Unsquare by MAYBE MONDAY – FRED FRITH, MIYA MASAOKA, LARRY OCHS + Carla Kihlstedt, Zeena Parkins, et al.

Intakt CD 132

Maybe Monday – Fred Frith, Miya Masaoka and Larry Ochs – first unveiled its collaboration in 1997, on-stage at San Francisco's Great American Music Hall. In retrospect, this meeting seems almost inevitable: the three members of the group had been crossing paths foryears: Ochs with both Frith and Masaoka through numerous Rova projects, and Frith with Masaoka on a tour of Europe with Tom Cora.
Now for their third album – recorded at the East Side Sound Studio in New York – Maybe Monday have invited four guests: Gerry Hemingway, Carla Kihlstedt, Ikue Mori, and Zeena Parkins. The delicate mesh of electric and acoustic, ethnic and urban, traditional and experimental, sets up a mesmerizing dynamic in the music.


REVIEWS:


Maybe Monday is Fred Frith (electric guitar), Miya Masaoka (25-string koto and electronics) and Larry Ochs (sopranino and tenor saxes). Their third album features guests Gerry Hemingway (drums, percussion, voice), Carla Kihlstedt (electric and acoustic violins), Ikue Mori (electronics) and Zeena Parkins (electric harp and electronics). Though its members had played with each other in different combinations, Maybe Monday first performed as a trio in 1997. Recorded in a New York studio in 2006, the present project grew out of shows that Masaoka was curating for John Zorn at The Stone, the results of which will be appearing on Intakt next year.
The album opens with "G"'s explosive torrent of sound, setting the pattern for much of what follows in its kaleidscopic succession of acoustic instrumental and electronic events. A playful, bucolic interlude featuring koto, violin and electronics is shattered by Frith's shuddering guitar chords and more turbulence; the piece ends in a mechanical-clock anthem. The gentle musings of "Saptharishi Mandalam" centre on an ethnic cocktail of Hawaiian-style guitar and koto. "Septentrion" is the most rhythmic track, and sustains a barrage of sound featuring a free jazz dirge by Ochs on tenor-sax. That mood continues on the final track, "Unturned", until a more lyrical episode where Ochs's sopranino curlicues round Frith's plangent, halting guitar line. With just enough structure to hold things together, seven master musicians exploit the dramatic possibilities of a freely improvised mix of acoustic and electronic sounds.
ANDY HAMILTON, The Wire, London, April 2008

Unsquare is the third disc from the Bay Area electro-acoustic improvisation ensemble Maybe Monday, and the first since 2002’s Digital Wildlife (Winter & Winter). Maybe Monday are a trio consisting of saxophonist Larry Ochs, guitarist Fred Frith and koto/electronic artist Miya Masaoka. Here, four guests augment the sax and string core: drummer Gerry Hemingway, violinist Carla Kihlstedt, Zeena Parkins on harp, and Ikue Mori on electronics. This septet evolved from a curatorial gig at New York’s sound gallery the Stone. Unsquare is the studio meeting of these musicians, and a two-disc live set is slated for release this year.
It is quite clear that Maybe Monday treads similar lines as collective improvisation groups such as AMM, the Howard Riley trio with Barry Guy and Tony Oxley, and the New Music Ensemble. The origins of a given sound or combination of sounds are not important, and whether what one is hearing comes from percussion, electronics, reeds, strings or something else entirely matters little. It is a subsuming of the parts to the whole, as well as a redefinition of the possibilities inherent in those very parts.
That isn’t to say there aren’t certain elements that rise to the top – Hemingway’s percussion, in trio with sopranino and violin, create an angular and somewhat lumbering center of accents on “G,” surrounded by a whirlwind of baited indeterminacy. Skittering guitar runs and alien harp plucks make themselves known in tense spaces, and tones do become associated with their origins once one becomes attenuated to the environment. Ochs’ saxophones, especially his tenor, are a commanding presence of near-lineage in a context wholly its own as sounds gel and compel, propel forward, lapse and fail in these five improvisations. He’s somewhat like Lou Gare in AMM, a Coltrane-like keen duetting with Frith’s guitar in a sea of samples and found sounds, almost pregnant with meaning in a struggle for sonic definition. There is grace in this tapestry, too – Ochs’ pensive sopranino chirps and trills open “Nitrogen” alongside subtle percussive accents and long tones, and Kihlstedt is a frequent purveyor of ornate classicism and East European folksiness throughout. But to parse Unsquare would be a disservice to the breadth of its canvas – this is a very rich recording of electro-acoustic improvisation.
Clifford Allen, Bagatellen, March 2008

Multi-instrumentalist, composer, and improviser Fred Frith has been making noise of one kind or another for almost 50 years.
Fred is best known as a pioneering electric guitarist and improviser, song-writer, and composer for film, dance and theater.

fredfrith.com
intaktrec.ch