The Squid's Ear Magazine


Neuringer, Kier / Rafal Mazur: The Continuum (Listen! Foundation (Fundacja Sluchaj!))

Investigating the continuity of our perceptions through sound--the one sense that flows continuously into our awareness--through a concert at Baza Club in Krakow, Poland in 2018 between alto saxophonist Keir Neuringer and acoustic bass guitarist Rafał Mazur, using magnificent technique as they tentatively then boldy exchanges waves of the past, present and future.
 

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product information:

Personnel:



Keir Neuringer-alto saxophone

Rafal Mazur-acoustic bass guitar


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UPC: 5905279364813

Label: Listen! Foundation (Fundacja Sluchaj!)
Catalog ID: 22 | 2020
Squidco Product Code: 29798

Format: CD
Condition: New
Released: 2020
Country: Poland
Packaging: Cardboard Gatefold
Recorded live at Baza Club in Krakow, Poland, on October 8th, 2018, by Rafal Drewniany.

Descriptions, Reviews, &c.

"We are used to capturing and perceiving the world through discrete events, events that always have their beginning and their end. When someone questions such an ordering of the world, without thinking about it, led by the conventional image of reality, we might answer: "everything begins and ends sometime." Everything just has its beginning and its end, that's how it is. In the oppressively introduced (and fortunately declining) dominant current cultural narrative, the world is divided into two parts - we have the so-called metaphysical intersection. And in this physical world in which you are reading these words right now, everything is temporal, that is everything must begin and end in time. Thus, everything is contingent, impermanent, and de facto, in some way unreal. It is a vision built on the basis of some kind of ignorance and religious conviction (which may be basically the same) and as such, this vision is less and less coherent with the contemporary world.

When you abandon the conventional limitations on thought and cognition and look at the world with a systemic approach to life, beginnings and ends begin to blur, lose their focus, lose their previous meaning, and ultimately cease to be clear. How to determine where a plant begins? Is it in the young shoot, in the seed, in the components from which the seed will be produced, in the plant that produced the seed? Is there at all before the integration of the elements and after their disintegration? Just "gone?" You might answer "it's there, but changed, it is something different." And where are the boundaries delineating the beginning and the end? And how were they established, and how will we establish them?

No sense so clearly demonstrates the continuity of existence as hearing. It never turns off, does not close, cannot be stopped. We listen constantly - the ears do not have the equivalent of eyelids. And we listen constantly because there is still something to listen to. There is no "soundless" state and there are no beginnings and no ends (it is our senses that lose touch with reality beyond their perceptive limits, including our hearing, which listens to only part of the available sound world). Sounds continue in a specific, 'disordered' continuum - waves flow continuously, penetrating and resonating with each other, suppressing and exciting each other; they are like a huge, polymorphic organism, fluctuating and changing constantly.

Music - sound practice - sharpens our cognition, allowing us to experience the world in its changeable and non-fragmentary form through listening. Sound and vibration affect us directly and constantly, especially when we listen to sounds in dedicated situations when we simply devote ourselves to listening to music. And though music conventionally understood and practiced in its corset of rules and regulations rather distracts the listener from the world, here we present it liberated, created spontaneously, uniting listeners with the fluid and uncontrolled matter of the world. We play another concert as if we never finished playing the last, as if we had not started, but have always been playing. The sounds flow, endless, unstoppable, undefined - ...Now it swelled, and now it died away, its peaceful and military strains clearly distinguished and given forth. Now it was clear, and now rough, as if the contracting and expanding of the elemental processes blended harmoniously (in its notes). Those notes then flowed away in waves of light, till, as when the hibernating insects first begin to move, it commanded the terrifying crash of thunder. Its end was marked by no formal conclusion, and it began again without any prelude. It seemed to die away, and then it burst into life; it came to a close, and then it rose again. So it went on regularly and inexhaustibly, and without the intervention of any pause... (Zhuangzi)"-

Rafał Mazur, translated by Keir Neuringer


Artist Biographies

"Keir Neuringer is a saxophonist, composer, and writer whose work is underpinned by interdisciplinary approaches and socio-political contextualizations. He is best known for a personal and intensely physical saxophone technique, revealed through long form solo improvisations, and is a founding member of the critically-acclaimed group Irreversible Entanglements. He co-leads the improvisation trio Dromedaries, has a decades-spanning duo with bassist Rafal Mazur, and collaborations with turntablist Matt Wright and pianist Simone Weissenfels, among others. He has traveled extensively to present his work, appeared on numerous festival stages, and given workshops throughout Europe and North America. In addition to the saxophone, he performs on electric and electronic keyboard instruments, narrates text (most notably with Dutch new music group Ensemble Klang), and composes largely outside of conventional new music scenes. He trained as a composer and saxophonist in the US, spent two years on a Fulbright research grant in Krakow, and then moved to The Hague, where he lived for eight years, curating performative audiovisual art and earning a masters degree from the experimental ArtScience Institute. He lives in upstate New York."

-Keir Neuringer Website (http://www.keirneuringer.com/)
11/29/2024

Have a better biography or biography source? Please Contact Us so that we can update this biography.

"Rafal Mazur's involvement with music began in his youth with violoncello studies in Krakow. He switched to bass guitar in the late 1980's. Since 2000 he has played an acoustic bass guitar built to his own specifications by luthier Jerzy Wysocki. He has developed an advanced and individual approach to his instrument, and to improvisation in general, in which sonority, extended technique and gesture combine effortlessly in performance. He has taken an important role in Kraków to support young artists and improvised music. A founder of the ImproArt studio of improvisation, he has performed jazz and improvised music in clubs and festivals across Poland and Europe, and in China, South Korea and Israel. In recent years he has collaborated with Lisa Ullen, Frederic Blondy, Charlotta Hug, Raymond Strid, Keir Neuringer, Zsolt Sores and others. His current focus is the band "Ensemble 56" and "Mazur/Neuringer Duo". He is an organizer of the Laboratory of Intuition, a series of spontaneous art presentations in Kraków. Mazur's main field of interest and activity is collective and solo free/spontaneous improvisation. In his practice as an improvising musician and on his way to mastery/artistry he studys Chinese philosophy (Jagiellonian University). He regards Taoism as a strong base for the enrichment of the improviser's attitude, and to this end he practices the Taoist's martial art TaiJi Quan Chen. For Mazur, following the masters of Chinese philosophy and martial arts is crucial in the development of a state of mind prepared for the unexpected situations an improviser encounters in the act of collective free improvisation. During the Polish Sound Art in China tour in 2006, Mazur presented lectures in NiHiLo Gallery in Foshan and Zendai Art Museum in Shanghai, taking the opportunity to meet Chinese improvisers and discuss and compare his approaches to improvisation, Taoism and TaiJi. Mazur's most recent work is the first album of solo acoustic bass guitar free improvisation: 'Sonor Forms'. Released by independent label DTS Records in Krakow on its Transidiomatic series, the disc is the result of investigation into the practice of solo free improvisation."

-Rafal Mazur Website (http://www.rafalmazur.eu/1bio.html)
11/29/2024

Have a better biography or biography source? Please Contact Us so that we can update this biography.


Track Listing:



1. II (The Distant Past) 26:14

2. I (The Near Past) 16:53

3. IV (The Present) 14:14

4. III (The Near Future) 12:57

5. V (The Distant Future) 6:55

Related Categories of Interest:

Improvised Music
Jazz
Free Improvisation
European Improvisation, Composition and Experimental Forms
Duo Recordings
Guitarists, &c.
Recordings by or featuring Reed & Wind Players

Search for other titles on the label:
Listen! Foundation (Fundacja Sluchaj!).


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The Squid's Ear Magazine

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