Trans Museq History
The
name TransMuseq comes from combining the implications
of the words transcend and muse!
Lending the suggestion that museq is a spontaneous gift from the
muse, making music in which the performer and composer are one,
a music inspired by the very moment in an act of expressing at once.
The earliest collaboration between LaDonna Smith and Davey Williams began in 1973, shortly after they were introduced by friend, composer Anne LeBaron, on an outing to a rural county fair, in which they were stuck on a Farris Wheel ride, discussing current experiments in music and art, and other newly found mutual interests. After improvising together for the first time, a life-time musical & soul relationship was born.
The music differentiated itself from the jazz-influenced jam session, evolving from a palette, that included classical as well as blues & soul background, from influences like Pierre Henry, Stockhausen, and the early electronic music experimenters, to Derek Bailey and a newly discovered Euro-jazz-improv scene, including Incus Bead and FMP to ambient phenomena like train engines, found sound, howling wolves and noise to an inner work which reveals the voice and personal style of the individual artist. Meanwhile, subsequent duo, trio and collective improvisational music sessions developed into an innate and mutual telepathy, of playing music together, utilizing a stream of consciousness form of automatism.
There was a whole scene involved in this attitude, a movement even. You may have heard of the Raudelunas group, that was active in Tuscaloosa, Alabama in the early seventies. Inspired by DADA and the Surrealist movement of the 30s, friends, artists, photographers, painters, musicians, all experimenting with images, music, and words.. collectively meeting in extravangant soirees, making creativity together, the marching vegetables, the Raudelunas Pataphysical Review, the Blue Denim Deals without the Arms, and the Trans Sessions. Two new record labels emerged. Say Day Bew Records featuring the large group, theatrical, and dada activities, and Transmuseq, featuring a smaller collective from out of the same collaborators, that focused pure musical development by automatic and psychic means. Regular weekly and nightly sessions were common. With the release of the first L.P., TRANS, in 1976, a culmination of community collaborations between neighborhood artists and musicians, a statement of departure from what was norm in the academic and popular music scenes of the era, and a new record label was born. TransMuseq Records has now been around for over three decades.
Today, Transmuseq Records wants to present not only its landmark released recordings and unreleased archival sessions of the past, but the new and current mature music of it's artists. Transmuseq also aims to discover & present other younger new artists, who are making a contribution to the art of free improvisation from their own locale and experience. We are particularly interested in the music of artists, young or mature, who further the art of music improvisation in the Americas, including North, Central and South America.
Synopsis of Major Releases:
Transmuseq 1, TRANS was recorded and released in 1976, by the larger core group known as Transcendprovisation, that included Davey Williams and LaDonna Smith, Anne LeBaron, Theodore Bowen, Tim Reed, Jim Hearon, and Adrian Dye. This group met every Sunday to spend the afternoon late into evenings playing and recording music on the reel-to-reel. Many of these early tapes are still in archive, even now, though not sure in what condition. Practically every session was studiously recorded. This group experimented in public with dancers, and performed the early gigs together, mostly in the context of free University halls, or churches.
Transmuseq 2, 'FOLK MUSIC' features the dedicated trio that existed between LaDonna Smith, Davey Williams, and Theodore Bowen, who played the contra bass, experimented with bowing of object, and large metal bedsprings. He was a gentle artist, and made beautiful pieces of art in wood, and paintings on paper bags baked in the oven. The title of the release represents our idea that first we were everyday folk, just doing music in a recreational sense, just as it had always been done, but in our case, our genre had not yet been defined. We played the first concerts in Birmingham together, sharing a bill with Oliver Lake, Eugene Chadbourne, & John Zorn.
Transmuseq 3, From the larger TRANS group, another precious relationship existed from the close friendship between Anne LeBaron, LaDonna Smith and Davey Williams. Long-term friends, avid about musical creativity, LeBaron produced JEWELS, a collaboration in which she pioneers extended harp techniques, improvising with Williams Les Paul guitar, and Smith on piano 'guts'.. well let's say piano 'harp' and other metals and implements in the string category.
Transmuseq 4 was released as a result of the good luck that the touring Italian percussionist Andrea Centazzo, found his way through Alabama and Mississippi during his first USA tour, and took a shine to the music that Davey and LaDonna were making together. He invited us to his Jackson, Mississippi gig, where we launched our first trio performance. Shortly thereafter, he invited us to Europe and organized a concert tour which included playing at the London Musicians Collective, Bristol, and five Italian cities! From the tour we recorded in Italy, both live and studio recordings, which were released as VELOCITIES.
Transmuseq 5, DIRECT WAVES is a live album from the early tours. TRANS DUO, the music of Davey Williams and LaDonna Smith had become it's own entity. Invited to perform and participate in activities from Eugene Chadbourne's 2000 Statues, his small festival in NYC, to Henry Kaisers' west coast network, a Bard College workshop, the "Ear it Live" Festival in Canada , to one-off concerts in Milwaukee and Grand Rapids, to a second European tour in Belgium, Holland, England and Germany, Direct Waves was notably recorded on site at the Urban Instute in Grand Rapids by Thomas Gaudynski (1979) and by Guy Strahle at the Palais des Beaux Arts in Brussells (1980). Live in concert the 'inner word' had chosen to make manifest as music tuned in the moment.
Transmuseq 6, Richmond Virginia's Idio Savant and Trans Duo combine to create TRANS-IDIO, a quintet collaboration between LaDonna, Davey, and Paul Watson, Danny Finney and Pippin Barnett. This Southern colloaboration represents the networking that was beginning to take form between the improvisers in neighboring Southern towns. (well 10 hours away or more. It was a good excuse to drive). The music was played, friendships were formed, and again another example of good folk music! (1981)
Transmuseq 7 White Earth Streak features yet another bold collaboration, also in 1981, but this time on a third European tour, Davey and LaDonna are met by the great first generation FMP trombonist, Gunter Christmann, and the younger contrabassist Torsten Muller, who was active in radio and free improvisation in Bremen. Recorded in Langenhagen by Elke Schipper, this narly music grinds and pops with clarity and calculated control. Although we have just a few remaining LP copies left, White Earth Streak was re-released as a CD by the Unheard Music Series. Included on the cd is also a re-release of the music from Song of an Aeropteryx (surrealist collaborator Hal Rammel, artwork and musical saw) www.altavistic.com
Transmuseq 8 (1985) Criminal Pursuits is the definitive Davey Williams solo album, of oblique sound images and convulsive blues. Featured techniques are his Listening Post system, his Burma Shave Method, and his Mockingbird Method, in which he "plagerizes from birds of the same name, short, improvised phrases of any complexity to be struck and repeated with subtle or minute variation in the manner of song" -Davey Williams
Transmuseq 9 Locales for Ecstasy is a rare and unique recording of which there are very few originals still around, that features Davey Williams and LaDonna Smith teamed up with Minnesota banjo & synthesizor player, Cinnie Cole. A subversive group of sounds, always revolving. "We detonated migrational noises inside ecstatical objects (in this case musical instruments and larynx). (1987)
Transmuseq 10 Travellers is a now defunct cassette tape of an obscure gig organized by Klimchak , at some unknown location in Atlanta. Trans Duo, stressed out. There is one known copy of the tape existing in the Transmuseq Archive. (1990)
Transmuseq 11 Eye of the Storm,
LaDonna Smith solo release, breaks the LP model, and Transmuseq enters
the digital age. This recording was released a year after Davey
Williams and LaDonna Smith broke up their domestic relationship and each
moved into their own personal musical directions. Davey was developing his
own local band "O.K. Nurse" as well as working with George Cartwright
in Curlew. Although still collaborating with many distinguished
partners on the local free improvisation front, LaDonna delved into a fierce
personal style, the multi-voiced linear vertical counterpoints, harmonics
and vocalizations that has become her solo style. Captured from solo
concerts in St. Gallen, Switzerland; Gent, Belgium and Birmingham,
Alabama, the solo recording still features Davey Williams on the 11th cut ,
"Our Changing Weather," recorded at the New Music Circle concert in St.
Louis. (1992) The duo lives on.
Transmuseq 12 Transmutating, Davey Williams and LaDonna
Smith, was actually produced by the Shaking Ray Levi Society in
Chattanooga TN. Avid friends of Trans Duo, SRL stepped in to
perpetuate the duo. Musical devices combined with nothing in particular
provides fertile musical sonic territory to explore, we have found. The
remaining concert at New Music Circle, in St. Louis is presented as well as
The Glass Teepee, recorded Oct. 3, 1992 at the Center for Contemporary Arts
in Sante Fe, NM. (1993)
Transmuseq
13 doesn't exist due to sheer superstition! Meanwhile, LaDonna tours
solo. She plays on other people's records, as does Davey. She takes
over the improvisor, journal of free improvisation, maintains it on
the web and organizes Birmingham Improv Festival in 1996
and 2004, releases the Birmingham Improv CD, including Yuri Zmorovitch,
Boris Rayskin, Johannes Bergmark, Gino Robair, Dr. Mabeuse, Samurai
Celestial and others.. She deliberately releases no new Transmuseq Cd
'products' for 10 years, due to the bold-faced and blatant saturation
of cd product on the market, as exemplified by the hundred perhaps thousands
of independent releases that now swamp the product terrain, and floating
into the improvisor. There was simply no need.
Transmuseq 14 Yokel Yen, LaDonna
Smith and Misha Feigin Duo Improvisations
Breaking the cycle of silence, Yokel is Southern colloquial for local,
and Yen is the old word for desire. This follows the thread of common
sentiment that was woven between old world musician, balalaika, Moskovite
guitarist, Misha Feigin, who captures and balances the attention of the
Alabama born violinist. A new partnership is born. Misha plays with streams
of romanticism and poetic creativity. There is a mix of cultural diversity
and personal invention. Fifteen short improvisations, an enormous
morning. (2006)
Transmuseq 15 Ambient Visage,
LaDonna Smith and Susan Alcorn, pedal steel guitar.
Another unique and wonderful collaboration, the subtle and gentle
presence of Susan Alcorn's pedal steel guitar combined with the rhythms of
subconscious string territories, mezmerizing floating washes of trance-like
luster, almost "new age" improvisations with the ragged edge.
(2007)
Transmuseq 16 Waters Ashore ,
Misha Feigin, Dave Liebman and LaDonna Smith
Music as the accessible form of universal language as being practiced
today. Bringing together a jazz icon, Dave Liebman with free
improvisation pioneer, LaDonna Smith and Moscow born poet-musician, Misha
Feigin. The fusion of jazz, poetry, folk music, and free improvisation, a
natural example of musical universality. (2007)
Transmuseq 17 Floating Bridges,
Stringtrek: LaDonna Smith and Misha Feigin (2008)
"Floating Bridges
radiates with high energy interplay from the first notes and reveals a
musical dynamism of fluid invention and sympathetic creation from the String
Trek duo of violist La Donna Smith and guitarist Misha Feigin.
Recorded in June, 2007 at the “Meeting of Improvisers” in Krakow, Poland,
this
well recorded live performance captures the duo at a high point of artistic
collaboration."
- www..allaboutjazz.com
Transmuseq 18 Antennae Road,
Davey Williams, solo electric guitar (2008)COMING
SOON !!!
This is the definitive mature Davey Williams, first solo LP on
Transmuseq since Criminal Pursuits. Combining his signature extended guitar
techniques, battery of object guitar theater from the latest battleships to
the standard rock and coffee stir, monotonous heart beats overturned by
implosions of emotion and automatist impulse. This is the new, old
Davey Williams.
Transmuseq 19 Deviant Shakti,
LaDonna Smith and Michael Evans, COMING
SOON !!!
with Michael Evans the infamous
NYC percussionist/thereminist/composer whose
work investigates and embraces the collision of sound and theatrics.
Recorded under foot, below the studio of Domestic Noise, in the lost
cave of Brooklyn New York. (2008)
