The name of the ensemble – Trummerflora – is explained in the booklet: “Trummerflora, or rubble plants and trees, are a special phenomenon unique to heavily bombed urban areas. The bomb acts as a plow, mixing rubble fragments with the earth, which often contain seeds dormant for a century or more. These seeds come to light and those that can live in this new and special earth grow and flourish” (Helen and Newton Harrison)

The booklet continues: “The Trummerflora Collective is an independent group of music makers dedicated to experimental and improvisational musics. The collective embraces the pluralistic nature of creative music as an important means of artistic expression for the individual and the community”.

“No Stars Please”, which comes on two impressive, stark black CDs with white print, features a collection of live concert recordings by the Trummerflora Collective and a few guest musicians.

The first track – “From the waste up” - was recorded at the Casbah in San Diego. It’s a fairly long piece with its almost 23 minutes.
It’s hard to know what to expect as the noisy, “Ascension-Coltrane”-like beginning hits you, but sooner than later the music gathers structure as the musicians line up and deliver a mighty modern jazz kind of event, forcefully and speedily mangling down the line in a steady beat flowering with meandering adventures of the wind instruments. It is indeed very “live”, this piece, and it feels just like you’re in that smoky domain when you listen in, in a sweaty group of listeners standing up on the floor, swaying and swaggering to the carnival beat, in which you can detect accents from The Band, The Mahavishnu Orchestra, Jean-Luc Ponty and whatnot…

A few minutes into the piece an experimental, almost electroacoustic atmosphere is let in to color the fix, and events slow down considerably, even hinting at Ensemble Modern-like renditions of impressionistic 1960s Charles Lloyd love-in-seductions.
At this point the instruments are chatting wildly, making fruitful conversation, sort of overheard by an eavesdropping audience, and I can envision the instruments on that smoky stage, leaning towards each other, shooting that good old breeze, completely oblivious of the concert situation!
The venture picks up speed, going right into a funk tradition of Chicago and the Mid West, changing costume and style just like that, in a chameleon behavior! Jason Robinson and Ellen Weller really get down to basics here, growling and screeching madly on a backdrop of steady rhythm & blues rhythms, hammering on down that path of residue and leftovers, into a junk yard filled with happy metallic finds! Go! Go! Go!

A continuous wall of sound, worthy of Dror Feiler and The Too Much Too Soon Orchestra, saws its way through your skull, eventually evaporating in mouthpiece kissing sounds of the wind, while hammer head war time drums march you ahead towards the conclusion in Allan Pettersson-symphonic vulnerabilities…

Before the end you’re rounded up by the crew, which now – with vocals added – sounds like something out of the bag of Dutch villains Willem Breuker Kollektief or German desperados Einstürzende Neubauten performing “Halber Mensch”! Simultaneously the percussion is a mimicry of Balinese gamelan, and it’s a pleasure to be here!

The following three pieces are all called “Nonet”, simply numbered 1, 2 and 3. The title brings back memories of transparent chamber pieces by Hanns Eisler. These pieces also sport durations fitting that notion, running from 2:40 to 5:06. They were recorded at The Lounge, KPBS, San Diego.

This is a more complex sound world, voices permuted through electronic devices at the outset and staccato rhythms planning for watery, bulging sounds off of a swell from died-down musical storms… but in the smaller format the storm gathers power once again, hitting populated areas in the audience head-on, and I duck behind the rubble as the improvisers pour their intense rage over my circumstances…

In the second “Nonet” the musicians play around with a little riff, possibly – probably – paying homage to some legendary piece of old, but insane scrapings out of Marcelo Radulovich’s electronics and sawtooth frictions out of Jason Robinson’s woodwinds plus jolly bubbles rising from Damon Holzborn’s guitar take the wind out of all old stuff, and it’s the seriously present NOW which rules, as Stockhausenesque “Piano Piece XIII”-showers are fingertipped out of the piano by Hans Fjellestad. Edgar Varèseian or George Antheilian sirens, portrayed by an inspired Jason Robinson, take the entourage on a roller coaster ride as the final minute of “Nonet 2” sets in. A short piano section of calm Diaz-Infante solos urges everyone to sit tight until the piece has come to a complete stop, and the whole tapestry of sound gets a wobbly tilt, as if perceived through crystal glass… and in the unfocus of the moment all that remains is a blur of swaying shapes and beautiful colors…

“Nonet 3” gushes forth madly from the very beginning, with a Conlon Nancarrow piano speeding head on into a wall of saxophone growls and insanely gesturing graffiti musicians. There is a tonal and rhythmical argument brewing, but it all seems to boil down to nothing much through acoustic guitar and bass, and on that note we leave the nonet stage of this double CD.

“Where’s the entrance” was recorded at The Luggage Store in San Francisco.
This starts on a Theremin key, but that’s an illusion instilled by electronic means. A sparse, see-through curtain of woody events, interspersed with sharp, hissing and grinding sounds, allowing also for lithophonic percussion and guitar, whisks the music ahead, arms outstretched, gaze directed forward, legs barely obeying the multitude of intentions of the moments, of the “moments musicaux”. A thundering bass enters, rumbling like brown infra-hoses beneath the floor, as synthesized rats gnaw at the cables before encountering a fabulous electrocution by crude amplifier-destined electricity from nuclear power plants thrown out across the prairies like doomsday ice-cream cones of infertility…

The last piece on CD 1 was recorded at The Casbah in San Diego. It’s “Frosty the snowman / Silent night”…
It winds up like some machinery of a workshop that really is… winding up! The guys turn the levers and operational devices of a steel business workshop of some kind, perhaps in a division of Bethlehem Steel! Machines are gearing up, pneumatic tools are turned on, overhead cranes start moving under the roof… break is over! Even though The Trummerflora crew only utilizes musical instruments and machinery, this desperate piece still sounds like The Too Much Too Soon Orchestra drilling through pieces of rock with pneumatic drills on stage, as fumes of kerosene and gasoline spread dangerously across the audience, smokers and non-smokers… creating sudden danger fields of improvisation… Forlorn voices from the local insane asylum tune in to the general mess of things, and naïve little melodies out of the most shallow layers of social life are integrated with this mad breaking-down of values and structure, where musical residue is spread across the Casbah like the dust of concrete from the World Trade Center or the flying debris from bombed out makeshift brick houses of villagers in Afghanistan… It’s all in the game… and the game is frantic… oblivious of calm moments in the garden, at the white table with a glass of lemonade… because this is a social and mental stone crusher of limitless brutality… and it remains to see if a Phoenix bird will rise out of these hot ashes of musical implosion!

CD 2 begins with “Third time”, recorded at the Artisan’s Hand gallery in Carmel Valley, live as everything else on this double-CD set. All three works on this second CD are recorded at that same place, on the same night.
Short, arching trajectories of whining sounds begin “Third time”. This is reminiscent of water and birds, droplets and jungle chirps; rain forest music; gentle, animalistic and animistic; electroacoustic. The music doesn’t sound live in the beginning, but arranged on hard drives, even though I know it’s not. Some of the percussion sounds North African, Moroccan; like big maracas used in Moroccan healing rites. Some of the more illustrious instruments are used in the triptych on this CD, like radio, melodica and rub-a-metatron, and I think accordion appears only on this second CD too.
The long durations of the pieces on CD 2 give the players enough time for ample deliberation and natural evolution of emerging tendencies, without anyone having to feel pressured or hurried.
The wind instruments well forth, at times, like a choir of air raid sirens being tested. Brittle metallic percussion diffuses shrill, golden vibrations through the air, and humming dynamos roll everything up in neat packages of humdrum bulkiness. Half hidden conversations are reduced to just one characteristic of the sound web, and it gets denser, like a New York street on a Friday afternoon, with all those individuals moving without bumping in to each other, in an eerie likeness of red blood cells moving up a blood vessel.

Like those individuals on the street, who can be perceived either as individuals or as a mass of meat, a mass of blood and bone and tissue, this music can also be viewed in two ways, as you can shift focus every second if you wish, from the concentration on one instrument or one separate occurrence, to an over-arching view of the whole web of sounds, enabling you to take in the colorings, the shadings, the diverse tilts and tendencies of the whole body of sound. This is a rewarding exercise in connection with Trummerflora’s music.

“Punch press pull” sounds like a workout at a gym, but it’s track 2 on CD 2.
A repetitious drum figure, slowly evolving and extending itself is persistent in the foreground, while cityscape mixes of emergency vehicles and heavy machinery at building sites provide the basic environment. This is as far away from a meadow in the woods as you can get; it’s certainly city music in serious identification with bricks, asphalt, street signs, enormous walls of glass and steel reflecting the sun that shines through the muggy smog, and sidewalks enduring the warm gushes of moist air out of subway ventilation shafts… and the cement mixers rule! Winches pull and lift heavy blocks of matter, lowering them elsewhere, as workers pry them into position. Big city life and improvisational music have many characteristics in common, so Trummerflora’s explorations of the cityscape is a natural occurrence in all its intricate noisiness, and San Diego and Los Angeles highway circuits are hot hell for a visitor from fresh air Scandinavia…
Let me just add, to make things clear, that Trummerflora does not work with musique concrète, meaning that they do not insert for example concrete cityscape recordings into their music. They simply sound metroplex-like through their creative utilization of their instruments! When glissandos of iron wire screeches transform into Giacinto Scelsi-like string etudes, you know you’re into something good!

The last entry is “The break invasion”, constituting the longest piece on the whole set; 27:16. Subdued but intense rhythms – as if heard through the wall – are mixed with a bluesy female song on the radio, as the thudding rhythm gathers more strength and develops its timbres, adding sharper, scratching high pitches to its fanatic progression, which – I suddenly realize – lends its basic formula from Pauline Oliveros’ “The Wanderer”!

The female blues singer returns for a while, until a hypnotic standing wave sound is allowed to completely dominate momentarily, in a stillness hitherto unknown on this set, with just a few fork-knife rattles added for your listening pleasure… Chopstick percussion and drawling bass gestures ooze and brew, with a certain amount of short-wave menace inserted…
…and so it goes on, in ever-changing nuances, as the sounds move like the shadows of clouds over the plains, in constantly changing patterns; Trummerflora music!