(Free Improvisation) [2CD] Teletopa - Tokyo 1972 - 2014, FLAC (tracks), lossless

In 1968 the young Sydney composer David Ahern studied in Germany with Stockhausen where he met Cornelius Cardew. The next year he travelled onto London attending Cardew’s classes in ‘Experimental Music’ at Morley College and – in a mammoth seven-hour concert at the Roundhouse on 4 May – participated (with Cardew) in performances of La Monte Young’s String Trio and also took part in the realisation of Paragraph 2 of Cardew’s The Great Learning which proved to be the catalyst for the formation of the Scratch Orchestra. These were revolutionary and defining moments in C20th music.
Returning to Sydney in 1970, one of his aims was to set up an electro-acoustic improvisation group – Teletopa was founded in Sydney in late 1970 by Ahern, Peter Evans and Roger Frampton.
Tokyo 1972 – The Triple LP release – features two 50min improvisations from a radio session at NHK studios Tokyo. The group was Ahern, Frampton, Evans and Geoffrey Collins and they were completing a 1972 world tour. The group broke up on their return to Sydney. Only a small example of their work has ever been released before.
Liner notes are a manifesto by Ahern from a 1971 pamphlet, and a newly penned Potted History of Teletopa by Geoffrey Barnard, who had been a member of the group from September 1971 until July 1972.
The tapes have sat in boxes for 42 years – with this release we can hear that Sydney in the early 1970’s had a group at the forefront of musical experimentation with a unique take on free improvisation.
This document is not just important for Australian music – it should establish them posthumously as one of the most interesting improvising collectives in experimental music anywhere in the world at this time.

In the first few years after their inception, members of AMM would occasionally ponder, "Why aren't other musicians doing what we are?" A reasonable, if slightly naive question. For all of the lumping together they've suffered with Musica Elettronica Viva or the Spontaneous Music Ensemble, those bands, for all their virtues, arose out of a crucially different set of formations than did AMM and, to anyone giving a more than cursory listen, sounded vastly different. Group Ongaku, which preceded the founding of AMM and was unknown to AMM's members (perhaps with the exception of Cardew), was closer in spirit to AMM's goals. But it was a long while before the ideas explicitly developed by AMM caught much of a footing in the improvised music world.
Except for Teletopa. I think I probably shared in common with most fans of this area of music (at least outside of Australia) an utter and complete lack of knowledge about this ensemble, organized around 1970 by David Ahern (who had been a student of Cardew's and had participated in some Scratch Orchestra events), Peter Evans and Roger Frampton (joined in 1972 by Geoffrey Collins), modeled after AMM to some degree. As Geoffrey Barnard puts it in his detailed liner notes, "AMM was the clear prototype for Teletopa, not only in regard to the type of improvisation Teletopa promulgated, but to the general ethos of the group as well." Interestingly, its brief existence (they disbanded shortly after this 1972 session) coincided with the period of AMM's first fracturing; by the time of this recording, Prevost and Gare were reinvestigating free jazz while Rowe and Cardew were expounding on Mao and Albania.
Right from the beginning of the recording, one affinity is apparent: the concern with space and extended periods of minimal activity. That said, the music would never be mistaken for AMM (not that it would aspire to be, of course). The musicians are all credited with electronics (unspecified) and percussion in addition to flute (Collins), violin (Ahern) and saxophone (Frampton); the above photo may give some idea as to their layout and devices. We at first hear a large space, empty save for dull gongs and high-register saxophone shrieks piercing the darkness. The sound world established maintains this character throughout much of the two-disc set, with little if any drone or continuo element underlying matters. As such, I found myself reminded more of the Tudor of 'Variations II' than AMM or any such ensemble, the salient difference being Tudor's ability to balance on the knife's edge of virtuosity and necessity, something that strikes this listener as supremely difficult and a level which Teletopa only occasionally reaches, not really a criticism, more a matter of a goal set very high, however implicitly. Here, there's a clear search going on, a very good thing, but it takes a while before the music really gels. A squall develops, the playing grows frenetic, particularly the saxophone (at least I think it's a saxophone; it's pitched so high and has a chalky enough sound that it's a bit hard to tell sometimes), though to their credit, there's really never a sense of any free jazz inflection. Every so often, much as in early AMM, you detect a faint tinge of mid-60s Sun Ra, but it's rare. About 20 minutes into the first disc, an enjoyable synthesis is achieved, a tight constellation of plucked, tapped and harshly rubbed sounds that suddenly emerges as a palpable presence, very strong, lasting several minutes then dissipating and morphing into the searching mode again, encountering a serious quasi-avian storm along the way, again rather Tudoresque à la Rainforest. Some deeper, more sustained tones appear toward the end of the first disc, from both electronics (sounds like an electric piano of some sort) and low percussion, presaging their greater presence later on. Before that, on Disc Two, we get some fairly disconnected...well, "noodling" would be too harsh a term but again I'm reminded of the disparity between Tudor's work with electronics, which this section superficially resembles, and attempts that fall short of his incisiveness. It's not that it's "bad", just that there's an unusually big drop off between first and second tier in this area, to my ears. My favorite moments of the entire session occur some 20 minutes into the second disc, lasting about ten minutes, and have their germination point in a series, once more, of high, shrill squeaks underlaid by low metal but this time it leads to a marvelously rich and deep interaction, the music attaining a plasticity that it had previously only touched upon. Here, there's something AMMish going on, a resonance that abstracts the music out into the world, very beautiful.
For myself, there's ultimately a bit more historical value (quite a bit) in this release than musical revelation but there's certainly enough strong work to recommend it on that account alone. For those seeking a fuller picture of post-AMM improv from this period, it's a very valuable document.