Review Text
'Mind's Island' is completely improvised and for one voice and one guitar in microtonal tunings; exploring various harmonic, modal & rhythmic textures with a plucked, bowed or prepared guitar and a voice being used as an abstract instrument, rather than a channel for known language. Rod Poole began playing the guitar in 1972. He experimented with various musical idioms and by the mid-80s, his primary interests were acoustic-based free improvisation and finger-picked solo acoustic guitar. A founding member of the Oxford Improvisors' Cooperative, Poole's association was between the years 1983-1986. After moving to the United States in 1989, his studies in just intonation began with the world's foremost theorist on the subject, Ervin Wilson. Poole spent the next several years developing his approach to playing the guitar using just intonation theory. Poole has released a handful of unique and highly praised CDs on the W.I.N., Transparency, and Incus labels - The Dead Adder, December 96, Iasis,and The Acoustic Guitar Trio. He contributed "Kalaidoscopic Sunday" to the Henry Kaiser-curated guitar compilation, 156 Strings, and "The Fire Left to Come" to the SASSAS two-CD set, Sound, a compilation of Los Angeles-based performances curated by Cindy Bernard. Poole was also responsible for engineering the recording of all but three of the performances on Sound. He has performed with Derek Bailey, Mia Masaoka, Joseph Hammer, Kraig Grady, Nels Cline, Donald Miller, Pat Thomas, Tony Bevan, Eugene Chadbourne, and others. Sasha Bogdanowitsch is a vocalist, multi-instrumentalist & composer whose work ranges from writing for chamber ensembles to multi-track tapes with live performance to music for unique ensembles, such as gamelan and early music groups, to live and recorded music for theater, dance and film. Sasha has a Master of Arts from the University of California at Santa Cruz and a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the California Institute of the Arts, where he studied composition and world musics, integrating the two into multi-movement, interdisciplinary performances. For the voice, Sasha often uses a language of sounds and has developed a way of singing that incorporates his studies in world, early & contemporary new musics. He has composed music for numerous theater, dance & films, such as 'On Becoming,' a new vocal theater work, the TV scores of Burkittsville 7 and Shadow of the Blair Witch, Grimm, a multimedia dance theater work; and Hidden Circle, an interdisciplinary work for voice, prepared tape, movement & projections. Sasha has worked with many artists, such as: SaReel Project, Sabrina Lastman, composer Lou Harrison, American Festival of Microtonal Music, Hesperus, choreographers Faith Pilger & Otis Cook, and Meredith Monk on her new CD, Impermanence, for ECM Records, which has just been nominated for a 2009 Grammy. 'Guitarist Rod Poole's Mind Island (a joint effort with vocalist Sasha Bogdanowitsch) falls under the broad net of the avant garde, but if hearing that phrase conjures up the ghost of Albert Ayler or the electronic poems of Edgard Varese, then this release demonstrates just how wide a net is cast under that label. In the case of Poole, avant garde more closely reflects his choice of instrument, or to be precise how that instrument is tuned, rather than any non-traditional choices in the framing of the music with noise, found instrumentation or other affectations of the modernist movement. Poole chooses to work with Just tuning for his guitar. Simplistically, this means the strings are tuned to be more harmonically sympathetic than what we usually hear in tempered (standard) tuning. These kinds of microtonal differences drive many in the straight music world insane, and anything recorded using this alternative approach is instantly classified as subversive, tagged with a scarlet L (for loony) and forced to live out behind the tool shed, to be visited only by crackpots, intellectuals or your uncle who drank way too much sco
