Ovi-poster

 

A neat little poster from a show at Kimo's in SF, spring 2006. The baby is by then former Ovipositor bass player Matt Carter's newborn son. I don't recall if Laurin Askew played bass with us yet. 

Kimo's was a cool, funky little dive bar on Polk St. that had an upstairs performance space. I figure that there were a lot of drag shows there, as that area was, along with SOMA and Castro District, a welcoming one for gay culture in the City. It had a small stage, a nice dance floor, and a beat up, but fun, vibe. I recall playing there a few times over the years. Last time I drove past its former space, it looked as though it'd been transformed into some kind of eatery. Everything changes.

We became friends with the members of Chords Are Dead, and played some more shows with them. I definitely felt like an "old dude" to them. I was 36, they were all in their early to mid 20's. Last time that I heard about them, they had started playing again after a long hiatus. 

Telomere Repair, from San Pedro, were intense, and I recall them getting into an argument during their set. I still have their CD, and I still like it. 

Graphic design and screen print by Colin Frangos.

Graphic Score

 

At certain points during my journey into Improvised Music, I really craved the stability of having some kind of plan to work from. I guess that may have something to do with my Capricorn sun? Anyway, the above piece was painted onto a thick board, in hopes to be used by an improvising ensemble of some sort. I can't recall it ever having been, though. It's sat in my garage for a while......

As I've pondered this post, there's been a lot of reflection about a time in my early 20's, when I lived in San Francisco, and had aspirations of being some kind of musical composer. I didn't really "go that route" in the traditional sense, but I have been involved in musical composition in one form or another from the late 1980's until 2020. 

This piece is clearly just a simple chord, E, A, B flat, F flat, which is supposed to lead to a "cloud" of improvisation. I really do like the way that that chord sounds as an arpeggio, so it seems valid to me, despite the admitted simplicity of its conception. 

Maybe someday it will be played, who knows? 

Image Copyright 2021, Mark Pino 

A nice review of M-KAT Ensemble's Eight Durations CD!

 I found this review of Eight Durations, which came out a bit under a year ago, yesterday. Stoked on a friendly, perceptive review from the Vital Weekly web page!

"M-KAT ENSEMBLE - EIGHT DURATIONS (CDR by Edgetone)

While listening to this album my mind starts to go on its journey. Thoughts about The Rita, Miles Davis interviews from the 1970s, Le Monte Young, films abrasively rescored live in the back rooms of pubs, being on a stag do in Prague and hearing some freak jazz being played and dragging the party in to watch for a drink only for them neck their pints and wait outside petulantly mumbling when it was my turn to pick the next bar, having to sit in the hallway of an arts centre during an all-dayer of experimental music as what was being played was too loud and complex for me to get my head around on a rainy Saturday night and a dozen other fragmented memories come to me only to be gone in a second. Effectively ‘Eight Durations’ is the kind of album that allows you to get all internal whilst getting lost in its rich melodies and tones.
    The beauty of ‘Eight Durations’ is how the songs are constructed I real-time. There were no preconceived structures or patterns. They just started playing and this is what M-KAT came up with. ‘Duration 3’ is either build around the Kersti Abrams’ ponderous saxophone lines or Mark Pino’s drumming. I can’t work it out. Either way, it doesn’t matter as they both give the other musicians something tangible to work around. Instead of playing call and response motifs or trying to mimic the others playing on their respective instruments they just appear to be going for it. ‘Duration 4’ feels like the most abrasive, and adventurous, track on the album. There is a horrific vibe to it that just gets gut-wrenchingly worse as the song progresses. The basslines feel like they are being ripped from the bass, rather than being played by one. The percussion sounds like it was made up of anything at hand and the levels of distortion are fantastic. When the flute kicks in at the halfway point the songs go up a notch.
    ‘Eight Durations’ is cavernous and cacophonous. The final throws of ‘Duration 8’ are glorious in their organised disarray. Pino is just going at it on drums. Abrams is delivering measured saxophone line after line. The bass is consistent but vanishes due to the bedlam all around and Andrew Joron’s theremin appears to be missing in action. I don’t doubt it’s there but it is hard to pick out once the machine is up and running. This album is a dream. A very wonky and tumultuous dream, but a dream none the less. (SR"

New ebolabuddha tracks up at Archive.org!

 

 

https://archive.org/details/ebola1

I went back and found these two tracks, recorded as some kind of demo (at least, that was how they were labeled).  Really enjoyed the energy of them, so I figured I'd throw 'em up onto Archive.org for others to do so as well. In some ways, I feel as though this was ebolabuddha's finest moment, in purely musical terms.