Gareth Davis & Machinefabriek
1. My Funny Valentine
2. Oh, Doctor Jesus
5-inch vinyl on Brian Records
Download on bandcamp, July 2011
First released as a super cute 5-inch vinyl record, this single is another collaboration with Gareth Davis, but this time it's far less abstract then our other outings. It's two jazz standards, on which Gareth's melodic bass clarinet is intimate and pure, with a backdrop of subtle electronic processing.
Availalbe as download
Vinyl is sold out
Reviews
Fluid Radio
Clarinet, fuzzy processing, stubbed out cigars in a back street pub are vehicle, passenger and idealised venue for Machinefabriek & Gareth Davis' "Jazz Standards Vol.1″. Rutger Zuyderveldt once miked up a zither at a Nottingham club in 2009, and that experimental streak serves, like his huge catalog of recordings already present, to what the second collaboration between him and multi-instrumentalist Davis was going to turn out like...
Murmered clarinet tones commence "My Funny Valentine", sentimentality blowing through the reeds, swiftly adjoined by an ostinato-esque hum from the mournful backing melody. What makes it so beautiful, is how few notes make such a lasting impression, comparable to Colleen's "Les Ondes Silenscieus". Real intimacy for equally small spaces. Plight of the instrumentalist: how you feel more can be done after one task is put into action, goes hand in hand with helping you keep track of your achievements each day. It builds your self-esteem. It shouldn't be guilt-ridden or feeling you need to do more. With this work, there's an affluence with jazz' resolution, how notes evolve and produce chords irrespective of time signature. And as love is entwined in so many daily musical activities: bashing a kit; tuning a harp; live multisampling, it makes channeling focus into digestible blocks all the more worthwhile, to your sanity as well. Lo and behold, years later you may garner endless meaning from altering your life by listening to this 'ere release.
"To accept a person does not mean that I deny his defects, that I gloss over them to try to explain them away. Neither does acceptance mean to say that everything the person does is beautiful and fine. Just the opposite is true. When I deny the defects of the person, then I certainly do not accept him. I have not touched the depth of that person. Only when I accept a person can I truly face his defects." ~ Peter G. van Breemen SJ, As Bread That Is Broken
That's essential to jazz' instrumental poise, whether it's drum solo, guitars and percussion, sax and oboe, transcendence. In this collaboration, it really kicks in for 'Oh, Doctor Jesus', the flipside of the lathe cut 5" vinyl. What it lacks in organisational business, all 1:57 of it - it shelves by its complicity to Davis and Zuyderveldt's dive into jazz and ambient decimal re-shuffle. Adore or despise it, the trademark bushy soundscapes remain unplucked from Rutger's brow. He's been applying them further back than 'Weleer' on m Lampse. But this, as with him and Davis on Sonic Pieces ('Grower' from 2010, with those being less white noise and more searing drone), produces an effect equivalent to violin pizzicato in classical music: a regularly fragile instrument being hectored for sonic information, so that it applies the right tension and release to the occasion. Combined with Gareth's little revelations in clarinet playing, they turn in five inches to beat any substandard weight loss programme in one fell swoop.
