these sequences. Not casual listening, but fascinatingly interesting - the music or noise, depending on which way you perceive it, rings forth like some sort of impressionistic souvenir. Sure, some of us may not include this release among the ongoing rotation. The content might parallel something akin to an avant-garde sculpture or oil painting: thus an artistic entity that deserves to be revisited from time to time.

2001 PHOSPHOR

Phosphor - Phosphor II

Burkhard Beins: percussion, objects, small electrics
Axel Dörner: trumpet, electronics
Robin Hayward: tuba
Annette Krebs: guitar, objects, electronics, tape
Andrea Neumann: inside piano, mixing board
Michael Renkel: prepared nylon string acoustic guitar via computer
Ignaz Schick: turntables, objects, bows

Phosphor, whose self-titled album came out in 2001, waited nearly five years to record its follow-up with Phosphor II. With editing, mixing and manufacturing, it has taken nearly eight years for the session to reach the marketplace.

With all that time that has passed, it is interesting to hear that the original super group, minus Alessandro Bosetti, can easily pick up right where it left off. These Berlin-based musicians practice the microtonal art of minimalist improvisation, yet their sound constructions are easily transferable to disc.

In fact, not having the visual component to their performance pushes the focus onto the sound, not which performer is making what sound—not always any easy thing to achieve.

The music here is, as Miles Davis once described it, about "the silence in between the notes." These eight compositions take that concept to the nth degree. Switches switch, air passes through instruments without notes, static takes the same place as rhythms, and electric charges fuel the tension that gives way to a cosmic release.

The sounds—noise, perhaps—are strangely inviting creatures whose vocabulary is one of a decayed future that meshes the human touch with computer and mechanical sounds that have slipped the moorings of beat and meter. (from ALLABOUTJAZZ)

2009 PHOSPHOR II

Robin Hayward - States of Rushing

Robin Hayward: solo tuba

When we’re young and immature, and perhaps even as we age, certain instruments are cool, and certain instruments are not. As a teen, I didn’t realize how great it was that my brother played clarinet, and I didn’t realize that instrument’s rich history in jazz. I also had no idea all the crazy things it could do, and would do, in records I loved. Guitar was my thing, and while I certainly still think guitar is cool, I’m adding tuba to the list of instruments that I am ashamed to admit I had an aversion to.

The major responsibility for this goes to Robin Hayward, and the reason he achieved it is because he took the tuba, and only the tuba, and met me halfway. This isn’t band music, and for the most part this isn’t melodic. Instead States of Rushing is a hardcore microtonal exploration of the tuba. If you clicked away, I don’t know if I could blame you. While the sax is a “cool” instrument, what about the tuba is so special to explore its twists and turns, its valves, and its tone? To be honest, I don’t see what is on this record as being distinctive from similar extended-technique marathons and studies in breathing, but that’s my point: what makes this cool for sax, but not for tuba? Nothing.

I’d go as far as saying that Hayward’s playing here shows that musicians, time and again, will try to recreate the sounds they love, sounds often more traditionally generated on other instruments, with the instrument they’ve been trained on. If you like pulsing, breathing, microtonal music, but you’re trained in the tuba, would you just not make that music, or would you find a way to make it happen? Hayward found a way to make it happen, and I’m happy he did.

This record can be intense. It can be monotonous and bleak, but in the sterile way eai fans like. At times Hayward is bludgeoning you with repetition, repeating the same sounds over and over. But in the context of this album, considering how he’s translating sounds he loves through his instrument, I’m as likely to take this as face value as I am to think he’s replicating the mechanical beat of industrial or techno. Regardless of his intent, this is a very solid record you should seek out. (from KILLED IN CARS)

2009 STATES OF RUSHING