wires and wooden boxes is the second recorded collaboration between Diaz-Infante and NYC-based free-electric guitarist Forsyth. Six of the 10 tracks are purely acoustic/electric duets, ranging from low-key rumble and plink to ruminative note-explorations. I’ve raved here about Forsyth’s abilities here before, but I’ll say it again: You’ll find no better example of unapologetically out-the-door-and-through the-window free guitar in the current underground. And he’s found a perfect foil in Diaz-Infante. The two, in their first real time recorded encounter, seem truly at home with each other’s abilities and possibilities. The remaining tracks utilize piano, toy piano, and "small percussion" in a manner that, especially on the eight minute-plus "sound is good all the time," allows the listener to fully partake in the musicians’ creation all around. You can’t help but feel/think, Damn they’re having fun. And so are you.
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Here we have two new and very different releases featuring Ernesto Diaz-Infante and Chris Forsyth. Wires And Wooden Boxes is the second collaboration from the duo. I haven't heard the first (Left & Right), though that release was recorded with each musician on separate coasts, whereas Wires And Wooden Boxes resulted from the two being physically in the same studio.

Wires And Wooden Boxes could easily be subtitled "Adventures In Music And Sound", or perhaps even "The Sound Of Music", as the variety and combination of sounds are front and center stage across the CD's ten tracks. The promo sheet points out each musicians' approach to playing the guitar, with Diaz-Infante using extreme alternate tunings and various objects to elicit sounds from his acoustic guitar, and Forsyth using more conventional equipment like volume pedal and distortion box with his electric guitar. The result is that each musicians' contributions are easily distinguished from the other, which makes the beauty of the resulting music all the more apparent.

A few of the tracks pair piano and guitar, and while the guitar duo pieces tended to excite me the most, the piano/guitar track "Straight To It" is one of my favorites on the album. The two duel furiously with one another, building the pace and culminating in a wild out-jazz freakout. The music has an intense feel and I could see it working well with an appropriate theater piece.

Several of the guitar tracks are numbered "Acoustic/Electric" pieces. This is BUSY music and the players accomplish as much as an entire band. I can just see Ernesto's hands moving wildly over his acoustic guitar while Forsyth at times kicks out more discernable rock licks (though there's little that's conventional about them). Another one of my favorites is "Sound Is Good All The Time". Raking over what I gather are piano strings gives the music an orchestral feel, which provides a pleasant backdrop for the maddened parade of sounds, both guitars and percussion, that fly about. The pace and volume of the music shifts dramatically, and I think the quieter moments provide the most tension.

The real joy of these pieces is the way in which they straddle the line between the accessible and the abstract. There's really quite a bit about this music that is recognizable and friendly, making it easier to latch on to the variety of sounds, tones, bashes, and clangs that come together to create a set of cohesive pieces.

On the harsher, angrier, and more aggressive side is Rev. 99, a quartet of Diaz-Infante, Forsyth, g3 powerbook noise musician Akio Mokuno, and ranting poet and sax player 99 Hooker. The promo sheet provides an interesting description of the recording as "environmental improvisation", which attempts to deal with the difference between recorded music and live performance.

Music like this is certainly always better appreciated in live performance, especially as regards a performer like 99 Hooker who I'd not heard of prior to Turn A Deaf Ear. Hooker's anguished rants immediately brought to mind Bobcat Goldthwaite (voice and speech patterns), but the comedian Bobcat is just silly whereas 99 Hooker communicates an enraged passion. But the rants added to the grating guitars and bleeping electronics made for an intriguing combination of contrasts, and when Ernesto plays piano the jazzy style makes for an even more noticeable contradiction that works well with the noisier sounds. Guitars and sax often go off on wild noise jams while the piano remains in it's own jazz jamming realm. These contrasts are most noticeable on "Olde Tyme Unnatural Rock n' Roll", where we get shades of Bob Segar, though only after the entire press run of his best selling hits have been run through a meat grinder. Hooker goes manic on the rants backed by pleasant jazzy piano and subtle noise bits.

One of my favorite tracks is "Your Title Here", a beautifully chaotic blend of guitars, piano, and electronics. Quirky jazz piano and out-acid guitars duke it out while the electronics swirl about. "Possum Ridge Paralyzer" is a tense 20 minute work in which Hooker does the demon thing while the guitars and electronics paint the eerie atmosphere around him. The surroundings are overwhelmingly dark and the intensity builds steadily throughout. Hooker also kicks out some interesting sax licks and I'd love to hear him take off a bit rather than just blasting out the brief teasers that he does.

In some ways Turn A Deaf Ear is similar to the music heard on Wires And Wooden Boxes but with an avant improv theatrical acid rock edge. There are some excellent instrumental moments and these proved to be the strongest parts for this listener as the vocal rants didn't always work for me. But overall a fine pair of recordings featuring Diaz-Infante and Forsyth hat I enjoyed hearing back to back.
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Wires and Wooden Boxes' is an exercise in free improvisation within self-imposed boundaries. Before each track, Ernesto Diaz-Infante and Chris Forsyth came up with a direction that they'd take while performing, forcing them to focus on navigating the music together rather than shooting down the rapids of experimentation with only carte blanche as a compass.

The opening track is the most arresting. 'NYC Journal excerpt (2000) piano/guitar' is based on music interpreted from ink drawings and scraps of words, somehow guiding the duo as they create the track with piano and static generated from the input jack and live power-cord plug of an electric guitar. The journey sounds as if it's grounded in an uneasy companionship between Morton Feldman and Aube. Tentative and restrained explorations on the piano produce a climate of foreboding, while the stabs of electricity cut through this delicacy like a machete.

Other tracks forego this dichotomy and opt for a more direct delivery. 'Straight To It' moves like a river that flows to a waterfall. Quick, short runs on the piano grow stronger in volume and frequency. An electric guitar joins in, duplicating the turbulence until the two tumble over each other in a vehement rush. 'Pulled Wires... "Acoustic/Electric #13"' doesn't even bother with a build-up. Acoustic and electric guitars are pulled and plucked viciously, the strings glistening with the abuse.

As mentioned in the liner notes to 'Wires and Wooden Boxes', in improv music "... the 'free' approach can often yield vocabularies and styles which become rigid and repetitive over time". Diaz-Infante and Forsyth circumvent this stagnation by ensuring that their compositions, and the way that they build them, are challenging and fresh from the beginning.
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The title of this CD makes me think of Bo Diddley and Marcel Duchamp in one startling inner gaze! Maybe that is not so off either, with some Diddleyish strumming and some Duchampian ready-mades allowed into the vibrancy of the sounding space!

When this duo emerges again – their last release together; “Left & Right”, in fresh memory – it is with a slightly different set of circumstances and new ideas. The last recording was done in solitary confinements across the U.S.A., since Forsyth recorded his parts on the East Coast and Diaz-Infante in his region over on the hip West Coast, swapping musical clips across the continent like Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg delivering poems by car or boxcar-boxcar-boxcar through the Grandfathers’ nights of the 1950s from New York to San Francisco and vice versa – but now by the faster means of the digital era… This set of recordings, though, was realized and made manifest with both musicians present, which of course is a totally different aspect of music-making; a more traditional way – but traditionalism is not to be expected when these extremely innovative, diligent and spiritual sound-mongers are at ease!

For one thing, they have extended their range of instruments since last time, now exploring for example an upright piano soundboard, toy piano etcetera, while alternate tunings also are utilized. Diaz-Infante applies screwdrivers, alligator clips and bells to enhance his acoustic guitar, while Forsyth uses a distortion box, a volume pedal and more.

The first piece – “NYC Journal excerpt (2000) piano/guitar” - works with extremes, which enhance each other, throw a bright light on each other. You hear Diaz-Infante in crystal clear, meditative piano threads; thin, sparse, transparent, with Forsyth’s self-inflicted electric static from the guitar’s input jacket! The effect is simply beautiful. The static itself resembles the eerie sounds of “Over de Dood en de Tijd” by Gilius van Bergeijk, which is a latter day homage to Schubert and his “Der Tod und das Mädchen”. Diaz-Infante and Forsyth pan the center of attention between the scratchy static and the wonderful timbres of the crystal piano, and my ears accept the sonic indecencies with pleasure!

“metallic strands… acoustic/electric #14” is a plucking, munching, trilling kind of journey, hand and fingers fumbling all over the resounding environment. This is probably – though genuinely mad – more in the improvising gender, out on a limb. There are more ways to make a guitar sing than Johnny B. Goode could ever have dreamt, and the brittle and sometimes crude flows out of the cornucopia of these two gentlemen who span a continent!

It strikes me, listening to track 3 – “sound is good all the time” – how much that piece has in common with some of the intuitive music of Karlheinz Stockhausen from 1968. I’m especially thinking of one of the pieces out of “Aus den sieben Tagen”; “Intenistät”, the way it came out when recorded in 1969, later issued as part of Volume 14 (seven CDs) of the Stockhausen Edition. Much of the handicraft notion (as if the music is hammered and sawed and polished in a carpenter’s workshop) is present on Diaz-Infante’s & Forsyth’s CD too, and maybe that is the farthest you can get on the road towards that elusive golden age of fulfilled improvisation, in which all the aspects of sound and motion come together in one line of vibrating sound, or a dense fabric of sound, like a standing wave through space and time. It’s a crunchy piece of work too, at times, in a mimicry of corn flakes flowing out of the package down into the bowl when it’s good-morning-time in the land.

Track 4 – “straight to it” – has Diaz-Infante coming on like he did on “Solus”, with notes tripping over each other in a heads-over-heels fashion, only this is no piano solo piece. Instead Forsyth’s electric guitar performs a shadow dance blotting-paper-close to Diaz-Infante’s spurting spirals of over-powering speed-keyboards. It’s fascinating to hear how these musicians are as one on this rather complicated piece. Again I get associations to Stockhausen, and this time to “Sirius”, in which the soloists sometimes achieve synchronousity that is out of this world. I’m very impressed by what these guys do on this track. It’s magic managing to keep this event together, especially when Diaz-Infante gets into a fury worthy of the faster pieces by player-piano-guru Conlon Nancarrow.

“pulled wires…acoustic/electric #13” again feels more at home in the down home improvising nitty-gritty of spellbinders, the guys performing on electrified and non-electric guitars, with all the bending maneuvers you can think of to twist and pull a set of strings; holy smoke and holy medallion!

“passing one another… acoustic/electric # 17” is a beautifier with comments on 1960’s and 70’s bar benders. Somewhere inside all this bravura and ingenuity a “Stairway to Heaven” is hidden, if only by color and atmosphere; I can feel it (like Hal said…). This definitely is a comment on the Byrds too, with a real 12-string feel to it, and groups like Yes receive homage! I wonder if Diaz-Infante and Forsyth thought about this when laying this tune down on digital media; no matter what – it’s beautiful and touching, full of color and bursting with feelings!

Track 7 is called “knock on wood… acoustic/electric # 11”. A lot of knocking on the acoustic guitar is going on; very percussive, while Forsyth twangs and bends his amplified strings in a splendor. The activity is intense, and I can see the guys bending towards each other in a “c’mon!” of startling energy! Diaz-Infante has attached bells to his acoustic guitar, which enhance, and comment on, his sleek fingerings.

Number 8 is “cut and dried… acoustic/electric 2”. Brittle and soaring acoustic Diaz-Infante guitar strings get the piece moving ever so lightly and gently, as Forsyth accommodates himself in this rather sparsely populated area with equally gentle electrifications. The speed picks up while the gentle touch remains, and we’re making our way through dense bamboo groves. Later Diaz-Infante is trying – in vain? – to shake the lice loose from inside his guitar, and the piece calms down abruptly, the shaking and scratching easing off into inter-track digital silence.

“to place in… acoustic/electric # 12” emerges out of a submarine sound world of shiny fish scratching bellies on sharp reefs as the light from above the surface reaches down in billowing movements to the swaying undersea plants. A seaman drops a mash of crushed rusk from the rail of his 19th century ship, and it floats down like a pointillist maze of guitar tones all around the two musicians.



The 10th and last piece on this CD – “trace out motion” - starts off with a Rileyish “In C” piano pulse, which changes pitch over and over again, while Forsyth tries to get inside the event with distant, short bursts of his electric guitar. Little bells ring like a saffron yellow Hare Krishna persuasion, as the bald-heads are giving you a book of Bhagavad-Gita on a busy street, telling you it’s a gift, looking sour as you take their word for it and leave without as much as a frown with the book, stacking it in your cozy quarters beside all the Jehovah’s Witnesses books and the bound edition of the Bardo Thödol; the Tibetan Book of the Dead.
The tune takes on a guise of a mixture of Debussy, La Monte Young and Lubomyr Melnyk (impressionism, minimalism and continuous music), and the piece – and the CD - times out slowly and wonderfully into the silence of interstellar space, through which all energies flows for ever and ever.
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