CONDIMENTS by matt wand & various improvisors

60 years of existence is upon me ... and the opening up of the world that happened at the end of the 80’s and early 90’s is now not just a distant memory but it seems a thing of the past to a large extent for all the poor mites hitting maturity now as the long worn out veneer of democracy finally starts to crumble and man-unkind finally gets proper payback for sticking it’s collective head in the sand and giving ‘so called’ world leaders enough rope to hang all of us on a biospherical gibbet.
But... what of those naive days of yore? Who are the ones instrumental in encouraging me to pursue a perversely slanted take on the concept of IMPROVISING? Well that’s a long story, only a quarter written and at 30,000 words it seems this might not be the place for it. Derek Bailey and Tony Oxley feature prominently but then so do many other lesser known names and faces.
But at least I should give you some small details about the recordings herein spanning the years 1992 to 2018, very nearly up to the world shutting down though there is a notable blank space 92 to 99, it would be tempting to blame Stock, Hausen & Walkman for that but it’s not the case, I did perform on the global improvising scene, perhaps more often, in those years it just seems i was too busy/distracted to request or follow up on getting recordings then, plus there weren’t so many ‘duet’ occasions and that’s the focus of this release. Notable omissions are duets with Iva Bittova, Matts Gustaffson & Nic Collins.
I have recordings of duets with Derek Bailey but i was unhappy with them and i know there are much better out there. Work with Richard Harrison has and will be documented more fully elsewhere.
Condiments 2 will focus on trios and larger groupings i’ve taken part in.
Nobody else is celebrating my cantankerous contributions to electronics & sampling in improvising back when there was so few of us doing it, so I guess i should make a stab at it, though I have always been ambivalent towards the idea of releasing most ‘improv’ stuff after the fact, the distance between a recording and the actual experience as an audience member or performer is vast.. almost un-traversable? Derek always viewed releases simply as ‘documentary evidence’ but I always had a more precious attitude towards Records as ‘artifact’ in and of themselves. In hindsight that was perhaps counterproductive some of the time.
And talking of counterproductive,,, what of the critics attitude to my efforts. Well, to be frank, not good, very few had a grasp on what I was trying to do and most could never get over their desperate clinging on to concepts of ‘instrumental skills’ even though it was those ‘skills’ that generally meant improv often resorted to habitual tropes and descended into empty displays of physical dexterity - like punk rock had never happened! Of course, listening back to stuff i was doing at the end of the 80’s/beginning of the 90’s it does seem very brutish , clumsy and often borders on what might have been unlistenable depending on what genres of music or sound you were familiar with .. it certainly WASN’T jazz .. man.
But the discomfort I feel airing some of these recordings has to be tempered by remembering what i was trying to achieve ie: a disruption of those all too common habitual tropes and some kind of “fold-in” cross cut against the other players and my own mental narrative.. and then the basic means I had to to try and execute that ie: 2 walkmans with cut-up sounds seperated left and right channel to make 4 channels of unknown mayhem fed via 4 diy button gates into a 4 second sampling pedal which had the spring replaced with elastic bands to allow very quick fire finger triggering... just that and a reprogrammed/abused drum machine for percussive elements and very hi pq patterns at extreme tempos making what I later discovered was actually a rudimentary form of “granular synthesis”. In fact, if the critics had bothered to investigate they would have been shocked at what I did manage to do with such junk... but they were too busy/lazy and often I noticed they plagiarised other reviewers negative phrasings as if actually listening to the record was beneath them.. the biggest clue they really didn’t know what was going on was in all the moaning about ‘my’ random ‘funny voice quotes’ undermining proceedings when I had expunged such stuff from my tapes after 92 and in fact it was golden boy Pat Thomas who was still rockin’ that trope. No doubt it would have been ‘genius’ if identified as his lyrical handiwork. Pat! I love you... genius you ARE ... but please own up to the funny voices and let’s stick some egg on those journos faces :)
Well, any way, lets see what they make of this mess of snippets plucked from the DATs of yesteryear if it doesn’t pass entirely unoticed? It was really only Mr Ben Watson and scant few others that were open minded enough to be enthusiastic about this way of going about things ... Thank heavens for the actual practitioners, the Tony Oxleys, Derek Baileys & Mick Becks of the world and those event organisers who have a mind of their own. It’s a scene I love and have made many attempts to commit to but still after all these years find its still tantalisingly keeping me at arms length.

Matt Wand: Electronics, Sampling, Tape Switchboard, Drum Machines.

A huge debt is owed to all the artists represented here.
Notes:
Sonic Pleasure is the improv nom de plume of Marie-Angelique Beuler, she plays Bricks.
In 1992 David Shea was still manipulating vinyl on actual turntables before his promotion to Samplist extraordinaire.
THF Drenching is the ‘safe word’ for Stuart Calton, he plays Dictaphones.

All the recordings marked London 1992 were recorded at that years Company Week by Paul Wilson.
The Pat Thomas Derby recs were by.. dammit.. where is that CDR? wait.. sieve memory suggests something like ... Chris Trent??
All the other recordings were by myself or at least on my own machine plugged into the mixing desk.
Thanks are due to all the venues that allow this sort of thing to go on behind closed doors, the DATs & CDRs were all minimally labelled and my memory isn’t up to the geographical task.
All the other artists go by their real names and their chosen instruments are widely known many thanks to them for allowing me to drag them down to my level.
Big thanks are due to Karen at INCUS records.

Matt runs the Independent Record Label HOT AIR. He formed the seminal electronic sampling & improvising group Stock, Hausen & Walkman in 1989 and also works under various other pseudonyms, Small Rocks being one.
He has remixed many people ie: Ground Zero, PULP, Frankie Goes To Hollywood, Hawkwind, Peter Thomas, Steve Reich, Buffalo Daughter, Lady Miss Kier, Thurston Moore.

HOT AIR RELEASES