The New York City-based Infrequent Seams label has been at the forefront of the avant-garde for over a decade, and with their 2023 K7 subscription series, the enterprise isn’t slowing down. There will be 12 releases in the series, released in three blocks of four (and also available individually monthly via Bandcamp). The formats are digital and cassette in limited editions of 50. The first block is available now, featuring music by James Ilgenfritz / Sandy Ewen / Michael Foster (Ekphrastic Discourse), William Roper, Cassia Streb, Timothy Feeney (Avenue 64), Time Phase Trio (Ty Citerman / Jen Baker / Shayna Dunkelman) (eponymous) and Lily Guarneros Maase (blood::face)
Composer, double bassist and improvisor James Ilgenfritz also runs Infrequent Seams, which helps to explain the prolificacy of his work on the label. There is a wide variety of Infrequent Seams releases from other artists however, with a handful having been reviewed for this website including Object Collection’s cheap&easy OCTOBER, Colin Cannon’s McGolrick, Lucie Vítková and Ilgenfritz’s Aging, and Andrew Cyrille, Elliott Sharp, & Richard Teitelbaum’s Evocation.
Ekphrastic Discourse brings together Ilgenfritz, guitarist Sandy Ewen, and saxophonist Michael Foster for a set of seven improvisations that date back to June of 2021 as part of the second Infrequent Seams Streamfest. Their interactions are abstract but spacious and are to an undefined degree reliant on found objects as sound makers. There are gurgles, scrapes, clinks, clanks, flutters, wiggles, grinds, buzzes, forceful splatters, rattles, huffs, hisses, and even a few moments that sound like kisses. We’re talking big cartoon smooches.
There are also fleeting stretches of recognizable guitar and sax, but Ilgenfritz resists plucking or bowing his bass in an identifiable way. And there are a few sweet spots where it’s unclear exactly who is responsible for what. The root of this activity is the Euro free improv scene of the 1970s, but there’s also some of John Zorn’s early ’80s undertakings to consider (Yankees with Zorn, Derek Baily and George Lewis connects these antecedents). The longer final piece on Ekphrastic Discourse brought the AMM to mind, which is just fantastic (Ewen has played with the AMM’s Keith Rowe).
Avenue 64 is also an abstract affair, but compositionally situated with one piece each by Streb (“A park, a train, and a secondary highway”), Feeney (“Another Pattern”) and Roper (“The Day Moved”). All three are Los Angeles-based improvisors and multi-instrumentalists. Across the three pieces “bells, spoken word, wine glasses, viola, tuba, drums, bones, beaks” are heard. The compositions encourage interpretation from the participant’s, tapping into their strengths at improv, but the structural underpinnings, if to varying degrees ineffable, are still felt.
Streb’s piece, which utilizes field recordings, registers as a travelogue, which might be a lazy association given her chosen title, but still feels on target. There are elements that sashay up to the border of drone in the work, and that’s good gravy. Feeney’s piece starts quietly with some qualities that highlight him as a drummer/percussionist (we’re talking sustained cymbal resonances). Roper’s piece is quite explosive as it opens with the composer delivering extemporaneous spoken word on the Loma Prieta earthquake of 1989. Appropriately, a beautiful racket is raised. Roper’s tuba smears are terrific.
Guitarist Ty Citerman, trombonist Jen Baker and percussionist Shayna Dunkelman are The Time Phase Trio, with their self-titled (or possibly untitled) tape featuring five compositions from Citerman (“Tennis” and the thematic “Mud,” “Streams,” “Water Music” and “Current”) and one from Baker (“25 Degrees of Sticking to It”), plus a “choice-based” improvisation piece by Citerman, “Droplets,” that provides the performers with six single bar cells that can be played in any order any number of times and in any manner the participants choose. And they chose to tackle it three times, raising the track total to nine.
Using their cited instruments and electronics that I will credit to Dunkelman (as it is part of her artist’s bio) the Time Phase Trio are the jazziest group of the bunch, though don’t go thinking it’s a finger-snapping affair. The flare-ups of woozy electronics and Baker’s trombone inspired thoughts of George Lewis, but I also had a vision of trumpeter Bill Dixon meeting up with the Sun City Girls in one of their jazzier moods. But a whole lot of what these three are laying down eludes direct comparisons, and that gets to the core of what the whole avant shebang is all about.
Quoting from the blood::face Bandcamp page, the Los Angeles-based Lily Guarneros Maase “is a Meximerican composer, educator and multi-genre concert guitarist.” Her April K7 installment diverges considerably from the prior three in stylistic terms while still fitting into the overall thrust of the series thus far (and the Infrequent Seams modus operandi as a whole). Succinctly, Maase’s collection (the first of two in the series, with teeth::bone wrapping up K7 in December) can be described as avant-folk, though the eight selections move around a lot.
Throughout, Maase reinforces that she’s a masterful guitarist and equally adept at song form. The track titles are pulled from a larger pool of work; There’s “Improvisation Two” (it’s predecessor track is absent) and four tracks titled “Kodafilm” numbered 1, 3, 5 and 6. And if avant folk, there’s a considerable psychedelic undercurrent. Opener “Kodafilm 1 – Alborada (First Dawn)” sounds like it could’ve been pulled from one of Tompkins Square’s Imaginational Anthem comps, while “Blood” is reminiscent of Skip Spence’s Oar, which is always a good thing. blood::face is more than a good thing. It’s a total knockout.
James Ilgenfritz / Sandy Ewen / Michael Foster, Ekphrastic Discourse
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William Roper, Cassia Streb, Timothy Feeney, Avenue 64
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Time Phase Trio (Ty Citerman / Jen Baker / Shayna Dunkelman), Time Phase Trio
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Lily Guarneros Maase, blood::face
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