WHAT'S NEW WHAT'S NEWFirst download-only album is out.
You can get In The Shaman's Pocket by RealTime on Ayler Records here.
First reviews:-
Shaman's Pocket
AYLER DOWNLOAD
There's no metronome in the shaman's pocket. Drummer Ken Hyder has no time in his music for frigid mechanical measures. His playing explores how persistent energy can flow vividly through transient forms, informed by early study with John Stevens, intense listening to Coltrane and Ayler and his own first hand research well off the beaten track-notably over the course of the past 18 years among rural people in Siberia.
In the improvising quartet RealTime, Hyder is joined by percussionist z'ev, trumpeter Andy Knight and bassist Scipio. In The Shaman's Pocket is a single track lasting a little over 42 minutes. Hyder recognises the fortuitous tightness for listening of vinyl time; CDs have tended to be overlong players, dissipating attention and encouraging slack content. This is not an incidental observation. These days Hyder's music is not only about sound, but also about our physical, emotional and psychic experience of time.
Within the involving rhythm of this piece there are strange changes of tempo -unpredictable acceleration, unexpected slowing down, firm strides that veer irregularly into an intoxicated reel, z'ev operates on wavelengths close to Hyder's own, fracturing pattern without sacrificing drive. Scipio, currently bassist with Tuvan rock group Yat Kha, contributes eccentrically loping off-kilter funk. Knight's blowing weaves through the cross rhythms, unforced and communicative, a distinctly vocal complement to Hyder's idiosyncratic wordless singing. The music's pulse carries you along, but the way accents fall is often disorientating. It's music that's readily approachable, but at a slant, from unaccustomed angles. A combination of pleasure and disclosure that touches the core of what it means to improvise.
JULIAN COWLEY
RealTime
In The Shaman's Pocket
Ayler Records, aylDL-087
Touching Extremes
By: Massimo Ricci
RealTime are Ken Hyder (dungur, percussion, voice), Z'EV
(percussion), Andy Knight (trumpet, flute) and Scipio (bass).
This 42-minute suite presents all the characteristics of a ritual ever since its
first movements, not a surprise considering the kind of projects and personal
beliefs these artists are known for. Tribal patterns and slow, incessant thumps
and thuds, underlined by Scipio's quasi-funky bass walks, get highlighted by
Hyder's vocal emissions halfway through chant and uttered invocation.
Z'EV contributes with a multi-timbral percussive arsenal, his command of the
pulse dictating the changes in the velocity of the piece.
Knight plays different things according to t
he
instrument chosen: on flute, he flows into the shamanic essence of the moment,
long dissonant whistles addressing the spiritual components in the correct
manner, whilst his trumpet's short blasts and deceptively simple lines can stand
the test of our concentration alone, or sinuously surround Hyder's throat
singing while Z'EV and Scipio interact like sonic Siamese twins.
When the sounds become more rarefied, we enjoy the value of single instrumental
gestures as if the players were offering something, putting it directly in our
hands. Whatever they decide to play, the physical response is one of pleasure -
uncomfortable pleasure. It moves inside but we can't quite determine what really
happens.
The secret of this album lies right there: a cross between the casual discovery
of a clandestine ceremony and the sense of being invited to a practice which is
guaranteed not to harm, yet remains somehow obscure.
The whole is very interesting and definitely bewitching.
The 1975 Dreaming of Glenisla has been re-released on CD by Reel Recordings of Canada.
It has just got its first re-review in the Wire.
"Scottish
drummer Hyder, a sometime associate of various Soft Machinists including
saxophonist Elton Dean, wanted to detach free jazz playing from both its
American and modernistic connotations and reconnect it with his Celtic folk
roots, African music, jazz, street funk, even Pipe Major John Burgess and the
Black Watch Pipe Band.
"This he does with remarkable naturalness and lack of contrivance, stressing the
communitarian aspects inherent in what appear to be musics poles apart.
"On 'Diddling For The Bairns', you fleetingly think of other Northern Europeans
taking on jazz as an idiom - Jan Garbarek springs obviously to mind.
"However, whereas Garbarek's music hangs high, aerially above the fjords,
Talisker are down there among the peat and the skirling."
David Stubbs, Wire, December 2007
The K-Space Going Up CD has sold out and has been re-pressed by Ad Hoc records. It's sold exceptionally well in the USA where it got lots of radio play and ecstatic reviews.
We recorded material in Poland in the Autumn for the new K-Space CD which will be technologically and artistically innovatory.
Raz3 - Lu Edmonds, Tim Hodgkinson and I - are finishing off a CD we've been working on for the past year. It's all-acoustic. And not a lot of things. Hear an excerpt here. And a wee one here.
New RealTime download-only CD now out. Available from http://www.ayler.com/_catalogue_dl.htm
Here's a couple of photies from my first gig in Dundee for 20 years, with Raymond Macdonald and others. Raymond and I will be doing duo gigs in Scotland in 2007.
In rehearsal.
Gig in Brighton with Geoff Hearn. Video here