Ancient Flight Text

Selected Reviews

Ancient Flight Text is Gianmarco Liguori's second album as group director of an ongoing series of experimental recordings.

Featuring two highly accomplished and intuitive artists, Murray McNabb and Kim Paterson, Ancient Flight Text is a collaboration between its participants and an exercise in spontaneous composition.

Liguori guided the proceedings in his usual ambiguous non-musical manner; the musicians expressing their own ideas within the preconceived framework. The music was mostly improvised in the studio and its complex textures and dynamics often materialise out of the rawest moments. As Liguori explains,

"The idea was to allow them to do their thing so they could bring themselves totally into the music. There wasn't any preparation at all on their part because I kind of wanted to get the guys off-guard. For me the excitement in jazz and "primitive" music - or any music for that matter - is when the initial spark of creation has been preserved.

Kim has an incredible sense of rhythmic space and harmony while Murray is a master of colour and texture.  Both of them have a kind of supernatural connection to music which is why I find it easier to record with them in this way."

Avoiding chord progressions for a more hypnotic approach, Gianmarco's current compositions change colour and shape in a linear way, like watching a landscape unfold from a moving train. More room was then left for melodic freedom and chance events.

Augmenting Paterson's innovative drumming, Liguori makes use of an early 1970s drum machine on a couple of the tracks, and analogue equipment like tape echo, a home made reverb unit and echo chamber are also used.

"There's still a lot of musical territory I'd like to explore in this vein", says Liguori. "I feel like we've only begun to scratch the suface of what we can achieve together."

-Roman Tomaszewski

Graham Reid - Elsewhere

The previous album by Ligouri (guitarist in Salon Kingsadore) was Stolen Paintings which found favour at Elsewhere for its jazz stylings and nicely stretching quality.

This time out -- again with Murray McNabb and Kim Paterson (and percussion player Steven Tait and Wes Prince on synths for one track) -- Ligouri teases the threads even further apart for evocative, improvised space-flight workouts which have subtle changes of character although keep a momentum going.

At almost six minutes, Bronze Frog is a standout and when it fades you can imagine these guys could have just kept developing it further. And again Ligouri is no spotlight grabber but lets McNabb and Paterson develop their own ideas within the broad frameworks.

There's quite some artillery used also: Ligouri plays guitars, bass, African piano, and drum machine; McNabb has synths, Fender Rhodes and organ; Paterson is on drums, percussion and trumpet.

Wrapped in unique packaging with a mystical short story, Ancient Flight Text is another fine addition to Ligouri's small but growing catalogue.

Live at Conch Review

Just past Taupiri, Tainui’s sacred mountain, Nina Simone usurps VU’s Live 1969 in the car deck. Her version of Gerry Jeff Walker’s Mr Bojangles putting me right up there as always. I’m on my way to Auckland to see Gianmarco Liguori and his collaborating trio of Kiwi jazz greats (Kim Paterson, Murray McNabb and Miguel Fuentes) instore at Conch on Ponsonby Road. Excited by the thought of the innovative sounds to come.

My best music memories always start this way. An edgy car journey from the heartlands south of the big city. The excitement rising as I crest the Bombays then the glide down the motorway into the territory of my birth – Papakura and its hinterland. The memories from here on in are thick and deep. By the time I rattle into the city centre I’m already there.

Slip into High Street where you always get a park and into Unity Books where I pick up Simon Reynolds’ Totally Wired – Post-Punk Interviews: Overviews.

Up at Conch Records Salon Kingsadore are out in force. Hayden tells me they’re recording later today then introduces me to his son. There are plenty of parents and couples in the quickly filling shop. A comfortable crowd of jazz and GM fans which spills out onto the strip.

One short black later and I’m perched on the seat in front of the group wrestling with a jammed camera when my friend, Wes Prince, the Kiwi post-punk creative who provided the compelling synth pulse for GM’s Ascending Spirals appears and starts flicking through the bins. Wes lived just around the corner from me in Mount Eden where I got to know him. By the time we finish catching up the boys are settling at their instruments.

The first song is all over the place but by the second they find their centre. I close my eyes to listen but there’s so much going on I just have to look. Miguel Fuentes is shaking the llama toes and together with Kim is drumming up a fearsome groove with Marco adding runs on the guitar as Murray McNabb colours and provokes, dropping hooks with ease.

They run through six or so songs from the album. I’d be hard pressed to say which tracks. They all merge into a glorious whole in which Kim’s moving soulful horn and drum groove blurs into Miguel’s masterful percussion into Murray’s sea of sound into Marco moving from guitar to bass on which he holds down a white funk line Holger would be proud of before slipping midway through into a piece of controlled feedback that evokes free noise at its most sonorous.

I’m buzzing still as I pass Taupiri on the way home to Hamilton in the early evening, watching the lights sparkle over the mountainside graves, and thinking I’d like to hear this quartet in a bigger room with time to stretch out. It may happen. Marco is hinting at a follow-up show.
Andrew Schmidt - Mysterex

Liner Notes

G.L.
guitars, electric bass, African piano, drum machine, treatments & electronics

Murracy McNabb
synthesizer, Fender Rhodes, organ, electronics

Kim Paterson
drums, trumpet, percussion, African piano

with
Wes Prince
synth pulse (2)

Steven Tait
percussion (2)

Produced by Gianmarco Liguori with Murray McNabb.  Recorded, engineered and mastered by Darren McShane at Earwig Studios with addiotional recordings by Kim Paterson at Lake Road.  Cover painting & insert drawing by Osvaldo Liguori. Design by G. Liguori

Sarang Bang Records
Specialists in the Psychological and Physiological Applications of Music