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SCAVENGER QUARTET
Reviews
Metro Times
Detroit, June 2001
Automated Tunesmith Machines
Beginning sometime back in the '80s, Frank Pahl has
followed his own pied-piping muse, charting a journey through progressive
ethno-folk, rummage-sale musical reanimations and all-around oddball and
enchanting song creations. Pahl began his quirky tunesmithery with Only a
Mother, Detroit's defunct ethno-acoustic prog-pop collective. Since then,
Pahl's been an inspiration to (and a collaborator with) likeminded area
musicians such as Immigrant Suns. He's also been in cahoots with other
border-defying musical personalities from around the world, including
guitar mangler Eugene Chadbourne and Dutch sax champ Luc Houtkamp. But for
his latest base of musical operations, he merely had to go around the
corner to recruit Only a Mother percussionist Doug Gourlay, reeds player
Tim Holmes and Immigrant Suns bassist Joel Peterson. As the Scavenger
Quartet, the four create patchwork instrumental ditties out of low-budget
organs, toy piano, pots-and-pans percussion, skronky reeds and upright
bass. Pahl often integrates some of his self-playing musical objects into
the group's work, like an automated gamelan made out of scavenged Tinker
Toys and toy xylophones, and his remarkable chiming and buzzing briefcases
of rewired doorbells. With his assemblage of theatrical carny tunes and
homemade instruments, Pahl conjures the kind of apparitions of hobo
composer Harry Partch that Tom Waits does on his post-Swordfishtrombones
recordings. This is off-kilter, flea-market Americana with an eye to the
exotica of Martin Denny- wordless thrift-store sea chanteys of the
avante-garde. To celebrate the release of their first CD, Whistling for
Leftovers (Pahl's a virtuoso whistler, too) the Scavenger Quartet performs
Saturday in the intimate setting of Entropy Studios.
-Greg Baise
The Wire
London, UK
Scavenging for Automatons
Very few composers could get away with using antique
sewing-machine treadles in the production of their music, much less want
to. But it's hard to think of a more fitting visual metaphor for the work
of Michigan's Frank Pahl. Under his music's well-oiled surface there's a
decidedly creaky and imprecise quality. His wickedly complex, percussion
heavy compositions are constantly undermined by a kind of nagging
unpredictability, due in large part to his use of 'automatic music'
elements. His foot-powered sewing-machine treadles connect to a
sophisticated system of pulleys and gears. Along with more modern binary
counters and microcontrollers - essentially, simple computers - they're
used to sequence various instruments with some degree of randomness,
adding a more 'human' feel to his music.
"You set a slow setting on a binary counter and hook up an air
organ," remarks Pahl, about an 'automatic Ambient' project he's
contemplating for old, consumer-level chord organs. "The attack and
decay of the air organs are not consistent, so when you use them with a
computer it gives it a more human feel, whereas a lot of computer music is
terribly rigid. You can overcome that rigidity by using something
undependable."
During the composition process, Pahl will even let these semi-intelligent
automatic instruments help determine the direction of a piece, introducing
another layer of imprecision. If he clearly prefers organic acoustic
sounds to hyperreal electric, much less digital ones, it's not out of
technophobia. On the contrary, he has been using computers as sequencers
for years, and has even written for the journal Experimental Musical
Instruments. However, his former group, Only a Mother, was as much chamber
music as rock, laden with baroque strings and woodwinds, tuned percussion
instruments and the occasional operatic flourish. And his recent solo
recordings are free of virtually any reference to modern electronic music,
replacing most of OAM's 'group' line-up with a battery of toys,
noisemakers, music boxes and jerry-rigged home appliances. An
"obsessive fleamarket shopper", Pahl often fashions beaters for
his automatic marimbas and gamelans from Tinker Toy parts, and has also
pressed Erector Set components and doorbells into service. Even when using
computers as sequencers, the high-tech equipment is driving low-tech
motors, plucking devices and ultimately acoustic instruments- and with the
sewing machine treadles, of course, it's low-tech/high-tech.
Listening to Pahl's recent recordings, it's often hard to tell exactly
where the line between humans and machines falls, or at least who's
calling the shots. Much of his own controlling input happens at the
construction stage. When configuring his automatic instruments, he
carefully assembles the parts to generate precisely the right timbres, and
at more or less predetermined time intervals. For example, he only uses
Tinker Toys with a certain kind of flexible plastic, and adds joints to
the beaters so that they fall onto his marimba just gently enough. He
builds his automatic gamelans from propane tanks that he himself saws to
precise lengths (don't try this at home!). And he sets up his binary
counters and pulley systems to generate general rhythmic patterns within
which he will weave his 'real' instruments, including guitar, ukulele and
piano. But at the same time, he will let the quasi-random, automated
rhythmic and melodic patterns "suggest what is needed" for the
score. This give and take process leaves his music sounding neither
machine generated nor chaotic nor obsessively fussed over.
With its Victorian 'toys in the attic' mustiness, Pahl's upcoming (still
untitled) totally automated release on the In Poly Sons label, home of the
great European tinkerers Pierre Bastien, Look De Bouk and Klimperei, is
strongly reminiscent of the surreally gothic animated films of the Quay
Brothers. In a pairing made in Heaven, Klimperei (the "French
toy-pop" project of brothers Franciose and Christope Petchanatz) will
be collaborating by mail, with Pahl mixing the final product. It's hard to
believe that this music is the creation of a human being, much less one
with all the technology of the 21st century at his disposal.
In addition to the automated music CD and a spate of recent theatre work,
(including music for a production of Shakespeare's The Tempest in which he
also acted), Pahl has been working on two other projects due for release
over the next few months. One is a second volume of the more song-oriented
In Cahoots (Vaccination), on which, as the title implies, Pahl
collaborates with a different guest on each track. It will include Eugene
Chadbourne, Sean Desantis, David Greenberger and several former members of
Only a Mother. The other is Whistling for Leftovers, the debut release by
his current group, The Scavenger Quartet- the name a deliberate poke in
the eye to elitists who exalt string quartets as "the highest form of
music". Including two automatic tracks and appearances by many of his
beloved toys, the CD features a kind of chamber jazz hybrid that is much
more intimate than Only a Mother's music but with an equally vast palette.
The group was originally formed to fulfill several dance commissions. At
one early show, they performed two Debussy pieces arranged for banjo, toy
piano and glockenspiel. "The intonation on everything was
clunky," Pahl concludes, not particularly concerned. "Intonation
is a beautiful thing, but I'm not going to go out of my way for it."
-Dave Mandl
The Woodward
Detroit, 2000
Scavenger Quartet and Clock and Body
The Gypsy Café, Ann Arbor 10-2-99
Musical maverick Frank Pahl has assembled a new
group from the ashes of his avant-folk combo Only A Mother. Fueled by
ukulele, motor-powered musical toys, acoustic bass, off-beat percussion,
drums and sax, this project is aptly named Scavenger Quartet, Its creative
origin can be traced to Pahl's Master Of Fine Arts thesis performance
project of two years ago. At that time he enlisted the help of Immigrant
Suns members Joel Peterson, Doug Shimmin, and Ben Temkow for a playful,
yet serious, exploration on the various shapes and sizes of sound, noise,
and music, and the often fine line separating them. On this early autumn
evening, Frank Pahl's quartet included longtime long-time collaborator
Doug Gourlay on drums, Peterson on the stand-up bass, Tim Holmes on
skronking saxophone, and Pahl himself whistling, playing the Farfisa
organ, assorted toys, the string instruments and providing the stage
banter.
Their highly accessible, yet slightly twisted, repetoire included
mutations of sea chanties, traditional folksongs, John Barry (of James
Bond music fame), and provocative originals that obscured the lines of
demarcation, not only between styles (folk, jazz and rock), but also
between times (caveman, ragtime, modern, and futuristic).
"Future-rustic" might be a more apt description of the Scavenger
sound, which achieves a fusion that is simultaneously antiquated and
avante-garde.
-Ralph Valdez
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