Jason Kahn
"Monads"
(2017)
Editions 005 Double LP

Jason Kahn // electronics, voice, percussion, environmental recordings

Edition of 250
Heavy weight 180 gram vinyl.
Hand-painted covers on thick gray cardboard.

Composed January 2014 to April 2016.
Mastering, liner notes and LP artwork Jason Kahn.

Many thanks to the Popkredit/City of Zürich for their generous support.

Download liner notes here.

Side A: Electronics (18.32)

Side B: Voice (17.59)

Side C: Percussion (17.59)

Side D: Environment (18.00)

Excerpts:

In the field of philosophy monads are often referred to as the elementary particles which combine to create a substance. In the context of this double LP, the title refers to the constituent facets of my musical activity: namely, percussion, electronics, environmental recording and voice. What ties these different pursuits together is my particular approach to composition. No matter what sound material I work with, the outcome — at least to my ears — reflects a certain compositional methodology and approach to working with sound in general. I thought it would be interesting to place these four sound groups together as distinct compositions, not only as a means of focusing on the compositional similarities but as a challenge to myself.

Often during the composition of these pieces I found myself in the position where mixing one of these four sound groups with another would've provided an easier solution than just, for example, sticking with only one sound source. Of course, at times any acoustic sound source could be construed as electronically produced and vice versa. But perhaps it was just the idea of taking something explicitly electronic and adding it to an acoustic source that became attractive — and from which I wanted to distance myself.

By now, though, after composing for years with different sound sources it's become clear to me that no matter what sounds I work with, the end result will always reflect my ideas about composition, will always sounds like me. Monads is therefore a kind of discourse in this realization and confirms what I've known all along. These four pieces are less about their sound sources than the compositional strategies tying them together. Any sounds could be at play here. The real material being used is how these sounds are worked with, combined and formed into an overarching sonic structure and dialog.

Reviews:

The initial impression of Monads is of something clinical and diagnostic, that it is composer/improviser Jason Kahn autopsying his decades-long musical practice, seeing it with his own eyes in a detached, critical light. Each side of this self-released double LP features a single aspect of his musical lexicon, accordingly named: “Electronics,” “Voice,” “Percussion” and “Environment.” Yet what sounds in description like a methodical examination is in practice anything but. Instead, the clarity of presenting one approach per side reflects what has always been the essential structure of Kahn’s music: transparency. No matter how dense or layered his compositions and performances become, their structure, location and direction always emerge.

At first, each side’s episodic nature, with Kahn switching between ideas in segments that last no more a few minutes at a time, distracts from thinking about larger formal concerns. Instead, you get immersed in the grain of each passage. On “Voice” you hear Kahn pushing himself, physically, to some kind of limit. A collage of studio, live and installation recordings that have featured his voice, it presents layers of gasps, moans, groans, shouts, chanting and more that overlap into strange chorales, seeming at turns shamanistic, deranged, desperate, barbaric, melancholy. For “Electronics” he went through every piece of equipment in his studio to produce a layered stream of noise, radio signals and synth noise that swoops through the stereo picture. “Percussion” moves between explorations of his drum kit, a special drum-feedback system of his own devising and other various metallic objects.

But it is “Environment” that seems to hold the key to Monads. When your record is all about the reflexive breaking-open of a musical personality, what better area to look at than one’s own immediate personal experience? Drawn from three years of recordings made with a portable digital recorder, “Environment” intimately captures a range of ostensibly mundane sounds: a children’s birthday party, church bells, teenagers talking, a church liturgy, lapping waves, a brass orchestra, street sounds, footsteps in various spaces. “Environment” metaphorically synthesizes the other three sides, featuring as it does voices, percussive sounds (e.g. wind chimes) and even electronics in the form of recordings of musical performances.

Common to all the environmental recordings is the presence of a group, be it of children, stamping feet, the brass band or choral music. And as one reflects on the other three sides, it starts to seem as if Kahn was attempting to reproduce this group presence by marshaling his own musical facets to resonate that collectivity. The polyphonic sublingual creep in some of the voice passages echoes the massed electronic flows. The brief percussion interludes at times take on the informal, aleatoric guise of field captures or even the synthetic texture of the electronics side.

Kahn himself notes some of these affinities in the essay accompanying the LP, but the juxtaposition of the four LP sides is enough to provoke the question of what guides his composition and performance: his material, the moment, or something more essential, more intrinsic to him or his surroundings? By letting the listener into his working process—into, more or less, his life—Kahn comes to embody the transparent character of his music, so much so that, despite some of its harder edges and cut-up-like structure, Monads becomes an expression of great intimacy and personal warmth, an extension of Kahn himself as well as of his social space.

>Matt Wuethrich, Dusted Magazine, 2017

Over the years I reviewed a lot of music by Jason Kahn. I lost count, but easily twenty or so releases. Quite a lot he did was in collaboration with others, as Kahn is an improviser pur-sang, and not much of that was solo work. I have seen credits for instrument slowly change; drums and percussion, later on with the addition of synthesizer, but again later on synthesizer solo, voice and field recordings. This double LP is a showcase of four interests, and each has it's own side. Electronics, voice, percussion and environment are these four and for each side he uses many recordings in order to create a sound collage per side. These compositions he does on the computer and shows how he likes to do his studio recordings, which essentially these are as he may use recordings from concerts and installations, it is a construction. Perhaps that is a side of Kahn, which we don't get a lot, the studio constructions. Much of the work I reviewed from him is recorded in concert and here we have another side of him. Using multiple recordings Kahn manages to create a very full sound, with many tiny sound events happening all around. In each of these pieces he moves between the carefully chosen minor details, solo and building towards the major layers, with everything going on at the same time. Sometimes it all blurred for me, which I enjoyed very much. Do I hear at this moment the 'percussion' side? Why does it sound like voices? Or environment? The same thing seemed to be happening with the voice sounding electronics, environment sounding voices, or the simple presence of drums in 'Environment'. But then sometimes, yes, these are voices, a modular synth set-up or his kids singing. Kahn's power in composing shines through here; its minimal music with maximal effect and perhaps maximal input to create a minimal output; and vice versa. All of it is a sum that makes up: the work of Jason Kahn. If you never heard of him, then this might be a good introduction.

>Frans de Waard, Vital Weekly, 2017

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