kaffe

The vast “cdBea” is electro-acoustic improviser Kaffe Matthews’ second major statement, following on with the same live electronics amazement as her previous release, cdAnn. Matthews is a unique musician, dedicated to live solo improvisation within a highly stylized context of her own creation. Her music evolves from three interfacing elements, abstractly filtered through her psyche: a conventional violin, a heavy rig of special “live sampling” electronics, and the social and psychological space of the concert. The last statement may seem pretentiously “conceptual”, but since her concerts exert an unusual sense of expanded mental “space,” it makes perfect sense. Her pieces are vividly emotional: gripping science-fiction landscapes which overlay the physical venue, altering the atmosphere with a dominating, somber delirium; as if the moment were being frozen, expanded, and cast into space. Because they are presented fairly neutrally without pretence and in long doses, the emotionality of her improvising can ring through, often moving into a sincerely dark and dissociated moods. It is probably this emotional intensity, the strange personal sense of place she provides, which is the most original aspect of her work.

The violin serves as a crucial kind of focus in this environment, with its miniature size and visual interest as a counterpoint to the layered masses of sound that Matthews creates. Truth be told, Matthews is a fine violinist, and on cdBea, more of her fiddling is heard than on the previous disc—in fact, some parts really soar in a deranged sawing sort of way. However, it is her ability to manipulate her electronics and the LiSa software she uses which makes her deserving of recognition as one of the most interesting live electronics players going. Specifically she has developed the technique of “composing” live with multiple streams of samples to an unprecedented level, like some of the best improvising drummers and pianists, able to keep many streams of discussion going at once–truly polyphonic and polyrhythmic improvising. The technology she uses allows for this on a physical level, but her sense of timing and proportion is key. Dense droning layers are built up, cut out unexpectedly into choppy rhythms, and then suddenly turn the bend to become entirely else. Throughout, there is very little obvious looping or hackneyed manipulation in the sound, and the total result is more akin to composed orchestral music or tape-spliced musique concrete than the usual direction of solo electronics. A hidden microphone always in the space, used extremely sparingly to add eves-dropped room-sound into the mix, seems like a sort of mental fake-out, adding mainly mystery.

The sound palette of cdBea covers a wide spectrum, often filling a large part of the audible frequency range with streams of transforming sound. There are many parts which are clearly electronic or string produced, and a fair amount of artificial ambience covering everything, which is particularly noticeable in the more oblique moments. Other sounds are more mysterious, suggesting out-dated automatons, household products amok, and telephone switch disfunction. With its density and harmonic riches, her sound has something in common with the Stochastic string work of Xenakis, and of later children like Elliot Sharp, Jon Duncan and Jon Oswald; but also has an openness and emotionality unusual in electronic music of this sophistication. In the midst of the buzzing drones, switching noise, and cascades of clattering, Kaffe Matthews is still there. In her wry way, she is keeping us company as we go.

by John Berndt
Resonance
Recorded
Baltimore, Maryland USA

Hub-Capped Diamond Studded Halo

Kaffe Matthews’ performances have flirted with the unpredictability of these kinds of live situations for a while. Using live, recorded sounds rather than a pre-recorded stock of samples, each of her performances is very specifically tied to a place. Using software called LiSa (which stands for live sampling), she’ll gradually incorporate and treat sounds from the environment with those from her wired-up violin.The tranquillity with which she improvises is amazing. Nothing like the kind of “horror vacui” such an open situation could inspire, more a wry amusement at the sounds that arrive out of nowhere and then disappear. Each one suggests new narratives, action or atmospheres which, like a sensitive and skilful medium, she either gives a voice or patiently muffles.

Mute- Issue 7
RUDE MECHANIC : Beaconsfield, london, UK
London, UK
Winter 1997

The new Annette Works label exists to showcase music combining improvisition and electronics, and Kaffe Matthews is a splendid musician to start with. The pieces on CD Ann combine solo violin with a flexible live sampling system and the sounds of the performance environment (a church, a shed, or a bedroom) Kaffe’s violin is a very successful when looped and layered against crackling ambient noise, and she obviously has a discerning and curious ear for sound. The less successful pieces are those where the violin itself disappears from hearing, since it’s the pleasantly puzzling contrast between instrumental and non-musical sound that really entices.

The Wire
Kaffe Matthews is the Pope of the virtual violin – one hand on the fiddle, the other on the Power Macintosh. But on the evidence of this stunning CD, we should think of her less as a violinist and more as a producer of seething improvised electronica. Last year Matthews played on David Toop’s “Pink Noir” album, and her concerns are not to far away from Toop’s haunted dreamscapes. More grit and dirt in Matthews’ pallette however, and the material is all recorded live. Matthews emphasizes the “here and now” quality of the music by always setting up a hidden microphone in the venue, contributing a wild-card non-musical element and ensuring the overall sound is not simply electronic. On track one, for example, we hear the sound of Paul Burwell cooking.

Within the past year Matthews has completely revised her technical setup: out go the prerecorded samples and Jackson Five tapes, in comes the “LiSa” system, designed at STEIM in Amsterdam by Frank Balde and Michelle Waisvisz. The violin is both trigger and sound source- the physical act of playing the violin remains central to Matthews’ performance, but there is very little recognisable left in the music.

Unlike the horrible drivel coming from the hi-tech hyperviolas and hypercellos in Tod Machover’s heavily bankrolled US projects, Matthews fortunately has plenty of ideas and a sturdy contemporary musicality. Matthews moves fluently from intoxicating racket to delicate lyricism, offering both a search for beauty and fuzz guitar sounds. The core of the album is “To Manson 13”, a barnstorming set of ten pieces taken from a Saturday afternoon concert at London’s 2:13 Club. You can easily lose yourself in these rollicking sonic jungles.

by Clive Bell
The Wire
UK

Mute, DIGITAL ART CRITIQUE. Issue 7, Winter 1997.

Pauline van Mourik Broekman

Kaffe Matthews’ performances have flirted with the unpredictability of these kinds of live situations for a while. Using live, recorded sounds rather than a pre-recorded stock of samples, each of her performances is very specifically tied to a place. Using software called LiSa (which stands for live sampling), she’ll gradually incorporate and treat sounds from the environment with those of her wired-up violin. The tranquillity with which she improvises is amazing. Nothing like the kind of horro vacui such an open situation could inspire, more a wry amusement at the sounds that arrive out of nowhere and then disappear. Each one suggests new narratives, action or atmospheres which, like a sensitive and skilful medium, she either gives a voice or patiently muffles.

(extract from review of the Rude mechanic event at Beaconsfield gallery, London)

Kaffe Matthews has been taking tea with several elderly people in the northern seaside resort of Bridlington. The excuse was her research for an installation piece in the Sewerby Hill Museum, but you get the impression that Kaffe relished meeting Olive Smee, Nora and Arthur Durham and the rest. “I built up a tape piece from a recording made at a tea dance. They were playing lush waltzes over a bad PA in a hall with an enormous reverb. Someone introduces the next dance, them everybody stands up, and you get this fantastic sound of feet shuffling onto the dance floor, the sound of a lot of people suddenly present in one room.”

Alongside the museum installation, Matthews also played live violin in a chill-out room full of sofas, while Olive handed out cakes to the audience. Upstairs she devised music for a large room with a “dance floor” entirely coated in white cake icing. “We gave the audience bags of pink icing which they could squirt around and decorate things.”

The violin music that Matthews produces for her installations and live shows is a far less sweet affair, a world away from tea dances. Using a computerised sound processing set-up, she can sample and treat her live playing in real time, and the results show an extraordinary range of improvisatory imagination. Starting by stacking up the violin arpeggios as if in a Steve Reich piece, she suddenly shifts into a dense wall of distortion and extreme noise. This in turn settles into a kind of violinist’s tropical rain forest, fragments flickering past like ungainly insects, which then opens out into a “dark Ambient” tundra landscape, devoid of all obvious violin sound and yet entirely created from live violin input.

With one foot in each of the converging camps of Electronica and Improv, Matthews played on David Toop’s recent “Pink Noir” album, and in November appeared in London’s Purcell Room in The Brood, as well as at the monthly eclectro-paradise The Sprawl. A regular fixture at the LMC gigs, this month she contributes to two fringe multi-art events: Rude Mechanic and Keep 3.

“Within the last year I’ve made a major change in my technical set-up,” she says, “and it’s allowed me to start making music that I’m really excited about. Before, I was using the violin to trigger pre-recorded samples via the MIDI pick-up, but this was an absolute nightmare.”

The problems of adapting MIDI – a yes/no triggering system designed for keyboards – to the sensitivities of the violin proved counter-productive. “You end up cramping your violin technique, and also spending hours pre-programming your machine with material that may turn out to be inappropriate once you’re inprovising in public.”

If a composer is someone who likes to take a lot of decisions before the performance, and an improviser takes the decisions during the show, then Matthews with her violin and computer is both a composer and improviser. Her new system uses a Power Macintosh to run software called LiSa (“Live Sampling”), developed by engineers at the STEIM institute in Amsterdam. You sample into the software’s memory as you go, and playback via MIDI. On the violin body there’s a little switch pad with buttons, sending remote control messages to a MIDI controller box. So there are no pre-recorded samples, just violin sound being grabbed and processed in real time.

Matthews caps off her live set-up by always setting up another microphone, maybe in a lobby or a bar somewhere near the concert, to provide a wild card element to sample. Recently she found herself playing in a concert hall in Warsaw, inside a castle. “The nearest bar was 300 metres down the road, so we ran a cable all the way along to this bar, and I hid my tiny mic in a vase on a table reserved for 8:30 pm – the same starting time as my concert.”

The tension in Kaffe Matthews’ performance is between the violin and the software. Brian Eno has pointed out that these days, before you can play or record music, you may have to invent your instrument. Matthews explains: “I need a physical contact with the instrument – I like the feel of a vibrating box under my chin, and the sensation of pulling hair across gut strings. But when I set up the software, that’s the instrument too, and I’m constantly modifying and redesigning it”.

by Clive Bell
The Wire
UK
December, 1996