The Squid's Ear Magazine

Sergio Armaroli Quintet (Armaroli / Sharp / Piccolo / Edwards / Sanders)

Introducing A Very Heavy Person, First Visit To The Audio Equivalent Of A Graphic Novel.

Sergio Armaroli Quintet (Armaroli / Sharp / Piccolo / Edwards / Sanders): Introducing A Very Heavy P (ezz-thetics by Hat Hut Records Ltd)

Blurring the boundaries between composition, improvisation, and spoken word, percussionist Sergio Armaroli leads a quintet of Elliott Sharp, Steve Piccolo, John Edwards, and Mark Sanders in an evocative, time-bending sonic narrative, drawing inspiration from John Cage, Kenneth Patchen, and free jazz traditions in a phantasmagorical soundscape and an immersive auditory experience.
 

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Personnel:



Sergio Armaroli-vibraphone

Elliott Sharp-guitar, soprano saxophone, vibraphone

Steve Piccolo-speech and electronic devices, vibraphone

John Edwards-double bass

Mark Sanders-drums


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Includes a fold-out postcard style image

UPC: 752156711421

Label: ezz-thetics by Hat Hut Records Ltd
Catalog ID: ezz-thetics 114
Squidco Product Code: 35745

Format: CD
Condition: New
Released: 2025
Country: Switzerland
Packaging: Cardstock Wallet with Image Insert
Recorded at Blackstar Recording Studio, Milan, Italy, on September 15-16, 2023 by Raffaele Stefani; Mixing and PRE-mastering by Elliott Sharp; Final mastering by Michael Brändli, Hardstudios AG.

Descriptions, Reviews, &c.

"If you reject the assumption that time is linear, the ability to conceive of a time machine is simple. Assume for this discussion that the concepts of past, present, and future are a false dichotomy. In other words, the past and the future simultaneously occur with the present. Composer and percussionist Sergio Armaroli accepts this premise and his quintet accomplishes a rather time-less travel through twelve tracks.

Let's back up a bit. In his career, Armaroli has been a student and interpreter of the music and philosophy of John Cage. Like Cage, his music has been influenced by poetry, painting, and philosophy. This recording from September of 2023 has a through-line connection to a radio performance from May 31, 1942, in Chicago. John Cage was commissioned by CBS Radio to write music for The City Wears a Slouch Hat, a radio play written by Kenneth Patchen in 1941. Patchen (1911-1972), also known as the 'father of the beats,' was a poet, an activist, and a committed pacifist. Late in his career, he could be heard reading his poems accompanied by jazz musicians such as Charles Mingus and Allyn Ferguson. In recent times, Patchen's poems have inspired the music of Peter Brötzmann and John Hollenbeck's Claudia Quintet.

The City Wears a Slouch Hat broadcast was a combination of surrealism, metaphysics, and Elizabethan poetry with a male identified only as "The Voice" walking through a city and encountering people, including the homeless, gangsters, a drunk, a woman who believes (incorrectly) that her face is horribly scarred, and at some point the narrator is even robbed. The play is scored for five percussionists who add live and recorded sound effects. While radio plays, in general, were popular in the time before television, audiences weren't prepared for the conceptual nature of both the script and the sounds generated by tin cans, gongs, woodblocks, alarm bells, a tam-tam, a bass drum, Chinese tom-toms, bongos, cowbells, maracas, claves, ratchet, pod rattle, foghorn, thunder sheet, and the sound-effect recordings. While the play in 1942 suffered from what Australian-born art critic Robert Hughes described as the 'shock of the new,' with the advent and acceptance of free jazz and free improvisation today, we have no such obstacles, well at least for open-minded listeners.

Time-traveling Sergio Armaroli takes advantage of this openness. He has previously worked with Downtown legend Elliott Sharp and Steve Piccolo of Lounge Lizards fame. This session also adds two giants of the UK free improvisation scene, bassist John Edwards and drummer Mark Sanders. The pair are favorites of musicians such as Evan Parker, John Butcher, and Paul Dunmall.

In the 1950s and 60s, John Cage developed an aversion to improvisation in his music, but at the time of this radio play and again in the 1970s he embraced some elements of the art form. Armaroli's Quintet doesn't so much perform a radio play as they create the audio equivalent of a graphic novel. Analogous to Patchen's character "The Voice," Piccolo opens "Intro" declaring the caveat "quite possibly extinct or soon-to-vanish sounds that will live on only in the minds of those who heard them in the past." His prophetic words detail the remaining 13 figure(s) or melodic fragments Armaroli has created for this quintet. Sergio explains, that the music is "completely improvised from every single Figure(s) you can find in the score... melodic fragments in the key of G for guitar or soprano by Elliott Sharp and in the key of F for double bass by John Edwards. Each individual Figure was improvised freely choosing first, not always, a rhythmic groove, an idea of style, but always leaving everything possible and open to the moment." With the musical talent assembled, Armaroli's Figure(s) or melodic fragments are all he required for this storytelling adventure.

Like Patchen's script for "The Voice" in The City Wears a Slouch Hat, Piccolo's utterances describe people, objects, places, and actions such as "iron scaffolding shaking in the wind," "chewing on crackers," and "scraping frosted windshield." Piccolo's verses which are the counterpart to Armaroli's Figure(s), could just as easily have been uttered in Chicago 1942. Both cue the assembled musicians to illustrate the pages of this phantasmagorical graphic novel for the listener."-Mark Corroto, November 2024


Includes a fold-out postcard style image

Artist Biographies

"Sergio Armaroli is a composer, percussionist, vibraphonist, teacher and total artist. His actions resonate through various artistic and musical fields, that of jazz being, perhaps, his most practised. He declares himself to be a painter, concrete percussionist, fragmentary poet and sound artist as well as founding his work "within the language of jazz and improvisation" as an "extension of the concept of art"."

-Sergio Armaroli Website (https://www.sergioarmaroli.com/about-sergio-armaroli/)
3/5/2025

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

"Elliott Sharp is an American multi-instrumentalist, composer, and performer.

A central figure in the avant-garde and experimental music scene in New York City for over 30 years, Elliott Sharp has released over eighty-five recordings ranging from orchestral music to blues, jazz, noise, no wave rock, and techno music. He leads the projects Carbon and Orchestra Carbon, Tectonics, and Terraplane and has pioneered ways of applying fractal geometry, chaos theory, and genetic metaphors to musical composition and interaction.

His collaborators have included Radio-Sinfonie Frankfurt; pop singer Debbie Harry; Ensemble Modern; Qawwali singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan; Kronos String Quartet; Ensemble Resonanz; cello innovator Frances Marie Uitti; blues legends Hubert Sumlin and Pops Staples; pipa virtuoso Min-Xiao Feng; jazz greats Jack deJohnette, Oliver Lake, and Sonny Sharrock; multimedia artists Christian Marclay and Pierre Huyghe; and Bachir Attar, leader of the Master Musicians Of Jajouka.

Sharp is a 2014 Guggenheim Fellow, and a 2014 Fellow at Parson's Center for Transformative Media. He received the 2015 Berlin Prize in Musical Composition from the American Academy in Berlin. He has composed scores for feature films and documentaries; created sound-design for interstitials on The Sundance Channel, MTV and Bravo networks; and has presented numerous sound installations in art galleries and museums. He is the subject of a new documentary "Doing The Don't" by filmmaker Bert Shapiro."-Elliott Sharp

-Elliott Sharp website (http://www.elliottsharp.com/bio.html)
3/5/2025

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

"Steve Piccolo (USA, lives and works in Milan, Italy). After studying at Bard College and New York University, he began his career in the 1970s playing bass in jazz groups and doing sound/performance in New York art spaces. In 1979 he started the Lounge Lizards with the Lurie brothers, a project which continued for about five years.

Active since the mid-1970s in music, theater, performance art, sound installations, video and film soundtracks. His activities as a musician, composer, artist, curator and teacher have become too numerous, frequent and varied to list them all here. He has exhibited/performed at the Kitchen, Franklin Furnace, Environ, Squat Theater, PASS, La Mama, Issue Project Room, The Stone (all in NYC, from 1979 to 2010), Zona Gallery Florence (1982), Galleria Peccolo Livorno (1982, 2006), Documenta 8 Kassel (1987), La Rada Locarno (1989, 2004), Japanese Institute of Culture Rome (2003), MAMCO Geneva (2003), Palazzo delle Papesse Siena (2003, 2005, 2007), Base Gallery Florence (2004), FRAC Bretagne (2004, 2014), Triennale Milan (2004-05-07-09), Villa Croce Genoa (2005, 2012), Berlin Jazz Festival (1981 and 2005), Technical Breakdown Copenhagen (2005-06), Swiss Cultural Center Milan (2005), Venice Art Biennale (with WPS1, 2005, and with performances in Belgian and Greek pavilions, 2015), Sant'Arcangelo Festival (2005), Itinerario Festival Cesena (2005, 2007, 2014), Galleria Mazzoli Modena (2006), Turchin Center for the Arts Boone NC (2006, with residency), Trinity College Wales (2006), Venice Music Biennial (2006), ArtBasel Miami (2006), Kettle's Yard Cambridge (2006), Babel Festival Bellinzona (2006), Moscow Biennial (2007), MiArt (2007), Swiss Cultural Institute Rome (2007), Spazio Mudima Milan (2007), SoundRes Lecce (2007), Experimenta Arts Festival Alberobello (2007), Performa New York (2007), Istanbul Biennial (2007), Body Process Arts Festival Istanbul (2007), Art Shakes Politics Messina (2007), Spazio Oberdan Milan (2008), Venice Film Festival (2008), Plektrum Festival Tallinn (2008), Venice Architecture Biennial (2008), GAM (now MAGA) Museum Gallarate (2008), City of Bergamo public art project (2008), Casino Luxembourg (2009), Metropolitan Museum New York (2009), City of Piacenza public art project (2009), Neon Bologna (2009, 2010), Parco d'Arte Vivente Turin (2010), Galleria Continua San Gimignano (2010), Loop Festival Barcelona (2010), Novara Jazz Festival (2010), (un)defined festival Merano (2010), Grrr Jamming Squeak Rotterdam (2011), TeatroStudio Scandicci (2011), group show I Miss My Enemies (collateral event Venice Art Biennial 2011), Festival of Imperial Gardens St. Petersburg Russia (2011) Isola Art Center Milan (exhibitions and local activism since 2002), Tirana Art Center (2011), Taller Seite Medellin (2011), Milano Film Festival (2011), Evento Bordeaux (2011), Auditorium Parco della Musica Rome (2012), Contemporary Locus Bergamo (2012), Festival della Filosofia, Modena (2012), MAAXI Rome (2014), Manifesta 10 St. Petersburg (2014), Vienna Secession (2014), Expo Milano (2015), Italian Cultural Institute Bratislava (2015), National Gallery of Arts Tirana, ONUFRI Prize (2016), Vienna Kunsthall (sounds for Nathalie Du Pasquier, 2016), Innsbruck International (with LF Nagler, 2016), Palazzo Reale Milan (VR project in exhibition by A. Pomodoro, with Oliver Pavicevic). Many of these projects were done in ongoing collaboration with Japanese musician/sound artist Gak Sato. Piccolo was sound curator at ArtVerona in 2008 and for the exhibition "Club 21" during Frieze 2010 in London, and curator of the project Chinatown Temporary Art Museum for Undo.net's participation at InContemporanea Milan in 2008. His collaborations on art video/performance/installation soundtracks include works with Adrian Paci, Luca Pancrazzi (including sound art group DE-ABC with Gak Sato), A Constructed World, Giancarlo Norese, Alessandro Mendini, Nathalie Du Pasquier, Gabriele Di Matteo, Marc Vincent Kalinka, Marzia Migliora, VedovaMazzei and many others. He has published many records (see discography on this website). He has taught art courses at Accademia Carrara Bergamo (2002-2014), NABA Milan (2005-13), and Politecnico di Milano (Piacenza campus). His writings have been published in many international journals, magazines and books, including 4 years of a monthly column for the magazine InSound and curating of sound art pages at the Undo.Net website. Steve was one of the active members of Isola Art Center in Milan (2001-2013), and is currently part of the magazine-collective E IL TOPO (since 2009). Projects for 2017 include a workshop at Galleria Nazionale Rome and a performance at Museo Vincenzo Vela (Ticino). He has founded and curates, together with Sergio Armaroli, a space for sound art and poetry in Milan, ERRATUM, and he is a founding member of the cultural association Città Sonora."

-Steve Piccolo Website (http://stevepiccolo.com/?page_id=8)
3/5/2025

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

"After taking up the bass, around 1987, John Edwards co-formed The Pointy Birds who went on to win awards for their music for The Cholmondeleys and Featherstonehaughs dance troupes. The group appeared at festivals in Glasgow, Edinburgh, Moers, Leverkusen, Copenhagen. Around 1990, Edwards played his first gigs with London improvisers such as Roger Turner, Lol Coxhill, Maggie Nicols, Phil Minton.

Between 1990 and 1995 Edwards was a member of three touring groups simultaneously: B-Shops For The Poor, The Honkies and GOD. During this period he also became an increasingly regular player on the London improvised music scene and performed his first solo gigs; he composed and performed music theatre with the bass and cello duo The Great Explorers, street-busked a lot and appeared at many more festivals in Germany, Estonia, France, Italy, Czech, etc.

Since 1995 John Edwards has become a "mainstay" of the London scene, playing with just about everybody, an activity that has seen him clocking up between 150 and 200 gigs a year. He has become regular player with Evan Parker, in many groupings, and with Tony Bevan, Veryan Weston, and Elton Dean, often in collaboration with Mark Sanders on percussion. He has become a more frequent player on the European (and festival) scene, appearing at Taktlos, Ulrichsburg, Nickelsdorf, Budapest, New Zealand and in the USA. He continues to work on solo performances."

-EFI (http://www.efi.group.shef.ac.uk/musician/medwards.html)
3/5/2025

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

"Mark Sanders has played with many renowned musicians including Roscoe Mitchell, Wadada Leo Smith, Derek Bailey, Henry Grimes, Roswell Rudd, Peter Brotzmann, Barry Guy, Otomo Yoshihide, Jah Wobble, Sidsel Endresen , Charles Gayle, Peter Evans and William Parker. He works with John Edwards in a duo and with groups including Evan Parker, `Foils` with Frank Paul Schubert and Matthius Muller and groups with Veryan Weston, John Tilbury, Agusti Fernandez and Mathew Shipp. Mark works in a regular improvising duo with John Butcher and also performing John`s composition `Tarab Cuts` which has played festivals in Rio de Janiero, Amsterdam, Barcelona, Glasgow, Bristol and London. In a trio with cellist Okkyung Lee, John and Mark have played in Belgium, France, England and Scotland. He also has a longstanding duo with Sarah Gail Brand which has featured on the BBC`s `The Stuart Lee Show`and in the film `Taking the dog for a Walk`.

He has performed solo for a Christian Marclay exhibition at The White Cube Gallery in London, Evan Parker`s festival`Unwhitstable` in Wroclaw, Poland for `Solos Festival` The 100 Years Gallery London, an improvised music series in Derby and Cafe Oto in London. Working with Christian Marclay in his `Everyday` piece for film and live music, he has performed in Aldeburgh, Ruhr Trienalle, Vienna Bienalle, Holland festival and London`s QEH and has also collaborated with him playing for the film `Screenplay`in London and Lisbon. In situations using composition in one form or another Mark works in various projects including `13 Vices` with Brian Irvine/Jennifer Walshe, Alex Hawkins Ensemble featuring Peter Evans, Simon Fell Ensembe, groups with Hasse Poulsen and Luc Ex , Sarah Sarhandi`s `Both Universe`, Elaine Mitchener`s `Sweet Tooth` and has played in the groups of Shabaka Hutchings including`Sons of Kemet` Conceptual Artist Sam Belinfante collaborated with Mark in his piece `On the One Hand, and the Other` in two exhibitions at Camden Arts Centre, London For Conceptual artist Henrik Hakensen`s film `The End` he has performed as an improvising soloist with orchestras conductedd by Jessica Cottis, playing the music of John Coxon in Glasgow, Sydney and Monte Carlo As a guest with New York`s ICE Ensemble he has performed John Zorn`s `The Tempest` in London and at Huddersfield New Music Festival.

Mark also works in the groups of Paul Dunmall including Deep Whole Trio with Paul Rogers, in duo and `Frisque Concordance` with Georg Graewe , and the ensembles of Mikolaj Trzaska, Uwe Oberg and Peter Jaquemyn. He has performed in the USA, Canada, Brazil, Japan, Morrocco, South Africa, Australia, Mozambique and Turkey, playing at many major festivals including Nickelsdorf, Riga, Ulrichsburg, Glastonbury, Womad, Vancouver, Isle of Wight, Roskilde, Berlin Jazz days, FMP, Mulhouse, Luz, Minniapolis, Banlieue Bleues, Son D`hiver and Hurta Cordel."

-Mark Sanders Website (http://www.marksanders.me.uk/biography.html)
3/5/2025

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


Track Listing:



1. Intro 7:19

2. Pigs Grunting 8:54

3. The Train 7:39

4. Chewing On Crackers 5:35

5. BluBottleFly 6:12

6. Rubber Boots 4:05

7. Iron Scaffolding 5:07

8. 20 Scratchin Pencils 5:23

9. Scraping Frost Windshield 4:33

10. Wheezing Lungs 6:11

11. Small Scissors 2:49

12. Low Groan 5:11

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Spoken Word
Staff Picks & Recommended Items
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ezz-thetics by Hat Hut Records Ltd.


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