Agents
at Midnight
The full-length debut by Agents at Midnight, a New York duo formed by saxophonist Ed Chang with noise artist Ed Howard to produce playfully chaotic collages of jazz, noise and improv. The two demonstrate exactly how much these three genres can find in common. The live spontaneity of Chang's bubbling, bellowing sax, culled from hours of recording, gets cut, filtered, pasted and ground into shards by Howard. Sounds run backwards, as if the tracks are inhaling themselves. The pieces here are unrestrained in length, which suits the general aesthetic atmosphere of excess, though they overshoot with the 17 minute "Damaged Symphony for Karl Stockhausen". But this is bold, gestural stuff, spraying sound in as many directions as it can.
Sam Davies, The WIRE, Oct 2006
Dalla congiunzione
tra le etichette Quodiblet e Fargone
esce questo CD che vede coinvolti l’instancabile Ed Chang
(sassofono) e Ed Howard (electronics, armonica) in un
raggelante vortice di sonorità spossanti e burrascose.
Siamo in ambito ‘improv’, e i due non sono tipi che ci vanno
giù con delicatezza, né ambiscono ad ottenere cospicui ricavi
dalle vendite (la tiratura in questione è di sole 500 copie).
Cestinati pertanto i ‘parametri del buon senso’ in nome della
più pura espressività artistica, ci si incanala in un tunnel di
oltre un’ora che conduce dritti in profondità, e non c’è
possibilità alcuna di risalita.
Il sax di Chang è strozzato e moribondo, ma riesce bene a
interporsi tra sfuriate inattese e sibili molesti; l’armonica
punta sugli acuti con una tendenza a perforare i timpani,
mentre i collassamenti elettronici creano frantumazioni e
sciabordii droning. Da brividi se ascoltato a notte fonda.
(Quodlibet Recordings/Fargone)
(5/5)
Massimiliano Drommi
- 18-4-2007
Agents at Midnight, eh? Sounds like the kind of film noir title Barry Adamson might like. But the music doesn't: it's a collection of raw, powerful improvisations for saxophone (Chang) and electronics (and harmonica) (Howard), a fine example of how the fences that used to separate Noise and Improv have been bulldozed into the dirt by the younguns across the pond (and a few of them here in Europe too). Chang's playing – alto sax, is it? not always to tell for sure – is rough and gritty, recalling at times early Zorn. But there are none of the Kartoon Komedy Kapers that characterized old chestnuts like In Memory of Nikki Arane. This is more Sun City Girls than Sin City, a kind of field recording from another planet, and despite Howard's noble attempts to hurl him bellfirst into a septic tank of noisy sludge it's clear Chang can actually play the horn, and isn't averse to a spot of melody from time to time (though not the kind of melody your granny could dig sitting in her retirement home with the stuffed pussycat). Imagine John Klemmer ca. 1973 jamming with Wolf Eyes. You can't? Well you need to hear this then.–DW
Dan Warburton, Paris Transatlantic
http://www.paristransatlantic.com/magazine/monthly2006/10oct_text.html#9
Agents at Midnight is the first release from this jazz/ noise duo of Ed Chang, who bends and frays and brutalises his saxophone, and Ed Howard who is in charge of electronics and harmonica abuse, all making a captivating and brutal mix of sounds, falling into improvised jazz states sometimes and at other times into a skin-burning noise state, sometimes both at the same time. Terrible meditation II opens the album up with seething and stretched sax tones, slowly being built upon by walls of electronics and modified sax, really a nice powerful opener. Midway the wall of sound drops out for a moment where Chang does some neat swirl improvised playing, with the noise element as more of a background element, like a distant storm. Changs sax is chattering, hissing, cut up and forced into odd angles. Almost drifting into an unconformable Meditative state towards the end. Damaged symphony for Karl Stockhausen is the longest track on offer here at near on twenty minutes. Starts off with electro pitter-patter and sax sliding in and out like a cruel dental tool. The whole track has a great damaged chaotic feel, always on the edge of really exploding, but the pair keep hold of it back on the edge of chaos. Chang paints some quite macabrely beautiful melodic and seething shapes with his jittering man-on-the edge-of-madness playing. At about the 12 minute mark they pull out some really nice set your teeth-on-edge high pitches, guaranteed to loosen those fillings. A very enjoyable and brutal cross breed, which has some surprising melodic elements, buried within its spine. To find out more and buy direct go here – but be quick as this is only limited to 500 pressings. Roger Batty - Music Machine
http://www.musiquemachine.com/reviews/reviews_template.php?id=888
A mighty roar emerges at the very beginning of “Agents at Midnight”, one a casual listener could mistake for some inexplicably forgotten outtake from the “Machine Gun” session. Ed Chang bellows from the deeps on alto while Ed Howard totally turns loose his electronics arsenal alongside. This attack is only one of several employed by the duo although it might be fair to say that it’s the favored game plan as well as their most successful strategy. About midway through that first track (“Terrible Meditation II”), the shutters descend abruptly, conjuring forth a far bleaker, more isolated space, one filled with echoing scratches and forlorn, reedy cries which in turn splay out into complex and harsh multiphonics, closing the piece in some degree of psychic pain. Good piece. The second selection stakes out the other end of the territory these guys occupy, suspending the music between extremely high-pitched alto and even higher-pitched electronics, occasionally leavened with some coarser granularity but structured less elastically, and more in pointillist fashion, the sounds unmoored.
Chang’s exclusive use of the saxophone on a recording of this nature (that is, one pretty firmly grounded in the No Fun noise aesthetic) is rather interesting in that, especially when he pushes it to extremes, one inevitably recalls past excursions into the area from the likes of late Coltrane through Braxton, Brotzmann and beyond to younger players like Ankersmit. ..Where Howard comes in (is in) choosing which frequencies, rhythms (implied or otherwise) and timbres to contrast with the reed work... crucial even when the volume is pushed to where one might think it couldn’t possibly make a difference. When he erects thick walls of sound, as on the opening track or “The Dread at the Back of Your Throat”, the music becomes entirely convincing and coheres marvelously, any reference to pre-established sax playing sublimating into the whole the two musicians melding completely. When things become atomized however, as in the chittering alto and backward tape flips of “Ghost Packet”, this listener sometimes scrambled for an ear-hold, though even that piece does end up getting momentarily rescued by something of a cavalry charge of samples and fluttering reeds. Still, the fragmentation proved distracting.
“Arse Cracked” is about 15 minutes of, well, arse-crackingly intense screams from Chang and Howard with the occasional retreat into the merely bowel-shaking. About 12 minutes in, it settles into a lush, rough drone imbued with vestiges of arcade-like quasi-melodies—a fine effect. The closer, another lengthy venture, again arcs out for different territories at the start with swiftly flickering noise, the darting electronics matched by flutter-tongued sax (both, it sounds like, processed through some phasing gate). It grows frantically in agitated intensity before a sudden storm break uncovers a willowy alto aloft on a small haze of static. But not for long, as an exceedingly, even by previous standards, harsh section knifes in to liquefy any and all tympanums in the area. It doesn’t end so much as collapse.
There’s still a part of me that recoils somewhat at the naked aggressiveness of much of this music, especially when that aspect is placed front and center as opposed to one possibility out of many. But on its own terms, which is after all how one has to judge things, “Agents at Midnight” is a very strong, uncompromising document and worth hearing.
Posted by Brian Olewnick on August 15, 2006 12:30 PMhttp://www.bagatellen.com/archives/reviews/001336.html