If you've not already caught these reviews from Sweden's Stephen Fruitman (who occasionally posts to Hyperreal's Ambient Mailing List), here are his latest. Stephen's attentive ears and expressive thoughts are appreciated by many, and I'm glad to offer this forum to my e-friend. Simon Haram: Alone... (Black Box) Simon Haram is a saxophonist who has apparently worked closely with "minimalist" composers like John Adams and Michael Nyman, several of whose pieces are covered here on his new CD Alone..., all to fine effect. Haram restricts himself to the soprano sax on all the cuts, often accompanied by a small ensemble of strings. Very pretty music indeed. His cover of Bowie and Eno's Warszawa is surprisingly faithful to the original, or perhaps even closer to Philip Glass' orchestral arrangement. Over a discreetly pulsing bass and small string ensemble, the saxophone naturally takes the melodic, narrative lead, even "voicing" the Bowie nonsense vocals, the only instance on the record when a chord of dissonance is struck. In the final moments, the saxophone combines nicely with the strings to bring it all home. A fine CD, worth having if you are curious to hear the saxophone as a mild, melodious ambient instrument, though perhaps not so much for the Eno cover, which though pleasant indeed, is hardly essential. However, this CD provides yet another example of how "seriously" Eno is now being taken as a "real" composer rather than the fringe figure critics have regarded him as throughout the eighties and most of the present decade. Gavin Bryars: The North Shore (Materiali Sonori) The name of Gavin Bryars is often associated with high-concept minimalistic works like Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet or The Sinking of the Titanic; I've even seen them pop up on All-Time Greatest Ambient lists compiled here. And rightly so. But the English composer also scribes less grandiose pieces as well, and three of them are now available on a wonderful little album released by Materiali Sonori in Italy. The North Shore is an evocation of the coastline at Whitby in North Yorkshire, where Bryars spent his childhood summers, displaying (ambiently speaking) as much evocative power of "real" landscapes as Eno's Dunwich Beach, Autumn 1960. A fine version of this already exists on A Man in a Room, Gambling, but here Bryars has rearranged it for cello and piano and the result is stunning. The players are members of the tiny ensemble Harmonia, and while only two of them appear on The North Shore, pianist Alessandra Garosi and cellist Damiano Puliti are joined by remaining member Orio Odori on clarinet for Intermezzo, commissioned directly from Bryars by Harmonia. Finally, the cellist withdraws and Odori and Garosi approach Allegrasco (also previously available, on ECM's After the Requiem and with a larger ensemble including violinist Alexander Balanescu and guitarist Bill Frisell) as a duet featuring luscious, fluid clarinet lines. Lyrical and melancholic, the three pieces provide an excellent showcase for Harmonia, who perform throughout with consummate musicianship and admirable restraint. A brief 42 minutes in length, it is still perhaps the finest chamber music release of the year. Antonio Testa & Alio Die: Healing Herb's Spirit and Five Thousand Spirits: Mesmeric Revelation (Crowd Control Activities) Two collaborative efforts starring Italian ambient minimalist Stefano Musso, aka Alio Die. Healing Herb's Spirit is a perfect example of everything that is right with ethno-ambient music. Gorgeous, slowly-evolving atmospheres - perhaps best exemplified on the track Icaros - conjuring both comfort and unease are lent pulse and physicality through Antonio Testa's exotic percussion, ranging from the rattling of sea shells to beating of the "water pumpkin". A strangely aquatic atmosphere dominates throughout, but be wary of the undertow. Trading under the name Five Thousand Spirits, Mesmeric Revelation pairs Musso with Raffaele Serra in five untitled pieces. The first, at over thirty minutes taking up half the record, is an exploration of subtle drones flavoured with sparing percussive elements and the odd synthesizer twinkle. Stellar. In comparison the four remaining tracks appear as miniatures (on track three, Serra makes excellent use of a harmonium), brief exercises in timbre and tone, interesting but overshadowed by the majesty of the first track. Bill Laswell: Rasa: Serene Timeless Joy (Meta) Rasa may just be Bill Laswell's finest exercise in True Ambient ever. Layered over soundscapes captured at the Buddhist monument Borobudur and its surrounding sacred mountains in Java, magical tones, bell-like loops and soft tom-toms develop organically for a full hour. Rich and varied, its evolution is both linear and cyclical. The piece quite simply "breathes", in the way in which a classic Vidna Obmana record does. Wave upon wave of sonic stillness washes up and recedes, only to reveal new and unexpected charms. And interestingly for a Laswell album, the bass doesn't make its appearance until the thirty-sixth minute, and then only as a brief interlude. Truly timeless music. Aki Onda: Beautiful Contradiction and Un Petit Tour (All Access) A new voice emerges from Japan and immediately stakes its claim to a territory all its own. Thirty-one-year-old Aki Onda has paid his dues in elektro, noise and hiphop, as well as being a sought-after producer, and now emerges as an ambitious soundscaper of great gifts. A mature hand guides the sounds culled from collaborators as diverse as Europeans Simon Fisher Turner, Blixa Bargeld and NoÎl AkchotÚ and brilliant Japanese players like Jyoji Sawada, Kazutoki Umeza and Onda himself (cassette recorder, sampler, programming), with a handful of American avantjazz names like Steven Bernstein and Ben Perowsky thrown in for good measure. Recorded in London, Tokyo, New York and Paris, his first solo CD Beautiful Contradiction has the atmosphere of an imaginary movie soundtrack. Opening with Chrysanthemum, an ambient piece of great beauty which then gives way to the sampler/flugelhorn/guitar duel of Red Light, the record thus embarks on a fifty-minute journey featuring an array of styles and top-flight musicians so diverse yet so cohesive, and including occasional vocals in German (the wonderfully suggestive In Windungen sung by Bargeld), Turkish and English (a slightly seedy story of doomed love growled forth by Linda Sharrock). Rosemary is a remarkable composition featuring the trilling of glassharps propelled along a bed of electronics by snare drum, while Petal is a short jazz chamber piece that wouldn't sound out of place on one of John Zorn's Masada ensemble recordings. Beautiful Contradiction dwells at the crossroads of acoustic and electronic music, extracting the essences of both and producing something quite unique in the process. The final impression is that of a restless cosmopolitan in love with sound, not merely for its own sake but for its narrative properties. The second and latest release, Un Petit Tour, is unavoidably more of a hörspiel due to the predominance of narration - reflections on love penned mostly by Onda and told in French by several voices. The spoken words are linked a kind of free-jazz scarlet thread, with the trumpet of Bernard Vitet (a little bit Hassell, a little bit Kondo) and the programming of Onda dominating. A delicate solo on the Japanese sanshin by Jyoji Sawada (who by the way is all over Beautiful Contradictions, playing a wide array of instruments and even composing one of its tracks) leads off the track Oú es-tu donc?, before other instruments begin scraping away at its fragile veneer. The music on this release is much more jagged than on Beautiful Contradiction, though the smokey, late-night guitar/trumpet duet which closes the album is just lovely. Both are packaged in equally handsome digipaks, with the latter featuring a gallery of photographs by Ayako Mogi which serve well as a visual complement to the sounds within. Aki Onda is an artist worth keeping a very close eye on in the years to come. Jon Hassell: Fascinoma (Water Lily Acoustics) Among all the so-called ambient musicians both old and new, Jon Hassell's music has always seemed to me to be imbued with the most "emotion"; while an Eno or a Budd can certainly conjure up moods and feelings with their unparalleled soundscaping abilities, Hassell's music seems to come directly from the gut and out of the bell of his trumpet itself. Therein perhaps lies the explanation: in common with Eno, many ambient artists have styled themselves as "non-musicians", idea men who are adept with a synthesizer, sequencer, programmer, whatever, but whom one rarely hears referred to as "one of the great [name of instrument here] players of our day". Hassell, on the other hand, while also a brilliant idea man, is precisely that. Over the decades since his first recording he has fashioned a trumpet sound which defies comparison - only inspires admiration and imitation. And though the whispering, breathy style which made him and his Fourth World sound famous is likely to be that which gets him into the history books, he has also shown that he can blast it and funk it up (City: Works of Fiction). Now he proves that he knows how to caress it, too. Backed up by the likes of Ry Cooder on guitar and Jacky Terrasson on piano, Hassell has chosen for the first time to interweave other composers' works with his own on Fascinoma - "musical exotica", he calls these tracks (there's a lot of that in the air nowadays, isn't there? Perhaps it is not surprising to discover that Hassell is quite good friends with David Toop, who has recently written a book on the subject). He does marvellous things with Nature Boy and Duke Ellington's Caravanesque (twice), but truth be know, he could choose to interpret "Mary Had a Little Lamb" or the old Soviet national anthem and still spellbind. Together with the five tunes he and his collaborators have penned, the ten tracks comprise a seamless, thematic whole, an exercise in stretching space and time which succeeds over every second of this recording, where the silences between notes say as much as the melodies. On Fascinoma one hears the trumpet more clearly than any previous Hassell album, its sound more rich and well-rounded than ever before. This is undoubtably the acoustic ambient album of the year, indeed one of the best jazz albums of the year, too, and a brilliant extension of the work of a constantly evolving, challenging musician. Still, all things considered this is no drastic about-face from his previous production, and fans of Possible Musics and Powerspot will feel quite at home. Stephen Fruitman's Reviews were posted here on October 27.

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