Avec quatre guitares électriques, Dither crée des superpositions d’accords entre Fred Frith et Monk héritiers du punk rock. Ils fonctionnent avec la précision d’un quatuor classique et la part d’improvisation pure de leur musique semble réduite à ce qu’elle est en rock, à cette différence près qu’ils sont les interprètes de partitions savantes. Musique discordante, dissonante, staccato, économe de ses mouvements. Tantôt énorme tantôt réduite à quelques notes elle définit un monde minéral et rigoureux où le plaisir se fraye de vigoureuses ouvertures. Plaisir des textures électriques avant tout, des changements d’ambiance musicale, plaisir de l’intrusion de la sauvagerie dans des sons policés, écrits, de border le silence de vacarme ou de presque rien. On les sent capables de reproduire cette musique chaque soir avec la même intensité — c’est à dire pas celle d’un improvisateur. Un exemple étonnant de ce que peut être une musique moderne créant sa forme instrumentale et empruntant sans hiérarchie aux musiques préexistantes (sauf au jazz). Une musique un peu pince sans rire : “et de ça vous en dites quoi ?”, “goûtez-encore celui-ci, voulez-vous ?”. Une musique très esthétique sans concession à la joliesse. Elle semble, à la manière surréaliste, viser un point fixe de subversion sans se laisser distraire d’aucune façon, musique au cordeau, sans courbes.

Translation:

With four electric guitars, Dither creates a superimposition of chords somewhere between Fred Frith and Monk, heirs to punk rock. They work with the precision of a classical quartet and the purely improvisatory side to their music seems reduced to what it is in rock music, with the added difference that they are skilled interpreters. Clashing, dissonant, staccato, sparse music. Colossal at one moment and reduced to a few notes in another, the music defines a mineral and rigorous world where pleasure opens up to vigorous overtures. Enjoyment of textures first, changing musical moods, pleasure at the savage interruption of sounds that are written and polished, to line the silence with clamorous noise or with almost nothing at all.

One feels that they are capable of reproducing this music every night with the same intensity- that is to say, not that of an improviser. An astounding example of what modern music can be in creating its own instrumental form and borrowing freely from pre-existing music (except from jazz). Music that’s a little bit deadpan: ‘and what do you have to say about that?’; ‘you want another taste of this?’. Music that is very aesthetic without conceding to prettiness. It seems, in a surrealist way, to look to a subversive fixed point without being distracted by anything, music that is straight as an arrow, without curves.

- Noël Tachet

Dither, a New York based electric guitar quartet, is dedicated to an eclectic mix of experimental repertoire which spans composed music, improvisation, and electronic manipulation. Formed in 2007, the quartet has performed in the United States and abroad, presenting new commissions, original compositions, multimedia works, and large guitar ensemble pieces. With sounds ranging from clean pop textures to heavily processed noise, from tight rhythmic unity to cacophonous sound mass; all of Dither’s music wholeheartedly embraces the beautiful, engulfing, and often gloriously loud sound of electric guitars. The quartet’s members are Taylor Levine, David Linaburg, Joshua Lopes, and James Moore.

- Bruce Gallanter, Downtown Music Gallery

Though the electric guitar was introduced in the early 1930s, its adoption into classical music came decades later. Composers like Leonard Bernstein and Michael Tippett used the instrument chiefly for its vernacular allusions. Later Rhys Chatham, Glenn Branca and Lois V. Vierk tapped into its capacity for producing complex overtones and, yes, punishing volume. Nowadays the electric guitar has become ubiquitous, deployed to vastly different ends in a wide variety of formats. Among its foremost innovators is Scott Johnson, a New York composer and guitarist whose renown falls well short of his achievement, at least partly, no doubt, because of the snail’s pace at which his work has been documented. “Americans,” recently released by the Tzadik label (TZA 8074; CD), is the first newly recorded disc to be issued under Mr. Johnson’s name since 1996 . “Bowery Haunt,” a rock-inflected electric-guitar duet, and “Anthem Hunt,” a pensive quartet with a prominent cello part, establish Mr. Johnson’s flair as a performer. “The Illusion of Guidance,” written for the Bang on a Can All-Stars, shows that he also writes idiomatically for other players; Derek Johnson, no relation to the composer, handles the perky, bristling guitar part.

“Americans,” a three-part suite, is a striking example of the way Mr. Johnson derives music from the contours and inflections of speech, a method he devised for “John Somebody,” a widely influential 1982 work for guitar and tape. “Americans all look the same to me,” a recorded female voice says at the start of the piece. As an isolated clip — “same to me” — repeats twice, its falling tone and syncopated beat are duplicated first on piano, then on guitar.

Here and throughout the work Mr. Johnson’s music is playful and engaging; only gradually do you realize “Americans” is also a sophisticated examination of the way immigrants negotiate cultural isolation and assimilation. Intentionally or not, the piece also shows how the electric guitar maintains its own character and connotations even when completely integrated into a mixed ensemble.

The New York quartet Dither focuses almost exclusively on sounds produced by electric guitars — clean, plucked lines, strummed chords, grungy feedback, resonating overtones, even the static buzz of amps and loose plugs — on its debut CD, “Dither,” issued by the California label Henceforth (108; CD).

The most conventional playing comes in “Pantagruel,” a jazzy tangle composed by Joshua Lopes, a quartet member. Lainie Fefferman’s “Tongue of Thorns” reclaims a primal Minimalism from art-rock bands like the Velvet Underground or Sonic Youth; “Vectors,” by Jascha Narveson, turns Dither into a live-wire gamelan.

In “Cross Sections,” the longest and most fascinating work on the disc, Lisa R. Coons painstakingly dissects the instrument, rendering muscular arpeggios, livid feedback, ominous rumbles and radiant drones. Erik K M Clark’s “exPAT,” in which the four players are prevented from hearing one another playing, is an agreeably noisy experiment most likely better encountered live.

By orthodox standards Kyle Bobby Dunn, a Toronto musician now based in Brooklyn, barely registers as a guitarist or a composer, though he is unquestionably both. Extending the work of drone-oriented Minimalists like Eliane Radigue, William Basinski and Stars of the Lid, Mr. Dunn uses a computer to transform sounds produced with an electric guitar and various acoustic instruments into nearly motionless reveries on his puckishly titled “Young Person’s Guide to Kyle Bobby Dunn,” newly issued by Low Point (LP033; two CDs).

No doubt intentionally, the sound sources Mr. Dunn uses are usually obscured by his processes. But occasionally you can make out string instruments, brasses and piano in his mix. What results is something like a chamber-music equivalent of Kirlian photography: dark, shadowy and indistinct at its core, surrounded by an iridescent glow. The effect is mysterious, hypnotic and deeply affecting.

- Steve Smith, The New York Times

File this under psychedelia. If you’re a fan of the dirtier, more ominous textures an electric guitar can create, an entire ocean of them, the Dither guitar quartet’s new album is for you. This is one of those albums that sounds like it was an awful lot of fun to make, in places more so than it is to listen to. Incorporating elements of noise-rock, dreampop, guitar jazz, classical and the avant-garde, Dither’s dense, hypnotic, overtone-laden instrumentals are imaginative, clever, sometimes subtly funny, other times flat-out assaultive. The influence of Elliott Sharp (who wrote the album liner notes) is everywhere, as is that of Steve Reich. But this isn’t mere layers of drones: with five different composers (including Dither’s own Joshua Lopes) represented, there’s a wide diversity among the tracks here. From the first few seconds, it’s clear that trying to figure out which of the group’s members – Lopes, Taylor Levine, David Linaburg and James Moore – is playing what is a lost cause, but there’s a consistent dedication to thinking out of the box and just simply having fun.

The opening track, Lainie Fefferman’s Tongue of Torns, is a pretty standard Steve Reich-ish “let’s all play the same A chord for an hour and a half” except that this one has a surprise, a shock to the system about three quarters of the way through. And they do it again, and again. Pantagruel, written by Lopes, is the most overtly jazz-oriented work here, serpentine ascending progresssions intertwined through off-key, tone-warping patches that eventually crash, burn and then fade out a la “A Day in the Life”. Lisa R. Coons‘ suite Cross-Sections is a showcase for the group’s exuberant command of every guitar texture ever invented, weaving hypnotically through skronk, atmospherics, muted plucking, a long siren passage, raptly still atmospherics and good old-fashioned noise. The showstopper here (they played this at Bang on a Can last year) is Eric KM Clark’s ExPAT, written for “as many guitarists as possible.” It’s a hearing-deprivation piece, each guitarist sonically isolated from the rest of the group, wearing headphones blasting white noise so as to throw their timing off. Yet the group is not so easily distracted! Ominous and intense, it’s a pulsing, echoing choir of hell’s bells, very evocative of Louis Andriessen at his most insistently abrasive. And yet, its shifts are extremely subtle, drifting apart but then coming together before another slight divergence.

Dither plays the cd release show on June 12 at the Invisible Dog Art Center, 51 Bergen St. in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn on a ridiculously inviting bill, a mini-Bang on a Can marathon of sorts with Redhooker, Kathleen Supové and Nick Didkovsky, Elliott Sharp, Matthew Welch, the Deprivation Orchestra of NY, Loud Objects, Mantra Percussion and Florent Ghys, which for a $6 cover turns out to be less than a dollar a band.

http://lucidculture.wordpress.com/2010/05/30/the-dither-quartet-mess-with-your-mind/

- Lucid Culture

Dither is a New York-based guitar quartet, unusual in that the four guitars are electric and much of the music performed here is through-composed, including verbal and graphic scores. It’s unusual, too, in maintaining much of the traditional split between composers and interpretive performers. There are five composers represented here and only one, Joshua Lopes, is actually a member of Dither, otherwise made up of Taylor Levine, David Linaburg and James Moore. It’s an oddly formal distinction, for the performances can reach levels of volume and insistence that are usually reached without a program. The CD opens and closes with aural shock treatment. After a quiet lacework of isolated harmonics and hum, Lainie Fefferman’s “Crown of Thorns” suddenly turns to a crushing repeated chord that suggests the Velvet Underground, or even loops of the Velvet Underground, humming feedback and overtones providing variety. The conclusion, Erik km Clark’s “exPat,” is even more provocative, a hearing deprivation piece in which the four guitarists play the same music while wearing headphones that blast white noise, making it impossible to hear one another. In between, though, there are more immediately engaging moments as the group collaborates with composers to explore the electric guitar’s range of tunings and textures, often contrasting rock-inspired skronk with a subtle control of quarter- tones. The CD’s most compelling moments come in Lisa R. Coons “Cross-sections,” a four-part, 24-minute work that begins with broken rhythms that can suggest Captain Beefheart & the Magic Band and the surf band staple “Bumble-Boogie,” only to extend to a long segment called “Prolix” that demonstrates Dither’s remarkable abilities to match high levels of control and complexity. It’s an intriguing debut by a group that summarizes much of the electric guitar’s history (from Dick Dale to Fred Frith) and mines further possibilities of their own.

http://www.pointofdeparture.org/PoD29/PoD29MoreMoments2.html

- Stuart Broomer, Point of Departure: an online Music Journal

Dither the band is a four-man electric guitar quartet and Dither the album comes packaged with liner notes by Elliott Sharp. Even if you think you know in what direction these details are leaning, there is a minute and a half at the outset of this self-titled debut release when things seem held aloft in a kind of sonic limbo. Over a vague, ominous rumble, the delicate opening notes of Lainie Fefferman’s Tongues of Thorns are carefully plucked out, tempting the ear deeper and deeper into the texture. But then in a breath the musicians punch their way straight through and out into the world with a repetitive primal drive that never lets up until the piece wraps minutes later. It’s a provocative rocking that sounds good, feels good, and even when the music hits its fever pitch and the wailing claps you sharply, things still manage to keep to the honest side of controlled.

It makes for a bracing start to a disc that flexes the ears in quite a few compelling directions. Vectors by Jascha Narveson is built on relentless pitch bending, spare and spring loaded until this wind-up toy of a piece finally begins to tire out. Lisa R. Coons’s four-movement Cross Sections takes up the bulk of the disc’s 53 minutes, but in many ways it also leaves the most air in the room, twisting a path through all manner of textures with a more nuanced, patient, and subtle touch than the other works utilize. Manic racing lines move into glitchy noise and then onto glacial harmonics. In the end, the music gives way to a platform of hardly any sound at all.

Dither’s own Joshua Lopes penned Pantagruel, and whether or not the piece was in any way influenced by Rabelais’s literary creation, there’s an inventive, comic-book style boldness of color in how Lopes throws down that makes this work a striking production. In performance, the exactness of the ensemble playing and the clear-cut layers in the sonic material impress with their clock-like precision.

Concluding this odyssey is Eric KM Clark’s punishing exPAT, “a Dither commission for hearing-deprived guitar orchestra.” Seriously, the players are wearing earplugs and headphones playing back white noise, and the piece is scored for “as many guitarists as possible,” so you can see how things might get loud. exPAT is dense and aggressive—a solid, unrelenting block of vibration that’s aurally exhausting in a way the works on the album up to this point have not been. Which is not to imply that the disorienting state of overdrive this train rides out in is a negative, but as in extreme sport, part of the thrill is in the possibility of pain. Prepare your ears.

http://www.newmusicbox.com/article.nmbx?id=6420

- Molly Sheridan, New Music Box

- Monsieur Délire, http://blog.monsieurdelire.com/

“this cd is bad ass!  good work.”

- Sean Francis Conway

Henceforth Records is proud to release, in May, 2010, its 8th CD, “Dither“. by the electric guitar quartet from New York City.

As Elliott Sharp says in the liner notes: “The compositions and performances on this CD speaks to those of us who hunger for more in music than pleasantries and who know that there IS always MORE and are willing to dig in to find it.”

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