issue 5

October 2025

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An ErstRowe Fantasia

The Baroque Synesthete and the Curator of Possibilities

By Marc Medwin

Keith Rowe in front of Pablo Picasso 'Guitar' at MoMA, NYC (October 5, 2005) (photo © Yuko Zama)

“There is the room. It contains an atmosphere, walls, perhaps windows. It is dark, grainy, ill-kept, an elegant theater space, warm and moist, empty and echoing with each footstep, a bit chilly, bustling with the arriving crowd. Traces of past events linger in the form of an abandoned plastic cup, graffiti cut into a table, the wale of crushed velour impressed by thousands of backsides. Each passing occurrence, large and small, has left a subtle tinge that manifests in small material changes, drawing the aura in the room toward comfort, edginess, sadness, vigor, tension, depth. Aspects of the world outside the room have seeped in: the conditions of the local population, their cultures (ancient or transnationalized), their wars, snow on boots, smoke from the processing plant a mile away, traffic, corporate artifacts. The room reflects the small touches of care or neglect meted out over the years; it has an identity as palpable as the several people worrying at their equipment, nestling into their seats. In one corner, against a wall, onstage, just over there, in the middle of the room, rests a table.

The table is strewn with a large number of objects, one of which is an electric guitar. The surface of the table is brown or black, red or silver; it is wooden or metallic or vinyl-covered. Occasionally, it's draped in soft cloth. The guitar, shiny black and trapezoidal, red and whole, sawn into fragmented blocks, only a fingerboard, laid on its back, neck facing left as seen from the seat placed alongside. There is dust in the air, motes glinting in and out of view, settling on odd surfaces, taking off again.” (Olewnick, 5-6)


When, in the summer of 2020, Erstwhile Records founder Jon Abbey mentioned, on a phone call, that he wanted me to write something specifically about Keith Rowe’s series of releases for Erstwhile, initial euphoria was replaced by dread, by the weight of the history I was on the point of examining. It took me more than four years to pull my thoughts and observations together to form this text out of the admiration and respect I feel for both Rowe and Abbey, but as I entered the project’s lengthy gestation period, several sources proved invaluable. First, I can’t overemphasize the generosity of spirit demonstrated to me repeatedly by Rowe and Abbey. I interviewed both on several occasions, long before the project was even an idea, and they entertained my questions with grace, wisdom and, most of all, patience. In 2018, Brian Olewnick, music writer and curator of the blog Just Outside published The Room Extended. Like Thayer’s pioneering Beethoven studies, Olewnick combines biography with some musical analysis to present the most authoritative book on Rowe and his art to date. I have relied on it throughout my own journey through Rowe’s Erstwhile catalog, and its contexts have proven indispensable, especially the absolutely exquisite extended passage quoted above. In 2021, Steve Flato’s Signifying Something podcast gained the addition of a nearly three-hour interview with Rowe and Abbey in which the Erstwhile label’s history is discussed in depth in the context of Rowe’s contributions. Finally, but by no means least, in 2021, Alan Jones and Bob Burnett’s film What is Man and What is Guitar was released, a brief but poignant exploration of many of the artistic questions with which Rowe has grappled and, without wanting to spoil the experience for anyone so-far unexposed, the issues he faces now. It is a sonic feast for the ears and a poignant reminder of how art triumphs over adversity in astonishing ways. What I present here is meant as a companion piece to those documents. I will not rehash them; rather, as Rowe does, I refer to elements from them by way of constructing a backdrop as I document my experience with what I believe to be one of the most extraordinary bodies of work to emerge from the first half of the 21st century.

From the film “What is Man and What is Guitar” (2021 © Bob Burnett)

It’s amazing, the way revelation comes in the form of a nourished seed, out of what is initially supposed to comprise the simplest of inquiries. Abbey planted the seed, and the nourishment came from the most mundane of questions. I wanted to know how Keith Rowe listened, through headphones or speakers, so I sent an e-mail. Had I reflected, I might have anticipated the reply’s complexity:


How do I listen to music? headphones or open-air speakers? a difficult one, if I ask myself do I listen to music? I'm not sure I do, listen to music that is, I'll try not to be awkward here.

For me music is not acoustic, music is wrapped in an acoustic wrapper, the sound is the means of transport, it carries the music, sound is its means of transport, music is the journey, as with a walk through a forest, the walk is not the rocks and the trees, but the journey itself, the problem here is it's beyond words, for me music is an emotional experience, Hmm. I don't know how to describe it.
​
— Keith Rowe, July 2020

And there it was. It was, at the moment of reading his reply, as if a layer of glassy illusion rolled back and an essence was revealed. Who doesn’t listen? Why wouldn’t someone listen? My dread turned to intimidation and then, slowly, to curiosity and wonder as listening, as a mode of discovery, interrogation, dialogue and even rejection, became my own center of interrogation. I would revisit, rethink, write, revise, re-revise, but always, the journey would itself be my point of return, each departure a reconnection and each connection a departure. In constructing what follows, my touchstone, the point of reference to and from which I would venture and adventure, was The Room Extended, for reasons I hope to clarify, but which, I’ll say immediately, is itself both a culmination and a point of departure, a space in which both occur. To that end, each album in Rowe’s Erstwhile discography, each statement leading to that room, is an artifact in that vast space, and each artifact contains remnants of the last and seeds of the next, a multifaceted corpus of unity within diversity plumbing depths leading to the essences of Rowe’s work and of sound itself.  
 
Even to attempt approaching those essences proffers a layer of unwanted illusion in writing about music stemming from a vision as singularly unique as that which Rowe has fostered for more than six decades. What is the nature of these excursions into sound? Rowe has said, to me and on multiple occasions, that his music is a highly obscured form of painting. The sounds themselves bear out his astute observation. As a blind person only imagining the universes conjured by the visual arts, both an impediment and a staggering opportunity for self-actualization when in conversation with Rowe, I was nevertheless stunned by what I can only call the concretized abstraction in his observations. Often, he does not speak in narrative, but his descriptions come across more as aphoristic moments in the stark but wisdom-infused annals of vaster time than as ends in and of themselves to be described and to support a narrative. Even when Rowe gives verbal narrative form to his work, as with the ErstWords piece he wrote concerning his 'Cultural Templates' on ErstLive 007, they are moments feeding and breeding moments all larger than themselves, each imbued with deeper implication and promise. They reflect his communication style, aural and written. Similarly, but frustratingly, each sound certainly contains the proverbial multitudes, but without Rowe’s explicit description of what that timbre meant in that specific context and the methods behind it, a layer of meaning is both lost and gained. Rowe’s use of contact microphones and various effects ensures a level of shining obscurity, sounds so present and vibrant but distorted or obfuscated beyond recognition. Like counterpoint and the harmonic and melodic relationships it simultaneously defines and obscures, Rowe’s music breathes the air of originality while remaining only nearly tangible, humanly palpable in its relationships between voice and object, human and machine and the temporality in which those sonic events, narratives despite flouting the conventions spawning them, occur. Rowe’s is a language of the simple and subtle gesture in implication as much to one who’s seen neither art nor life as to those as versed in the arts as he. My attempt has involved finding a way not, or if applicable, not simply, to ascribe meaning but to speak of the archetypes underpinning those meanings.

Keith Rowe at Amann Studios, Vienna, July 2005 (photo © Yuko Zama)

It may be appropriate here to invoke Aristotle’s ideas of language and its importance as represented in On Interpretation. Aristotle expresses a fundamental truth of perception and cognition when he writes: "Spoken words are the symbols of mental experience and written words are the symbols of spoken words. Just as all men have not the same writing, so all men have not the same speech sounds, but the mental experiences, which these directly symbolize, are the same for all, as also are those things of which our experiences are the images" (Section 1, Part 1). Rowe’s work deals directly, profoundly, with notions of symbol, perception and the resultant and sometimes conflicting syntaxes they create. I have used the word language as a clumsy catch-all term, so I want to clarify, to nuance, my terminological choice. In describing the purpose of a poem in his preface to Paterson, William Carlos Williams writes that a poem should “… speak for us in a language we can understand. But first, before we can understand it the language must be recognizable. We must know it as our own, we must be satisfied that it speaks for us. And yet it must remain a language like all languages, a symbol of communication. Thus the city I wanted as my object had to be one that I knew in its most intimate details” (61-63). Articulated in 1951, Williams prefigures with stunning accuracy Rowe’s methods of sonic inquiry. For anyone au fait with his work, his language is immediately recognizable to the ear, but cognition does not render specific meaning. Again, it seems clear, from corresponding with Rowe in various contexts, that every sound and gesture involves a very specific but potentially veiled association, or series of associations. Williams speaks of an effective language as a symbol of communication, not as the communication itself, a fascinating and telling point of distinction. Listening to Rowe reveals various layers of sound, those contrapuntal relationships whose sonic elements may never overlap with any conventional notions of what is or is not music. Yet, as is fundamental to any piece of music from any historical era or culture, and if there is a unifying method in his work, Rowe constructs, deconstructs and reconstructs. Size, space and their conjoinings are staggeringly vivid in every gesture he makes, but the gestures draw attention to themselves and their actions rather than existing in a comparative space.

As I perceive the levels of relationship in that symbolic language Rowe has been constructing since the mid-1960s, which he has been moving toward and which bear its maturest fruit on Erstwhile, three levels of sonic interaction govern in parallel, without dictation. First, there are the drones, the audibilities of silence made manifest in sonic sustain, at times literally and figuratively static, rippling with electrified repetition at others. The guitar may be, but just as often is not, responsible for these tone complexes as they fluctuate in and out of the aural landscape. Then, there are the sounds associated, loosely, with radios and/or various byproducts of transmission. These sounds deliver the most direct approximation to readily identifiable language. Again, they often drift in and out of focus, but they may just as easily be switched on and off with a dizzying suddenness. They may also be manipulated out of cognition’s range, hanging close enough to familiarity to be maddening. They can coexist with the drones and static, emerging from them and often obscured by them. Only for the sake of convenience, I am including Rowe’s pre-recorded cultural templates in this category, which make their first full appearance on ErstLive 007, though, of course, they occupy a very different sonic space and have a separate layer of meaning to be elucidated later. What unifies these transmissions, deliberately pre-recorded and otherwise, involves direct communication. The world enters the room through them, the world in its various environmental guises. Finally, by way of contrast, there is the sound of making, of doing, of constructing a series of sounds to which, it is too tempting to avoid positing, the droning levels of silence and the transmissions serve as soundtrack, context or canvas. By constructing, Rowe breaks down the proverbial fourth wall, inviting observation of method. Like the imagist components Williams employs to construct his city, Rowe assembles room after room with sonic objects, each of which maintains ever-evolving and tenuous autonomy. Each scrape, fitting, etching, tearing, dragging or moving is a poetic line or brush stroke. All relationships are open to interpretation. If, like the reports and letters Williams inserts into Paterson’s poetic framework, a radio transmission connotes a constructive sound, or vice versa, the relationship is still lesser in importance than each utterance or the whole. The sounds are less the focal point than the journey through them.   
 
How, then, to articulate relationships when meaning and comparison fail? The most obvious and complicated methodologies are infused by the points at which inversion and subversion conjoin. My domain is the aural, but to say that is to deny the absolutely fundamental associations negated by that fundamentally flawed term. Language is, of course, a largely visual construct, replete with positions and spatial approximations themselves peppered with bait-and-switch approximations, all purportedly in the service of defining spaces, physical and otherwise, but ultimately failing to do so. “Come here, listen here, there there…” are phrases dependent on the binaries of “here” and “there,” but their associations blur and finally disappear in context, even though the words have not changed. We encompass, categorizing even before completing a thought, such are the confines of verbal expression. Entirely negated by verbosity’s purportedly concrete obfuscations are the slippery and stimulating ideas of association without boundary, of meanings below meanings that precipitate cascades of possibility, blurring line and exploding form in the process of musicmaking. Confronting Rowe’s world from a purely sonic perspective is akin to navigating a familiar path in a strong wind. Objects are present, they’ve always been present, and yet, an underlying force of extraordinary power and transparency to match, a force in subtle but constant transposition, threatens to render everything new at any moment. Each sonic object, so fixed in the usual aural context of travel, of daily living and the skills to persevere through it from one point to the next, transforms into a nearly unrecognizable relative, something that to label meaningless would simply constitute another false boundary. 
 
A critical moment on my journey toward Rowe’s monumental creative act came with the discovery (thanks to the guidance of my American University colleague Tanja Aho) of David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder’s A Cultural History of Disability in the Modern Age. In the 4th chapter, following in the wake of previous scholarship, Mitchell differentiates conventional views of blindness as a deprivation, the lack of sight and thus of a fundamental human right, from ocular-centrism and ocular-normativism, the views that create what might be called metanarrative notions of blindness. Mitchell quotes David Bolt:

If ocular centrism is thought of as the baseline of assumptions, the very foundation of the meta-narrative of blindness perhaps, then this neologism ocular normativism denotes the effect: the perpetuation of the conclusion that the supreme means of perception is necessarily visual. (69)

I want to extend the metaphor. I, as a blind person, keenly (and necessarily) attuned to the sounds surrounding me, hear Rowe’s assimilation of them as unique and uniquely contextualized. In a sense, they are divorced from their immediately recognizable contexts, and, therefore, their meaning. They are then liberated, as is the listener, to engage in multivalent interpretation. It is not that Rowe closes the eye, as does James Joyce in Finnegans Wake. Rowe decenters the ocular experience by drawing, sometimes quite literally, attention to each sound in an essentialized form. On August 16, 2021, Rowe responded to an observation I made by pointing me toward a quotation that helped me begin to formulate my present thinking about the soundworld he creates. Rowe’s quoting of Robert Motherwell, in his notes concerning the June 1, 2007 Rothko Chapel performance that would become Concentration of the Stare (Bottrop Boy, 2011) pulled everything into focus: “He (Rothko) painted an inner light, not the light of the world.” There could not be a more perfect and perfectly succinct summation of Rowe’s own corpus, especially that on Erstwhile. He does not neglect the eye, as visual art is such an integral part of his Erstwhile catalog. Rather, he creates a gradually focused and accumulating sonic metanarrative that culminates in the 2015 solo set that would become Absence as well as The Room Extended. He neither filters out nor privileges sight but renders sound an equal and equally mysterious, even luminous, partner on the playing field. Its mystery, its light, the metanarrative illuminated by that light, is simultaneously readily apparent and veiled, the clarity of never-complete detachment engendering the freedom to listen, to experience and to interpret. The room is the artistic life in constant production and flux, the journey on which these 25 documents proved points of repose, rejuvenation and, ultimately, reference.

Keith Rowe solo concert at Rothko Chapel in Houston, Texas (June 1, 2007) (photo © Yuko Zama)

I had the title long before the content became clear. In July of 2020, in an e-mail to me, Rowe refers to his work as Baroque synesthesia. In a 2013 interview, when I asked him about his relationship with Erstwhile Records owner Jon Abbey, Rowe described him as a curator of possibilities, and there, in the dizzying juxtaposition of disparate chronological philosophies, lay half of my title. In considering the cultural templates, regardless of historical era, the most obvious points of connection involved an approach to controlled freedom, of strategy serving invention, or is it the other way around? Marais, Purcell, Haydn, Wagner, Mahler and Dvorak stretched boundaries to breaking points while, ironically, keeping distances and still following the rules of syntax that guided their paths toward freedom, even if those rules aren’t always completely apparent. Early in the pandemic, Rowe, Elsewhere owner Yuko Zama and I had an e-mail exchange in which Rowe described an exercise from his studies with Professor Graubart: “Give me a history of music in five words, six if you must, four is better!” We tried it. Rowe gave us: “Long sounds supersede the short.” After acknowledging that there could be no one answer, that the exercise was meant to encourage boldly dynamic thinking, he offered: “It helped me to make sense when looking back and realizing what I did by laying the guitar flat on the table, that was the history of the guitar, laying the guitar flat was a concentrated history of music.”

Like the bold gestures in each of Rowe’s sounds, a single image proffered conjoining historical perspectives. In constructing what follows, I used as my model Rowe’s five-word summary, obviously not in any strict or dogmatic sense, but as an injunction to state, with boldness and concision, the qualities that separate each of Rowe’s musical statements on Erstwhile while also elucidating the various facets of his readily identifiable language and syntax. Beyond this, I returned, again and again, to the freedoms of the fantasia, part of the tissue connecting the Baroque and Classical periods but actually beholden to neither. Fantasia, as a form, is neither completely composed nor completely improvised, a boundary-blurring exercise if ever one existed, but both elements were essential to each piece’s construction. In 1753, Carl Phillip Emanuel Bach, one of the finest Baroque representatives of this mode of music making, describes the free fantasia as consisting “of varied harmonic progressions which can be expressed in all manner of figurations and motives” (220). The liberation associated with improvisation is obviously not an end in and of itself, though it needs to be present, just as the rules of composition (while obscured) are paramount to the music’s success. Obviously, Rowe is not working in harmonic progressions, but he is most certainly employing what might be called figure and ground, the more dynamic elements of his pieces unfolding against the complex but unified backdrops of drone, hiss, looped electronics and static. Any harmonies are, of course, related to prerecorded music, broadcast or otherwise, but they serve no traditional functional harmonic purpose. Rather, they serve as points of unification. In the Signifying Something interview, Rowe and Abbey discuss the Mottomo Otomo festival in Wels, Austria (November 1999) as having incorporated a crucial aspect of Rowe’s vision that was then communicated to Abbey, foremost in terms of programming. How do purportedly discrete festival sets relate to each other? Can one set serve as an overture to the next? Abbey would incorporate this idea into Erstwhile’s formation and development, creating not only the AMPLIFY series but the various subseries that he would curate, ErstLive being only one. Later in the same interview, Rowe describes another type of unity, one that relates to his musical vision and, more obliquely, to the concept of the fantasia. In typical Rowe fashion, when discussing The Room and The Room Extended, Rowe invokes the visual arts, specifically Mark Rothko. “If you compare the Rothko exhibition with Gerhard Richter, you’ll turn a corner, and Richter will completely blow your mind in an utterly different way, … whereas with Rothko you don’t get that. You get one single emotional state all the way through. There’s just one atmosphere, one circumstance, one situation. He’s not going out of his way to impress you with his virtuosity.” Rowe then turns to the fox and hedgehog strategies, which has been invoked in a wide range of avenues of inquiry. In brief, the fox knows many things and employs a strategy based on diversity, while the hedgehog employs a single overriding principle that guides every decision. Rowe aligns himself with the hedgehogs, but my take, discussed toward the end of my essay, is that the truth for Rowe is midway. Yes, the free fantasia’s improvisational qualities are certainly present in so much of what Rowe does, but repeated listening reveals the ground below, or supporting, the figures, the basso continuo against which ensembles and solos emerge.

Keith Rowe in front of Mark Rothko's painting at MoMA, NYC (October 5, 2005) (photo © Yuko Zama)

What I present is largely in the order written, though with some revisions. It is the cumulative results of a journey comprising journeys, stops along the paths this extraordinary music creates without exact delineation or demarcation. In several cases, my own discoveries of Rowe’s increasingly focused syntax are laid bare. I have made no attempt to present them as anything but personal. They are possibilities that are then subsumed into other and larger possibilities, each an object in a room of Rowe’s exquisitely intricate construction, and, like the fantasia, delineations of form and structure, the guiding principles, remain tantalizingly visible but, happily, just beyond my grasp.          ​

AMM (photo © Jak Kilby, 1981)

AMM and Portals of Discovery

Even before his work for Erstwhile began, Rowe’s own journey might be considered the portal, the cornerstone of the room he has spent his life constructing and refining. To trace Rowe’s more than two decades on Erstwhile without evoking the previous three and a half decades of his multivalent music making would be equivalent to opening a novel to the action-packed conclusion, or to hearing only the denser and louder components in his musical language. In 2018, on an episode of the Signifying Something podcast where Rowe and Abbey are interviewed by Steve Flato, Rowe stated that waiting is an integral component of artistic pursuit. Nowhere is that sentiment more convincingly corroborated than by his own 60-year palimpsestic pilgrim’s progress. It is only a partial truth, a necessary evil, to suggest that music moves from one moment to another. Even Rowe’s music follows this incomplete law, though out of the simple necessity of serial occurrence rather than by design or through habit. It may be better to suggest that while flow is fundamental, and I’m speaking of flow in the highly Romantic sense of vast arcs and parabolas of wax and wane, those elements proceeding along such etched lines also, and ultimately, become a background, a kind of simultaneous presentation of epochs in dialogue. As in bardo transition, as with the clearing of a sky or the clouding of water in bodies, the passage of time can be slow, rapid, or, most confusing and enlightening, be one but feel opposite. More than any other artist working both in and against the popular music realms, perhaps even preceding many in similar engagement, Rowe’s music inhabits those interstitial areas, the molten freeze and icy heat of sound in flux. It is not to connect with each other that those sounds flow and ebb, scatter across space and sonic spectrum, but to make themselves and their associations known. Like fragments from the hand-carved woodblocks containing Buddhist scripture, the sounds imprint rather than manipulate. Their force resides in a center-calm of creation, the unchanging realization caught in word and action at the heart of the intellect, each sound a door and each silence a doorway leading, through the entrances the sounds illuminate, toward the freedom of fresh experience. Through variously colored luminosities, pitch enters the picture only as a series of vibrations prepared at any moment to change, even to fragment into their components. The aggregate layers of the sustained components in Rowe’s work may be pitched or not, and those distinctions may become ambiguous as a piece proceeds.

The journey was long and sometimes glacial. In AMM before 2000, Rowe relied more on a proximately metaphorical but pragmatic approach to the guitar, one heavy on drone and distortion while presaging the clarity of his Erstwhile tenure. AMM, not just the fabled Crypt sessions but as far along as the late 1980s, was often dense and cloudy, despite its reputation of embracing tranquility. Rowe’s hazy distortions, pitch-bent or otherwise, were often at the center of various layers of what could often still be heard as free improvisation peppered with jazz tropes, though the descriptive approximation is just that, imperfect and really inadequate as a whole.  Fine is a point of transition, a nexus through which silence and storm equalized. Rowe’s various slides, points and drones attained space, and the groundwork was laid for the bulk of his work outside AMM’s direct sphere of influence, direct only because it is impossible to overestimate AMM’s contributions to improvised music’s emergent rhetorics. During the past two decades, each sonic element in Rowe’s morphing catalog has taken on weight and individual significance in a unifying context of his invention. Each layer is stark, absolutely clear and movable but inhabiting a delineated space along the stereo spectrum. Whatever occurs in lower registers, the upper extremes pulse with something very close to light. A burst of feedback is allowed to transcend its boundaries and supposed limitations. It becomes solid, leaving the inertia of error and idealistic segregation for the certainty of autonomy in communal existence. The sonic gestures can also be transparent, quick and alive to an instant’s reactivity, the humanity of a plucked sound, the innumerable scrapings of a multipronged body in motion, the mechanical aura of metal on metal, a tap or burst of static, the turning of a page, the deliberate motion of an object itself—like pencil or charcoal—often indulging in the act of creation. It is not as if Rowe eschews repetition. Rather, he destroys its associations. Loops, repeated pitches in utter detachment, even the ubiquitous timbres of scrubber all point toward the place where repetition blurs its own boundaries. Actually, what is sustain but repetitions rapidly presented to the point of indistinguishability? The smallest and largest gestures are in constant and constantly mutating juxtaposition, celebrating each moment while marking its passage. Then, there are the torrents of staggering volume, distortion overriding all as the spaces between the sounds disappear and intensity reigns. After all the glacial transitions, the temporalities in stasis and flowing juxtaposition, after the ticks of time are transcended by the slowly building and burning liquid fire of creation transfixed by and between its own utterances, after action, interaction or reaction as the situation dictates, after the surgical precision and radio-grab uncertainties of discovery have spent their respective forces, all moves toward the inevitable silence. Most challenging for the annotator, and absolutely stimulating from an aural perspective, is the constantly shifting contexts in which these elements occur, recur and are branded in Rowe’s few but precious elucidations. His development proceeded parallel to Erstwhile’s own while also guiding it through the choppy and often murky waters connecting the improbable worlds of improvisation and composition.

The World Turned Upside Down

Keith Rowe’s original painting for The World Turned Upside Down (2000)

Rowe’s first album for Erstwhile is amazing in its trajectory of coalescence. “Phase 1,” the second piece, opens with music that sounds as if it could have been lifted from early AMM, but only the first piece puts that allusion and all that follows in context. “Phase 2” begins in juxtaposition, Günter Müller and Taku Sugimoto’s quasi-modal backdrop supporting Rowe’s pointillistic guitar investigations, recognizable as such only through timbre. Rowe’s pitch is fluid, glissandi and percussives ultimately distilling as Müller and Sugimoto’s more traditional reference points diminish and disappear. It is then that the sounds themselves take on Rowe’s extraordinary syntactical fluidity. Juxtaposed with the glissandi, especially apparent beginning at 12:48, is his standard incorporation of the voice via radio transmission. Complementing the charred fragments of string manipulation, a single vocal outburst surges forward only to disappear into an increasingly complex background, itself an accumulation of contrapuntal timbres as delicate as they are forthright. Over the next several minutes, the thorny and rocky insinuations fragment, but instead of fading, they liquify and coagulate, a body of intersecting rivulets slowly converging. By the 17:30 minute mark, an astonishing transformation has occurred, one that leaves even the shades of Rowe’s 1990s work behind in favor of what makes sense, in hindsight, as a precursor. The glacially emerging conglomeration of static and minuscule sonics caught in closeup prefigures The Room’s delicate but powerful austerity. As Sugimoto intones, returning to more conventional sonorities, Rowe seems to be planting the proverbial seed, mapping in microcosm the future charted by all of his succeeding Erstwhile projects. That audible silence embodied in (and as) drone is punctuated by sounds captured in extreme intimacy, objects slowly dragged, plucked and rattled against beautifully recorded percussion. When Sugimoto’s guitar recedes again, leaving only whispers in miniature, the transformation is complete. The final section of “Phase 2,” adorned by a beautifully ornamented solo from Sugimoto, is a slow build toward drone in apotheosis, pitches remaining the same even as others change, all receding toward gritty susurration.
 
“Phase 1” follows suit, and it can be heard as a meditation on the vast transformation just having occurred. Sugimoto provides a repeated chordal background that it would be insufficient to label a drone, though it does, ironically, serve that purpose. Müller’s lightly intricate taps and occasional clangs bolster Rowe’s amalgamation of manipulated voices and sustained sounds, converging to become foundational, rising with glacial intention as the chords delineate the passing seconds. In various instances, Rowe’s Harsh (and harsh) music also comes into focus but only for a moment, so as not to disturb the sustained mood of introspection. All of this blooms from the high-frequency whistles, looped and variously reiterated, that conjure shades of AMMMusic. The album ends with only that sound, or a similar one, leading all toward silence. Taken as a whole, The World Turned Upside Down is a bold statement of intention to match, both as a moment of transition for Erstwhile and as a point of definition in Rowe’s work. While Rowe’s approach to sound as syntax would change radically, and repeatedly, over the succeeding decades, the blueprint is contained in those two tracks and their ineluctable progression.

Weather Sky

Keith Rowe’s original painting for Weather Sky (2001)

Rowe and Nakamura begin from a place of unity. No-input mixing board tone and Rowe’s attention to minute objectified and interregistral detail form a constantly mutating whole, a glacially swelling aggregate. The motion from simultaneity to interactivity around 16:40 of the first section turns out to be something of a red herring; there is always a constant in flux, a pool of infinitely shifting planes and colors, a vast crescendo against which tiny landmarks are erected and destroyed. The unceremonious removal of the carpet, when the bass drops out at 36:53, is both cataclysmic and, somehow, merely a blip on the canvas, as are other sudden but temporary removals a minute later. The ultimate return to something approximating the opening sonorities is both shocking and inevitable, The Room’s amalgamation in microcosm.
 
The third section is initially more subdued, sometimes more intricately rhythmic and relies more on microdetail. Tempo fluctuations inhabit an immediate present but also a relative distance, their register relegating them subservient to that all-encompassing fundamental that it would be inadequate to label a drone. As with the first section, pitch is just as malleable as dynamics and stereophonic perspective, but more important is the attention drawn to interlocking rhythmic cycles. Each pitch is a rough-hewn forest of timbral brambles and undergrowth with rhythms emanating from it. The net result is the realization that these overlapping cycles are fundamentally inseparable from their attendant pitches. The music’s final collapse renders the connection with stunning clarity. The remarkable emergence of an aperiodic tapping, what sounds for all the world as if it were typed code emerging at 23:45, draws further attention to the inextricably linked phenomena of pitch and rhythm, as, even more remarkably, does the second section. There are relatively few miniatures in Rowe’s catalog, and this one serves as both bridge and summation. The open intervals support a low-register sound in the right channel inhabiting the border between pitch and rhythm that is eventually replaced by aperiodicities similar to those in the third section. The miniature moves the music between the cohabitant worlds of pitch and rhythm with the gracefulness of a sliding door or a cleansing spring rain, while also serving as the album’s spiritual centerpiece.

The Hands of Caravaggio

Keith Rowe’s original painting for The Hands of Caravaggio (2002)

The Hands of Caravaggio is unique in the Erstwhile discography for many reasons, not least of which is its historical disparities. What genre categorization holds it? Where exactly do we place the beautifully translucent sonic influxes of the Music in Movement Electronic Orchestra? Even the disc title conjures multiple eras with the unostentatious grace of visual art embedded in it. Anyone familiar with the Erstwhile catalog will remember the premise. Rowe composed the piece, in contemplation of a then recently rediscovered Caravaggio painting, to be performed by the Music in Motion Electronic Orchestra, an organization he cofounded, and his AMM compatriot John Tilbury. The added element of intrigue involved Cor Fuhler’s piano-innards in manipulation, meant to push Tilbury beyond any perceived comfort zone. Recalcitrant and adventurous, the album went on to become the source of multileveled verbal bandying that finally obscured its musical importance. First and foremost, it has one of the most beautifully transparent and transparently nostalgic openings in the entire Rowe discography, a Romantic gesture transported to May of 2001, a moment as transcendent as anything Busoni might have penned in the final movement of his own 1904 piano concerto but even more ephemeral, those sonic signifiers largely down to the use of electronic instruments he envisioned in the early 20th century. Indeed, there is something post-Romantic, in the Reger or early Schoenberg-ian sense, as the huge work gradually but inexorably takes wing, something summative of Rowe’s work at this time, both on its own terms and relating to the sonic language he’d been forging from vastly disparate sources for nearly three decades. That said, the points of chronological contact are also decidedly contemporary, as, far from being limited by those attendant chronologies, Rowe’s syntax is modular and updatable. The resulting concerto is a palimpsest of palimpsests, nested layers of communication as spatially diverse as the title implies. There are, of course, internal moments of dialogue, as in the pseudo-sci-fi exchanges 13:28 into the first section, Tilbury’s piano surrounding glisses, swoops and curls of ascending sound, leading the way toward two beeps, one stage left and private, the next at 13:34 overtaking and reverberant, as if broadcast. Guitar interjections, unidentified percussive sounds and other ephemera provide the work its “modern” patina, but beneath it all, a Romantic undercurrent guides the music forward in reverse parabolic motion. The first of these embedded arcs comes to an apex at 8:23, during which a natural crescendo is buttressed by points and squiggles, themselves playing hosts to Rowe’s radio transmissions. It is the first instant in this gargantuan work in which composer and musician impulses merge with such clarity and so completely. Tilbury’s pianism is either absent or entirely submerged during this frenetic outpouring in a way it is not as a smaller arc crests at 10:56. Conversely, there are the troughs and valleys like the one 3:18 into the third movement, hushed but never reverent spaces open to sonic flotsam and jetsam, timbral swirls and splotches greasing and reflecting off of their semi-smooth surfaces. A similarly sparse and dreamier interlude constitutes an early phase of the 4th movement, containing some of Tilbury’s most familiar pianistic gestures, open fifths, resonantly extended harmonies and rolled clusters. All around them, the music simmers, sizzles and drill-bits, as if literally being constructed in the moment. Hearing the album in 2004, as I did, would have afforded no clue as to how it entered into Rowe’s development, but hindsight exposes not only Rowe’s language as it grew out of his 1990s work with AMM but as it would manifest on the first ErstLive discs. If Tilbury is the soloist, Rowe is the composer in more ways than providing the concept. Each musician of the orchestra is playing, celebrating, an aspect of the rarified soundworld he created.

Keith Rowe ‘Pollack #82” piano version dedicated to John Tilbury

Rabbit Run

Keith Rowe’s original painting for Rabbit Run (2003)

Of all the Rowe collaborations, nothing is as overt, as blatant, as Rabbit Run, his 2003 trio with Thomas Lehn and Marcus Schmickler. The miniscule aspects of Rowe’s art are brought to the fore here. The spring and knife-blade, so prominent, are treated as a melodic composite, it wouldn’t be correct to call them chords or even tremolo. The trills in the second movement of Beethoven’s op. 111 come closer to such aperiodic instabilities. The sound crashes and burns its way forward, flinging moments aside with the energy that would be sublimated in the 8th section, leaving Rowe to draw the memory further away from established traditions. With its pointillisms on full display, we’re still in the disjuncture of an early Stockhausen melody in reminiscence. There are definite Rowe moments, a burst of radio interference or chatty broadcaster, that knife-blade and spring in melodic rotation. Sounds do actually recur throughout. Unity beckons in listener retrospect, but it’s a unity shot through with the felicities of diversity. Here, not only is Rowe at his most active, but it seems fair to say that the space and subtlety of motion defining earlier Erstwhile collaborations, like Weather Sky, are deliberately stripped away or distilled, leaving a series of gestures that are both blunt and somehow also syntactically essential. Yet, even to claim that subtlety is absent would be to understate or to present an incomplete description. All elements of Rowe’s aesthetic are present but in astonishing miniature, the antithesis of an artist who develops long sonic lines over space. The contradiction is both unsettling and instructive. This approach, down to the post-production of Marcus Schmickler, mirrors the album's construction, a series of 42 brief tracks meant to be played serially or reordered in shuffle mode. A comparison with Bart, the earlier Erstwhile release featuring Lehn and Schmickler, tells the story. Rowe’s contributions are foregrounded in the mix, giving them added depth but also an extreme of power. The fifth piece contains what sounds like a brash bit of techno from Rowe’s radio, and it even fades in and out in a way familiar to any AMM connoisseur, but the result is both present and absent, slamming into gear rather than gliding forward with the usual effortless grace. It may be the case that the fifth and 12th tracks came from the same moment in real time, as the music coming over Rowe’s radio is similar and occupies nearly the same portion of soundstage right. A similarly brash radio transmission, or a series of them in rapid-fire channel change, comprises a major component of the 11th track. The spring and scrubber also thump and grate rather than add their usual series of atmospheres to the 5th track, anticipating the way the spring grinds and pounds its way through the 22nd track. Is that Rowe’s spring running backwards later on in the same track? The album’s compositional sculpting is astonishing in its juxtaposition of brevity and organicism. Returning to the fifth track as a point of reference, the volume and activity only increase in tracks 6 and 7, but by the eighth track, one of the longer entries at nearly a minute, we move from Lehn and Schmickler’s hyperreal extremity toward the more familiar silence-based introspection that a Rowe gesture might entail. Synthesizer pointillisms eventually fade, leaving room for more spring and, most unexpected, the introduction of a near-silent moment that sounds like it might have come from a Rowe solo effort. The reintroduction of Lehn and Schmickler is both sparse and respectful, building with a slow bejeweled crescendo over the course of the ninth track. A similar amount of space is left in which Rowe can meditate throughout the tiny suite comprising the 24th, 25th and 26th tracks, and the gradual winding down and puttering to a halt that concludes the album is a stroke of genius. Rowe’s sonic signifiers are given a novel existence of extraversion, their malleability manifest in a way both radically different and essentially familiar.

Duos for Doris

Keith Rowe’s original painting for Duos for Doris (2003)

In July of 2003, Pitchfork writer Andy Beta stated of Rowe and John Tilbury’s Duos for Doris: “Those familiar with the instant sound universes created by hardy perennials AMM will not detect any straying from that singular and difficult path.” This overstatement demonstrates a rather astonishing unfamiliarity with AMM’s multivalent and vastly disparate “sound universes,” an apt but misfired phrase, but also underappreciates Rowe’s rapid development in the early 2000s. Coincidentally, or perhaps better to call it an intriguing synchronicity, also in July of 2003, Rowe writes of the same album, on Erstwhile’s site:

Clearly the death of John's mother just a few days before the recording had a deep effect on how I perceived the "room". By room, I'm not merely referring to the space we performed in, but an altogether larger imaginary conceptual space, which included supporting John through this difficult closure, compounded with the threat of an imminent and illegal war. A considered, reflective and pensive mood enveloped me. Being strangely aware of John's movements, but not necessarily listening to what he is playing; not reacting to his playing but being affected by it. The act of NOT listening is very important, preferring juxtaposition to confabulation, disturbing the congruity and avoiding Pavlovian laminates.

Non Listening for me is about the intensification of the edge, or frame. This might be seen as an attempt to limit certain aspects of encroachment of the external environment, and it's almost always been part of my musical makeup. I'm very aware that it's almost heretical to praise not listening, but nevertheless I feel there is a place for it. I write these thoughts not needing or wanting to convince anyone of the correctness of these ideas, but only to explain how I approached playing these sessions.

There it is, Rowe’s room, as described as no one else could in the opening paragraphs of Brian Olewnick’s superb and already mentioned Rowe biography. Most remarkably, like Wagner constructing the blueprint of Bayreuth in his short story “Pilgrimage to Beethoven,” Rowe was anticipating an aspect that would become vastly important to his musical trajectory but only apparent years later, and in retrospect. Even beyond the environmental, sociopolitical and performative aspects the room as concept entails, Rowe was incorporating a raw emotionality into his description, the oft-mentioned but ever-poignant circumstances under which Duos for Doris was recorded. What Rowe tactfully calls difficult closure for Tilbury is certainly represented, but a transmogrification is captured in process. It is impossible for me to avoid a personal reflection at this point. I came to the album in 2004, when I moved from being a casual Erstwhile consumer to what, evoking Pauline Oliveros’ parlance, I would now call a deeper listener. My memories of listening to these two discs in their entirety involve neither the act of listening nor interpretation but moments of evolution. I mean instants in which that which is “I” becomes another and radically different I in the face of complete unfamiliarity rendered familiar through the breakdown of filtration’s connective tissues. Emily Dickinson makes better reference to this tenuous yet pursuant connection: “Adventure most unto itself/The Soul condemned to be—/Attended by a single Hound/Its own identity.”

Nothing can replace the experience of listening to one of the most important documents in Rowe’s Erstwhile catalog. Moments must, but never will, suffice for that continuity of continuities. They embody and are embodied by each moment of music committed to bits and bytes in January of 2003. Indeed, anticipating the ErstLive series, the first thing to be heard is the space, the theater in which the extremely private performance was recorded. Only Olewnick and Abbey were in attendance, and for any pursuing deeper interest, Olewnick’s Bagatellen review, now also posted on the Erstwhile site, is as potent and important a document of the music and its genesis as could be desired. He distills, just as the two performers do, language, time and event as few critics even aspire to achieve. The sounds reflect this linearly non-linear approach to syntax, time and, most importantly for our purposes, space. The album’s opening minutes exist in a space in constant negation, a room whose sonic properties, its own sounds, are defined and fluxed by electronics and acoustics in the multitemporal dialogue of space and no-space. As would be the case in so many subsequent Erstwhile releases, substance and the air around it move in but transgress their respective boundaries only to reestablish them. Again, Rowe sums up the relationships in his prescient notes as juxtaposed abstractions, to which I might add that the abstractions manifest as realities in the moment conjoining sound and sense. Timbres transcend themselves. As Rowe’s variously sized fans, themselves portending the death motive in Cultural Templates, become sonically other than their supposed purposes dictate, Tilbury’s wooden rubbing of the piano, stopping at 6:11, ultimately takes on the sounds of the natural world, exterior space becoming interior, as it does during the neo-Messiaenic dialogue opening Olaf as Tilbury and the birds exchange ideas in the mundane shadow of Rowe’s radio transmission. Tilbury’s pitched rubbing, so prevalent early in Cathnor, return in Olaf and dominate much of the first 7 minutes. It is difficult to point with any precision to the moments dividing pastoral from volcanic, as with the subtlest shade threatening usurpation of tranquility 14:29 into Olaf or the piano chords anticipating, as has so often been mentioned, the shattering climax forty-five minutes into Cathnor. Eschewing the facilities of pitch and timbre, Oxleay’s opening shudders, balances and beats against its fluctuating environs with fleeting existence’s semi-staticity, repetition in non-repetition natural to history’s accumulations but for which there is as yet no precise structural or formal vocabulary.

​Now seems as good a time as any to discuss a sonic manifestation of that space we call “zero,” or the historicity with which Rowe was coming to terms, via questions, in his Duos for Doris notes.  It is a simple thing, a natural phenomenon, to settle into something as enduring as a drone, or the delicate static that became so integral to Rowe’s syntax when he began recording for Erstwhile. Oxleay progresses on it to the point that it becomes part of the room, or the space, or the environment, or as integral as breathing to Rowe’s palette of communicative gestures, that is until it ceases. It doesn’t so much evaporate as ascend, leaving the room in the sound whose lack it was impossible to perceive until the luminous opening occurs, the delicate veil is lifted. These moments were prefigured in AMM but here, in this space of temporal timelessness, take on a new dimension. In a narrative of glacially slow builds dotted with moments of the most exquisitely subtle changes, the slight but infinitely important transition from quiet to quieter, never quite approaching zero but affording a glimpse of it, may be the album’s most important and ephemeral attribute.

AMPLIFY 2002: balance

The festival for which this box is named could not be more aptly titled. If there is a summative and completely contextualized moment in the early days of Rowe’s association with Erstwhile, it is certainly AMPLIFY 2002: balance. This musical snapshot of worldwide EAI, caught as the artists converged on Tokyo in autumn 2002, can still best be appreciated via a feature by Matt Wellins. Its appearance in Dusted Magazine post-dated the box’s release, and like the box, Wellins encapsulates the importance of the music and its context, at that time in rapid development. The passage of two decades and their gathered insight provides further context, especially regarding Rowe’s musical reinvention, then in staggeringly rapid development. It is worth noting that Rabbit Run was released after the AMPLIFY box, ensuring that only those who had attended the 2002 event would have heard the multifarious extension of an aesthetic initiated with The World Turned Upside Down and Weather Sky. The duo and trio associated with the latter and with Rabbit Run was each given a set in the main festival. Rowe was also the guiding force behind a seven-guitar rendering, after the main festival events concluded, of Cornelius Cardew’s Treatise, a piece extremely important to his development and excerpts of which AMM recorded in 1984. While the temptation is to imagine the seven-guitar recording as akin to those always exciting but sometimes disappointing Norman Granz 1950s Jazz at the Philharmonic jam sessions, Rowe, along with Taku Sugimoto, Oren Ambarchi, Tetuzi Akiyama, Burkhard Stangl, Otomo Yoshihide, and Toshimaru Nakamura, are all as completely ensemble players as they are soloists. Their smaller-group Erstwhile projects attest to that complex balancing act, a collaborative feat separating them from so many improvising musicians. Felt more than specifically heard, it seems fair to say that while Rowe’s audible presence is minimized, he is truly the symbiotic guiding force behind the two lengthy pieces, one derived from pages 82-84 of Treatise and one lengthy improvisation. All of the spatial constructs Rowe had at that time been cultivating and that would become paramount to his emergent syntax imbue the often sparse recording, and the guitar gestures are both reminiscent of and adjacent to those he pioneered and was just then abandoning. Even if the vocabularies are different, the space, the atomism and the blurring of pitch and timbral boundaries owe a huge debt to Rowe’s Erstwhile aesthetic and to much of his early 2000s contributions to AMM. The reverse articulation at 17:45 rends the veil, so similar in spirit to the second movement of Shostakovich’s final string quartet, as another pitch resides quietly but resolutely wavering in the background. The improvisation breathes similar air, and if there is a factor unifying the two pieces, it is the glissando. There’s a nearly inaudible but brilliantly multiphonic example 9:18 into the improvisation, and indeed, slides and curves come in all flavors and speeds. The second piece’s volume and timbral increases do nothing to mitigate the pitch instabilities vying for prominence with the wonderfully pure tones out of which any well-tuned chamber music ensemble fashions a resolution.
 
Rabbit Run and Weather Sky occupy completely, or mostly, opposite aesthetic polarities, but despite the same group formations and attendant syntaxes, the festival sets are more similar than different in the paths along which they unfold. During the first half hour, Thomas Lehn and Marcus Schmickler slow considerably the rate of moment-to-moment change, much of the music in glacial dialogue with itself as vast mountain ranges of sound dotted with points, wavy lines and crags solidify only to disassemble with commensurate slowness. In the trough at 12:14, a convergent sound object of parabolic intersection exposes a wonderful cadence, a fifth whose tones create a third only to be slammed without warning into a different shape. The jump-scare intrusion at 21:46 is just that because of its rarity, at least in the first half of this soft-edged set. While the penultimate ten minutes sparkle with an energy somewhat closer to the trio album, the final 7 minutes return to something approaching but never quite achieving placidity, doubtless due to Rowe’s influence.
 
Nakamura and Rowe share an approach to sonic sparsity so complete that it can be difficult to separate their contributions. A loop seems to begin 9:10 into their half-hour set, but actually, repeated listening exposes it deeply buried in the texture as early as 5:22. Such is this concert performance’s subtlety that it may even contain deeper levels of nuance than Weather Sky or the radically different between. The subtly shifting planes of sound from 5:25 to 9:06, one so breathily human as to be unsettling and one squarely in the electronic sphere, form a static mosaic whose only motion involves the slightly curled lines adorning the sound object. Nakamura’s loop emerges from this glorious semi-flux, only ceasing at 14:06. The rest of the set might best be described as a spontaneous two-part invention, as rich in ideas but as economical as anything Bach committed to paper. Yet, here especially, color constitutes the way, color in spatial balance as stage left and right merge and diverge, deep and bright color that distills its varied contexts into the sparest call and response, colors in the service of a luminosity balancing all externalities through the simply profound non-action of emanating from within.

A View from the Window

Keith Rowe’s original painting for A View From the Window (2004)

Form is foregrounded here, as the late 2003 collaborative effort exists in two roughly inverted halves, the first more overtly changeable and moody, the second a unified whole anticipating Rowe’s work with 4g - cloud and the final section of ErstLive 005. Another unifying factor is the superb engineering of Christoph Amann, here working with Rowe for the first of numerous fruitful encounters. It may be ironic that, along with Wandelweiser composers, some of Rowe’s most sonically sympathetic and inspired collaborators are brass players. Axel Dörner and Franz Hautzinger demonstrate this seven years before Radu Malfatti would cement the point on Φ, and A View from the Window would go a long way toward defining the dual aspect of Rowe’s collaborative aesthetic. Their instrumental versatility, vocabularies forged in the timbral flux of long-nurtured experience, complement Rowe’s then-emergent blending of long and short sounds with periods of silence, a vision similar to the one captured a few months later on his ErstLive set with Burkhard Beins. At 15:50 into Magenta-Black, exhalations from the trumpet players reveal the same breathy insertions conjured by Rowe’s pickup hiss, silence made audible, a particularly poignant moment that contextualizes the nearly imperceptible arpeggios a minute later. When Rowe-driven pitches occur, as they do sliding from Cadmium Yellow-Turquoise’s first 13 minutes, the brass players either complement with pitched material or dot with briefer elucidations, sometimes periodic and sometimes not. Yet, despite undercurrents of protean exchange, the bipartite model holds. A gargantuan clang, either resulting or descended from Rowe’s spring, rends the temporal fabric at 17:40 into Magenta-Black, just as various breath mutations and pitched points imbue its second half. A pitched interlude anticipating much of Cadmium Yellow-Turquoise ends at 26:59, and only after it subsides does the realization occur that so much of the piece has been pitched deep below the surface. Like The Room’s briefly pitched interludes, moments of bristling tension puncture the shifting audible silence. A gentle scrubber highlights and offsets that buzzing drone, mingling serenely with the subtle hint of a radio broadcast at 30:39, a complete contrast to the vast and booming interjections so often heard in the previous half hour. It is as if the second half of the album emerges from the shadow of the first. A confluence of low-frequency pitches, themselves in flux, provide one level of exchange, playing host to a layer of sonic complexes similar to those that would define The Room’s opening minutes three years later. The brass players engage fully, augmenting, diminuting but never fundamentally altering the multi-leveled relationship. Where the components defining the album’s first half were largely rendered serially, a vertical counterpoint ensues, a wave upon waves replete with additive changes and similarly ineluctable disappearances. Traces of individuality have been largely sublimated by the music’s conclusion, as would occur in the May 2004 Berlin quartet performance comprising ErstLive 005. Spatially, A View from the Window sounds like just that. The three musicians occupy their own spaces, never leaving them but only emphasizing their differing aspects. Rowe’s motion is captured from the center outwards, while Dörner and Hautzinger sit comfortably to either side. The album’s juxtaposition of sweeping motions with relative staticity would prove to be both a summation and prophetic of many elements defining Rowe’s music even through the changing and culminating linguistic concerns presented by Absence.

Keith Rowe, Axel Dörner, Franz Hautzinger, Jon Abbey at the recording session of 'A View From the Window' at Amann Studios, Vienna (November 8, 2010) (photo © Yuko Zama)

Live at the LU

Keith Rowe’s original painting for Live at the LU (2004)

If there is an entry in Rowe’s collaborative discography suffering from general misunderstanding, even unwarranted neglect, it is Live at the LU, his 2002 performance with Christian Fennesz. High-profile reviews have judged the collaboration to be faulty, but what this 42-minute set reveals is the dynamic but unified pairing of two artists in a symbiotic exploration of an extended moment. The conclusions of Weather Sky and ErstLive 005 expose a similar union, a conjoining of disparate artistic visions. The spatial concerns in much of Rowe’s work are nearly absent. More than anything else, Rowe and Fennesz focus on melody and counterpoint. So much of this material betrays an obsession with pitch, whether specifically pitched elements are determining structure and form or they make their way surreptitiously into a given moment. The opening minutes of the set contain both scenarios. The nearly thunderous entrance at 2:52, presumably courtesy of Fennesz, complements the long form Rowe has been constructing to that point. The ascending bass glissando might be perceived as being rhythmically ribbed, a perfect foil to the upper-register broadcast elements so integral to Rowe’s language. The rhythms subsequently emerging are not so much percussive as melodic. The pitched syncopations push against the various drones and airy electronic whispers that finally subside, albeit temporarily, at 3:28. The album’s blueprint has been created, and the overall atmosphere changes very little throughout. Various elements accumulate and dissipate, as with the counterpoints of guitar and electronics 2:20 into the second track, reaching a roaring zenith with the low E-flat at 3:38 and others with the upper-frequency complexes informing the next several minutes, but by 5:34, these have also settled down to a single low drone punctuated by showers of rhythmic bursts from above. Deeper listening reveals a constant blurring of boundaries between pulse, rhythm and melody, exemplified by the melodic rattling at 6:37. Is it pulse or pitch, or maybe an entity to be taken on its own autonomous terms, approaching both from that wickedly difficult, because imprecise, vantage point of timbre? It is as if the melody, or melodic material, is growing from within, pitches surrounding and being surrounded by their respective and similar environments in counterpoint, akin to and entirely different from a consort of viols, complete with varied articulations. The most interesting manifestation of this phenomenon comes in the final track with the overt melodic material, so disparaged in the press. Beginning at 5:53, an upper-register melody doesn’t so much emerge as bloom, ornamenting its “exotic” way through a complementary bass and flanked by static susurrations whose pitches can be discerned by any willing to listen deep within the timbres. In the most overt spatialization on the disc, the sound glides slowly stage right, but all the while, the beautifully crafted melodic material, so similar to the album’s opening pitches, floats like a halo above all simultaneous occurrences. The music might have been made by one person, so complete is the musical synergy. Repeated listening reveals that melody, rhythm, form and structure coexist even as they push against each other, a process of discovery in development rendering the disc one of the most satisfying in Rowe’s discography.

ErstLive 001

The AMPLIFY 2004: addition concerts form the first of the ErstLive series, which would prove to be extremely exciting and provocative, nowhere more so than in the first installment. In retrospect, it is regrettable that Keith Rowe and Burkhard Beins did not collaborate on disc more often, so energetic is their 28-minute set (and so crisply captured by the great Christoph Amann). The initial laughter buoyed by ambient noise place the disc in a different realm from anything else previously on Erstwhile and set the tone for the warts-and-all but excellently recorded series. At strategic moments, the “warts” provide their own syntactically deviant view of the space Rowe creates. Like Live at the LU, we are treated to a chamber music performance whose pitched material is in constant and vibrant flux. Beins’ reiterated A-flat complements and is complemented by Rowe’s similar pitch at 3:34, the microtones beating against each other as radio transmissions, vocal and otherwise, swoop and curve beneath in their own melodic spaces. Thunderous bass drum and brushed snare shatter and complement that checker-work of tonal foliage, the transportive balm of tone and timbre so eloquently simplistic in its all-encompassing brightness. Beneath it all, that gorgeously multivalent Rowe drone pervades all, a thunderously transparent reminder of a syntax in protean development. At 5:43, soundstage hard right, the first anticipatory anomaly slashes through the perfectly constructed contrapuntal curtain, anticipating the similarly prominent grind-and-kick event at 7:27, the mechanized groans and electro-splatter that pushes Rowe out of his comfort zone onto a constantly shifting plane of guitar feedback, string sustains and fretboard scraping. Saturating the soundstage, Rowe and Beins thrust and parry, point and counterpointing in truly “modernist” revelry until 10:06, where a brief point of respite brings a return of what sounds eerily like the set’s opening material. To suggest pitch and rhythm relationships is to slam headlong into the blurred boundaries enforced by stubborn language and attendant perception, especially when the low-register descents at 11:32 refuse to conform to any of those categorical descriptors. Yet, there is no denying the unity of purpose achieved by the two veteran improvisers, subtly anticipating what might be a spring-driven roar at 12:53. With a controlled and rolling clatter, Beins brings the first section to a close at 13:23; a silence ensues. The ensuing pulsing drone slowly builds, while with similar inexorability, a second prophetic anomaly pervades the texture. So often, Rowe’s broadcasts occupy a single portion of the soundstage. Wherever they are, they sit narrowly defined in their poignant singularity. Here, Dusty Springfield’s drummer grooves history into sharp focus stage right, bolstered by all that lovely brass, all ringed by the golden circle of Beins’ percussion before it all distorts, grittily morphing into a waltzy French pop tune. These two conjoined vignettes of creative destruction, so close in spirit to that anomalous moment early in the set, anticipate the cultural templates of Tokyo more than four years later and, by distant proxy, the room’s recursive iterations. In David Lynch fashion, temporal elements then flow outward but in reverse from that temporally charged palimpsest. The music finally spends itself, returning in spiral fashion to something akin to the opening moments, achieving an arc of points, domes and jagged crests, a perfect series of imperfections.

Keith Rowe/Burkhard Beins duo set at Club der Polnischen Versager, Berlin (May 10, 2004) (photo © Yuko Zama)

ErstLive 002

The second in the ErstLive series was actually recorded 5 days earlier than the first. The quartet of Rowe, Nakamura, Lehn and Schmickler presents a conundrum to the critic attempting to describe the contradictory syntaxes in play, the ascetic contrasted with varying degrees of activity that constitutes this 38-minute set. Unlike Rowe’s duo with Burkhard Beins, the first ten minutes reside in a backlit world of near-silences or glacial ascents and descents. The quartet palpably finding its way comprises the music’s softly luminous ebb and flow, that is until the sudden increase in activity at the eleventh minute signaled by Lehn’s synthesizer and Rowe’s guitar. The next two minutes are ablaze with crackle and grit in various shades and colors, distorted peaks are reached and abandoned with some of the same vigor that informs ErstLive 001. In fact, Rowe’s transmissions and relatively active (and readily identifiable) guitar timbres connect this performance to its later festival counterpart. There ensues what can best be described as gestural dialogue, more blending of pitch and rhythm but this time cloaked in a series of swipes and jabs, Rowe tuning and detuning, seemingly in real time, his various guitar deconstructions. If there is a spatial element beyond the various transmissions and attendant rustlings now becoming familiar, it is provided by the synthesists, presumably Lehn and Nakamura. They cocoon the cyclic points and lines with which Rowe fills the texture. Even the dizzying descent at 19:06 does little to disturb the sense of a sonic third space, a haven of drone completely manifested by 20:00. The techno-inflected radio transmission beginning at 20:40 which then becomes the music’s guiding force prepares the way for the sparsest section, a three-minute stretch in which Rowe’s sparse and perfectly timed pointillisms determine the music’s course. Until Nakamura reinstates the pitched material at 29:14, the aesthetic is akin to a latter-day AMM performance in that timbrally diverse silence seasoned by some of Rowe’s electronic reversals informs the nearly 10-minute episode comprising the second part. The final ten minutes is something of a return to the first section with a coda. One of the things that separates Rowe from every other musician involves what might be described as a lack of sonic dogma. The pitched material that slowly comes to the fore at 34:52 is both beautiful and ultimately ominous, especially as its elements begin to fragment at 36:27. As a low distorted pitch threatens to overtake all else, it becomes extremely difficult to discern the origins of each sound. Like one of Leopold Bloom’s Nighttown fantasies, the edifice dissolves at 37:19, evaporating much more quickly than it had emerged. The performance ends in scattered silence, first with what sounds like cyclically agitated and detuned guitar strings and then a few low-register rumbles from Nakamura’s no-input mixing board. It is not the sudden ending of The Room iterations. Sounding for all the world like a Picardy third, low and dark instead of heightened and bright, the music resolves and fades, silence filling space but cadential nonetheless. It could be the presence of an audience that pulls forth a cadential gesture in a way that studio productions do not, but the two pitched swipes, so reminiscent of earlier Rowe gestures, proffer one of the most satisfying conclusions in Rowe’s discography.

Keith Rowe, Thomas Lehn, Toshi Nakamura, Marcus Schmickler set at AMPLIFY2004: addition at Stadtgarten, Cologne (May 8, 2004) (photo © Yuko Zama)

ErstLive 005

Keith Rowe’s original paper artwork for ErstLive 005-3 (2005)

A monument is rooted in the ground. While predetermined, a monument’s designation contains something of the arbitrary, a historical precedent made manifest in the confluence of image and appellation by a community in crisis or celebration, a figure never quite alone and representing history and community. Rehearing, 19 years later, the document of the quartet performance in Berlin from May 14, 2004, reaffirms its historical status. Here Rowe is joined by Sachiko M, Toshimaru Nakamura and Otomo Yoshihide. The longest single performance in the Erstwhile catalog, it now emerges as a single and singly monumental historical parenthesis, arising and returning not to silence, as I’d originally concluded. If revisitation of Rowe’s Erstwhile catalog has reaffirmed anything, it is the contradictory nature of the less and less understood and appreciated state we keep calling silence, that increasingly rare and radical construct with which Rowe has been coming to terms, overtly and covertly, for six decades. The four-hour four-musician performance actually has an obvious but underappreciated fifth element, one at the center of Rowe’s consciousness, especially as demonstrated in succeeding years: the room. The only sonic equivalent in terms of sheer spatial vastness is Absence, and the only document so spatially nuanced on multiple levels is The Room Extended. ErstLive 005 begins and ends with that room,  beautifully rendered by Christoph Amann, its cumulative cavernousness itself prefiguring the transtemporal implications of the Allegri assemblage from AMPLIFY 2020. Backfabrik’s opulent acoustic inaugurates and concludes the performance, and that rumbling boom at 1:51 and again at 3:06 into the first disc relies on space and reverberation for its effect. There’s a spectacular moment, in Miles Davis’ 1958 recording of “Love for Sale,” as the first eight bars of his solo transition to the second, where Philly Joe Jones riffs, his snare tearing a hole in everything around it and largely because of a similarly reverberant acoustic. In reauditioning the Berlin quartet performance, however, conveniently split into tracks but certainly meant to be heard in toto, I was struck by the sound emerging in tandem with the second boom, just below Sachiko M’s sine tone. Hindsight elucidates that sound to be very similar, if somewhat constricted by its lower register, to The Room’s opening moments. The combination of M and Rowe’s initial contributions mirrors and augments the space in which the music will unfold and be subsumed. If ever a “silence” was rendered audible, this sonic layer exemplifies the instant. At the same time as the room magnifies all occurring in it, the source of magnification is being negated by the recording process itself. The second track on the first disc provides a cross-sectional contrast. At 0:14, an electronic snap, maybe a guitar emanation or a piece of equipment in sonic flux, serves a purpose similar to Philly Joe Jones’ snare, but seven seconds later, another electronic sound, a briefly sustained squib in a much higher register, escapes much of the echo with delicate precision and focus. It occurs again seconds later, more completely reverb-drenched this time but still occupying a space somewhat different than the immediately subsequent lower frequencies tailing more transient electronic bursts. Rowe’s timeline anticipations at 1:46, however, whizz and boom through the space and all occupying it. These sonic and spatially disparate juxtapositions pervade the set. Rowe’s syntax inhabits a dynamic setting similar to his duo set with Burkhard Beins from a few nights before, and by 4:17 into the same track, the room affords the illusion of shrinking as a degree of intimacy ensues. The first disc’s final track allows much of that intimacy to continue despite a period of less overt motion. The reappearance of M’s sine tone at 9:20 becomes as monumental as the set’s opening moments of gradual discovery, as does Yoshihide’s turntable nuancing at 9:46. The space is also capable of housing such astonishing subtleties as the gradually emerging percussive loop, slowly becoming apparent at 11:02 and remaining a concern contrapuntal to M’s sine tone until 13:06. Its ensuing manipulation suggests that it’s a Rowe contribution, but Rowe is certainly responsible for the equally subtle and gentle sounds beginning at 15:07, finally and serendipitously matching M’s sine tone pitch! The room is a nearly inaudible ghost.

Keith Rowe/Sachiko M/Toshi Nakamura/Otomo Yoshihide 4-hour quartet at AMPLIFY 2004: addition at Backfabrik, Berlin (May 14, 2004) (photo © Yuko Zama)

If a single instrument encapsulates the dual nature of Backfabrik’s sonic properties (beyond Rowe’s guitar and attendant concerns), it is Yoshihide’s turntable. He takes the opportunity for an extended solo on the second disc. It brings environments into the already vibrant environment, as Rowe also does at 7:10 with a looped radio grab. The rhythmic and arrhythmic elements coalesce and disrupt each other as the set progresses, vinyl crackle occurring and recurring in alternate tandem and discord with the music’s general trajectory. Like Rowe’s found objects, the turntable solidifies and erects spatial boundaries beyond the merely physical, embodying the performance’s entire process of being and becoming. 6:06 into the second disc’s second track, in perfect trio consort, Rowe, M and Yoshihide assemble a sculpture of dotted lines, angular ambiguities and vinyl thuds. Their accumulated histories resonate in a shared space, creating both a monument to strategic spontaneity and composed freedom, as well as an exemplar of the 21st century iteration of collective free improvisation.

Keith Rowe/Sachiko M/Toshi Nakamura/Otomo Yoshihide 4-hour quartet at AMPLIFY 2004: addition at Backfabrik, Berlin (May 14, 2004) (photo © Yuko Zama)

4g - cloud​

Keith Rowe’s original painting for 4g - cloud (2005)

In the aforementioned episode of Signifying Something, Keith Rowe recalls that for a year, he made his collaborators in this quartet of improvisers watch and listen, repeatedly, to the Lindsay Quartet perform Haydn. That British aggregate’s wise and subtle version of 18th century transitional music, the multifaceted sonic universe Haydn inhabited and created, elucidates these April and May 2004 performances. Rowe, Christian Fennesz, Oren Ambarchi and Toshimaru Nakamura claim precious little space for themselves, though their individual contributions constitute a dialogue of wit and circumstance to create one of the most subtle and nuanced entries in Rowe’s Erstwhile discography, comparable only to Live at the LU. Felt rather than heard as often as not, much of the music swings shy of overt occurrence into the gray areas of contrapuntal insinuation. The slight but never transparent entrance of a motoric timbre 3:42 into “Perfect Grass” scintillates rather than imparts. The entire piece and much of the album work along similarly wavy but precisely drawn lines, occupying spaces that it would be tempting but false to call egoless. Even at dynamic heights, as with the conjoining drones and waves inhabiting 12:41, a sound sharp in attack but resonant enters without disturbing the surrounding ebb and flow. Points of individuality emphasize, or accent, rather than dominating, and like the Live at the LU dynamic, the aesthetic here is openness in counterpoint, a collegial exchange exquisitely captured in which soundstage, frequency and sound object coexist and thrive by glorious turn. With headphones, the way the soundstage is configured even resembles a string quartet’s placement, especially at 13:33 of “Perfect Grass,” when Rowe, panned soundstage left and right, ripples and rasps a phrase in direct dialogue with two tones, creating a powerfully articulated but never intrusive open fifth. A sensitive drone and a delicately distorted rattle, intermittent as if in response, settles in soundstage right. The negative space version of this extraordinary moment of temporary repose opens “Deformed Veil.” Here, in this moment inverting the first piece’s sustains, it is only the punctuations forming the dialogue, the silence the drones previously made audible bolstering each insertion. Particularly poignant are the ascending and descending pitches at 3:33, easing their way out of the sonic squibs and splotches, dabs of pure color suddenly but subtly offset by flute-vibratoed pitch as the coloristic elements gradually coalesce. The ensuing lower frequencies, intermittent at first, complement rather than encroach until a decisively analogue sound rends the veil at 6.06. Rowe’s distinctive crackle and electronic sibilance pervade, bolstering all around it until, with a cadential suddenness, they disappear at 15:48. Mirroring the piece’s opening, the long silences at 3:11 and beyond also anticipate Erstwhile’s later deeper involvement with Wandelweiser’s compositional aesthetic. Divided into two halves, the hour-long Yellow Cloud is an accumulation of accumulations, encapsulating everything occurring on the first disc, or subsuming its multilayered dialogics into a series of semi-circular gestures. Tones first presented as pure and vibratoless warp as they proceed. Melody escapes its own prescriptive boundaries, both present and absent. Rhythmic elements take on the spatial elements their quartet placement had previously denied them, as with the centerstage rapid pulse migrating left beginning at 6:21. The initial melody, rhythmic though definitely pitched, is later enhanced by surrounding elements it would be too simplistic to call harmonies, slowly gaining in momentum until fully established at 15:04. Here, finally, all frequencies merge to create a staticity in motion, a cloud as unified as its materials are diverse, a floating mass of energy exuding points of light and whose pockets of shade reveal themselves proportionally to depth of examination. It prefigures the similar low-register unifications of  “Amann” from between but is even more complete, traversing and retraversing every spectrum imaginable. Even what sounds like it may become an overt melody at 20:53 proves deceptive, fragmenting and then suddenly ceasing at 21:32. Pulse crosses the line to become pitch, pitch reverts to its pulsing state, and only an occasional guitar tone, as at 31:22, hints at the four musicians’ ties to the instrument that, to varying degrees, they would modify and reject. The piece’s second half is itself a rejection as pitch and pitch relations slowly recede in favor of powerful and all-inclusive droning so much a part of Perfect Grass. At that point, as each soft-edged gesture flows with seamless grace into the next, individuation is impossible to identify, a continuously forming luminescence, a true counterpoint that leads ultimately, with airy finality, toward silence.

Keith Rowe, Toshi Nakamura, ​Christian Fennesz, Oren Ambarchi '4g' set at AMPLIFY2004: addition at Backfabrik, Berlin (May 26, 2004) (photo © Yuko Zama)

between

Keith Rowe’s original painting for between (2006)

These 2005 recordings demonstrate just why, as Toshimaru Nakamura makes plain in a “Fifteen Questions” interview, the word “onkyo” is not really applicable to his music. It might be even better to suggest that it is an incomplete descriptor. While Onkyo is inextricably linked with quiet sounds, and while they do abound on certain parts of between, that box is far too small and narrow to hold the vastness of a partnership then in development’s full bloom. Rowe and Nakamura’s combined approach is timbrally, historically and temporally complex, encompassing non-linearity but also the spiraling beauty of a musical arc.

​The album is both a progression and an amalgamation, a series of pieces with “Lausanne” as the centerpiece, though the others present that material from alternate angles. “Vienna” and “July” provide a glimpse of all the material captured in the Lausanne performance but without its arc. They comprise a concentric series of hills and troughs, pulsing pools and eddies of sound in the contexts near-silence provides. They might sustain or they might break off mid articulation, once in a while taking on surprising human manifestation, as with what sounds suspiciously like laughter 15:01 into “Vienna.” Even when transient bursts of loudness occur as happens nearly a minute later, they recede into the cauldronous brew comprising the backdrop against which the music unfolds. It’s slowly evolving melodies and filtered hiss paves the way for what occurs on the second disc. While the stunningly loud “13630 kHz” certainly has moments of foundational thrust and parry, it spends most of its fairly brief existence blasting its way through middle and higher register territories. “Lausanne” captures the lustrous interplay in technicolor with an additional layer of raw power to match the myriad nuances it blankets. The rumbles and bursts of static opening the piece assert themselves in slowly rising torrents, augmented by crests and folds of gritty electronics until a single feedback pitch rends the veil at 3:37. Bolstering the squiggles, the bursts of static and the foundational rumbles that persists in glacial waves, an all-encompassing drone fills and refills pitch and rhythmic space, a continuo for the dotted loops emerging at 9:57 and continuing to 14:17. Various sonic squalls produce a counterpoint, like the high-frequency interjection at 16:24 or the gorgeously vibratoed pitch vanguarding itself at 19:50. With the mellifluous felicity of a theremin, Nakamura suddenly jettisons all notions of modernity in a single gesture, evoking multiple pasts with a single, if superficially incongruous, sustain of ravishing beauty. It breaks, one overtone then becoming the prominent pitch which in turn transforms into another, only dissipating at 24:22. Rowe contributes to what is really a long-range dialogue, as if the continuo he was creating comprised organ and lute along with the viola da gamba. He adds a thundering bass line at 27:06, swelling nearly to breaking point and then complemented by a similarly oscillating figuration from Nakamura until those theremin pitches reassert themselves at 30:45. The collaborators spend the rest of the performance manipulating the high-register material in a way that is as melodic as any Frescobaldi toccata or Gesualdo madrigal and similarly harmonically intriguing. It is a summation of all Rowe and Nakamura had achieved to that point, and the sounds find their spaces between the moments of summation.

Keith Rowe/Toshimaru Namamura at the recording session of 'between' at Amann Studios, Vienna, July 2005 (photo © Yuko Zama)

The Room

Keith Rowe’s original paintings for The Room (2007)

There is nothing in Rowe’s discography to complement the scope and ambition of The Room until The Room Extended. Brief but miles deep, it is his first solo project for the label and an astonishing statement of intent which, he states in Signifying Something, was a single take performance at home. It is summation rolled up in departure, a portrait of the artist, a three-fold statement of intent whose implications increase with each reaudition. It isn’t simply that it contains, in distillation, many of the sounds Rowe marshals piecemeal throughout the rest of his discography; rather, it is that very distillation in dialogue with a few sounds to be heard nowhere else in his work. Like its title, the piece connotes something extraordinarily and almost comfortingly simple while transcending it in multiple ways. The opening sound serves as blueprint. The uppermost part of that sound is also its most flexible, entering and exiting in freely pitched iterations too strong to be characterized as anything other than bold, too unpredictable to be dominant. The sound is pitched and unpitched, harmonic but in no functional sense, a symptom and an encapsulation of everything contained in Rowe’s entirely unique sonic vision. It’s a kind of Grundgestalt, an embryo. Soon enough, all morphs and fragments into the various components of this astonishing 38-minute piece, as close to any album in Rowe’s discography that could be called aphoristic. Rhythms overlap in polycyclic repetitions and post-Ivesian dialogue stripped clean of reference save to itself and its creator. Rhythm and pitch join in the nebulous regions birthing both, a drone of drones in complete support. Various shades of buzz and blurred-line geometries shape and contextualize the cycles’ returns, restatements it would be wrong to call aperiodic. The ribbed higher-frequency cycles are interrupted by moments of pitched stability, while tones in central frequency range percolate in slowly concentric parabolas. By the 11th minute, much of the upper extremes have faded, the lower end soon to follow, leaving the waking dream of incisively gentle motion nevertheless pregnant with intent. The minuscule gestures culminate at 11:45 with the first of several obviously string-generated pitches, like the similarly plucked tone at 17:13. The guitar string seems to be a primary focus of the following ten minutes, even when powerfully registered upper frequencies return. Is that a guitar-generated descending glissando of epic proportions beginning at 14:58, ushering in another iteration of the original low-frequency drone? The guitar string is certainly the vehicle of mutation as various pitches glide in and out of focus at 22:59, a kind of culmination, traversing the stereo spectrum, that has been occurring in and out of focus for several minutes. The sound of a knife in the strings seems to make a brief appearance at 23:04, a brief glimpse of the past in an entirely new context as contact microphones also play their part as variables in the complex equation. Like the behind-the-scenes studio moments presenting and distilling the construction of Stockhausen’s Hymnen, breaking the fourth wall, a single beep at 14:22 and the ascending mechanical whirr at 17:27 betray either a CD player engaged or a hard drive in action, an instantaneous peak into that infinity of mirrors that typifies The Room as biographical and temporal construct.
 
At 23:43, there is a rebirth, or at least a restatement. A version of the opening material returns, something akin to a theme and variation set with all the elements present but juxtaposed differently. Its power doubles and redoubles, rolling, spitting and lunging forward in gritty cycles until another silence ensues and is broken at 34:19 by what I’m labeling the coda. A transformed version of the epic glissando, this time in low-register ascent, begins at 35:47, intersecting with the static and what sounds like a low-flying aircraft and a return of the high-frequency pitch heard nearly 20 minutes previously. Radio static, present from early in the piece, becomes the dominant feature, as if the internal world has morphed into the external at some hidden juncture. All slams suddenly, irretrievably, into a curtain of silence.

ErstLive 006

This next entry in the ErstLive series blurs collaborative boundaries in the service of machines in cyclic motion, but it does so employing the partial negation of Rowe’s usual musical language. Maybe sublimation would come closer to describing the way he interacts with Taku Unami. How quaint but perfectly apt that one of the first sustained sounds in their 2008 collaborative performance in Tokyo seems to come courtesy of a timepiece! Initial impressions suggest that it may be someone’s watch. This wouldn’t be surprising, given both composer/performers’ preoccupations with temporality, but there it is, laid bare, gradually becoming audible and swept aside only at 2:02 by what sounds like, but can’t be, the lighting of a gas burner, the rapid-fire clicks of ignition that themselves bespeak cyclic returns. That timepiece resides in a place far from the timeline Rowe describes in his notes to ErstLive 007, remaining readily identifiable amidst the unfamiliar. It returns at 4:29 and 8:58 in its ur-form, but by 5:08, the realization dawns that it is not a timepiece at all but part of some motoric sonic complex, possibly a literal motor, which also would not be surprising given Unami’s more recent Erstwhile release, the enigmatic three-disc set bot box boxes. Yet, before that moment of cognitive conflagration, boundaries seem more firmly drawn. The elemental fiddling immediately preceding the timepiece’s initial interruption moves from far soundstage left to equally distant soundstage right, seeming to be a subtle sonic trick from Rowe. Before the low-register string tone at 3:54, that cyclic sound repeats in various permutations and at two tempi, blatant repetition adrift in a sea of near-silence. The ensuing pitches are complemented by what must be Rowe’s knife-blade, which returns at various points throughout, emphatically at 25:42, but by 7:43, all bets are off unless one was there to see what actually occurred. At 9:37, the cyclic clicks are suddenly snafu-ed in way that suggests an alarm clock, a theory reenforced at 10:09 but suddenly thwarted, again, as the layered tempi return and again travel over the soundstage’s remarkably wide vista. Rowe’s fan makes an appearance around the 26-minute mark, designated as the death motive in his solo set, but its resonantly repetitive qualities adhere to the cyclic nature of the rhythmic elements in play throughout the collaborative performance. The timepiece has a beautifully moving analogue beginning at 32:40 with the repeated iteration of a pitch by Unami, a D, a much lower E and then an F-sharp. In the last three minutes, we hear a sustained version of the solo syntax to which we’ve become accustomed from Rowe. It is as if this set and ErstLive 007 are meant to coexist as foils, or doubles. Again, pitch and rhythmic boundaries blur but this time in the service of repetition, at various speeds but always mechanized, affording Rowe’s use of electric fan a special poignance when heard against the backdrop of his Cultural Templates solo set. It is worth noting that readily identifiable radio transmissions are entirely absent. It is as if every edifice constructed by Unami, no matter its size and significance, is first reenforced and then dismantled by Rowe until, by the end, all has fragmented in the name of something that might or might not be progress with a sinister face.

Keith Rowe/Taku Unami duo at AMPLIFY 2008: light (1st day) at Kid Ailack Art Hall, Tokyo (September 19, 2008) (photo © Yuko Zama)

ErstLive 007 (Cultural Templates)

It would be far too easy to become intimidated by Rowe’s verbiage concerning this Tokyo solo performance. His comments are stunningly detailed, and, for that reason, subjective to the point of proffering explication whose individuality, a network of allusions in astonishing subreference, defies adherence. Yes, we can hear the timelines when pointed out, but does that mean that any sound involving dotted scraping is to be taken as a timeline? Does any detuned fragment of radio broadcast also signal an entrance into Dante’s Inferno, particularly the Phillips and Greenaway version? Meaning and associations evolve and even devolve in intersecting planes, so that what seems the most important component of this solo recital, and one that Rowe does not mention with specificity, is space. It is in this performance in particular that Rowe’s sense of space and spatial embodiment is most readily apparent. At 8:29, where Rowe explains that a radio broadcast is detuned to represent the inferno, which in turn then and later represents the grime of every-day life, there is also a shocking spatial occurrence as the buzz and wiry broadcast thrum moves with jump-cut precision from centerstage toward encompassing the soundstage’s left and right extremes. The center is left open, but this serial manifestation of spatialization is only one of many, beginning with the inaugural gestures. Similarly dispersed at directional extremes, Rowe’s plastic lid and scrubber enter in soft but clear focus, affixing slightly blurred but bold lines to the silence made audible by evolving stages of background noise at variously audible levels. The most provocative spatial element occurs at 28:01, which Rowe describes as a line of boundary demarcation being drawn. It cuts with razor clarity across the right half of the soundstage, one of its strongest characteristics being the ghostly pitches immediately following it, emphasizing the moment’s conclusive nature while paving the way for the succeeding retrogressive insinuations. In typical Rowe fashion, all of these sounds are foregrounded, immediately precise and vanguarded in listener perception. Then, and by way of some contrast, we are offered, for the first time, the cultural templates that have become so much a part of Rowe’s more recent musical strategies. They present space and spatial awareness in a radically different way than his ubiquitous radio broadcasts, as they bring both the performance space and the recording environment into focus. The final template, an excerpt from Henry Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, would prove essential to the construction of The Room Extended several years later. In 2008, it enhances and negates what Rowe describes as the death motif, itself augmented by the sounds of everyday life distorted, as they have been at various moments throughout the performance. It is intriguing to note that in his Tokyo solo, Rowe does not begin with Dido’s actual lament but with the recitative immediately preceding it. “Thy hand Belinda/Darkness shades me/On thy bosom let me rest…” The simple but achingly poignant gesture of two hands clasping and the comfort it implies and anticipates resides at the heart of Rowe’s vision, the constant need for communication, coded or otherwise. The music occupies an expansive space, filling the stereo spectrum and contrasting with generative facility the other motifs elucidated by Rowe in the ErstWords piece, themes gently restated in summary, in retrospection’s nostalgic afterglow. The death motif then resumes, crescendoing and finally dominating the entire sound field, stretching the limits of tolerance until, like both Room iterations, a gesture mirroring the unanswered questions engendered by the cultural templates, it vanishes with sickening suddenness into silence.

Keith Rowe solo from AMPLIFY 2008:light at Kid Ailack Art Hall, Tokyo (October 2008) (photo © Yuko Zama)

ErstLive 008

At some fundamental level, Erstlive 008, Rowe’s final released collaboration with Nakamura to date, brings their series of recordings back to its roots but via a process of inversion. Beyond that, the 37-minute live set, recorded in Tokyo during the 2008 AMPLIFY: light festival, comprises some of the duo’s most intense music, as well as some of its most pitch oriented, certainly something of a departure from their previous mode of working. While pitch is not usually a phenomenon discussed in EAI, it certainly plays an important role, notably in 4g - cloud, and it returns here in something of a chamber-music guise. We can hear it from the beginning of the set as it slowly infiltrates the upper register in an amorphous form, notably in the razor-sharp occurrence at 2:10. The most obvious pitch-centric material occurs around 7:30, though this time-stamp is somewhat arbitrary because that material has been generating itself for some time. Nakamura’s bass line, the closest possible descriptor given its range and timbre, has been evolving since the beginning of the set, and Rowe’s subsequent looping descent is a product of a similarly slow build. It’s as if the arch leading up to this fraught moment has been invisible, in some ways a microcosmic representation of the piece’s obscure form. Rather than simply forming an arc, as with “Lausanne,” the collaborators forge an opposite-reaction and circuitous path of peaks, shallow valleys and boulders to be traversed only by the intrepid. The few moments of respite, like the one at 15:10, prove a very temporary reprieve from the punishing loops, screeches and low-frequency pummelings comprising much of the set. Static, rapid-fire oscillation and distortion become subservient to surprisingly delicate interjections, like the morse-code sprinkler squiggles at 23:55 that ultimately fragment into rhythmically varied repetitions before vanishing suddenly at 25:06. Notably, even the highest-dynamic sections are rendered with clarity. No detail is lost, nor are any overpowered. When the tumult finally does die down at 29:24, the pitch C emerges. Then, a few minutes later, a G above that is foregrounded. The backdrop to these two suspended pitches is one of subdued chatter as the tone begins to evolve outward from itself, the entire complex sputtering away at 35:10. Like the concluding minutes of Mahler’s 9th Symphony, the remainder of the set consists of shards, spent fragments sent out over a void as if further communication has been rendered impossible. In reaching this point, it is as if the duo has returned to the opening moments of Weather Sky, as if the calm simplicity of approach in partnership to the very idea of partnership could have been re-achieved only after such emotional intensity. Listening to the duo’s albums in sequence reveals these final fleeting gestures as poetically just. Though each artist would go on to many further creative triumphs, there is a sense, at the end of Rowe’s final set with Nakamura, that for the moment, utterance proves futile, that language has exhausted itself, and that all that is required has been said.

Keith Rowe/Toshimaru Nakamura duo at AMPLIFY 2008: light at Kid Ailack Art Hall, Tokyo (3rd night) on September 21, 2008 (photo © Yuko Zama)

contact

Keith Rowe’s original painting for contact (2009)

Rowe is always exceptionally aware of his collaborative role in the ever-shifting context of an in-the-moment experience, environmental and otherwise. He speaks constantly of “too much” or “too little” in the way of exchange, especially clearly in a 2007 interview where he describes the danger of collaborators being too careful and his need to push back, to overdo for the purpose of fostering reaction. This relationship built on forced point and counterpoint could not be further away from the one Rowe cultivated in 2008 with Sachiko M. Though they had worked together before, notably on ErstLive 005, contact (their first duo together) exists in the false interstices separating sound and silence. As with so many Rowe projects, notions of size are skewed from the beginning, but the whole takes on a hallucinatory quality with Sachiko M’s sampler sine tones. Apart from Toshimaru Nakamura and possibly his one-off Fennesz collaboration, Rowe’s partnership with M might be the most unified outside of AMM. M’s first sine tone enters at 0:23 of Square and doesn’t cease until 19:26. That said, its journey between sound and silence is one rife with the subtlest gradations, an absolutely perfect match for Rowe’s instantaneously shifting details. As the sine tone slowly sheds dynamic layers, not so much softening as easing imperceptibly into the background, Rowe’s rustlings, sinewy scraping and breathy murmuring comes to the fore. They are certainly apparent in the mix, sometimes approaching the dynamic level of M’s sine tone, as with the zephyrs he floats at 1:21 or the purring buzz at 4:05, but they are in a sense subservient, liquified tension to the pure-steel buzz with which M raises and then gradually lowers the stakes. Strangest of all, and least explicable, is the effect that a sine tone has on perception. As Rowe’s sonic landscape morphs, circles back on itself and spirals in rivulet miniature, the sine tone seems to fan out from itself, taking on phantom pitches and then discarding them with a single shake of my head. This, though, brings another series of false elucidations, obstacles resulting from manufactured shifts in volume and brightness until the illusion becomes intolerable. M’s sine tones are both foil and sneaky partner, as on the trickster squiggles and humorously dotted planes of “Rectangle.” They point, drip and splatter onto that asymptotic thing in Rowe’s conception that is never really silence, Rowe responding in kind as with the warped drill-bit pitch at 3:03 of “Rectangle” or more susurrations at 9:26. To suggest that most of the album is typified by this relationship sells the astonishingly pure music short, as it is in a continuous state of flux at the center of which exists a repose that even the highest-volume occurrences cannot destroy. Yet, the best is saved for last, as the final track Circle forsakes sine tones altogether in favor of contact microphones. The two performers blend as a single instrument, as at 7:19, where paper-thin wisps and tendrils shorn of environment create their own, leading to the gloriously minute appearance of what sounds like guitar tone at 8:08. Circle is the culmination of a journey without climax, a path from silence to silence deconstructing and emphasizing the inner workings, the minutia, of sound rather than highlighting any particular aspect of it. The collaborative effort is the ultimate celebration of communication in something approaching but never reaching the void, or absence, insignificance in stark relief and, thereby, toweringly significant.

Keith Rowe/Sachiko M at AMPLIFY 2008: light at Kid Ailack Art Hall, Tokyo (3rd night) on September 21, 2008 (photo © Yuko Zama)

Φ

Keith Rowe’s original paper artwork for Φ (2011)

There is no need to rehash, in great detail anyway, the now well-known details of Φ’s execution. The first disc of three presents two compositions, one chosen by Rowe and one by his partner here Radu Malfatti, the second disc contains compositions by them and the third is an improvisation. However, there is something winningly concise about the title of Malfatti’s compositional choice, his Wandelweiser colleague Jürg Frey’s Exact Dimension Without Insistence, something lean but deliciously expressive of the space opened up by Rowe and Malfatti’s interpretation that renders it a perfect opening statement. Not only is there an unwittingly prescient parallel between Frey’s piece and Rowe’s Matchless solo album A Dimension of Perfectly Ordinary Reality, a philosophical synchronicity telescoped and then manifested in ways startlingly similar to the music history summative exercise Rowe recounted in communication to me. The interpretation’s extraordinarily rarified soundworld works along lines far more similar than I had comprehended when writing about Φ in these pages a decade ago. Yes, each note set or single pitch from Rowe and Radu Malfatti are repeated exactly and hang in the no-space of digital silence, but they are also cut from the same articulative and timbral cloth. Rowe’s pitch at 8:26 has a juicy attack, decays quickly and then swells in completion. Rowe’s second and third pitches decay similarly, the most minute swell adorning them. Timbrally, both eschew the higher frequencies their respective instruments offer, though Rowe’s, surprisingly gritty underneath a smooth veneer, proffers slightly more upper frequencies than Malfatti’s. The two pitches are half a step apart, which is a world poised atop the smallest interval, or the largest if regarded inversionally. The album’s first 20 minutes strips nearly all externals from Rowe’s art, and it shines with a focus even more pure than in most of his already laser-sharp focus.

Keith Rowe ‘Pollack #82’ score

The rest of the album involves a serialization and eventual combination of the various elements exemplifying Rowe’s and Malfatti’s musical vocabularies of that November 2010 meeting. A particularly telling example of the combination in a composed context occurs 7:32 into Cornelius Cardew’s Solo with Accompaniment, Rowe’s compositional choice. Malfatti’s trombone and Rowe’s electronics blend with such precision, in such complete cohesion as Rowe’s pitch warps, fragments and then returns, that the two sound as one instrument, exemplifying perfectly the permeable boundaries between soloist and accompanist. Rowe serializes acoustic and electronic elements as he might arrange objects on a table, and Malfatti’s pitch universe is narrowly constructed but astonishingly detailed, especially as Rowe underpins certain utterances with low-frequency electronics in sympathetic vibration. All sense of Rowe’s usual soundstage is forsaken until the piece’s second half, in favor of the complete synchronicity of collaboration. The sonic continuum broadens in scope, especially regarding Rowe’s contributions, with Malfatti’s Nariyamu. The pitch spectrum increases along with the music’s density and a move toward abstraction. Interstices are explored as instability via slide and microtone also becomes a factor. Then there are the stunning moments of resolution, like the exquisitely tuned 4th at 32:15, so much larger than its interval suggests as a church-organ illusion is conjured. The relatively brief (18 minutes) Rowe-penned Pollock ‘82 continues the move toward an abstract syntax replete with trombone-generated white noise, electronic glissandi and what may be scrubber, all presented linearly, rendering the first two discs contrapuntal dialogues over time and in their own right. As in Rowe’s AMPLIFY set with Taku Unami described above, what sounds like a timepiece informs the first section of the duo’s improvisation.  

(above) Keith Rowe ‘Pollack #82’ trombone version dedicated to Radu Malfatti

(above) Keith Rowe ‘Pollack #82’ guitar version dedicated to Derek Bailey

(above) Keith Rowe ‘Pollack #82’ flute version

The improvisation disc is a fascinating spatial exploration in that two levels of continua are explored. First, whereas the first two discs minimized the presence of environmental space, the recording space, Amann Studios, is overtly present throughout the nearly hour-long interaction. This is a boon, as the second level of discourse involves something of a temporal palimpsest. While both musicians are pioneers of new, radically shifting but strikingly similar musical syntaxes based on sparsity and extended pause, they were also active in earlier phases of improvisational practice. Listening beneath the admittedly calm surface elucidates protean planes of activity that combines elements of the atomistic concerns of European free improvisation with the (de)constructive aesthetic we might associate with Taku Unami. Rowe’s electronics fade in and out with relative speed, especially when compared to their employment in other contexts, and when Malfatti is not playing pitches, his trombone and body unite to create layers of minute but palpable activity. As if in tacit acknowledgement, Rowe interjects sounds that could best be viewed as extensions of the timeline sonics he describes in ErstLive 007. A particularly poignant example occurs 23:10 into the second track of the download version. Other acoustic sounds from Rowe, amidst the occasional transmission, bring earlier projects, including AMM, into the complex soundweb of associations. Taken as a whole then, Φ is a monumental study in unification via diversity, an iconic sonic departure that is itself a network of cultural references in chronologically associative construction, but its form is approached like a Brahms-ian developing variation set or the gradual exposure of the “Ode to Joy” theme throughout Beethoven’s final symphony.

Keith Rowe, Jon Abbey, Radu Malfatti during the Φ recording sessions at Amann Studios, Vienna (November 8, 2010) (photo © Yuko Zama)

ErstLive 010

How can a perspective shift be quantified and expressed? In the split second of experience's transition to memory, what is retained? Can the catalyst be articulated or even recognized? ​So much within and outside of Rowe’s normal manner of working comes together in this 47-minute set. It isn’t just that Rowe and Christian Wolff share such an important collaborative history—Wolff having briefly been a member of AMM—or that Earl Howard, another stunning composer/improviser, recorded this September 4, 2011 set at the Stone in NYC. Unlike so many other Rowe collaborations, the precise nature of the musical relationship, not to mention other types, is so difficult to articulate, to place in the convenient but stifling boxes of post-discovery. Similarly to ErstLive 001, there's the convergence of outer and inner space. It begins with a wonderful jump-cut entrance, the movement and blurred speech captured with such vivacity! The bee of some piece of equipment or other, maybe a camera, and then the gradual introduction of Rowe’s electronic and whatever percussive Wolff incorporates (he’s only credited with guitar and piano.) Best of all is the car horn at 0:25, soundstage left but not hard-panned and far outside, a felicitous infiltration. Here is a catalog of sum-and-difference interactions, of congruous incongruities, a dialogue of cozy interruptions as veterans converse. At certain points, a magical coalescence carries the evening, a convergence of serendipities, for instance what sounds like prepared guitar elements in tandem with electronics from 5:30 to 6:07, immediately followed by gentle scrubber, or the exquisite plucked tone from Wolff at 18:15 matching perfectly the upper partial in Rowe’s electronics. At other moments, there seems to be a clash, as James Joyce has it in Finnegans Wake, “Of wills gen wonts.” The varied timeline scrapings at 21:33, or thereabouts, seem at nearly humorous odds with Wolff’s rhythmic percussion so similar to the set’s opening. Indeed, as Rowe’s familiar buzz and hum swells and arcs, Wolff seeks a point of entry, as if some sort of exclusive space was being constructed near but not quite including him. Yet, how beautiful is the scrubber and single piano-pitch duet at 31:07! What a moment of room and timbre in perfect harmony, that single string singing stage left and the scrubber occupying that space that is neither simply pitch nor scintillating rustle, somehow inhabiting both simultaneously. Around it all, the space, the intimacy of the Stone, imbues with something between welcome and expectancy. Headphones reveal the subtle movement of bodies, the reflections of wall, floor and ceiling back on themselves and on what transpires among them. Wolff at work, preparing, dismantling, conjures shades of Taku Unami constructing and deconstructing, questing hands in search of the next position. It is seemingly his piano preparations requiring those subtle negotiations, soundstage left but to the rear, if such a thing is possible. The recording is beyond superb, transcending the limits of two speakers and approaching the immersive qualities of binaural capture. The space itself may be the final participant, traffic rumble increasingly prominent, or at least felt, as the set concludes, but one moment stands out above all, one syntactic fly in the proverbial ointment. At 5:35, Rowe’s electronics switch with sudden but definite precision. A modulation occurs even as Wolff’s percussion continues. Where have I heard just such a switch in Rowe’s catalog? There is one, the lower-pitch introduction of chorused buzz veering toward stage right so familiar. Its upper partials rise, curve and fall back into a never quite established place, that sinewy and fluctuating timbre so much a component of Rowe’s communication, but for which there is no verbiage beyond science or metaphor, quietly stretching outer and inner space in the miraculous pursuit of memory in construction.

Christian Wolff, Keith Rowe duo set at AMPLIFY2011: stones at The Stone, NYC, (September 4, 2011) (photo © Yuko Zama)

September (ErstLive 011)

Subtitled September, this entry in the ErstLive series comprises yet another unique and fascinating entry in Rowe’s discography in part because of its formal strategy. Tiny Mix Tapes’ Matthew Horne has it that Rowe’s September, his solo September 11th set at 2011’s AMPLIFY: stones festival, is primarily about engagement with the past. While this is certainly true, listening to the set more than a decade later illuminates its contrapuntal strands in a different way. To me, more than any other single work in the ErstRowe discography, the 34-minute piece embodies transgression via recursion. The strands knot, loop and tangle, an intertwined series of associations that conjure shades of the past while nearly bursting the seams of the performative technologies involved. This multifariously knotty relationship becomes clear, or is vanguarded, at 2:40, when what might be the scrubber begins to distort at the stereo spectrum’s extreme edges. The Dvorak quintet, certainly a cultural template, has already come into play, and the first of many radio grabs makes an appearance, but what stands front and center in the mix are the distortions. The closest parallel in the ErstRowe discography is Rabbit Run, in which Rowe’s syntactical approach takes on the power and compression of popular music rather than the room-enhanced qualities associated with the “Classical” world. Something similar occurs in September in that each micro-gesture confronts, booms and throbs, with the intensity doubtless a product of the set’s commemorative affect. The harsh and bold lines drawn at 3:23, some brashly dotted, occupy a similarly transgressive sonic space as the Dvorak is slowly enveloped by electronic sounds and then takes over the texture. The first five minutes unfold similarly in a series of grimy, uneven arcs. A nuanced pause leads to the second section. Here, the transgressive distortion exists within and stands against the polyphony, reaching an apogee stage right at 7:31 just before disintegrating and then returning at various moments. In fact, listening to that invasive crackle exposes another layer of counterpoint, a richly varied layer of dot-matrix linearity juxtaposed with the various transmissions buried beneath drone, buz and hum, just before the bottom drops out of it all at 9:03. Much has been made of Rowe’s serendipitous captures, but, seen in the light of transgression, EMF’s “Unbelievable” entering the fray at this moment, preceded by silence and occupying its own singularly narrow soundspace, takes on an extended poignancy and significance. The repeated word “unbelievable” stands with and against the ensuing two-gesture loop, an ironic synchronicity rendering the paring both appropriate and dower set against the ephemeral scrubber lines. The reappearance of Dvorak’s quintet at 12:03 fills the conjoining roles of practical demarcation, neo-Romantic boon, and somber revisitation. In 2024, Rowe wrote to me concerning the cultural templates: “An early type of cultural template would involve me saying to an audience "You think you have a grip on what's happening" but, to experience an event, experiential hooks need to have been developed for an experience to take hold, the presence of cultural templates ideally might lead to the state of incomprehension, to experience rather than to seek understanding, and something at the very heart a 'resistance to resolution', incomprehension, being the most fluid state.” The fact that the cultural template occurs with the same overlay of electronic sound as its initial manifestation, builds, fragments and rebuilds to a climax and, like the Mahler that Rowe would treat several years later in The Room Extended, subdues itself toward silence at 14:49. The boldly drawn lines and slashes early in the set have their analogue at 17:31, where the guitar string makes one of its most stereotypically familiar timbral appearances. The scrubber has its distorted static analogue at 26:30 and beyond, the set’s penultimate peak. Through it all, the transgressive distortions soundstage right continually threaten and ultimately destroy stability. Like a blueprint, the opening dots and slashes spell out the set's choppy course, even the cultural template being nearly destroyed in bursts of static as the set draws to a quietly harrowing conclusion. Its final reemergence is a hollow subdued victory, a bittersweet remembrance and half-promise in the face of what seems, in retrospect, suspiciously like viral destruction.

Keith Rowe solo at AMPLIFY2011: stones at The Stone, NYC, (September 11, 2011) (photo © Yuko Zama)

Making A

Original artwork by Keith Rowe and Graham Lambkin for Making A (2013)

It is with Making A, his 2013 collaborative album with Graham Lambkin, that Rowe makes a decisive and sonically demonstrable move toward engaging head-on with the physical spaces of rooms and buildings. We have seen engagement with the concert space and the structural elements filling it. We have also encountered the various temporal, sociopolitical and artistic metaphors that space, boundary and their blurring entails. Lambkin and Rowe aid and abet in placing all of them front and center while also allowing for environmental engagement not usually associated with Rowe. Lambkin’s sonic paintings are often chock full of readily identifiable environmental situations, many obviously but “universally” domestic. Rowe’s concerns along those lines are turned inward, each a momentary amplification of a gesture, an instant of speech, guitar-related sound or radio transmission. Making A is the first album on which Rowe’s guitar is entirely absent. In this way, he sets the stage for the assemblages and other works following his 2015 retirement from solo performance incorporating guitar. The album documents, or confronts, the passage of chronological time via everyday environment in ways that no Rowe album, collaborative or solo, does to that point. However, far removed from a strictly chronological précis of events, Rowe and Lambkin fashion a series of recurrences that find their recent predecessor in the similarly recursive form of September. The most obvious example is the sound that begins “Wet B,” having also concluded “Over C.” There, it was stacked, superimposed in stepped intervals. At one time, I figured it to be the flushing of a plane-lavatory toilet. Whatever it is, its recurrence is undeniable, a symptom of how the three-part suite is assembled. We also hear two clearings of the throat, one at 9:03 of “Over C” and another at 9:39 of “Making A.” They reflect that stereotypically human element usually absent from Rowe’s work. His modus operandi is most clearly evident in the microgestures informing the first and third pieces, not to mention the obvious sounds of drawing, sketching and erasing that unite the entire suite. They are, as usual, very closely recorded, possibly in some cases with contact microphones. At 2:54 into the third piece, an etching or tearing is in progress, every nuance beautifully captured. At the same moment, an entirely different process of motion is in play, something very much part of a room, replete with ambient drone, in which the environment, the acoustics of the room, is a key player. At 3:11, and as so often happens in Rowe’s work, a decisively artistic gesture wipes the underlying drone out of existence. Yet, even this process breeds its own ambiguities, as what sounds like Rowe’s scrubber begins at that point. Is Lambkin in fact responsible for those close-up microgestures that appear so similar to Rowe’s established syntax? A similar juxtaposition informs “Over C”’s obviously airport-captured opening, where external sounds, like the gun-control discussion, is tempered by the minuscule sounds of a person shifting personal belongings, but whose? Like that possible flush, voices, escalators, footsteps, motoric drones and technological whirring guide the music along its circuitous path of spiraling recurrence, while the two layers, the internal and the external, are always in dialogue. The final several minutes are given over to Rowe, who manifests the album’s title in a series of constructive gestures. Lines, circles, boundaries whose edges are audibly confronted and the most delicate tracery seem to generate the picture worth a thousand words, or in this case sounds. Like the two violins that conclude Haydn’s “Farewell” symphony, the visual art is the structural skeleton, the sole element left to tell the album’s ambiguous tale of place, time and environment, their superimposed documentation, sonic disparities and ultimate disillusion.

Keith Rowe and Graham Lambkin at 'Making A' sessions, January 2013 (photo by Adris Hoyos)

The Room Extended

If every shade of recurrence comprising a life converged in a new language, what would the mix resemble? When Beethoven imagined “universal brotherhood” in the 9th Symphony, the conception turned out to be the tip of a huge and increasingly insidious iceberg of which the late string quartets formed an even larger component. The original The Room bears just such a burden. It is what Beethoven’s 9th is to his late works and to the Romantic era in general, just as A Love Supreme is to Coltrane’s final period, a precursor in substance as in name. For Rowe, The Room Extended is both summation within summation and radical revisitation of a single work, layers within layers of concentric connections, the spiraled syntaxes of a creative life reassessed without judgment.

In his Signifying Something interview, Rowe described the four recording techniques that he used in the four-hour piece. The first disc involved pre-recorded sounds burned onto CDs and then sent via FM transmitters to radios, which were then recorded. Like The Room, the second disc was recorded from sounds, what Rowe calls motifs, burnt to CDs and then mixed in real-time. The third and fourth discs involved computers, the third without the use of pre-recordings on CD and the fourth a mixture of the first three techniques. In the same interview, with some irony, intended or not, Rowe states that his goal is to create a piece in which the mood does not change, a piece about aging and its impact on memory and attendant perception. For anyone familiar with Rowe’s work, and like a Bach fantasia chorale-based movement from the Leipzig period, avoiding association is impossible, a progressive approach toward and away from the central themes of Rowe’s career. The Room itself, as work and concept, is obviously one of these, but all of the elements throughout Rowe’s Erstwhile corpus and beyond are present; whether they are newly executed or mixed in from earlier recordings can be difficult to gauge. Easy enough to identify is The Room’s opening motif, the tonal complex anchoring major moments of the 2007 release. It returns throughout The Room Extended’s first disc, in full force at 29:35 only to vanish at 31:55. The ambiguities far outweigh these moments of certainty. Take the tearing sounds forty-two minutes into the first of the four vast movements. They may as well have been lifted from Rowe’s ErstLive set with Taku Unami or from Making A, as they even occupy similarly fluctuating points on the soundstage. If they are newly manufactured, their integration is complete enough to be deceptive. There are also sonic anomalies, elements rare in Rowe’s discography, like the car driving away 45:53 into the third piece or the birds at its opening. Timelines abound, or rather there is an abundance of graduated sliding sounds that seem to correspond to the timeline motifs in the Tokyo performance. The coloristic gestures we have come to associate with Rowe’s syntax at all stages are complemented by more extended passages of something approaching tonality, like the feedback passages nearly concluding the third piece or what sounds like a sine tone octave opening the fourth. Are these taken from earlier sources? What is the motivic nature of the ever-so-familiar scraping noise from the second piece or the metallic construction sounds from the third, both of which appear 2:51 into the final movement? Do the sine tones and the bell, as at 10:03, not to mention the Shostakovich quartet samples throughout, hail from 13 Thirteen, which would be released later? Locating either the departures or the precise parallels in Rowe’s discography would, however, ultimately descend into the seductive madness of bean-counting. As for the minutia, it may be sufficient to observe the parallels, like the radio clock 33:24 into the second piece, as a type or trope, its own cultural template of a sort. Such symbols occupy spaces similar to the various shades of construction, or deconstruction, or the point at which one’s boundaries blur into the other, as with that click from What is Man and What is Guitar, eliminating possibilities even as it has been used to create them.
 
Despite Rowe’s expressed vision of the work as defying memory and signifying nothing, The Room Extended is that and a great deal more. It occupies several chronological spaces while defining its own chronology in the clear light of autobiography. Its episodes resemble the cumulative nature of his Erstwhile discography, a shifting and reconfiguring of motives, occasionally elucidated but always significant. It is a literal summation of theoretical summations, a four-movement symphony of the cyclic variety, a product of the Romantic era and of its profundities. Listening to the final movement even as I describe it, all of the previous thematic material is recapitulated even as it is deconstructed, a universe in expansive diminution, paralleling the Mahler/Wagner palimpsests of the first two movements, an early version, as Rowe informed me by e-mail, of his as-yet unreleased Mahler Mix. Even so, and excepting the third movement, most of The Room Extended’s soundstage is set up more like 4g - cloud, representative of the late 18th and 19th century string quartet in the way elements are placed in a kind of layered spatial congruence. Beyond these coexisting temporal universes, even more than on any other release including The Room, Rowe has achieved a counterpoint akin to anything from the Renaissance or Baroque periods, again most palpably in the final movement. The clarity with which each textural layer is achieved is matched only by the richness of timbral detail as each sound fades in and out of focus. Like the room embodied in the title, multiple phases of Rowe’s increasingly connected body of work conjoin in what are, nevertheless, episodes of a dream-like intensity. Mahler symphonies often build with similar cataclysms and then descend toward silence with similar rapidity, rendering hallucinatory all before the collapse. What is left, after the music and the tones, the transmissions and the electronic sounds dissipate, is the human gesture of creating, of building, of constructing, small acts of decision against a backdrop of endless flux, the space in the room, the space connecting regions, cultures and centuries, all illuminated with the inner vivacity of creation, evolution, destruction, restoration and ultimately an inconclusive absence.

13 Thirteen

Even for seasoned listeners to Rowe’s body of work, the new sounds always proffer surprise, nowhere more than on his 2017 collaboration with Michael Pisaro-Liu. Most impressive, unexpected and conscious-altering, are the snaps, or it may be more precise to place them in an interstitial space between a snap and a clang. Like the Buddhists' bell or slap, they return the listener to awareness at 5:05, 9:59 and 15:00 in the first disc of 13 Thirteen, the first collaborative composition shared between Rowe and Pisaro-Liu. A bell is also present, another sound not necessarily associated with Rowe’s ever-evolving palette. Doubtless a sonic signifier, or motif, in Rowe’s mind as he shaped his half of the composition, the repeated interjections are, though only one factor, one extremely affecting component in a multilayered series of ambiguities pervading this 140-minute work. The length was agreed upon beforehand, and the compositional felicities, including variously employed sine tones, guitar sounds and sampled Shostakovich quartets, is well beyond the scope of this article. Suffice it to repeat here that both musicians contributed a composition, played them in tandem and improvised over them. Rowe’s composition is called Fate, Pisaro-Liu’s Melody, Rowe’s improvisation called Life and Pisaro-Liu’s Event. As it turns out, those clangs, or amplified thwacks, do signal turning points in Rowe’s composition, as do the Shostakovich samples and sine tone entrances in Pisaro-Liu’s, but it is the collaborative combining of predetermination and spontaneity that sustains the music from moment to moment. The clarity of those combined musical events are a direct result of spatial placement. It might be fair to suggest that Rowe occupies soundstage right, Pisaro-Liu soundstage left and combined elements centerstage, but even these conceits are flawed. Like Pisaro-Liu’s collaborative 2 seconds / b minor / wave album with Taku Sugimoto, events spill over into unexpected portions of the soundstage. Like Duos for Doris, the music develops by contraries, a series of opposites in attraction that turns out to represent something like kindred spirits in the fluid motion of a dance. Let a roughly five-minute cross-section represent the whole. At 24:26 into the first disc, gorgeously placed sine tones and the subtlest guitar tones are complemented by Rowe’s more jagged but familiar drones emanating soundstage right. The razor-thin sonics slice the air and then just as quickly disappear. Yet, just as it seems that spatial boundaries are firmly drawn, sonic objects come to the fore to deregulate, offset and subvert. Who is responsible for the guitar notes at 24:54, microtonally removed, albeit slightly dissonant and then resolving, from the sine tones fundamental to the texture? It does seem that Rowe contributes the overtonally rich bell at 26:01, a tritone off from those same surroundings, but who provides the variously tuned guitar tones in-between? Who is responsible for the booming, throbbing and pulsingly resonant recurrence, bell-like and apocalyptic, heard to stunning effect at 28:03? The mechanical movement at 28:40 could be from no one other than Rowe, but the immediately ensuing guitar synchronicity, filling the soundstage, must be a product of both musicians in a rare unison of pitched and glissandoed intent. Through it all, around, underneath and palpable as a backdrop, is the silence. The sounds emerge from it in lines and aggregates. At times, a familiar sound-stage distance is maintained, as with the distorted passages 20:39 into the second disc. Sometimes the sonic elements infuse each other with combined drone, as at 52:35, but always, like a blanket of deep snow or like another of the piece’s series of intertwining motives, the silence returns, or the thing that never actually becomes silence, or that strangest and most antithetical of concepts, absence.

Michael Pisaro-Liu, Keith Rowe at the recording session of '13 Thirteen' in Nantes, France (May 2016) (photo by Julien Ottavi)

Absence

In failing to write a conclusion, and having had every conclusion I attempted fail, I took a break from writing about Rowe’s work in the summer of 2024. I read Gilead, a beautifully meditative book by Marilynne Robinson, and decided that instead of my usual precis, I’d write to Rowe what amounts to a simultaneous homage and refutation concerning Absence:


Keith,

There’s something I want to tell you, to explain. I keep thinking about how I’m always the one asking questions. Now, I feel the need to elucidate, to make sense of something I’ve been trying to understand as I’ve revisited your Erstwhile recordings over these past several years. I have to work up to it.

I’m listening to Absence. What a sentence! It’s like saying I’m imbibing the silence, or vibing off the color! If I’m listening to absence, does it count as listening? You’d be asking questions like that. Each question would be like the bold move with which you begin the 2015 concert that brought you to the decision to retire from solo performance. You even described something similar to me once, the gesture of sweeping from left to right across the strings, though this opening salvo doesn’t really sound like guitar strings. I never know for sure, though the sound is as familiar now as the sound of my breathing, as is the succeeding wash of ambience I’m not going to dignify by mislabeling as silence. It thrums quietly, rife, like predestination, with focused potentialities, anticipating and following in its own footsteps until another gesture almost like it sweeps it away. The space is vast, and I can only imagine what it was to be in that room, to hear those sounds stark against that space, defining themselves even as they redefine their contexts with the world vibrating just beneath. That world, that room, the conjoined conjoining of fate, endeavor, what was it you said in those Duos for Doris notes? “Listening will/may have become overwhelmed by the histories of painting/music/the instrument/ noise/the nature of success/the nature of failure/politics/poverty/ life/death/appropriation/who am I?, on and on.” Yes, there it is, the seed of your work planted in … what is that? It’s no more a sentence than the room is a room! Air is air, space is space, but they conjoin in the ambiguous regions beyond place and verbiage. In that briefest statement, you’ve articulated what it’s taken me hours and pages even to begin to understand! Those opening four gestures accumulate even as they dissipate, and beneath and beyond their reverberant contexts, like the fluid protagonist of Samuel Beckett’s How It Is, there’s a glimmer of appreciation that the whole thing may as well never have happened, “All balls from start to finish.”

Why can’t I get past the contradiction at the heart of what you’re doing? Why, given a language so pure, so rarified, rife with things but so irrevocably and purposefully stripped of their usual implications, does it all remain so damn difficult to parse, to follow? How, as that scrubber glides across the soundstage, does it take on the clarity of rain or the freshness of wind? Does all that space surrounding it negate some essential component of the fragments configuring and reconfiguring to form that unified disunity I can’t bring myself to call a sound? All those years ago, you wrote me, “Do I listen?” Well of course you do, nobody makes sounds of such scorching intensity and meditative beauty without listening, but, I’d say the more appropriate followup question might entail, to what? What, gleaned and then abstracted from what you’re hearing, becomes the instruments, the implements, of listening that then lead, before and after, to the descent of the hand, the gesture as gesture but so much else, the phrase as line and line as timbre and timbre as tone buried along with so much else, symbol in faint illumination, the light within, the symbol guiding the surface toward and away from the pauses surrounding it? I have never experienced motion like yours, stasis like yours, and never with the power, thunder, subtlety and ultimate peace of this particular performance, this moment in time you nearly actually discarded, this moment so close to your nature in that 2015 instant yet so far removed from, or maybe above, its delicate futilities and failings? Finally, as I sit here typing, reflecting and typing again, the guitar strings!

All this leads me to yet another question. Absence? From what?! Because of what?! I’m sorry, I don’t buy your commentary about your own unessential status, that should be obvious. Sure, there are things you are unable to do anymore, I get that, but what’s done is done. Did I really just resort to that tired adage? As the radio enters, the mother and child reunion of your own past in symbiosis with the vocabulary you introduced into a music then barely or perhaps unprepared for it, the world entering the room which enters the world, there’s no removing those connected influences, questions answered to be queried again. If you’re not listening, if the forest is not the journey, as you’re so fond of saying, then the entire edifice on which the absence you name is constructed must be false. Even as I’m listening again to those sounds you bring to every event, every recording, they are different, malleable, change in the changeless context established by one whose large idea dictates all, or at least a large component of all.

There’s the tremor. You talk about it in the notes, the moment you decided that it was inconceivable for you to continue performing solo, and this is what I wanted to get to, why I began writing this in the first place, maybe even the moment that brought your music into the sharpest focus I’ve ever experienced. Yes, the tremor’s periodicity drives home the eschewing of repetition pervading everything you’ve done, but there’s something else. You told me, and I’ve heard you say in other contexts, that your music is a highly coded form of visual art. I can’t see what you do, but the moment of tremor gave me a glimpse, a temporary perception of the physical space in which you operate. It centered me ocularly, a gateway into the room in which you perform, illuminated momentarily but unambiguously the connected series of connections conflated in every one of your musical gestures. Had I not been told, I would not have known what it was any more completely than I know the genesis of any one of the sounds you use, save perhaps the various pieces of music emanating from radio or prerecording. I spent a lot of time listening to that moment of decision, because it elucidated something else. Within that space, the protean space of exploration and contemplation with which you approach what became both a physical and mental struggle but which has been your canvas, the most minuscule event is magnified in what turns out to be relative gestural stasis. I can imagine your movements only because they were interrupted. I can now hear, when I return to everything else you’ve done, the minutely vast motions causing a reflection of reflections as one sound bleeds with the exquisitely miniature delicacy of contemplation into the others because that delicacy was thwarted.

Kieth Rowe during his last solo concert in NYC (October 2018) (photo by Jon Abbey)

No, none of that was really what I wanted to tell you either. It doesn’t speak to the impact Absence has had on me, on my appreciation of your work. The heartbreaking humanity of yet another gesture, the one at 14:10, when one movement sweeps the radio aside, is what speaks most directly to me. I now hear it as a humanity that you’ve embraced while attempting maybe not to avoid but to purify. In the vast number of cases where everyday sounds, the sounds of action, are selected from your palette, they eschew grit. One way to put this would be to say that there’s little of the world in them, or rather, the world is channeled through the radio. The sounds of deliberate action, objects dragging, the timeline, creation via drawing or other types of construction, are so sharply focused that they exclude their accidental, or coincidental, contexts. That periodic motion, those dynamic gestures that become the dominant leitmotif of this final solo performance, change that world, expand that universe beyond the fluid but immediately recognizable parameters within which it was designed. The following ten minutes document the struggle in ways beyond description, but they say nothing of all that follows, the legacy of that formative event informing the next stage of reinvention so often undertaken as to appear misnamed. Each album documents a phase, a turning point amidst the radical reappraisals of an artistic life in flux, one that would continue with The Room Extended, not to mention the 2020 assemblages as well as the click pieces so integral to the film What is Man and What is Guitar.

What is humanity? What is it to be human, or to strip humanity to its essentials? What accounts for the absences left by what is able to be left? In my case, as a blind person, I was taught to call that leaving or absence a disability. You have done, at the crossroads where sound as action and intention meet—or is it non-intention?—what those theorizing disability attempt to describe, or prescribe. Given the limits of verbiage, you demonstrate through cumulative non-intention the courage of persistence, of reinventive continuity.
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Later, same day. “—What is a ghost? Stephen said with tingling energy. One who has faded into impalpability through death, through absence, through change of manners.” Joyce was writing of Stephen Dedalus, who was speaking on Hamlet in the National Library. Yes, here we are again, coming around to the curation of so many possibilities, so many colors, a dizzying semiotic array for the devotee, transcendent syntax for the initiate. I was surprised when Jon Abbey released this performance, but why should I have been? His visionary courage, fortitude, dogged persistence, has never failed him, and neither has yours. He curates, allows the archive to be opened, the tone, time and timbre ordered and reordered, and you draw, paint, construct, providing your own soundtrack to a life of things as ideas, ideas in things. Is absence a curation, a coexistent fractalization of possibilities unrealized? How many of your pieces simply end? What actually fades into impalpability? Haydn has refused to dissipate, though the 80th symphony fades from the auditory space you construct around it. The room does not, the hour and the day and the season do not, they become transitional, but that essence remains as the silence is made audible. Who’s left? What ghosts heard you, altering them? They wait. There’s no harm in waiting, as you’ve observed. So much of your work has involved waiting, but here, they have a role to play, they provide the curtain call. They rustle, expect, dare to anticipate, even to glean, realize there’s nothing more to the various shades of intention with which you, the various versions of you inhabiting space and time with them but extending back beyond clouded and weathered skies, presented them, rendered their environment a curation of possibilities for a brief space in time. You deserve that applause and much more, though after it ends, the rustling continues, the ghosts appear to fade, footfalls bespeak continued perambulation, engagement, striving and ceasing to strive. A historical moment is what it is, William Carlos Williams’ idea as thing as room becomes city, city ultimately condenses into room, a room of rooms in which the soundworlds you make public are privatized, shaped to achieve their own ends, silently luminescent as, despite everything you might say to the contrary, I imagine you continuing to listen.
 
Marc Medwin ​

Keith Rowe with Jon Abbey after his last solo concert in NYC (October 2018) (photo © Yuko Zama)

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About the Author

Marc Medwin teaches music history in the Performing Arts Department at American University in Washington D.C. He maintains an active career as a musicologist and journalist. 


past article:  The ErstWand Series: Composition of Time, Absence of Place  (issue 3)

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Works Cited

Aristotle, On Interpretation (Accessed 29 Sept. 2024)

Bach, C.P.E. Essay on the True Art of Playing Keyboard Instruments (Accessed 29 Sept. 2024)

Mitchell, David T., and Snyder, Sharon L. A Cultural History of Disability in the Modern Age (Bloomsbury Academic, 2020)

Olewnick, Brian. Keith Rowe: The Room Extended (Brooklyn: NY, PowerHouse Books, 2018)
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Williams, William Carlos. Paterson (New Directions, 1995)

Radu Malfatti / Keith Rowe Interview (erstwords, February 2011)

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