Fire&flux
New York On Two Hands
© 2007 Fire&flux Recordings (format: CD-R)
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Freejazz improvisations of alto saxophone and drums--Raw, political, explosive bombast, with moments of warm melody and calm, for fans of blistering freejazz and other uneasy listening. No amplifiers needed.
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FIRE&FLUX
Benjamin Kates / Alto Saxophone
Richard Gilman-Opalsky / Drums and Percussion
This CD was recorded live in New York City just before Rich moved to Illinois and Ben moved to Oregon. This CD documents the end of our time in New York together after 8 years of musical collaboration of one kind or another.
Track Info:
We Support... is a completely improvised piece that covers most of the ground of what this duo was about.
New York on Two Hands is named after a poem Rich wrote and reads as part of the performance. We played this piece in a show space which require very, very quiet playing.
An Aphorism on Time is almost completely composed and lasts for about a minute.
Such Small Hands is a ballad with a head. This was the last song we played at our last show. It's our love song named for an EE Cummings poem that ends with the words "no one, not even the rain, has such small hands."
About Fire&Flux:
We started playing together in a hardcore/punk band in 1997. This band, Countdown to Putsch, just kept making stranger and stranger music until we were doing totally improvised music with a carload of instruments. After one person left the band, Rich & Ben formed Fire&Flux with the intent to more or less leave the static hardcore punk scene and play in scenes more open to experimental and creative music. FIRE&FLUX is an improvising duo consisting of saxophone and drums that draws on various traditions in freejazz and improvisation, as well as on a variety of other music and genres outside of the mainstream that have inspired us. The two of us have been playing and practicing together for the past eight years.
FIRE&FLUX's improvisations are always accompanied with some text or imagery, both in performances and on record. At a performance, listeners may see a projection, an easel with imagery, or they may receive a program for the show. These measures are taken in order to anchor an otherwise extremely abstract music to particular ideas and arguments. Our improvisations, in other words, are a part of an effort to communicate particular things that we are thinking about, in addition to the experience of our sonic output. Our music is often accompanied with political reflections and critiques that address issues of social, economic and political inequalities, matters of foreign policy, and problems of political culture. This does NOT mean that we don't play pieces about love, music, happiness, and other more uplifting matters of the human spirit. We do. We try to express a broad range of feelings and thinking, to engage a diversity issues.
FIRE&FLUX generally utilizes four approaches to making music: 1) Some pieces are organized around written melodies-we play the melodies and improvise "outwards" from them, going "outside" of the melodies. 2) Some pieces are read off of a kind of "sheet music" on which tempo, volume, intensity, pauses, silences and solos are indicated, but where the actual notes and actual rhythms are wholly improvised under the guidance of the spirit or the meaning of the theme of the piece. 3) Some pieces could be called "game pieces." With these, each of us plays a predetermined role or "acts out" a predetermined relationship to/with the other player. 4) Finally, some pieces are entirely improvised, with no structural guidelines other than the meaning, the mood, and the spirit or the theme of the piece.
BENJAMIN KATES started playing saxophone in the 4th grade. He got serious in high school and started at NYU in 1996 as a music education major. But playing 2 to 4 to 6 hours a day burnt him out on the horn, so he put it down for a while and only picked up again for regular "woodshedding" when FIRE&FLUX began. Ben often plays fast and fiercely, but always with a penchant for melody, which he never abandons for long. Ben taught English to middle school kids in Manhattan then moved to Oregon where he is a special education teacher.
RICHARD GILMAN-OPALSKY started playing the drums somewhere between 8 and 10 years of age. One of his interests is in a method he calls "transitive resonance." With transitive resonance, the idea is to send vibrations from one part of the drum set through another part by laying a drum stick or other implement on the drums. Using this technique, Rich sometimes aims to resonate as many sounds as possible off of the drum set at one time. Other times, the idea is to generate sounds that are not normally acoustically produced with drums. "Improvisation, for me, is the most vital and living way to approach music, to engage other players with attentive listening and creative, sensible, responses. The ideals of freedom, communication, and provocation are in the forefront of my music and musical thinking." Rich is now a professor of political philosophy in Illinois.
Some band & musicians that have inspired us: Peter Brotzmann, Sun Ra, Crass, Propaghandi, Cecil Taylor, John Gruntfest, Kauro Abe, Ruins, late era John Coltrane, Arthur Doyle, Max Roach, Milford Graves, Rashied Ali, Muhammad Ali (Rashied's drumming brother), Frank Wright, Shoji Hano, Los Crudos, Born Against....
NOW, CHECK OUT SOME VIDEO SHORTS OF FIRE&FLUX LIVE AT
http://www.youtube.com/profile_videos?user=fluxist
reviews
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- author: SEBASTIEN H
From Countdown to Putsch to Fire an Flux, Anarchism takes a higher way..very good