the thing… hitting hard…

Jun.05, 2012

review in excellent mag FreiStil — from a concert at Stadtwerkstadt, Linz, march 2012

High energy! Wenn Mats Gustafsson,
Ingebrigt Håker Flaten und Paal Nilssen-
Love aufs Pedal treten, bleibt keine Bat-
terie leer. Und selbst wenn das Trio akus-
tisch, also mikrofonisch unverstärkt und
auf engstem Raum in der Linzer Stadt-
werkstatt auftritt, geht von der Wucht
ihres Freejazz kein Gramm verloren.
Nimmt uns mit auf eine Tour de Force
über Stock und Stein und Rock und Roll.
Das Ding, das große Ding (siehe auch
Platten des Monats, Seite 24!) funktio-
niert, banal beobachtet, so: Mats bläst
wie verrückt ins monströse Baritonsaxo-
fon, vereinzelt auch in kleiner Verwandte
davon; Ingebrigt strapaziert die Kontra-
basssaiten, bis man sich um sie sorgt;
Paal trommelt sich die Seele aus dem
Leib und damit in die Musik hinein, wild
und präzise zugleich.

The Thing: ein Kraft- werk, das keine Stromzufuhr zur Energie-
gewinnung benötigt, die, in Form von vie-
len kleinen Schweißperlen, zu hundert
Prozent biologisch abbaubar ist. The
Thing: Körperkunst auf höchstem, die
Physis und die Artistik forcierendem
Niveau. In der Stadtwerkstadt, diesem
Spielort, an dem im Normalfall dem Noi-
se gehuldigt wird, etabliert The Thing
einen ungewohnten Ton – aber auch
wieder einen perfekt zur Umgebung pas-
send. Ein schillerndes, schier grenzenlos
intensives Konzert.

andreas fellinger

http://freistil.klingt.org/index.html

+ review in same mag of forthcoming studioalbum MONO on smalltown superjazzz

MONO

Mats Gustafsson (bs, ts), Ingebrigt
Håker Flaten (b), Paal Nilssen-Love (dr)
Höchste Energie, mehr Licht ganz
ohne Sparlampen. Der Fluss und der
Überfluss. Der verschwenderische Um-
gang mit Intensität. Die unbändige Lust
am Zitat. Die Leidenschaft im Vorwärts-
gang. Die Muskelkraft des Freejazz. Die
Hymne mit Hirn. – Was alles von The
Thing zu kriegen ist, lässt sich im Voka-
belheft der großen Gefühle gar nicht um-
fangreich genug abbilden. Und das Ärgs-
te ist: Als reichte der Reichtum dieses
Trios des freundlichen Irrsinns nicht
schon völlig aus, umgibt es sich gele-
gentlich auch noch mit zusätzlichen Fach-
kräften. Um nur ein paar Namen zu nen-
nen: Jim O’Rourke(!), Otomo Yoshi-
hide(!!) und, demnächst auch auf einem
burgenländischen Festival unseres Ver-
trauens, Neneh Cherry(!!!). Der künstle-
rischen wie auch ideologischen Kom-
paktheit dieser handgreiflichen Zauber-
gruppe entsprechend, verliert man sich
nicht in elitären High-end-Angebereien –
sondern spielt diese Platte de facto so
ein, wie sie heißt: mono. Das Ensem-
ble, das Starkstrom mit akustischen Mit-
teln erzeugt und sonst so gern avan-
ciertes Rockmaterial herbeizitiert, fährt
hier eine einzige Coverversion auf, und
zwar eine hinreißende von Sonny Rol-
lins’ „Alfie’s Theme“. Ansonsten, abge-
sehen vom Traditional „Bruremarsj“,
stammt alles aus eigener Feder, die man
sich allerdings als Stahlfeder vorstellen
darf. The Thing, das Ding an sich, ein
Umspannwerk, immer gut für ein wuch-
tiges, an Dichte nicht zu übertreffendes
Statement (siehe auch „kurz+gut“).
Viele Volt. Phänomenal.

(felix)

reviews and more reviews…

Jun.05, 2012

the cherry thing… hitting hard…

reviews are coming in from everyfuckinwhere in scandinavia….. the release went early in the north…

worldwide release of the cherry thing is june 18th!

and the vinyl version is alreday sold out….but pressing plant is working in the next batch as we type…

http://www.nrk.no/lydverket/sexy-beist/

http://www.svd.se/kultur/musik/neneh-cherry-the-thing_7253945.svd

new 7″ – Gustafsson & Lindsjö

May.27, 2012

order it here:

http://treffpunkt.nu/release9.html

guardian interview with neneh cherry

May.27, 2012

Neneh Cherry: ‘Jazz can be the way you make love’

'She can kick the music in all directions' … Neneh Cherry. Photograph: Graeme Robertson for the Guardian ‘She can kick the music in all directions’ … Neneh Cherry. Photograph: Graeme Robertson for the Guardian

Neneh Cherry, who stormed into the 80s with Buffalo Stance, is back – with an avant-garde jazz album. She tells Jude Rogers why it took her so long

Neneh Cherry sits in her manager’s fashionable office, wearing a necklace made out of a mousetrap that swings around as she speaks. Behind her, pinned to a wall, there is a calendar featuring a topless woman. “That’s kept me going today,” laughs Cherry, her corkscrew hair looking much the same as it did in 1988, the year her hip-hop-influenced single Buffalo Stance made her a star. Musically, Cherry has travelled a long way from those days. Next month sees the release of her new album: a collection of free-jazz, avant-garde covers.

The Cherry Thing is the result of her collaboration with Norwegian/Swedish jazz trio the Thing, known for their punkish live performances: frontman and saxophonist Mats Gustafsson regularly sprays the front row of his audience with spit. To those who only remember Cherry at the height of her fame (she had four top 10 hits, including No 1 charity single Love Can Build a Bridge, with Cher and Chrissie Hynde), it sounds like a bizarre union. But once you delve into Cherry’s background, it begins to make sense.

Cherry, half-Swedish on her mother’s side, was brought up in a hippie commune in Sweden. Before her fierce pop years, she was in female punk band the Slits, then in post-punk group Rip Rig & Panic. In the last decade, Cherry has also made music away from the mainstream as part of CirKus, a downtempo collective that includes her husband, the producer Cameron McVey. Most significant, however, is the connection with her late stepfather, legendary jazz trumpeter Don Cherry: the Thing are named after a track from his 1966 album Where Is Brooklyn?

Cherry, now 48, is in buoyant mood. “I’m really proud of what we’ve done,” she says of the collaboration that began two years ago in Stockholm, when McVey and a colleague returned, excited, from a Thing gig. “They came back going, ‘I think that’s your band.’ I was like, ‘What are you talking about?” She rolls her eyes. “But OK, fine.” Cherry started hanging out with the trio; she began writing for the first time in years. “I started feeling a sense of urgency. ‘OK, I’m going to close the doors and sit down. I want to make a solo record.'”

Cherry’s last solo album, 1996’s Man, produced an international No 1 single: Seven Seconds, a duet with Youssou N’Dour (recently appointed the culture and tourism minister of Senegal). Understandably, she is feeling the pressure. “I didn’t want to have people going, ‘Here comes Neneh’s solo album! She hasn’t had an album out for 16 years!’ The kind of focus that was going to demand – it wasn’t where my head was at.” So she linked up with Oslo-based label Smalltown Supersound, home to such artists as Norwegian pop princess Annie and space disco pioneers Lindstrøm and Diskjokke. “And then the Thing were really up for doing something together, which was a massive honour. I feel a righteous connection with the wildness of what they do.”

Luckily, the Thing feel it, too. A few days after our interview, Gustafsson sends me an email from Japan, where the band are touring. It is a riot of exclamation marks. “She is the most amazing singer I have ever worked with! Period! Because she can really kick the music in all directions.”

Cherry and the trio recorded the album over four days last November. That’s a long time for a free-jazz band used to doing everything in one take, says Gustafsson – but quite the opposite for Cherry. Nor did it take place in a big-budget recording suite, but in a small studio in west London. “We were smoking roll-ups in the stairwell,” grins Cherry. “I was half-listening to Martina Topley-Bird’s Too Tough to Die on my laptop. Then we discussed tempo, they worked out roughly what they were going to do, then we just went for it.” She widens her eyes. “I was a bit shell-shocked.”

The band had 50 songs in mind; the final album has 10, all twists on an impressive variety of material, including that Topley-Bird tune played on the stairwell and one original Cherry composition, Cashback. “The tunes stretch out, they go where they go, but we wanted the whole record to feel like a bit of a punch. It’s fairly wild, but also fairly compact.” Particularly good are a stunning, languid cover of Dream Baby Dream by electropunk duo Suicide, a stuttering take on hip-hop artist MF Doom’s Accordion, and a nerve-jangling attack on the Stooges’ Dirt. Movingly, it also includes a cover of Don Cherry’s Golden Heart.

Cherry says she now feels able to deal with the legacy of her stepfather, a man who played with Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane. They were always close, she says. “The way he made music – that is something I have always had with me, but I haven’t contemplated it so much. Now I’ve maybe journeyed into it.” He died just before Man came out, and just before her youngest daughter, Mabel, was born. “Two days before he died, he sat with his hands on my stomach. It was like he was sending his last energy into her.” She is clearly moved. “Sometimes I look at her and think, ‘I wish you could have met him.’ But you know, he’s still there.”

She felt scared about exploring this bond through music. “I felt an immense … you know, I really wanted to do it right.” It helped that musician Christer Bothén – who first introduced Don to the Malian “hunter’s guitar”, an instrument he played on Lou Reed‘s 1979 album The Bells – performed on Golden Heart with them. “Just hearing his sound, because they used to play together all the time, is like hearing a lullaby.”

I mention how revelatory it was to me, as a young girl, seeing Cherry performing Buffalo Stance on Top of the Pops while pregnant (with her second child, Tyson). She recounts the press furore with glee. “I remember some doctor saying that what Neneh Cherry’s doing could cause her child harm, that sort of bollocks. But I feel really proud of having done that. I didn’t feel being pregnant took anything away from my sexuality, who I am, the woman. It felt like a positive thing to celebrate it.”

These days, she feels like a jazz musician. It’s a genre that seems to have seeped into her way of life, at least if her explanation of it is anything to go by. “Jazz can be the way you make love one night,” she says, “or something that you cook.” She laughs, and that mousetrap necklace swings again.

a new cherry thing video!!!!

May.04, 2012

THE CHERRY THING!!!!!

after the first track out there on the web, dream baby dream, by Suicide…. here is the next track on the forthcoming THE CHERRY THING album, to be released on Smalltown Supersound, June 18th

check it out!

Accordion – by the great MF DOOM!!!

follow the link:

http://www.thefader.com/2012/05/03/video-neneh-cherry-the-thing-accordion-mf-doom-cover/

BLINDFOLD TEST IN DOWN BEAT!

May.02, 2012

a classic blindfold test is just published in DOWN BEAT…. it looks like this:

http://www.downbeat.com/digitaledition/2012/DB201206/single_page_view/122.html

the thing interview!!!

May.02, 2012

the thing interview + a streamed first track from the forthcoming album

THE CHERRY THING!!!

http://www.planetnotion.com/2012/05/01/interview-the-thing/

neneh cherry intervew!!!

May.02, 2012

http://www.planetnotion.com/2012/05/01/interview-neneh-cherry/

preorder BENGT!!!

May.02, 2012

soon out !!! —- the new solo LP ” BENGT! on Utech records

WHITE limited edition vinyl!

Artist: Mats Gustafsson
Title: Bengt
Price: $19
Format: LP (White) + CDaaEdition: 500
Length: 39’aaTrx: 2
Catalogue Number: URLP072
Released: May 19, 2012

Side A
1.Bengt A
Side B
1.Bengt B

Bengt is the new solo recording by Mats Gustafsson and is dedicated to Bengt Nordström. Mats Gustafsson plays a plastic alto sax. A classic Grafton sax. The type of sax that was used by Charlie Parker, Ornette Coleman and Bengt Nordström. Nordström is best known having produced Albert Ayler´s first recording Something Different!!!!!! on his Bird Note imprint. It is in his own role as a sax player Bengt was truly inventive. Bengt was playing solo sax improvisation already in 1962 (!!!) Nordström mentored Swedish reedman Mats Gustafsson in addition to playing in a quartet with drummer Peter Uuskyla, bassist Bjorn Ålke, and violinist Lars Svantesson. Nordström died in 2000 at age 63. Bengt is a celebration of the music and the man behind it.
From the liner notes by Swedish author Thomas Millroth- On this record you might not hear the Gustafsson you are used to, but I assure you this is the real Mats, this is the nucleus in his playing. These solo pieces are a wholeness, together forming a sounding essay about the Me in his music. The Me in Me that is Me in You – as did Ekelöf write in a poem.
Limited to 500 copies on white vinyl. LP includes cd version of the album.