Gregg Kowalsky

Reviews & Interviews:

Gregg Kowalsky - Tendrils In Vigne (Root Strata)
Dusted Magazine (Feb, 2008)
Composer Kowalsky transposed one of his electronic compositions for the 25-piece Contemporary Performance Ensemble at Mills College, led by Fred Frith on violin, as part of his Masters’ thesis. Here’s the result, a somnambulant wander through a descending four-note theme, female vocal sliding down the ever-shifting base of acoustic instruments. It sounds at once settled and vibrant, a profound modern classical work of beauty but also a strong semblance underpinning the affair, one that demonstrates how the influence of 20th/21st century classical has crept into the media. Eno might be proud. Paste-on sleeve, not a whole lot of copies to go around.

Aquarius Records (Jan. 2008)
Latest release from this Bay Area composer, electronic musician and dronologist Gregg Kowalsky. A one sided lp documenting part of his Master's Thesis, which entailed taking one of his electronic compositions, scoring it for a live ensemble and then conducting the performance. Kowalsky enlisted the Contemporary Performance Ensemble, directed by Fred Frith, who also contributed violin. Recorded in 2005 at Mills college, the result was sublime. A gorgeous organic piece that references Feldman and Part and Melnyk as much as Kowalsky's previous works.
The strings are low and buzz and throb dramatically, the piano is minor key and delicate, fluttering in brief little flurries, streaks of high end run through the swirling moodiness, over the top voices soar in choral fragments, washes of cymbals sizzle, horns moan, all manner of instruments are smeared into a heaving organic whole, shakuhachi, vibraphone, flute, a sonic cloud constantly expanding, intensifying chordal whir, like some moody rock band with the bones pulled out, leaving just a gloriously amorphous sound shape, slithering and drifting, creeping and billowing, building and building, some sort of classic chorale stretched out into a shimmering dreamlike blur. On the surface, it's a dark drift, but beneath the surface, sounds are roiling and churning, a sonic sea of tension and emotion, subtly psychedelic, a gorgeous, organic, orchestral drone.

Interview posted at Mundane Sounds.
Interview with Chilean webzine Loop.

Gregg Kowalsky - Tape Chants A Million (Root Srata)
Aquarius Records (Jan. 2007)
With his first release for Root Strata, Kowalsky utilizes a much more eclectic array of source material: tape cassettes, sine oscillators, contact mics, bells, bird callers and a computer. Recorded live on KFJC in May, this half hour epic is another gorgeous slab of abstract ambience, those disparate sounds smoothed into thick warm swells, billowy swirls of smeared melody, and huge stretches of blissy whir. This is another one of those records that perfectly captures that sound we can't ever get enough of, a testament to the power of the drone, completely mesmerizing and hypnotic, when the music finally stops, your ears and your head feel empty, and it's only a matter of moments before we can't help ourselves, press play again and fill them back up.

Gregg Kowalsky - Through The Cardial Window (Kranky)

Aquarius Records (April, 2006)
This is Furniture Music for the 21st Century!

The Wire (April 2006)
Through the Cardial Window is a collection of seven gorgeous electronically treated drones that seep into the listening space on a cloud of softly clashing microtones and teased out harmonics. The character of each piece is determined by the sound source. "Gara Note" features bowed acoustic guitar and violin, with Kowalsky manipulating the upper frequencies into fizzing, tambura-like overtones, while "Into the Marshes They Drove Me" applies the same techniques to samples of slo-mo Metallers Isis and is consequently dirtier and denser. Other tracks see him filtering the sounds of a chamber ensemble through a guitar pickup to record sympathetic string vibrations, and finding a useful purpose for a broken floor heater. The result is an album of beautiful, fascinating ambience. - Keith Moliné

XLR8R (April, 2006)
Oakland's Gregg Kowalsky has quite a penchant for creating engaging noise and ambient compositions. Through the Cardial Window barrels through a buzz of minimal feedback, ghostly cymbal swells, and decadent build-ups that capture life's most tumultuous times. Often ubiquitously serene and ravenously heavy at the same time, the Mills College MFA graduate employs a dense amount of textural techniques, from filtering his work through an acoustic guitar pickup to reworking source material from the brutal ambiance of the band Isis. From beginning to end, Kowalsky's potent blend of feedback loops and psychedelic chiming leaves you feeling medicated and breathless. -Fred Miketa

Tokion (May, 2006)
We love Kranky records! The congestive, textural ambience of Gregg Kowalsky's debut is only matched by its serenity and growth. Thick, time-stretched layers of manipulated guitar and tape loops float down beautifully droning feedback, while digital debris get sloshed around swallowed in the album's mighty current. Never gaining the speed to crash into a waterfall of noise, Kowalsky's sounds rather bottleneck to a placidly babbling brook. -Saheer Umar

The Stranger, Seattle (Feb. 16th, 2006)
Kowalsky claims that the dense, humid air of his longtime home of Florida affected his music. Consequently, there's an intensely enveloping quality to Window. But instead of drenching you in sweat as does Florida weather, the disc induces the sort of chills that come from close encounters with the sacred. Kowalsky has distilled his sound to the essentials and made them shiver in a reverent light. His compositions have the rare ability to convince even staunch agnostics that a higher power exists. Window is a supernatural expression of sound's spiritual dimension. -Dave Segal

Portland Mercury (Feb. 16th, 2006)
Kowalsky's upcoming album on Kranky Records, Through the Cardial Window, is filled with the slow motion, pin-drop friction the label has become synonymous with. The plundered sound sources range from the tiny (a broken water heater) to the huge (dissected riffs from shoegazer metal giants, Isis), all melted down into subtle celestial hues. -Josh Blanchard

Disquiet (Jan. 16th, 2006)
When the brief write-up at the Kranky Records website, kranky.net, describes its most recent free download as "a live version of the song, 'Coral Gables'" from Gregg Kowalsky's forthcoming debut full-length release, Through the Cardial Window, due out in April, the more ethereal-minded listener might fear that, well, you know, it'll be a "song": words that hint at a story through rhyme, a tune that treads the familiar path back and forth between verse and chorus, tossing in perchance a bridge. God forbid, ya know?

Fear not, fans o' abstraction. This latest MP3 is true to the Kranky label's strengths in rural atmospherics. Kowalsky makes his musical home in the remote fringes of headspace, even if the free Kranky track takes its name from a stately Miami suburb (Kowalsky's bio states he was raised in Florida). "Coral Gables" (MP3) is a burbling brook of organo-electronica, and it adheres to, if not song structure, then certainly the single-sine-wave arc of much drone music, moving from near silence and back again, in between peaking with a hazy, textured moment that would only be considered loud relative to the quietude that bookends it. That texture at times sounds like a filtered waterfall, at others merely like you have water in your ear. And though the arc is singular, the sound is not; it is many simultaneous layers of airy noise, from quick rounds of digital riffs to more serrated, granulated material.

More info on Kowalsky at his website, ossobucco.net, where a second free track, from the same session that yielded "Coral Gables" (he describes the pair as "2 live compositions from the Ensemble Room, Mills College [Oakland, 2004]"), can be found. Titled "Into the Marshes They Drove Me," it's another essay into low-to-the-ground, murky soundscapes (MP3), but with the benefit of sublimated tribal drums that lend momentum. (I was hoping to see Kowalsky play at the Hemlock Tavern in San Francisco this past Friday, along with Birdshow and the duo of Greg Davis and Sebastian Roux, but a nasty sore throat, which I didn't feel like sharing with some of my favorite musicians and their fans, kept me home).

Osso Bucco/Ljudbilen & Piloten Split Cd (Nosordo)

XLR8R (November 2004)
CD Numero uno for Nosordo is a split disc filled with warmth, doing its best to raise all of the cochlear hairs at once. without leaving split ends. The first half, Osso Bucco (Gregg Kowalsky) meanders in the rich caverns of textured sound, and more tingly and electric sensed pop ambient. Ljudbilden (Kristofer Strom) handles the second half of the disc and he plays with our folk sensibility but thankfully leaves much of the music sparse and unprocessed. -J. David Marston

The Wire, July 2004
This elegantly packaged split CD features the work of American sound collagist Gregg Kowalsky, aka Osso Bucco and Kristofer Ström, whose recordings are filmed over with wispy nuances and slight asides. Wheter using field recordings or more conventional instrumentation, such as keyboards, zither and melodica, both composers share an interest of suspension between events. "This is the beard we are always growing", runs the Nosordo mission statement, and it shows.

Foxy Digitals
9 out of 10
There is some music that is so good, it makes me feel like my heart is about to rip itself out of my chest. There is some that is so good, I start drooling. There is some that is so good, it puts me in a better mood the instant I hear it. But it is rare that music is so good, it inspires me to filter that beauty through my own psyche and go on creative endeavors of my own. Osso Bucco and Ljudbilden och Piloten do just that; they produce grainy art films and sober poetry out of the contents of my own mind. They make it really, really easy to write this review.

They reach so deeply, in fact, I might recommend that those with dark, uncomfortable secrets not listen to this album. The music itself is so richly textured, it penetrates the darkest fathoms. I suddenly find myself remembering these intensely simple moments that are so personal, I don't want to tell anybody about them. Even if I were willing to talk, my explanation would be so absurd and complex, and so punctuated with sputtering while trying to find the right words, I would sound like I had just taken 15 bong hits.

Gregg Kowalsky, who is Osso Bucco, and Kristofer Ström, who is Ljudbilden och Piloten, share their space very well. They are peers, similar enough that the divide between Kowalsky's four songs and Ström's five isn't a chasm, but different enough that their separate voices can be heard. Though it doesn't seem possible after Osso Bucco's subtle constructions, Ljudbilden och Piloten is quieter. Though Ström never goes as far as to follow the usual pattern of verse-chorus-verse, his songs are more structured than Kowalsky's.

Both make excellent use of field recordings, immersing you in a world that they have created not just through their music but the musical setting as well. There are also sounds that form the base of the songs that are hard to identify, which I suspect are not conventional instruments. Yet put together under Kowalsky's and Ström's supervision, they create a complexity that pulls you in completely. It is easy to become so wrapped up in one song that you forget there is anything else.

Somehow, these soundscapes have the ability to heal you also, to make you whole again, as if the only missing piece in your life was Osso Bucco and Ljudbilden och Piloten in the first place. It is medicine without any bitter taste, a vacation without the exhaustion that usually follows, the beautiful laughter of a child.... It is everything that you ever loved, formed carefully and neatly into songs. It's not even necessarily "happy" music, but it is so perfect, you can't help but love it.

I keep thinking I should be describing the songs, but I know I could not do them justice. They say everything I've ever wanted to sayabout how magnificent life is, in much better ways than my measly words could ever express. Music should be the sound of emotions, the epitome of things you can't say because there are no words. It should be so beautiful, it makes you want to cry. If anyone knows how to do that, it is Kowalsky and Ström. - Eden Hemming Rose

Phosphor Magazine
This release on Nosordo presents the work of two different artists; Osso Bucco and Ljudbilden & Piloten.Tracks 1-4 are by Osso Bucco and capture avery warm atmosphere that immediately reminds of artists appearing on the American label Apestaartje. Think for example of the work of Aero and that of Anderegg. The lustre of warm drones is at times hiddenbeneath noisy textures, but then emerges to reveal itself. The organic and tantalizing nature of the drones is juxtaposed to harsher clicks and pops, as if the sounds were subjected to some kind of digital wear, which only enhances its beauty. Both types of sounds augment each other well in these four pieces in which they are intertwined. There are some small transitions in the compositions that keep one focused.

After the harsh ending of Osso Bucco’s fourth and final track on this CD, the first of a total of five pieces of Ljudbilden & Piloten starts in a very subtle manner. A variety of sounds can be heard: field recordings, acoustic instruments (guitar, trumpet), vocals, and some processed instruments, even rhythms. This is interestingly pieced together in organic-sounding pieces which slowly develop in a very catchy manner. The use of effects and electronic instruments is sometimes scarce, at other times obviously present. The musicality of these recordings makes the experience of listening a very enjoyable one. Of course the use of electronics in more widely accepted compositional song-like structures is not something new, think of the popularity of the label Morr music for example. Yet these two artists are able to stand out in the midst of the pact since they seem to have a voice of their own.
(mvk)

...