Foghorns,Trombones, Clean Feed, Etcetera.

Bob Burnett: I've recently been wandering around www.emusic.com for some music I haven't discovered before. I'm happy to say I've fallen upon the Clean Feed label out of Portugal. The first discovery I made was a duet album from 1995 by Anthony Braxton and Joe Fonda and that led me to a wonderfully abstract find--Joëlle Léandre/Pascal Contet's Freeway a series of 12 open compositions for contrebass and accordion. Joëlle Léandre is an artist that I've had on my "must explore" list for awhile and I plan to do more digging. She has a John Cage-Morton Feldman-Derek Bailey pedigree and has been weaving within the avant/classic/jazz/improv world for several decades. Freeway is open and exploratory--a very challenging but worth it venture.

Another discovery I made on emusic was the Etcetera label--most notably a John Cage composition I had never heard, Two5: Music for Trombone and Piano interpreted by trombonist James Fulkerson. The composition is a subdued 39 minutes of long tones, subtle piano chords, open space and contemplative resonance. I'm reminded of Stuart Dempster's work with Pauline Oliveros in the Deep Listening Band--you may recall a review I wrote (way back) about their "atmospheric space music".

A further connection I made was with sound sculptor Bill Fontana. In the mid '80s a friend in the San Francisco bay area sent me a cassette tape of a radio broadcast he recorded of Fontana's Landscape Sculpture with Fog Horns--a work where 8 microphones were installed in a variety of geographic locations in the bay area to capture multiple acoustic delays of the fog horns on the Golden Gate Bridge. It is an astounding work. Fontana has travelled the world capturing engaging sound environments. His webpage is a great resource where many of his activites are documented with visuals and sound clips.