AU NI KITA
Misère et Cordes
Potlatch
P 101


Step right up folks: four guitars, all improvising, and no waiting. That could easily be the come on for this remarkable 63-minute session of collective, non-idiomatic string inspiration. Non-idiomatic is also an understatement, since the members of Au Ni Kita -- which means guitar music in the language of the Solomon Islands -- offer maximum variety in their sounds since each comes from a different guitar background.

Pascal Battus is a full-fledged experimenter, concentrating on what he calls surrounded guitar, that is one that's extended with such objects as small engines, amplified percussion, the e-bow, radio and electronics. Acoustic guitarist Emmanuel Petit moves between jazz and new music and has worked with the likes of percussionist Lê Quan Ninh and saxophonist Michel Doneda. An early post-rocker, Dominique Répécaud is known for his membership in the band Soixante Etages. Finally, so-called ethnic music is represented by Camel Zekri. Of Algerian-French descent, he has played not only with sonic explorers like Ninh, Doneda and electroacoustian Xavier Charles, but also with traditional performers from Africa and Europe as well.

No hootenanny or cutting contest, the work of the four instead melds into one 24- string instrument. They complement one another so well that it's almost impossible to tell who plays what and, as a matter of fact, where one instant composition ends and the next begins.

Imagine the audience at the festival site in Vandoeuvre-lès-Nancy, France where the disc was recorded, as participating in a futuristic tribal ritual. As one man creates his version of sound, the others try to amplify it as best they can, not by adopting his style, but by expressing the parts of their own that will fit.

Which means that at one point you'll hear a solo acoustic guitar interlude, accompanied by the bang, crash and chalk-on-the-blackboard sounds that probably come from electronics. Other times, as on "Eg Sumo," a heavily amplified rock style complete with fuzz tone licks -- from Répécaud, perhaps -- succeed steady strumming that dissolves into what could be an approximation of a jet plane landing or gigantic rubber bans being stretched.

Like German Hans Tammen, a practitioner of "endangered guitar"; Battus appears to spend most of "Thinging" battering his poor instrument into submission. Sounds that could be a lathe turning, a bowling ball rolling down the stage or a fan belt slapping against the mechanism make their appearance. Earlier, what appears to be the rumble
of a motor, and a duet between what appears to be one musician sawing on metal and another vocally practicing his opera scales, can't really be ascribed to any one player.

If the fire bell ringing comes from Zekri, is it he or Petit who supplies the acoustic guitar interludes? And is the tiny, flamenco dance of movement with dampened strings on "Argil" a traditional or extended technique? These are questions you'd like to ask, but are satisfied not to, since the CD is satisfying without interpretation.

Although there are times that you feel that a background in auto mechanics or metallurgy would be more appropriate than musicology for judging the results here, the overall impression is fascination with what the four create.

Other European, such as Tammen, Derek Bailey and Keith Rowe are in the midst of creating a new identity for the guitar, divorced from its pre-20th century associations. The four plectrum pioneers here can be added to that group.

However, it's odd that they've taken a pun on mercy (miséricorde) for the title of this disc. For the cordes (cords, chords) are only intermittently in misery (misère). A more appropriate name for the session is suggested by Rowe in the booklet notes: "inventive eccentricity"


-- Ken Waxman


Track Listing: 1. Têt raz; 2. Eg sumo; 3. Analog; 4. Thinging; 5. Zone; 6. Argil; 7. Au Ni Kita


Personnel: Pascal Battus, surrounded guitar; Emmanuel Petit, acoustic guitar; Dominique Répécaud, electric guitar; Camel Zekri, classical guitar and electronics